Chapter Fourteen
From there they took a few more turnings, and then a few more, until Isabel was completely lost. She’d given up on the map. It was taking all her energy just to keep putting one foot in front of the other without dropping facefirst onto the floor. If it weren’t for Foster leading the way, she was sure she’d never be heard from again. She’d be bones in the dark for a future Archivist to trip over.
The ghost was carrying Sairy, though at least she was strong enough to protest it. Barely. Infection aside, the dizziness and nausea from constant contact with a ghost must have been intense.
“This is the fastest way to get you to the midwife,” Isabel called up to her. “Quit squirming. Be happy your feet are dry.”
And it was definitely fast. Isabel had to hustle and block out a great deal of pain to keep up.
There wasn’t a whole lot around to take her mind off of it, though. Constant dripping from the ceiling at this point, beading up in condensation on the walls. Muddy lakewater pooling in the gappy tile of the floor. She fell behind a little, then caught back up.
“That,” Sairy announced, pointing at a finger-wide runnel of gray water issuing steadily from the ceiling, “I do not like the look of. Is that not bothering anyone else?” When nobody replied, she turned her attention to the ghost. “Thanks,” she said grudgingly. “I didn’t mean for you to carry me like a—”
“No worries,” Foster said. “We’ve carried worse.”
But Sairy was on her feet now, Isabel noted. When had that happened? Still thrashed-looking, if not so bright with fever as she’d been…just a few minutes ago.
This scared Isabel maybe even more than the leaky ceiling. More than once she’d seen wounded upstarts whose systems had rallied just hours, or minutes, before shutting down for good.
“Sairy,” she said, coming level with her. Trying to keep the alarm from her voice. “Hey. Let me check on your—”
Isabel glanced down at Sairy’s hand and blinked, then exhaled hard, realizing what she was seeing.
The bandage was gone. The wound was gone.
Behind her, the ghost’s silence was thick enough to cut.
Isabel opened her mouth, then closed it.
She fell back to walk beside the ghost.
“You’re impossible,” Isabel told him.
“You’re welcome,” he replied.
All at once Isabel could feel something unseen between them click invisibly back into place, like a couple of rusty gears grating against each other until, improbably, they meshed. On they walked in silence, shoulder to shoulder, two old friends in the dark among the sunken bones of a dead world.
Sairy, meanwhile, was practically bouncing on her toes with nerves.
“I was supposed to be helping in the fight this whole time,” she was explaining to Foster. “I can’t wait to get up there. Going to find Lissa and Meg and unleash holy hell.”
“Just a little farther,” Foster was saying. She glanced over her shoulder at the ghost and Isabel. “When we get to the hatch, you two can clear a space and relocate the townspeople. It looked pretty stable up that way. Then once everything’s over, we’ll come back for them.”
“I don’t think anyone knows where that second hatch is,” Isabel said doubtfully. “At least I never heard of it. You said it’s by the lake?”
“It’s practically in the lake. It was under about a foot of wet sand.”
“How’d you open it?” Sairy asked.
Foster shrugged.
Even if I’d gotten there, I never could’ve gotten it open from below, Isabel thought, skin prickling. And nobody above would have known where to look.
“Don’t worry,” Foster said, misinterpreting Isabel’s look of horror. “We’re going to win.” She nudged Sairy. “You ready?”
Sairy made a face. “What do you think?”
Foster grinned. “I think you were born ready.”
“Wait,” Isabel said. “We?”
But she knew. Foster heard everything, saw everything, missed nothing. She knew exactly what had to happen to make this work.
Foster looked insulted. “What do you think, I’m just going to dump her up there and cross my fingers that she doesn’t get herself killed? I’m going with her.”
* * *
On and on they went. The lamp-oil was getting visibly lower, the walls and floor visibly wetter.
The harvesting-knife never stopped doing its thing, and Isabel never stopped feeling ill, but she didn’t drop through the floor into the ghost-place again. When she started to feel that weird sensation like she was starting to slip through, the ghost always noticed, and always knew what it signified. He’d fall in step close beside her in silence, and she knew that if she did slip through he’d catch her, the way he’d fished her out of the river before.
