“You know this place,” she told them. It’s probably the only place you know. Tell me why it’s doing this to me. Instead she took the map from Sairy and pointed at the symbol of the second hatch. “Do you know if the path is clear between where we are and this?”
“Not as clear as here,” Foster said. “The facility is kind of a mess further in. It only gets worse.”
“More ghosts?” Sairy asked.
Foster tapped the shimmering bundle of threads at her chest. “Contained.”
“Can we make a space that fits fiftyish people without the ceiling dropping on their heads?” Isabel asked. “One cave-in for today is enough.”
“If by we you mean yourself and your injured subordinate,” the ghost said, “I would say it’s doubtful.”
Sairy spluttered. “Subordinate?”
“She’s not my subordinate,” Isabel said, at the same time the ghost said: “I’ll go with you. If you like.”
“Oh no,” Foster told him. “You’re not decapitating any more of my ghosts. I’m coming too.”
Only after the ghosts had volunteered their service and their company did Isabel realize she’d been holding her breath wondering whether they would. Incomprehensibly, her hands were shaking. She felt like she’d been walking on the ridge and a rockslide had missed her by inches.
“And I need to check on Salazar,” Foster said. Still with that weird hesitation, like Salazar was a word she’d just learned, not a person she’d lived and trained and nearly died beside. Then, tensing slightly: “You said you’d trapped her? You didn’t—”
“Destroy her? No. She’s safe. But she kind of brought the ceiling down on herself. It seemed stable, but if you try to excavate her while the townspeople are still so close, I don’t know what will happen.”
“Then she’ll keep. I’ll take a look at her when I can but I won’t move her until we get your people relocated.”
Gratitude, Isabel discovered, still made her awfully awkward. So instead she held up the map in front of her as she walked.
“We put her here,” she said, indicating the space between the first hatch and the tunnels. She tried to calculate how far they’d come along that blue tangle, how long it had taken, how much longer they had to go. But she’d slipped into the ghost-place, where time ran different. If she stuck out her thumb and pinky finger as far as they would go, she could just about touch the second hatch symbol and the last room they’d passed simultaneously. “How far are we looking at here?”
The ghost glanced at the map. “Seventeen hundred sixty-odd meters, if it were a straight shot. Which it isn’t.”
Isabel eyed him. The ghost stuck a thumb over his shoulder, helpfully. “Miles,” he said. “That way.”
“Miles,” Isabel echoed. Ragpicker take her, she was tired. She felt like she’d been bundled into a sack and bounced off a cliff. “Okay. Have you ever opened that hatch? Do you know if it’s even…openable?”
Foster shook her head. “We tried to leave through the southern exit, but.” She took off a glove, held her hand palm-out to Isabel.
Isabel looked at Foster’s hand and her mind went white. The skin there had flaked and silvered. Never, not if Foster drank blood by the bottle every day for a thousand years, would it heal. Isabel thought of the way the child-ghost’s head had reattached because of Foster’s thread and wondered why Foster hadn’t just tried to fix herself. Unless she had, and this remaining damage was all that was left. The ghost equivalent of a scar.
Foster wiggled her fingers at Isabel. “You can see how well that went for us.”
The ghost watched Isabel’s reaction. Without looking she could feel his scrutiny. The palpable, precise, careful weight of everything he wasn’t saying.
Even after everything they’re helping me, she thought miserably. Even now.
For a while after that it was an awkward procession. Nobody said anything. There was only the shuffle-slide of Isabel’s injured gait and the dripping of the ceiling. Two sounds she’d rather not hear.
For a while now her stubbornness had worn her like a puppet, lifting up one foot at a time, moving it forward a little, plunking it down. It’d carry her a while farther yet.
Her wrists were killing her. Her ankles. Her neck. She could feel the ghostgrass Sairy was carrying at a deliberate distance from the ghosts, a slow-spreading smoldering like a warn-fire gone damp. One foot in front of another.
