Impostor Syndrome: Volume 3 (Arcadia Project, The, Band 3) - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Mishell Baker is the author of the Nebula and World Fantasy Award Finalist Borderline, which was also a Tiptree Honor book, as well as the second and third books in The Arcadia Project, Phantom Pains and Impostor Syndrome. She is a 2009 graduate of the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop, and her short stories have appeared in Daily Science Fiction, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Redstone Science Fiction, and Electric Velocipede. She has a website at MishellBaker.com and frequently Tweets about writing, parenthood, mental health, and assorted geekery at @MishellBaker. When she’s not attending conventions or going on wild research adventures, she lives in Los Angeles with her husband and children.

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Impostor Syndrome

1

The British declared war in January, just after my boss’s twentieth birthday. Of course 99 percent of America just kept going to work and doing laundry and wishing creative deaths on their noisiest neighbors, because it was the Arcadia Project that was at war, and we’d done a damned good job of remaining invisible.

Inspiration had to flow to keep the world moving, but there was no polite way to hold a press conference now and say, Hey, there really is a secret society that’s been controlling human progress for centuries, and as of three months ago it’s falling apart, and you all might die. So anyone without a blood-signature on one of our contracts enjoyed the privilege of blissful ignorance.

My friends and I, though? We were screwed.

I’d taken a crash course in Project operations since opening a vein for them last October. I knew what the structure was supposed to be. A hundred ninety-eight nations, including us, reporting to Dame Belinda Barker at World HQ in London. America, being huge, was split into Western, Central, and Eastern regions, with offices in the three Gate cities: L.A., New Orleans, and New York City.

But that all got shot to hell when Alvin Lamb, our National head in New Orleans, found out that a couple decades ago Dame Belinda had authorized the abduction and torture of a U.S. citizen, aged eleven months. Once that bomb dropped, Alvin invoked the Philadelphia Protocol, which, if you’re a history buff, means pretty much what it sounds like: Fuck you, England. America’s gonna do its own thing now.

It might even have worked, if Tracy Wong in New York hadn’t decided to believe Dame Belinda when she told him that Alvin had lost his last marbles. Tracy hadn’t been there, like Alvin had, when we’d surprised Belinda into defending her atrocity. She’d had time to pull the mask back on, the one we’d all fallen for. Alvin had fallen harder than anyone until that moment—he’d been dripping Belinda-flavored Kool-Aid from every pore—and I think that’s part of why he cut ties so hard and fast.

And now here it was—January. We should have been expecting that Dame Belinda would patiently wait to line up the precision shot from cover; she’d been a World War II sniper, for God’s sake. But we weren’t ready, not even a little. My boss, Western Regional Manager Caryl Vallo, had been the abductee in question. She was kind of a mess. Alvin was back in New Orleans trying to keep the Central regional manager from panicking and joining New York. My partner, Tjuan Miller, was trying to get a fourth Gate operational at Valiant Studios while simultaneously writing a hit television show there. Meanwhile, I, thanks to a backslide in my mental health, was pissing everyone off, repeatedly forgetting my basic training, and nursing a paranoia about the Residence manager’s pet crow.

It could be argued that my intense level of crazy was, in a roundabout way, the only reason Tjuan got wind of what was about to happen to him. He’d been practically living at Valiant, and if not for me and that damned rubber suit, he’d have been right there in the line of fire when the news broke.

The suit arrived late on a Saturday afternoon—Caryl’s birthday of all days—neatly packaged with a Louisiana return address. (By this time the shot had been fired, mere hours ago. We just didn’t know it yet.)

Alvin had an in with someone who made diving suits near New Orleans, and he had put in a custom order. In theory this thing would let me wander around Arcadia without all the local spellwork being blown to bits by the excess steel that held the jigsaw puzzle of my bones together. In practice, I realized as soon as I took the suit up to my room and started pulling it on, there were problems.

Good points included the lightweight neoprene, the relaxed fit (I wasn’t planning on swimming in it), and the way they’d stitched the legs of the suit right into a pair of rubber-soled hiking boots just the right size for my main pair of prosthetic feet. But when I started to pull it up to get my arms into it, things got weird.

The suit was one big piece that opened in the back and, despite my daily stretching regimen, I still didn’t have the range of motion to get the zipper up on my own.

I didn’t like the idea of having to ask someone for help every time I needed to put the thing on or take it off. As I stood there with the back gaping open, I asked myself a question that would indirectly end up buying us two weeks of planning time:

What if I need to pee?

At first I was picturing a scenario where I was in the Residence and forgot to use the bathroom before putting the thing on. But then an even worse train of thought started barreling down the tracks: Were there bathrooms in Arcadia? Did fey even have bladders?

I’d been through the Gate in Residence Four’s tower only twice, for brief local errands. I’d stayed away from fey civilization, from anywhere that might be laced with fragile spellwork, and so I had no idea where the fey actually lived or what their accommodations were. Was I going to have to squat in the wilderness? And if so, would I have to strip naked to do it?

I wasn’t just being dainty. Ever since my semi-deliberate plummet off a seven-story building a year and a half ago (how deliberate can a person be when blackout drunk?), I’d only undressed with the lights on for one person, and that was my Echo, Claybriar. Getting naked for him was like getting naked in front of a mirror, which, don’t get me wrong, had been hard for a while too. But there was no damned way my scarred and shattered self was going to strip down in a foreign land where God only knew who or what might creep up on me.

To make matters worse—and I actually tried this, there in my room—I couldn’t figure out how to manage a squat with my prosthetic legs. I planted my feet apart to give myself a more stable base, but every time I tried to lower myself, I could feel an uncomfortable threat of torsion in the silicone sheath that held the stump of my left thigh. I worried the whole thing would wrench loose, send me toppling to the floor.

When I’d been released from the hospital to the loony bin nearly a year ago, I’d quickly figured out how to do the basic stuff—getting in and out of the shower, on and off toilets, up and down stairs—and I’d confined my activities to those things. Now, for the first time in months, I was faced with a thing I quite possibly needed to do and could not come anywhere close to doing. I was broken.

That last bit, of course, was my borderline personality disorder talking. When people with BPD are dysphoric (think “bad mood” to the tenth power), they have a hard time balancing complexities. My dysphoria did not permit me to consider the vast and ever-changing spectrum of ability we all experience throughout our lives. My dysphoria told me I was as worthless as a shattered iPhone. It took me fifteen minutes to control my crying enough to get dressed and leave my room.

I descended the grand wooden staircase into the two-story living room where bored people in Residence Four usually hung out. My goal was to find Residence Manager Song, the most soothing human being alive, but, fortunately, even the mindful act of making my step-over-step descent as “normal” as possible helped scoot me back...