Latchkey

by Nicole Kornher-Stace

  “Shut up,” she told the knife, clamping it white-knuckled until it went—or seemed to go—still. Her whole hand went pins-and-needles with it, which she decided to ignore. “I know. I see it.” She gestured at the waypoint. “I don’t care.”

  Screw this place, she thought, and powered her way back up the hall.

  The length of tunnel where she’d left the ex-upstarts was almost wholly unrecognizable. They’d almost completely cleared a section that was about eighty strides long. The floor was clear of sharp-edged debris and all the junk they’d picked up was piled out of the way for later sorting.

  When Isabel arrived, Bex was hauling bricks. Glory was stomping tiny shards of synthetic tile deep into the mud of the floor where they couldn’t cut anyone. And Sairy was in the middle of laying the other end of the ghostgrass perimeter.

  Isabel picked up a few chunks of broken brick and went to add them to Bex’s pile, which stood to waist-height all along a stretch of wall. Metal, plastic, glass, bits of whatnot from Chooser knew how long ago. Relics, every one.

  “Jen made me promise to go through whatever we find,” Bex said, dropping off another armload of rubble and pausing to wipe sweat from her forehead. “See what’s worth keeping.”

  “Of course she did,” Isabel said. “We get through the next few days, she can come down here herself.”

  “That’s what I told her you’d say.”

  Sairy picked up an orange plastic cylinder, some kind of little bottle with a white plastic lid. Like everything else down here, it was grubby with an unguessable accumulation of dust but not brittle the way it’d be if it’d been exposed to sun. “Hey, Isabel. If Glory sees a ghost, you can catch it in this.”

  Sairy tossed her the bottle, which she went to drop on the heap.

  And stopped.

  Wedged behind the pile of rubble was a flat flexible sheet of plasticky synthetic. It was scratched up, and smudgy, and sideways, but Isabel knew a map when she saw one.

  She pocketed the bottle absently and pulled out the map. It was about the size of two of Meg’s flatbreads laid side to side. Beneath the dirt she could just make out snaky lines of color, the suggestion of little squares. The songkeeper had some old maps like this, collected by Sweetwater scav crews and years of barter. Isabel made a mental note to bring him this one after—

  Dislodged by her rummaging, something else rolled free of the pile and fetched up against her foot, and she forgot the map entirely.

  A tube-shaped device about the size of Isabel’s thumb. One side was surfaced in black Before-stuff, dull and dented now, but Isabel knew that it’d once been shiny and smooth, because she’d seen another of these things before.

  Standard issue, went the voice in her head.

  Isabel replaced the map and picked up the device. Carefully, thumb-and-forefinger, like it’d burn her.

  No effort at all to remember the noise one of these things had made as it powered up, its beeping just barely scraping through the smeary film of her consciousness, and then the searing pain of being put back together, cell by outraged cell.

  Sairy was at her elbow. “What’d you find?”

  “A Before-thing,” Isabel said. Turning the thing over and over in her hands. “They used to use them to heal people.”

  Weirdly, it didn’t look too banged up. The tunnels had protected it from the ash and wind of the Waste for longer than Isabel had any way of guessing at. Not enough visible metal on it to rust.

  Sairy was narrowing her eyes at the healing device doubtfully. “What, like it has ointment inside it?”

  “It’s a Before-thing. You touch it and it works.”

  “And does what? Heals you? Like in ‘Ember Girl and Carrion Boy Fight the Metal Men?’ Just like that?” Sairy lit up. “We can use it in our fight!”

  “It’s been down here since the Before, Sairy, it’s broken. Look.”

  Isabel pressed one fingertip to the black-film side of the healing device, as she’d seen the ghost do, back in her little Archivist-house, forever ago.

  They watched the device expectantly, but this time the film didn’t light up. Not so much as a blink. Not so much as a fizzle. Not even the mournful little beeps these things made when they powered down and died.

  “Your hands are shaking,” Sairy observed.

  “Just cold.” Isabel made herself shrug. “Hey,” she called, and tossed the healing device over to Bex. “Relic for Jen,” she said. “We done here?”

