“What’s it doing?” Sairy whispered.
What it was doing was humming to itself. A simple little tune, but it sounded oddly familiar.
Then it turned, wiping blood out of its eyes, and with a shock like a slap, Isabel knew where she’d seen this ghost before. The blood had been red then, not silver, but everything else matched up. She’d seen this child-ghost the same place she’d seen Salazar. In the ghosts’ memories, in the ghost-place, on her search for Catherine Foster. A dead kid, bleeding out every hole in its head. A casualty of the second or maybe third wave of the Latchkey operatives’ development, of that four percent survival rate that in the end had left only two standing. Gone in its sleep, bled out, strapped to a cot, while that Ragpicker-taken lullaby played on, relentless.
That was the tune the child-ghost was humming now. The same one they’d play to the youngest Latchkey subjects at lights-out. Strapped down to tiny cots in an open observation area, hooked up to machines, with a statistically significant chance of bleeding out in their sleep. No wonder they’d needed a lullaby.
It had played for them in mechanical beeps, looping endlessly. All night, every night, well past when they’d outgrown such a babyish thing. It didn’t sound as soothing as it was probably meant to. Isabel’d heard it in one of the nameless ghost’s memories, years ago, and still woke up some mornings with it stuck in her head, humming it to herself as she got dressed for the day.
It came to her that it might be the only song any of the operatives knew.
The child-ghost was swaying back and forth a little, wearing a kid-sized version of the Latchkey operatives’ uniform, sleeving at the bloody mess of its face.
For some reason the little uniform made Isabel think of snakes shedding their skins. She wondered who’d made all the new copies of those uniforms, a little bigger every year, for those that survived. Until they didn’t have to make any more.
The child-ghost was blinking in her vague direction, hers or Sairy’s, but didn’t really seem to be seeing either of them. Whether that was because it was a ghost trapped in the world of the living, or because its eyes were full of blood, Isabel didn’t know.
Nor could she have really said why she did what she did next.
She started to hum the lullaby.
And when she did, the child-ghost drew her into focus and saw her. Slowly, jaggedly, it got up and padded its way over to her, lifting its feet with effort, like it was walking through glue. Still weak, she noted. Not a threat.
“Isabel?” Sairy said, uncertain.
But the child-ghost had stopped before her and was tilting its head inquisitively. It’d died a fledgling Latchkey operative, but it’d died a little kid first. It didn’t attack her. It didn’t try to empty her out onto the floor. It seemed to like the look of her knife, and it made a grab for it.
It didn’t move with the same ridiculous speed as Foster or the nameless ghost, or Salazar for that matter. Its development hadn’t made it that far. If it had been, Isabel wouldn’t’ve so much as seen it move before it had hold of the harvesting-knife with one hand and probably broken her neck with the other. As it was, she was running on pure reflex when she jumped back and slashed out, more warning than intent.
And the child-ghost’s hand closed around the blade, and Isabel was ripped from reality like a patch from a quilt. And into—
* * *
Isabel was in a room she’d seen before: the wide open space where she’d seen Foster and Salazar sparring, as children, in Foster’s memories. But now it looked different. Gone were the racks of wooden swords, the bins of padded gear that even Isabel knew would make no difference if those operatives swung at each other with anything more than minimal effort. Even the walls were bare and gray, not yet painted brilliant white and padded for impact. The floor matched them.
The gray room was packed with children. None younger than five or six, none older than maybe eight. They looked tired and grimy, some visibly injured with the kinds of wounds Isabel had seen on people pulled from broken buildings in Sweetwater’s earthquake a few days ago.
Most of the kids didn’t look too happy to be there, though there were some who’d formed up into little groups to chase each other around the room, shrieking, weaving between the ones miserably slumped on the floor.
A wash of sound. Half plaintive despair, half oblivious joy.
A little team of adults had split up and fanned out among the children, squatting down before each one in turn, checking the little cards pinned to the children’s shirts, writing on a kind of handheld light-up panel with a pen-like thing.
