Salazar was tilting her face toward the knife, toward Isabel’s face, as if she was having a hard time squaring one of those things with the other.
On the verge of blacking out, Isabel waved feebly at Sairy and the others. “Go,” she mouthed.
And Sairy, Catchkeep blast her, didn’t run. She popped her shoulder back in with the speed and clenched-jaw grit of someone accustomed to sustaining training injuries, then came around behind and began digging for something in the voluminous pockets of Isabel’s Archivist-coat. Emerged with the vials of water and milk, the firestarter, a few scraps of bandaging-fabric. Hurried back over the broken doorway into the empty space of hall beneath the hatch, dropped to the floor, dipped a finger in the milk and started drawing the overlapping rings of a ghost-banishing circle on the broken tile.
Salazar let go of Isabel and stepped back. Even for a ghost her movement was stilted and juddering, not with a fading of energy but an overload of it. She stood there a moment as if recalibrating herself for that sudden influx, spewing silver light.
The blood had strengthened her, Isabel realized distantly. The blood had strengthened her a lot. But wherever a ghost’s limit was to bear that dark light without bursting into silver shrapnel, Salazar was certainly teetering on the edge of it now.
“You,” she said.
Hazily, Isabel blinked. Had she just caught Salazar on the last word of her loop? It sounded different. Almost like—
Then Salazar drew her sword, and it was all Isabel could do to get her harvesting-knife in hand and jump out of the way.
Salazar came at Isabel in stop-motion bursts, a jerky here-and-gone movement that was on some visceral level awfully disturbing to look at. Flickering in and out of reality as the blood lent her strength, the strength gave her memory, and the memory pulled on her hard.
She swung her sword at Isabel, blaring blue-violet light in an audible arc before it.
Lucky for Isabel, the harvesting-knife was itself a broken sword, with a sword’s hilt and guard, and she just managed to turn Salazar’s strike aside, just managed not to shatter both wrists while doing so. Backed a step and Salazar drove forward, an overhead blow that Isabel darted to the side of, already repositioning the harvesting-knife in a reverse grip. Paused a split second, dumped tension down her legs and out her feet and sprang at Salazar with all she had, slamming the end of the hilt into whatever passed for her temple.
It was pretty much a controlled fall back two more steps from there while Salazar hacked at her again. Hoping Salazar didn’t realize she was being baited toward where Sairy was using her ruined hand to paint a ring of blood on the floor, was tracing over that with the strips of fabric, was fumbling with the firestarter above them.
Salazar wasn’t fighting like a Latchkey operative, Isabel noticed as she defended against her next two strikes. Too wild, too sloppy, too desperate. Swinging her sword like a club.
Then she realized exactly where she’d seen this before. In the memory she’d read, twelve-year-old Mia Salazar training with twelve-year-old Catherine Foster, Salazar had fought exactly like this. Until the treatment-sickness had doubled her over, choking up ropes of her own tissue before they’d carted her away. Turning to Foster, terrified and enraged: why isn’t it killing you?
This might be the last clear memory Salazar had ever had.
Back by Sairy, the ring of fabric began smoldering weakly.
“Done!” Sairy shouted, and got clear as Isabel backed into the circle and Salazar followed.
The dark light encased Salazar fully now, pulsing out from her in waves that Isabel had to brace against or be knocked back by. In the grip of it Salazar’s face was going featureless, reverting to a howling mask the color of lightning. Around her, the bricks of the tunnel were beginning to vibrate, attuned with Salazar’s energy flares.
“I need her inside the ring,” Isabel shouted. “And both of us out of it.”
Somehow.
But she had frozen Salazar in place. Briefly. When she’d spoken her name. And Isabel now had a pretty clear idea of what memory Salazar was stuck in. Strengthening that memory would strengthen Salazar, yes. But first, if the One Who Got Away smiled upon Isabel, for a few precious seconds it might also overload Salazar into staying put.
It was a Ragpicker’s gambit, but one that’d kept Isabel alive once before.
“Why isn’t it killing you?” Salazar asked her, almost mournfully.
