Latchkey

by Nicole Kornher-Stace

  All at once, she knew where she was. Wished she didn’t. Remembered the ghost explaining the darkness of that water to her—it draws all the colors out from the ghosts that die in it—and heaved again.

  Move, she told herself. You have to move.

  She forced her arms out in front of her, tried pulling at the water to slow herself down. The shore was passing fast. Buildings hunched and clustered on the riverside. Scrap-houses like the ones in Sweetwater. Mud houses. Long low pastel-colored houses with weird squarish bushes beside the doors. Those impossibly tall buildings she’d seen in the city of the ghost’s memories, made of glass and metal and stuff she had no name for, daggering at the clouds. Huge houses with heavy doors and peeling multicolored paint. Log cabins. Ruins of white stone. Towers like shivs of black glass set with running lights. All mashed together with no order, no reason, piled shoulder to shoulder like they’d been dropped at random to fall where they may.

  Waypoints of the dead, she knew. The ghost had taught her how to recognize them. Relics. Memories. Doorways, all. They flashed past and were gone.

  She was losing strength. The river was sucking it out of her. Scanned the surface for something to grab hold of, something to float with, something by which she could get herself to shore.

  Nothing. Not so much as a stick. Not so much as a drowned ghost. Not yet.

  Pain lanced down her side as she tried to turn herself around, get her legs out behind her, shove her way to land. But the river would not be shoved. The river shoved back, and she went under. Came up burbling, black water streaming from every hole in her head.

  There wasn’t much more of this left in her. She was rapidly nearing her limit. If the thread was still attached, it was hidden beneath the frothy skin of the water. It didn’t matter. If she’d already drowned, would she know? She’d seen what happened to ghosts in this river before. She knew what was coming next for her. Caught in the current, thrashing, conscious, filling with water but not dying, unable to pull herself to dry land, until it dumped her out into whatever ocean it fed, where she would drift forever, a silver bag full of black water staring up at the unchanging sky. Alive, aware, scraped clean of everything that defined her.

  No. She wasn’t dead. Couldn’t be. She’d know. Just this side of dead, maybe, arms windmilling for balance as she walked that wire, almost definitely, but not right-this-minute dead and that was something worth clinging to.

  She’d fight, it’d hurt, she’d die and turn ghost regardless, but there were worse things than being handed Chooser’s odds and telling Her with all due respect to stuff them.

  With difficulty, she brawled her way against the water, got herself aimed toward the shore, and braced for a world of pain when she showed this river she was done messing around—and the current kicked up, twirled her backwards, pushed her down and sat on her. She gasped and got a burning lungful, willed herself not to cough and suck more in, desperately wanted to cough, fought it, convulsed, cursed herself, convulsed, coughed, clamped down, convulsed, fought it, couldn’t fight it, fought it, inhaled—

  * * *

  “Shut up! They’ll hear us!”

  “Hear you.”

  “Shhh!”

  “Your dessert for a week if they do.”

  “Our heads on the Director’s wall if they do.”

  “Hey, a bet’s a bet.”

  “Tell that to the Director.”

  “Tell her yourself, while you’re busy kissing her ass.”

  “Say that again.”

  “You heard me.”

  “Oh shit. Down! Get down!”

  Four kids in dark uniforms dropped like sacks of flour, heads tucked in, huddling beneath the bottom edge of a wide thick window set into a white brick wall. Two of them were visibly ill, luminous with fever, swallowing their coughs. Maybe twelve years old, and sick, but still with that inhuman, almost-disturbing elegance of movement that made Isabel’s breath catch, because it was no less clear an indicator than their uniforms of exactly who and what these children were.

  One of the kids was Foster. Another was the nameless ghost.

  She’d know them anywhere, dead or alive, child or adult, even surrounded by their fellow operatives and dressed the same. She’d know them with their heads cut off. She recognized them like she’d recognize a friend who’d snuck up behind her, hands over her eyes.

