A sudden mental image came to her: broken old skulls lying in the dust somewhere, corpseroot growing through the eyeholes. Silver slivers rattling around inside.
He said he buried Foster, she thought. And then, linked to the back of that, a thought she immediately wished she hadn’t had. Just like the Director said she’d buried Salazar. But there’s a silver square in a black case and a big clear box in a drawer that says otherwise.
“I wonder,” she said, as carefully as she could say such a thing, “if the reason why I didn’t find one for Foster is because they never got a chance to take hers out.”
Finally the ghost spoke. So quiet she barely made it out. He sounded tireder than she felt, which was saying something. “I don’t remember.” Then, his tone sharpening off as what she’d said sank in: “Wait. Didn’t find one what for Foster exactly?”
“Well,” she said. “Here’s the interesting thing. In the room I just got us out of, I found these drawers. Eleven of them, with names and numbers on them, and a space for a twelfth that was missing. Inside were little black boxes, also with names and numbers. And inside those were the same little silver squares.”
The ghost blinked. Lifted his gaze, brought the precise point of it to bear on her. There was a certain hesitant, suppressed radiance in his face that it took her a moment to recognize as hope.
The unasked question was written in every strained, silent line of him.
“Ten,” she said, so quiet the word barely made it out of her mouth. “Twelve drawers. Ten boxes. No box in Foster’s drawer.”
“And,” he said, with feigned indifference that did not fool her for one second, “these drawers are all labeled with the names of their…” He trailed off, visibly sifting through all the possible ways to end that sentence. Owners, maybe, or occupants, or prisoners. “Their…contents?”
“I don’t know. Most of them, definitely. I read one, saw it had Salazar’s name on it, and got all those little black boxes out as fast as I could so I could get a good look at them later. It was dark, and I wasn’t trying to stick around in there. I was trying to do the opposite, actually.”
“And these black boxes?”
“Back with my body,” she admitted. “I tried, but…” She patted her empty pockets.
He was a moment in processing this. “You got out of there,” he said at last. “And so far you’ve managed not to drown. Everything else is of secondary concern.”
“But,” she added quickly, because she had to give him something, something that wasn’t just more screwups and more pain, “I did find the other half of Foster’s sword.”
“You did?”
“Yeah.”
“In the room with the drawers?”
“Yeah.”
The ghost narrowed his eyes at that, like a person reaching after the receding edges of a dream. But it outpaced him, and he sighed and shook his head a little, irritated. “Secondary concern,” he said again, quieter this time. Then, louder: “We need to keep moving.” He resumed walking toward that distant door.
Isabel walked alongside him, remembering.
“It was the weirdest thing, fitting that broken blade to the harvesting-knife. It was like…I mean, holding Before-relics is always weird. It’s like looking down into a dark hole in the ground with no bottom. But this is the harvesting-knife. I knew what it was since I saw Foster with her sword before, back when we found her stuck in the ghost-place, but it still…” She trailed off. “She would’ve hated what we did with it,” she said softly.
“Her sword?”
“Yeah. I mean. This is a thing she tried to get rid of. It was broken in half and buried in three levels of underground tunnels, for Chooser’s sake. But then it came back up, like—like a bag of shrine-dog puppies you mess up trying to drown. And we just kept giving it to kids and making them spill more blood. The exact thing Foster wanted to stop doing. The exact thing she died to stop doing. Her sword kept doing it without her for four hundred years.” She drew the harvesting-knife and turned it over in her hands as she walked. Now that the dogleather grip had been removed, the ancient synthetic one underneath was identical to the one on the ghost’s sword, blue-black and shiny. “Four hundred years of blood.”
There was a pause. Then: “A bag of what?”
Isabel kicked an object in mysterious crinkly packaging and watched it sail off, then reappear at its exact point of origin. “Never mind.”
But he surprised her.
“You’re right,” he said after a moment. “She would have. But consider this. If it had remained in that drawer, you wouldn’t have found her before. You wouldn’t have freed your people from further oppression. You wouldn’t have earned the authority to protect them now. And we’d never have—”
“Are you trying to say she’d think it was worth it? Because I highly doubt—”
“I’m saying she’d think it’s a start.” The ghost raised his chin at something off ahead. “It’s closer.”
Isabel glanced up. The door was maybe twenty yards ahead of them now, visibly nearing with each step. Strange. They’d been walking toward it for minutes without closing any distance, and now this. She eyed it skeptically, unsure what had changed.
Isabel studied it. It wasn’t even one door, it was four, two sets of double doors side by side, all set into a wide recessed arch. They all might lead to the same place, or each might lead someplace different. Impossible to say until they stepped through.
Within a moment they stood before the doors. They both knew better than to pick one at random and hope for the best.
“Don’t look at me,” the ghost said with bland self-deprecation. “I’m not the one who figured this out last time.”
“Last time I knew where we were trying to go,” Isabel said. Then she thought a moment. Last time, when they were searching for Foster, she’d tried saying as much aloud before going through a waypoint. But had it worked at that time, or had it been another dead-ended attempt at navigating the ghost-place? She couldn’t remember. There had been a lot of false starts, but she couldn’t bring to mind the particulars of each. The learning curve of this place was brutal.
