Latchkey

by Nicole Kornher-Stace

  Sairy had fallen asleep.

  * * *

  Satisfied that Sairy was only asleep and not unconscious or worse, Isabel finally let herself sit down. Stationing herself near Sairy, she began the tedious process of kneading out her leg. Back braced against the wall, staring at the floor in silence, rooting her fingers into those old knots of scar tissue like she was trying to dig a hole to nowhere.

  Focusing all her attention on the pain, because it helped distract her from the lightheaded nearly-puking awfulness that was worsening the longer she lingered in the tunnels. At least she hadn’t dropped into the ghost-place again, though the threat of it remained: lurking in the dizziness and nausea, the burn of the ghostgrass on her skin, the hum of the harvesting-knife, tiny and low and just there enough to notice.

  Twice now she’d already passed through the ghost-place, or the ghost-place through her. The contrast between that world and the living one was not, for her, as high as it once was. She didn’t reckon it’d get any better from here.

  This was all easier when—

  But if there was one lesson the past three years had hammered into her head, it was that easier and less complicated did not always equal better.

  As if on cue, the ghost approached. Stopped before her. “May I?”

  Isabel kept her eyes on the floor. “I own this place now?”

  The ghost sat beside her, barely stirring the dust. Even now, even on the periphery of her vision, the inhuman quality of his movement was mesmerizing, so alike and yet so different from Foster’s. Foster embracing her power, explosive and expansive, and the ghost with his on lockdown, like one wrong move and it’d either tear him, or everything else around him, into shrapnel.

  There was something he was very pointedly not saying.

  Isabel didn’t have the mental energy or inclination to probe this. All her worry right now was being spent wholesale on Sairy. She wasn’t even angry anymore, or at least her anger had been bodily shoved into the box in the back of her mind where it’d lived for three years.

  “About Foster,” the ghost said, and paused, gathering either his words or the resolve to say them. Finally he spoke.

  “Her memories. We…after we got her out of that place,” spitting the word like poison, “I thought they’d…”

  “All come running back to her?” Isabel said. Already knowing the answer. The one thing she thought she’d truly succeeded at had finally found a way to go wrong. Of course it had.

  The ghost looked like he desperately needed to break something into a million pieces. “I was mistaken.”

  “This is what you wanted to talk to me about,” she said. “Back by the room with the child-ghost.”

  Silence.

  “There’s nothing you can—”

  “No.”

  “Do you have any idea what’s—”

  “No.”

  “Shit.” Isabel let her head fall back against the wall. “That’s…shit.”

  All they’d been through to find her, and for what? For Foster to lose everything—the ferocious compassion, the burning loyalty, the cocky chase-the-Chooser’s-cape attitude—that defined her? What did that leave? Meat, like any corpse. Or the faceless, mindless ghost equivalent that stood in place of death for what could no longer die.

  As Archivist she could easily pick out them out, the ghosts who’d forgotten that much of themselves. Their faces would fade. All the colors of their clothes and hair and eyes and skin began to melt back to silver. At last they’d revert to shapes like paper cutouts, empty eyeholes in a silver mask, mouth agape, nothing inside. Formless blurs of light and rage and sorrow. And as Archivist she’d destroy those too-far-gone ghosts on sight. Put them down like Waste-crazed shrine-dogs. Before they got somebody hurt.

  All too well she remembered the improbable strength of this ghost when he’d fought her up on Execution Hill the day her life had been turned inside out. He’d been powerful, and confused, but still under control, more so than any specimen she’d encountered before or since. What would happen to Foster’s ghost when she, starting out from the same place of strength but without that icy calm to temper it, came untethered?

  When Isabel tried to picture it, her mind fixated on one image from the songkeeper’s picture-book. Ember Girl burns the world to ash.

  “Well,” she said slowly. Thinking of those ghosts weakened just shy of silver oblivion. Their minds like patterned fabric sun-bleaching to white. “She still seems like herself. She hasn’t lost that. Just her memories.”