  Seeing them here, now—even knowing it wasn’t here and now, just a memory—it did something to her that she couldn’t put words to. It caught her in the throat, behind the eyes, in the sudden clammy shaking of her hands.

  She started listing plants in her head. Corpseroot. Three-eyes. Suns-and-moons. Carrion Boy’s Tears. Scorchweed. Clotweed. Ghostgrass. Come-what-may.

  She’d keep going until her heart slowed, her breathing regulated, and the unseen weight crouching on her shoulders got up and went its way.

  Unseen but not unknown. She was quite familiar with it by now. She saw it every time she closed her eyes. It looked like Isabel planting ghostgrass in front of waypoints. Its name was not today. Its name was regret.

  Listing plants wasn’t working. Of course it wasn’t. She advanced to phase two. Anchoring herself with her senses. What she could see. What she could hear. What she could smell.

  But how was that supposed to work if she wasn’t even here? This was just a memory, and she was just passing through.

  Wait.

  A memory—but whose?

  It should worry her more than it did. She should be losing it, she should be trying to wake up, she should be climbing up the walls of this place to escape. Like a bug in a bottle. Like a ghost in a jar. Dimly she was aware that this was the reaction she was supposed to expect of herself in a situation such as this.

  Instead she stood there, heart pounding, retching breath like she’d been throatpunched. And watched.

  Maybe eight feet away from them and they couldn’t see her. All four kids, all four fledgling Latchkey operatives, stared through her at the far wall, panting with nerves, hissing at each other like cranky geese. She vaguely recognized the other two from Foster’s memories, but didn’t have the first guess to their names.

  It wasn’t that she didn’t know—suddenly, immediately—where, and when, she was. It was that she had no idea how she’d gotten there. Water, the river, the black river in the ghost-place, she’d been drowning, and—

  “Is it her?”

  “Of course it isn’t. Foster’s full of it. Like I said. There’s no way.” This from the ghost. His attempt at withering disdain, at age twelve, needed some fine-tuning.

  His voice was still a knife in an old wound, though, and the longer she stood there the deeper in it twisted. But at the same time, calm overswept and enveloped her like the thickest softest quilt in the world, and her throat unclenched, and her hands stopped shaking, and her mind, for the first time in three years, was still.

  “Foster’s full of it, huh?” Foster was saying. “Quit talking about Foster like Foster isn’t here. Did you follow them when they took Deegan away? I saw what I saw.”

  “Yeah,” said another of the kids, “too bad nobody else did.”

  “What do you think you’re here for now, genius?”

  “This is so stupid.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry. Somebody make you come here? No? Then shut it.”

  “Oh my god. You know what? Forget this.”

  “Don’t you even think about it. They’ll see you.”

  “Yeah, but this is crazy, Foster. Think. It’s freaking Medical. They’re not gonna—”

  “Will you please. Shut. Up.”

  “This is such a bad idea—”

  Meantime the ghost had leaned back against the wall, eyes shut, silent, shaking his head in a very particular this-is-a-stretch-even-for-you-Foster kind of derision. Desperately trying to put himself above this. But Isabel could read him. Sometimes it was like looking into a mirror. He was closing in on himself because he was staring down into the depths of whatever abyss Foste
r was dragging him toward, and whatever he saw there scared him half to death.

  Foster shifted to take something out of her pocket, wrapped in a long perforated sheet of some kind of flaky brown paper. Shook it out carefully into her lap. Shards of mirror, one per kid. She passed them down the line, and all four held their mirror-pieces out in front of them and a bit above, tilting them around, trying to find the angle that would show them what was happening through that window at their backs.

  “We’re too low down. I can’t see. Way to think shit through, Foster—”

  “You’re not aiming at them, dumbass. The whole wall behind them is a two-way mirror. Aim at that.”

  “Why is there a two-way mirror in Medical anyway?”

  “The hell I look like, the answer fairy? Did I build this craphole? Did I put it there?”

  More fumbling and bickering, and then they all fell abruptly into wide-eyed silence.

