Latchkey

by Nicole Kornher-Stace

  Chapter Two

  Dinner was flatbread, soup, hard-boiled eggs, and their tiny daily ration from the town garden’s plum tree, sliced and passed around and supplemented with the double pocketful of wild blackberries Meg had gathered on her way back from her chore rotation in the town gardens. Usually there were apples, but lightning had struck Sweetwater’s prized orchard last spring, and it was a couple acres of blackened stumps and scorchweed now. Nothing they could eat.

  It was Sairy’s and Isabel’s turn to stay in the Catchkeep-shrine common room and set that long table, which they did while the others trickled in from their afternoon chores. All seven ex-upstarts that remained in Sweetwater, along with a few of the townspeople from the training session that afternoon. Onya was there, a couple of kids her age in tow. Isabel recognized Andrew, the songkeeper’s grandson, but not the other.

  “Ugh,” said Lissa, sniffing as she walked in. “Onion soup.”

  “At least it’s not bug soup,” Jen said, and that shut her up. Lissa knew what happened when a harvest ran low, and with the apples gone, it would be a hungry winter.

  “Or dog soup,” Sairy added. “Cover your ears, Squirrel.”

  Now they all went quiet, as they still did three years later at any reference to any aspect of their lives under the Catchkeep-priest. They all still remembered drowning those extra puppies, the ones that didn’t make the cut to become shrine-dogs.

  “I’ll go check the bread,” Meg said loudly, and normalcy resumed.

  Isabel stood sweating by the fire, ladling soup while bits of the ex-upstarts’ conversation skidded over her. Glory complained about the weather. Bex had heard a rumor about some bit of Waste-relic stuff someone had left as an offering at the Catchkeep-shrine. Kath was trying to negotiate a preemptive trade of tomorrow’s chore tokens because she had a freshly sprained ankle and orders from the midwife to keep her weight off it. Lissa was convinced that Catchkeep was trying to warn her of something important, because when she’d been on shrine duties that morning, the candles in Catchkeep’s statue had blown out, one by one, in no wind at all. Jen had a bit of news about the high seats of Sweetwater trying to replant the burned orchard with grafts traded up on a barter run from Grayfall. Sairy hoped the grafts would bear red apples. Jen hoped for green. Friendly debate ensued. Then Meg came back in with an armload of flatbreads and got practically mobbed.

  “We should get one of those grafts when they come in,” Bex said through a mouthful of food.

  “I nominate you,” Sairy said, leveling her little garlic-peeling knife at Jen.

  Jen choked a little on the hot pepper stem she was chewing. “Okay, first thing? Unlike some of us, Sairy, I’m pretty busy with harvest inventory.”

  Sairy looked elaborately unimpressed.

  “Second thing—”

  “She likes you.”

  “She doesn’t like any of us,” Lissa said, spidering her fingers at Onya and her friends. “We’re scary.”

  “Jen got her to send people over to build the new oven that time,” Sairy said. “Didn’t you, Jen.”

  Lissa shrugged. “True.”

  Jen dropped her face into her hands, began massaging her temples.

  “What would she want for it?” Meg asked.

  “Paper,” Jen muttered. “That’s my best guess anyway.”

  Meg groaned.

  “Well,” said Sairy, “how bad do we want that graft?”

  “Our own apples?” Bex said, making a face like Sairy was asking her how fond she was of breathing. “Bad enough.”

  “Eggs?” Kath suggested, drumming her fingers on the table-edge. “Honey? Wine?” Sairy and Lissa both turned to her in horrified unison. “Okay, okay,” she said. “Not wine. Isabel? Thoughts?”

  They glanced over at Isabel, who was busily decimating a plum with slow ferocious precision. Perfectly uniform slices slivered from her knife-blade. It was a moment before she felt their eyes on her and glanced up. “Hmm?”

  “Where the hell were you?” Sairy demanded in mock outrage, but her eyes were sharp with concern. She wasn’t Isabel’s second-in-command for nothing, but some days she felt to Isabel more like a caretaker. She was the one who’d told Isabel to recite lists in her head when the memories threatened to overtake her, who tried to rig Isabel’s chore rotations with easy work on days when the ghost-place’s toll was too much for her to lightly bear. When Isabel was Archivist, Sairy had been the only upstart who’d ever shown her kindness.

