Then Isabel realized she felt it too. Frostbite and vertigo. The exact unmistakable sensation of touching a ghost.
Except she wasn’t.
Three years Isabel had been Archivist. She’d encountered many hundreds of ghosts and was thoroughly familiar with the wide variation of every class of specimen. From the silver wisps too weak to coalesce, all the way up to the enraged blinding blurs of light too pissed off to coalesce. And, of course, the ones in between. Able to coalesce but not do much else.
The pissed-off ones had mindlessly attacked her, from time to time, and done worse to several Archivists before her. But even with the strongest of those, the frostbite-and-vertigo sensation only came when she picked one up, or one grabbed hold of her ankle like a baby, or when one’s fist slammed into her face hard enough to loosen teeth.
It came on contact. Only on contact.
But there was nothing there.
Was that a flicker of light across the darkened little window of that door? There and gone, darting past like a fish in the shallows, leaving her questioning whether it’d been there at all. It might’ve been nothing more than their lamplight reflecting. But it’d looked too silvery for that, and Isabel’s luck had never been that good.
If it came down to it, could she still fight a ghost? Or would she meet with that occupational hazard described with such horrified fascination in the field notes by the Archivists next in line? Shredded, bled out, flayed for the salt of her fear-sweat . . .
“Stop,” she said, throwing up a staying hand toward the approaching light of Onya’s lamp. Her mind was whirring back and forth between Sairy and the children in desperate calculation. None of them were going to be any help to her here. She’d have to hold this together with both hands, alone. Should’ve covered this in training after all.
“Stay there. I’m going to come to you.”
“What’s wrong with Sairy?” Onya called back.
“I said stay there.”
Already dragging Sairy away from the door. She looked like she was about to be sick. This close to the doorway, the frostbite-and-vertigo sensation ramped up and went through Sairy like a boot through rotten wood, and Isabel held her up bodily. Pulling ghostgrass out of her pockets. Shoving it into Sairy’s hands. Barely registering how it felt like it was frying her fingers. “Don’t put that down. Not for anything. I’m going to go get them. You turn around quietly and start walking back the way we—”
The silver light whipped past again and faded, shuddered and came back brighter, and the last dregs of her patience shriveled abruptly up and died.
“Sairy, Ragpicker slag you, back it up or I will put you down.”
Sairy didn’t seem to hear her. She was frozen in place, gazing toward that little window in the door. “Isabel,” she slurred, “something in there just moved—”
Shivering violently now, Sairy swayed a few steps forward and stumbled. Went down on one knee. Threw a hand out and down to catch herself. There came a dry rustling sound as her fingers caught on the end of the nearest ghostgrass bundle, shifting it ever so slightly out of line.
“Run,” Isabel breathed, yanking Sairy by the shoulder as from the doorway there came a sound of metal tearing.
Sairy had hardly turned from the door before it blew off its hinges, barely missing her as it shot across the tunnel and cratered the far wall.
What stepped through that doorway wasn’t featureless and silvery, like a ghost that hadn’t been deliberately strengthened for questioning. This ghost was plenty strong enough on its own. It stood there, large as life, looking like it’d just wandered in out of the Before, fully dressed and vaguely bewildered.
Automatically Isabel grabbed Sairy, dragged her back against the wall. Stay put, she thought at Onya and Andrew up the hall. Hissing at Sairy: “Don’t move.”
Then she really looked at that ghost, and all the strength ran out of her like water.
It was female, around Isabel’s height, with olive skin and brown hair pulled back in a ponytail. It wore a uniform, basic and dark, with clean lines and black boots. A gun and a sword were stuck in its belt. It looked to have died not too much older than Onya and Andrew were now. Blackish silver light steamed gently off of it.
Isabel stared at it, a kind of hollow-seashell rushing sound in her ears.
She knew those clothes. She knew that gun and that sword and the way it was radiating strength, tendrils of visible energy shooting out of it like lightning. She’d seen all of that before.
But only once.
