Latchkey

by Nicole Kornher-Stace

  “Okay,” Glory said, “but if this whole mess is the tunnels, then where’s us?”

  “Near a hatch,” Isabel said. “Near where the halls are shaped like a T near a hatch.”

  They all leaned in to look.

  Upon closer inspection, there were four separate mazes, blue-green-orange-red, one for each quarter of the map.

  SUBLEVEL A

  SUBLEVEL B

  SUBLEVEL C

  SUBLEVEL D

  Interspersed among those lines were little squares and rectangles, more palely colored. Each one labeled tinily.

  CAFETERIA

  QUARANTINE

  MEDICAL BAY

  There was a red star on a length of blue straightaway branched with especially small squares.

  OBSERVATION CELL 27

  OBSERVATION CELL 28

  OBSERVATION CELL 29

  Bex appeared with the songkeeper. “I figured if anybody knows how to read one of these things…” she said.

  “I’m not entirely sure I do,” the songkeeper said. “I have twenty-seven Before-maps, and they’re all different. Some of them aren’t even—oh. Look at that. This is a beautiful piece. May I?” He took the map and scanned it briefly, then made a sound of surprise. “All this is here under the town?”

  Sairy looked like she was about to companionably elbow the songkeeper, then thought better of it. “That’s what I said.”

  “Well,” the songkeeper said, recovering himself, “these will definitely be rooms. Look, they’re all labeled. Training Hall. Reception. Generator Room.”

  “I understood, like, two words of that,” Bex said.

  “Classroom 1,” Sairy said, reading over his shoulder. “Classroom 2.”

  “Laundry,” Bex added. She made a face. “Laundry in a room?”

  “Archive,” said Glory.

  Isabel blinked. “What?”

  Glory poked a tiny square in the lower left quadrant where a tangle of orange dead-ended. Isabel read that label twice, convinced she must’ve seen it wrong.

  “Weird,” Sairy said.

  Isabel tore her eyes from the ARCHIVE label.

  Hatch, she told herself. Halls shaped like a T.

  “I don’t see a hatch,” Lin said.

  “I don’t either,” said Bex.

  Neither did Isabel. There was absolutely nothing that looked remotely like a big round door set with a wheel in the middle.

  If she set out blind there’d be miles of ground to cover, and the lamp would only last so long. Even down by where they’d found Salazar, already the tunnels had felt different. Smelled different. Her voice hadn’t echoed there. It’d dropped like a weight, dull and deadened. Isabel found herself picturing the deeper tunnels as somewhere sound didn’t carry right, light didn’t go far, the halls never connected up, and there was nothing down there but uncharted miles of suffocating, lake-stinking, ghost-infested dark for her to die in.

  Not uncharted, she reminded herself grimly. Map.

  For all the good it was doing.

  After a moment the red star dragged her attention back to it. It was the only one on the whole map. And stars were something she knew better than to ignore.

  Then she saw it.

  A little ways from the star, that blue tangle made a T shape with no branching squares. The bottom leg of the T continued a short distance toward the bottom edge of the blue quadrant, was crossed by a thick black line, and went on a little farther before terminating at a weird little symbol like an X inside an O.

  Beyond that there was nothing. Just the grimy whitish background of the map.

  Fixing what little she knew of the tunnels in her mind, she followed that blue squiggle back upward. She had to be sure. Symbol, space, black slash, bigger space, then that long-armed T with no rooms. Hatch, hall, broken door, hall, and the branch in the tunnels. It matched.

  “Here.” Isabel tapped the symbol. “That’s where we came down. So if we can find another—”

  Bex was already poking another spot in the tangle. “There.”

  Another X-in-O symbol. It was way up the side of the blue tangle, near the upper right-hand corner. Almost the whole way across that endless maze of halls.

  Impossible to gauge how long it would take to reach it. If she could get there before the lamp went out. If the ceiling wasn’t somehow caved in around that hatch too. If it had a ladder. If that one didn’t break when they tried to climb.

  If. Such a little word. Like a rock you throw at a plan over and over until the plan shatters.