  “Just her memories,” the ghost echoed, with such bitterness that Isabel relented.

  “Okay, okay. Bad choice of words. But you know what I mean. She remembers you. She remembers me. She remembers the Latchkey ghosts.”

  The flip side of this last part, though, was: Does she? This is Foster you’re talking about. Someone who got herself killed putting her ass on the line trying to save people she didn’t know and had no personal reason to care whether they lived or died. What makes you think she’s doing anything different now? She didn’t even remember Salazar’s name.

  The ghost nodded impatiently. “There seems to be a cutoff point. Things that happened to her after we found her, she remembers. Everything before that? An almost perfect blank. Bits and pieces. Nothing solid. No continuity.” He paused. He looked like he was working up to saying something it was going to cost his pride to admit. “Worse than mine,” he said, and paused again. “Don’t misunderstand. I’m not blaming you. Far from it. You went above and beyond, and I’m indebted.”

  “Slag that. Did you not hear me before? You. Do not. Owe me.”

  “That isn’t what I meant.”

  “Then what—”

  “I’ve been telling her all the things I still know,” he said, ignoring this. “About Latchkey. What I have left of it anyway. About you, and how we found her. But she doesn’t remember any of that. It’s like I’m telling her stories. Like I’m handing her things she doesn’t recognize.” He gestured vaguely and lapsed into fuming silence.

  “You tell her how you couldn’t find her without me?” Isabel said, because she had to say something stupid or it was all too much, it would knock her over and sweep her away. Her voice was doing something weird, she couldn’t modulate her tone for crap, it kept swooping and sinking and she couldn’t hold it still. She was desperate to pick a fight with him and she had no idea why. “Or did you cleverly leave that part out?”

  The ghost fixed her with the same even look she remembered, the look that came out when most people’s tempers would, and it was like a spike being hammered in where the thread in her chest used to be. “I think that was her favorite part of the story,” he said, deadpan, and Isabel laughed, though it felt like broken glass in her throat. What was it called when what you were homesick for wasn’t a place? Whatever it was, for the first time in years it was gone.

  “But it’s been a long time,” the ghost went on, “and I’ve forgotten more than I recall, as you’re aware. The emptiness of that place, it—” here he gestured, one gloved hand drawing something unseen from the other— “it pulls on you. You lose so much. You can’t let yourself forget.”

  Oh, she knew. She remembered overhearing the ghost reciting to himself the story of the moment when Foster began to be lost to him. There was a hostage. A child. Foster’s orders were to take him to the rendezvous point for extraction, where he’d be—

  “I need you to promise me something.”

  Isabel had a pretty good idea where this was going. She shook her head. “Not happening.”

  “When it’s your time down there. If you see us. If we’re—if we’re past saving. If we’ve lost too much to get back. I need you to end us.”

  Past saving. Isabel knew what that meant. Unlike in the living world, it was hard to totally destroy a ghost in the ghost-place. A ghost’s only strength and currency was its memories, and the ghost-place was constructed of memories. Down there, you could cut a ghost into pieces and the pieces wou
ld keep moving toward wherever it had to be. Or thought it had to be. The two didn’t always overlap.

  But the longer a ghost remained in the ghost-place, the more it forgot. Almost like the very landscape of the place was siphoning memories through unseen threads from those who wandered it, draining them to silvery nothing. Reclaiming its faded ghosts the way a forest will reabsorb its rotten trees.

  If Foster’d already forgotten her whole life, and the ghost wasn’t far behind, how much time did they realistically have left before the ghost-place got the better of them?

  “Did you not hear me say no?”

  “Foster agrees that it would be for the—”

  “Look, I knew what you were going to ask, all right? And the answer is I’m not doing it. I can’t do that any more than—” she hesitated, briefly— “than you could kill Foster when she asked you to.”

