“Why are they staring at you?” Sairy hissed at Foster.
Foster shook her head. “I don’t live here. You tell me.”
These two were leaders, but they weren’t fighters, that much was obvious at a glance. Those long knives were sharp, but clean. They’d drawn no blood. They’d been waiting in here this whole time.
Sairy looked about ready to spit. “They’re like the Catchkeep-priest,” she said in a kind of disgusted wonderment. “They want this town but they’re not even going to get off their asses and fight for it. Are you?” she shouted at them. “You want a fight? I’ll give you a fight. We trashed your army. We killed your Crow. Don’t you want revenge? Pick up those pretty knives and come at me.” She considered them, practically shaking with controlled rage. “No? Then I’ll bring it to you.”
“Wait.”
Sairy stared, disbelieving, at Foster’s glove on her arm. “What do you mean, wait.”
But Isabel could understand Foster’s hesitation. It must be unnerving being stared at by perfect strangers at a remove of centuries with what looked so much like recognition.
“Look, I have my orders,” Sairy protested. “No prisoners. They’ll get loose, they’ll escape, they’ll come back and try again with more.”
Foster nodded. “I know.” She tore her gaze from the Clayspring leaders, the unaccountable look of betrayal dawning on their faces. What had they expected? “Make it quick.”
“I will.”
“Do you want me to—”
“No.”
As Sairy and Lissa circled around back of them, one knife out, one hand free to hold each head still as blade slashed throat, both of the leaders of Clayspring began, in unison, to pray.
Sairy wouldn’t’ve been able to make out what they were saying, spoken as it was in the familiar, breathless delivery of memorized words by voices about to be silenced. But Foster could, and so Isabel could too.
Ember Girl protect me, I have been weak, I have kept my head down, I am no hero. Use me as kindling for Your ever-growing fire. I will find glory there.
Ember Girl. Not Carrion Boy. Given everything Isabel knew about these people, this confused her.
What confused her more was that they weren’t closing their eyes as they prayed, or looking at the floor, or the suggestion of sky past the ceiling. They were staring straight at Foster.
Chapter Seventeen
One second the ghost was there beside Isabel, the next he was the whole way up the hall, slamming into Martinez and Tanaka, keeping his sword between them and the way to the hatch. It was like he faded out of existence, then came back in, and it was all Isabel could do to fling herself up the hallway after him.
Drawn by the blood, Tanaka tried to shoulder past, but the ghost intercepted him, picked him up by one handful of his uniform jacket and flung him easily at Martinez. In the split-second of distraction that provided, the ghost drew his gun and unloaded three bullets between Martinez’s eyes, aiming to lead her movements even as she dropped to the floor, sword held aloft. Tanaka sailed over her, two bullets in his back and the third in a shoulder, and fell in two pieces as he cleared the edge of Martinez’s blade. Martinez rolled and came up sword-first, deflecting the next two shots into the tunnel wall. The ghost drew his own sword, slashing down as Martinez leaped—
—and Tanaka was upon Isabel. He was missing an arm and a shoulder and a big chunk out of one side, but the rest was still joined up to its thread.
Tanaka blurred, and by now she knew enough to lead the strike. Threw the harvesting-knife up two-handed to block the sword before she’d even seen it move. Don’t cut him, she screamed at herself, you can’t cut him, and they clashed and her knife slid free and she twisted aside and spun to give him an elbow in the face.
This seemed to get his attention. Slowly, still holding the sword, Tanaka touched the back of his hand to the busted corner of his mouth. Made a show of examining the blood on the glove. Looked Isabel dead in the eye and gave his hand a deliberate downward flick, spattering the knees of Isabel’s Archivist-coat with syrupy silver.
“Stop it, Foster,” he said.
It shocked her into dropping her guard for a fraction of a second she couldn’t afford.
