So Isabel unfolded the paper. Looking at that sketch made her feel like she was trying to puke up something bigger than her whole self.
“This one—” a jab toward the page, pulled just shy of contact—“came to me. Wanted my help. I wanted out. We made a deal.”
“Deal how? Ghosts can’t—”
“Talk? Think in a straight line? Interact with the living? Yeah. Well.” Isabel wasn’t even trying to lift her gaze from the sketch anymore. Like Wasp was this whole separate person that Isabel used all her strength to hold underwater, and every so often Isabel lost her grip, and Wasp came up gasping. “This one could.”
It took Sairy a moment to process that. “What did it want?”
So, went the voice in her head. I take it you are in the business of hunting ghosts.
In response Isabel tapped the other figure in the sketch, the one that had catherine foster floating over its head like a halo. “To find his friend.”
“In the Waste?”
“In the ghost-place.”
None of this was squaring with what Sairy had been taught. She was blinking hard, shaking her head like she could physically shift the information into place.
“Wait. To find—but. They don’t remember any—”
Isabel looked at her.
“Don’t tell me,” Sairy said. “This one did.” Then, when Isabel didn’t refute it, even more skeptically: “From the Before.”
Nobody knew how long back the Before even was. When it had ended. How long it had taken people to scrape the residue of their lives back together and push it, over untold generations, into the shape of something new. It was a question that not even four hundred years of ghostcatching and field notes had been able to answer. Isabel watched as Sairy’s mind threw itself at those unknowable numbers, gained no handholds, slid off. “But why?”
Isabel couldn’t begin to explain to Sairy what little she understood about the Latchkey Project. How it turned children into living weapons. Its four percent survival rate.
“They fought in a war together.” The voice in her head: when there were twelve of us left, they partnered us up. Not to help each other. To inform on each other. It didn’t work out quite the way they wanted. “They…took turns saving each other. They weren’t supposed to, but they did. Foster’s last turn got her killed. To protect him.”
“From what?”
“Bad shit.” Isabel didn’t even have to close her eyes to see the little room where they’d tried to break Foster, again and again, healing her up just to give them more to cut into. Three days and they couldn’t crack her. And then—
Isabel dug her nails into her forearm, bringing herself back. “Very bad shit.”
Sairy shook her head slowly, awed. “Making deals with ghosts. Making friends with ghosts. It’s—” She had an upstart’s upbringing, so she knew what would’ve been expected of her as Archivist in the off-chance she drew the short straw and managed to not get herself murdered. Catch ghosts, study them, destroy them, go catch more. It was a short list, on which bargaining and befriending did not appear. “This is crazy. What are they like? Where are they now?”
“Gone.”
“How do you know?” Hard to tell if Sairy was still thinking of Aneko or if she was just terminally optimistic.
“Because,” Isabel said. Hating how her voice was rising unsteadily. Wholly unable to stop it. Briskly she folded the paper back up and shoved it into her pocket. “They came back for me.”
“Really?”
“And I sent them away.”
Sairy blinked, absorbing this. “They might—”
“No,” Isabel said shortly. “They won’t.”
It took a second for that to sink in. Even without watching Sairy’s face, it was easy to know when it had.
“No,” Sairy said, aghast. “No way. You—”
“It was the best way to protect the town,” Isabel said softly.
They gazed out at the silver sea of ghostgrass.
“But if you—” Sairy began, and then jumped off the hatch as Jen and Bex exploded into the brickfall cave. “Don’t do that!”
“Oh thank the Chooser,” Jen panted. Had she run all this way? She gestured breathlessly at the hatch, where Bex was already getting her grip on the wheel. “Help me get that open.”
“Now?” Isabel asked. “But—”
“Perimeter shot a scout a quarter hour ago,” Bex said, cranking the hatch-wheel. “Raider army’s not two miles behind him.”
“They’re not supposed to be here yet,” Sairy protested lamely.
“Well,” Bex replied, “you’re going to have plenty of chance to tell them that. Real soon.”
