It wasn’t hard to find.
He must’ve taken a nasty hit in the fight above. Too much blood and damage for Isabel’s inexpert eye to tell whether he’d been stabbed or shot, but whatever Martinez had done, she’d really nailed him. It almost looked like—
Sudden image in her head of the uprushing vortex of ghost-energy that had busted the ceiling above Salazar, much the same as Isabel’s failure to contain Foster’s ghost-energy had done to the ceiling above her. Sudden awful suspicion that it hadn’t been Martinez who’d injured him so grievously at all.
“You’re in the ghost-place now,” she said into the silence. “The ghost-place will heal you.” But what was that based on? Field notes. A ghost will strengthen in the proximity to a ghost-place door.
But she’d been in the ghost-place since, and she knew better. She’d never seen the ghost-place heal a ghost. If anything, she’d seen the opposite. All the ghost-place did was make a ghost dissolve a bit slower than it would in the living world. It would do nothing to help her now.
Damage control, she commanded herself.
She found the cleanest piece of cloth she could: an extra length of bandaging from her pocket. She pressed it to the wound with all the strength left in her arms.
Soaked through in an instant, leaving her plunging her hands into a morass of homogenous silver slop. I can’t see how deep it goes, Isabel thought wildly. No guts. It all looks the same in there.
He hadn’t moved an inch throughout any of this. Not when she’d exposed the wound earlier, not when she bore down on it now. He was helpless, she was practically wrist-deep in him, it was extremely undignified, he’d hate it, she wanted him to get up and stop her.
“Fuck you,” she said, her face twisting. “Wake up.”
Deathgrip on the harvesting-knife. Slashed her palm. Cut too deep. Barely noticed. Made a fist so most of the blood would drip out one way. It dripped slower than it had in the archive room. Like it had somehow immediately congealed to the thickness of honey. Opened her palm in frustration, ready to hack a Ragpicker-taken finger off if she had to—and her breath caught.
Not only was her blood alarmingly close to the texture of ghost-blood, but it was shot through with rich veins of silver.
But her arsenal of ghost-strengthening techniques was rapidly diminishing, and it was all she could do not to grind that blood into his closed mouth, as she’d done with the salt when she’d captured him, way back when she was an Archivist and he was a specimen and her life was a much simpler thing. Instead she aimed it in, a steady dribble of silver-streaked red, the other hand pressing the wound.
The position was uncomfortable at best. Kneeling, back hunched, tipped forward, arms spread wide, like a crow mantling carrion.
Bent her head to crack her neck—and noticed the thread emerging from her coat-front. It crossed over her left shoulder, traveled a few feet, and there vanished in midair.
It wasn’t like the one Foster had given her, not anywhere near that vibrant with ghost-energy. It was frail and gray, like gathered ash one flick from crumbling, attached as it was to something that lacked the energy to power it. Her body. In that little room, in the dark. Only the bare fact of its presence suggested she hadn’t yet drowned.
Although, she thought helpfully, I could be drowning right now and not know.
For a long moment she sat there, eyes shut, concentrating on her breathing so she wouldn’t lose her mind. When she opened her eyes again, they fell on the thread, and she felt something in her chest give a little kick and settle.
The thread.
More than once she’d watched Foster attach threads to ghosts. It’d looked easy, a nothing kind of job, like paying out string from a reel. And it strengthened ghosts a whole lot better than blood.
With trembling fingers she pinched the base of the thread where it disappeared against the front of her coat. Braced herself and tugged.
The pain was outrageous. But an inch of thread unspooled.
She set her teeth and pulled again, slow and steady. The last time her thread had broken, she’d been forcibly ejected from the ghost-place and dumped unceremoniously back in her body, which had been left out in the elements without food or water until it was within easy arm’s reach of death. A sack of cold meat lit with the faintest possible pulse.