Eventually they made their way into another stretch of little rooms. This whole sector seemed to be nothing but those, evenly spaced, each one maybe five long paces by five if Isabel stopped and went inside to measure, which she didn’t. There was a good bit of distance between them, though, and the walls were extremely thick. This far down the tunnels there was evidence of fire. Scorched walls and ceiling, and the smell was different.
Soon they encountered a huge heavy door, half-open, spanning the hall. They went through it, took maybe a half-dozen steps and reached a second door, identical but closed. The thing looked to be the density and weight of the hatch door they’d descended through, but the ghost slid it open easily and they walked through it and on.
At one point they passed a larger room, fronted with a bank of thick plate windows. Despite herself Isabel slowed as she passed it. Remembering the four Latchkey operatives ducking down below those exact windows, angling bits of mirror as Salazar had her head cut open and a tiny silver square dug out. It’d said something above the door once. Like the rest of the lettering on the walls, it was black on white and mostly illegible. The doors were sealed.
Hit by a sudden compulsion, she put the lamp down under that bank of windows. Hoping to see—she didn’t know quite what. Salazar laid out on a white table, maybe. Some evidence of what that thing in her head had been, or where it’d gone.
Cupped her hands to the glass and peered in. Took a second to realize what she was looking at. Jumped back a step, startled. Dropping her hands from the glass like it’d burned her.
Water. The room was totally submerged in the muddy darkness of the lake. The leaks they’d encountered so far in the ceiling must’ve devolved into a full-blown rupture somewhere beyond this wall. Somehow, whatever those windows and door were sealed with, it was containing the flood to that room.
You’ve held for this long, she thought at them. Just a little longer. Please.
The ghost was beside her. “Those doors we passed a while back,” Isabel said. Still staring at that bank of windows like it’d explode in a torrent of Sweetwater and glass if she dropped her gaze.
She didn’t need to say anything else. He just nodded once, whistled up the hall to Foster, signaled incomprehensibly, and took off back the way they came.
After three years of giving orders to the ex-upstarts, negotiating with the high seats, forcing appropriate words out of her mouth at appropriate times, all for the sheer stupid sake of fitting in, how refreshing and comfortable it was to be able to be silently, absolutely, immediately, flawlessly understood.
A grinding noise echoed up, and then a crash, and then the same again, as both doors were hauled by main force across their runners and rammed shut. Within thirty seconds the ghost returned.
Soon they reached the hatch. Isabel could hear nothing of the fight above, but if Foster’s grim expression was any indication, things weren’t sounding like they were getting any better.
This hatch looked much like the first, except that the door at its entrance was in somewhat better repair, as were the rungs laddering up.
Under the hatch, it felt like Isabel stood in the world’s last bubble of calm and
it was about to pop. It reminded Isabel of the instant before she’d step out onto the sand, knife drawn, on the Archivist-choosing day. Only on a much larger scale. Maybe this was what it’d felt like to live in the last moments of the Before, Isabel reflected. Right as it was about to stop being the Before and start being whatever came next.
Idly and not for the first time, she wondered what that must’ve been like. Foster wasn’t there for it, obviously, she thought. Then caught herself glancing over her shoulder toward the ghost. She’d always assumed he hadn’t been alive at the time of the old world’s death. Surely he would have at least remembered that much. Even if—
“Here’s how this is going to go,” Foster told Sairy. “I don’t know my way around up there. You do. Anything I need to know, you tell me. Don’t wait for an invitation.”
“Okay.”
“We move fast and we move smart,” Foster went on. “I take point, you stay close. We only engage after we measure risk.”
“No Ragpicker’s gambits,” Sairy said. “Got it.”
Foster stopped, boot resting on the bottom rung, and looked over a shoulder at her strangely. “No whats?”