  Glory checked the lamp-oil. “Done early. This hasn’t been burning more than two hours.”

  Sairy glanced over their work. “I think we’re ready to report.”

  When they reached the hatch, Isabel went last. She stood, one foot on the ladder, looking back over her shoulder into the unanswering dark. Then climbed.

  “Well,” Glory said, as they shut the hatch and turned the wheel, “that was nothing.”

  “Told you,” Sairy said, swatting at her. “This was the easy part. Tomorrow you get locked down here with forty children.”

  Glory made a face. “I want to help fight.”

  “Seriously, the raider army will be coming for the children,” Sairy reminded her. “Protecting them means telling the raiders to shove their plan up their ass where it belongs.” She pulled Glory in sideways and kissed the top of her head. “Now let’s go see if they left us any wine.”

  Chapter Five

  They found Ruby in the meeting-hall, where the party was still underway. Bex and Glory made a beeline for the wine and sweets, but, tempted or no, Sairy insisted upon staying with Isabel, helping her shoulder through the packed room.

  Not that Isabel needed the help. Even after all this time, crowds parted before her like water. Isabel didn’t know if this was due to all the bloodshed in her history or all the ghosts, or both, but something seemed to have left an invisible, indelible stain on everything she touched, and there were still those in the village who wouldn’t so much as set foot in her shadow.

  Isabel shooed Sairy toward the wine. She didn’t need much convincing.

  Reaching Ruby’s high seat, Isabel stopped. She knew better than to say anything here in this crowded room. So she waited for Ruby to climb down and together they went outside.

  “I miscalculated,” Ruby said. “My latest head count is forty-six.”

  “We can fit them.”

  “And the supplies?”

  “You’ll have to be picky about what you send down,” Isabel said, “but yes. Food. Water. Bandages. Enough for a week.”

  “If we haven’t solved the problem up here in a week, I’m afraid it’ll be beyond solving,” Ruby said grimly. “What about the town relics? The songkeeper’s histories? The statue in the shrine?”

  “The songkeeper’s things we can fit. The statue is way too big to move, and it has sharp edges. I’m not risking their safety down there. It’s going to be hard enough keeping forty children still without having a bunch of metal teeth and claws around for them to stick themselves on.”

  “Nothing you can’t handle,” Ruby said.

  Isabel blinked. “Nothing I can’t—” Then she realized what Ruby was saying. “No. Not happening. I’m staying up here to fight. I’m not herding a bunch of—”

  “Walk with me,” Ruby said.

  “No. This is stupid. We prioritize people who can fight and we put them up here. We send a few down into the tunnels to keep the children quiet, but that hatch is unfindable. You probably don’t even know where it is.”

  “Be that as it may—”

  “Did you put me in charge of this or didn’t you? I’m telling you the people in those tunnels do not need to fight. Glory with her broken arm goes down. Bex goes down because she physically cannot touch a weapon without puking everywhere. Now ask me why she can’t. I’ll wait.”

  Ruby wasn’t a high seat for nothing. Abruptly, she changed tactics. “Isabel. Listen. The tunnels were your idea. They were a good idea. We might well look back on that idea and say this, right here,
is what changed things for us. This plan, Isabel’s plan, is what saved the town. If that were my idea, I wouldn’t want to leave it in the hands of someone else to screw it up. I’d want to be there supervising it myself. Don’t you?”

  “If I’m of more use up here? No. I don’t.” Isabel lowered her voice, hissing: “You do know what’s going to happen to the people in the tunnels if the town is overrun? Maybe eventually they come back out and Carrion Boy’s people find them. Or they’ll hide down there until they starve. Neither will be quick.”

  “And now you understand,” Ruby said gently, “why that’s exactly where we need you.”

  It was like being slapped. After everything she’d done over the past three years, this was still what the high seats looked at her and saw.

  “I’m sorry,” she said tightly. “You’re going to have to elaborate. I’m not sure I understand what you mean.”

  But she understood. She understood all too well.

