Latchkey

by Nicole Kornher-Stace

  “That sounds like them. Listen, do you need me to get you anything? Water? Did you eat?”

  “Bex took care of me. I’m good.”

  “Okay. Yell if that changes.”

  Lin nodded. “Will do.”

  She didn’t even realize the midwife’s apprentice had come up behind her, the girl was so quiet. When Isabel turned she almost tripped over her.

  “David says his skin is stinging him,” Rina said.

  “His skin is stinging him?”

  “And he’s dizzy.”

  “Okay,” Isabel said. Trying not to let her exasperation show. “What do you usually do about that?”

  “I don’t know. It just started. When we came down here.”

  “Keep him comfortable. We’ll be out of here soon.”

  Glory came up to her, looking troubled. “Isabel.”

  “What.”

  “Where are they supposed to pee.”

  Isabel turned to stare at her. She hadn’t even thought of it yesterday, and now their options were pretty limited. For one second she entertained the notion of sending the kids down the hall to squat with that glowing ghost-passage at their backs. No chance.

  So she took a lamp and a bundle of ghostgrass, set Glory in charge, and went off to clear the space directly on the other side of the hatch entrance.

  Before she’d even made her way back over the dented fallen door, she could hear noises coming from the hatch. No: from directly below the hatch. Instinctively she ducked out of the open doorway, curling her body around the lamp to hide its glow in the wide wings of the Archivist-coat. Making sure the harvesting-knife was within easy reach. Running through scenarios in her head, none of them good.

  She left the lamp, tiptoed through the doorway in the almost perfect dark. Somebody was frantically trying to jam the broken rungs of the ladder back into the holes it had ripped from the wall.

  Isabel snuck up on the figure, grabbed it, spun it around.

  “Isabel?”

  “Sairy?” Sheathing the harvesting-knife. “What the hell—”

  “I was trying to—”

  “You’re not even supposed to be here.”

  “I know. I was helping settle people in. When I went to leave, the hatch was already shut, and the ladder…” In a fit of frustration she hurled a broken rung at the wall. “There has to be a way to fix it. There has to.”

  Cursing under her breath, Isabel fetched the lamp. Raised it toward the hatch. It was easily six feet above her head, and it weighed more than any three of the ex-upstarts combined. For all its weight it opened surprisingly easily on its hinge—but only if they could reach it.

  “This is a problem,” she said.

  “I know. I screwed up. I thought Jen would wait for me—”

  “Go find me the strongest person in there who isn’t Lin.”

  Sairy took off and returned with Bex. After several minutes of taking turns boosting each other upward on interlaced hands, they fell back defeated. They hadn’t even managed to so much as brush that hatch-wheel with their fingertips.

  “It’s right there,” Sairy wailed, gesturing violently upward. “It’s right there.”

  “Okay,” Isabel said. “Get Lin.”

  Bex went and got Lin and they still couldn’t reach the wheel enough to grip and turn it.

  “We need a ladder,” Lin observed.

  “No shit,” Sairy said.

  “You were trying to push the pieces back into the wall?” Lin said. “Some Before-people tool put them there, you can’t just do that with your hands.”

  “We had a whole plan,” Sairy wailed. “Me and Lissa and Meg and everybody, we were going to work together, they don’t trust the high seats, they’ll—” She trailed off, horrified. “All hands in the fight. They said we need all hands in—”

  “You need to breathe,” Isabel said, because now Sairy was eyeing the tunnel wall like she was planning to dig her way out through that and twenty feet of dirt beyond. “Jen knew you were supposed to be up there. She’ll come back for you. Or she’ll send someone. They can open it from above.”

  But a very different thought was running through her mind.

  I told Jen I was staying down here. And Sairy’s been shadowing me for years. Jen must have thought—

  And I told Ruby that the ex-upstarts only take orders from Sairy.

  “And what if she doesn’t? Or she can’t? What if she’s pinned down in the fight and I can’t get to her?”

  “Sairy. Listen to me. Right now you need to calm down and you need to—”

  A distant cry came from behind her, way up the hall in the cleared area.