“A gamble,” Isabel translated. “A crappy hopeless gamble. A Ragpicker’s gambit to beat Chooser’s odds. Usually a bad idea. Sometimes the only idea you have.”
“Last trick up your sleeve,” said Foster.
“Sure,” said Isabel. “I guess.”
“I need you to be my eyes. I don’t know the friendlies from the hostiles. More importantly, they don’t know me. I don’t want to start messing up the wrong ones. That’d be bad news for you. I’ll tell you someday what it looks like when your side thinks you’ve jumped to the other one.”
A noise came out of the ghost that might have been a laugh, but probably wasn’t.
“So once we get up there, I’m your weapon. Point and shoot. In that order. Your people aren’t going to like the look of me up there any better than they would’ve liked the look of Salazar down here, and you’re not going to have time to explain, so prove, fast as you can, beyond a shadow of a doubt, whose side you’re fighting for. Clear?”
“Clear.”
Sairy turned to Isabel and Foster stopped her with a gesture. “None of that. Goodbyes are bad luck. You’re going to see her again real soon.”
As if in demonstration, she turned to Isabel. “Hey.” Faster than Isabel could track, let alone block, Foster’s hand moved. Isabel glanced down and there was a black-gloved pointer finger poking her in the sternum. When Foster saw her looking, the finger swept upward to bop her gently, incomprehensibly, under the jaw. “Chin up,” Foster said, and winked, leaving Isabel to stare after her in bewilderment.
For the ghost, Foster only had a glance and a nod. Whatever passed between them passed in silence.
They all watched as she scaled the rusted remains of the ladder easily and lifted the hatch door up and out like it weighed nothing. Damp globs of sand plopped down from above, and summer morning light streamed in. It seemed somehow wrong that Isabel could hear birds out there, and a breeze in the stunted trees, and lakewater gently lapping at the shore…
“Clear,” Foster called down.
Then Sairy was on Isabel, squeezing the life out of her lungs. “Don’t you fucking die,” she was practically snarling in Isabel’s ear.
“Me? I’m stuck down here where it’s safe. I’m not the one diving neck-deep into the shit.” Isabel pushed her back gently, held her at arm’s length. “Go on,” she said at last, giving Sairy an awkward little shake. “Get out of here.”
“Already gone,” Sairy said, and followed Foster up into the light.
Isabel and the ghost stood side-by-side and watched her go. That close, frostbite-and-vertigo blasted clean through her sleeve, zapping straight up her nerves to her teeth and the backs of her eyeballs. Like getting stung, or burned, she always forgot how much it hurt until it happened again.
What did a ghost feel when it came into contact with the living? The same? The opposite, whatever that was? Nothing? Mentally Isabel tossed it on her pile of questions she’d maybe ask the ghost someday. Along with what did you do with Foster’s remains? and what ended up killing you? and you knew that the only bridge between you and your memories is me, and that bridge washes out the second I die and turn ghost, so what I can’t figure out is, knowing all that, what the hell kind of sense did it make, offering to take me with you?
Foster shut the hatch, and the dark returned, barely cut now by the dying lamp.
“I want to check out the rooms in this hall,” Isabel said. “Ghostgrass over a doorway worked with Salazar, it’ll work against anything else down here. And—”
At that moment her eyes finished adjusting to the dark and her gaze fell upon the thread emerging from her chest.
“No,” she whispered, rounding on the ghost in a blind panic and a dead certainty that the tunnels were about to spit her out into the ghost-place again. Almost-drowning once was plenty, and there were nastier things in the ghost-place than that river, promising quicker deaths for her if not more merciful.
But no. She wasn’t dizzy, at least no more than she always was down here, and her vision was clear, free of interference. And unlike the other threads, she could see where this one was going.
It emerged from her coat-front to run in a clear line up and up to join the bundle of threads that passed through the hatch, trailing Foster like a comet-tail, linking her to the Latchkey ghosts she’d captured.
Isabel’s thread connected to her chest at the exact place where Foster had poked her. Chin up.