  But there was so much that Isabel couldn’t bring herself to tell anyone, second-in-command or no. She couldn’t even begin to explain how she’d traveled into the ghost-place, and to what purpose, and in whose company, and why she’d come back out alive. All Sairy or anyone knew was that Isabel had vanished, out on the edge of the Waste, in the dead of winter. By the time she came back, on foot, across the snow, she’d been within spitting distance of starvation, dehydration, exsanguination, death by exposure. Horribly wounded, though the wounds had been closed by some unrecognizable means, and showed no sign of turning septic. Nearly bled out, nonetheless. And she wouldn’t talk about what had hurt her, or who had healed her, or where she’d been. But she’d come back.

  Which in itself was a puzzle. She’d tried to escape several times before, and failed—but this time, she’d finally succeeded. And, for some often-guessed-at reason, she’d chosen to return.

  Not only that, but she’d come back knowing the truth behind the upstart-Archivist system. Secrets she had no way of learning out in the Waste. And armed with that truth she’d torn the system down.

  She’s heard them talking, from time to time, in voices they thought were beyond her earshot. Among their theories: she’d run off with a scav crew; she’d discovered a town unknown to Sweetwater; she’d died out there that winter and was now actually a ghost, returned among them to atone for her bloodyhanded past.

  You’re not a ghost, went a voice in her head. You’re in-between.

  “Apples,” she said, ignoring it. “Right?”

  “Right,” Sairy echoed, side-eyeing her like the world’s most suspicious hawk.

  “I don’t care what you people say,” Bex said. “I want that graft and I’m going to get it.”

  Jen produced a pad of brittle paper, its handmade stitching frayed. Finding the page she wanted, she ran one fingertip down it. “Well, we have surplus vinegar, beeswax, nettle-yarn, and a whole jug of that corpseroot ink that didn’t really take. We—”

  “We won’t have surplus nettle-yarn when we need it for winter clothes,” Meg pointed out.

  Jen’s pointer finger blurred through her notebook. “That,” she said, “is a thing that needs to go on the rotation yesterday.”

  “On it,” Glory said. She’d already brought over the bowl from the rotation wall and was carefully charcoaling something onto a blank chore token that looked like a thing the baker’s cat might cough up.

  “That’s yarn?” Sairy asked.

  “Oh look,” Glory said, lobbing the token at her. “Our first volunteer.”

  “Like hell.”

  “I’ll figure this out later,” Jen said. “What’s in the bowl for tomorrow?”

  “Nettle-yarn,” said Sairy, dropping the token in the bowl.

  “Give,” Kath said. “I can do that with my foot up.”

  “I call perimeter,” Sairy said.

  “Full or half?” Jen asked.

  Sairy rooted around until she came up with a token. “Half.”

  “And?”

  Sairy made a face and blind-grabbed another token from the bowl. Looked at it. “No.”

  “Well?”

  Sairy heaved a sigh and tossed the token on the table. It had a little drawing of a log of firewood. Except that, now that the orchard was gone, there was no firewood, and flammable alternatives must be sought. Sometimes that meant surplus ghostgrass. Sometimes it meant dried goat shit from the cheesemaker’s yard. Grumbling theatrically, Sairy hung the token from her hook on the chore r
otation wall. “Best luck,” Kath sang sweetly after her.

  Glory drew water-hauling and paper-making, Meg drew shrine duties and food-preserving, Lissa drew full kitchen, Kath drew gardens and promptly traded it for Meg’s food-preserving token, and Isabel drew bread-baking and ghostgrass. Jen did not draw a token. She was head of barter and inventory, and her chores were unchanging.

  Everyone went to hang their tokens on the rotation wall. Isabel was a moment in joining them. As always, her attention snagged on that ghostgrass token, its symbol like five long knives bundled. Odd that such a tiny thing could make her feel such keen—displacement.

  Sudden cramping in her chest, where a thread had once connected her to her own half-dead body and been severed. As if Isabel was not so much her true self as she was the husk her true self had ripped free from. As if the Wasp part of her remained down there, in the ghost-place, tearing itself into crumbs, scattering itself into a path that no one would ever follow.

  “Trade,” Sairy said, appearing beside her. It didn’t sound like a question.

