Latchkey

by Nicole Kornher-Stace

  She stopped so fast she almost went facefirst into the door.

  The tunnels.

  They were ancient, and crumbled, and mainly unexplored, apart from one short stretch beneath the town gardens where ghosts were known to appear. There were no people down there. No light. Nothing in the field notes about expeditions sent down there for salvage. It was probably only Archivists who knew they even existed.

  She’d just been out to the entry point a few days ago. Behind the ghostgrass barricade, under the corpseroot overgrowth, that weird round heavy door with its drop down into the dark. It was half a mile outside of town. Under a pile of rubble the size of a small mountain. Not even most townspeople knew that door was there.

  She wouldn’t have to go far in. Not much space had to be cleared. Just enough to hide the few dozen people who couldn’t fight—the children, the elderly, the injured—while the rest defended the town. Yulia had said that Carrion Boy’s raiders took children for their armies. Isabel could hide a lot of children in those tunnels.

  She’d been in those tunnels before. There was a ghost-passage down there, but it was where one arm of the tunnels dead-ended in a collapsed brickfall. Even back when she was Archivist, ghosts hardly ever came through there. It was the least-trafficked waypoint in Sweetwater and she mostly avoided it. And the ghostgrass barricade around it was solid. She’d checked on it before the quake, and Sairy after.

  It was a Ragpicker’s gambit, of course. But it was the best option she could see. This way the townspeople wouldn’t have to take off on a hopeless slog through the Waste. They wouldn’t have to abandon their food supply, their water supply, their shelter. They wouldn’t be standing an excellent chance of being caught out in the open miles between towns for winter or worse to find them.

  When Isabel went back out into the common room, all seven ex-upstarts and all three high seats were there, waiting. Their faces turned to her like flowers to the sun.

  “So. What was Her counsel?” Ruby asked her. “Do we stay or do we go?”

  Isabel meant to tell her the truth. How could she possibly know better than Catchkeep what the proper course of action was? This wasn’t the time to be going rogue, indulging her own authority at the expense of the town’s safety. Nobody else even knew those tunnels existed, and she hadn’t been down there in years. They could well be a deathtrap. They were well on their way to deathtrap last she’d seen.

  On the other hand, she couldn’t protect anyone out there. Here she at least knew what they’d be up against, and she could fight it on her own terms. They already knew which direction Carrion Boy’s people were approaching from, and that they’d be caught between ridge and lake along the one Waste-road. Meanwhile the townspeople could stockpile supplies in the tunnels. The ones who were able to defend the town could protect the ones who weren’t. The ex-upstarts in particular, she knew, would fight tooth and nail for the place they’d carved out for themselves, the roots they’d sunk in the Waste. Alone if they had to, and to the last one standing.

  In any case it was out of her hands. She was the mouth of a goddess, and she would let the goddess speak.

  “Catchkeep’s up-self never sets,” she found herself saying instead. “She watches over us always. Until Her stars fall from the sky, Catchkeep will never turn Her back on us. Not here where Her house is. Not here where Her ways are kept.”

  None of this would have even been happening if she’d just kept her head down, stayed Archivist, let the Catchkeep-priest live. She had dug this hole herself, and nobody was going to fill it for her. She looked Ruby dead in the eye and swallowed her second thoughts.

  “We stay.”

  Chapter Four

  So Ruby threw a party.

  It would start at first light and was set to carry on until around midday. That gave Isabel’s team a few hours to clear the tunnels while the high seats worked with the perimeter guards to coordinate the town’s defenses. Then, when the tunnels were ready, Ruby would make her announcement to the people of Sweetwater. Some would begin training, some would relay supplies to the tunnels, some would prepare to hide for the fight’s duration.

  To that end, Isabel and the ex-upstarts grabbed a few hours of sleep before the long day to come. Then at dawn they gathered ghostgrass to bring into the tunnels and readied themselves for the descent.