  Ruby looked more uncomfortable than Isabel was used to seeing her. “Believe me, it isn’t what I—”

  “You want me,” Isabel said, keeping her voice slow and soft because it was either that or shouting, “to slaughter a bunch of sick people and children. Just—” she gestured, furious— “sit down there with my feet up, sharpening my knife, waiting for my signal to start cutting throats. And you waited until now to tell me.”

  “I want you to do what you alone of all of us have extensive experience doing,” Ruby said. “Yes.” Then, to whatever she saw in Isabel’s face: “Don’t think of it in those terms. Think of it like this. Those people are counting on you. You are their last line of defense. You are their only hope of mercy. Because you’re absolutely right. Every other option is slow, and painful, and unnecessarily cruel.”

  Isabel stared at her.

  “You could send a guard then,” she said at length. “You’re going to tell me they haven’t killed before?”

  Ruby opened her mouth to answer, but Isabel didn’t give her the chance.

  “But you won’t send them,” she said. “Because they’re part of the town, and you trust them to fight for it. And you can’t trust them to kill their own people. But they’re not my people, so I can do that no problem.”

  “Isabel—”

  “No. You know, you’re right. They’re not.”

  She stormed away a few steps, then stopped short.

  “I’ll stay in the tunnels,” she said, her voice abruptly colder. Calmer. It backed Ruby up a step. “But on one condition. When the fight starts, Sairy is my voice. The other girls from the shrine answer to her above you or anyone else.”

  “Isabel, there are extensive plans in place already for—”

  Isabel plowed over her, her tone unchanging. After all, it’d been the voice in her head for three years. “That is not negotiable. They are a unit, and that unit moves on her command. And I’m not sure you even begin to deserve to have them at your service. So when this is over and I get Sairy’s report, the only thing I expect to hear about you is the extent of your gratitude.”

  Ruby was looking at her like the Ragpicker Himself was clacking His teeth at her heels.

  “Send them whenever,” Isabel said flatly. “I’m ready.”

  She strode away, fists jammed into her pockets to hide the shaking in her hands, and didn’t stop until she found herself back at the hatch, pacing furiously back and forth along the length of the ghostgrass barricade. The old wound in her calf was screaming at her, and the one in her side felt like someone had reached in and knitted a scarf with her guts, but she had no choice. She had nowhere else to go, and she couldn’t stop moving. If she stayed still she presented a better target for all her thoughts to settle on her fully.

  Eventually, though, her bad leg made the decision for her. She followed the path they’d cut in the corpseroot earlier and sat on the shut wheel of the hatch, elbows on knees, her face in her hands.

  It wasn’t that far in, but all the sound seemed to die at the edge of the brickfall cave, and she couldn’t even make out the noise from the town. She was struck by a strangely uncomfortable sense of perfect balance, caught in that bubble of space between the collapsed building above her and the hatch below. A poisedness between the now and the Before, which she found herself mentally prodding, the way she’d poke a sore tooth with her tongue.

  After a while she heard footsteps, picking their way through the ghostgrass. She’d been tailed by them often enough to recognize whose they were by sound alone.

  “Not feeling like a party either?” Sairy asked, ducking into the cave. There came a distinct sloshing sound as Sairy plunked down beside her on the hatch-rim. “Lucky for you, I brought the party with me.”

  She nudged Isabel with her shoulder and passed over a wine-jug.

  Isabel didn’t move. “I’m good, Sairy, thanks.”

  “Like hell. Come on. This is the brew-mistress’s finest. There’s peaches in it. All the way from Chooser’s Blindside.”

  Isabel lifted her head. “I thought she was hoarding that batch.”

  “She was.”

  “She sold it to Ruby?”

  “She gave it to me.” Sairy was grinning outright. “What can I say, I’m very persuasive. Here.”

  Isabel took the jug. Went to put it down. Found herself taking a sip instead. It was delicious.

  “Oh. I brought these too. Sorry, they kind of stuck together.”

  Sairy wrangled a couple of sweet buns out of her pocket and pried them apart, then passed Isabel one. It was full of what were very likely the garden’s last blackberries.

  Isabel wasn’t hungry, but made herself eat with Sairy anyway. Not for the first time her friendship with the ex-upstarts struck her as something like a very soft, very warm, very cozy garment that just happened to not fit her quite right.

