Foster slid her right foot another couple millimeters and settled on it, beginning a long slow exhale. She stood easily, relaxed and still, her breath her only movement. Isabel had seen Foster fight before. Recognized the signs of imminent detonation. The calm before the storm.
“I don’t want to hurt you,” Foster replied, just as evenly. “Don’t be like this. We had a deal.”
Isabel wasn’t sure she heard that right.
Deal? What deal? What could possibly be worth this?
“Move,” said the ghost. “Or I will go through you.”
“I thought they were friends,” Sairy whispered. “They’re going to kill each other if we don’t do something.”
But do what? Their code was unlike anything that Isabel had ever dealt with or had any idea how to deal with. It’d be like trying to negotiate an accord between two warring shrine-dogs, or storms, or stars. Or, thought Isabel, the stories bubbling up in her again, useless as a drink while drowning, like Carrion Boy and Ember Girl.
“He’s one of us,” Foster was saying. “Like Salazar is one of us. That little kid you executed, you idiot, is one of us. I am trying to do for them what you did for me. If I’m going to lose all my memories anyway, I need some of those memories to be of things I actually did right. Or there’s no—goddamn—point.”
Something in the ghost’s expression snagged and was forcibly smoothed, and that more than anything told Isabel that they were running out of time to settle this—whatever it was—nicely. Not for the first time, she wondered how they’d survived each other’s presence long enough to die older than her.
The ghost didn’t move. Neither did Foster. They stood, sizing each other up, gauging distance, strategizing. Isabel knew that behind the blank intention of their faces the machines of their brains were on overdrive, each of them visualizing the coming fight branching out like a tree in all the possible permutations of strikes and blocks and dodges, disarmings, throws and recoveries, clinches and breaks. Each calculating a sequence of events leading to a desired outcome. Projecting damages. Compromising risk with benefit. They were, right now, easily twenty steps ahead of anything Isabel could begin to guess at.
“We have to get out of here,” she yelled up at them. “We’re feeding him. You two standing there having your incomprehensible little pissing contest, you are feeding this ghost literally everything we don’t want him to have.”
“So get him out of here,” Foster yelled back, gesturing with a wrench of her head toward the ghost. “I’m doing this. I have to do this. He’s—”
The light surrounding Ayres gave a single hard pulse and blew a layer of bricks out of the wall ten feet to either side. Chunks of rubble pattered around the ghosts’ boots. Neither so much as blinked. They’d reached a place where Ayres was going to have to wreak a lot more havoc than that to break their focus.
“Do you need to be reminded what happened when Salazar got loose?” the ghost said. “I’m not leaving this thing walking.”
“If he was hostile he’d be attacking,” Foster shouted. “He’s confused. Like Salazar was confused. And Salazar’s been secured, she’s—”
“And who secured it?” the ghost shouted back. “I’m not putting her at risk again.”
There was one merciful split-second in which Foster was actually taken aback. Then she swung the blistering force of her attention onto Isabel. It felt like staring directly into the sun and Isabel willed herself not to look away.
It took Isabel a second to realize the ghost didn’t mean Salazar. “Wait,” she said. “What? Don’t put this on me.”
“It’s already on you,” the ghost said. “This thing is our responsibility. Like Salazar was our responsibility. You could have been killed. If you think I’m going to just stand by and watch that happen—”
“We’re not in the ghost-place anymore, okay?” she said. Harsher than she intended. Like her voice was a barricade, pushing him away. Whatever this was, whatever he was doing, she didn’t begin to deserve it. “I helped you, I got you back to Foster, and it’s done. It’s over. You don’t need to have my back anymore, and you sure as hell don’t owe me.”
The ghost straightened. His stare was unfathomable.
“Look,” she said. Why couldn’t she shut up? She wanted to shut up. Instead she jammed her shaking hands into her pockets and listened to the words spill out of her, hating herself. “You just pulled me out of the ghost-place river like an hour ago. Okay? We’re even.”
“You actually think,” he said at last, “that what this is about is me owing you?”