Her whole world had narrowed to a point, which was the sound of her heart hammering its ghostgrass-poisoned blood deeper into her veins. Felt like it was beating just below the surface. Like it was about to burn a hole through the fragile paper of her skin and land splat on the floor at her feet.
She tried to lose herself in thought. Certainly there was plenty on her mind. But she couldn’t say most of it, not without admitting things she had no intention of saying aloud. It was all too tangled together. Any one thing she gave voice to would rip the others out of her, and the person she’d spent three years building would fall around her like a house of cards.
Get your shit together, she told herself. Walk or fall.
“I’m surprised you wanted to protect Salazar in the first place, Foster,” she said. “Considering how nasty she was to you when you both were—” alive— “kids.”
Foster rounded on Isabel so fast Sairy almost tripped over her. “What?”
“When you were kids?” Isabel repeated. Maybe Foster’s earlier confusion had been temporary, some kind of ghost-glitch Isabel hadn’t before encountered. Only one way to be sure. “Salazar was…it’s, um, strange that you’d be so nice to her after…”
“After what?”
Isabel had nothing intelligent left to say to the confusion on Foster’s face. She stared helplessly.
“You’re saying,” Foster went on, incredulous, “that I knew her?”
“Seriously?” Sairy said. “You realize you guys are all dressed exactly alike. Unless everybody in the Before went around wearing all black with swords and guns stuck in their belts, it’s probably pretty safe to assume—”
“I know,” Foster said, quieter now. “But I would have thought I’d have remembered.”
Isabel caught the ghost’s eye. He was giving her a complicated look from an angle that Foster could not see.
Isabel knew that look. From living in a house full of upstarts all keeping secrets from each other and from the Catchkeep-priest and possibly mostly from her, she knew it. That look said not here, not now, but we have to talk.
Chapter Twelve
They walked for what felt like forever. Down the long length of that hall, around a corner, down another hall, two consecutive lefts. Without the map, Isabel would’ve been convinced by now they were going in circles. The place was huge. She said as much to the ghost.
“It used to be much bigger,” he replied. “This is just the basement.” Then, apparently realizing that the word basement might not be one she knew: “The part that’s underground. There was a whole building above this. Many, many floors.”
Isabel thought of the ruined building at the corner of the garden. The brickfall mantling the hatch. For generations Sweetwater had built its houses out of what it had salvaged there. There’d’ve been no town if there hadn’t been those provisions for shelter. Settlers would’ve moved on, or been stomped by the Ragpicker striding through the Waste of His domain.
Strange to think about. This place, this ghost. Her life built on the bones of his.
As they walked, Isabel explained to Foster as much as she knew about Salazar, the Latchkey Project, the facility where they were now. It was all secondhand, and based on memories that were mostly Foster’s to begin with, but Foster listened in rapt silence until Isabel was out of information to relay, which didn’t end up taking all that long.
After a while Sairy took point with the sack of ghostgrass, over Isabel’s protests.
“Look,” she said. “I’m carrying a bag of ghostgrass the size of a small child. I’m safer than yo
u, certainly. I—”
Isabel grabbed her, pulled her back. “Shh.” Pointing with her spare hand to something off ahead, down in the dark.
Whatever it was, Foster and the ghost had caught sight of it too. They’d both assumed a kind of quiet readiness, still and calm. All their attention was fixed on something further down the tunnel, where part of the darkness seemed to separate.
Isabel slitted her eyes at that darkness.
The darkness glinted back.
* * *
Great, Isabel thought. Another ghost.
As its light brightened and she saw it clearer, she amended that assessment. Worse. Another Latchkey ghost.
This one had died several years older and so was substantially larger than the last one. It looked to have been closer to the age that Salazar had been when she’d succumbed to the treatment. Isabel, with the strength of Salazar’s ghost quite fresh in her mind, would be lying if she said she wasn’t somewhat disconcerted to see this one here now. Not so much blocking their way as having collapsed in it, oblivious to their presence. But what was really alarming was the look of surprise on Foster’s face.
