“You—wait. You fished me out of the river with—but—how did you even—”
As always, the ghost recovered his composure almost before she’d witnessed it fail. “Is that where you were?” Wiping his blood from her knife. Handing it back. Inspecting the silver-stained slash in the glove. All with that ridiculous fluidity and economy of motion, that studied nonchalance. If she hadn’t known him as well as she did, she might’ve disbelieved she’d just seen him shaken. “You’d collapsed. There was a thread coming out of your chest.”
“You were flickering again,” Sairy added. “Like a—” She stopped herself just short of saying ghost.
Reflexively Isabel glanced down. No thread. It must’ve vanished when she’d returned from the ghost-place, like before.
“But how did you—”
“My options were limited. Some looked more favorable than others.”
Isabel’s eyelid twitched. Catchkeep preserve her from the insufferable dead. “How could you possibly know that would work.”
The ghost just gave her that languid blink and stare. Clear, cold, calm. “I didn’t.”
“Wherever you were,” Foster said, “it didn’t look like anyplace good.”
“Like you were having a nightmare,” Sairy said.
“It was like that,” Isabel said slowly. “Like waking up out of one bad dream into another. I was drowning.” Looked at the ghost. “In that black river we crossed in the ghost-place.” It was settling on her fully even as she said it. “I had a thread. I was drowning in that river and I had a thread. I fell through the floor. And then I—”
She paused. Right then she couldn’t access the words to tell them about the chemical stink of that room, the blinding whiteness of its walls, the fear in the child operatives’ eyes. That bloodied silver shard being worked out of Salazar’s brain like a thorn.
The ghost was watching her closely. “You fell through the floor?”
“You have no idea how creepy that is,” Sairy told her. “I was staring right at you. You didn’t go anywhere.”
“Not like through a hole,” Isabel clarified. Then, realizing she had to do better: “Like when you purify lakewater for drinking, and you filter it through sand? Except I don’t know which one of those things is me.” She looked from face to face. “That’s not helpful, is it. But even now I…”
She trailed off, feeling for that strange sensation that’d struck her earlier. It was dialed down, way down, but definitely there. Like it was biding its time, waiting for her to drop her guard again. “You feel that?”
The ghost snapped to stillness, gauging his surroundings with total concentration and in complete silence. Scanning the tunnel like he could see through the mold and brick and Chooser-knew-what of its construction. It was like the look the songkeeper would put on when he told Carrion Boy stories, miming Him catching bullets out of midair.
In a moment his gaze flicked to Isabel’s face instead, and she knew the ghost was using her reaction as a measure for what he had not sensed himself.
They waited, watching each other, as Isabel tried to put words to what she was feeling. Words that made more sense than being-shuffled-into-something, being-pressed-through-something, being-stuck-half-in-one-world-half-in-another.
Under the knife-blade of the ghost’s regard, she forced a shrug. Got up.
Too fast. The ghost-place had always had that after-effect on her. Like being blackout drunk without having touched a drop. Like the ground beneath her feet was thin ice, and she couldn’t walk lightly enough for it to hold her.
Before she could so much as blink, the ghost was on his feet. He delicately pinched her coat-collar as she stumbled back, waited without comment until she’d gained her footing, then let go. All the time with that look. The pitch of it seemed calculated to pierce clean through with utter clarity to all the things she would rather be punched repeatedly in the face than say.
“You saw one of his memories just now?” Foster asked, frank curiosity shining out of her face. How much had the ghost told her about their journey to find her? “With the knife?”
But before she could respond, Sairy spoke.
“Isabel.”
“What.”
The ghost raised one eyebrow incrementally with what might have been amusement. “‘Isabel’?”
She gestured leave it. “Sairy. I’m listening.”
“These are the ghosts in your drawing.”
“In my field notes,” Isabel said brusquely. Unaccountably embarrassed. “Yes.” Then, remembering what people did in circumstances like this—or at least a little like this— “Sairy, this is Kit Foster, and this—”
“We’ve met,” Sairy said icily.