At that time, with the salt, and the kit, and the knife, and far fewer injuries, that other ghost had still nearly murdered her. Isabel looked across the roil of silver-black light at this specimen and knew that if it went after her, or Sairy, or Onya and Andrew, she was going to have to fight her way through it if she wanted to live. And knew, with equal certainty, that she would lose. Badly. This thing could probably spread her in an even layer across the tunnel floor without breaking stride.
Plastered in ghostgrass, Sairy was just about able to hold herself up now. “Is that a ghost?” she whispered. “It looks so…so real.” She narrowed her eyes. “Wait. Isabel. It looks like—”
“Shh.”
“It looks like the ones in your drawing.”
“Quiet.”
Quickly, silently, she assessed. The ghost hadn’t noticed them, or Onya and Andrew. That much was obvious. Sudden movement might draw it down on them, but thank the Chooser, the kids had some sense.
She had to think. But it was hard to. The frostbite-and-vertigo sensation was flowing freely out from the ghost, miring Isabel’s thoughts. Waves of dark light lifted off of it, getting denser every minute, flaring and mantling like wings. The smell of it was like the lakeshore after lightning struck. The sound of it was one clear pure glassy note, shattered and reformed, still ringing, but with all its edges grinding one against the other.
It was pacing back and forth before the doorway like a shrine-dog on a too-short lead. Two steps and turn, two steps and turn. Seemingly agitated, staring at nothing from the open sores of its eyes. Blind as it was, Isabel had the distinct sensation that it was aware of her there. That if it turned her way it would see her. Not the space where she stood, which was all most ghosts seemed to be capable of. Her. Which should by no means have been possible.
But it didn’t. It kept on pacing with its hands in its pockets as a comet-tail of dark silver light raged around it, brushing the ceiling.
Whatever had killed this ghost hadn’t been pretty. An open lesion covered half of its face and tracked down its neck in weeping craters, and there was blood crusted around its nose and eyes. Patches of its hairline oozed where the hair had come out, taking scalp with it, and what little of its skin Isabel could see looked bruised.
She recognized it. She’d seen it years ago when she’d read Foster’s memories. Coughing up clots, half its nails fallen out. Caught in the jaws of the illness that Isabel knew had been its death.
Salazar, she remembered. Her name is Mia Salazar.
The longer they stood there, the closer Isabel’s flight instinct got to bypassing her brain and going right for her legs until it slingshot her back up that tunnel and away from the slag-pit of Salazar’s face. But the Archivist-part of her was driving now, and it knew better than to turn its back on this caliber of specimen. And seeing a ghost in that uniform, with that sword and gun…complicated matters in ways she didn’t have time just now to unpack and examine.
Salazar reached the end of her circuit and spun on her bootheel to stalk back the other way.
“Why isn’t it killing you?” Salazar was repeating, over and over. “Why isn’t it killing you?”
Sairy’s voice in Isabel’s ear. “Is it talking?”
“Stay still.”
Every ghost had a moment it couldn’t move past. Its death, usually. A choice it made wrong. A screwup it regretted enough to imprint upon. In any case, a loop it couldn’t break free from. It stayed caught t
here like a leaf frozen into a block of ice, neither drifting nor landing.
It didn’t escape Isabel’s notice that Salazar’s inability to break free of her loop was very possibly the only thing keeping her and Sairy—and everyone else in the tunnels—alive.
“Are you going to capture it?”
Another tight shake of Isabel’s head. There was no way she was getting this thing in a jar. Besides, it’d been three years. Did her knife even still work?
“Are you going to destroy it?”
Her ghost-destroying kit was still in the pocket of her Archivist-coat. But part of that ritual involved lighting a fire. Outside was one thing. But in the tunnels?
“Only if she makes me.”
“Did you put that ghostgrass in front of the door?”
“No. Hush.”
Sairy took this in. “Then who—”
Eyes glued on Salazar, Isabel clapped her hand over Sairy’s mouth.
Over by the doorway, Salazar had begun nosing at the air, scenting like a predator. Suddenly, viscerally, Isabel wished Salazar still had eyes. Her slow blind triangulation of their position was extremely unnerving. It made Isabel uncomfortably aware that she was, at best, a slow-moving bag of blood, and it would take precious little effort on Salazar’s part to unzip her.
