The Ghost Sequences

by A. C. Wise

  I didn’t understand what she meant, but my body folded nonetheless, knees hitting the hard-packed snow. In my peripheral vision I saw Viader, Ramone, and the others do the same. Had Adams ordered us? The air hummed. I couldn’t hear it over the wind, but I could feel it in my bones.

  Adams didn’t lower her mask, and goggles still blanked her eyes as she moved down the line. Despite the bulky gloves, her pour was deft. One by one Viader, Kellet, Martinez, Reyes, McMann, and Ramone lowered their masks and received Adams’ honey on their tongues.

  I should have felt frost burn immediately, but the proximity of the honey was enough to unleash the effect. I felt it sliding down my throat before it ever touched my tongue. Time bent, and the world went sideways. I had swallowed the honey, would swallow the honey, was always swallowing it. Then Adams tilted the bottle and let a drop touch my tongue.

  Her limbs bent strangely, and there were too many of them. I saw myself reflected a dozen-dozen-dozen times in multi-faceted eyes. The honey was liquid fire. It was like holding a burning coal in my mouth, all heat and no taste. It was like swallowing stars. But as soon as I did it, I felt no pain.

  The storm raged, but I couldn’t feel it anymore. The wind became a hush, a lullaby. I thought of my grandmother, but it was someone else singing now. The words weren’t Russian; they weren’t even human.

  Adams lowered her scarf. Her lips were cracked and bloody, but light clung to her. She was holy, we all were, and I watched in wonder as she used her teeth to pull her glove free, ran her finger around the inside of the bottle, and rubbed the last of the honey on her gums.

  It should have been crystallized with the cold, rough against her skin, but it was as liquid as it had been when she’d poured it down my throat.

  “Come on,” she said. “Let’s go.”

  Everything was sharp and bright after the honey. Adams walked on gravel and broken glass, fallen leaves. Each pellet of ice under her boots cracked inside my bones so I felt it as much as heard it. My blood thumped; eight of us breathed. I heard the crystals growing where my breath froze on my scarf—fractal ice patterns, branching and branching. Forming hexagons. Forming a structure like a hive. Rewriting my cells; instead of bones and blood, guts and liver, there were only endless chambers, dripping honey.

  And under it all, the song. A lullaby, a nursery tale. Limbs like needles tucked me in, sealed me in wax and left me to dream. A girl with wild, tangled hair stood under a tree, its trunk lightning-struck and smelling of scorched woods. Bees swarmed the air around her, a steady hum, and liquid gold dripped down the seared bark.

  Only she wasn’t a girl, she was much older. Ancient. Her bones were already buried beneath the roots, her skin peeled from her ribs, her insides hollowed to make room for a hive. Raised welts dotted her skin, a secret language I could almost read. History a billion, billion, billion years old. A map. Bees hummed while her bones fed the tree and she stood in its shadow, buried and not buried, dead and alive.

  All of it echoed through the song, inhuman concepts crammed into human form. The girl wasn’t a girl, but a god, a seed, a splinter of history forced under my skin. I wanted to scream. Instead, I hummed, my whole body vibrating to the frequency of wings beating. I didn’t feel the cold. None of us did. And together we walked, a segmented body with too many limbs, and Adams as our head.

  *

  Night fell, the sky darkening from plum twilight to deep blue-black. I didn’t care where Adams was leading us. I could have walked forever. Ahead of me, Ramone stripped back his protective gear, exposing his arm to the elbow. Kellet pulled a folding knife from her pocket and cut open her palm. I listened to the blood plink-plink-plink on the snow.

  The eight of us were joined, bound by an invisible cord. Reyes and McMann, Martinez and Viader, they were my skin and bone.

  As we walked, something walked with us. Vast and impossible, just on the other side of a sky that was a blue-dark curtain, painted with stars. Long, thin limbs. Taller than the Empire State Building. Moving slowly. Singing. The song wanted something from me. It wanted me to change.

  I wanted to.

  I wanted to let the honey stitch my veins with threads of liquid gold. I needed it, more than I’d ever needed anything in my life. I wanted it to subsume me.