  “How long do you think this has been here?” Sairy said eventually. Pointing up with the last corner of her pastry at the ceiling of the brickfall cave.

  Isabel shrugged.

  “Maybe the earthquake the other day loosened it up,” Sairy went on. “Maybe it’ll come down on us while we’re sitting here. Stomp us like Ember Girl’s own bootheel.” She clapped her hands together once, then picked up the jug and drank. Laughed. “Squish.”

  Isabel took the jug from her and hefted it in one hand. It wasn’t very heavy. “How full was this when you—”

  “I remember my family,” Sairy blurted. At Isabel’s incredulous look, she laughed a little, bitterly. “I know, we’re not supposed to, we got taken too young. But I see them sometimes when I dream. Until you figured out the truth about how we got here, I thought, that’s all it was. Just dreams. We’re in a different town. It’s in, like, a bend in a river, so the water wraps around the whole front of the town.” She gestured widely: a broad ribbon of water, curving. “In this dream there’s fire on the river, something burning. Whatever it is, it smells like the Ragpicker’s own crapper, and it burns green.” Sairy paused. “I think maybe I had a brother? I don’t know. Some boy. He put me in a basket and hid me on a cart. Told me hush. When I’m dreaming I can see his face, but when I’m awake and try to remember it, he turns into Aneko. And I’m forgetting her face too.”

  Despite herself, Isabel flinched. Aneko, the upstart Isabel had tried to save. Had tried to spare during the last Archivist-choosing fight, thus breaking the system and freeing them all. And failed.

  “We had a plan,” Sairy said. “Aneko and me. To escape together. Steal a map and try to find a town along a river. See what we see. I don’t know. Stupid, probably.” Then, her tone brisk: “Obviously we never got up the guts to do it, and now she’s dead.” When Sairy broke the ensuing silence her tone had changed again. “Sometimes in the dream it’s her burning, pushing me down into the basket while her hair goes up like a warn-fire. Brightest green you ever saw.”

  She took the wine-jug back and drank. “I used to want to kill you, you know.”

  “To avenge her,” Isabel said. “I kin
d of figured.”

  “Partly, maybe? Mostly just so I could become Archivist instead and find her.”

  There was so much Isabel could say to that. “If you found her,” she heard herself saying instead, “she wouldn’t know you anymore.”

  Sairy’s smile wasn’t a smile, not really. “It took her a long time to die. She didn’t know me by the end of that either.”

  After a moment’s hesitation Sairy pulled a folded paper out of her jacket and handed it to Isabel. “Don’t get mad at me,” she said. “Here.”

  Isabel didn’t have to unfold that paper to know what it was.

  “If the town gets trashed tomorrow,” Sairy said, and stopped. “I thought—I don’t know—you’d want that kept.”

  “I guess,” Isabel said, or meant to. No sound came out. She turned the folded paper over and over in her hands.

  “All I want to know,” Sairy said softly, “is if they’re the ones who hurt you.”

  Isabel looked at her sharply. “No.”

  Silence raveled out between them.

  “They healed me,” she made herself say, and she heard Sairy’s breath catch. “I would’ve died.”

  A pause, and then, delicately: “When you were gone that winter.”

  “That’s right.”

  “With one of those healing things! That’s how you knew what—”

  “Yeah.”

  Visibly, Sairy tried to drop it. But she couldn’t help herself. Three years of silence was a long time. “You should’ve seen the Catchkeep-priest’s face when the dogs couldn’t starve you down off the Hill,” she said all in a rush. “He told us Catchkeep had gotten sick of your disobedience, stepped down out of the sky and swatted your useless ass dead, but you could see in his face that he didn’t believe it. He knew you finally got away, and he knew we knew it, and that’s the part he really didn’t like. He’d whip us if he heard us say your name. He—” Sairy trailed off. Closed her mouth. Braced herself. Opened it. “Isabel, what happened out there?”

  Isabel thought about what it must cost Sairy to reach out, over and over again, despite what Isabel had taken from her. Thought how maybe, if both their lives had gone very differently, it might cost her nothing to reach back.