The ghost was watching her carefully.
“Is it because you’re not in the ghost-place?” he asked her, at the same time as she said, flatly, “I’m not in the ghost-place,” and forcefully sheathed the knife, then threw up her hands in frustration. “Well, there goes that—”
Then came the knock at the door.
“That’ll be Ruby about the meeting,” she said, and made herself answer.
* * *
Already, the weather had changed. That morning had been crisper, the evening cooler and less oppressive. Summer was beginning to turn its face toward fall. In light of that, and of the coming winter, the high seats had called a meeting to decide how the people of Sweetwater would proceed from here. There was no meeting-hall in which to hold one anymore, so they’d gathered on the lakeshore beneath the lowering sun.
By now seventeen new buildings had gone up, pieced together from the busted parts of old ones, courtesy mainly of Foster and the ghost. Four roads had been repaired. They’d sealed both breaches in the garden perimeter fence. Whatever damage Foster had inadvertently done to the town seemed to have been widely forgiven in light of this.
On top of twenty-nine townspeople lost in the fight, another ten had since perished of their wounds, bringing Sweetwater’s total count to one hundred fifty-seven. Given the current state of the town, even half that population was insupportable.
To Ruby’s credit, she didn’t ask Isabel why she hadn’t been at the meeting, just launched into what she had to say without preamble.
“Some of us have decided to leave,” she said, putting Isabel immediately in mind of the statue of Catchkeep, the candles burning in Her eyes. How Isabel had tried, and failed, to disobey Her counsel. You win, she thought at that statue, lost or sleeping beneath the lake. Of course You’d win. “And some will stay. Watch over the wounded. Try to rebuild.”
Most, Isabel figured, would leave. Inch by inch Sweetwater was drowning, melting, returning to the earth. In a year it would be overgrown, digested wall by wall into the greenery. Most potential supplies having been buried or burnt, a hundred-odd exhausted townspeople, six ex-upstarts, and two superpowered ghosts could only do so much. Salvaging building material from these upended houses was the kind of job you draw straws for, and start praying to the One Who Got Away before your foot so much as touches mud.
“The ones who are leaving,” Isabel said. “Where will they go?”
Ruby gestured vaguely southward. “Grayfall, mostly. A few want to strike out for a place they’re calling Waterside. I’ve not heard of it myself. I gather there’s a river?” Ruby drew herself up, a full head taller than Isabel. “I will stay. I have no intention of forsaking the wounded. Here we have fresh water—more of it than we need these days!—and reliable means of food production, once the perimeter fence is repaired.”
“Next year, maybe,” Isabel said. “There’s nothing left to harvest.”
“Well. Jen and I spoke with Cora. She leaves tomorrow with a cart of weapons and trinkets and whatnot off the Clayspring dead. She’s taking it to Stormbreak, thinks she can trade it along with the things Jen’s finding from the tunnels for enough food to see us partway through the winter. Especially with our somewhat…attenuated numbers.”
“We trade in corpse-loot now?” Isabel said, impressed.
“We trade in what we have for what we need. I didn’t guess that would bother you.”
“It doesn’t bother me.”
“Well, we all make compromises if we want to eat,” Ruby said. “Which looks more inviting to me than a Waste-slog any day, Grayfall or no Grayfall. Though I do hear it’s lovely. My aunt used to run a scav crew down that way…” She tilted her head at Isabel. “What about you? You’re young and strong. Take your chances in the Waste? I understand some of your girls are throwing their lot in with that group.”
“I heard.” Kath and Bex were going, but as far as Isabel knew, the rest planned to stay. The high seats had put Jen in charge of rationing and distributing and storing what remained of the town’s food supply for winter, with Glory as her number two. Lissa was to begin holding regular combat training sessions, aided by Meg. They wouldn’t be caught unawares again.
It was interesting to see how, after the fight for Sweetwater, the ex-upstarts had adopted Foster as one of their own. Sometimes she’d go out into the fields with them while Isabel worked with the ghost, exchanging sword-lessons for knife-lessons. Their styles were well-matched. They all fought dirty.
