“Hold formation!” the ghost yelled. “Let them imprint! Four!”
Isabel wasn’t sure she’d heard that right. Imprint?
Without missing a beat, Foster picked up what Isabel realized was a countdown. But a countdown to what?
“Three!”
Ayres loaded several into a bag he’d found on the street, whirled it over his head and sent it sailing. Foster dropkicked one, and Isabel heard it ping off of something in the invisible distance. “Two!” the ghost shouted, and picked up a couple of the things in one hand and hurled them so far so fast Isabel lost their glow almost immediately against the paste-gray sky.
Ayres’s partner had a kind of handheld device that attracted the things to it with a low humming sound. She’d been holding the device out at waist level and the things had been hopping up off the street to attach themselves to it. She pressed a button on the device, and the glowing and cheeping of the attached things stopped at once. Another button, and they fell to the street, apparently deactivated. “One!” she shouted.
Foster screamed “Against the walls!” and the two rows of soldiers broke formation. Dived for the walls, plastered themselves against them, as the cheeping of the few remaining things grew quicker, louder, shriller. The things eased themselves up off the street and began to hover, spinning at incredible speed at waist-height in midair, and then shot off toward the exact locations where the soldiers used to be—and the operatives still were.
They were fast, but the operatives were faster, swatting them out of the air, kicking them away down the street with one last burst of effort.
Ayres, as his boot connected with the last one, began to cough. Hard. The sickness that followed the operatives’ treatment had gotten him in the end, Isabel knew, but she hadn’t known when. Adrenaline had pushed the symptoms away, but as it wore off, Isabel could plainly see them gaining on him. Catching him back up. He choked and gasped, and his kick went wide. Sent the thing flying with some force straight into the chestplate of one of the soldiers along the wall. There it stuck.
That soldier looked down at the thing, then up at Ayres, gray with horror. Ayres took one step toward him, one hand outstretched like he could reach out and physically take back the mistake. But there was nothing he could do. The soldier began to shake all over, as though having a fit, but faster, impossibly fast, more like a vibration that went on and on. A single high-pitched sustained note was coming either from him or the thing stuck to him, and it was soon joined by a long sequence of sudden snapping sounds as every bone in his body was broken by some invisible force, into halves, quarters, eighths, and yanked inward toward the thing stuck in his chest.
The high-pitched sound stopped when the ghost put a bullet through the soldier’s head. The snapping sound went on.
Foster blurred across the street and barreled into Ayres, pinning him forearm-to-windpipe against the wall, denting the metal behind him. “The fuck, Ayres,” she was hissing into his face. Beside herself. Too furious even to yell. “We had this.”
Ayres was staring past her, through her, at the quivering pile of soldier steadily turning to paste inside his skin, crack by crack, as the first outliers of the next wave of things rained down.
“I’m good,” Ayres was whispering, wide-eyed and ashen, struggling not to cough. “It’s all good. I got this. Back off, Foster, it’s okay, I said I got this.”
Chapter Thirteen
Back in the tunnels. Disoriented. Queasy. Cold sweat down her spine. The fading back in was the worst.
She took stock. Everything looked exactly as she’d left it. She must have only been gone for an instant. The only difference she noticed was that the ghost now had Ayres pinned to the wall with one hand around his neck. Expressionless, unhurried, his head tilted slightly, as if daring Ayres to provoke him. Swordpoint resting in the hollow of his throat.
Sairy, one good sway from a topple, was nevertheless backing up his effort with a fistful of ghostgrass, gently repelling Ayres toward the ghost’s control. Caught between them, Ayres was still, his ghost-energy draining along the thread to Foster.
“Isabel?” Sairy said. “You okay? You fell over.”
“Lost my balance,” she said.
Isabel stood before Ayres again, an idea taking vague shape in her head. She knew, now, the moment Ayres’s ghost couldn’t move past. She’d seen it. The field notes had never specified exactly what those moments were supposed to signify for ghosts, only that they were what ghosts got hung up on, what drove them to say a few words or reenact a single moment over and over for eternity.
