The work was a monotonous, painstaking grind. Two steps forward and one step back on a good day, one step forward and three steps back on a bad one. The device only had enough juice to run a chip for maybe a quarter hour at a time when they’d started, but that limit had dwindled down to half that length by now, and the effect of the chips on the ghosts, if any, was not obvious.
Thanks to Foster’s thread, Patel had at least strengthened enough to start muttering to herself. “Out of here,” she was saying, over and over, to no one. Days of this, incessant. Her voice sounded as hopeless and tired as Isabel had ever felt.
And until Sorensen and Martinez were strong enough to show her the moments they’d gotten stuck on, there was no loop for her to break them free of. And until she stumbled across a clue in Patel’s chip that would explain the moment she’d gotten stuck on, Isabel’s hands were similarly tied.
For nowhere near the first time, she found herself wishing the device still played sound to go with the images. She had no idea how to break a ghost free of its loop without hearing what it was saying, then matching the words to the memory in which they’d been said. In her somewhat limited experience of breaking ghosts free of their loops at all.
“At least,” she confided in the ghost in a moment of downtime, as they attempted to play the mystifying Before-game from Ruby’s house, “as Archivist I knew what I was supposed to do.” When she pictured this new work she saw a sheer cliff of ice, without handholds or footholds, that she was somehow expected to scale. Absently she stacked the little plastic game-discs in a tower, red-black-red-black, until she ran out of discs, and then she flicked the whole thing over.
Each day the Latchkey ghosts stood dumbly in their ring. Patel fully-formed and lifelike, mumbling out of here at something long since too dead to hear her. Sorensen and Martinez, silver-streaked and shambling, bumping into the unseen wall that marked the ghostgrass perimeter. Foster tried giving them more power, but either they’d taken too much damage or they’d been drowned too long. They spewed ghost-energy like slashed veins.
“I used to have to put down this kind of ghost,” Isabel finally admitted, after about a week of watching Foster frantically regulating her energy output to keep Martinez balanced on the vanishingly fine line between deliquescing entirely and blowing the roof off the shed. “Or send them back to the ghost-place. If I could.”
The ghost’s boot, tapping out a bored little tune on the floor, abruptly stopped. “And we aren’t doing this why?”
Isabel bit her lip doubtfully at Sorensen, at present geysering silver-blue light from both eyes. Sighing, Foster dialed back the energy down his thread and he collapsed like a puppet with its strings cut. I don’t want to give up on them yet, Isabel thought, and said, “They’re not ready.”
The next day she left the Latchkey ghosts in their ghostgrass ring and sat in the violet evening light with the device and Patel’s chip. “Useless slag,” she told the device, but powered it up all the same. She’d chased the Chooser’s cape for longer, and for causes less lost.
She caught the black box before she saw who’d thrown it. While she shook out her stinging hand she inspected what had landed in it. SUBJECT #2122-08-B, AYRES, NICHOLAS. Looked up and the ghost was sitting his bootheels beside her. “Try that one.” One black-gloved finger motioned: a loop endlessly rolling. “Skip to seventeen oh-eight two-one-three-one.”
“Okay,” Isabel said. “Why?”
“That’s the last date on Patel’s chip.”
“Yeah, but we ruled out where they die. I told you, ghosts don’t get stuck on—”
“Something happens to her feed a full two weeks before that. She stays in one room the whole time, and then out of nowhere she—” he gestured incomprehensibly— “goes dark.”
“This is Ayres’s chip you just threw at me.”
The ghost just looked at her.
“Fine.”
She selected a string of numbers a couple dozen places in advance of 17 08 2131.
There was Patel, battling her way up a long street of weird machines.
“What am I looking for?” she asked.
“Not that,” the ghost said. “You’ll know it when you see it.”
“How do you know?”
“I don’t,” the ghost said. “Keep going.”
Next came a training session in which Ayres was sparring with the ghost.
He stared at that a moment, then said, “Next.”
Isabel spun ahead a few numbers on the string.