  “That’s Glory,” Bex said, and took off running, Sairy right behind her.

  “What the shit now,” Isabel hissed under her breath, following them as best she could. “Ragpicker take this day and every—”

  She stopped when she saw Glory’s face.

  “Please tell me,” Glory was saying, “that Onya and Andrew are with you.” Looking around the cleared area like maybe two ten-year-old kids were hidden under a brick she hadn’t checked yet. “I just saw them a minute ago.”

  “Well, they didn’t go that way,” Bex said, nodding down the hall in the direction of the waypoint and cave-in.

  “And they sure as hell didn’t go up,” Sairy said.

  Glory caught sight of her. “Sairy? Aren’t you supposed to be—”

  Sairy blew out a frustrated breath, throwing up her hands. “Surprise.”

  “If you just saw them, they’re not far,” Isabel told Glory, already walking backwards down the hall, away from the waypoint. “Nobody moves. Nail them to the floor if you have to. I’ll just be a minute.”

  “Bring them back safe so I can kill them,” Glory called after Isabel’s back. A pause. Then, incredulous: “Did they take a lamp?”

  After a few steps Isabel caught sight of someone approaching her shoulder. “Sairy, what part of nobody moves—”

  “This is my fault and I’m going with you and that’s just how it is so let’s go.”

  For one second Isabel considered this. It’d probably be easier to push a Sairy-sized boulder back to the cleared area, by hand, uphill, than it would’ve been to talk her out of it.

  “Then you get to hold the lamp,” she said, and together they headed into the dark.

  * * *

  Soon they’d gone far enough that the collected lamplight of the cleared area beyond the hatch couldn’t reach them. The sounds of the townspeople could only be heard faintly, wavering, like murmurs at the bottom of a well. Ahead was black. Behind was black.

  No sign of Onya or Andrew.

  Isabel’s wrists began to itch.

  “I get to help Glory kill them,” Sairy was muttering. “She can hold them down.”

  Ten more paces and they’d reached the first door.

  It was made of some kind of metal that had only barely begun to rust, which amazed her, given the humidity of the tunnels and the sheer age of everything in them. It was rectangular, as heavy-looking as the hatch door, with a small opening at eye level set with the remains of what used to be a tiny window, glass layered with a very resilient-looking synthetic mesh.

  There was a dent in the center of the door like someone had catapulted a boulder at it.

  Isabel didn’t like the look of this door one bit. It didn’t look like a door for going in and out of. It looked like a door built in the same spirit as an Archivist’s ghost-catching jars. For locking something up and taking field notes on it, and eventually letting it out into someplace even worse.

  Sairy shouldered open the door on shrieking hinges and shoved her lamp-arm in. Nothing.

  There was an identical door beside that one, and another beside it. Another across the hall. Another next to that. And so on. Several had been dented by some great force. Some had been ripped straight out of the wall and flung an improbable distance. Like someone at some point had gone to considerable trouble to trash this place to hell, a
nd had gone about it methodically, systematically, door by door by door.

  “Well,” Sairy said, shining the lamp down that field of doors. “That’s creepy.”

  Isabel didn’t reply. The nervous itching on her wrists was getting truly awful now, and spreading to her neck and hands. She scratched under the ghostgrass bracelets covertly.

  They investigated the next room together, and the next, and the next.

  Inside each room was nothing. Same floor, same walls, same ceiling. All apparently once white and white no longer. Isabel couldn’t even imagine what it must’ve looked like, all that white. Like staring down on the Waste from a height when fresh snow was on it, so bright in the sunlight that it hurt the eyes.

  Each little room itself was empty but for the remains of where something had once been bolted into the wall in two places before the bolts rusted through. A bed of some kind, maybe, a narrow metal slab. On the other side of the room there was a hole where a pipe had gone into the wall, attached presumably to something else, now collapsed into rubble or missing altogether.

  It came to Isabel that each door had a handle on the outside, but the inside was smooth.

  No Onya, no Andrew. They moved on.