There was a pause in which Isabel had no idea what to say. She didn’t want to say anything. She wanted to drop into the floor again. In her pockets, her hands balled into fists. One of them brushed against something smooth.
Ayres threw another blare of light, stripping another layer of moldy brick off the wall.
The dripping from the ceiling noticeably quickened.
And Isabel realized what the smooth thing in her pocket was. The orange plastic bottle Sairy had found clearing the tunnels.
“I can capture him,” she said. “But Foster, I’m going to need your help.”
“I’m listening,” Foster said.
“How?” Sairy asked. “I used up the ghostcatching kit stuff back with Salazar.”
Isabel fished the orange plastic bottle out of her pocket and held it up for all to see. “We’re going to shrink him down and put him in here. Temporarily. Just to keep him from dropping the ceiling on us for now. But to do that I need your help. All of you.” She lifted her chin at the ghost. “You keep him still. Sairy, you stand back. Keep the ghostgrass ready. He’s probably not going to like this.”
“Did I miss something?” Sairy asked. “Or did you skip right over the part where you say how we’re going to shrink him?”
“I’m getting to that. Foster, you’re going to link up a thread to him, like you planned. But—” holding up a silencing hand toward the ghost— “instead of feeding him more power, I want you to use the thread to try to draw some of his extra ghost-energy out. Like you did when you regulated Salazar. But I want you to keep pulling it out until he’s small enough to put in here. That way he won’t break anything or hurt anyone—” she raised her eyebrows at the ghost pointedly— “and then later we’ll take him back to where the little rooms are and I’ll help you put him in one myself.”
Foster gave Ayres one last once-over and holstered her gun. Then, not dropping the sword or taking her eyes off the ghost, she reached down blind with her off-hand and pulled out the first few inches of a new thread. It glimmered faintly as she stretched it out. Then she stopped, pinching the thread thumb-and-forefinger and squinting at it doubtfully. “You’ve seen this work before?”
“Not exactly. But weakened ghosts shrink, if they’re not in the ghost-place. That’s how Archivists get them in jars. And I’m pretty sure if you can strengthen him, you can do the opposite.”
Nobody said anything. Isabel’s exasperated gesture encompassed Foster and the ghost and their whole ridiculous standoff. “I can promise at least it’s a better idea than whatever the hell this is.”
Foster opened her mouth to protest, then shut it. Isabel had her and knew it. Before and beneath all of Foster’s anger and frustration remained the deep-rooted, ice-pure, chase-the-Chooser’s-cape desire to see what would happen.
“Okay,” she said. “Let’s do it.”
Then—incredibly—Foster sheathed her sword. Another pause and the ghost followed suit. It was a formality, a gesture, a joke. If they got it into their heads to pound each other into a fine silver mist, they’d do it armed or no, and the best she’d be able to do is get out of the way.
“So, what,” Sairy was whispering to Isabel. “Just like that they’re friends again?”
“Let’s just take what we can get, okay?” Isabel replied. To Sairy’s unasked next question she said: “And yeah. They’re usually like this.”
* * *
&nbs
p; Foster got the thread in one hand and pinned Ayres’s shoulder in the other. Readying for placement, she looked like a parent preparing to pull a scorchweed splinter from a child’s foot. Sairy and the ghost flanked Ayres and stood by with ghostgrass and sword at the ready, respectively. Isabel wrestled open the bottle and slowly approached.
Ayres seemed to have stabilized, thank the Chooser. Without further provocation, the initial jolt of energy that Ayres’s name had given him was wearing off. The walls had stopped shaking, and the chattering of Isabel’s teeth slowed in the wake of diminishing aftershocks. Which was a wink of the Chooser’s good eye, as there was already lakewater dripping into Isabel’s hair.
Close up, that flickering ghost-light was giving Sairy a better look at Ayres than she probably wanted. She shuddered a little. “What the hell happened to these people?” she hissed at Isabel.
You don’t want to know, Isabel thought. “Eyes in front. Stay clear of his reach.”
