Latchkey

by Nicole Kornher-Stace

  All she found at first were a few sheets of what might have been paper, which crumbled to dust at a touch. A few broken pieces of something unidentifiable. That was all.

  Reaching up blind on tiptoes to swipe the higher shelves snagged her another weird little Before-device, larger than the healing one but flatter, most of one side of which was nothing but a glossy black panel. Nothing that looked like it was going to keep them from drowning, so into a pocket it went.

  Then she turned to investigate that bank of doors along one wall. The doors were a couple of square feet apiece, each with a pull handle running the length of the bottom. Stacked on top of each other, four by three, to the height of the ceiling. She’d never seen doors this shape and size before and had no idea where they might lead.

  They all looked to have locked, once, but someone had at some point pried them open. All were dented on one side where they’d been assaulted and given way. Most stood very slightly ajar. One was missing altogether, leaving a square dark hole.

  Come on, she thought at them. Give me something to work with.

  Closer, each door had a metal plate bolted to it, about the length of her palm and a bit narrower. Each engraved with some kind of label that Isabel couldn’t make out in the poor light without squinting. Those plates, and the doors themselves, were in surprisingly good repair. Like the room itself, whatever they were made of was made to last. The only part that really showed its age was the panel set into each door beside its plate. Once glossy black, now spiderwebbed with cracks, set with buttons and dials and things Isabel couldn’t name, all busted. Temperature control, no longer operational, she thought, leaning in to read one of those plates. Humidity control, no longer operational. Archival seals—

  “Tertiary auxiliary power supply—” the room said, but Isabel didn’t hear it over the sudden pounding in her ears.

  Deep in her chest of field notes there’d been a list. One of the oldest sheets of paper in that box. On it was the series of questions an Archivist was supposed to ask a ghost, in the event she found a ghost who could answer them. A template by which Archivists could eventually piece together what had killed the dead world Before. Name of specimen. Age of specimen. Place and manner of specimen’s death. Manner of the world’s death, if known—

  It was looping through her head, over and over, as she read and reread the engraving on the plate.

  SUBJECT #2122-28-A

  SALAZAR, MIA

  There were other words, or maybe numbers, engraved below, but those were smaller and less deeply set, and mostly worn away.

  “I don’t have time for this,” she muttered. “This isn’t the way out.”

  But she couldn’t make herself let go of that handle. When the room flooded, whatever was in those drawers would be lost to the lake forever.

  She glanced at the ghost, then back at the drawer.

  She took the handle in both hands and pulled.

  Stuck.

  She pulled harder and the door lunged out at her, dragging a long narrow drawer behind it. She fed it out beside her until she was standing next to it, looking down into an opening longer than she was tall.

  Most of the drawer was taken up by a box, about six feet by two, made of some thick clear synthetic, set with another black panel. Presumably this panel was also broken, because whatever had been in that box, unspeakable age had rendered it down to a pink residue lining the bottom, furred with mold.

  Isabel stared at that a second, her skin prickling, before turning her attention hastily to the smaller box at the outer end of the drawer. This one was made of some kind of black material indeterminate to her—she wasn’t sure whether it was synthetic or metal. She lifted it to the floor.

  On the top was a smaller plate. It was grimy, but cleaned off well enough with a quick swipe of a sleeve. SUBJECT #2122-28-A, SALAZAR, MIA. Like the drawers, the box had been forced open at some point, but then put back where it was. Looters, probably.

  Isabel sympathized with the apparent compulsion to replace what hadn’t been taken from this room. Next-best thing to never setting foot down here at all. The place was creepy, lousy with ghost-energy, though no ghosts appeared. But the frostbite-and-vertigo sensation was thick in the air here. That, and the taste in the back of her mouth, a sick-sweet tang like she was about to throw up, gave it away.

  For a moment she’d thought it might be coming from the ghost, but no. By now the signature of his ghost-energy was unmistakable to her, the way she’d recognize her own handwriting even in field notes she didn’t remember taking. This was something different. Knife or no knife, she’d tread lightly. Already the tunnels had proven porous to her, like the ghost-place remembered her, was calling her back to it. She’d fallen through more than once in the span of a day. And this time he couldn’t help her. She was on her own.

  Just a quick glance. Was he brighter? A little, maybe. What the hell was taking so long?

  She opened the box like she expected something to leap out. But it was just a couple of folders stuffed with sheets of paper, all rotten. There, at the bottom, a little black box, labeled with name and number like the drawer and the larger box before it. As if she’d peeled back the false layers and this was the tiny pure essence nestled at its core.

  What’s more, she recognized that box. Sure enough, when she raised the lid, there was the little silvery thing they’d taken out of Salazar’s head, looking exactly the same as when she’d seen it in the ghost’s memory. Only cleaner.

  Instinctively, she pocketed that too, box and all. To the tune of tertiary auxiliary power supply at three percent, she hustled down the bank of drawers. The dark was almost complete, and she was out of time, so she shoved Wasp back to the back of her mind and didn’t let her waste time climbing up to the high drawers in order to clean their plates off and squint at them. The same information would be on those little cases, and she could stop to read those when she was out of here. Whatever was on them would be of no use to her corpse. So she eased the drawers open, removed all the tiny black boxes, pocketed them for later inspection.