Better safe than sorry, she decided. “Okay,” she said. Making sure her voice was clear and firm. Worst case, she’d feel stupid, and she had bigger fish frying just now. Best case, the ghost-place was listening, and would decide for reasons of its own to cooperate. “I have to get word to Sairy or Foster or somebody that the tunnels have flooded. We have to get the people out of there.”
“No,” the ghost said. “Top priority is getting you out of there.”
“I will,” she told him. “Later.”
“There may not be,” he gritted, each word measured, “a later.”
“If that water comes in, there might not be time for both. I can’t—”
“Exactly.”
She waved this off. “Right, yeah, none of your concern, I get it. But there’s fifty of them and one of me, and yours isn’t the only concern on the table. Anyway, look.” She held up the thread, which by some miracle was still intact. “You Before-people might’ve killed the world, but you sure knew how to make doors. Plenty of time for you to lose this argument on the way back to Sairy.”
She gestured at those four doors in frustration. “They should really put signs on these things or something.”
Then, because it occurred to her that the ghost had never been around to have this explained to him: “I’m not sure I even found the right path last time. Every time we got close to the right waypoint, or where the right waypoint could be made, the harvesting-knife started acting weird…”
The ghost glanced down at the harvesting-knife in its sheath. Contrary to Isabel’s very reasonable expectation, there wasn’t so much as a trace of skepticism in his face or voice when he spoke. “So what’s it doing now?”
Isabel drew the knife and held it out in front of her, waiting a moment to see what it would do. “Nothing,” Isabel said, frustrated. “Nothing at all
. It was doing more than this when I wasn’t even looking for anything, I was just walking around in the tunnels, it makes no sense.”
“What was it doing in the tunnels?”
“Not anything as noticeable as in the ghost-place before,” she said. “It just kind of—shivers? Sometimes? It’s hard to describe. I don’t think it really moves, exactly, it just…” She trailed off, at a loss for words. “Since I came into the tunnels it’s been pretty intense. At one point it got really bad.” When had that been? Everything was blurring together, and her little journeys in and out of the time-distorting ghost-place weren’t exactly helping. It felt like she’d been in the tunnels for at least a week, but it couldn’t have been more than a day or two. “Right before the time I fell into the river, I think. And then since then it’s been worse than before. I’ve been trying to ignore it, honestly.”
Eyeing the knife closely: “But it’s not doing this…shivering…now?”
Isabel paused to assess. Deliberately, she held the knife out two-handed toward each of the four doors in turn, feeling silly. Nothing. She sheathed it, annoyed.
Shook her head. “Not since the tunnels.”
“And before the tunnels, not since we were looking for Foster?”
She hesitated. Then, because it was high time she consigned her embarrassment and awkwardness to the Ragpicker and chose to be openly honest for once, she told him how she used to follow the harvesting-knife around the roads and fields and Waste-edges of Sweetwater, taking its weird behavior as reassurance that he and Foster were out there in the ghost-place somewhere.
“Except you weren’t,” she said slowly, the implications clicking into place. “You were in the tunnels the whole time…”
She fell silent. It was a delicate idea, what was hatching in her mind. Too delicate to handle without crushing it.
Last winter, Jen and Bex had built a little game. A handheld frame like the lid of a box, with a floor made out of sturdy scorchweed-nettle paper. On the floor Bex had drawn a maze, a bird’s-eye view of a town, zigzag streets and squares of house-roofs. There was a little silver metal person-shape, stubby-limbed and faceless like an unformed ghost, that sat in one corner of the maze. You’d move it without touching it, scooting it through the maze by way of a piece of different metal held hidden underneath. And if you took the two pieces of metal out of the game and set them on a table an inch or so apart, the under-the-maze piece would draw the person-piece to it, snapping audibly together as the ex-upstarts murmured in astonishment.
Right before she’d fallen into the river, she’d said. That’s when the harvesting-knife had acted up worse than it had in years. And who’d approached as she lay dead to the world on the floor? Who’d been there when she’d woken up?
The same person it had led her to before, unerringly, as soon as she’d set her rational mind aside and gave the harvesting-knife the reins.
She thought of the map she’d drawn aboveground, the dots indicating where the knife had been the most insistent. She’d expected them to cluster around the ghost-place entrances she knew, which they hadn’t. But if she had a map of where Foster had walked in the tunnels beneath the town, it might well match up to that.
“Ragpicker slag me,” she whispered. Then, louder: “Wait.”
“Are you saying that you—”
“I don’t know what I’m saying yet. Give me a second.”
The ghost fell silent and watched her draw the harvesting-knife, hold it out in front of her. There was a tingling in her fingers where they touched it. She’d assumed that was from where the ghostgrass had touched the hilt, before she’d removed it and thrown it away. But what if it was something else?
Again she held it pointed out toward each door in turn. Again nothing.
She turned around to aim it back toward the field of Before-stuff scattered across the floor, panning back and forth for good measure. Nothing.
She turned toward that long bank of broken windows, and the sensation ever-so-slightly intensified. Like static electricity, but not. Like the certainty that someone is watching you across a crowded room. Like the prickle of your flight instinct kicking in.