If this thread broke now, it’d slingshot her back to the archive room, along that dissolving silver trail. She’d be right back where she started, waiting to drown in the dark. Except now she’d wait alone, because the ghost wasn’t bound to the archive room and so had no reason to reappear there with her.
She had one chance—at most—to get this right.
A few more inches ripped free from somewhere deep in her and wormed out between her fingers. Felt like yanking arteries from her beating heart. A shudder escaped her and she clamped down on it, tiptoeing the barest edge of blacking out.
Another few slow pulls and she’d generated enough slack to reach the silver of the ghost’s wound and watched, wide-eyed, as it fused.
After that, it was easier to push aside the most part of the pain. She pulled slack and fused it, pulled slack and fused. Wiped her hands, caught her breath, cursed a bunch, pulled slack and fused. Gripped in a dreadful certainty she could feed thread into the wound forever and it would never fill, but after an unguessable time it began to look shallower, then narrower, and at last it drew shut.
But now he was attached to her thread, and she didn’t know how to cut him free without cutting hers as well.
For a long moment she pondered this. Then she pulled out more slack, so she was holding her thread in both hands, with the slack length of thread between them angling down toward the ghost in a shape like a T-junction, like the map-drawing of the tunnels on their way to the hatch.
She thought about what ghosts were made of. Pure energy, as far as she could tell. No kind of earthly material she could hold in comparison. A ghost could reassemble its shape based on its memory of itself and the strength of its will. She’d seen it a million times as Archivist. She’d just never used it before.
This is me, she thought deliberately, feeling silly but hefting the thread in her left hand anyway. And this is me, hefting the thread in her right.
She brought them together and they stuck.
Ragpicker slag me, it worked.
She pinched up a length of each thread-path and squeezed them together, rolling the twist between her fingers for good measure. Kept on doing that until the distinct strands had melded to a waxy thickening. Then, keeping them pinched hard in her off-hand just in case, she cut the ghost free, already flinching as the detached thread began to smolder into silver ash. She double-tied the fused thread off and waited, but nothing happened.
“Stay put,” she told the ghost needlessly. “I have to find a way out of here.”
But she couldn’t even find the strength to stand. When had she last been this tired?
She had to be alert. Vigilant. She’d seen what sorts of things tended to go rummaging through the ghost-place, stirring up trouble. The ghosts of all the upstarts she’d killed were here somewhere. The same went for whatever remained of the ghosts of all Catchkeep’s shrine-dogs, bred to keep Archivists in their place, drawn to a living Archivist in a place where one did not belong. Last time, the landscape itself had almost killed her at least once. Hell, the idea of the Catchkeep-priest’s ghost alone was enough to keep her on her toes.
For now, though, no other ghosts were here. No ghosts of shrine-dogs. No ghosts of vengeful upstarts. All the better—right now, Isabel wouldn’t’ve bet on herself in a brawl. It was all she could do to stay awake. A few more minutes and she couldn’t even do that anymore. She crashed into sleep still kneeling, her bloody fist resting on the ghost’s face.
Chapter Twenty
When she woke, she was lying on her side, curled in fetal position around the thread. Sunlight warmed her through the coat.
Then she remembered where she was, and her eyes fle
w open.
The ghost was still beside her.
Beside her, sitting on some kind of crate he’d found somewhere. Leaned forward, boots apart, elbows on knees, eyes downcast.
Barely even disheveled. Unbelievable. Isabel felt like she’d been dragged twenty miles through the Waste from the back of a cart. She wasn’t sure how it was possible for a person to feel so irritated and so jubilant in such an even split, but there it was.
“Hey,” she croaked.
The ghost’s attention snapped to her. He said nothing, just exhaled very slowly, and something in him seemed to settle.
It came to her that he’d been afraid to try to wake her. In case he hadn’t been able to.
“Does that,” he asked, watching her face as he hooked a thumb sideways at the place where her thread disappeared into nothing, “have anything to do—” prodding the air just above the faded silver tail of remaining thread, hanging down from where his wound used to be— “with this?”