  Al-Raqqah had been folded into my skin. The world torn apart, gone black and red; the flash-point explosion vaporizing a child. Those things lived between my bones, branched through my lungs. The honey was bigger than that. It could eat my pain whole.

  Because it wasn’t just honey, it was a civilization too old and terrible to comprehend. More had been lost than I could fathom. That was in the song. That was in the honey. It was too big to hold, and that gave me permission to let go.

  Tears ran on my cheeks. They should have frozen, but the honey left my skin fever hot. It kept the moon from setting and the sun from coming up. I couldn’t tell how far we’d gone, but it was still dark when Adams called a halt. We pitched tents from the packs we carried—packs whose weight we no longer felt—and built wind-blocks out of snow.

  I watched the street in Al-Raqqah torn apart, an endless film reel flickering and superimposed on the night. I watched the mother crawl towards the burned remains of her child. I saw her other child caught in a loop of instant incineration, his mouth open in a wail. And none of it mattered.

  In the here and now, I watched Reyes kneel to clear space for a fire. There was an old hunting trap buried under the snow. I saw it an instant before it happened. He put his hand into the drift, and metal jaws closed around his arm with a wet snap. Reyes saw it, too. The scene hung inverted in his eyes, playing out like the film reel of Al-Raqqah’s destruction. And Reyes stuck his hand into the snow anyway.

  He didn’t scream. I thought of the rat in the cage, cleaning its whiskers as electricity sang through its body. I imagined teeth sunk into flesh and the rat tearing its leg off, bleeding out and at peace with the world. Reyes held his arm out, staring at torn cloth, red nerve, and splintered bone. He smiled.

  Kellet and Viader moved to either side of me and together we pried the trap loose. Ramone sat by, watching his flesh redden, then go dead-white with the cold. McMann broke out the first aid kit, cleaning and bandaging the wound as best he could. Adams watched us, arms crossed, her expression saying we were wasting our time. Then Reyes sat down, still smiling, staring in wonder at the flames as Martinez built up the fire.

  *

  I don’t remember sleeping. Light crept over the horizon, staining the snow pale gold and carving deep shadows in the hollows. We found Reyes’ clothing, shed like skin and frozen into the ground. There were footprints, spaced farther and farther apart until they simply stopped. But no Reyes, not even his remains.

  “It’s like the story of the wendigo.” Ramone’s voice made me jump. His gazed was fixed on the last footprint, dragged long and impossibly sharp into the snow.

  “It comes in the wind to snatch people into the sky, making them run faster and faster until their feet burn to ash. Sometimes, you can hear their voices in the sky, still screaming.”

  I didn’t know the story they were talking about, but I tilted my head, listening for Reyes. I didn’t hear anything except the low vibration of wings.

  *

  I don’t remember sleeping, but before we woke to find Reyes gone, I woke with Adams’ hand over my mouth. Or maybe it was after, or during. Time was funny on the ice.

  “It’s here,” Adams said. “Come on.”

  She led me out of the tent and into the dark. I didn’t ask where we were going. I could feel it—a vast system of caves under our feet, the earth gone hollow and strange. Juts of ice stabbed at the sky. I followed Adams through a maze of crystal spikes like crazed, broken teeth. There were steps cut into the frozen earth. We descended into an amphitheater for giants. One bowl below us, the other above us, the sky spattered with stars. Then we were underground.

  I crawled behind Adams. Shadows moved on the other side of us. Echoes. M
emories. Cracks in the real. The groove worn into the earth was a record. Adams and I were the needle, playing the sound. Occasionally, the record skipped, and we caught flickers of ancient things, impossibly out of time. Somehow, I knew: we were in the blind servants’ tunnels, crawling out of sight of the masters. Wingless. Broken at birth so we couldn’t flee.

  There were bones in the ice around us. Australopithecus. Neanderthal. Hives hung in their ribcages, hexagons in place of hearts, dripping with honey.

  “Here.” Adams’ voice jolted me into the present.

  The ice wasn’t ice anymore, but rock, a slick purplish-grey, like a thin layer of mica spread over slate, but the wrong color—night instead of gold. Or it was both. Ice and stone and rock the color of desert sand. Here and now and on a planet billions of years ago.

