Latchkey

by Nicole Kornher-Stace

  “The shrine,” Sairy breathed, and took off sprinting.

  No trouble at all for Foster to catch up with her. Harder not to blast effortlessly past her, leaving her in the dust.

  A little shudder racked Foster, like a sudden chill, but not at all unpleasant. Isabel understood. This was what Foster was made for. It was a part of her life she’d died trying to escape, but it was also a thing she was literally created to do. It was written into her on a cellular level. Her work, her life, her prime directive, irresistible as instinct. A thing of which she was, and remained, terrifyingly capable.

  And now something—not memory exactly, not with that clarity and specificity, but something both vaguer and deeper—was clicking back into place within her. Something long buried was stirring awake after a deep dreamless sleep.

  “Two people I need to get to,” Sairy was saying as they ran side-by-side toward the town, Foster glowing brighter than before. “Lissa and Jen. They’ll be who’s in charge until I show. Lissa’s big, tall, looks like she can break a bear in half. Lost a bet and had to shave her head so she’s been painting it green instead. Jen’s little and wiry with short hair. Looks like she can fight but can’t for shit so she’ll probably be giving orders from somewhere safe. Her skin’s a little darker than Isabel’s, more like yours, and Lissa’s is a little lighter, but still darker than mine. Same scars on their faces as me. Same clothes as me.” She paused for breath. “In fact, you see anyone dressed like me, tell them you’re who healed Isabel so she could take down the Catchkeep-priest. They’ll follow you through six hells after that.”

  “Really?”

  “Six at least.”

  Foster kept careful pace with Sairy toward the village, her mind rushing out ahead. Tracking and triangulating the fires, the skirmishes, the defenses that held and the ones that failed. There was a burning building with screaming people barred inside. There were at least two separate groups of captives under guard. There were girls who moved like Sairy, knives in hand, glimpsed in the distance, there and gone. Someone was screaming words that were spat like curses, so slurred together as to be unintelligible. Someone else was laughing unkindly.

  It all splayed out ahead of her in panorama, so laughably slow as to be almost frozen in time. She could rip through this whole place with her bare hands if she so chose, gut it and leave it for dead, and they’d never know what hit them. Corpses before they hit the ground.

  It felt like something huge was trying to work its way up out of her. Like her body was made of lightning.

  “Remember,” she gasped at Sairy. “Point and shoot.”

  Another shudder escaped her, harder than the first, and if Sairy’d been looking she’d have seen the silvery corona of Foster’s ghost-light brighten, deepen, kick up little shining spikes of energy, then settle like a tremor soothed as Foster regained control.

  But that power had to go somewhere. As when Isabel and Sairy had trapped Salazar with ghostgrass, Foster’s excess ghost-energy didn’t just dissipate.

  Trailing behind her, the bundle of threads gave one soft pulse and began to glow.

  * * *

  “You can…see her?”

  “It’s hard to explain.”

  “Imagine my surprise.”

  “It’s almost like when I read her memories. Except it’s not.”

  “That was…overwhelmingly informative.”

  “Thank you.”

  The ghost studied her a moment. “You seem less anxious. About the fight above.”

  Isabel considered this. “Well,” she said, “Foster’s there now. I’ve seen her fight a whole lot worse than raiders.”

  “Point taken.”

  They’d walked out from under the hatch and were scanning the immediate area for a room large enough to safely house the townspeople. “I want one with one of those heavy sealing doors on it, like the ones we passed in the hall,” Isabel said. “They’re going to need to walk lightly past that flooded room, and assume there are others that are flooded too. And we need to put them right by the hatch so if the tunnels do start to flood we can get them out fast.” She paused. “I mean, they’ll all be huddled up on the lakeshore trying to hide in plain sight from Carrion Boy’s entire raider army, and they won’t be able to light a fire so they’ll pretty much have sand and corpseroot and a hatch-lid to eat, but at least they won’t—”

  “But you can see Foster.”

  She gave up. “Yes.”