  “I’m going to scout ahead,” Isabel said. Going over to the water jug and drinking two careful swallows even though she was still horrifically thirsty after. She picked up the jar of ghostgrass paste, then put it down. The way her wrists and neck and ankles already felt, she’d rather let the ghosts at her than smear that stuff on her skin. But she did make herself pick up the last sack of bundled ghostgrass, even though it felt like a fistful of nettles. “If the hatch is viable, I’ll set up a perimeter. Then we relocate.” Before we lose the lamps and have to walk this maze in the dark.

  Lin was looking at her dubiously. “By yourself?”

  “No,” said Sairy.

  “No,” agreed Isabel, stowing the map under one arm. “Sairy, you’re with me.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me. Check your ghostgrass and get ready to move out.”

  “But—” Sairy drew Isabel aside. “My hand. I’ll draw ghosts.”

  “And if you do,” Isabel said softly, “I want you doing it out there. Understand?”

  Sairy looked around the cleared area, and her eyes widened a little. Swallowed. Nodded.

  Isabel pushed the sack of ghostgrass into Sairy’s arms. “Good.”

  Louder, including the room: “Lin’s in charge until we get back. Bex and Glory are her hands.” The ex-upstarts took one look at Lin’s armload of babies and nodded. “There’s danger, you find Bex. You’re looking for work, you ask Glory. She’ll find you something to do.”

  Last, she drew Bex aside. “If you do see a ghost,” Isabel told her, “you do not engage. You stay behind the ghostgrass and you wait for me. Got it?”

  “Got it.”

  “Everybody say good luck to Isabel and Sairy!” Lin told the children, and they all hitched in a huge breath to yell with. “Quiet voices,” Glory added, with a hasty glance toward the ceiling.

  “Good luck, Isabel and Sairy!” they whisper-shouted at her, and Isabel stood aside while Bex and Glory hugged Sairy hard and clapped her shoulders and hung their good-luck charms around her neck and whispered things in her ears that Isabel couldn’t make out from her distance but weren’t meant for her anyway. The ex-upstarts would always all have each other, no matter what, and Isabel could only stand on their periphery, one step removed. She’d spent too long being their monster to reasonably expect anything different.

  Chapter Nine

  They got as far as the room where they’d found Salazar and stopped to get their bearings, holding the lamp out at armslength toward the further dark.

  “Straight down past this bank of rooms,” Isabel said, “then left between OBSERVATION CELL 14 and 16. Then it looks like a lot of little turns, so stick close. You see anything that looks like stairs or anything leading down, stay clear. One cave-in for today is plenty.”

  They walked in silence. Isabel carrying the map and lamp, Sairy one-arming the ghostgrass bag with her bandaged hand crammed as deep as it would go in the pocket of her coat. All they could hear was a low unsteady dripping, coming from somewhere further off, deeper down. Slowly but steadily the mud between the floor-tiles was getting wetter, and Isabel gave up quickly on trying to gauge whether they were getting nearer to the lake or farther from it.

  “Who builds a bunch of underground tunnels beside a lake anyway?” Sairy whispered.

  Isabel just shook her head in response. They were both breathing like people trying to conserve their air, though they’d never specifically agreed to. They
were also breathing like people trying to move quietly, so as not to catch the attention of whatever their lamplight might discover next.

  Here and there they passed areas of the hallway where the bricks were different colors, spelling what might’ve been words stenciled straight onto the wall. Whatever they’d used to paint with, it must’ve been with an eye for preservation in the damp, or something, because the darker coloration remained. It was only because a number of the bricks had fallen out of the wall face that the words were no longer legible. Not a map, not by a long shot, but maybe better than nothing. Once Sairy picked up a few bricks, slotted them into gaps in the wall, stood back, inspected the result, gave up.

  They’d been walking for maybe fifteen minutes when Isabel started feeling that very specific weirdness again. She tried to brush it off, ignore it, but she couldn’t deny that this place was getting under her skin. That inexplicable sensation of being sieved through something unseen hadn’t quite returned to her but she felt constantly as if she were caught in the split second between a shove and a stumble. She wasn’t off-balance exactly, and it wasn’t exactly that she thought something was going to come up behind her and give her a push. It felt sort of like a stuck sneeze, that pinch in the back of the nose, except everywhere.