“They’re planning to come back,” Isabel clarified. “They just want to see what’s out there.”
“You say that like someone who’s not going with them.”
“I’m not,” Isabel said. “I have work to do here.”
“You’ve really poured yourself into the rebuilding effort,” Ruby said, nodding. “We’ve all noticed. You and your—friends. Those two ghosts. I know you’ve been hard on yourself, but the fact remains, we’d’ve been lost without the three of you.”
Stupid that after everything she’d been through, one lousy compliment could still make Isabel squirm. “Thanks,” she made herself say, and shut the door, then fell back against it, utterly exhausted.
“It was in the ghost-place,” she said, gesturing tiredly at the table, the harvesting-knife, the ghost who sat and watched blandly as she shook her head at her own stupidity. “When I read your memories, or Foster’s. It was always in the ghost-place. I don’t know why I never realized that before.”
The ghost said nothing. Whatever disappointment he felt, he had the grace to hide it well.
“I’ll get back in,” she promised. “I’ll find a way.”
But she wasn’t so sure. When she’d gone to the ghost-place to find Foster, it’d nearly killed her, and that method wouldn’t work again. The tunnels, so full of ghost-energy, had been porous enough for her to pass back and forth within them, having been partly a ghost for so long herself, but they were under the lake now. There had to be other places that were like that, were possessed of that liminality. She just had no idea where. Or how, short of dying, she’d persuade them to let her in.
So she couldn’t read the ghost’s memories. She couldn’t read Foster’s memories. And the chips and device were looking more and more like a dead end.
Her aggravation must have been visible on her face.
“Like I said. It would’ve been bad news anyway,” the ghost said lightly, which somehow only made it worse.
* * *
Still, together Isabel and the ghost developed a system, and over the next days fine-tuned it. Each chip had about a million times more information on it than they had any hope of combing through at a stretch before the device needed to be recharged. So they’d pick a chip, pick a random chain of numbers off the initial list—a list of days, the ghost explained to her—and skip around the mess of images it showed, hoping to hit upon something that seemed maybe slightly more important than the rest. When they got there, Isabel would match each operative in the scene up with their field notes, and make note of what they were doing. She also wrote down what each one was doing in each memory of the ghost’s or Foster’s she’d read before, to the best of her recollection.
By comparing all her information methodically, she’d inferred that the child-ghost she’d found in the tunnels was #2122-17-C, DEEGAN, ZACHARY, the first in that last wave to die. That the girl with the blue-black ponytail, Ayres’s partner, was SUBJECT #2122-21-B, PATEL, NIDA. That Salazar had initially been partnered to Safiyah Khoury, Martinez to a boy whose name Isabel hadn’t yet figured out, and Deegan—briefly—to #2122-42-C, SORENSEN, EMIL, before Deegan had died in the early stages of his treatment, cutting Sorensen adrift until the next operative died and her surviving partner—Tanaka—was paired up with him. Process of elimination strongly suggested that the dead girl had been #2122-38-B, HALE, TIFFANY, but there was something wrong with her chip and it wouldn’t run at all, so her life remained in large part a mystery. That left #2122-05-A, MARTINEZ, EL
ENA partnered with SUBJECT #2122-11-B, SONG, JIN, presumably lost to the tunnels with Sorensen, Khoury, and so on.
Isabel and the ghost mapped this all out together. No detail left out. Be meticulous, she chided herself when her patience flagged. Do the work.
So she wrote down how the child operatives would all play seek-and-find in the lower tunnels, and barter chores for the brightly-wrapped candies that the white-coated adults would reward them with after each round of treatment, and tell each other stories after lights-out. How they could make games out of found trash and desperation. They raced bugs, adopted rats they found in the deep tunnels. Drew pictures on each other’s bandages when they emerged from under the knife, playing tough but crying in their sleep, cradling new wounds. Each of them wanting to be a normal kid in the way an outrageously beautiful topiary might secretly desire to be an ordinary tree.