  “Clarify that for me. You’re conscious. You’re present in your surroundings. When you read memories, or when you fade into the ghost-place, it’s more…dramatic.”

  “It’s okay, you can say it. I fall over.” But the ghost still seemed troubled. “What?”

  “It’s more than that. When I pulled you out of the ghost-place earlier, you looked…it reminded me of when we were searching for Foster, and your thread was about to break, and I didn’t know where you’d go when it did, or how I’d even begin to find you. Or…” He trailed off.

  Isabel wasn’t used to seeing him grasp after words and come up empty. “Or,” she ventured, “whether you’d be able to?”

  The look he gave her could have peeled paint. “Is that the version of events you remember?”

  The corner of her mouth quirked. “No.” She pushed the door open on what the map had labeled RECEPTION. “Let’s check this one.”

  The room beyond was huge and bare and in decent condition, all things considered. There was a wide heavy desk in the center of the room, and little broken chairs arranged in rows. Frames on the walls here and there, their contents black and rotten. A bigger, more irregularly-shaped frame dominated the wall behind the desk. A kind of symbol, all glass and metal. It looked like someone at some point had thrown a chair through it, and Isabel had no way of making out what it had once depicted. She approached it, squinting in the gloom.

  Then she stopped dead.

  Flowers. There were blooming flowers in a vase on a table a little ways away. Flame-colored lilies, their leaves the deepest green Isabel had ever seen. They were the only bright thing in the room.

  “Plastic,” the ghost informed her as he passed, gliding ahead to make a perimeter sweep of those shadowed far corners.

  But it was so incongruous that she still needed a moment before she could pull her gaze away. She thought of the ghost-place, of looking for things that were out of place, somebody’s misplaced memory jammed sideways into the fabric of the surrounding landscape. She went to join him, shining her lamp under a bank of those little chairs.

  She almost dropped it as a sudden jolt of power, intense but not quite unpleasant, went fizzing through her veins, and she shivered with delight. It felt like she’d slept a week. Like she’d been handed a cup of clean water after a week’s piss-drinking slog into the Waste.

  She shifted her focus back to Foster. Strange how easy it was to just see in her mind, like a daydream, something happening concurrent to her present reality, no matter how far away it was.

  “Two people I need to get to,” Sairy was saying as they ran side-by-side toward the town, Foster glowing brighter than before. “Lissa and Jen.”

  The thread caught her eye. Like a firefly, it now glowed with its own light, cleaner and brighter than even the lamp. It stood out like a white-hot filament against the dark.

  So much power, and this was what Foster could spare. They’d be able to mulch the gardens with what was left of the raider army when she was through with it.

  The ghost was watching Isabel with close concern. After a moment she realized why. “Oh. It’s not that. I’m fine. I’m here. It’s…” She held out the thread. “Foster’s in her element up there.”

  “Yes,” the ghost said. “I imagine she would be.”

  Isabel gestured widely at the room. “I think this is clear. Let’s check the door.”

  It seemed solid enough, and waterproof insofar as the ghost’s estimation. So Isabel gingerly arranged some ghostgrass in the doorway and they began the long
walk back to the townspeople for relocation.

  By then she’d had some small chance to put her thoughts in order.

  “It’s like…it’s not even that I can see her,” she said as they walked. “Not like you’re thinking. It’s more like I can see with her. Like you tell someone you trust to do something for you because you can’t, you say, you’re my eyes, you’re my legs, whatever. Except she…”

  “You can keep track of her actions remotely, even as you’re in control of your own person.”

  “Yeah. Exactly. Like Foster was doing with the ghosts she caught, I guess. It’s confusing though. It’s like being in two places at once.” Then, as it struck her: “And she’s keeping track of eight of these?”

  “She’s had a long time to collect them.”

  Isabel sighed. “Yeah. I guess she has.” She waited for the next round, but it never came. “What, no more vague accusations? You think you have something to say to me that I haven’t already—”

  “How long has it been?” he asked, surprising her. “Up there.”