  “Dig,” Adams said.

  My hands moved. I knew the patterns, written into my bones with the gathering song. I was born for this, scraping honey from the walls until my skin tore. Adams kept handing me bottles, which I filled before they disappeared into her coat, more than the folds of fabric should have been able to hold.

  The cave buzzed. And all the while, the song echoed. The song like the one my grandmother used to sing while cooking Sunday dinner, calling ingredients and flavors together and compelling them to be a meal. A making song. It mellified my bones. It mummified me, rewriting me in a different language. I was the god-child beneath the tree, curled at its roots. The beginning and the end, the seed of the world. Bees thrummed the air and wrote maps onto my skin. Words. Commands, compelling me to be ancient, to be terrible, to change.

  A harvest song. A blinding song. A binding song.

  I obeyed.

  A day later, or a million years later, we climbed out of the dark. The stars turned in dizzying motion overhead. If I kept going, I could climb right out of the world into the night. Like Reyes, pulled screaming into the sky. Adams caught me by the ankle and hauled me back down. I hit the ice, scrabbled and fought her, weeping and babbling incoherently.

  She dragged me back over the snow, tucked me into my tent like a worker bee sealing up a little queen in a cell of wax. She whispered in my ear, a continuation of the song, that humming buzz, and this one said sleep, sleep.

  I obeyed.

  *

  We packed our gear and left without Reyes. I thought about what we’d tell his family. We didn’t have a body to bring home, no explanation to offer. He disappeared and we didn’t look for him, because we knew he was gone.

  The honey still sang in my veins. Had we accomplished our mission? Adams hadn’t said a word about the tunnels. Only the abraded skin on my hands suggested I’d been under the earth, under some earth, gathering.

  I had no sense of where we were in relation to the base camp. Like Adams’ story, our compasses spun, and our GPS was useless. We’d given up on the radios long ago.

  That night, we pitched our tents next to a wicked-blue crevasse, a scar in the ice so deep we couldn’t see past a few feet even with our lights.

  “Do you know where we are?” I asked Martinez, keeping my voice low.

  He shrugged, unconcerned, and I moved to help him with the tents. I wanted to ask if he’d heard anything during the storm, or what the honey felt like on his tongue. Maybe Adams had taken him under the earth, too. Maybe she’d taken us all one by one. Maybe what Reyes had seen was too much. Enough to make him stick his hand in a trap. Enough to send him screaming into the sky.

  Behind us, Viader and McMann built a fire. In the back of my mind, Reyes played on a loop, the trap closing on his arm. Each strike driving the tent peg into the ice became the snap of bone.

  I smelled Viader’s burning flesh an instant before it began to burn. And in my mind, the street in Al-Raqqah went red-black, and the woman crawled. I turned just in time to watch Viader walk into the flames. She made no sound. Her clothes went up in an instant. Then she stood there, eyes closed, humming. I recognized the song, felt the echo in my bones. Sparks kissed her cheek, ate away the skin and heat-cracked her jaw.

  “It’s beautiful,” she said. Or maybe she said, “I’m beautiful.”

  Heat seared my cheeks, leaving salt-tracks dried to crystal. When had I started crying? I agreed with Viader; she was beautiful.

  She was necessary.

  Patterns had to be repeated. Viader burning wasn’t really Viader, she was cities turned to ash, wax melting and the sound of wings, all the queens burning in their cells, keening, and the low, sad song as the tall creatures behind the sky moved from the beginning to the end of time.

  None of us tried to stop Viader when she went to the crevasse. None of us tried to catch her as she dropped, plunging into the blue. She was a meteor, streaking into the abyss, never hitting the ground.

  *

  I woke to the sound of propeller blades, and the spray of ice and snow they whipped up as the tiny plane landed. Panic slammed through me. I couldn’t hear the song over the engine, then the shouting as the team sent to pull us out hit the ground, boots too loud on the snow. Hands on me; I thrashed against them, all fists and elbows. A curse, muffled, as I landed an unintentional blow.