She also recorded, diligently, the deathbed-birthday party the operatives had thrown for Tanaka. The weird fight in the streets she’d seen when she’d accidentally cut Ayres. The way the kids had all played together in that big room before the Director had divided them up into groups. One to become the first wave of Latchkey subjects. Where the other went, she didn’t know.
They were like upstarts, she thought, not for the first time. All thrown into the same crap together, knowing they wouldn’t all survive. Climbing up onto each other to get out.
She got a lot of useless information. The memories were viewed piecemeal, and without context, and out of order, and with no sound. Trying to curate such overwhelming volume of information was like wading into a stream with a minnow net in one hand. A little water ran through the net at once, and maybe a minnow if she was very, very lucky. But most of it rushed on by.
And none of it could help Foster or the ghost reclaim their memories. That was, by far, the worst of it. She found she carried on with the work anyway. She’d cut Foster’s threads and lost those ghosts. She owed at least a bit of effort. And it wasn’t like there was a whole lot else right now vying for her time.
Every night, after she’d set the device aside to recharge throughout the next work day, Isabel tried again to read his memories, or, occasionally, Foster’s. Every night, the most she’d get is a feeling much like waking from a dream, grasping after details that ran through her fingers like sand. Like dreams, sometimes she’d catch disjointed little fragments—a glowing bank of buttons, a wooden training sword, a needle injecting something into a child’s arm, a bottle passed back and forth, a bright light overhead—but nothing concrete enough to write down. She was all too aware of the damage every cut was doing, and that none of them would heal. Eventually, despite the ghost’s objections, she stopped.
But she still had so many questions, and no way of answering them now.
How had the ghost died? Why did all the Latchkey ghosts mistake her for Foster? What was the deal with the harvesting-knife—leading her back to Foster with almost perfect reliability, again and again, in the ghost-place and the living one?
For that matter, why were Foster’s remains not in her drawer? Where was her chip? And the ghost’s?
And when Isabel’d asked the Director about Foster’s chip, what in the slag-blasted fifth hell had she meant by glancing at the ghost and telling Isabel ask him?
* * *
Meanwhile, Foster fished for ghosts.
Every morning, she and Jen had been going out to stand at the edge of the black pond that used to be the Catchkeep-shrine, skimming float-salvage off the surface as it bubbled up. Lately, Isabel had been opting to join them. It rapidly became her new favorite chore. She didn’t have to walk anywhere, she barely had to talk to anyone, and it was fascinating to see the kinds of junk that drifted up from the depths as the tunnels had filled.
Lake-crap, mainly. Plant matter. Aquatic clotweed in its element, and Carrion Boy’s Tears well out of its. Also waterlogged bits of paper, dissolving at a touch. Cylindrical orange bottles, each of which she held up to the light, looking for a silver glint inside that might be Ayres. Shards of plastic whatnot. Unnameable antique debris.
Foster wasn’t here for artifacts, but Jen sure was. Before-stuff, every bit of it, and priceless. They wanted to eat this winter, they needed to wring use out of every scrap of this new currency.
Glory joined them, aiding Jen with inventory. They’d been working in companionable silence for nearly an hour one day when something bubbled up and spread there on that black water. Something big. Something like a drowned coat. Pale and gray, with hints of darkness on its underbelly.
“Your side,” Jen called across thirty feet of water to Glory, who reached with her stick-net to pole the thing over, then dragged it slithering onto land. Jen, inventory notebook in hand, was shouting before the thing had even touched the shore. “What is it? Some kind of blanket, or—”
“Stop,” Foster said, in a voice of pure and urgent command. It stunned them where they stood.
Isabel’s breath caught and Glory nearly dropped her salvage-pole as Foster turned the thing over in the grass.
It wasn’t a coat at all, but something like a person-shape cut out of a sheet. Almost perfectly gray, but silver where the sun hit it. Streaked with smeary black where its clothes would be if it were wearing pants and long sleeves, with darker black where its hair might fall. It had the barest suggestion of mouth and eyes. The vague shape of a sword was at its waist. Its chest was rising and deflating softly with the memory of breath.
