Ghost Talkers

by Mary Robinette Kowal

  “It will be easier on you if I simply channel you and give you a body to pick the lock with.”

  “And what about you?”

  “That is my choice to make.” Ginger held up her hand to stop him. “If you try poltergeisting and fail, then you’ll be exhausted and incoherent, and you won’t be able to lead me out. We know that channelling will work, and it leaves you more coherent.”

  He glared at her, aura swelling around him. It exploded outward as he turned with a growl, fissioning into multiple versions of himself. They all snapped back together, leaving only Ben, staring across the cellar away from her.

  “I hate this.”

  “I know.” Ginger closed her eyes so she could not see the weary set of his shoulders, or the heavy grey despair that dripped into a pool at his feet. “I know.”

  “And you are right.” He had a wry tone to his voice. “Which I am sure you are going to lord over me.”

  “I don’t know.” Ginger opened her eyes and tried to match him. “Can one ‘lady it over’ someone?”

  “My lady, I believe you do that all the time.”

  “Ah … but I’m not a lady, am I? Simply an American.”

  “Well, you can definitely American it over someone.” Ben sighed and came back to stand at the door. “Shall we? If we’re going to?”

  Ginger nodded and, with the hairpins clenched tightly in her fists, reached out her soul to meet his.

  She is kneeling outside the painted green door of the commandant’s office. Her German uniform chafes at the neck, but then it wasn’t hers originally. She is supposed to be on guard duty, but has left the perimeter to come here. No one will look for her for another half an hour, by which point she should have the battle plans she needs to steal and be away. With her eyes closed, she concentrates on the tiny vibrations of the pick and torsion wrench in the lock. It is a simple lock, but her hands are still cold from standing sentry duty.

  The wrench slips. She grimaces and repositions it to try again. Frowning, she eases the picks again, and—

  The door unlocked.

  Ginger stared at the rough wood door in front of her. It had been green paint a moment ago. She closed her eyes and opened them again, letting out a sigh. Right. Ginger turned her head to look for Ben. He was hovering next to her, his brows drawn together in confusion.

  Bracing herself on the doorjamb, Ginger rose to her feet. Her hands were so cold. “Good job.”

  “What? Oh…” Ben looked at his hands. “Thank you. What … what am I supposed to do?”

  “You were going to watch the doors. To warn me. If someone comes.”

  “Warn you.” He nodded slowly and rose through the ceiling. “Warn you, yes.”

  Shivering, Ginger turned back to the door and opened it. Lit by a single candle, Merrow stood on the right side of the room with his ear pressed against a safe set in the wall. He was no longer in hospital blues, but in a regular soldier’s uniform. The cloth bandage was gone from his head, but a fresh bruise on his jaw made it clear that he’d been in some sort of altercation.

  He gave no sign of hearing the door open.

  Ginger came farther into the room and tried to catch his gaze, but his eyes were shut, and his entire concentration was on the knob he was turning. She bit her lip, trying to think of how to alert him without startling him. Touching his shoulder would likely give the poor man a heart attack. His aura was already dark with fear.

  But unless she touched him, he couldn’t access the psychic vibrations, and without those, he could hear nothing.

  Vibrations … perhaps that was the key. Ginger stomped her foot on the floor.

  Merrow’s eyes shot open and he whirled, grabbing her arm. Ginger shrieked as he twisted it. She dropped to her knees.

  “Oh, no—” He released her hand and backed away. “I’m so sorry. I’m so, so sorry. I didn’t know—”

  Ben erupted from the ceiling, anger flaming around him like the fires of hell. He flew between Ginger and Merrow and threw the young man back against the wall.

  “Ben! No—he didn’t know it was me.” Ginger scrambled to her feet. “I frightened him.”

  She thanked God that Merrow could not see Ben and wished she could not either. His jaw hung slightly open to accommodate an unnatural number of teeth. The weight of it pulled his neck forward, jutting out like a bull’s, and his hands … his arms were too long and ended in talons.

  With a grunt, he pressed one of those against Merrow. Even without being able to see, Merrow began to shiver uncontrollably. His breath wheezed in his throat.