“And this is the ghost I traveled with before.” She hesitated. “He, um, well, you know how ghosts don’t tend to remember much about their lives, and—”
“You don’t know your own name,” Sairy said, peering up at him, which he allowed. “Weird.” Then, to Isabel: “That’s why you didn’t put it on that sketch!”
Isabel elected not to respond to this. “And this is Sairy.”
The ghost nodded once in Sairy’s general direction.
“Charmed,” Foster said.
“You should be,” Sairy replied. Then something seemed to occur to her. “They’re dressed like that one that bit me.” When Isabel didn’t answer, Sairy went on. “How do you know they won’t go all crazy hungry ghost on us like that one?”
“Because they’re right here and you’ve got an open wound and they’re not, Sairy, okay?”
“But what if—”
“You know we can hear you?” Foster held up one hand. “Hi.”
Sairy looked Foster up and down. “I don’t recall addressing you,” she said. Then, to Isabel: “This one tried to choke me out.”
“You were choking yourself out,” Foster said amicably. “I was just holding on.”
“You don’t touch me.”
“Then don’t start what you can’t finish.” Foster glanced down at something, then back at Sairy.
Isabel followed her gaze. There on the floor between them was a bundle of ghostgrass, presumably lying where it landed when Sairy had been disarmed of it.
Poor Sairy. These ghosts were uniformed and armed identically to Salazar. No wonder she’d assumed they were a threat to be neutralized. The fact that she’d jumped them, two on one, after having catastrophically underestimated Salazar’s power, and with Isabel down—it spoke volumes for Sairy’s grit and guts and Isabel couldn’t help but be impressed.
“You two can fight this out later,” she said. “For now we have to find a way out of this place.”
The ghost made an indecipherable sound.
“What?” she asked him. Then, because she couldn’t help it: “What are you even doing here?”
“I should be asking you the same.” His tone strongly suggested there was one potential right answer and a pile of wrong ones, and he wasn’t expecting her to come out with the former.
Foster was more helpful. “Come here,” she told Isabel, walking back to the little room where the child-ghost was. “I’ll show you.”
I have to keep moving, Isabel told herself. But these ghosts were standing here before her, after all this time, and something was compelling her to linger. Like they’d vanish back into the realm of her should-have-dones the second she turned her back on them again.
So she got up and she went to join Foster. Sairy was standing nearby, arms folded, not lifting her glare from the place between Foster’s shoulderblades where Sairy’s knives would both vanish to the hilt if Foster so much as breathed funny.
Foster paid her no mind. She leaned in the doorway, staring at something in brief confusion. After a second she laughed. “I was wondering where that was,” she said to herself. Then she called over to the ghost: “They found his head.”
It was too much. “You put the ghosts in these rooms? You took the ghostgrass off my—what the hell is that?”
&nb
sp; Foster straightened and glanced down at what Isabel was staring at.
Threads.
Where Salazar and the child-ghost had each had one thread, Foster bristled with seven, each a slightly different shade: silver-white, silver-gray, silver-violet, silver-blue. All pale and dull, difficult to notice if the light wasn’t on them directly. They all attached where Isabel’s had in the ghost-place, where Salazar’s and the child-ghost’s had too—directly over the heart, or where one would be if a ghost were possessed of such. Two of Foster’s threads were broken and dangled loosely down, glowing in high contrast against the pitch-black of her jacket, remaining bright until the point of termination.
“You’re—” Isabel said, and trailed off, struggling to square what she knew with what she saw. Yet again, her inner Archivist’s mental field notes were undergoing a sudden, rapid expansion. She knew she had to get out of here. Find the hatch. Move forward. But she couldn’t help herself. The Archivist in her had to know. It had rooted her feet to the floor and was now prying her mouth open to ask: “You’re what these ghosts are attached to?”
Foster drew her sword. Holding it at arm’s length she used the point of it to nudge the ghostgrass strands out of place, giving herself a gap to step over. “Yep.”
“For what?”