And, in the memory, Foster had replied—
“I don’t know,” Isabel said.
And for a split second Salazar froze, flickering, and the uprushing of light froze above her, like a waterfall of black ice.
Isabel didn’t hesitate. She stepped back out of the circle, leaving Salazar within. Even now, the words rolled off her tongue like they’d always been there, waiting for her to choose again to speak them.
“I am the Archivist. Catchkeep’s emissary, ambassador, and avatar on earth. Her bones and stars my flesh; my flesh and bones Her stars. I am She who bears you, She who sustains you, She to whom your dust returns. You have lived well. You have died well. I release you. Do not ghost my way.”
She knelt to plunge the blade of the harvesting-knife into the overlapping circles Sairy had drawn—and just managed to scramble free as Salazar’s sword crashed down, spraying tile.
Too late, she thought inanely, too—
“Isabel! Get your ass out of the way!”
Sairy and Bex had appeared from the direction of the cleared area, each with a huge armload of ghostgrass and a terrifying light in her eyes. No, Isabel thought, no no no—
They charged.
It was all Isabel could do to scramble out of the way as they came barreling through, hollering at the top of their lungs, driving Salazar back and pinning her to the far wall a few feet from the hatch.
The dark light of Salazar’s ghost-energy was spraying outward like blood from a slashed throat, making a sound like hot oil spitting on a pan. Isabel went and joined Sairy and Bex and together they shoved the bundles in place around Salazar’s feet, her own personal ghostgrass barricade. Behind it Salazar writhed and twisted, hooked like a fish.
They backed off quickly as the black light shot up from her, raging but contained by the invisible half-cylinder of the ghostgrass semicircle, eclipsing Salazar completely. All that energy focused to a point now like sunlight through glass.
Focused—toward the ceiling.
Which started to shake.
Isabel wheeled on Sairy and Bex. But they were already backpedaling, eyes on the ceiling, which was now throwing bricks.
The pitch of the light and the noise—both piercing—redoubled until Bex winced and cried out and put her hand to her ear and brought it away red.
Sairy grabbed her and dragged her bodily away from Salazar as that funnel of dark light began to bore a hole through the ceiling. Bricks rained down, then dirt, then the rubble of the ruined building above. It fell through the hole, pattering the floor, slowing as larger pieces plugged the gap from above. But the light kept drilling through.
It’s going to push its way out, Isabel realized. Straight through and up into the sky.
A perfect beacon to lead Carrion Boy’s people directly to the tunnels.
“Get out of there!” Sairy was yelling behind her. “It’s going to—”
“Leave me and go!” she yelled back. “I have to contain this.”
But how? Reaching through that storm of ghost-energy would be like sticking her hand into a grinder. She couldn’t expect to be able to pull it back out.
She took a step forward.
Then she was moving backwards rapidly, gracelessly, dragged between Sairy and Bex as the rest of the ceiling gave up and fell in. Salazar’s ghost-energy kept drilling upward, taking chunks of the ruined building down. Isabel could hear it dropping into the tunnels like thunder.
All three stood there a minute, coughing up dust, eyes streaming. The inside of Isabel’s head was making a noise like she
had mosquitoes stuck in both ears.
“No,” she whispered, staring at the glowing hill of rubble that used to be the exit to the hatch.
“How are we supposed to get out now?” Bex said, voicing Isabel’s own thoughts. “How are they going to let us out?”
Down the hall, others were heading over, alerted by the noise. Sairy herded them back across the ghostgrass perimeter into the cleared area, cursing at the top of her lungs.
Isabel didn’t need to turn in order to be aware of all those scared eyes tracking her. Waiting to see what she would do.
She set one hand to the new cave-in. It was solid. Tonnage of tunnel-stuff and the brick and whatnot from the building above. It must have filled that stretch of hall entirely. More fell as they stood there, shaking the ceiling even through however many feet of dirt.
It’s like the earthquake, she thought dully. Except upside-down.
Salazar’s purplish silver light leaked steadily through the cracks in the rubble. Frostbite-and-vertigo came with it like air through an open window.