  Ginger staggered forward and rested her hands on the cool air of Ben’s back. “Please, Ben. Beloved. Please.”

  “He hurt you.”

  “No. He didn’t. We just frightened each other.” She had no book of poetry to read to Ben this time to soothe him. But Ben had always been a man who believed in duty. “Ben … you have tasks unfinished, and I can’t do them alone. I need Merrow, and I need you. I need you here, with me, and calm. My darling, can you please, please be calm for me?”

  Ben lowered his head even further and raised those talons to wrap the overlong arms around his head, but at least he released Merrow. Backing up abruptly, Ben rushed through Ginger, leaving her gasping with the cold of his passage. She turned to find him huddled in the exact centre of the room, not on the floor, but in the air.

  Her poor, sweet boy. His own instincts would shred his soul. He needed time to recover from that foolish, foolish manifestation. God. What was it about men that made them so quick to leap into a fray? Squeezing her eyes shut for a moment, Ginger held her breath, trying to regain some sense of her own equilibrium. Ben would need time. Meanwhile, there was Merrow. She breathed out slowly before facing the young man.

  He still cowered against the wall, his aura stark with fear and apprehension. She reached for him, and he flinched.

  Pausing, Ginger turned her hand over and held it out, palm up, entreating Merrow to take it. He glanced at Ben, before wetting his lips and lowering his sweating palm into Ginger’s hand.

  She squeezed it. “Are you all right?”

  “Fine, miss.” His aura said that was anything but true. He was a bundle of anxiety.

  “How did you come to be here?”

  “I’d gotten off the train in Amiens, thinking that—it was bound for Étretat, I thought and—and we needed to catch the Le Havre train. I figured we were just using the soldiers to get inside the terminal.”

  “Ah … you wouldn’t have heard the announcement. It turns out that it was a Le Havre–bound train.”

  “Well. Damn.” With his free hand, he rubbed the back of his neck ruefully. “When I couldn’t find you, I assumed that Capt. Reginald Harford had you, and I was going to try to rescue you, but…”

  “You were caught instead.”

  He nodded, face turned down. “Thought I’d see what was in this safe.” Shrugging, he tugged on his ear. “Not much luck.”

  “Have you cracked a safe before?”

  He raised his brows in apparent surprise at her use of slang.

  “I do read, Pvt. Merrow. Novels. Sherlock Holmes has more than one fan.”

  With a faint smile, Merrow gave a little nod. “Yeah. I learned how. Just not that … well.”

  Ginger eyed the safe. It would be good to know what Reginald was hiding. If he had Ben’s things, the notebook in particular, then the safe was one of the most likely places to put them. Unless he had it on him, of course. She would deal with that if it came to it. “Do you think you can teach me?”

  His face scrunched with concentration. “I can tell you, but as to the doing—as to the doing, that’s harder. You turn the knob slow to the right, until you hear or feel the tumbler drop. Then to the left. And so on. It’s the learning to feel or hear that … I can’t. I can’t show you that.”

  “Well. I’ll give it a go, and if I can’t, then we’ll just leave it.” She glanced toward the door. “It’s only a matter of time before they
come back.”

  “They’re at the front.”

  Ginger’s brows rose with surprise at this. “And they left you here? Without food or water?”

  “I don’t suppose they much cared.” Merrow spread his hands with a shrug. “But it gives us some time.”

  “Indeed.” Ginger approached the safe and laid her ear against the cool metal, as she had seen Merrow do. Closing her eyes, she turned the knob slowly. There was, indeed, a faint clicking as the dial advanced. How in the world would she be able to tell when a tumbler dropped? What did that even mean, anyway? The dial made a complete circuit, and she heard no distinguishing noises. Lifting her head, Ginger sighed. “I didn’t hear anything out of the ordinary.”

  “Sometimes, you have to go round multiple times. Like three around to twenty-five or something.”

  “Then I shall keep on.”

  Beyond Merrow, Ben had turned and was watching her. He was still wrapped in a tight ball, and only one eye was visible. It stared, unblinking, at Ginger. Shivering a little, she closed her eyes and concentrated on the task at hand.