  Ten in total. She swiped inside the square hole in the dark, but there was nothing where that missing drawer should be. Another drawer, high in a corner, seemed empty, but when she pulled it open she could hear something sliding around inside. It sounded different than anything she’d found in the other drawers. Maybe something she could use to escape.

  A lower drawer, pulled partway open, made a step. From there she could reach in but not see in. Swiped around inside, cursing exasperation. Snatched her hand back, stung. Dripping blood. Something had cut her.

  She shut the drawer she was standing on, opened the one above it, opened the bottom one to the right of it, stepladdered her way up, careful not to touch any of those long pink-smeared boxes.

  She reached into the dark and drew the thing out carefully, then stood blinking at it.

  It was the last couple feet of a sword-blade, snapped off unevenly.

  The legend was skipping through her head again. The first one any upstart learned. The one about the harvesting-knife, found deep in a ruin underground, given to the girl who would become the first Archivist…

  Isabel, here, now, was standing on the nexus of two stories, in the place where they grated against each other like a badly-set bone.

  Slowly, she slid that high drawer shut on its runners. Then she reached up and wiped the plate clean.

  Sometimes knowing what you’re about to see still isn’t enough to prepare you for actually seeing it.

  SUBJECT #2122-06-C

  FOSTER, CATHERINE

  Back on the floor, she touched the two blades together, break to break.

  The fit was almost perfect.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Plenty of time to think on that later. For now she had an unconscious ghost and an inescapable room to deal with. She didn’t know what would happen when the tertiary auxiliary power supply at two point five percent failed. The lights would go out, sure. But what
about the door? What was it sealed with? Did it need auxiliary power supply to stay sealed?

  She could deal with the dark. But she wanted out of there, ghost and little boxes and blade and all, before she got an answer on the door.

  First things first. She got the broken blade situated in her belt in a way she hoped wouldn’t end up gutting her before the day was out. Then she went to the ghost, gave him some blood from her fresh cut. That began to brighten him noticeably, almost counterbalancing the gradual extinguishing of the room’s lights as the last of the power was diverted to wherever the room deemed it most necessary. The door, Isabel thought, and mentally gave herself another kick. Shut up.

  Brightened noticeably but not moved. Or not much. He might have shifted a little, as in sleep. Hard to say. He wasn’t breathing, but did he usually? Isabel couldn’t remember. The cut she’d gotten from the broken blade was still dripping steadily, so she gave the ghost a fourth quick dose and moved on. If she couldn’t find a way out of here, he could wake up right now and it wouldn’t make any difference.

  But no matter how optimistically she tried to study that room, it stubbornly remained the same dead end. Four walls, ceiling, floor. Some junked old shelving and eleven long drawers, plus the hole where a twelfth would be. If she could get the big clear synthetic box out of one of them, she’d fit inside. Best-case scenario, it was airtight, and she’d suffocate instead of drown. She could climb to the highest drawer, which would still get her drowned, but she’d get to watch the whole room fill with water first.

  Really. This is the best you can come up with.

  “Tertiary auxiliary power supply at two percent.”

  Isabel stopped pacing and stared at the door like she could barricade it with her eyes. The shelving could be dragged over and propped against it, but that would do precisely nothing against water and she knew it.

  “If I had any sense I’d leave you here,” she told the ghost. “Leave you and swim for it.”

  But she didn’t move.

  She couldn’t stop thinking about the ghosts caught in the black river in the ghost-place. Already dead, they couldn’t drown exactly, but they could fill with water, ballooning until they burst. No blood, no thread, would fix a ghost that broken.

  Not only would she die, she’d die in a way that she’d never get across to the ghost-place, she’d be stuck in this room until Catchkeep ate the world, or Ember Girl burned it down, or Ember Girl and Carrion Boy sectioned it out like an orange between Them.

  Maybe someday some future Archivist would open up this weird little room—whatever Archivist would mean in another thousand years or so—and study what she’d discovered, not knowing what it was. Both halves of a sword, some little black boxes. Two drifting silver ghost-rags, caroming off each other like blind fish in the murk…

  Isabel shivered, which she wrote off as dread. Then reconsidered. She started paying more attention to the nausea. It was the very specific kind of nausea that came of being near an upwelling of ghost-energy. If she hadn’t just explored this entire little room, she would’ve been convinced there was a ghost-place waypoint in it. No other explanation for—

  The edges of her vision started shifting, rippling like wet clay. Terror seized her between its teeth and shook.

  “No,” she begged. “Not now.”

  Like she could command the floor not to open up and swallow her again. Like she could convince the ghost-place to reject her. The river not to drown her, or whatever it would be this time. And this time she’d be lost there for good, because the ghost couldn’t pull her back out. He’d be stuck here, on the wrong side of that accidental passage between worlds, in the same facility in which Foster had died. Which made her vision go momentarily white with rage.

  She had to anchor herself. A list, she needed a list.

  There was a list in her pockets, a list of names and numbers on little boxes. She pulled one out and glanced at the label. Too dark to read it now.