  “For firewood?” Isabel said, snapping out of it. “No chance. Enjoy.”

  “No, I’ll…” Sairy eyed the rotation wall. “I’ll get someone to trade with you. I’ll call in a favor. I’ll figure it out. Keep the bread one. Give me the ghostgrass one. Do, I don’t know, do nettle-yarn with Kath.”

  “You do know I can still walk, right?”

  “It’s not that.” Sairy pulled a long-suffering face. “Look, you want perimeter instead? Plenty of walking.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “You also haven’t done ghostgrass in a while.”

  “So?”

  “So it makes you weird.”

  “It—”

  “Watch this.” Keeping her eyes on Isabel, Sairy raised her voice to reach the room. “Does doing ghostgrass make Isabel weird?”

  General assent.

  “See?”

  “Listen, I’m fine,” Isabel said. “In fact, I’m going to get it out of the way right now so you stop worrying. Deal?”

  “In the dark?”

  “The moon’s out.”

  “Not a full one.”

  “She can walk, she can see—what can’t she do?”

  “I’ll come with you.”

  “No.”

  Something in her voice stopped Sairy dead in her tracks. “It’s just,” Sairy said quietly, “we work together now, right? Worth risking two to save one? Aren’t you the one who taught us that?”

  “You don’t need to save me, Sairy.” You couldn’t if you tried.

  * * *

  Alone, she made her way around back of the shrine, across the field where they’d trained that afternoon, along the path that skirted the western edge of Sweetwater near the burned orchard, heading out along the ridge toward the Waste.

  It wasn’t Catchkeep’s time yet. Unlike the others She was visible year-round, but right now the sixteen stars of Her up-self were halfway hidden behind the Hill across the way and out of sight. In a couple of months She’d swing down slightly, visible from Sweetwater but not from here, lashing Her tail to bring the autumn winds over the lake, and in years past it was then, when She was Her lowest and closest over the water, that Her Archivists were chosen. By that time, the leaves would be drying on the branch and rattling like the Chooser’s cape of bones, and the Chooser Herself wouldn’t be far behind.

  The Ragpicker was setting now, hanging upside-down as if suspended by one foot, His head dipping down into the Waste where it belonged. And the One Who Got Away had gotten away, not to return until next winter’s collapse into spring.

  Carrion Boy stood ascendant, partway turned toward where Ember Girl was just beginning to climb up out of the Waste and into the sky. He reached out to Her one-handed, either to assist Her in Her climb or strike Her down. On that point the stories were unclear.

  Isabel walked on.

  There were four places in Sweetwater where ghosts were known to appear. Four of the silvery ghost-passages Isabel had come to think of as waypoints.

  Around the well. Beside the snapped bridge where the suns-and-moons grew thickest. Surrounding the heavy round door leading down into the old Before-tunnels beneath town. And up Execution Hill, where Isabel’s journey into the ghost-place had begun. Places where two worlds rubbed thin against each other, rupturing into something like doorways, passable by the dead and—as she’d learned—if conditions were exactly right, the nearly-dead as well.

  It had been a job of some weeks to find, uproot, and transplant enough ghostgrass that each one of these waypoints now stood behind its own waving knee-high sea of silvery gray grassblades, a field at least ten long paces by two. The local wildlife—deer and squirrels mostly—seemed pretty uninterested in those tough gray grassblades, so the major problem with maintaining the transplants was erosion and desiccation as day by day the Waste fought to reclaim its own.

  The Execution Hill waypoint had proven the hardest to barricade, cut as it was into the sheer face of a cliff almost eighty yards up, accessible only by a busted path and a narrow ledge. But the ex-upstarts had relayed dirt up there dutifully and spread it on the ledge so the ghostgrass could take root.

  If she tilted her head back and squinted, Isabel could just make out that waypoint from the fields below. Among all that black rock, a lonely silver glimmering. Blades of ghostgrass waved before it in the breeze, eclipsing and returning that pale cold light.