  Almost four years since we went down into the ghost-place to find Foster, Isabel thought, trying desperately to clamp down on it and failing. But since you came back and offered to take me with you—

  “Three years,” she heard herself say. “Two months. Fourteen days.”

  The silence that followed was so long she thought he might not have heard her. Which was, of course, absurd.

  “Three years,” the ghost repeated at last. Filing it away, like Foster had filed away Salazar earlier. Syllables. Sounds. She could have throttled him. But then he paused again. “It felt like longer.”

  Yes, she thought. But for some reason she couldn’t say it. All at once, her anger had broken and scattered from her, and the calm it left behind was almost overwhelming.

  “After this is over,” she said, “I’ll find a way to help you.”

  A scornful sound. “Help me. There’s nothing left of me to help.”

  “Shut up and listen. No matter how bad it gets, I’m not going to be able to destroy you. I’m just not. But here’s what I’m offering instead. We get out of here, I’ll read your memories, I’ll read Foster’s. I’ll write them all down. Every word of it. Every day if I have to. I’ll draw pictures. Okay? Just—after the fight, when I get out of this Ragpicker-taken place and go back home—” Don’t say it, she warned herself, don’t you say it— “come with me.”

  The ghost made a kind of slow-motion recoil, then stared her down with the wariest, most skeptical specimen of hope she’d ever seen. There was a very long pause, during which he didn’t appear to trust himself to speak. “You’d do that.”

  What she thought was: I’ve been waiting three years to undo the biggest mistake of my life.

  What she said was: “Hey. I’m the last of four hundred years of dead Archivists. I take spectacular field notes.”

  A pause, and then he said, deadpan, “Haven’t you figured out by now not to make bargains with me?”

  “Yes,” she said. “But I guess I could say the same.”

  “What’s in it for you?”

  “Nothing,” she lied. Then, pointedly: “Just like last time.” When he said nothing, she glanced up at him. “Come on, you deserved—”

  The look of wretched disbelief on his face stopped her cold. “Why are you doing this?”

  “Doing what exactly?”

  “Helping me. Trying to help me. You’re not Archivist anymore, correct? Having dealings with ghosts is no longer your responsibility.”

  “Destroying ghosts was my responsibility as Archivist, like it was literally—”

  “You know what I mean. Why refuse that and offer this?”

  Oh, there was so much she could reply to that. Except…she couldn’t. She’d spent so long swallowing the words that they’d gotten stuck in her throat, like a handful of thorns.

  What came to her then was a ridiculous thought. She could barely protect her townspeople. She wasn’t even sure she could protect herself. The idea that the ghost would want or need her protection was absurd. And yet all at once, with every atom of her being, she knew that if this went bad—if it was the last ground she ever stood, the last fight she ever picked, the last worst idea she ever had—whatever either world had left to throw at them, it’d have to go through her to reach him.

  “I thought,” she said at last, carefully, “you were smarter than that.”

  For a moment he said nothing. When at last he opened his mouth to reply she plowed over him, louder and faster than strictly necessary.

  “Besides. The Catchkeep-shrine is a lot better than this shitty place, and it will amuse me to have ghosts over to visit. Especially when I think about how much the Catchkeep-priest would have hated it. You and Foster can stay with us as long as you like. I could tell you that we make decent soup sometimes, and Meg’s bread is delicious, and Jen gives honey to the brew-mistress who makes it into wine, but you’re dead anyway so you don’t care about any of that. So I’ll take your share of the wine and I’ll read your memories.”

  “Is this the hard sell?”

  “Is that Before-talk for thank you?”

  I’m babbling, she thought. But she couldn’t shut up. “Actually, no. Don’t thank me yet. We still have to win this fight. Not to mention getting you and Foster all the way across Sweetwater to the shrine. That’ll be fun, the whole town is warded against—”

  Ghostgrass.

  Hanging from every door and every window of every building in Sweetwater.

  A kind of strangled shout came out of her, and before she knew it the ghost was in front of her, gripping her shoulders so tight the feeling had gone totally out of her arms before she could figure out why.