There was the Director shouting directly into Ayres’s face, shaking a sheet of paper at him: INCIDENT REPORT.
“Go back one.”
There she/Ayres found Patel, hunched over her knees, backed into a corner in a little tile stall with a drain in the floor. Isabel expected the sickness to have disfigured her by now, but she looked healthy enough. Apart from the long ditches of blood she’d gashed into her forearms, presumably with the shard of glass that lay beside her.
There came a pause while Ayres might have said something, though no sound came through the device, as expected. But, for some reason, the ghost was pointing. “There.”
“There where? There’s no sound. The hell are you—”
Then the ghost was tapping at the screen. The image halted, ran backwards a second, resumed. Like any ghost-loop.
“You’re not listening. You’re looking. What’s she been saying all week?”
“Out of here,” Isabel said, with a weird little prickle of disorientation as the shape of Patel’s mouth matched up to the words Isabel spoke.
The image skipped back again, replayed. The ghost pointed at Patel’s mouth as she spoke. “She just said until I get out of here.”
Isabel practically hurled herself back into the shed.
Inside, Foster was overseeing Patel’s pacing and muttering with the air of someone intently watching paint dry.
“She tried to kill herself,” Isabel shouted. “Ayres found her. He must’ve said something like, I don’t know—” frantically trying to come up with a set of words that fit Patel’s, like a puzzle-piece— “something like how much longer are you going to do this, because then she said until I—”
“—get out of here,” she and Patel said together.
Patel blinked. Took in Martinez, Sorensen. Tried to walk forward, was rebuffed by the ghostgrass ring. She put her hands up in front of her, palm-out, like she was trying to feel a wall that wasn’t there. The ghostgrass singed them and she pulled back fast, wiping her palms on her legs. “What is this? Is this some new test? I want to talk to the Director.”
Foster leaned forward as far as the perimeter allowed. “What’s your name?”
“Patel,” she said impatiently. “Nida Patel. 2122-21-B. Look, tell the Director—” She broke off, peering around her like she’d walked into darkness and was waiting for her eyes to adjust. “Am I in the simulator? What is this place?”
It was all Isabel could do not to start shouting. She had the strongest most unaccountable urge to grab the ghost and shake him. We broke it, her mind was blaring. We broke a loop on purpose.
But now what?
Isabel found herself staring at the pits of light that were Sorensen’s eyes. Pure silver until memory gave them shape and depth and color. As with any part of any ghost. Something rustled at the back edge of her mind.
“You can see us?” Foster was asking, incredulous. “You’re here with us now?”
“I see you,” Patel said, annoyed. “What, she can’t even come down to run her own diagnostics anymore?”
“Tell me something you remember,” Foster demanded. “Something that happened to you before what’s happening to you right now.”
Patel opened her mouth. Shut it. Opened it again.
“She doesn’t remember,” the ghost said aside to Isabel.
“This test makes no sense,” Patel declared, gathering herself. “I refuse it.”
Foster held up the device. Onscreen Patel bled silently
. Ghost Patel folded her arms. “Do you know who this is?” Foster asked.
“Should I?” Patel said irritably. “Some girl. I demand to speak to the Director. Now.”
Isabel wasn’t listening. She was thinking back on when she’d healed the ghost. The unvaried silver of his insides.
The unvaried silver of any ghost’s anything. A ghost was energy, pure energy, molded by memory into a person-shape. But malleable. You could pull a thread out of the chest of one. You could cut one into pieces and watch those pieces reattach. A ghost could carry items with it, even, out of one world into another. She thought of the ghost’s gun and sword. Of her own harvesting-knife. Of the Director’s device, which had shivered into sparks upon Isabel’s touch.
Isabel hadn’t healed the ghost by knowing medicine.
She’d healed him by knowing ghosts.
“A girl,” Isabel said, watching Patel’s face as she spoke, “a Latchkey operative, found by fellow Latchkey operative Nicholas Ayres, #2122-08-B. Her partner.” A pause while she hefted the guess in her mind. “Her friend.”