  Isabel, having a fine view through the window they were hiding under, saw why.

  Inside, on a white table in a white room, a team of men and women in white coats were shaving away what was left of Salazar’s hair. Clearing ground for a silver pen tipped with a red light that sliced through Salazar’s skin and bone and brain like a hot knife through butter. Next thing Isabel knew, there was a window cut in Salazar’s head and a puzzle-piece of her skull in a pink plastic tray and a woman in a white coat was working long silver tweezers out of the red-gray meat of Salazar’s brain with a fingernail-sized glinting piece of something caught in their grip.

  The woman turned the thing back and forth in the light, gave one tight-lipped nod, and even from her distance Isabel could see the tension in the white room lift a little.

  The thing was set all around its edges with hair-thin filaments, which the woman was now in the process of very carefully detaching. Isabel couldn’t really make them out, they were so fine, but from the motions the woman’s tweezers made around them, they looked to each be a good few inches long.

  A tiny box was brought for the remaining tiny central square, a box with a lining and padding of the exact right shape and size to receive it. The square was cleaned off and laid inside and the box was sealed and set down like undetonated ordnance, and the woman stripped stretchy blue gloves from trembling hands and dropped to a stool while another woman clapped her on the shoulder.

  Isabel forced her focus to draw away, back to the hall. Bit by bit, the rushing in her ears faded, and sound washed back in.

  “We gotta go. We gotta get out of here right now. We gotta go—”

  A piece of mirror clinked to the floor, was kicked skittering away across the tile.

  “You can’t just leave that here, they’ll know—”

  “No way that was Salazar. They said they buried her. She was sick, they—they buried her, they said they—”

  “What about all the other sick ones?” said one of the sick ones, frantic gaze darting from face to unresponding face. “What about—”

  Somebody sobbed once, bit it off fast.

  “What was that thing?” the ghost asked. Voice so quiet, like the question would go away if nobody answered. “Are there…do we have…I mean, we’d know if we…”

  “I get it now, Foster,” one of them said, sounding dazed. “I get it.”

  Foster was collecting the mirror-pieces, tucking them away into her jacket before anyone could protest. That way, any fallout from this would land square on her, and Isabel could think of nobody else more capable of carrying it. After all, she’d seen the whole long road that one-wayed straight to Foster’s death, and she knew where it began.

  This wasn’t the first step down that road but one of many steps along it. Foster’s will had already aimed and deployed itself. This was just one snapshot of the resulting trajectory.

  “Nobody gets it,” Foster said. Her whole body rigid, radiating terrible purpose. “But we’re gonna keep looking ’til we do.”

  * * *

  Isabel drifted slowly, hesitantly back to reality, her mind still trying to process what’d just happened. Tried to move, could not. Eyes shut, she mentally probed her body for damage. Disoriented as hell but alive, best she could tell. Banged up but nothing broken. Still, her whole body was one great slug of pain. Everything from her nose down her throat and deep into her chest felt like it was smoldering. A crushing pain in her knife-hand, different and deeper than the welts and blisters that the ghostgrass had left there. But she hadn’t hurt her hand in the river, or in the memory she’d seen next.

  But she hadn’t read a memory. At least not that she knew of. No ghost was in evidence. She hadn’t so much as drawn her knife, though there it was in her hand, she’d know the feel of that hilt anywhere. Ghostgrass burned her palm, even worse now than before.

  She opened her eyes. Blinked the tunnels into focus, and the river was no longer interleaved with them. The sensation of being sieved through or shuffled into something—the ghost-place, she now understood—was gone. For the moment, she was stable. She was here.

  The light was somehow different. Fainter, colder than the lamp. It wasn’t coming from her.

  Effortfully, she lifted the vast weight of her head.

  Her hand hurt because someone was clamping it hard to the hilt of the harvesting-knife. That someone had their other hand in a black-gloved fist around the blade, thick silver blood squishing up between the fingers.