She’d seen Foster’s version of that moment before. She’d seen the ghost’s. She’d seen Ayres’s.
But now, for one of these at least, she’d seen what came after.
Sairy lifted her chin at Ayres. “What’s he doing?”
He was flickering at intervals of about two seconds, as the moment he couldn’t move past played on loop, dragging him with it like a dead squirrel caught in a cart wheel. Still whispering I got this, over and over, staring at a spot around Isabel’s hairline that would’ve been the exact level of Foster’s eyes if she’d been standing there instead, leaning in. Her forearm to his windpipe. A wall at his back.
He didn’t move. He was wedged deep in that memory now, as mired as in quicksand. Whisper, pause, flicker, repeat.
It was either the best idea she’d had in a while, or the worst. In a minute she’d know.
“Foster, stand here.”
She took Foster by the shoulders and guided her into place, which Foster allowed. The ghost stepped aside and stood by in silence, hand on hilt, awaiting trouble.
“Gonna need you to do what I say when I say it and not ask any questions, okay? I’ll explain as soon as I can.” If I live through this. “I promise.”
A pause, and then Foster nodded, her mouth pressed into a line.
“Put this part of your arm against Ayres’s throat—like this—” in demonstration she held her own forearm up toward the ghost, who raised an eyebrow at her over her sleeve but said nothing— “you’re not going to hurt him, okay, nobody’s going to hurt him—just—put your arm there and push him back against the wall.”
For a second Foster looked like she was going to literally choke on her unasked questions, but then she set her jaw, put her forearm to Ayres’s windpipe, and walked him back against the wall. He bumped against it, seemingly weightless, and stood there flickering, staring through Foster across the dead centuries at something none of them could see.
“Good. Now say: what the fuck, Ayres, we had this. Sound really, really mad.”
Foster looked at her sharply, opened her mouth, thought better, shut it. Blinked. Turned back to Ayres. “What the fuck, Ayres, we had this.”
At had this, Ayres, who’d been whispering to himself this whole time, reached the end of the loop and the loop kicked over, as it had been doing for minutes straight.
Except that this time it started earlier.
“I’m good,” he said. “It’s all good. I got this.” His voice was wobbling out and in, all waver and echo, like he was calling out with the last scrapings of his strength from the bottom of a well. It cut out for a second, came back in. “—off, Foster, it’s okay, I said I got this.”
But he wasn’t looking at Foster.
He was looking at Isabel.
He’d been looking at Isabel this whole time. Like she was the only thing in this whole place he could see. Isabel couldn’t help remembering just before she’d fallen into the ghost-place river, the swirls of visual disturbance in the halls with one clean point in the center.
Except that Ayres’s field of vision had been centered on Foster, and he’d turned from her to Isabel like Foster wasn’t even there.
“Tell him it was an accident,” Isabel said. “He was sick and it was an accident. Tell him you know it wasn’t his fault.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Ayres said to Isabel, from that far-off, way-back, caught-in-between place. “Sti
ll killed him.”
“Yeah,” Isabel said, shaken. “You did. Foster, let go.”
Foster let go.
“This has gone on long enough,” the ghost said, but halfheartedly. Staring with thinly-veiled fascination at something even Isabel had only seen twice before. A ghost broken free of its loop. It was how they’d found Foster, saved her from the sinkhole of her own mind, long ago. He knew perfectly well what was at stake.
“Just give me a minute,” Isabel told him. “Keep an eye on him but don’t engage. Sairy, stand clear.”
Sairy nodded, shifting her weight to spring away if needed. “Clear.”
“Wasp—” the ghost said.
“I got him,” Foster said. The flow up the thread redoubled and Ayres wilted visibly. “Okay,” she told Isabel. “Go.”
“One minute,” the ghost said. “Then it’s my turn.”
“More than I need,” Isabel said.
But eye to eye with the guilt and anger and pain in Ayres’s face, all her words dried up. What could she say to him that would make any kind of difference?