  Worse, the ghostgrass bracelets had upped their game and gone beyond raising welts on her exposed skin. Where they touched it was now beginning to blister.

  I’m not a ghost, Isabel thought at them, like she could will braids of grass to comprehend. Leave me alone.

  In those twisty halls the squares on the map were farther between and less uniformly-shaped. According to the map they passed ELEVATOR, and EMERGENCY MEDICAL SUPPLY, and KITCHEN.

  Rounding a bend in the hall toward DORMITORY A, Isabel flung an arm out, nearly clotheslining Sairy. Lifted her chin in silence toward an open doorway. There, on the floor, laid along the threshold—ghostgrass. Not as much as on the room Salazar had been contained in. Not by far. But someone had put it there, and it wasn’t Isabel.

  In the black cutout of that doorway, the faintest possible silver glow.

  Isabel’s outflung arm turned palm-down, made a gesture like she was pressing something unseen toward the floor. It only occurred to her afterward that she used the same gesture on Squirrel. Stay.

  But she needn’t have bothered. Sairy had already set the ghostgrass bag aside and was holding one bundle out like a weapon. She pointed with it, eyes narrowed in the dim light, at something at the doorway’s edge.

  Isabel glanced down, and sure enough there was a thread, even fainter than Salazar’s, so fine and pale she’d write it off as a trick of the light if she hadn’t just seen this same pattern a little while ago. Doorway, ghostgrass, silver glow, thread.

  Optimistically, she raised and lowered the lamp, altering the angle of the light. No such luck. That was definitely a thread.

  So frail though, like Isabel’s own thread had been right before it’d been cut. Like when Sweetwater sugared its five stunted maples in the early spring, and left the boiled syrup to chill until it thickened to the texture of honey, of ghost blood, and the children would dip their fingers in and pull them out trailing dripping strands. Where those strands terminated in sugary wisps almost too fine to see, that was what this thread looked like.

  They retreated a few steps and Sairy watched the doorway while Isabel consulted the map. “No good,” she said. “It’s this way or nothing.”

  “So we go quiet,” Sairy whispered back. “Avoid the ghostgrass. Maybe we add more even? There’s hardly any there.”

  “If we’re lucky,” Isabel replied, “maybe that means a weaker ghost.”

  Shaky logic, she knew. She’d feel a whole lot more confident in that ghostgrass if she knew how it’d gotten there to begin with.

  Glued to the far wall, they approached.

  As they came level with the doorway, Sairy stopped dead and stood staring into that room, one hand over her mouth. Isabel squinted into that soft silver light—and found herself looking at one of the strangest-looking ghosts she’d ever seen.

  It was totally silver, and nearly formless: no hands, no feet, no head, just the vague noodly shapes of arms and legs stuck into a blob of torso. It was lying on the floor like a piece of pale fabric that someone had dropped.

  “That’s a ghost?” Sairy was hissing. “Where’s its head?”

  “It’s just weak,” Isabel whispered back. “That’s our first good news all day. Let’s not question it.”

  But Isabel had never seen a ghost in the living world that was this weak but still this big. In the ghost-place you could cut a ghost into pieces and the pieces would keep moving. Mindlessly squirming, like a worm cut in half, for eternity. Here, though, this ghost would’ve shrunk as it weakened, it should’ve been small enough to sit in her hand. But this one was as big as Onya.

  That thread, Isabel surmised, was the only thing keeping this ghost from melting into a silver puddle of slop on the floor. First Salazar’s awful strength had dropped out of her immediately when her thread was cut. Now this.

  But what were they? Not tethers to a half-dead body, certainly, as Isabel’s had been three years ago. At least Salazar’s couldn’t have been—she’d been dead since the Before, she was dust somewhere in the rumored green beneath the Waste.

  No—Isabel pictured these threads more like puppet-strings, or fuses a fire could travel along. Increasingly, she didn’t reckon she wanted to run into whatever was holding the other end of them.

  She drew her knife to cut the thread—and jumped, startled, as the ghost twitched hard and began to move. Flopping weakly like a fish trying to wriggle its way back to water, sand in its gills, hopeless. For a three-count Isabel watched it. Then she sheathed the knife.