“Don’t need to tell me twice,” Sairy muttered.
Light was rippling down the back of Ayres’s coat in wavelets, rousing and settling like a bird fluffing its feathers in the rain. His hands hung at his sides, ungloved, with the same oozing nail beds and calcified ridges of scar tissue as on Salazar’s, and his face didn’t look much better. Whatever had gotten Salazar had gotten him too, though he looked to have burned out faster in its grip. Less evidence of successive rounds of strategic damage and regrowth, like a tree being pruned. He had the marks of the sickness, though, the slack gray skin and the weeping sores, blood crusted in tracks down both cheeks from the eyes, down the neck from the ears, down the front from the nose.
“Just one…more…second…” Foster was saying. “There.”
A shudder racked Ayres as the thread connected. His light began to tremble like a stomped puddle, followed by a faint, almost-metallic thrumming as the energy siphon took hold.
“Okay,” Foster said. “Here we go.” As she had back in the child-ghost’s room, she shut her eyes, and the thread began to glow. Dark light bled down the length of it from Ayres to Foster, flaring and quenching, slow and sure. After a moment, Ayres’s light began to fade.
“Stay back,” Isabel told Sairy needlessly, and they all stood and watched as Ayres’ ghost-energy weakened from mostly black down through violet and blue to gray, finally bottoming out somewhere between tarnished silver and dirty white. Rounds of fat sparks went sizzling down his shoulders and arms, which shrank gradually and vanished up the thread.
It was working. It was actually working. She’d seen ghosts weakened before, of course, but not like this. The Wasp in Isabel had dragged her forward one step, then another, before she realized what she was doing and started backpedaling.
Too late. Weakened or no, Ayres’s head snapped up, and he stared straight at Isabel. Not past her down the long drop of the vanished years. At her. Despite herself, she froze.
No reaction from Ayres when Sairy or the ghost had neared, no reaction when Foster had taken hold of his shoulder—but as Isabel approached she realized he was muttering something over and over. Had he been doing that before? Had she somehow not noticed?
Regardless, she knew what she was witnessing. The moment a ghost couldn’t move past. The moment it snagged on, like a sleeve on a thorn, and stuck. Ayres’s version of Salazar’s why isn’t it killing you?
But he was looking Isabel dead in the eye like he knew she could hear him.
“I got this,” he was saying. “I got this.”
Sairy narrowed her eyes. “What’s it saying?”
Isabel shook her head at Sairy: hush.
“Wasp,” the ghost said warningly.
“Back off, Foster,” Ayres was saying. “It’s okay, I said I got this.”
Foster’s eyes went wide. “The hell did he—”
But Ayres wasn’t looking at Foster. Ayres was looking at Isabel.
“I got this,” Ayres repeated, and flickered, the way the ghost had done three years ago on the ledge of Execution Hill, guttering like a candle-flame in a drafty room. Balancing on the knife-edge of a memory, teetering back and forth between that world and this.
With that, Foster wasn’t holding onto Ayres anymore. He’d stepped free of her like she wasn’t there at all. Automatically, Isabel drew the harvesting-knife.
“I got this,” he told her.
Oh, she was going to regret this in short order.
“Got what?” she said.
Faster than she could react to, Ayres reached up. Put his hand on her face to give her a shove that would have launched her straight off the ground and sent her flying to smash against the far wall.
And the ghost reached the abrupt end of his patience. Before Isabel had so much as seen him move, his sword had gone through Ayres below the collarbone, pinning him to the wall.
Before all that, though, Isabel’s reflexes flung her knife-hand up to block Ayres’s grab. A split-second in which the knife slashed through Ayres’s sleeve and found the arm beneath.
As always, a split-second was all it took.
* * *
Isabel was in a city.
It wasn’t a city like the kind she’d heard about from songkeepers or Waste-walker scavengers like Cora whose rounds brought them to Sweetwater every few weeks for trade. Cities like Grayfall, away to the south, where the cliffs dropped away into a shield-wall at its back. Or Refuge, to the northwest, a month’s slog from Sweetwater and to all accounts worth every step.