Patel looked back at her blankly. “Who?”
I’ve been going about this all wrong. The device just shows pictures. But the chips…
“Listen,” Isabel said. Patel’s chip in one hand. Harvesting-knife in the other. “So I just had the weirdest idea.”
* * *
They stood before the snapped spine of the oldest bridge, before the gray-green sea of ghostgrass planted there. It was the easiest waypoint for Isabel to reach on her bad leg, but she still had to hang back, resting, while Lissa and Glory forged ahead, clearing a path to that distant grayscale lightbleed that indicated a ghost-place door. An open wound in the skin of two worlds.
She wasn’t in the tunnels anymore, and she wasn’t mostly a ghost. So she wasn’t going to be able to cut her way through this door. She’d tried, earlier, before escorting Patel out of the shed. Bloodying the knifepoint and setting it to the waypoint, which had, predictably, refused to acknowledge her.
But in the archive room she’d made a waypoint. If there was a place in the living world that was permeable enough to receive her, it was here at an existing one. If she only bent her will to it sufficiently.
Foster, the ghost, and Patel stood with her.
Predictably, Patel’s loop had resumed, and she didn’t seem to so much as notice the waypoint. “Out of here,” she was muttering under her breath. “Out of here.”
“You really think this is going to stop her doing that?” Lissa asked.
“I don’t know,” Isabel said. Thinking back to the Director, or Salazar, or Deegan, or Ayres. If it’d been possible to break them out of their memory-loops for more than a few minutes, or Patel from hers, Isabel didn’t know how. Someday, she assured them silently, though it was a promise she had no idea how to keep. “But right now it’s kind of the best I got.”
The roil of emotion coming off of Foster was palpable. On one hand, a Latchkey ghost potentially rehabilitated. On the other hand, even if what Isabel was about to try worked, she wouldn’t be able to do the same to Foster, or the ghost. Their chips had vanished with the rest of the Before.
Across twenty feet of ghostgrass, Lissa waved.
Truth was, she had no idea how this was going to go down. But it felt like the nearest thing she was going to get to closure. Not for her, not for Sairy, but for someone. There were still two more ghosts in her shed, and their chips were safe in their boxes. If she could do this much, she could do more.
“If this works,” she told the ghost, “I should see at least one of your memories, anyway. Maybe we can figure out a way to use it in future to read more of them.”
“Just stay safe,” the ghost told her. “We’ll deal with the rest of that another time.”
Keep moving, she thought, and walked the path her ex-upstarts had cut. The ghosts followed.
Within spitting distance of the waypoint, the ground beneath her gave a little lurch and steadied.
Come on, she thought at the waypoint. You’re going to let me through.
Then doubt seized her all over again, like a cramp. What if she couldn’t get through? What if she couldn’t bring the chip through with her? She couldn’t ask the ghost to bring it through for her, she needed him here to get her back out. And she pointblank refused to ask Foster. There was no guarantee that the far side of the waypoint would lead back here.
So instead she glanced over at the ghost, who was standing by awaiting his cue. “I’m going to feel pretty stupid if this doesn’t work,” she said.
“You did it before,” Foster reminded her. “This thing’s got nothing on you. It’s just a door. So open it.”
“Okay,” Isabel breathed. Her heart was hammering. “Just a door. Okay.”
“Count of five,” said the ghost, “when you stop breathing. Yes?”
Isabel nodded. “Just like in the tunnels. I don’t think I can signal or anything, so, you know. Do your best.”
Isabel took Patel’s hand and shut her eyes. I did this before, she told herself. I did this before.
Trying to bring back that feeling from the tunnels, the feeling of being half in one place, half in another. Eventually she felt it, a yearning sort of dizziness like a long drop urging her to jump.
I’m not falling-into, she thought. I’m crossing-through.
The here-and-elsewhere feeling was building around her, she was tugging it along the length of her, from the feet on up. When it reached her eyes she opened them.