“Observation.”
“You—” Isabel blinked, taken aback. “You can see the ghosts through those?”
“It gets harder the more of them there are,” Foster said. “But I can keep track of them. Threads started breaking, going dark, and I knew something needed checking on. Didn’t know it’d be you.”
Two broken threads. One for Salazar, Isabel reckoned. One for the child-ghost. Did the threads dissolve back toward Foster when they were cut? Did the excess fall away like ash? She didn’t know. Fuses a fire could travel along, she thought again, watching in rapt fascination as Foster went straight over to the vague silver shape that used to be the child-ghost and knelt beside him. Wrapped one of the two broken threads around her hand, spooling it out with meticulous care from somewhere within her. It looked like quite a process, arduous and painful. It set off a matching memory-twinge in Isabel’s own chest.
When the thread was long enough to reach, Foster attached it to the child-ghost, then sat on her heels and waited meditatively until some unseen calibration was reached and the thread ignited white down its length.
Gradually, the child-ghost reattached his head, regrew his clothes, and was beginning to detail his features back in when Foster tousled the silver-orange flap of his hair. “Gotta cut you off now, buddy,” she told him. “It’s for your own good, I swear.”
With that, the flare-like glow of the thread began to taper back until it looked much the same as it had when Isabel had first seen it. Fine and pale. The word dormant seemed odd to apply to a thread but crossed Isabel’s mind anyway.
“The last one got stronger before we trapped her,” Sairy said, still balefully tracking Foster’s every movement from the doorway. “She was getting that power off of you?”
Foster shrugged. “Sometimes, they get strong enough, they get greedy and try to draw more. I noticed she was hitting that point so I regulated the output. You’ll have to show me where you put her so I can link her back up.”
The blood drained from Sairy’s face. “It…she could’ve been stronger?”
Foster just laughed.
Beginning to dawn on Isabel was the unwelcome suspicion that cutting Salazar’s thread was the only reason she, or anyone she’d brought down into these tunnels for that matter, was still alive.
She knew these two ghosts were strong, but a ghost having enough surplus ghost-energy to power other ghosts went sailing well beyond the limits of anything she was equipped to comprehend. She’d seen something like it when she’d first met the ghost on Execution Hill, an outpouring of power so sudden and huge that other lesser ghosts had exploded like seedpods scattering, but Foster’s excess ghost-energy had been utilized, fashioned deliberately into a tool to do—what?
“They don’t know who they are,” Foster told her, watching the child-ghost as he crawled back into his corner and began rocking and humming anew. “They don’t even remember how to talk. Some of them just say a few words over and over but that’s it.”
“That’s all most of them do,” Isabel said. “They get stuck on something. For a lot of them it’s the moment when they die, but for some of them it’s just something they can’t move past.” She thought of the ghost’s memories, and of Foster’s. “Usually something bad.”
“They look like they had hard lives,” Foster said. “I thought maybe I could help them.”
“I think,” Isabel said carefully, “they had lives a lot like yours.”
Foster shrugged. “Maybe.”
Maybe?
Isabel looked from the child-ghost to Foster and back. The threads, the oversized catchment-jars of the rooms, the ghostgrass barring exit. Strengthening the ghosts just enough to serve some purpose, not enough to allow them to escape.
She’s doing my job, Isabel thought again, incredulous. All that was different was that Foster was feeding them straight-up ghost energy instead of blood, and that if she was taking field notes, her notebook was not in evidence.
“I’ve never even seen a ghost with a thread before Salazar,” she said. “Just the one that attached me to my body when I was in the—oh.” She glanced over at the ghost. “You told her about that?”
“Of course,” the ghost said simply.
It took her aback. Not five minutes ago he’d saved Isabel with her own knife, turning her memory-reading tactic into a stratagem. Isabel hadn’t even explained much to him about the ghostgrass before, only why it’d been hanging above the door of her Archivist-house the day they’d met, and her own thread had been something they’d learned the nature of together. And yet here was Foster, playing Archivist, claiming and shaping those threads and ghostgrass into research tools.