Back toward the doors and the sensation dropped away almost entirely.
“Okay,” she said under her breath. “Okay.”
It came to her the ghost was staring at her, waiting.
“Everything in the ghost-place is made of memories, right?” she said. “So maybe the knife remembered what it used to be, and it was trying to get back to her. Somehow. I don’t know. All I know is that, for whatever reason, it led me there. I just…” She shrugged. “Paid attention.”
“And you’re paying attention now.”
“I’m paying attention now.” She nodded toward that bank of broken windows. “And I’m about halfway sure that this’ll take us to Foster.”
* * *
Close up, the broken windows were slowly cycling through somebody’s memory of disaster. They were whole. They were clouded with the breath of countless tight-packed bodies. They were smudged with the palmprints of countless restless children. They were lit with a sudden burst of blue fire. They were blowing out, inward, crumbs of glass melting before they hit the floor. Then the glass-melt ran up and together and leapt back into the window, a perfect pane, and the loop began again.
One of these windows was a waypoint, Isabel was sure of it. She recognized it at once from the way its loop was staggered out of sync with the others. Out of place, she thought. Glass in the frame when the others’ was on the floor, and vice versa. Also from how, when the blue light hit it, it silhouetted a form in the center of the pane, the shape of a person reaching.
The question was, was it the right waypoint. It could well one-way them into certain death.
Isabel stilled, concentrating on the harvesting-knife. She could swing it toward the window easily, but as soon as she tried to pull it away it put up resistance. And trying to take a step backward from the window felt like walking through water up to her neck. “Okay,” she said again, inanely.
The ghost wasn’t even looking at the window. He was looking at the harvesting-knife. “Even if she is through there, that still leaves the question of how to return you to your body.”
“First thing, Foster and Sairy have to know the second hatch isn’t viable. Then we find a way to get the people out of the tunnels. Foster’s somewhere in town. If this takes us to a waypoint near her, then we know where we are, and we can figure out the rest somehow.” Then she saw his face. “What?”
“A waypoint near Foster.”
“Yes.”
“Foster, who is somewhere in your town.”
“Yes. It—oh.”
Of course. The ghostgrass barricades.
“Well,” she said, “it’s either I try this or they all drown.”
The ghost looked like he wanted to say something, then didn’t. Instead he looked at the windows. Then he looked at her. “Tell me what I have to do.”
“We’re going to step through this waypoint,” Isabel said, leveling the harvesting-knife at the smudgy window like she was issuing it a challenge, “and Foster’s going to be there on the other side.”
The ghost looked doubtful. She elbowed him.
“Picture it. I did that before and I think it might’ve helped.”
“You think it—”
“Foster. Through there. Wondering why we’re not in the tunnels anymore.”
“And why you suddenly look so much like a ghost,” he said, acquiescing.
“She’ll be busy helping Sairy tend to the wounded after the fight.”
“She won’t have left any wounded to tend to.”
“She wouldn’t have wanted it to go down that way,” Isabel said slowly, realizing it aloud word by word. “But she would’ve done what she had to do to help me.”
“Yes,” the ghost said simply.
Isabel swallowed past the sudden tightness in her throat. Sighted along the blade at armslength and long-vanis
hed glass sprayed past her like water, leaving a jagged-edged mouth of blue light. “She’s through there.”
“She’s through there.”
The ghost took a step toward the waypoint and stopped, gazing coolly back at her like he was waiting for something. It came to Isabel that she was holding his sleeve.
Her mouth was about to say something. She just wasn’t sure quite what.
“If we come through into someplace bad,” she heard herself saying, “get out. However you can. Don’t—do what you did back there. In the tunnels. I mean it. I’ll be fine.” Better to lose one than risk two, she thought, and I’ll let the Ragpicker eat me and shit me back out before I let you get stuck down here like Foster. “Promise me.”
“The same goes for you,” he said. “If you have to make that choice. Don’t hesitate.”
She scoffed, but her voice caught like her throat was full of fishhooks. “Like I would.”
“Then there’s no problem.”
Briefly, silently, they sized each other up.
They walked through and the broken window reformed behind them, piecing and healing like a wound.
Chapter Twenty-One
They stepped through into a muck-scented darkness that Isabel immediately placed as tunnels. Her thread was intact, at a glance neither brighter nor duller than before.
The lake was not immediately apparent. That was the good news. The bad news was: neither was Foster.
“Well,” she said sullenly, “there goes that theory.”
They began to make their way around the room, looking for a door. A map. Something.
The air in this part of the tunnels was comparatively fresh, and what Isabel first took for a waypoint in the ceiling was actually moonlight, bleeding in from above through a wide fissure in the ceiling. No greenery trailed down through it, though, so whatever had made that crack was recent.
Standing underneath it, vague noise reached her from beyond. Lots of voices. Weirdly close. Was this sector of the tunnels even still below Sweetwater? Did they reach to other towns, stretching out under the Waste like the roots of some impossible tree? They were definitely in the topmost sublevel, what with the moonlight pouring through the ceiling, though Isabel didn’t recognize this room at all.
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