Tanaka slashed and she leapt back, tripped over rubble and went down. Already he was on her. She rolled, and Tanaka’s swordpoint shattered tile where her head had been. Without hesitating, he pulled it out of the mud and tile and stabbed again, and Isabel rolled, and he stabbed again, and Isabel rolled, and then she was out of floor. She shot her heel out at Tanaka’s knee, forgetting for a second that this wouldn’t work on a ghost—but he sidestepped neatly and readied for another lunge.
The ghost had other ideas. He took hold of Tanaka again and flung him at the ceiling, cratering the brickwork, then spun to reengage with Martinez, who slammed into him, blade to blade.
Both the ghost and Martinez were moving too fast for Isabel to get a clean lock on either. They were a blur of dark uniforms and silver ghost-light, swords ringing against each other with the speed of raindrops hitting a window.
“Wasp,” the ghost said. There was an edge of true alarm to his voice that she didn’t often hear.
“I know.”
“You have—to—cut—them—now.”
“I know.”
As if on cue, Tanaka put his hand on the floor, vaulted up neatly and rushed her.
She scrambled for the twist of threads on the floor by the hatch entrance. Easy enough to spot them. Against the darkness of the tunnel they burned like silver fire. Drew the harvesting-knife in one hand. Fumbled up the threads in the other.
At the last second before Tanaka rushed into her sword-first, she realized that all the threads were not in fact in her hand. Her own thread still hung down loose from her coat-front, joining the bundle several feet closer to the hatch.
No time.
Please let this work, she thought to nobody in particular, and slashed the remaining threads.
At the same time, Tanaka dropped his sword entirely and made a grab for them. The knife went through the threads, through his sleeve, raked a deep furrow up his arm.
And she was ripped away.
* * *
Tanaka, roughly the same age as his ghost, lay shivering on a cot, flushed and feverish, treading sleep like water. A half-moon of Latchkey operatives sat on the floor beside him. The room was so tiny their backs were pressed against three walls. Six kids on the floor in total, between the ages of twelve and fifteen. Theirs was the somber expectant silence of upstarts awaiting the Chooser when one of their number had transgressed and was unlikely to survive her punishment.
Isabel recognized Ayres there, and the black-haired girl Isabel thought to be his partner, and Salazar. Notably, Foster and the ghost were absent.
There was a pitcher of cheery orange liquid sloshing in the margin of floorspace between the half-ring of operatives and Tanaka’s cot. Next to that was a clipboard evidently standing in for a plate. On the clipboard was a stack of crumbly discs, tilting precariously. Most of them were grubby and broken, as if they’d been smuggled around in somebody’s pocket for a while. Someone had jammed a twist of paper into the topmost disc. It stuck up and out from the tower like a stubby fuse.
On the cot Tanaka stirred, and his eyes bleared open.
All six kids started talking at once. Their voices were rich with that fruity brightness that aimed to be comforting and fell flat on its face somewhere along the way.
“Hey, Tanaka.”
“Hey, man, you feeling better? It’s your birthday!”
Three at once: “Happy birthday!”
“We made you a cake—”
“Well, it’s actually cookies, dipshit, but—”
“From the Director’s stash.”
“And juice! Salazar swiped a whole pitcher. And it’s the good kind. Not from powder.”
Salazar gazed at her bare feet with the distinct glow of a person basking in her own uncharacteristic disob
edience.
“No cups though.”
“Hey, before I forget. Can you hear me? Tanaka? I’m supposed to say happy birthday from Foster. She says she hopes you like the cookies. She, uh, said to say she wanted to be here, but she was unavoidably detained.”
“Means she’s in the box—ow! The hell was—”
“Oh my god shut up. This is a party. It isn’t about her.”
“Fine, but all I’m saying is, a little respect. She isn’t in the box for stealing cookies. She’s in the box because—”
“All right, okay? I know—”
“—because she covered for your ass, Salazar, when you got caught stealing the fucking juice.”
“So what. I never told her to—”
“But you never told the Director it was you either.”
“Can we shut up about Foster now? She’ll be out tomorrow. Tanaka’s sick. On his birthday.”
And they lit a little fire on the paper twist and murmured over it and blew it out. They put the least mangled-looking cookie on Tanaka’s chest, having nowhere better to put it, and set the second-best one aside for Foster, in the manner of a living family leaving an extra place at table for their dead.