Somehow it stood in for all of the other questions she knew he kept in waiting. She knew also that the one question he would never ask straight out—why don’t I remember what happened?—was the loudest.
“You were unconscious for a while,” she told him. “I brought us here because I would have drowned if we’d stayed, and we’d both be stuck in the facility with no way out, and I couldn’t—” She paused. “What’s the last thing you remember?”
Isabel could practically see the walls go up. Not that she didn’t see that coming, or sympathize. Most ghosts didn’t even remember enough to realize the extent of what they’d lost.
Three years ago he would’ve stonewalled her. This time, he spoke.
“There was a skirmish,” the ghost said slowly. “The tunnels flooded. I had to force a way through the floor. You—” He went utterly motionless. Isabel found she could pinpoint the moment when the oppressive quality of that unblinking stare changed, ever so slightly, from what the hell is going on to what the hell did you do.
“Wasp,” the ghost said carefully. “Did you—”
The words hung unspoken between them. Die. Turn ghost. To save me.
Of course not, she wanted to say. Don’t be stupid.
But she opened her mouth and, like Ember Girl in “Carrion Boy in the Sinkhole of Gentle Deceits,” could not get the lie out. Isabel was no Ember Girl. She lacked a certain spiky empathy, a certain noble, bruising, alien generosity of spirit. Though she was quite good at torching everything she set her hands to, so they had at least one thing in common. She couldn’t even bring herself to tell him about the broken half of Foster’s sword.
“I don’t know,” she said. Sort of limply gestured toward the spot in midair, now some distance behind them, where the slack of her thread paid out and out and disappeared. Would it dissolve slowly as her body died, or snap all of a sudden when her heart gave out? “Maybe a little. Anyway, don’t get the wrong idea. I was saving both of us.”
The next thing she knew, the ghost had stood and set her on her feet. “Which way to the exit? If your body is in the flooded facility, getting back to it will be a time-sensitive operation. It’ll be faster if I carry you.”
“Okay, first? I have no idea. Second, no. Third, I thought you wanted to know what happened after—”
“Then tell me while we’re finding a way out. Or later. Or never. It doesn’t matter.”
“It doesn’t matter? I thought you just got wounded in the fight, but I’m starting to think you hit your head or—”
The ghost rounded on her.
“I. Am not. Leaving you. In this place.”
She couldn’t help it. She busted out laughing. Once she’d started, it was very hard to stop.
The look he gave her was pure murder. “Yes?”
“It’s just—that’s exactly—” She gestured helplessly at the thread— “exactly what I—”
The ghost strode off toward that distant door and it was all she could do to heave her exhausted self after. Distortions of distance and time in the ghost-place, by this point, surprised Isabel about as much as sunrises and sunsets in the world of the living, and she had a bad feeling this walk was going to be a lot longer than it looked.
She walked in silence a while, not even attempting to keep up with the insane pace he set. Whole lot of good it was going to do him, too, if this room was anything like the rest of the ghost-place she’d encountered. You didn’t get nearer to a landmark in here unless it wanted you to, or you figured out a way to outsmart it. He of all people should know that.
So she followed at a distance, and she looked for clues.
Close up, the floor was littered with discarded Before-relics, randomly abandoned. Clothes, dolls, backpacks, bags. Bottles of water, cans of food. Even single shoes that their owners hadn’t stopped to put back on. And many, many objects that Isabel wouldn’t’ve been able to name with a knife to her throat.
The brick and mortar of the ghost-place, Isabel knew, was memories. Everything in it, no matter how big or small, was something that at least one ghost had been struck hard enough by in life to remember clearly in death. Usually the instrument or circumstance or setting of that death. The ghost-place was basically just one big interconnected web of these memory-pockets. Some were rooms or buildings. Others were whole cities. Or clearings in forests, or snowfields patterned with the staggering footprints of the lost. All honeycombed together with waypoints. These doors did not all look like doors. And they did not always open onto the same place twice.