  “Come on,” Isabel said, giving Sairy a nudge as she walked by. “That one’s not going anywhere.”

  But Sairy didn’t move. “Is it bleeding?”

  Despite herself Isabel paused. Glanced back in.

  The silver ghost had edged up to the near wall now and was bumping up against it rhythmically with the place where its head should’ve been. Tangling in its thread, which kept spooling out from wherever to accommodate it. It fumbled its way vaguely toward the open door, depositing a silver trail as it went.

  So it wasn’t that it hadn’t fully formed a head. It was that its head had been removed.

  Isabel went still. That spray of silver blood on the wall back by the ghost-passage. That rag-like thing on the floor beneath.

  She needed a second to piece this together. Someone had decapitated a ghost back by the ghost-passage. Left its head there. Moved its body down the tunnels and stashed it in this room. Attached a thread to it, fed it just enough strength to maintain its form, but not enough to bust through the ghostgrass that they’d laid so carefully across the door.

  Systematically, meticulously, and all for reasons unknown and pretty much incomprehensible from where Isabel was standing.

  And, apart from the decapitation, they’d done the same with Salazar.

  It was like an Archivist’s shelves of ghost-catching jars, if that Archivist had figured out how to expand that operation on a much larger scale.

  Except that the idea of an Archivist who could handle a specimen like Salazar without being reduced to a drag-trail with a splatter at the end of it was…unnerving.

  Sairy was staring into the room in a kind of unsettled fascination. “I wonder who it used to be.”

  Keep moving forward, went the voice in Isabel’s head. Even if it doesn’t get you anywhere.

  “I’m going in there for a second,” she said. “Stay here. It won’t hurt me.”

  Stepping over the ghostgrass, she pulled that silver rag out of her pocket. Ignoring Sairy’s shout of surprise when she realized the rag had a mouth and eyeholes and was squirming slightly in her grip.

  Eventually Sairy found her words. “This shit,” she declared, “did not come up in training.”

  “Yeah.
” With slow care, Isabel knelt. “Mine either.”

  The silver ghost’s body bumped its way along the last few feet of wall and heaved up against her, slick and cold, too insistent to be mindless, lashing her soggily with boneless arms.

  This is a terrible idea even for you, Isabel thought, and held the rag against the stump of the silver ghost’s neck.

  And the thread emitted a single faint pulse. Began glowing brighter and brighter, vibrating like a plucked string as it siphoned power out of wherever until the shape of the silver ghost began to sharpen off and brighten and saturate as color bled in.

  “Is—” Sairy began, then stopped. “Is that…normal?”

  “Blood will strengthen a ghost like this,” Isabel murmured back. Not taking her eyes from the silver ghost as the paddles of its limbs began to sprout hands, feet, then fingers, toes. “Just…not this fast.”

  Not only that, but whatever this thread was, it was repairing damage that no amount of blood would ever fix. The gap between the head and body began to fill with slow silver like a scab. The changes were rapid and dramatic, like a come-what-may unfolding from bud to flower in the moonlight.

  Isabel let go, took a step back, and watched, hand on knife-hilt in case of trouble.

  The silver of the ghost’s body began to loosen in pleats and folds, suggesting clothing, which darkened rapidly through grayscale to pitch black. The vague silver flap of its hair brightened to an orangey brown. It was definitely a child, maybe seven or eight years old.

  “Oh,” Sairy breathed. “It’s so detailed.” Then she seemed to realize what she was saying, and her voice sharpened. “Like the last one.”

  “If it was like the last one,” Isabel said, “I wouldn’t be in here. We’d’ve dumped ghostgrass all over this doorway and run like hell.”

  Slowly, the child-ghost pulled itself to a sitting position. Same stuttering quality of movement that Salazar’d had—that any ghost had in the living world. Flickering like a candle in a draft.

  There it turned its back to them and sat like it’d been caught misbehaving and was being punished. It squirmed with impatience, rocking back and forth, tugging on its thread each time it shifted forward. From behind it was impossible to tell whether it was a boy or a girl.