  “Wasp,” he was saying. “Wasp. Talk to me. What is it?”

  “They’re in trouble.”

  * * *

  Well before they hit the Waste-road, Sairy stumbled over her first corpse. Only the sturdiness of the back of her shirt, and the speed at which Foster grabbed it, stopped her from faceplanting in the second one. Still, Sairy had the presence of mind not to cry out, just gasped out a string of curses as she was hoisted free of the mess.

  “Not ours,” Sairy said, once she’d caught her breath.

  Foster surveyed the scene before her. “None of them?”

  Sairy swallowed audibly. “No.”

  There were five, spread out over a span of thirty yards or so, two together and the other three spaced out. To Foster’s eye, developed to distinguish ally from enemy even faster than she could lock onto a target to engage and mow down, pattern recognition did not serve here. These combatants were dressed not unlike Isabel or Sairy, in too-often-mended clothing made of something like leather and some kind of rough knitting, and she was baffled and impressed that Sairy could tell the difference at a glance.

  They’d been killed by arrows, within reasonable firing distance of the hills above the town. Reasonable for an exceptional archer, anyway. And they hadn’t been dead for long.

  Sairy pointed. “See?” Two of the bodies were missing multiple fingers. One had lost an eye. Another had carved a slab out of one cheek, and the fifth one’s nose was gone. The cheek wound was maybe a week old, and horribly infected, but the rest of the injuries were older, some by obvious years. “Carrion Boy’s followers do that shit to themselves.”

  There was a certain grim, thin-lipped, grayish look about her that didn’t escape Foster’s notice. “You need a minute?”

  “I absolutely do not,” Sairy snapped. “I just…haven’t seen this. Up close. Before.”

  “Identifying marks,” Foster offered.

  “That’s right,” Sairy said gratefully. “Watch out for them. Anybody stupid enough to mess themselves up on purpose like that is not one of ours.” A sudden furious grin, and she tapped her own scarred cheek. “Ours messed up little kids instead.”

  Foster’s mouth twisted. “Yours too?”

  “What?”

  “Long stor
y.”

  Sairy kicked the nearest corpse and said: “Come on. They want to get cut up so badly, let’s oblige them.” Then she caught sight of Foster, who had whipped her head around and was staring off toward the town like she could see straight through the walls. “What’ve you got?”

  Foster’s gaze snapped back around to Sairy, who literally startled back a step.

  “Ragpicker slag me, has anyone ever told you how creepy it is when you—”

  “Who’s Ruby?”

  “What? Ruby’s the—how do you—”

  “Somebody just said Get Ruby to cover.”

  Sairy stared across the distance to the huddle of buildings on the nearest edge of town. “Somebody said that in there.”

  “Yeah. Now—”

  “And you heard it?”

  Foster shushed her with a gesture. Sairy visibly strained her ears and Isabel knew she was getting nothing for her trouble but an impenetrable thicket of sound: shouts, clashing of weapons, the odd scream. Something that sounded like a building incrementally collapsing, which might’ve been one of Jen’s barricades being rushed by a wave of bodies, or—

  “Lissa, right? Lissa’s your primary objective?”

  “I have to get to her, if that’s what you—”

  “Sounds like you’re not the only one,” Foster said. “Point and shoot, remember?”

  “Just get me there.”

  They stayed low and ran. The fight seemed to have shifted toward the center of town, so the outskirts were pretty quiet and they slipped in undetected. Soon they were glued to the back wall of a house as Sairy tried, as silently as she could, to catch her breath. Beside her, alarmingly, Foster seemed to be doing much the same.

  It’s the ghostgrass. Isabel tried to propel the thought toward Foster forcibly along the thread. It didn’t seem to take. It’s on that house. It’s on every house. That whole place is rigged to poison ghosts, Foster, get out of there.

  “How are you out of breath?” Sairy gasped at her. “Do you even need to breathe?”

  In response Foster just put a finger to her own lips. Hush. Pointed.