She inspected the thread. It looked different than the one that’d connected her to her body before. Glossy and cold, pale and fine, but with a springy strength like scorchweed tendrils. Her best guess was that it was only the combination of the liminality of this place, her nearness to death three years ago, her travels through the ghost-place, and her ability to flicker in and out between the real world and the ghost one, that allowed the thread to gain purchase on her at all.
Light seeped visibly along that thread, pulsing in infinitesimal pure white flares.
Ghost-energy. Foster was…fueling her, the way oil fuels a lamp, along the wick of the thread. She was standing straighter. It didn’t feel like there was a stick being jammed deeper in her side every time she inhaled. Experimentally she dumped her weight onto her bad leg and held it there, reflexively gritting her teeth against the agony to come—but it never came. There was pain, just as there was still thirst and hunger and exhaustion, but it was dull and muted, like a pillow held over a scream.
“She didn’t. Can she even—she didn’t really—”
“It’s Foster,” the ghost said drily. “Of course she did.”
“But why?” Isabel asked, but then fell silent, because something even stranger was happening to her. It was like falling through into the ghost-place, a here and an elsewhere overlapping. Except that now, the elsewhere was the outskirts of Sweetwater. As if, without having climbed out of the tunnels herself, she was now on the lakeshore above, kicking wet sand over the hatch-lid to hide it from view, and Sairy was beside her, staring off toward the smoke and noise in the middle distance.
No: she wasn’t seeing it at all. The true evidence of her eyes was: tunnels, hatch, ghost. It was like a daydream. Something she was imagining. But she knew it wasn’t.
You can see the ghosts through those? Isabel had asked Foster.
The ghost touched her sleeve. Frostbite and vertigo, snapping her back.
She drew him into focus, stricken. “I can see her.”
Chapter Fifteen
Isabel watched as Sairy and Foster emerged on the shore, kicked wet sand loosely back over the hatch, and paused to get their bearings.
They stood on the edge of the shore where four hundred years’ worth of upstarts and Archivists had risen and fallen. Chooser only knew what Sairy must be thinking. And Foster—
It was like when Isabel had read Foster’s mem
ories in the ghost-place, except at a closer remove. Those were more like a scene she’d walked into and was witnessing as it played out before her. This, though…
She’d heard ridiculous Before-stories of ghosts possessing people. This, as best as Isabel could tell, was very nearly the reverse. She wasn’t hearing Foster’s thoughts precisely, or seeing through her eyes exactly. It was much more complicated than that. Like Foster had become the lens through which Isabel experienced the aboveground world.
And all Foster was seeing—perhaps all she knew how to see—was a battlefield.
Noise. Screaming. A seesawing rush of sound. All of it much clearer and much closer-sounding than it would have been to Isabel’s ears. Without stopping to think she immediately knew the town was twelve hundred-odd yards away, east-southeast. The breeze blew smoke back off the town, causing Sairy beside her to wince and knuckle at her eyes. They stood in a slight dip in the land, a low place beneath the higher ground of the town itself, so Foster couldn’t see precisely what was burning, only that something was, and it was big. Isabel thought it might have been the meeting-hall.
“We’re too late,” Sairy breathed.
“No,” said Foster, who could hear the noises of the town in layers and read them with astonishing clarity. There was death, and there was dying, plenty of both, but the fight raged on. “It’d be quieter than this if we were.” She listened another few seconds. There were two hot spots where the most noise was centered: the middle of town and a point on one edge, away and out of sight. The raiders weren’t just trampling over. There was a narrow place at which they—at least some of them—were being repelled. “They’re defending a…gate?”
The Waste-road, Isabel thought.
“The Waste-road,” Sairy said, drawing her knives. “Come on.”
Then she saw which way Foster was pointing. “The Waste-road’s not that way.”
“Well, something sure is.”
Isabel realized what Foster must be pointing at. Way off to one side of town, surrounded by its own outbuildings but otherwise kept at arm’s length from Sweetwater proper…
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