What Isabel really did not need right now was Ruby’s voice in her head, but it looked like she was getting it anyway. Every other option is slow, and painful, and unnecessarily cruel…
There wasn’t a person in here whose gaze she felt remotely ready to meet. She fixed her stare on the ground.
It fell upon a pale silver thread. It emerged from the cave-in, slack and loose against the floor, and continued in the direction of the room where they’d found Salazar to start with. Toward the unexplored reaches of the lower tunnels. In the torrent of ghost-energy, Isabel hadn’t noticed it until now.
But she’s been dead since the Before, Isabel thought. She has no body to connect to. What’s she doing with a thread? And where the hell’s the other end of it?
Even as Isabel studied Salazar’s thread, the slack seemed to be slowly, almost imperceptibly reeling up out of it, like whatever was holding the other end of it was drawing it taut. And then the thing down in the tunnels, whatever it was, would follow the thread up toward—
Before she let that scenario play out fully in her mind, Isabel drew the harvesting-knife and quickly slashed the thread. She watched as it began to dissolve into silver sparks and felt an unaccountable sense of relief, probably misguided.
A moment passed.
“Do you hear that?” Sairy said.
Isabel didn’t look up. “What?”
“It’s quiet.” Sairy set her ear to the cave-in, where the tendrils of light were fading. The frostbite-and-vertigo sensation was still discernible, but dialed way way down. Like Salazar, improbably, had worn herself out.
Sairy straightened, her whole face shining with cautious wonder. “It stopped.”
Chapter Eight
They spent a few minutes picking at the cave-in, lifting rocks and setting them aside. For each piece of debris they moved, several others fell, raining gravel and pulverized brick for many long seconds on end. Bex deadlifted a bigger chunk out of the edge of the landslide and the ceiling began to grumble ominously. It backed them up several steps and they stood staring at the ceiling until the rain of dirt and Before-junk had stopped just out of sight. Then they backed quickly away.
It felt like a long walk back to the cleared area and the gathered townspeople. Onya and Andrew had run ahead and Lin could be heard from some distance, ripping into them for running off. Even she fell silent when Isabel stepped over the ghostgrass perimeter.
They all had a million questions, that much was obvious. And there wasn’t a single one of them that Isabel was ready for. So she took Sairy aside and sat her down to clean and rebandage the cut on her hand. That much she could do.
Chooser knew what kind of Before-germs had been rubbed into the wound by whatever Sairy’d cut her hand on—or from Salazar’s mouth for that matter—but at least it wasn’t a huge cut or a deep one. Rina dug into her apprentice satchel and came out with a pot of ointment. “Rainstealer salve,” she explained.
“Tell me that keeps infection out,” Sairy said.
Rina shook her head, holding it out. “Stops bleeding.”
“I was hoping it did both.”
“The good stuff is at the midwife’s,” Rina said. “She said we’d be safe enough down here.” Leveling a critical eye at Sairy’s hand: “You cut yourself on what?”
“Bricks. Ghost teeth. You know. This and that.”
“Ghosts have teeth?”
“Well, I mean, maybe not ghosts of babies, or really, really old—ow!”
Isabel packed salve into the cut as Sairy winced and swore under her breath. “Move your fingers,” Isabel said, and Sairy gestured at her rudely. “At least it’s not your knife-hand.”
Lin came to sit beside them. “Is it true?” she asked.
Isabel knew what that meant. Lin would have heard everything from Onya and Andrew. The ghost, the capture, the cave-in.
But word had spread that Sairy had been ghost-bitten, and children had gathered to stare. If they were on the edge of panic, Isabel didn’t want to push them over now. “It’s okay,” she said. “We’ll figure it out.”
Sairy was watching her closely. Uncharacteristically quiet all of a sudden, her face still spoke volumes: we will?
Finally Lin seemed to notice the children to either side of her. She stood, mouth pressed into a grim line, and went to whisper something to the songkeeper. Immediately the songkeeper was gathering the children back into the story circle, launching straight into “Ember Girl at the Crossroads.”