One of them, a tall woman in a blue skirt, clipped across the floor in crisp-sounding shoes and stopped before a little boy leaning against a wall, hugging himself and staring at his feet. He had the same wavy orangey-brown hair as the child-ghost in the tunnels, before it had turned silver. He was about the same height, too. No uniform though. No uniforms on any of them. Not even the jumpsuits they’d been given in the early stages of the project. All their clothes were mismatched and filthy, like they’d just returned from a long march through the Waste.
“Let’s see here,” the woman said, and glanced at the tag on the boy’s shirt, then at the panel in her hand. Nodded. Jotted something on the panel. Smiled. Too many teeth in that smile for Isabel to trust. The boy looked like he’d probably agree. “Good morning, Zachary,” she said.
Over the smile, the woman’s eyes were calculating. They didn’t look as tired as they had when Isabel had seen her before, in other memories, in which the operatives had addressed her as Director. Here she looked confident, optimistic, but with a strange grim determination behind it, like she was preparing to break a whole lot of eggs to make a very small omelet. It put Isabel in mind of upstarts drawing straws on the eve of the Archivist-choosing day. Four percent survival rate, she thought, and looked across this sea of children, and swallowed.
The Director was strafing her gaze back and forth over the boy like she was capturing and indexing his every movement, mannerism, expression. Field notes, Isabel thought. She stood for a full half-minute apparently just to watch him fidget. Once every few seconds she’d write something else on her screen but said nothing.
Eventually she seemed to decide enough time had passed.
“I like your shirt,” she told the boy, in a voice so gentle it made Isabel’s skin crawl. Seemed to be counting seconds of ensuing silence. Another flurry of notes when he didn’t reply. Then she raised the pen and made with it a kind of elegant sweeping gesture from her blue skirt to the boy’s shirt, also blue, though his was smudged and torn, mostly gray now and a kind of muddy brown. A different blue, anyway, to begin with. “See? We match.”
There was another pause, filled with joyous screeching in the background. If the adults’ attitude reminded Isabel of upstarts, some of these kids reminded her of rejected shrine-dog puppies, bundled into a sack with rocks and pitched into the lake. They’d keep on thinking it was the best game ever until the moment the water closed over their heads.
The boy didn’t seem to want to meet the Director’s eyes. Isabel couldn’t blame him. “I’m thirsty.”
The smile, if anything, brightened. The Director made a note on the device. “Of course you are! You have had yourself quite a week. All of you boys and girls here have been very, very brave.” She glanced up from the screen, tried to catch the boy’s eye, but he was having none of it. “Now. I have just a few quick questions for you and then when we are finished I will personally not rest until I have found you a cup of juice. Deal?”
His eyes darted up at her, then away. Brown. Before they’d been full of blood they’d been brown.
“Easy questions?”
“Would you like them to be?”
The boy nodded at his shoes. The Director noted that too.
“Orange juice?”
She beamed. “You know it.”
“I don’t like apple juice,” he mumbled.
“Tell you a secret,” the D
irector said, leaning in conspiratorially. “Neither do I.”
* * *
Isabel came to, lying on her back, staring up at a shadowy ceiling beaded with condensation, gasping like she’d been kneed in the chest. Damp floor, soupy gloom, smelled like an old shoe left lying in a pond. The harvesting-knife lay a little ways away, as if it’d been kicked and clattered to rest across the tile. Ghost blood, like silver honey, still clung to the jagged point.
Sairy was leaning over her, staring into her face like the simple fact of Isabel blinking up at her was a hand-delivered gift from the Chooser Herself.
“What the shit,” Sairy said, whole voice and face and person tight with alarm, “was that?”
Of course. Sairy’d never seen her read a ghost’s memories before. No living person ever had.
She couldn’t’ve been gone for more than a few seconds, but that was a few seconds too much. A quick glance revealed that the child-ghost seemed to have lost interest in her and her knife and had reverted to humming that lullaby to itself, fidgeting with its sleeves like any bored, nervous kid.