There was the bridge, blood-red in the twilight. The half-moon sky, the flatlands of the Waste beyond. But also a path, a meadow, a distant city. On second glance, the stars were wrong. Catchkeep, but not. Ember Girl, but not. The One Who Got Away, almost. Carrion Boy, recognizable only if she looked really hard and with an open mind. They were there, but all the stars of their up-selves were arranged slightly off, like somebody had elbowed them and knocked them askew, then put them back from memory as best they could.
Count of five, she thought. Let’s do this.
She concentrated all her will and focus on that other place—and the bridge vanished, though the stars remained.
One.
Time stretched and dilated, irising open. A five-count in this place might last minutes. Or an eyeblink. Chooser knew.
Patel appeared beside her, at the ragged hem of that wide meadow. A road unrolled before them, straight and narrow as a sword. On either side, grass grew to the height of her throat. On the horizon, that unreachable city’s lights blinked off and on.
Isabel took inventory. The harvesting-knife was there. Patel’s chip was there. At the roadside was a squat stone statue, unidentifiable. Sitting on it put Patel at just the right height for what Isabel was about to do.
Two.
Quickly, carefully, ignoring the pain, Isabel drew a thread from her chest and affixed it to Patel. Then she stepped around behind.
The point of the harvesting-knife parted the non-flesh, non-blood, non-bone of the back of Patel’s head like a stick through fog. It made and did not make a tiny aperture, the length of a fingernail. Patel’s chip did and did not fit through there neatly. Like the device Isabel had taken from the Director, the chip fizzed into sparks and vanished, and Isabel poured all her focus into that thread as she had done with the ghost before, until the incision sealed shut, its edges oozing slowly together like wet sand.
Three.
“Sorry,” Isabel said, as if it had hurt her. “Okay. This is it. Be smart. Stay safe. I’ll send the others down when they’re ready. You won’t be alone. Just make sure you—”
“Is Ayres here?” Patel interrupted.
Isabel stared at her. “Not yet,” she said slowly. “But I’ll bring him as soon as I can.”
“Good,” Patel said. “It feels like forever since I’ve seen him.”
“Yeah,” Isabel said. “I believe it.”
Isabel pictured them, Patel and Ayres and Martinez and Sorensen and the rest of them,
wandering the ghost-place together as the dead upstarts had done. Gaining strength from each other. Lending strength to each other. Having each others’ backs. In either world, it was the best that anyone could hope for.
In this place other ghosts were wandering. Some were faceless silver cutouts, life-sized or smaller. Some looked like people, only edged with silver. They walked alone, in pairs, in little groups. The ghost-part of Isabel was drawn toward that wide field, those strange stars. But there’d be time enough for that someday. All the time in the world.
Four.
She ought to do something. She was releasing a ghost. The words were there, just waiting to be spoken.
“I am the Archivist,” she whispered. “Catchkeep’s emissary, ambassador, and avatar on earth. Her bones and stars my flesh; my flesh and bones Her—”
One group of wandering ghosts caught her eye. They carried little knives. They wore the wide-sleeved undyed garb of upstarts. Isabel didn’t recognize most of them, but knew at once what she was seeing.
The one in front she knew. Long bloodstains tracked down both of her pant-legs where she’d slashed the big veins in her thighs on the Archivist-choosing eve when Isabel had drawn the short straw instead of her.
“Becca,” Isabel was about to whisper, but then forgot about Becca entirely.
She’d spotted the one ghost in that group that didn’t match. Like most of them, this one’s upstart uniform was stained deeply red. But unlike the others, under the red this one’s clothing was dyed a streaky, patchy blue.
An exhalation of pure stupid relief ripped from her. Something prickled at the backs of her eyes, catching at her throat. She drew breath to call out, not even knowing what she’d say, just to see the look on Sairy’s face when she turned and saw Isabel in the—
“Thank you so much, Foster,” Patel said, and the ground gave a lurch under Isabel’s feet that had nothing to do with the ghost-place claiming her or the living world pulling her back. “Seriously. For every—”
“Wait,” Isabel said. “What? Patel, I’m not—”
Latchkey Page 35