Isabel tied off Sairy’s bandage and leaned back against the wall. Catchkeep save her, she was tired. She listened to the songkeeper a moment, waiting for—she didn’t know what. Lin to return and come up with a plan. The hatch to magically unbury itself from the cave-in. This all to be over.
“So,” the songkeeper was saying. “This one time Ember Girl got in a fight. Ember Girl got in lots of fights, because Catchkeep told Her to. Because Ember Girl was so good at making ghosts for Catchkeep to carry, and Catchkeep, like any smart dog, hated being bored. You know how when a dog gets bored it starts chewing on the chairs? Well, a dog the size of Catchkeep gets bored, you can see how things get ugly fast.”
“Lots of little ears,” Lin explained, plunking down beside Isabel. “Now. What’s the plan.”
Isabel blew out a breath. “We still have enough food and water for a few days if we stretch it thin.”
“And then what?” Lin whispered. “I just went to look at the cave-in. They’re not digging us out of that in time. It’ll take weeks.”
“Do we have enough air?” Glory asked, arriving with Bex.
“The plan was to shut us in here,” Sairy said. “Remember?”
“The tunnels are full of air,” Bex added reassuringly. “That’s the one thing we have plenty of.”
But Isabel was thinking about the hallucination that had landed her on her ass in the mud earlier, and she wasn’t so sure. She must have breathed something. The air had gone bad. There was some kind of Before-chemical in it. Something.
“And ghosts,” Lin said. “Apparently.”
“I don’t know,” Isabel said. “We only ran into one, and she was nowhere near the ghost-passage.”
“It only got out because we were careless,” Sairy admitted. “We know better now.”
“She responded to ghostgrass,” Isabel added. “She was strong but it still held her off.” Not saying: she was the second-strongest ghost I’ve ever seen. Not saying: I still have no idea who ghostgrassed her into that room. Nodding instead at the perimeter. “If there were more ghosts down here, you’d know it, because they’d be trying to get through that.”
“Okay,” Lin said. “So we stay behind the perimeter. That still leaves us stuck down here with three days of supplies.”
“I’d say more like two,” Bex said.
“There’s not much lamp-oil left,” Glory said. “A day at most.”
At this they all fell silent, eyes on the place whe
re the lamplight pushed up against the encroaching dark. Isabel let the songkeeper’s voice cut a welcome swathe through her thoughts.
“…Ember Girl said yes, because yes is what you say to Catchkeep. But on the inside you can still think different, and so on Her inside Ember Girl was busy scheming. I’ve made a million million ghosts for You, Catchkeep, and now I’m bored too. Maybe today’s the day I put My stuff in My backpack and go find something new to do instead. So when Catchkeep left, Ember Girl put on Her shiny boots and went to find Carrion Boy, and They—”
Isabel started. “I think I can get us out.”
“What?”
But Isabel was scrambling to her feet, hurrying to the pile of debris they’d cleared from the tunnels.
Sairy surveyed this moodily, her curiosity not quite defusing her frustration. “Please tell me that somewhere in there is some Before-thing for opening hatches.”
Isabel fished out the plastic map.
“How about,” she said, “a Before-thing for finding hatches?”
“What is that?” Lin asked. “That’s the tunnels?”
“Yeah,” Isabel said, scrubbing at the map with a sleeve. “I think it has to be. I had it set aside for the songkeeper’s collection, but…if I can just…” The dogleather of the Archivist-coat wasn’t doing much to clean it, but she didn’t dare waste the water. She spat on the plastic and tried again. When she sat to tilt the map into the lamplight, angled lines and little labeled boxes stared back at her cryptically.
Sairy gave a low whistle. “Ragpicker take me. All that is down here?”
“It’s like a whole other Sweetwater,” said Glory. “But underground.”
“A bunch of Sweetwaters squished together, more like,” said Bex. “Like Grayfall, or Here.”
“The lines will be the halls,” said Lin, leaning in to see. “I think the squares are rooms.”
“And if even our shrine and meeting-hall have back doors,” Isabel said, scanning those colored lines with a furious intensity, “something this big is going to have another way out.”
Latchkey Page 11