* * *
“And that,” Sairy said, “is what we call a Ragpicker’s gambit.” Caught sight of Foster. “What?”
Whatever it was, it was hitting Foster with a shock like a bone breaking. She didn’t know what was about to happen, but she seemed to have a pretty good idea, and it scared her worse than the entire Clayspring army arrayed before her.
“She cut the threads.”
“Foster,” Sairy said. “I don’t know what that means.” Trying to stay calm and failing utterly in the face of whatever Foster was staring down the barrel of. “Listen, it’s okay, we beat them, it’s over, you—”
Foster grabbed her wrist, and Sairy gasped. That weird ghost-sensation would be blaring up her arm, Isabel knew, the dizziness and nausea and cold of it, but there was something else. Isabel brought her focus in on Foster and felt it. Like Foster was transmitting lightning through her touch. She was utterly rigid, seized into place, radiant as a star about to explode. Her sleeves, hands, whatever of Foster Isabel could see—was glowing.
She’s trying to say something, Isabel realized. But it was like her mouth wouldn’t work. Like she couldn’t remember how to make the tiny, delicate, precise movements that would shape words. They were too small for her, for whatever was ripping out of her.
All the raw energy she’d been shuttling down those threads had found itself abruptly cut off from those destinations. It was clashing and running together like streams joining a river, and began to backfill into Foster. Without the ghostgrass weakening her, without the threads draining her energy, surrounded by blood and suffused by memory—your name is Catherine Foster, you’re a ghost, you used to be some kind of fighter—that power kept on generating, welling up from somewhere deep within her. Her eyes, ears, nose, mouth, soon the pores of her skin leaked silver. Her face worked, as if in overwhelming pain.
Eventually, Sairy found her voice. “Jen!” she screamed. “Get everyone out of here now!”
Foster clubbed Sairy to the ground, bouncing her head off the floor. Sairy looked up, dazed, and there was Foster standing over her, both arms locked, palms out and down, containing that outpouring of energy with what looked like colossal effort. Like she was trying to hold up a collapsing building with her bare hands.
Foster’s eyes were pits of silver light, drilling through her. “Run.”
With that, she filled and flooded. Black light exploded out of her, sheeting off her in a ring. It went shearing through the walls of the shrine with no resistance.
There was a horrible sound and the ceiling slid sideways, bringing the entire top half of the building with it. Fast as she could, Sairy tucked into a ball, arms clamped over her head. Kept her eyes shut for a twenty-count.
When she dared to look, Foster was still standing over her. Here and there, pieces of black rock from the shrine walls were falling around them. Where they hit the black light of Foster’s energy halo they vaporized. The bodies of the Clayspring leaders had been lost beneath the rubble. There was a weird smell in the air, like a summer thunderstorm moving off away.
The dust lifted and there were townspeople staring in at Foster through the broken walls. Jen was there, and Meg, and Kath and Lissa. They were giving Sairy concerned looks. Over Foster’s dead body she’d let them come in here. But how could she stop them? She couldn’t even move.
Foster was flickering in place, caught in the overload. Another flare threatened to burst from her, it was rising up in her like bile. This time the walls of the shrine wouldn’t be there to absorb the strike. It’d flare out, unimpeded, taking down everything in its path. Other buildings. The Sweetwater survivors. Sairy, if she got up. Standing, that blade of light would shear off the top of her skull.
Sairy hustled up into a crouch, gesturing stay out for all she was worth.
“Get back,” she tried to yell at the people outside. But they couldn’t hear her over the sound of Foster’s ghost-energy, the grit and dust in Sairy’s voice. Small mercy, the townspeople didn’t look too ready to come in there after her. They just stood there gaping.
“She’s one of ours,” Jen was screaming at anyone who’d listen, screaming above that seething thrum of energy with her hands clamped over her ears. “She fought for us.”
“The raider leaders are dead,” Lissa was hollering at her side. “We killed them. It’s over.”