“Better to lose one than risk two,” Ayres said, and the nimbus of his light started juddering, churning, spitting sparks.
Sairy started. “What?”
But Isabel wasn’t listening to her. She saw her way in. She’d just about had her fill of better to lose one than risk two. And all the other crap that Latchkey had shoved down its operatives’ throats. Partnering them up to inform on each other. Encouraging them to stand back and watch their partners die, because it was easier and cheaper for the people in charge. Less wasted funding. Less effort put forth in removing—whatever it was she’d seen them remove from Salazar’s corpse’s brain, in secret, having lied about her burial. Impossible to guess where the body had ended up when they were done with it. Isabel’s best guess wasn’t buried.
“That was a lie,” she told Ayres. “That’s what the Director wanted you to think. And it got a lot of people killed.” She held her arms out to either side, indicating the wide empty expanse of the tunnels. “Do you see the Director here?”
Chooser knew if he even remembered the Director. It probably wasn’t likely. But Ayres’s whole person gave a stutter and seemed somehow to reset. “I’m with you, Foster,” he said. “Just tell me what I have to do.”
Foster’s gaze whipped from Ayres to Isabel. “Why does he think you’re me?”
Isabel wished she had an answer. “He doesn’t think anything. He doesn’t even know where he is, let alone—”
“Foster,” the ghost said warningly, gesturing at the thread. Foster’s attention had lapsed, allowing the grayscale lightbleed of the thread to reverse. Ayres, strengthened by the memory, was sucking energy back down it. Foster didn’t seem to notice. Nor was she listening to the ghost.
“I’m standing right here. Why the hell does he think you’re me?”
Projecting such angry betrayal. Like she’d landed in a trap she’d have to gnaw her way free of and she couldn’t decide which leg to leave behind.
What must it feel like, for someone whose memories were fading, to be effectively erased from the sight of someone who was looking right at you?
“I find out, you’ll be the first to know,” Isabel told Foster. “I promise.” She double-checked her grip on the jar and nodded. “Okay,” she said shakily. “I’m done here.”
Foster looked like she had a lot more questions where that one came from, but she swallowed them. Instead she shut her eyes, concentrating, and Ayres’s ghost-energy went zipping up the thread in huge gulps of light. Within a ten-count he’d silvered and collapsed completely, drained but intact, reverting to the position in which they’d found him, slumped with the side of his face against the far wall of the tunnel.
“So fast,” Sairy whispered, echoing Isabel’s own thoughts.
But Foster wasn’t done. She kept drawing ghost-energy until Ayres had crumpled and shrunken to the size of a mouse. It was how most ghosts looked in the living world, with only enough energy to project and maintain a vague tiny person-shape. But to see a ghost with Ayres’s strength so dramatically changed, so quickly, and on purpose? Isabel was so impressed that it took her a minute to realize that Foster was glowing.
She’d never seen Foster’s ghost-energy before. She had no idea why there were those tiny variations in color between one ghost’s energy and another’s. Silver-blue. Silver-violet. Silver-gray. Foster’s was silver-orange, a color like a thrown spark.
“He’s ready,” Foster said, cupping that little ghost-form in both hands like a candle she was protecting from wind.
Together she and Isabel coaxed Ayres into the bottle. Isabel lidded it up and handed it to Foster, who set the bottle gently in a little nest of rubble along the wall. Ayres’s thread trailed out from there to join the bundle at Foster’s chest. Now, including the broken one that had been Salazar’s, there were eight. Without being asked, Sairy set a few blades of ghostgrass around the bottle, just in case.
“Okay,” Isabel said. No time to rest. Time to look at the map. “A little farther along this way, and then it looks like we make a right. Should be about—” her heart sank— “halfway to the hatch.”
They set out. Foster in front, then Sairy, then Isabel and the ghost.
Sairy made it maybe five steps before she dropped.
* * *
They got her laid out on the tile as best they could. The floor was mud and rubble here, but Foster and Isabel made a flat place while the ghost lifted Sairy off her face and over onto her back in a grip that looked like it hadn’t the first clue how to hold a person without breaking said person’s arms.