  Meanwhile, Ruby bought out the brew-mistress’s supply. She tasked the baker’s whole family with baking the last of the summer fruits into the kinds of sweets that usually only appeared on high holidays. She had someone set up games in the grass outside the meeting-hall. She sent people to pick all the more delicate vegetables from the garden, everything that couldn’t be stashed in the tunnels.

  Isabel had no idea what Ruby had told these people. Whatever it was, it wasn’t the truth. Not that she really had any room there to complain.

  “What,” Ruby said, amused. “You think I don’t know how to have fun because I’m a high seat? Or because I’m older than you?”

  “Both?” Lissa said.

  Jen punched her on the arm. “Mostly,” she said, giving Lissa a just-shut-up-already look, “we thought it was a weird time to be celebrating.”

  Ruby nodded. “Chasing the Chooser’s cape. You thought.”

  Jen hesitated, visibly suppressing the reflex to gesture Chooser-look-away-from-here. “Yes.”

  “Well, we’re not celebrating,” Ruby said. “We’re using up some food we can’t store in the tunnels. I don’t know about you, but I call that resourcefulness.” But she caught Jen’s eye and winked.

  “I call it distracting people,” Lissa said. “Giving them something shiny to look at while they get stabbed in the back.”

  “Or how about,” Ruby said, “letting them enjoy a beautiful summer day in peace, without troubling themselves with what’s to come.”

  Lissa snorted.

  “She wants to prevent a panic,” Sairy told her, not taking her eyes off of Ruby as she spoke. “She doesn’t want to tell everyone until she can give them something useful to do. So they don’t feel so helpless when they get the news.”

  “You catch on fast,” Ruby said admiringly. To her credit, she didn’t say for an upstart. “You should’ve been a high seat.”

  “I get to a point where all I want to do is sit in a fancy chair in the meeting-hall and listen to people complain about their neighbors all day,” Sairy said, “I’ll let you know.”

  “I look forward to it,” Ruby said.

  “Give us a few hours to clear a space,” Isabel told her. “Then send down the supplies. I want everything ready before we have to fit people down there. Get me an accurate head count.”

  “I have forty-one so far,” Ruby told her.

  “Plus a couple of mine to watch them? It’s going to be tight.”

  “But you’ll manage?”

  “We’ll manage.”

  When Ruby had gone, Isabel gathered the ex-upstarts.

  “This party is a terrible idea,” Sairy said, launching into her best impression of Ruby’s voice. “So, everyone, here’s some food and wine and games. Enjoy them! Because you’re about to die.”

  “I don’t know,” Kath said. “It gets people fed, keeps their energy up.”

  “And she’s right,” Jen added. “We can’t store the whole garden in the tunnels. Better they eat that food than the raiders do.”

  “That’s not our concern,” Isabel said. “Most of you are going to work with the perimeter guards and train people. You need to be ready to receive the people Ruby sends you. They’re going to be scared. They’re going to be pissed off. They’re not going to want to need your help, and they’re probably not going to thank you for it.” The corner of her mouth quirked. “Remember,” she said, “the idea is to train them. Not break them.”

  They laughed.

  “Be efficient. Think: if you had two days to learn how to fight, what would you want someone to teach you? Nothing fancy. The dirtier the better. And no ghost stuff. They’ll be fight
ing people. We know Clayspring is coming from the north, so they’ll hit us where the road passes between the western edge of the lake and the top end of the ridge. The high seats will have some kind of strategy to defend that stretch and the town itself. Whatever we do, we do within the framework of that plan. Don’t do Ruby’s job. Do your job. It comes down to it, you can’t find me, your orders come from Sairy. Argue with me later if you have to, but listen to her then. We can’t protect the people in the tunnels if the town above is overrun.”

  She gestured toward the table beside her. Where the vegetables and chopping-boards had been yesterday there was now a bundle, partially unwrapped, glinting where the light caught on its angles. Jen, who had brought that bundle out of long storage, untied the twine and pulled away the rest of its blanket wrapping.

  Thirty- or forty-odd knives, given over to Jen for safekeeping when the Catchkeep-priest had died, taking the Archivist-upstart system with him.