Isabel’s brain chose that moment to remind her of something she was far happier forgetting. Something she’d heard Foster say, when Isabel had read her memories.
We’re not special, Foster had told what few of her fellow operatives had survived their treatment so far. Martinez was special. Tanaka was special. Salazar was special. You know what we are? We’re just the ones who didn’t die.
Martinez. Tanaka. Salazar. The best and brightest operatives that the Latchkey Project had to offer. And one of them, Chooser knew why, was here.
Had Salazar lived out her treatment, her strength and abilities might’ve surpassed the ghost’s, surpassed Foster’s. This was distinctly terrifying. Isabel had to focus on the had she lived part. Because if Salazar had already surpassed them despite dying so young, Isabel might well be staring across fifteen feet of empty space at the strongest ghost she’d ever seen.
But this old bundled ghostgrass, however it had gotten there, had held Salazar in that room. Even when she’d met the other ghost on Execution Hill three years ago, she’d had to remove the bundled ghostgrass from her door before he could enter.
As plans went it wasn’t her first choice, but it wasn’t nothing.
“Stick to the wall and head back the way we came,” she commanded Sairy. Talking low and fast under her breath. “Slowly. You don’t stop til you get over our ghostgrass perimeter and then you make sure everyone stays put. I don’t care what you hear, you keep moving.” Nodding toward the silver raging of Salazar’s light. “I’m going to put her back where we found her. Then we—what are you doing?”
What Sairy was doing was pulling the rest of the ghostgrass from her pockets. Brandishing it in front of her. “Helping.”
“Not happening. You’re getting out of here.”
“It’s what, a dead thirteen-year-old girl? You get it back in the room. I’ll fix the ghostgrass. Done and done.”
Isabel stared at her in horror. You really have no concept of the depth of what we’re standing in, do you?
What Sairy saw in Isabel’s face decided her. “Fine,” she whispered angrily. But she set her face and began backing away.
One down, Isabel thought. Okay.
She waited until Sairy was almost out of sight up the hall. Then, ghostgrass held out in front of her, she took a tiny careful step toward Salazar. Then another.
“Why isn’t it killing you?” Salazar was still whispering to nobody Isabel could see. “Why isn’t it killing you?”
Still sniffing vaguely at the air, and all at once Isabel knew what she was looking at.
She wasn’t hunting at all. Stuck in that memory like quicksand, Salazar was crying.
A sound from way behind her, and she turned just in time to see Sairy stumble, tripped by something in the rubble. Saw her land neatly, one hand one knee. Heard her curse softly under her breath as she lifted that hand into the lamplight and stared at it, horrified, as the blood started trickling down.
Isabel spun back toward Salazar—and Salazar was no longer there.
Chapter Seven
Isabel didn’t think. She moved. Somehow, gracelessly, bad leg screaming, she closed the distance. Already, with the proximity to blood, even from up the hall she could feel Salazar gaining strength. The color of the ghost-energy radiating off of her had condensed to a depthless, radiant black, like the space between the stars. The sound of it, that glassy keening, was now a shriek Isabel heard mostly in her teeth.
Sairy had popped up off the floor and was brandishing her fistful of ghostgrass at arm’s length with two shaking hands, keeping Salazar—for the moment—at bay. “Isabel?” she asked uncertainly.
Salazar, however the hell she’d gotten there so quickly, had halted a few inches from the ghostgrass and was staring across that invisible barrier at Sairy, wrecked gaze drilling into her face. “Why isn’t it killing you?” she screamed.
It was exactly here that Sairy hit her limit. She broke and ran.
“No—Sairy, no—”
Salazar lifted her head after Sairy, tracking her with something that could not possibly have been her eyes. Blurred—and reappeared in Sairy’s path, reaching out for her.
So fast, Isabel thought wildly, so—
“Sairy, look out!”
At the last possible second, Sairy’s brain seemed to accept what her eyes were showing it. She did what Isabel guessed anyone would do, seeing someone magically appear twenty feet from where she’d left them. She skidded to a startled halt so fast she nearly fell back over. Got hold of herself quickly enough to whip the ghostgrass into position, swinging it between herself and Salazar like a child beheading suns-and-moons with a stick-sword.