“Off,” Sairy pronounced.
“You’re awake,” Isabel said. Sairy blinked at her like Isabel had just shaken her from sleep in the middle of the night to take watch. “I need to see your hand.”
“How far to the hatch?”
“We’re taking a break. I need to see the cut on your hand.”
“It’s fine,” Sairy mumbled. “I slipped in the mud is all. Let’s go.”
“And blacked out? Makes total sense to me. Happens all the time. Show me your hand.”
After a moment Sairy seemed to realize she didn’t have enough energy left to argue with. She held up her arm, wincing. “See? It’s not that bad.”
Isabel took Sairy’s hand as gently as she could. Not daring to remove the ghostgrass braids, she slid them gingerly to either side of the bandage as she and Sairy hissed pain between their teeth for different reasons. Then she began to unwrap the bandage. It was soaked through with old blood and new pus, grimy with tunnel-dirt, and Isabel’s breath caught when she saw the wound underneath. It had stopped bleeding, but the skin around it had puffed and reddened, and dark streaks trailed from the bottom edge of the wound the whole way to Sairy’s wrist.
Isabel had seen this kind of infection before, but never setting in so soon after the initial wound. And she’d never seen it end well. Then again, she didn’t know what happened when a ghost bit a person and was stopped before that person was dead. This was unknown territory.
Whatever this was, it was going through Sairy like a hurled rock through a paper window-screen. It was a long walk back to the medical supplies, and Isabel knew at a glance that they had brought down nothing that was going to fix this.
“We’ll get you to the midwife,” she heard herself say, though she had no idea how to even begin to keep that promise. “She’ll know what to do.”
“She’d need to be carried,” the ghost said. “Look at her. That is a person who has gone as far as she is going to go.”
“Your midwife,” Foster said, dubious, “can fix that?”
“I don’t know,” Isabel hissed at her. “All I do know is that I can’t.”
“She needs antibiotics,” Foster said. “She needs a hospital.”
“What?”
Foster was squatting on her heels, sizing Sairy up, head tilted slightly sideways like a hawk’s. Like she couldn’t
make up her mind whether to bargain with Sairy or eat her. Then she looked sharply at the ghost.
“No,” the ghost said. Holding up one black-gloved finger. “That’s not happening.”
Isabel looked from the ghost to Foster and back. “What’s not—”
“We change her bandage,” the ghost said. “We clean the wound. Field medicine buys time to get her to proper medical attention. I’ll carry her myself. But I’m not—”
“Clean it?” Isabel said. “With what?”
“Don’t do this,” Foster told him. “She needs—”
“Hey,” Sairy said. Her voice sounded weird, like it wasn’t really hers. Like it’d traveled a long way and was now coming back to her from that distance. She was glaring down the hall into the dark like she could propel them all toward the hatch with her eyes. “Quit wasting time arguing. I’ve gotten hurt worse in training.”
Foster shot to her feet. Took the ghost by the shoulder. “Can I talk to you a minute.”
They retreated a few steps, arguing in urgent whispers. The words help her reached Isabel’s ears, and selfish, and deal. The ghost didn’t seem to be saying much of anything.
Sairy was still muttering under her breath. When she fell silent, Isabel glanced down to find Sairy staring up at her, her eyes huge and luminous with fever. “Don’t you dare let them carry me.”
But Foster had taken off somewhere, and the ghost came back alone.
“Wasp,” he said, and at the sound of that name Isabel started like something had grabbed her in the dark. “Foster is scouting ahead to clear a path and see if the hatch is viable. Have your subordinate rest until she returns, and if the way is clear we’ll get her to where she needs to go.”
“Okay,” Sairy said. “Two things. First—”
“You should rest also,” the ghost told Isabel. “I’ll keep watch. Foster won’t be long.”
“First,” Sairy said. “It’s my hand, not my legs. Nobody’s carrying me. And second—”
There was a pause. Isabel and the ghost exchanged a glance.
Latchkey Page 18