  No way could she get up there to check on that one. The path was much too hazardous. She’d nearly died climbing up there before, and that was years ago, without all the scars the ghost-place had laid on her. The bone-deep stab wound in her right calf. The shoulder that’d been yanked from its socket with huge force and hadn’t been quite right since. The slash that nearly disemboweled her. The pale pink starburst on one brown forearm where the deliquescing sludge of a dying ghost had left a spray of chemical burn straight through the skin and into the meat below, tracing the vague outline of the ghost-teeth that had dissolved there. The place over one temple where something nearly crushed her skull. Not to mention the unseen internal damage from having left her body behind while she wandered the ghost-place—at the top of Execution Hill, for solid weeks, in the dead of winter. Exposure, dehydration, her body digesting its own proteins for lack of food.

  She wasn’t climbing the Hill today, but that still left her three barricades she could check. The hatch to the tunnels was closest, then the bridge, and she could hit the well on her way back in toward town.

  So she followed the path around toward the town gardens. Around the garden fence, past the gate, and toward the mountain of rubble that marked the southernmost corner of the perimeter.

  She hadn’t been out here in months, but it looked much the same as she recalled. Fence, weeds, seventy-foot heap of metal and brick and heat-fused glass, and the raggedy hem of the Waste beyond, the ash of it rendered plush and blue and peaceful in the moonlight.

  Wasn’t fooling her. That way was death. The path from town dead-ended at the gardens for a reason.

  She reached the ghostgrass barricade around the far edge of the ruins and stood a moment, struck by the tarnished silver color of the ghostgrass by night. Weird that a plant so dead-looking could smell so green. She really hadn’t been out here in a while.

  Impossible to get a better look at the actual waypoint from here, but no matter. This was the only one of Sweetwater’s four waypoints that was not within actual sight of its barricade. Instead it lay below. Past the ghostgrass barricade, buried somewhere under corpseroot overgrowth, was the ancient heavy round hatch that led down into the busted tunnels under Sweetwater.

  That used to be a ghosthunting spot, though never one much frequented by ghosts, and so mostly avoided by Archivists as well. But if a ghost did wander through the waypoint, down the tunnels, and up the ladder to the surface, the barricade still stood between it and Sweetwater, and the ghostgrass would burn it down to shapeless silver slag before it
so much as set foot on the path. Never mind that most ghosts were shapeless silver slag to begin with. She’d only ever seen one ghost strong enough to even think of attempting a stunt like that.

  This barricade was nearest the Waste of the four, and the one that needed the most regular shoring up with new transplants, so she made sure to inspect it carefully. First she paced out the length of it and noted the distance—twelve paces—then stood at the near edge of it and took three long steps in among the grassblades, which brought her to the other side. There the ruins opened out into a kind of little cave of fallen brick and ancient trash and thickly growing corpseroot, its thorns the length of her fingers. Not about to venture in there and scratch her legs to bleeding so near a ghost-place waypoint, she retreated. Pulling out her notebook, she charcoaled in ruins barricade twelve by three looks solid. Then she pocketed the notebook and charcoal and began to walk away.

  And stopped. There was someone behind her.

  Slowly, carefully, knife-hand on the hilt, she turned.

  Nothing there. Just that sea of ghostgrass, dead still now that the breeze had gone, and the bunched shadow of the ruin above.

  Still, the back of her neck was prickling. Her palms had gone pins-and-needles. No—not palms—only the one holding the harvesting-knife. She had the weirdest most sudden compulsion to walk back through the barricade and toward the hatch beyond, corpseroot or no.

  She glanced down at the harvesting-knife. She knew, though she couldn’t begin to explain how, that it had been trying to turn her around.

  It wasn’t moving exactly. It wasn’t really rattling in its dogleather sheath, tapping at her hipbone, prodding her to draw it. It wasn’t actually trying to get her attention. It only seemed like it was, in a way she couldn’t begin to describe. Her fingers itched to pull it clear of her belt and—what? Follow it around like some kind of slag-for-brains until it brought her—where? Around in circles, like a dog chasing its tail. Like ghosts, she thought. Like stars.

  Down in the ghost-place, that knife had helped her find the ghost of Catherine Foster. Its methods for doing that were strikingly similar to whatever the hell it was doing now. Mysteriously vanishing from its sheath and appearing yards away, impossibly, where a passage through the ghost-place had been hidden. Falling to the ground where a passage could be made. Catching on things to stop her from walking past a passage she couldn’t see. Getting her to where she had to go.