  The ghost went very, very still, and she felt filthy for bringing it up, for using that memory as a lever to turn the argument around. But he needed to understand what he was asking of her, and she didn’t know how else to say it.

  “There’s another way. There has to be.” Did there, though? Since when was she so blindly optimistic?

  The ghost’s light flared up, darkening, as his control briefly faltered. Then just as quickly faded, and his demeanor was back to its usual guarded, serene hauteur. Like flipping a switch. Like dropping a rock into a lake. “And what would that be?” he asked her, every syllable cut with slow precision. “Please. Tell me. You know what it’s like down there. It scrapes away at you. It doesn’t give anything back.”

  How weird it was, being caretaker of someone else’s memories. Being the only one able to access them. The only one who even knew they existed anymore. The gatekeeper and arbiter of someone else’s knowledge of their own mind.

  If she died down here, in a way, these ghosts would die with her. Risking herself was risking them all. Like she was carrying them above her head as she struggled through swift water up to her mouth. If she lost her footing it wouldn’t be just her who was swept away.

  “I can’t deal with this right now. Okay? Sairy’s all messed up, Foster’s gone off Chooser-knows-where, my town is under attack, and I haven’t really slept in days. What were you and Foster fighting about just now anyway? Not sure what’s so important that in the middle of all this you think it’s—”

  The ghost reached into a pocket of his jacket and pulled out a healing device.

  For a split second, Isabel’s breath caught in her throat. But she knew better.

  “Yeah, you’re every bit as funny as I remember,” she said. “It’s broken.”

  The ghost held the device lightly, thumb-and-forefinger. Over it, he watched her levelly. Treating her to that long slow appraising stare that made her want to throw things at his head. “Is it?”

  For one second she was afraid he’d actually forgotten. But no. She knew that tone. That look. He might not remember everything, but he sure as hell remembered that. Well, his sense of humor had always been a little…odd.

  “We’re seriously doing this. You’re seriously going to pretend you don’t remember using it up healing me before.”

  “Did I?”

  From edge to edge of the Waste, Isabel was certain, there was nobody alive who could rile her like this dead thing could. She had to shove both hands into her coat-pockets or she was going to punch him. There was nothing for it but that she was going to bust her fist open on the unassailable unendurable calm of his face, frostbite and vertigo and puking be damned.

  Even though, deep down, if she was truly, finally honest, she was only angry at herself.

  “Don’t. Just…whatever you’re doing? Whatever this is? Stop.”

  But the ghost had pressed the black film on the side of the cylinder, and it was now beeping softly. Lighting up.

  “Fine,” he said. Shut the device off and pocketed it. “I am willing to accept I misjudged your priorities.”

  It was a moment before Isabel found her words.

  “That one’s Foster’s,” she said.

  “It is.”

  “She didn’t use it up when she healed me before.”

  “She did not.”

  “That’s what you were arguing about.”

  Silence.

  Isabel swallowed. Thinking about Sairy, of course. But about something else too. “How much—”

  “Enough to finish what we started.”

  “Is that an answer?”

  “We healed you, the damage was worse than our hasty field estimate suggested, we didn’t finish the job at the time. An oversight we can now correct.” A delicate pause. Then, all studied mildness: “If that is what you choose.”

  “Choose.”

  Easy enough for her to translate the silence that followed.

  “It doesn’t have enough power left for both of us. Does it. Sairy’s hand. My—” she gestured down at herself like she was flicking something away— “everything the ghost-place did to me.”

  “Foster is of the opinion that the remaining power would be best spent on your subordinate.”

  “Then that’s where she should use it.”

  “It isn’t Foster’s anymore. It’s mine.” The barest sketch of a shrug. “And your subordinate isn’t really my concern.”

  Isabel steeled herself against horrible temptation. She never in a million years would’ve imagined she’d be faced with this choice. Never in a million years would’ve guessed she’d be in a position to turn it down.