Foster, still hemorrhaging power like blood from a slashed throat, fought with all she had to suppress the flow. The next flare was coming, there was no shutting it down, only containing it. It was like trying to bottle a storm.
The ground beneath her boots began to shake. Something cracked under her and threatened to give way. Dirt began sifting down through an opening in the floor that hadn’t been there before.
The next flare, clamped down upon with all the colossal force of Foster’s will, did not erupt. But it had to go somewhere. It sought and found and rerouted itself toward a new outlet.
The one thread that remained.
* * *
Isabel opened her eyes. She was alive. Tanaka hadn’t killed her when she’d snapped away into his memory. She’d cut the threads. It was over.
Already Martinez had collapsed into a silver mess, her ghost-glow blown out like a candle. A few feet away, the ghost had taken up the fight with Tanaka. Mid-swing, Tanaka’s remaining borrowed energy ran out. He froze in place for the barest splinter of a second and was skewered. The ghost blinked in surprise, once, and then unceremoniously planted his boot on Tanaka’s chest and hauled the sword free, slinging an arc of silver into the growing dark.
Isabel shook her head to clear it. Being in two places at once, and then getting pulled away into a memory, and then thrust back into the here and now, was exceptionally taxing. Her brain struggled to translate those separate realities even as they crumbled around her in pieces, a scaffolding of dreams. Pieces of puzzles she couldn’t reassemble. She cut the threads, Foster had said. Why had that seemed to scare her? Wasn’t that what Isabel had needed to do?
“This may be of interest to you,” the ghost was saying. “Someone up there is loudly proclaiming that the raider leaders are dead. That, and I quote, we killed them, it’s over.”
Isabel squeezed her eyes shut, reopened them. Only tunnels, thank the Chooser. She tried to focus on Foster but didn’t understand what she saw. Everything was brightness. There was a sound like her ears were ringing, a smell like the air after it rains. She almost dropped the harvesting-knife, her hands were shaking so badly.
“They’re…okay?”
“Evidence suggests. Sounds like Foster and your subordinate didn’t save us anything to do.”
“I told you,” she said distantly, “she’s not my—”
And doubled over, retching for breath like she’d had her throat kicked in. Unlik
e anything she’d ever felt. Worse than anything she’d ever felt. Like she was being turned inside out. Like her blood was trying to boil its way free. Like someone was trying to cram a bucket of water into a ladle, and the ladle was her. Frantically she wondered if this was what that soldier in Ayres’s memory had felt in the moment before his bones had begun spontaneously snapping into fractions.
The ghost was at her side. The look on his face scared her maybe more than anything. Until he spoke, and that was much, much worse. The sheer level of icy calm in his voice was terrifying because she knew it by now for what it was: his version of anybody else’s blind screaming panic.
“Wasp,” he said. “I don’t know what to do.”
She shook her head, helpless, frantic, as pain howled through her like a wind. Clawing at herself like the agony was something she could peel off and cast away, but it was her now, and she was it. Like a suit of red-hot metal there was no squirming out of. Tears of pain stood in her eyes. It was like her face was melting, running down like candle-wax. “Get back,” she choked out. “I can’t—”
She cut off, unable to keep herself from crying out as something ripped free inside her. Ripped free and shoved its way up and out until she was sure her eyes would rupture with the force of it escaping. Her ears popped and she tasted blood. The harvesting-knife dropped from her hand and was flung away in the force of what was erupting out of her. Distantly she was aware that her Archivist-coat had caught fire.
No—not fire—it was black, edged and lined with silver—
“Oh fuck,” she sobbed, and an invisible hand wrenched her head back, pried open every hole in her head, and Foster’s ghost-energy thundered through her with the force of a hurricane being rammed down a gun-barrel. She stood—no, she lifted inches off the ground and hung there—no, part of her was dragged free of another part, and one part sought to rise while another tried to sink, but both were pinned on that thrumming blare of energy. She froze there, the ghost-self and the pain-self. Weeping, bleeding from the nose and ears, pissing down her leg, fountaining light.
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