Isabel had never set foot in either. Even so she knew that those cities, trade-rich and grand as they were, were to this one as a puddle of mud was to the lake that had lent her own town its name.
Strange to think that she’d spent more time in this fallen city than in any that still stood. Even if she’d only been here in the memories of the dead.
It was exactly as she remembered. The same tall buildings, the same straight wide streets. Everything made of materials no longer in use in Isabel’s time, unless when scavenged and repurposed in what small fragments remained. So much metal, so much glass. She was standing under a building now, a building that easily weighed as much as every building in Sweetwater combined, but raised up on sturdy pillars, with the streets running uninterrupted beneath. It hulked over her like some gigantic animal. She was tiny in the shadow of its underbelly.
The streets themselves were a mess. Torn up in massive jagged chunks. Littered with glass blown out of windows. Pocked with bullet-holes. Bloodstained. Half-blocked with vehicles that had flipped, all in a row, as if the street had been yanked out from under them like a rug.
Ayres was there, and Foster, and the ghost. Another operative whose name Isabel didn’t know, a girl with skin the same shade of brown as Isabel’s, but a ponytail so black the light shone off it blue. Isabel didn’t know her name, but knew that Latchkey paired its operatives, and guessed this one to be Ayres’s partner. Or, she thought, the one they’d partnered him with when both of their original partners had died.
All around fifteen or sixteen years old. Isabel had seen enough dead operatives to suspect that these, at the time of this memory, might be the only four left alive.
They were in the process of clearing the main road for something, moving those flipped vehicles down side-streets. By hand. Isabel was well acquainted with the ghost’s absurd strength, and Foster’s, but that didn’t quite prepare her for the sight of teenage kids pushing these huge hunks of metal hard enough to send them skidding down the alleys, or picking them up and tossing them like snowballs.
Stories had taught Isabel that in the Before, people had machines to do things for them. She realized that these four kids must have been chosen to clear this road because they could do it faster.
On either side of the street flanking the operatives, rows of uniformed men and women—not operatives but other soldiers, as Isabel had seen before—stood with guns at the ready. Waiting to provide cover fire for the operatives, shielding them from something they obviously were expecting t
o come down those streets. The operatives would clear a stretch of road, and then the uniformed soldiers and the four operatives would move together down to the next part to be cleared. While the operatives were working, the soldiers stood stock-still, waiting with the patience of stones, in a sleety downpour.
They made their way down the street like that, toward that weird raised building and Isabel underneath. Whatever they were clearing ground for, they were doing it in a hurry.
Then it came.
Way up the street, glinting in the rain, Isabel had only the vaguest impression of some kind of massive vehicle, itself the size of any six of the vehicles the operatives were tossing like wadded trash. But this one was floating maybe half a foot above the rubble of the street, all the unguessable pounds of it, gliding on a gently glowing cushion of blue light.
More of that light pooled and swirled in the open barrels of the thing’s three massive guns, pits of blue light each the diameter of a catchment barrel.
Almost as soon as the vehicle appeared, something started falling from the sky, hailing down in long arcs from the far end of the street. Aiming, Isabel thought, for the vehicle, but not making it that far. Landing instead among the operatives. Maybe it wasn’t the vehicle they were aiming for at all.
Isabel didn’t know what was falling. Only that it landed on the street in a peppering of metallic pings and began to glow, like dozens of fist-sized fireflies lying in perfect stillness on the rubble, cheeping softly.
The operatives were picking them up as soon as they landed. Catching them in mid-flight when they could. Pitching them back down the street with throwing-arms like cannons firing. When the things started glowing, everyone froze involuntarily, fear taking over for a second before their directive kicked back in.
“Shit,” Ayres whispered.
“Oh no,” said his partner.
“Five!” the ghost shouted, and all four operatives started throwing faster.
The uniformed soldiers were looking down at the glowing things with immense dread, but they held the line. A few splintered off to help with the effort. Several looked like they’d rather just run.
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