“Oh shit,” Sairy said. “Oh shit.”
“The kids are right behind us,” Jen said. “A few adults. Glory’s showing them the way.”
“And the supplies?” Isabel asked.
“Let’s just say we’ll have to wrap this fight up fast,” Bex said.
Sairy froze. “What?”
“There’s what they could grab on foot,” Jen clarified. “It’s not much.” She tilted her head, listening. “Here they come.”
“On three,” Isabel said, and she and Bex heaved the door open. “Tell me you at least brought lamps.”
“I have one,” Glory said, appearing at the edge of the cave.
“One,” Sairy repeated. “One lamp.”
“Lin has another, I saw it.”
Isabel flung a staying hand back toward the field of corpseroot. “Keep them back! One at a time, and not until I say. There’s thorns.” Then, as Glory’s words sunk in: “But Ruby’s not sending guards down.”
“Lin’s not here as a guard,” Glory said as Jen lit the lamp. “She’s nursing babies.”
“She only has one baby,” Sairy said.
“She’s nursing all the babies. This is ready to send down.”
“On what?” Bex said. “Give me a rope.”
Glory froze. “Shit—”
“Don’t worry,” Sairy said. “I got it.” Scrambling one-handed down the ladder with the lamp.
“Okay,” she called up. “Bex, get down here so you can keep the kids in line. I can’t watch the ones in the tunnels and the ones on the ladder at the same time.”
“I’m sending Glory,” Bex said. “Her arm’s busted. There’s at least one sick person up here who needs to be lowered, and Isabel can’t—” She bit off the rest of that sentence. “You’re getting Glory.”
Bex helped Glory down, then situated herself at the hatch with Jen while Isabel took over the bottleneck at the cave entrance. There was a crowd of people there, mostly terrified children. Isabel picked out a total of three adults, one of whom was too sick to walk and was being carried by the other two on a litter. One cart of supplies. As far as Isabel could see, two jugs of water. Some random bags and bundles and loaves and baskets and whatnot held in arms. That was all.
It wasn’t near enough. Not for this many people, not for any length of time.
But it was going to have to be.
“Everyone quiet.” Now there are two ways we can do this, said a voice in her head. Calmly or the other way. “Line up and come along the path one at a time. Don’t touch the thorns.”
Isabel gestured to the adults bearing the litter. The songkeeper and one of the water-boilers, it looked like.
“No,” the songkeeper called back. “Children first.” He waved at Onya, who was hesitating at the edge of the ghostgrass barricade with a sack of acorn flour hugged in both arms. “Go.”
“Here’s how we’re doing this,” Isabel said. Gesturing for Onya to come forward. “We’re going to toss down any supplies that won’t be damaged in the fall. Then you go down and relay that stuff back to the cleared area. Glory will show you the way. Then—” Isabel pulled a couple more older kids out of the crowd— “you two help her. You three are on supplies duty. Glory!”
Glory’s voice echoed up. “Yeah?”
“You make sure they’re putti
ng that stuff where it actually belongs and not just dumping it wherever.”
“Got it.”
“I’m going to lower some really little kids down,” Jen told Glory. “Can you reach them?”
“Broken arm?” Glory reminded her. “Bex, get down here!”
“Little busy.”
“I’ll go,” said a woman from the crowd. Lin the guard stepped forward, two babies strapped onto her, front and back. She handed them off to the songkeeper and climbed down.
One by one, townspeople disappeared into the hole after her.
Ten down. Fifteen. Twenty.
At twenty-eight there came a horrible noise from below. A long metallic screeching, followed by a crash.
“Whatever that was,” Isabel called over one shoulder, “it better have been on purpose.”
“Ladder gave way,” Glory yelled back from below. “The rest will have to lower themselves down.”
“Prop it back up,” Bex told her.
“It’s in about twenty pieces all over the floor. They’re gonna have to jump. Give me a minute to clear a space for them to drop to.”
“I still have some busted-up person on a stretcher up here,” Isabel shouted. “We need a rope.”