This room, so big and rich in detail, strongly suggested that it’d been brought into being by many ghosts together. Something bad had happened here.
They picked and crunched their way across the field of it. What they stepped on broke beneath their heels and reformed again behind. She picked up and drank from a bottle of something that looked like bright pink water. It tasted, surprisingly, like salt.
As she walked, she thought back on her escape from the archive room, replaying it over in her mind until she snagged on the detail of the black boxes in her pockets. Those inscribed names and numbers. There’d been no box in Foster’s drawer, and the missing drawer was Chooser knew where, but—
The ghost. His name. It had been lost to him for countless centuries, and it might be in her pocket right this minute.
She jammed both hands into her pockets and—nothing.
The boxes were gone. Foster’s broken blade was gone.
Of course they were. Only an extremely strong ghost could bring objects between worlds with it. On their search for Foster three years ago she’d managed it, but this time she was so thrashed she was amazed that even her harvesting-knife, even her Archivist-coat, even her clothes had come through.
It shouldn’t have disappointed her, really. It wasn’t like she had any idea what purpose those tiny silver squares could possibly serve. She’d only taken the things out of a sense of—she wasn’t sure what to call it. Only that she hadn’t wanted to leave them there for the lake to digest. Those silver squares, along with a tunnel full of ghosts beside themselves with confusion and loss, were all that remained of a dozen lives otherwise erased, lost forever to this godsfucked place.
Isabel sighed. Then called up ahead: “You never asked me what I saw.”
The ghost’s stride hitched minutely, regained its mechanical smoothness.
“When you fished me out of the riv—”
“I know,” he said tightly, “what you meant.”
What she wanted to say felt like the kind of thing she had to wind up to. Ease her way in. But the more Isabel thought about it, the more she felt like she was teasing out the loose end of a tangle. She could pull it one way and snarl it further. Another way might untie the whole thing.
“I saw a weird little silver square. Some kind of Before-relic. Something they used in Latchkey.” Remembering the white-coated woman’s expression when she’d worked the thing free of Salazar’s brain, Isabel said: “I think they were important to whoever—” she
discarded verbs and settled on “—was in charge of the operatives.” Another face swam up from memory, a face and a title. “The Director. I think they were going to use them for someth—” The ghost glanced over a shoulder at her, went ankle-deep in something that looked like a heap of laundry but probably wasn’t, kept walking. “You don’t care.”
“Those people,” he said, “are none of my concern. They were not then and they are not now.”
Expression kept fragilely blank as an egg. Just beneath the surface ran that ice-cold fury, so exacting, so unlike Foster’s. Hers leaked out to maintain equilibrium, but he leaned on the lid of his, a jar with a monster inside.
Walking around the edge of the room now. Isabel inched her way along, one hand always in contact with the wall in case it tried anything funny. She knew this place better than to trust it. The door, somehow, looked just as far away as before.
“When I saw…what I saw. Those silver squares, they came out of the operatives. I saw it. People in white coats were cutting one out of Salazar’s brain.”
The ghost halted so abruptly Isabel almost smashed into him. He didn’t turn. He stood there like she’d just told him he was surrounded by venomous snakes that would bite him the second he moved.
Well, she was in it now. May as well splash around.
“When I saw your memories before. Yours and Foster’s. I saw you cut a different kind of silver square out of the back of her hand—here—out of yours too. You said it was so they couldn’t follow you. So those things—and these things—they must have some kind of information put in them somehow. The ones in your hands to find you, the ones in your brains to…do something else. Right?”
With agonizing care, the ghost turned.
“So,” Isabel continued. “All these ghosts are stuck in the tunnels, just like Foster was stuck when we found her. They can’t remember anything. Sure, part of that is because they’re ghosts, and ghosts forget. But maybe another part of it is because they, you know, had things taken out of their brains.”
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