  That’s unlike him, she reflected blearily. Normally he held the knife with such care, such awareness of the permanence of whatever damage he sustained. He hadn’t even taken off the glove.

  Then she realized what her eyes were showing her.

  That’s it, she thought. I’m dead.

  Her gaze winced its way past those black gloves, up the black sleeves beyond it, until it met that familiar gray stare, angled slightly aside, less coolly analytical than she remembered but instead studying her with the white-hot intensity an Archivist might accord a promising specimen. The way she’d looked at this one when first she’d caught it, a lifetime ago.

  No, not the way she’d look at a specimen. More like the way that white-coated woman had looked at that shiny piece of whatever from Salazar’s brain. Like someone who’d been handed Chooser’s odds and told Her with all due respect to stuff them. And, against all reason, somehow gotten away with it.

  It was not a look Isabel saw often on this particular ghost. It wiped his face clean of all arrogance, or most of it, leaving him eyeing her askance with a very uncertain sort of awe.

  “Got you,” he said faintly.

  Isabel stared. Behind the ghost, beyond the edge of the silvery phosphorescence he threw before him in the living world, Sairy had slumped—no, Sairy was being restrained in the world’s gentlest choke-collar of a hold by the ghost of Catherine Foster.

  “Morning, sunshine,” said Foster.

  At long last, Isabel found her words.

  “Oh,” she said, “you have got to be fucking kidding me.”

  Chapter Eleven

  “Don’t say anything,” she told them. “Just…not yet. I need a minute. Foster, let go of Sairy before she pukes on you. Sairy, listen to me, it’s okay, Sairy, put the ghostgrass away, she’s not going to hurt you, I promise—”

  Propping herself up on her elbows as the walls spun around her. Drowning, she’d been drowning. Then, like a scene change in a dream, she’d snapped out of the river and into—

  The harvesting-knife. When she’d regained consciousness, it’d been in her hand. She had read a memory after all. And now she knew how, and why.

  And whose.

  Released from Foster, Sairy immediately flung herself out of reach of another choke-hold. Stayed there, crouching behind her brandished ghostgrass bundle, glaring cagily. “Isabel, what the—how the—what the shit is going on?”

  “It’s fine, Sairy, they’re—” She paused, mentally cycling through her options before settling on: “Just trust me, it’s fine.”

  Sairy didn’t look like she was
buying it. “That one cut you.” Utterly outraged. Leveling her ghostgrass bundle at the ghost. Her temper had torn free of her now, and bringing it back was about as likely as catching a bullet midflight and stuffing it back into the gun. “It cut you with your own knife.”

  Isabel had no way of explaining it to Sairy. She was in the midst of trying to explain it to herself.

  “It tries that again,” Sairy announced, “and I’m going to end that thing myself. Ghost kit or no. I’ll take it apart.”

  The ghost gave Sairy a look that reminded Isabel of nothing so much as the screen of leaves over a beartrap: mild enough until you test it, then the long drop and the spikes.

  Foster, meantime, was grinning at her appraisingly. “She is not taking your shit,” she told the ghost.

  “He didn’t cut me, Sairy,” Isabel said. “He cut himself. He just…made me hold the knife…” She trailed off. This wasn’t going to make any more sense to Sairy than…anything else she could be telling her, honestly.

  “You trust it,” Sairy said, aghast. “Since when do you trust any—” Sairy stopped short. “Did you say Foster?”

  “I said,” Isabel said, louder now, “he didn’t cut me. Just…let me think a second.”

  Isabel dragged herself upright, eye level with the ghost. The hallway swung around her, slowly steadying. Reading a memory took a lot out of her, mentally and physically. The same went for going into the ghost-place. Doing both in short order, she was learning, was exquisitely demanding. Especially when she’d dropped into the ghost-place without warning or preparation, and reading that memory wasn’t something she’d done by choice but a tactic that was used on her strategically—

  It would have pissed her off a lot more if it wasn’t also indisputably the only reason she was sitting here, now, alive enough to have the luxury of annoyance.