  They lay in a jumble of salvage scrap and glass and filed bone. The weapons of all the ex-upstarts were here, and the weapons of a number of dead upstarts before them. Many were rusted or chipped, or snapped entirely in two, but others were whole, and yet others could be repaired.

  The ex-upstarts stood before them in silence. Several of them, Isabel noted, were looking everywhere and anywhere but at that pile of knives.

  There are other exits, deeper in, said a voice in her head. But this door is not one of them. And I can’t open it for you.

  “I know,” she told them, as gently as she knew how. “But it’s not like it was before. We don’t owe these people anything. If you want to leave, this is the time. Nobody will come after you. But if you want to stay, you fight. Because you choose to. Because if Carrion Boy’s people catch you, they will conscript you. You know the stories. You’re too useful to kill. They’ll break you until you have to fight for them, their way, on their say-so.” She looked into their faces, each in turn. “You want to go back to that?”

  Silence.

  “Fuck no,” said Sairy.

  “Never again,” said Kath.

  Meg shook her head, mouth pressed into a line.

  “No way,” said Jen.

  Glory shuddered, like she’d touched something unclean.

  “They’ll have to kill me,” Bex said. “I’m not doing shit for them.”

  Lissa was staring at the pile of knives like it was first-apples day and she’d just found the winner’s token in her slice of pie. “Let them come at us,” she said. “I’m ready.”

  “Clean the blood off of them,” Isabel said. “Add the kitchen knives and sharpen everything. Broken ones go to Kath.” She raised an eyebrow at Kath, sitting with her sprained ankle elevated on a stool.

  Kath gave the knives a once-over and nodded. “Some of these are completely trashed, but I’ll fix what I can.”

  One of Lissa’s old knives lay near the top, and she ran a fingertip along the flat of it. It had one notch cut into its handle, old sweat and blood dried into its grip. She reached to take it up, but then a thought hit her and she looked up at Isabel instead. “There’s going to be a lot of blood.”

  “Carrion Boy’s people won’t come at you with wooden knives,” Isabel told them.

  “And if we pull ghosts?”

  “We take precautions. You draw a ghost down on a crowd, it goes for the person who’s bleeding. The person who doesn’t have ghostgrass to protect her. Don’t let that person be you.” Isabel paused to let that sink in. “You’re right. Normal days, yes, we play it safe, we train with wooden knives. But whatever this ends up being when Clayspring gets here, it won’t be a normal day.”

  They nodded. Some with resignation, some with focused calm, some already spoiling for the fight to come. These girls might’ve been domesticated, but it’d be a good long while before they were anything like tame.

  “You, and whoever is up here fighting alongside you, you’re the first and middle and pretty much last line of defense. So put away everything you’re thinking about these people. You don’t need to make friends with them. You need to keep them alive. You need to teach them how to help keep you alive. Anything less than total cooperation and this goes straight to shit very fast.”

  “What about you?” Jen asked.

  “I’ll be on the front lines with you. Once the tunnels are cleared, Sairy and I will join everyone aboveground. Glory and Bex, you’ll be in charge down there. All you have to do is keep them quiet and keep them still. No wandering. Nothing stupid. No matter what you hear up here, you keep those people locked down.”

  Bex and Glory exchanged a glance. “Sounds easy enough,” Bex said.

  “Good. Now. Sairy, Glory, Bex, you’re with me. Jen, gather all the ghostgrass we have. Make sure everyone has some, and the houses are protected too. Lissa’s right—there’s going to be blood. Let’s not make more problems for ourselves than we already have. The rest of you, get ready to teach these people how to cut something that’s not their dinner.”

  * * *

  Isabel, Sairy, Bex, and Glory made their way out of the Catchkeep-shrine, carrying sacks of ghostgrass. They had to move fast, travel light, and, most importantly, get to where they were going without being seen.

  Easy enough when everyone was occupied. Whether or not she agreed with it, Isabel almost had to admire the sneaky efficacy of Ruby’s plan.

  Their path to the hatch was a new one. It avoided the Waste-road entirely. As per Sairy’s idea, it turned away instead through the sparse grass at the Waste’s edge, tacking back and forth to avoid leaving too clear a trail.