  By the eighth room, Isabel was starting to get dizzy. When had she last eaten? Her vision was going weird around the edges, like she had a migraine coming on. And it was taking every crumb of her willpower not to scratch her itchy wrists to bleeding.

  “What do you think did this?” Sairy asked, voice hushed. Raising the lamp at a door that, to all appearances, had been thrown so hard that the edge of it had embedded itself in the wall.

  Despite herself, Isabel reached out and touched it, and Sairy gasped.

  “Isabel, what the hell.”

  “What?”

  Sairy grabbed her hand and dragged it by main force into the light.

  There was an angry red rash on Isabel’s wrist and palm.

  “Isabel, are you okay?”

  “Of course I’m okay.” Reclaiming her hand. Shoving it into a pocket. Her conversation with Rina earlier was returning to her uncomfortably. His skin is stinging him? “Come on. They can’t be far. You go on ahead.” Swallowing her pride. “You’re faster.”

  “There’s one lamp.”

  “So I’ll follow it. The longer we wait the farther they get.” Isabel gestured up that endless corridor of rooms. Chooser, she was dizzy. “I’m right behind you.”

  “I’m going to kill them,” Sairy muttered again, and hauled open the next door.

  Isabel locked her focus on the ground at her feet, shutting out the migraine aura edging in on the sides of her vision, and started walking.

  No problem at all to trail Sairy. Her lamplight was easily close enough to safely follow. Nothing on the floor was likely to trip Isabel up even if she wasn’t staring at it. Just the same even field of broken tile both ways, like the thin ice on a puddle that somebody had stomped. Broken tile and mud squelching up between.

  Isabel had gone a few steps like that when she slipped on a patch of ice where that broken tile should’ve been and her feet shot out from under.

  She went down in a heap and sat there. She felt, and probably looked, like somebody had just tried to brain her with a brick.

  Ice?

  In the middle of summer?

  She hitched in a steadying breath. It smelled wrong. The only parts of it she could identify were winter air and smoke, although she couldn’t guess what would smell like that when burning. There was another smell almost like metal left out in the summer sun, at odds with the general smell of cold. And another like a sudden burst of improbable flowers as someone brushed past her and kept on walking, unseen, a shadow dissolving in the dark.

  “Sairy?” she whispered.

  No answer.

  She scrambled back and hit a smooth glass wall. Which had about as much business being in these tunnels as the ice. Too startled to shout, she gave a kind of squeak and recoiled hard enough to almost flop over sideways and stared up and up and up at what used to be the low-ceilinged side of the tunnel, last she’d checked.

  It was a building. A very tall building. Taller than any building, any tree, any thing she’d ever seen, short of Execution Hill—except in the city she’d entered in the ghost-place, the memory of a city from a time not her own. Glass and metal flashing blue in the low-slung winter sunlight. People walked past her, over her, through her. They didn’t say anything or notice her there. They didn’t smell like the people of Sweetwater. Their coats flapped against her like crows’ wings.

  It was a hallucination. Had to be. Bad air in the tunnels. Maybe that’s why she’d been so dizzy.

  Catchkeep, she thought. The Chooser. Ember Girl. Carrion Boy. The Hunt. The Ragpicker. The Crow. The One Who Got Away. Catchkeep’s Tower. The Grave. The First to Die.

  Even listing constellations wasn’t cutting through this one. She felt like the tunnel had flipped sideways, not worming just under the surface but boring straight down for miles, and she was tumbling into the dark. Frantically, she marshaled her senses to anchor her.

  It was silent, so if she was silent too she’d hear Sairy walking ahead. If she looked down she’d see the broken-eggshells-and-mud patterning of the tile floor.

  She was quiet—and heard the footsteps of the not-there-people all around her. She glanced down—and froze.

  There was a faint pale light coming from somewhere, and in it, she could just make out an even fainter silver thread, flickery but definitely there, emerging from her breastbone and fading to nothing as it fed out away from the light.