“Salazar,” Foster echoed, thoughtfully but without recognition. More like she was mentally recording syllables in order and filing them away. The name itself had no significance.
Which was strange.
The ghost not recognizing Salazar’s name—that made sense. As far as his life was concerned, he had a memory like a bucket with a hole kicked in it. Foster, though, hadn’t been wandering through the ghost-place for ages, gradually losing herself. She’d been stuck in the loop of her death, the moment she hadn’t been able to move past, and Isabel had freed her. Unlocked her memories. Or so Isabel had thought.
Foster had known Salazar. Trained with her. Isabel had seen it. Foster’s amnesia flew in the face of all of Isabel’s assumptions. It was deeply unsettling. The look of resigned disappointment on the ghost’s face did nothing to make it less so.
Isabel glanced a question at the ghost and he shook his head, almost imperceptibly.
Her unease was instantly upgraded to a definite chill.
Finished with the child-ghost, Foster cleared a gap in the doorway ghostgrass, then fixed it back up behind her as before. Then she caught sight of Sairy’s ghostgrass bundle, lying where it had fallen. She hooked it over with the swordpoint and flinched. “Ow.” She sheathed the sword to shake out her hand, tilting her head at the ghostgrass quizzically. She squatted beside it, took off one glove and stuck an experimental fingertip directly on a blade. It hissed. Foster yanked her hand away and leaned in for a better look. “This stuff’s stronger,” she said to the ghost in surprise. “A lot stronger.”
Foster’s assessing stare was different from the ghost’s, more like a predatory bird gauging how much fight its prey had left in it. It wasn’t malicious, but neither was a predator’s, for all the difference it made to the prey. She fixed this on Isabel now. “Where did you get this?”
“We grow it,” Isabel said, flustered. “It’s a plant, it grows, we picked it. It—”
“And you brought it down here,” the ghost said. “Why?”
Isabel
made a quick assessment of Sairy, who’d gone quiet again. She wasn’t taking her wounded hand out of its pocket and every time that arm moved she winced. Isabel was going to feel a whole lot better about that once she had a clear exit to the midwife’s.
“Walk with us,” Isabel said to the ghost. “And I’ll tell you. Sairy, good to go?”
Sairy lifted the map and her eyebrows in response.
“How’s your hand?”
“Fine,” Sairy said.
“You’d say fine if it fell off and you were carrying it in a bag,” Isabel told her.
But Sairy kept up, and didn’t go after Foster again. They walked and walked, past COMMUNICATIONS and AIR/WATER FILTRATION and COMBAT SIMULATOR and COMMISSARY, and Isabel told the ghosts about the townspeople hidden in the tunnels. The smoke rising in the distance. What would happen to a town that Carrion Boy’s people invaded and took over. The plan to fight, and to protect those who couldn’t. The cave-in when she’d trapped Salazar and the map they were following now.
She paused, wanting to tell them about Ruby’s plan for Isabel if things went wrong. Found that she could not.
Unbidden, the thought arrived: how am I supposed to do it exactly, if it comes to that? No ghosts down here my ass. Am I supposed to mercy kill all these people bloodlessly? Go around snapping necks one by one?
“I feel strange down here,” she said, swatting that thought away. “There’s something weird about this place. I’m dizzy, I feel like I’m going to puke any minute. My knife has been doing the thing like it did in the ghost-place. Right before you found me it was almost as bad as back then.” She hesitated, then held out her wrists. “And then there’s this.”
Sairy saw it first. “That’s from the ghostgrass? What in the shitting hell, Isabel, you should have said something.”
“I guess it’s because I was partly a ghost once,” Isabel said, because she had to say it out loud or she had no chance of normalizing it. Her whole brain felt like it was grasping at straws. “But I handle ghostgrass all the time and it never happened up there.”
Foster was staring like she could read her fortune written on Isabel’s face. Whatever the ghost was thinking, he gave no sign.
Latchkey Page 15