  Three sets of arms now, restraining me. A needle snapped in my arm as they tried to give me a sedative. The ice fell away beneath me. I’d been wrestled into the plane and we were leaving. I looked around for Adams in a panic. I couldn’t see her, then someone pushed my head back, strapped me down with more restraints.

  A high, wild keening, like the sound of the queens in their cells as the city burned. I didn’t realize until much later the sound was coming from me.

  *

  It’s been almost a year since the ice.

  A year of therapy, of convincing myself I couldn’t possibly have seen what I thought I saw. Enough time for one honorable discharge, zero contact from Adams, and three hundred and sixty-five, give or take a few, nights of dreams—cities burning, honey dripping from bones, vast shadows crossing the sky. And all that time, the song, just on the edge of hearing. Last week, it started getting louder. Yesterday, I could feel it reverberating inside my skull.

  Today, I got an email from Kellet. No subject line, all lowercase: martinez is dead. funeral at st. john redeemer, des moines, iowa. saturday 1100.

  *

  Light slanted over the church steps, leaving Kellet and Ramone in shadow as they stood in the doorway. Ramone had his empty sleeve pinned up against the wind snatching at our clothing and hair, blowing a storm of petals around our feet. I’d either forgotten or never known that he’d lost his arm after they pulled us off the ice. What had the past year been like for him, for Kellet? Had the edges of their hearing been haunted by inhuman voices, did they dream?

  “What about McMann?” I asked.

  “I tried to contact him, no response.” A frown touched Kellet’s lips, and I felt a twinge, a certainty that McMann was gone, and none of us had been there to witness it.

  I didn’t bother to ask about Adams.

  Our footsteps echoed as we entered the church. A trio of women—Martinez’s sisters? Cousins?—occupied the front-most pew on the left-hand side. A few others were scattered through the rest of the church, but the room was emptier than it should be.

  “He shot himself.” Kellet nodded toward Martinez’s casket as we slid into a pew in the back.

  A framed picture of Martinez, younger than when we’d known him, sat where his head would be. Draped over the middle of the casket, a spray of purple flowers gave off a sweet scent on the edge of rot.

  I thought about Martinez in his tiny bathroom, knees bumping the edge of the tub as he sat on the toilet lid, lips puckered around the barrel of a gun. I’d never seen Martinez’s apartment, or his bathroom. Certainly I hadn’t been there when he died. Except I was there, now, bound as we had been on the ice. A unit. A hive.

  Martinez’s shoulders twitched, even as he fought to steady the gun. His cheeks were wet, the tears leaving glistening tracks in a face already carved by pain.

>   Shoot up. Shoot up, not in.

  For a moment, I thought I’d spoken aloud. But the priest behind the lectern didn’t pause, and neither Kellet nor Ramone looked at me. Were they seeing the coffin, or were they seeing Martinez’s bathroom, too?

  Martinez jerked, like he at least heard me. Like I was there and then, not here and now. He jerked, but he still fired and the bullet did its job, spraying blood and bone and brain onto the wall.

  “I’m going to look for her,” I said, as we stepped out of the church into the too-bright sunlight.

  “We’re with you,” Ramone said; neither he nor Kellet had to asked who I meant, and of course they were coming with me. It was never a question.

  *

  “Why now?” Ramone leaned forward to be heard over the plane’s engine. We’d tracked Adams to a small fishing village in the Yukon. Through the tiny windows, a network of rivers gleamed below us, the patchwork slowly resolving into detail as we descended. “Why did we wait almost a year?”

  “We were scared.” The engine drone swallowed my voice, but it was still just loud enough to be heard.

  Kellet shot me a look, but didn’t object. The look on Ramone’s face was one of relief, like he was grateful someone had finally said it aloud. It was easier to breathe when I leaned back. The plane circled lower. After a year of sweat-soaked sheets and night terrors, we were going home.

  We found Adams drinking in a bar converted from an old canning plant—corrugated metal walls, plain wooden furniture, the whole thing crouched on a pier jutting out over the water. It still smelled of fish, the odor laden over with sweat and beer. Peanut shells cracked underfoot. I thought of the ice cracking and tiny bones.