“Too damn close,” Isabel said, “is what it was.”
“You weren’t moving,” Sairy shouted at her. Down came her fist on Isabel’s shoulder. “You were all flickery. Like a mirage or something.”
“Ow. Sairy—” Then it hit her. “Wait. What? I was—”
“You were. Disappearing. And coming back. And disappearing again.” Sairy slumped, deflated. Then she punched Isabel again, like she was trying to reassure herself of her solidity. “You looked like a ghost!”
Painfully, Isabel levered herself up to standing, picked up the harvesting-knife, and slashed the thread. It scattered into glowing ash and the child-ghost collapsed, immediately and utterly, like a stomped sandcastle. It toppled over and lay there motionless, rapidly silvering. The place where Isabel had fused its neck back together began to liquefy and separate, its head listing sideways on melty strings of silver goo.
Sairy was staring in horrified fascination. Isabel had seen enough.
“Come on,” she said brusquely. Shaken and trying to hide it. This was all very, very strange.
Everything—the tunnels, the child-ghost, the healing device, Salazar, the lullaby, the map, the ghostgrass, the thread—was in pieces, sliding past each other in Isabel’s mind, glancing off, trying to connect into some kind of meaningful whole. They would fit together, she was almost sure of it. She just had to figure out which way round to turn them.
All at once the story came flooding back to her. The one the upstarts learned first. The origin story of the harvesting-knife.
Catchkeep fought the Chooser for dominion over the land of the dead and won, sort of, but the last star was knocked loose from the tip of Her tail and fell, and the first Catchkeep-priest found it in a ruin deep underground, and gave it to the first Archivist, who realized that it could…
The harvesting-knife. Foster’s sword. A ruin deep underground. Where not one but now at least two Latchkey ghosts remained. At the bottom of all the lies, at the heart of a system built on lies, at least some small part of at least one small story was true.
Isabel realized she’d been spending this whole time rejecting the obvious.
She knew exactly where she was.
These places she’d seen three years ago in the ghost’s memories, and in Foster’s—they’d been right beneath her feet this whole time. No wonder the ghost had come after so many Archivists, unsuccessfully seeking their help in his search for Foster, before he’d found her. In part because the Archivists’ particular skillset had rightly seemed useful, of course, but also simply that the ghost had been here first.
But ghosts didn’t—usually—stay where they died. What were these ones doing here?
All she could think was: there’d been a dozen Latchkey operatives. Foster and the ghost had gotten free of this place, but that still leaves ten.
Chapter Ten
Not a minute’s walk farther down the tunnels, Isabel started feeling seriously wrong. She was queasy. Dizzy. Couldn’t tell if she was too hot or too cold. There was a pain where her thread had been, like a long thin needle being delicately bored into her chest. She didn’t have much in her to puke but her guts seemed to be pretty enthused about giving it a try all the same. It felt like opening her eyes after spinning in circles with them shut, except all she’d been doing was walking down a hallway in a straight line.
She stopped, knuckling at her eyes like that would fix anything. Took her hands away and the view of the tunnels before her was somehow melting into, interleaving with, the view of someplace else. Someplace definitely not the tunnels. The sensation came to her again of being pressed through or shuffled into something just beyond the reach of her mind to perceive. Like the skin of the world was being abraded. Like a friction burn to the brain.
Too afraid to ask Sairy if she saw it, because she knew what the answer would be. So she soldiered forward a few more steps and doubled over in startled pain as the ghostgrass wards on her wrists and ankles began to sear like oil burns. She could almost hear her skin cooking.
But no. That didn’t make any sense. It was this place getting to her, it was—
Frantically, she started listing stars in her head. She’d gotten as far as the Broken Trap and the Spool before she realized she could list every star whose name she knew and it still wasn’t going to do so much as take the edge off this level of weirdness.
At her side, the harvesting-knife chose that moment to begin twitching hard. It was really going berserk this time, acting up worse than it had in years. It reminded her of when it’d kept vanishing unaccountably from its sheath in the ghost-place, and she now held it tightly in place so it couldn’t pull that trick again. She was taken by a sudden urge to look behind her.