“There’s no time,” Jen said. “We’ll figure it out. Keep sending them.”
They got the children all lowered down, and then worked together with Lin and the songkeeper to get the sick person—a man Isabel didn’t know—readied for lowering.
“Put him apart from the others,” Isabel said.
“He’s not catching,” Jen said, voice hushed. “I know him. That’s David. He got hit by lightning out in the Waste on a scav run a week ago. He almost died.”
“He did die,” Bex added. “That’s what I heard. His heart stopped and they were going to bury him but he woke back up.”
As Isabel stared after the man, he began coughing. He hacked up a mouthful of pink froth and spat to the side of the hatch.
Alarm brought her up a little straighter on her feet. “That’s blood.”
“Barely any. Look, what do you want us to do, leave him up here?” Jen read Isabel’s face and shook her head. “We’re not leaving him up here.”
“I want you to go bury him in ghostgrass,” Isabel told Bex. “But don’t draw attention to what you’re doing or why. Understand?”
Wordlessly Bex swung down into the hole. At the bottom, Isabel could just make out one of the kids, struggling with the last armload of supplies. Bex shouldered half of the load and they disappeared into the dark together.
Isabel gave the situation until the count of ten to present another catastrophe on the order of the collapsed ladder. Nothing came. Voices echoed out from the cleared area. That was all.
“That’s the last of them,” Jen said. “Let’s close it up.”
“I’m not coming with you.”
“What? Why?”
“Because this was my plan,” Isabel said, “and I have to stay to see it through.”
Jen took this in. “But the fight—”
“The guards can fight. You can fight.”
“Not like you.”
“Maybe a few years ago,” Isabel said, “that might’ve been true.”
Then, entirely unsure how to say goodbye for what might end up being rather longer than just a day or two, Isabel found herself brusquely giving Jen advice instead.
“Watch your footprints,” she said. “Keep ghostgrass on you.”
“Ration the supplies,” Jen replied. “The water and lamp-oil especially. Have them eat the really fresh stuff first before it spoils.” Her face twisted. “Not that there’s much of it.”
“Fight dirty. But don’t fight stupid. And when you come back to let us out, I guess we don’t have anything to climb up now. Bring ropes.”
“Bex and Glory get themselves killed on your watch, I’ve instructed them to send their ghosts back to haunt you.”
“You get yourself killed, I’m going to take the barricades down so I can beat your ghost’s ass personally.”
“Deal,” Jen said, and Isabel climbed down into the dark.
Chapter Six
In the tunnels, at first everything was chaos. Kids yelling, kids crying, babies crying. The injured man David moaning in pain, presumably from the less-than-gentle descent. Bex and Glory hustling to move the supplies to a corner of the cleared area where they could be guarded and rationed and kept safe from accidental spillage.
Isabel got to work. She had a clear sense of what to do and how to do it, and it gave her the same weird sense of peace that she got from loading up on chore rotations at the Catchkeep-shrine. Alongside her, Bex and Glory pulled their own weight and then some. Gradually, things calmed.
First thing: make sure everyone else stayed busy and out of their own heads. They’d all watched that hatch close, watched their light dwindle to what they carried. It wasn’t just her that could use the distraction.
There were only three adults plus the sick one.
Lin, the perimeter guard, who was healthy.
The songkeeper, sworn to the Chooser, whose faith did not permit him to fight. The father of one of the kids who brought boiled lakewater to the shrine every morning, slowly organizing rations with a bandage on his head. Another earthquake casualty like Glory, Isabel guessed.
She made sure everyone knew not to touch the ghostgrass for any reason whatsoever. She set older children in charge of keeping the smaller ones away from the perimeter she’d staked out the day before.
“I have to check you all for cuts and scrapes,” Isabel said. “Anyone who knows they’re bleeding, or sees someone bleeding, come to me. I’ll get around to all of you but those ones are first.”
Nobody came, so she collared Onya and gave her a quick once-over. Found a scrape on her upper arm and bandaged it. “You’re my eyes,” she told her. “Anyone’s hurt, bring them here.”