  “This’ll be more important when the supply runs come later,” Sairy said, walking backwards to kick ashy soil over their footprints. “But it takes ten seconds to test it for them now.”

  They made their way around the far side of the ruined building so as to avoid the gardens and the workers hastily picking vegetables for Ruby’s party inside.

  “All right,” Isabel said, stopping at the edge of the ghostgrass barricade. Breeze went sighing through it, tousling it like hair, and an awful thought occurred to her. What if the earthquake had collapsed the tunnels, bringing the ceilings down like a rotten log, and she’d open the hatch onto a cave-in? Why hadn’t she thought of that earlier? Why hadn’t Ruby? Or the other high seats?

  Even worse, she understood why nobody had brought up the possibility. Because Catchkeep wouldn’t have told us to stay if it wasn’t safe.

  She sighed. Already the day was weighing on her like a stone around her neck. “Go easy,” she instructed the others. “Don’t trample the ghostgrass. Pick a few fresh blades to put on yourself. Just a few. The freshly-growing stuff is more potent.”

  “What about the bundles we brought?” Glory asked.

  “It comes down with us. That’s our perimeter.”

  Quickly, efficiently, they tied the long strands of ghostgrass around their wrists, ankles, necks. Bex and Sairy had hair long enough to have grassblades braided into, and they all wrapped some around their belts and bunched some in their pockets. Isabel took one blade and wound it around the hilt of her harvesting-knife, over the shiny synthetic grip that’d remained when the secondary dogleather one had been removed.

  That done, she took a deep breath and picked her way in. Through the ghostgrass barricade, up against the corpseroot overgrowth where she’d turned back the other day.

  There she stopped to consider it. It grew waist-high and filled the cave of the brickfall completely, burying the hatch. All jaunty crimson blossoms and clustering thorns, undaunted by the dark. There was no way around. There was no pleasant way through.

  This gave Isabel pause. The thorns were inches long and curved like reaching claws. And she was supposed to herd children and injured people through this without drawing blood?

  At least the brickfall hadn’t collapsed onto the hatch. She was fully prepared to take her good news where she could get it, and that was good enough news for now.

  Carefully, she began to
work her way through. Stepping on the brambles to crush them, shoving through them in a kind of sullen fury with which the corpseroot was wholly unimpressed. After a moment of hesitation, she drew the harvesting-knife. Even after these years of disuse, it cut through the corpseroot like butter.

  The others joined her, slashing with their newly-reacquired knives, but Glory hung back, visibly pale. “There was death here.”

  “No shit,” said Sairy, grunting as she sawed through a bramble the thickness of a wrist.

  “I’ve never seen so much corpseroot.”

  Isabel straightened. “You do realize what we’re standing under.”

  She pointed at the ceiling of the brickfall and all three gazes followed. From the look on Glory’s face, Isabel could well believe that Glory, in fact, had not realized until she stood before it now. Most of the bricks themselves were eroded to gravel, but long spider-legs of twisted metal remained. Impossible to guess how tall the thing had stood. The pile of its ruins alone was taller than any five buildings of Sweetwater stacked up.

  “It’s a building,” Bex told her, voice hushed in the presence of the dead. “From the way way back Before. It’s even bigger than it looks from out where we planted the ghostgrass.”

  “Buildings died in the Before,” Isabel said. There was more irritation in her voice than she wanted there to be, and much less of it was directed at Glory than Glory probably assumed. “People in them. Dead buildings, dead people, corpseroot, ghosts.”

  At ghosts Glory stopped cutting. “But it’s safe?”

  “It’s dead empty down there,” Isabel said. “There’s a waypoint in the—”

  Sairy blinked. “A what?”

  It was a moment before Isabel realized her misstep. “A ghost-place passage. It’s—”

  “What did you call it? I’ve never heard that word before.”

  “Something somebody else called them once,” Isabel snapped. “It’s nothing. Anyway it’s empty. I think it used to be more populated—it’s in the field notes—but every time I went hunting ghosts here there was nothing to find.”