  Trying to focus on her senses just made it worse. She was nauseous, dizzy, covered in cold sweat. Even from across the room, the ghostgrass she had thrown away was burning her. The world around her bent and rippled, sickeningly malleable. How could she anchor herself with the evidence of her senses when all her senses were doing was proving she was straddling two worlds at the same—

  Wait.

  Maybe she could use that. If this place was that near the ghost-place, if the veil between those worlds was that thin here, then rules she’d learned in the ghost-place might well apply. And that was a territory she had some idea how to navigate.

  Or not, and she was tertiary auxiliary power, one point five percent away from drowning like a field mouse in a catchment bin. But at least when the Chooser came to claim her ghost, She wouldn’t find it sitting numbly on the floor, waiting to hear that clacking cape of bones approaching.

  Just like in the ghost-place, she told herself, and drew the harvesting-knife. Just like before.

  She felt her way over to the ghost in the dark and parked herself beside him. The ghost-place would open to receive them both or they’d be destroyed together. Either way, this was a one-way trip for her.

  “I’m getting you out of here,” she told him. Ignoring how her voice snagged in her throat. “You Ragpicker-taken utter pain in my ass.”

  She didn’t even have to make a new cut this time. The one she’d got on the broken blade was still bleeding. She just drew the flat of the knifepoint carefully along it, trying to disturb the clotting as little as possible.

  When the knifepoint was bloodied, she paused. Took a deep breath. Let her eyes come unfocused. Forced her thoughts to dissolve. Concentrated on feeling like a basketful of mud, oozing through the weave. A stack of papers shuffled into another one.

  She let that awful dizziness build around her, let it sluice through her. She went completely still, like a hunter in a blind, like she’d had to do when the ghost separated her from her body to go questing in the ghost-place to begin with. The edges of her vision were going dark. Not yet, she thought. Not yet.

  The room gave a shudder, rippling from one side to the other like heat-mirage, and through it she saw…she wasn’t sure. Somewhere not here. But wherever it was, it wasn’t dark there. She could see it, whatever it was, and that made it better than this.

  “Okay,” she whispered to the ghost-place. “Come and get me.”

  She pushed the whole of her will toward that other place and began to feel herself come unstuck from the tunnels. She was floating, she was sinking, her field of vision was pure interference, like walking a night road in a snowstorm.

  The worst of the mirage-stuff looked to be in the direction of that bank of long drawers. Effortfully, muscles screaming, she heaved the ghost up and stumbled with him toward that wall. Found the strongest distortion near the leftmost drawers, in the column that contained the missing drawer on the bottom and Foster’s on the top, with a third drawer in the middle. She shouldered the ghost as best she could and readied the harvesting-knife.

  The unbreakable Before-stuff of Foster’s drawer parted like flesh beneath the blade.

  As before, only the bloodied part of the harvesting-knife went in, but that was all she needed. As before, elongating the cut was slow going, as though it was meeting unseen resistance, even as it passed through the middle drawer and into the empty hole of the missing one below. It gave her the same sensation as walking into a strong wind, or through deep water, but with what felt like the last crumbs of her strength she dragged the knife up through the missing drawer and the one above it, across the middle of Foster’s drawer, and back down, giving her a shimmering imperfect rectangle, a vague approximation of a door.

  She had no idea what was through there. It could be anything.

  She hit the doorway shoulder-first. Gelatinous and cool even through the dogleather sleeve of her coat. The resistance had grown as the cut in the wall scabbed over, but she fought through bodily, digging her feet in, both hands white-knuckled on t
he ghost’s arms.

  “Tertiary auxiliary power, one percent,” the room said, but nobody was there to hear it.

  * * *

  All at once, they were through. She almost expected a popping sound as the far side of the door spat them out, but there was nothing. Just a new bizarre sensation, one that put her weirdly in mind of scooping the yolk out of a raw egg. She turned just in time to see the faint blue outline of a messy rectangle as it vanished altogether. No way back. At least, not here.

  Wherever here was. She drew the knife and assessed.

  At a glance, they’d come through into a building, or the massive ruins of one. A wide sweeping staircase led up to pulverized walkways. Windows all along one wall of the main room, each one bigger than a whole side of a Sweetwater house. Floor covered in a thick layer of stuff, more varied and colorful than the broken debris of the tunnels. All the windows were blown out, littering the floor with glass. Light poured in through gaping holes in the roof. Broken doors led to what looked like outside but probably wasn’t. There was nobody around.

  Satisfied that nothing was going to leap out of this open space and attack them, she sheathed the knife and turned her attention to the ghost.

  And froze.

  Silver was pooling steadily on the floor around him. An alarming amount of silver.

  Isabel felt her own blood drain out of her face. Felt her mind snap blank for a second, a minute—some rushing space of time wherein her plans, her ideas, her strategies, all packed it in and fled. Heard someone saying, over and over, soft and low like a prayer, “It’s going to be okay, it’s going to be okay.” Then she realized it was her.

  But where was the wound? Under the jacket somewhere. She got it unfastened and inched it open cautiously, dreading what she’d see.