Salazar drifted back a step, though languidly, not obviously impressed. Ghostgrass or no, the blood had her attention now. It was going to be a hell of a job to shift her focus.
“Stay there,” Isabel told Sairy. Working her way up the hall toward them. “Do—not—move.”
“It’s still bleeding,” Sairy said, voice small. “I don’t know how to make it stop. I think there’s a piece of something stuck in there—from where I fell—”
“Don’t panic,” Isabel told her. “If there’s something stuck in the wound, do not pull it out. Just put your hand in your pocket and back slowly—toward—me.” And, she could’ve added, start praying to the One Who Got Away that I can pull her attention off you before you get yourself eaten from the hand up.
“Little further. Don’t turn around. I’m right behind you.” Grabbing a length of bandage fabric from her pocket. “Reach back and take this. Get that bleeding stopped, but keep the ghostgrass between you and her at all times. Okay?”
“Okay.”
Isabel came up beside Sairy, holding out her own bundle of ghostgrass to give Sairy cover while she wrapped her hand. Fascinating how Salazar’s ghost-energy died back to a dark fuzz of light around her, thinning out to nearly nothing the closer she got to the ghostgrass. Around Salazar’s glove it was nearly invisible.
Isabel looked up from there to see Salazar staring into her face with a curious intensity. It wasn’t the right word for something with no eyes, but Isabel didn’t have a better one. Unnerved, Isabel drew the harvesting-knife, and an instant wave of fresh ghost-energy poured off of Salazar like mist off the lake, all of it visibly yearning toward Isabel.
Isabel had no way of interpreting this beyond time to go.
“Now we back her into one of those rooms,” she said evenly, “and we ghostgrass her in. Just like we found her.”
“Got it.”
Isabel looked around. They’d gone back past the little rooms and were at the T junction that led out to the hatch. If Salazar got past them here, it was only
another few dozen yards until she’d be within sight of the townspeople, and that was not a risk Isabel planned on taking.
“We’re going to walk her back toward the rooms. First one we reach, we hold the ghostgrass out front, we direct her in. Slow and steady. Yes?”
Sairy nodded, and they backed Salazar up the hall one step, then another.
All at once, Salazar drew herself up, like a dog catching sight of a deer. Snapped her attention away from Sairy. Away from Isabel. Back down the hall, toward where they’d found her. Toward where they’d left Onya and Andrew.
No, Isabel thought. They wouldn’t.
“Hey slag-for-brains!” Onya’s voice piped up behind her, and Isabel froze. It was the worst kind of gutsy, misguided, Ragpicker-taken—
“What the shit,” Sairy hissed, half-turning. “Get back.”
As she turned, there was no ghostgrass covering her shoulder, her back, her whole right side.
Too fast to track, Salazar’s hand shot out and grabbed Sairy by the exposed arm. Spun her around easily, with such careless strength that Isabel could hear Sairy’s shoulder pop. Sairy immediately began beating Salazar over the head with her ghostgrass bundle, but the blood was pulling on Salazar too hard now. She brought Sairy’s hand to her mouth and began to feed.
Onya and Andrew swarmed Salazar, yelling and pelting her with bricks, but Salazar paid them about as much attention as she would a couple of buzzing flies. She didn’t even notice when the ghost-proximity proved too much for Andrew and he threw up on her boots.
And Isabel—remembering a fight with another strong ghost a long time ago, and what’d happened when those crackling arcs of dark light had reached and exceeded its capacity to contain them, and what else strengthened a ghost besides blood—drew her knife and opened her mouth to say something she would almost certainly regret.
“Your name,” she said clearly, “is Mia Salazar.”
Salazar froze for a three-count. Then dropped Sairy, instantly forgotten. Again she blurred, too fast to track—and the next thing Isabel knew, Salazar had reached out and taken her by the shoulders. The frostbite-and-vertigo sensation was an icicle in her eye, a lightning strike down her spine, nerve pain in every nerve she possessed.
Latchkey Page 10