  “Use it on Sairy.”

  The ghost shot her a look like she’d been sick on his boots.

  “Sairy needs—”

  “I didn’t bring it for her,” the ghost shouted. Then, tightly, the pristine mask of his calm shoved hastily back into place: “I brought it for you.”

  Isabel was a moment in processing this.

  “When?” Although she dreaded the answer.

  “I don’t know. Does it matter?”

  “You tried to come back,” she said. “You tried to bring it back.” She swallowed. “You couldn’t get through the barricade.”

  For a long moment the ghost did not reply. Staring a hole through the floor, his gloved fingertips pressed together in front of him with a bizarre exactitude, at an apparent impasse with himself. Training all his focus on one point, one thing he could control, like the keystone that holds up an arch. Until the keystone gives way and the arch comes down.

  Weird how you could forget someone’s mannerisms until they were back in front of you. Weird how it felt like they’d never left to start with.

  He measured his next words with even more care than usual. “We didn’t expect that you would have shut us out. It was…surprising to find.”

  Unbidden, against her will, Isabel’s brain was making another list. I’m sorry was on the top of it, followed by it wasn’t what I wanted and nothing in the past three years was what I wanted and I did what I had to do and I’m sorry.

  She wanted to say it. Any of it. All of it. Something. She opened her mouth and what came out instead was: “Use it on Sairy.”

  The ghost stonewalled her. “This is disappointing. You said yourself that your midwife could heal her. Where does that leave you? Can she fix you?”

  “I don’t need to be fixed. And I don’t even know if the midwife can help her. We don’t have magic Before-relics just lying around.”

  “Magic Before-relics?”

  “How’d you even get that thing off of Foster in the first place?”

  The tiniest, most telling of pauses. “We made a deal.”

  It was too much. “Really.”

  “Yes.”

  “A deal.”

  Silence.

  “A deal, like, what, like the one you made me with your healing thing, which turned out not so well as I—”

  “It was the only way I could get him to help me capture the ghosts we found down here,” Foster called, striding toward them out of the dark. She could hear every wo
rd of this. Of course she could. From that distance she could probably hear Isabel’s breakfast digesting. “He destroyed one first thing, when we came through the waypoint into the tunnels looking for you. I had no idea so many of us were stuck down here.”

  Not them, Isabel noted. Not how many of them. How many of us.

  The ghost would have said them.

  “You stayed to help them.”

  “I stayed to help them,” Foster said. “He stayed because he was after that device. He’d lost so many bets trying to get me to hand it over.” She paused a beat, amused. “So many bets.”

  “I don’t understand,” Isabel said. “You know I put up the ghostgrass barricades. You’re pissed at me. I get it. But then why go to that kind of trouble to help me? You have literally no reason to want to—”

  “I thought,” the ghost said, dangerously softly, “you were smarter than that.”

  “What the hell is that supposed—”

  By then Foster had reached them. “We ready to move out?”

  “You’re going to have to carry Sairy,” Isabel said. “And she’s not going to thank you for it. Talk to me about the hatch.”

  “Well,” Foster said, “the good news is I didn’t run into any trouble, and the hatch opens easy.”

  For you, maybe, Isabel thought.

  “And,” the ghost said, “the bad news?”

  Foster glanced at Sairy before she spoke. Then, in a hushed voice: “It’s a real mess up there. You go out that way, you surface right beside a lake about three-quarters of a mile outside of the town, and—” she hesitated— “even from a distance, it’s not pretty. I don’t know where this midwife’s office is, but it looks like about half the town is on fire.”

  “What?”

  “It isn’t over,” the ghost said. He was listening to the ceiling, Isabel realized. “When it goes quiet is when things have gotten bad.”

  “I’ll get you to the exit,” Foster said, “and we’ll figure things out from there. But you’re going to have to prepare yourself for the possibility that the place you think you’re going back to might just be gone.”