“And where were you hiding?” Foster asked it, in a tone of fond reproach. To the question in Isabel’s face she said, “This isn’t one I put a thread on.”
“What is that?” Glory was asking. “That isn’t Sairy?”
“No,” Isabel said. “I have no idea who that is.”
* * *
Within ten minutes Jen and Glory had assembled a ghostgrass ring on the floor of the storage shed, that trashed silver ghost lying rumpled in its center like a discarded skin. A new thread ran from the center of its chest to Foster, squatting on her heels as far away from the ghostgrass as the tiny room allowed. A little ways away the ghost stood stationed in a corner. The sword-hand on the hilt belied the studied indifference in his eyes.
“Put more ghostgrass down outside,” Isabel instructed Glory. “Fresh perimeter around the whole building. Maybe ten, fifteen feet from the walls.”
“What,” Glory said, grimacing, “like the old Archivist-house?”
This gave Isabel pause. But only for a second. “Yeah,” she said. “Like that.” At Glory’s look of alarm she realized what Glory was really asking. “Not like that like that. This is just—” she sighed, then opted for honesty— “something I can do.”
“She’s reclaiming her powers,” Foster added theatrically, doing some kind of songkeeperish voice. “Using them for good instead of evil.”
Glory snorted. “Before-story stuff.”
“Came from somewhere.”
“Out somebody’s ass.” Glory side-eyed Foster, who shooed her toward the door in mock irritation. “Five minutes for the perimeter,” Glory told Isabel, all business now. “I’ll give you a yell when it’s done.”
“Remember,” Isabel said, “nobody breaches that perimeter. Not Ruby, not anybody. No matter what.”
“Yes, Archivist.”
“And Glory?”
Halfway out the doorway, Glory turned.
“Thanks.”
She shut the door behind.
“You two want out before she lays the perimeter?” Isabel asked.
“Nah,” Foster said. “I’m good.”
The ghost swept his gaze from the rumpled ghost on the floor to Isabel. “I’m staying.”
“I figured you’d say that,” Isabel said. “That’s why I told Glory to leave some space.”
When Glory had given the all-clear, Foster sent a few gentle pulses of ghost-energy down the thread, darkening the silver ghost’s uniform to solid black, bringing its face into focus. Sixteen years old, maybe, at time of
death, a long-limbed girl with skin the color of Isabel’s and a blue-black ponytail.
I know you, Isabel thought, and rooted around in the black boxes until she came up with SUBJECT #2122-21-B, PATEL, NIDA.
Turning to Foster. “You good?”
“I got her.” The thread brightened, dulled, stabilized. A warmish silver. “Do it.”
“Done.” Into the device went the chip. While it powered up Isabel sat at the outer edge of the ghostgrass ring. Mentally preparing a sort of introduction, something with which to anchor this ghost to its new reality. Your name is Nida Patel. You were an operative in the Latchkey Project. You fought in a civil war. Your partner was Nicholas Ayres. You were two of the last few standing. Everyone around you got sick and died. After a while you did too.
It scraped the bottom of the meager barrel of Isabel’s knowledge, but it came naturally enough. By now she was used to making lists.
She held that little black screen out at eye level with Patel’s gaze, half silver half brown.
“Your name,” she said clearly, “is Nida Patel. I want to show you something.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
Even after the pond froze over, Isabel tended to slow her pace going past the clouded surface of that water. Waiting for the day she’d glance down and find the silver hands of Sairy’s ghost pressed up against the ice from underneath, Sairy’s silver face staring up. But this never occurred.
Meanwhile two more ghosts surfaced—first Martinez, then one who Isabel’s study of the chips eventually revealed to be SUBJECT #2122-42-C, SORENSEN, EMIL.
Also some more bits of silver flotsam that Isabel collected in a jar labeled SALAZAR, unsure what else to do with them. Martinez and Sorensen, meanwhile, went into ghostgrass rings in the shed as Patel had done. First alone, then together, in the hopes that they might attempt to communicate, or send their own threads questing out toward each other as Salazar had done. They did neither.
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