She resisted. Holy or not, ancient or not, weird or not, a knife couldn’t tell her what to do. If she turned around, obeying that compulsion, she’d be beginning a long slide down a slippery slope to nowhere good.
Don’t, she thought at herself, don’t you dare, and turned.
Nothing.
Shut up, she thought at the harvesting-knife, glancing down, shut up shut up—and there, stuck to the front of the Archivist-coat, was the thread.
It was frailer than before. Frailer even than the child-ghost’s. It blinked in and out of existence, nearly invisible. Sick with dread, she tried to draw it into focus—
—and she wasn’t standing on the tile floor of the tunnel, she was standing on nothingness, hovering a few inches above something roiling and swift and black as tar. Desperate, Isabel yanked her gaze back up. Kept it locked on Sairy’s silhouette, toiling through the lamp-lit dark beyond. Oblivious of the walls curving back on themselves, the hallway tunneling to a point, a slowly spinning vortex which they’d soon reach and be sucked down and lost—
It’s in my head. It’s in my head. It’s in my head.
She tottered forward one step, another. Almost caught off-balance when her foot struck tile exactly as that out-shouted, rational part of her had known she would all along.
See? It’s—
She made the mistake of blinking. When her eyes reopened, the darkness ahead was wavering violently, like heat-mirage, like migraine. Blurring and sharpening, exchanging focus with—she squinted—something else, also dark, also shifting, but differently, somehow. She struggled to focus on the darkness and shifting that she knew. Push it back into the shape of a crappy dank tunnel. Slot herself back into that picture. Stitch the patch back into the quilt.
But she’d slipped through once already. Fallen on ice that wasn’t there. Stared up at the buildings of a city that’d either never existed or long since fallen. Whatever this rip in the fabric of the tunnels signified, it’d already proven itself wide enough to receive her.
Staggering on, trying not to alert Sairy and freak her out worse than she was already, dragging her feet like the mud was over her ankles. Exactly the way the floor had clung to the child-gh
ost’s feet as it’d stutter-walked up to her, half here, half not.
She wished she hadn’t thought of that.
It’s in my head, she told herself, and took a few more steps and went down. Unsure what she tripped over, only that her foot snagged and dropped her, arms out in front, with the sick bleary helpless knowledge that she’d go through the floor, through and on into—
She landed on tile. Even dizzier now, her vision reduced to pure migraine aura with one clean spot in the center like a hurricane’s eye. Everything around it swirled but through that hole she could see both places clearly, interleaved, seething over each other like maggots in a ball.
She tried to call out for Sairy, but her voice had cut out on her. Whatever noise came out of her instead, though, was enough to get Sairy’s attention. As if in slow-motion, as if from miles away, Isabel saw her turn, her mouth falling open even as she began to sprint back toward Isabel, holding a bundle of ghostgrass high up and back like it was a club she was going to beat Isabel with.
“Stay back!” Isabel tried to call to her, but Sairy didn’t seem to notice what was wrong with the floor. Her eyes were fixed on something above and behind Isabel’s head.
Her curiosity momentarily overriding her horror, Isabel tried to turn around. See what Sairy was seeing. But as she did, her focus shifted, and the not-tunnels place was brought into piercing focus.
Oh, she said to herself. It’s a river.
And then she fell in.
* * *
Isabel splashed and spat, kicked and flailed. Water shot up her nose and washed down the back of her throat. Felt like swallowing needles. Choked and hacked and got another mouthful. Labored to stay afloat, fought herself against fighting the current. Bobbed up, was whisked around, stabilized. Breathed. Breathed. Realized her body had locked in that position, head flung back, arms flung wide. Breathed. Couldn’t move. Breathed—and the river ducked her for a six-count, popped her back up like a cork. Arms still frozen. Legs still dead. All her panic on the inside. Retched. Black water, thin and murky, like diluted ink, like bile.
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