  She did, finally, on the fourth revolution, hear a faint tink that differed from the rest, but her surprise made the dial jump and she had to start again.

  How long she endeavoured to hear the minute differences, Ginger did not know. The room grew cooler, and the metal chilled to an almost intolerable cold.

  “Stop,” Ben whispered in her ear.

  Ginger jumped, with a cry of alarm that sent a flush of embarrassment to warm her cheeks. She opened her eyes, and the sight did nothing to calm her.

  Ben hovered directly in front of her with his head stuck inside the door of the safe.

  “Benjamin Harford! What the devil are you doing?”

  He pulled his head out, the features elongating as if they had been stuck in the metal before snapping back into their regular arrangement. His brows were drawn together in concentration. “Helping.”

  “You need to rest.”

  Ben shook his head, brows still compressed, and pointed at the safe. “I—I, I, I … watch.”

  “You watch?” What could he possibly see inside the safe? “Can you see the papers inside?”

  He shook his head, digging his fingers into his scalp. “No. No! Watch, clock, dial … watch, watch … turn. Turn! You turn. I watch.”

  “You can … you can see the tumblers?” At her question, his whole aura illuminated with disproportionate pleasure. His brows relaxed from their scowl, and he beamed like a small child. Ginger swallowed, her throat tight, and nodded. “Well done. Let’s try it, then, shall we?”

  She took hold of the knob, not troubling to lay her head against the door, as Ben slid his face back into the safe. With her attention fixed on him, Ginger turned the knob slowly to the right, spinning it around the four revolutions and then slowing so that it clicked forward one number at a time.

  Ben raised a hand. “Now.”

  She stopped, then began to turn the knob slowly in the other direction. After only one revolution, Ben raised his hand again. “Now.”

  It took only another quarter hour of inching progress, turning the wheel back and forth at Ben’s direction, and then—even to Ginger’s untrained hand—the final tumbler dropped with a clunk. “Ha! Take that, Mr. Sherlock Holmes.”

  She waited until Ben had pulled free of the safe and then twisted the handle to open the door. Merrow gave a gasp behind her. “You did it!”

  “Thank heavens, yes.” She peered into the safe. It was filled with papers. “I wonder if that’s the secret to being a good sleuth. Keeping a ghost around for nefarious purposes.”

  “Watson.” Ben patted his chest with a grin.

  “More useful than that, my dear.” Ginger pulled a stack of papers from the safe, handing them to Merrow as she reached in for more. Most appeared to be reports, but there was a German passport and some currency mixed in. Quite a lot of currency, actually. Most of it British pounds, which would be close to useless in France.

  “Miss! His notebook!” Merrow held up Ben’s notebook.

  “Oh, thank heavens.” Ginger turned from the empty safe and set the papers she was holding on the floor. “May I see it, so Ben can look?”

  The familiar black notebook was in better shape than it had any right to be, considering that it had been in an explosion. No blood and very little soot stained it. She flipped through the pages, with Ben leaning over her shoulder. Merrow rested one hand on her arm so he could hear them both.

  Pages had been torn out of the notebook. She fingered one of the torn edges. “Did you do that?”

  “No.” Ben frowned. “I think.”

  Which was the challenge, of course. At this point, just because he didn’t remember doing something didn’t mean that he had not done it. Still, this stood as the best chance of jogging his memory. She turned the pages forward and found strings of letters—completely random letters.

  “Do you recognise your code?” She glanced over her shoulder at him.

  He smoothed his mustache, frowning at the page. “Notes.”

  “Can you read it?” If he had been making notes to himself in code, it would surely be worth knowing the subject.

  “I wrote it.”

  Which was not at all the same thing as being able to read it. Ginger gnawed on her lip, trying to remember what he’d told her about codes.

  Merrow asked the question before she could. “Maybe—if you remember what the code was—we could translate it for you?”

  “Brutus.” Ben squeezed his eyes shut and a veil of violet concentration shrouded his features. “Not Brutus—”

  “Caesar? A Caesar cipher, sir?” Merrow nodded, relief and triumph blossoming in his aura, followed by confusion. “Caesar’s the easiest to crack. I’m surprised you used it.”