  Strange, that light. It was a cold phosphorescence, like what was thrown by a ghost-passage, or a ghost—

  She clung to the thread as something behind it, deep in her chest, lurched into freefall.

  The light was coming from her.

  “Not possible,” she whispered. She wasn’t in the ghost-place. She hadn’t left her body.

  Possible or not, the thread pulsed almost invisibly along with her heartbeat. It moved—the tiniest bit—in her breath. She plucked one dull flat note on it and did not dare touch it again, because she knew what it was, what it had to be, and that nothing good would happen to her if it broke.

  In that instant, the sound cut out, and all was quiet.

  The silence scared her worse than the noise. The noise was something she could track. She had a horrible feeling that the silence hid something that was tracking her.

  She found her feet and tried to dart off through the crowd—and the crowd wasn’t there. Mildewed walls, busted floor, slimy pond-smell, the warm humid stillness of the tunnels like a clammy hand laid across her face.

  There was a person lying sprawled on the tile a few feet away. It wore a long brown coat and had short brown hair. The other end of her thread was sticking out of that body’s chest. It was a moment before she realized it was her.

  It was like startling yourself awake from a nightmare. She snapped back into her body so fast that for a moment it felt wrong, ill-fitting, unresponsive.

  “Sairy?” she croaked. Unsure what she would say when Sairy answered. Can you see me? Did I disappear just now? Am I back?

  Shakily, she stood. No more glow. No more thread. The dampness of the floor hadn’t soaked through her pant-legs. She must’ve only been lying there a second or two at most. But it’d felt like many minutes had passed.

  That unsettled her almost as much as the thread. She knew quite well where she’d experienced both of those things before.

  Took two steps and stopped, splaying her hands at hip level as if the ground had just trembled underfoot. A weird feeling gripped her, one she couldn’t begin to name. It felt almost like that untethering sensation she’d get when she was almost asleep. It put her in mind of soft mud being pressed through a loose-woven basket, or one stack of papers being shuffled into another. If she were the mud, the paper, pressed through or shuffled into…what?

  So, she thought drily, because it was either
that or lose it entirely. This is new.

  “Isabel.” Sairy sounded farther off than she should’ve. “Think I found them.”

  One quick look over her shoulder—nothing tailing her—and Isabel set off toward the bright radius of Sairy’s lamp, shaking her head to clear it.

  Sairy was standing in the middle of the hall, gesturing with the lamp toward another door a little ways ahead. No—Isabel realized—not the door but something on the floor in front of it.

  “At least they weren’t completely stupid,” Sairy was saying. “I’m still going to kill them though. You open the door and I’ll go in and give them hell.”

  Then Isabel drew level with Sairy and saw what she was looking at.

  Ghostgrass.

  Dried, bundled ghostgrass. Visibly older than what they’d brought with them into the tunnels. Paler, more brittle, less potent. Entire bundles, three of them, carefully laid to overlap end-to-end across the foot of the door.

  It looked a whole lot like what had gone missing from the waypoint at the cave-in.

  “This,” she said carefully, “isn’t ours.”

  “Huh?” Sairy said, turning. “Then what—”

  Away up the hall, Onya’s voice. Laughing. Then she and Andrew emerged from one of the farther rooms, spilling lamplight before them. Caught sight of Sairy and Isabel and froze.

  Sairy fishhooked them with her eyes. “Get. Over. Here. Now.”

  They obeyed. At least they had the good grace to look sheepish.

  Sairy strode ahead to meet them partway. As she walked past the ghostgrassed doorway, she stopped. Seemed to lose focus. She was shifting her weight from foot to foot, rubbing her arms, looking lost. “What is that?”

  Isabel looked from Sairy to the ghostgrass to the shut door beyond.

  “All of you,” she said, keeping her voice as calm and even as she was able, “come here.”

  “We’re sorry,” Andrew called down the hall as he and Onya approached. “Really sorry,” Onya added. “Please don’t be mad at us. We were just exploring.”

  Sairy didn’t seem to hear them. “No, seriously, what is—”

  She staggered sideways like something had pushed her. But nothing had.