Seven threads, Isabel thought. Twelve operatives.
And this one had no thread.
“I thought you had this under control, Foster,” she said. Not shifting an inch. Barely even moving her lips when she spoke. Like this Latchkey ghost would rush at her the second any part of her changed position.
“Count of twenty,” Foster replied. Watching that Latchkey ghost in perfect stillness, like an arrow just before it’s loosed. “Then see if you feel the need to say that again.”
“She does have this under control,” Sairy said to the ghost, her voice skeptical. “Right?”
But the ghost wasn’t listening. He was drawing his sword. Easing a step forward. Without taking her eyes from the Latchkey ghost, Foster shook her head very slightly, and the ghost paused and stood there on full alert as Foster started making her way down the hall, stalking that Latchkey ghost in long slow silent strides. Weighing his partner’s wishes against his partner’s apparent deathwish, and for the moment—and likely only for the moment—staying put. And practically vibrating with the strain of doing so.
“It’s okay,” Foster was telling the Latchkey ghost. Like it was a stray kitten she’d found in an alley, not the disembodied will of a genetically modified superpowered murder machine. Isabel couldn’t even make out its face. Time and isolation from the ghost-place had so weakened it that its features had gone gummy and gelatinous, worn through in places to an oily-looking gray. The awful strength of any Latchkey ghost seemed to be the only thing keeping this one from deliquescing completely, boiling itself down to a puddle of silver sludge. A framework that held up the vague shape of the thing while all of its substance fell in.
Wherever it’d come from, this ghost was lost, so lost. It obviously had no idea who or where or what or when it was. As Isabel watched, it kept trying to hurl up arcs of bruise-colored light, as Salazar’s ghost had done before, but this one lacked the juice. Here and there, sparks of ghost-energy hovered off it, fizzled wetly. It had its head pressed against the jagged brickwork of the wall, was trying to push itself, facefirst, to standing. One cheek and one temple were slashed and silvery from the effort.
Foster, being Foster, reached in and stood with it and set it on its feet. There she got it in an elaborate hold that looked friendly enough, but Isabel knew better. Foster might be an idealist, she might be reckless, she might be stubborn—but she was about as far as you could get from stupid.
This ghost was male, about Foster’s height and solidly built. Its hair had either been blond in life or was well on its way to damaged silver as a ghost. A lake-color, like driftwood or sand. Sixteen, maybe, at time of death.
Isabel took stock of the hall. They’d moved well beyond the banks of identical observation cells where they’d found Salazar and the child-ghost. This stretch of tunnel was comparatively bare. They’d passed a door that led onto an up-down set of broken staircases, which they’d avoided, and were about to come up on a very large rectangle on the map labeled TRAINING HALL.
In short, nowhere that looked suitable to store a captive ghost.
“We should help her,” Sairy whispered.
“She caught seven already.” Isabel glanced at the ghost for confirmation, but he wasn’t taking a shred of focus off of Foster and he didn’t look terribly at ease with what he saw. “This is nothing.”
“Whatever happened to count of twenty?” Sairy hissed. “It’s been twenty—”
“Foster knows what she’s doing.”
“This starts to look like trouble, I’m going up there.”
Dead-on-her-feet spent or not, Sairy looked about ready to march up there and shove a fistful of ghostgrass down that Latchkey ghost’s throat to the elbow. But it’d be sheer force of will driving her. She looked awful. The second Foster finished up here, Isabel was getting a good look at that hand, even if she had to tackle Sairy and sit on her.
“We stay put,” she said. Then, teasingly, because the more she really looked at Sairy the more unsettled Isabel became: “You don’t even like her.”
“So? I didn’t like you for years. First rule: It’s worth risking two to save one.”
Isabel gaped at her in mortified horror.
Too late. The ghost was staring too. “What did you just say?”
“I said it’s worth—” Sairy trailed off to a gasp before Isabel could strangle her to shut her up. “The shit is that noise?”