In between checking people, she surveyed the pile of supplies. There were half a dozen big jugs of water, which turned out to be most of what the supply-cart had been holding. A couple sacks of acorn flour, one of dried meat, two of black walnuts, one of dried plums. A few loaves of bread. A basket of carrots, still dirty from the garden. A basket of raw eggs, some broken. A roll of bandages. A jar of lamp-oil. Three lamps.
It would be enough for a few days. They’d be hungry, and thirsty, and uncomfortable, but they’d live.
As she worked, Isabel kept glancing over at David. Bex had stashed him off in the corner of the ghostgrass perimeter nearest the waypoint. More bundles of ghostgrass lay at the head and foot of his blanket, and some of Glory’s ghostgrass paste was smeared around his mouth. He lay there, muttering feverishly, tended by the midwife’s apprentice, an eleven-year-old girl named Rina.
Commotion behind her as the songkeeper began to unpack his puppets. Isabel caught a glance of The One Who Got Away with His/Her arms sewn into a position of time-biding patience, Carrion Boy and Ember Girl all in black, and the Chooser with Her good eye and blind eye and little scaled-down cape of mouse- and bird-bones stitched together.
Within five minutes the songkeeper had drawn a crowd, two dozen pairs of eyes now staring enraptured at his recital of “Catchkeep’s Favorite Children.”
He could’ve grabbed some food instead, Isabel thought, but then realized how quiet the tunnels had become and changed her mind.
Out of the corner of her eye, a couple of older kids about Onya’s age were rifling through the debris piled along at the other edge of the perimeter.
“Hey,” she called out. “Leave that stuff alone. Glory!”
“You two! Over here!” a voice barked out. The perimeter guard, Lin. She had her daughter slung sleeping across her back and was adroitly nursing two other babies as she summoned the kids with her eyes. Onya and Andrew, the songkeeper’s grandson.
“Everybody has a job to do,” Lin told them. “Your parents would be really proud of you if you help with the babies and little kids down here. They’
re really scared and they don’t understand what’s going on and they’re way too little to take care of themselves. Or,” she continued, “I can tell them you were causing trouble. Or I can just deal with you myself.” At their look of terror, Lin’s face softened. “But I’d rather not. See that tall lady over there with the spiky hair?” Nodding across the way at Glory, crankily wrangling a swarm of toddlers into the songkeeper’s circle. “I bet she could give you some important work to do.”
They ran off and Isabel mouthed thank you at Lin.
“So this is turning out to be an interesting day,” Lin said. “Straight from a party to a lockdown.”
Isabel hesitated. It was a rare thing, someone from the town talking to her. Someone not of the Catchkeep-shrine, someone not Ruby when she wanted something.
“What’s it like up there?” she asked. Carefully not asking: did Ruby even explain what was coming before it got here? Not asking: was anyone ready for it? Or: were the ex-upstarts the only ones who even knew?
“I don’t know,” Lin said. “They rushed us down here first thing.” Then, quieter: “Yulia and Jacen assembled the guards earlier and told us. Some of us went to ready the defenses while the people were distracted.”
Somehow, Isabel wasn’t surprised. “That sounds familiar.”
“They’ll be fine,” said Lin. “Perimeter will spot the raiders miles off.” Lin attempted a gesture that might have been the beginning of the drawing of a bow, before realizing her arms were full. She adjusted her grip on a protesting baby and grinned. “Target practice.”
Isabel made a noncommittal sound. But Lin was just warming to her subject.
“Plus we still have a few surprises stashed in the guardhouse for just such an occasion. These slag-for-brains are only getting in along the Waste-road, unless they’ve grown wings or they plan on swimming. We’ll mop them up by dinnertime.”
“Well,” Isabel conceded. “I hope you’re right.”
“I saw some of yours up there keeping pretty busy too,” Lin said. “Lissa and Meg made this one thing with tripwires and some old broken knives that looks pretty nasty.”
Latchkey Page 8
