BORDERLINE (The Arcadia Project, Band 1) - Hardcover

Buch 1 von 3: Arcadia Project

BAKER, MISHELL

 
9781481453066: BORDERLINE (The Arcadia Project, Band 1)
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1481453068 ISBN 13: 9781481453066
Verlag: Pocket Books, 2021

Inhaltsangabe

A year ago, Millie lost her legs and her filmmaking career in a failed suicide attempt. Just when she’s sure the credits have rolled on her life story, she gets a second chance with the Arcadia Project: a secret organization that polices the traffic to and from a parallel reality filled with creatures straight out of myth and fairy tales. For her first assignment, Millie is tasked with tracking down a missing movie star who also happens to be a nobleman of the Seelie Court. To find him, she’ll have to smooth-talk Hollywood power players and uncover the surreal and sometimes terrifying truth behind the glamour of Tinseltown. But stronger forces than just her inner demons are sabotaging her progress, and if she fails to unravel the conspiracy behind the noble’s disappearance, not only will she be out on the streets, but the shattering of a centuries-old peace could spark an all-out war between worlds. No pressure.

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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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Borderline

1

It was midmorning on a Monday when magic walked into my life wearing a beige Ann Taylor suit and sensible flats. At the time I had more money than sense, and so I had been languishing at the Leishman Psychiatric Center in Silver Lake for just over six months.

The Center had a rigid routine, and there was a perverse comfort in knowing what misery of boredom to expect and when. Breakfast: grayish sausage, carbohydrate mush, and the kind of eggs that are poured from a carton, all eaten with plastic utensils. Physical therapy: a rotating assortment of blue-shirted people who urgently pressured me to feel happy about accomplishing things a three-year-old could do. Patio break: a chain-link enclosed concrete yard where everyone else flocked to light up coffin nails and trade confessions. Knowing they’d all be gone in three to fourteen days and wouldn’t stay in touch, I elected to sit in the fluorescent-lit common room and run reel after reel of movies in my head.

When a well-dressed woman stopped with purpose beside my chair that Monday, I assumed she was one of the Center’s bureaucracy. She was of average height and build, with a conservative suit and ethnically ambiguous features. Her face was drab and powdered matte; her hair and eyes were a muddle of colors that defied category. If she had drawn a revolver, shot me in the kneecap, and walked out, I’d have had a hell of a time describing her to security.

Although her appearance put her in the ballpark of my age, she addressed me in a flat, husky alto that had forty years of smoke and whiskey in it. “Millicent Roper,” she said.

“Yeah?” I was hesitant because when people in the movies say a name in that tone, the next line is usually, “You’re under arrest.” Instead she extended a gloved hand.

People do not wear gloves in Los Angeles. These weren’t cold-weather gloves either, but light dress gloves the same shell pink as her blouse, their cuffs disappearing beneath the sleeves of her jacket.

“I’m Caryl Vallo with the Arcadia Project,” she said.

“I don’t know what that is,” I said, leaving my hands in my lap.

She withdrew the gesture with no change of expression. “We are a nonprofit organization partially funded by the Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health. I would be pleased to tell you more if we can speak confidentially. Could we retire briefly to another area?”

Her formality nudged my brain into a rusty gear that I eventually recognized as curiosity. “Fine,” I said. “We can go back to my room.”

I grabbed the wheels of my chair and rolled myself down the hall with practiced economy. The chair was a squeaky piece of crap, and I found myself embarrassed by it.

“I was under the impression that you used prosthetics for walking,” Caryl said.

“Only when I have somewhere to go. The AK socket starts to dig into my ass if I’m just sitting around.”

“Are your prosthetics in your room?”

“Yeah.”

“Will you put them on for me?”

“Sure.”

Before you ask why I was so docile about an invasive request from a complete stranger, keep in mind that I’d spent the past year of my life following the orders of a procession of doctors, therapists, and other random concerned people whose names I sometimes didn’t even bother to learn.

I was paying extra for privacy, so there was a desk in my room where a second twin bed would have been. When we arrived, Caryl seated herself at it, pushing back the chair.

“Are you happy here?” she asked me, looking around. She seemed an extension of the bland decor.

“If I were happy,” I grunted, wheeling myself over to the locked chest containing my prosthetics, “I wouldn’t be here.”

Caryl, declining to comment, skimmed gloved fingertips over her tightly bound hair. I tried not to think about my own cowlicked mess, a few inches long all over except for a mostly hidden seam on the left side where hair didn’t grow at all.

“Forgive my poor choice of words,” she said. “Do you feel this is the best living situation for you at this time?”

“With my job and credit history,” I said as I braked my chair, “I think my only other option is a refrigerator box.” I took the key from around my neck, leaned over to unlock the chest, and pulled out my bottle of Dry-Lite, applying a generous amount to the stump of my right shin. I glanced at Caryl and found her watching me with the politely attentive expression of someone in the front row of a lecture hall.

“So,” I said, lifting my BK prosthesis out of the trunk. “You were about to tell me about the Arcadia Project.” I aligned the suction suspension and slid my shin into it. Once the carbon foot was solidly on the floor, I pushed myself to a stand with both hands, balancing one-legged and forcing the rest of the air out of the valve with a moist, embarrassing sound.

“The Arcadia Project,” said Caryl, “is funded partially by the Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health and partially by private donations from members of the entertainment industry. We seek mentally ill adults who meet certain qualifications and provide them with meaningful employment, housing, and ongoing—”

“What sort of employment?” I interrupted as I pivoted to sit down on the edge of my bed.

“Employment opportunities vary depending upon the quali­fications of the individual, but the majority are part-time or freelance creative positions in the film and television industry.”

I blinked at her a few times, an assortment of sarcastic replies clotting together in my brain like cars on the 405. I tried to remember my former Hollywood manners, then remembered that as a mental patient I had a license to say whatever the hell I wanted.

“Let me be sure I understand,” I said, reaching into the chest for the silicone suspension liner of my AK prosthetic and starting to powder the inside of it. “I flipped burgers for five years putting myself through community college, got fifteen grand into debt making a bunch of pretentious indie films about people trapped in rooms together, then bullshitted my way into what’s arguably the most prestigious film school in the world, when all I really needed to do to break into the industry was jump off a building?”

Caryl looked at me with the kind of aplomb that comes from dealing with the mentally ill on a daily basis. “No,” she said flatly. “You needed to do all that and then jump off a building.” There was nothing in her demeanor to suggest that she was making a joke, or even knew what one was.

I snorted at her, hiking up the leg of my shorts. I slipped the powdered liner onto the stump of my thigh as far as it would go.

“You used lotion to make the first seal and powder to make the second,” Caryl observed. “Why?”

I stopped and looked at her, but her face held only the same detached curiosity. “You just learn to do whatever works,” I said with a shrug. “Every amputation is different.”

I reached into the chest for the AK. AK stands for above-knee, but I liked that it sounded like an assault rifle. The...

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Verlag
Pocket Books
Erscheinungsdatum
2021
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1481453068
ISBN 13 
9781481453066
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
400
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar

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