It was like two sheets of rusty metal grinding together, and it was coming from the Latchkey ghost. Thread or no thread, its proximity to the apparent ocean of Foster’s strength was, in turn, strengthening it. Silver droplets of ghost-energy were beading up on it. Was it coming out of the Latchkey ghost or was the Latchkey ghost gathering it from Foster?
“We can help you,” Foster was shouting. The rusty-metal sound went shearing through Isabel’s teeth and she winced. Presumably based on what Isabel had told her about Salazar, Foster continued: “We worked together. We were kids together. We trained together.”
Here Foster’s reserve of extrapolation ran dry.
Admittedly, if Isabel mentally removed the gaping silver wounds and subtracted about eight years off this ghost’s age of death, it—he—started to seem familiar. She pictured those last dozen surviving subjects, perched at little desks, raising their hands, the Director calling on them to answer—
“Ayres,” she whispered, the name falling into her head and out her mouth concurrently.
Down the hall, Ayres went very still. Too late, Isabel saw her mistake.
“Oh,” she breathed, “shit—”
Beside her, the ghost, one shadow of a provocation from blurring down the hall to bag himself another specimen’s head, glanced at her sharply, then back at Ayres, who had gone dangerously still and was now staring just past Foster with a curious lucidity. “What.”
“He heard me.”
Grabbing a bundle of ghostgrass. Gritting her teeth as she felt it burning its way into the flesh of her palm like a hot coal through a snowbank. Holding it out in front of her, she broke into a run—
—and Ayres’s feeble silver sparks flared up and ran together, stretching into a crackling arc of blue-violet light that whipsawed out and took Foster upside the head with a sound like a wire snapping under tension.
For the tiniest instant, Foster’s grip failed the tiniest bit.
It was enough.
Ayres ripped free of her and stood there blazing, his light so intense it seemed to throw cold the way a warn-fire throws heat. Pure reflex, Isabel dug her heels in and skidded into an about-face on the muddy tile, her momentum flinging her into the core of that bright darkness that seemed to pull all other light toward it. She struggled to stop and earned herself another helpless quarter-turn, drawn inexorably in as if into orbit.
Like the story, she thought inanely, flying sideways toward her doom. How t
he Chooser was stealing all the dead from Catchkeep, because the Chooser’s eyes were so sharp She could see everyone’s death nesting in them long before it blossomed, so Catchkeep tricked one of Her eyes into trying to look so far that it exploded, and that eye-star of Her up-self exploded with it, so bright it blocked out half Her other stars from sight, and—
Something knocked her aside, hard, slamming her into the wall. She went down like a bag of rocks and sat there. Sairy rushed to her side, hauling her up, checking for wounds. Isabel shook her head to clear it and there was the ghost, standing between her and that blinding light.
Foster had interposed herself between the ghost and Ayres. She was positioned sideways between them, sword trained on the ghost, gun trained on Ayres. Staring at the ghost in dawning disbelief. “What do you think you’re doing?”
“Minimizing risk,” he replied.
“To what?”
He said nothing.
“What are they doing?” Sairy whispered.
Isabel shook her head. “I don’t know.” Whatever it was, having seen these two ghosts as living people, she wasn’t overmuch surprised.
“So, what, now you have a problem?” Foster jerked her chin toward the threads. “All the others went down just like this and you said nothing.”
“It was not,” the ghost said tightly, “just like this.”
Because of me, Isabel couldn’t bring herself to say. Because I said his name and he heard it. The thing that went wrong here was me.
“Then stop me.” Foster tightened her grip on the sword. “Or stand the fuck down.”
“Foster,” said the ghost evenly, “get out of the way.”
In response, Foster shifted her feet slightly, redistributing her weight. She hadn’t spared a glance for Ayres this whole time and she wasn’t starting now. Every iota of her attention was on the ghost. Given the raw power Isabel could plainly see radiating off of Ayres, what this suggested about the ghost’s strength was terrifying.
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