  “Baker’s tale.”

  Ginger turned to look at him, letting Merrow take the book. “Pardon?”

  “Baker’s tale. No—Baker’s wife. The knight, the canter, the … Chaucer!”

  He’d said it was a Caesar cipher, but perhaps he used more than one method to encrypt it. “It’s a book code using The Canterbury Tales?”

  Ben shook his head and pointed at the book. “Chaucer!”

  “I’m sorry. I don’t understand.” Perhaps if she were not close to fainting with exhaustion, she might be able to follow him.

  “Chaucer in the centre. It’s. I was—in the centre. I was chaucering.”

  “You were chaucering?” She could make no sense of it. He’d studied the classics at university, with an eye toward historical texts—before the war, that was. She grasped at straws. “You were writing in Middle English?”

  “Yes!” Ben shot to the ceiling and zoomed around the tiny room. “Yes, yes, yes!”

  “Well … I’m not sure you needed to do anything more than that to encrypt it.” Ginger put her hands on her hips and turned to Merrow. “I don’t suppose you have Middle English among your tricks, do you?”

  He shook his head, frowning over the text. “But there are three names … At least. Yes. See?” He held the book out and pointed to a short list.

  NGXLUXJ

  GDZKRR

  YOTIRGOX

  “And those are names? How in the world can you tell?” Ginger frowned over the text.

  “I guessed, to be honest.” He squinted at them and pointed at the first. “If this were Harford, then the next would be … Axtell.”

  Ginger shivered, but there was no real surprise there. “And the third?”

  “Sinclair.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know him.”

  Merrow looked uneasy, glancing at Ben to see if he’d explain, but language still seemed far away from his grasp. Turning through the pages, Merrow said, “That’s Ben’s superior in London. I figure … I figure that’s who the German spy was directing him to.”

  “And that would be why he didn’t want to put this in plain text or in any reports.” Ginger covered her face with her hands. Regi
nald, Ben’s cousin, of whose guilt she could have no doubt. German on his mother’s side, and with other reasons to wish his cousin might not return from the war.

  It likely also explained why Axtell was investigating the Baker Street trench. He wasn’t looking for foreign spies there; he was trying to find Ben’s contact.

  “So we—we should head to London, I guess.”

  “To London? Why? Axtell and Reg are here.”

  “Well … to warn the London branch of mediums. About the bombing. That’s where the main branch is, right?”

  “To—” She stopped and stared at Merrow. She had forgotten that she had lied to him. Only a small corps of people knew what happened in Potter’s Field. “The bombing the German spy warned us about. Targeting the London Branch—that’s a code name. The London Branch is here. It’s the women working for the Spirit Corps in Le Havre.”

  Merrow swore, shock running through his aura. He cleared his throat. “I’m betting Captain Reginald didn’t go to the front at all. Not if he thinks we’re close to finding all this out.” He looked from her to Ben. “I’ll run word. As a soldier, I’ll be able to travel faster than you. And the captain … he needs looking after.”

  Ginger hated to send Merrow alone, but he was right and she was, frankly, exhausted. “Thank you.”

  Merrow folded Ben’s notebook and tucked it into his pocket. He started sorting through the rest of the papers. “Wish I’d thought to bring a bag.”

  Groaning a little, Ginger stood and walked to the door. “I’ll see if I can find a pillowcase.”

  “There’s a bedroom at the top of the…”

  Ginger stopped. Merrow had heard her.

  She hadn’t been touching him, and he had heard her.

  Heart pounding, Ginger stood in the doorway, praying that she was wrong. Merrow had said that he might get some hearing back. And she had seen the blood at his ears after the blast—but she knew how to fake that now. No—no. He had been locked in this room.

  Or had he locked himself in? The door to the house had been unlocked.

  Ginger shivered. She was simply overtired, and Ben’s paranoia was creeping in.

  She turned. Merrow was watching her, and any doubt dropped away at the sight of his aura. It was a mixture of spikes of alarm and the murky brown of someone regretting a mistake.