Then, all at once, she did.
It looked different here than it had in the ghost’s memories of it. Different than its rendering in the ghost-place. A long dark room, its running lights long since broken, no longer with its double row of child-sized beds lined up, feet pointed inward. Though the platform where the beds had been remained. It stood in deep shadow on the far side of the room.
“Hey,” she called to the ghost, who was making his way briskly over to the platform and the darkness beyond. Thought about telling him where they were, then thought better of it. “This leads outside. Can you get up there and see where we…”
She turned just in time to see him stop so fast he rebounded a little, like he’d collided with an invisible wall. A kind of voiceless, strangled little noise came out of him.
Isabel drew the knife and headed over. Then she saw what he was looking at.
On the platform a chair lay toppled over sideways. Like the chairs in the reception room, whatever synthetic it was made of was shockingly resilient. Two neat holes were punched in its back, one high, one low.
The ghost-place version of this room—that platform, that chair—was where they’d found Foster’s ghost, locked in the pitiless loop of her own final memory. Those holes were from bullets that had gone through Foster first.
That’s why they didn’t shoot her in the head, Isabel realized for the first time. They didn’t want to destroy that silver square in her brain.
Isabel was beginning to get the distinct impression that the knife was messing with her. Foster wasn’t through that waypoint. Foster hadn’t been here in some time. But it’d brought her directly to the exact place where she’d found Foster before.
The ghost stood beside her, fists clenched, deliberately taking measured, ragged, even breaths. Clutching after the rapidly fraying extremity of his calm.
“So,” he managed. “Looks like we just missed her.”
Isabel was staring at that chair, seized by a bizarre imagining. What happened to the relic of a ghost’s broken loop? Any minute the chair might stand itself upright, bullets zipping through it backwards, holes sealing up behind. Foster might reappear in it, her uniform exchanged for a jumpsuit. Clamped into that chair at intervals: chest, waist, upper arms, wrists, thighs, ankles. Then she’d tear free of her restraints. Say something to the ghost. Hand him a sheet of paper, her dying wish. And the shooting would begin.
But it didn’t. The chair was a piece of garbage resting on a high place in the floor. The ancient stain on the platform was almost faint enough to ignore.
What the hell was it even still doing here? Why had nobody removed it after Foster died? It put Isabel in mind of the condition of the rest of the tunnels. Not the great age of the place, or the encroachment of the lake, but the older damage, which she’d seen earlier, unable to explain. Heavy doors ripped off their hinges and flung into walls. Fire damage blackening long stretches of hallway. The missing drawer and mangled shelves in the archive. Now this.
It’s like this whole damn place went down with Foster, she thought, and shivered.
“Come on,” she said. “Let’s keep—”
The ghost saw it at the same time she did. Flickering in the darkness beyond the platform.
They stood behind their weapons, waiting to see what it would do. It flickered again and faded. Flickered and reached. Isabel squinted but couldn’t get a lock on it.
Whatever it was, it was bright. Not humanoid. There was a violent stop-start stuttering quality to its movement, as though it was only tenuously tethered to the world Isabel could see. It was along the wall, it was emerging from the shadow, it was already on the platform, trailing threads. Lots of threads, sunbursting out behind it, floating on the empty air like the long hair of someone drowned. Shimmering silver filaments, scouring Isabel’s eyes with light.
Closer, not humanoid was not exactly accurate. Humanoid once. Long ago. Still somewhat recognizable as such, now that it’d settled into place. Isabel’s mental box of field notes left her at a loss to classify it. It didn’t have the strength to retain its shape—no, it isn’t that—it looked to have been broken apart and reconstructed. Reconstructed, but slightly wrong, as if its person-shape had fallen to the floor and shattered, then been glued back together by feel. Pieces askew, pieces missing, pieces cobbled together. Most of a blue skirt, part of a white coat, a single shoe making crisp sounds like soft gunshots as the thing shifted its weight back and forth on the platform, left heel to right ankle-stump.
Not glued, Isabel realized, staring at it. Stitched. All those threads…
“Did Foster—?” she whispered, gesturing. Already knowing the answer. She’d cut Foster’s threads. And yet here these were.
“We’ve never been down here,” the ghost replied. Then he seemed to realize what he was saying. “Well,” he added, with a bitter irony. “Not for a while.”
Which made Isabel realize something. She knew that blue skirt. Knew that white coat. Knew the sound of that one remaining shoe. Even recognized some of the items in the armload of debris the broken ghost was clutching to itself. She might not have known their names, but she’d seen them. In the memories of the Latchkey dead.
Long ago, searching for Foster, Isabel had thought to look for the ghosts of the people in charge of the Latchkey Project. Glean clues from them. Those ones I found, the ghost had told her. We won’t be finding them again. Because he had destroyed them. Eventually. Once he’d realized they’d be no help to him in his search for Foster.
Well, they’d found one. Or what was left of one.
The Director.
The ghost of the Director was carrying more stuff than she could hold. Objects slipped from her arms, one by one, and each time she picked something up another thing would drop. This task seemed to engage the whole of her attention.
The ghost was watching the Director with a kind of fascinated contempt. “What’s it doing?”
“That’s the moment she got stuck on,” Isabel whispered. “She’s looping.”
“Like Ayres?”
“Like Ayres. Like Salazar. Like Foster.” Glanced over. “What are you doing?”
What the ghost was doing was raising his sword. Surveying the platform and the swaying, bending, scooping, fumbling thing on it with a sort of nonplussed derision. It wasn’t clear whether he recognized the Director’s ghost. Either way, Isabel knew the first move the Director made toward them, he’d go up there and finish what he’d started. The sheer number of pieces he must’ve cut the Director’s ghost into in the first place was both mind-boggling and faintly nauseating. He must have pinned her down and diced her, meticulously, into squirming confetti, while she—
“Wait,” Isabel breathed. “The threads.”
Tension radiated off of the ghost like the visible heat over a fire. “I know.”
“If Foster didn’t put them there—”
“I know.”
A folder of papers tumbled from the Director’s arms and fanned across the platform. The Director dropped to one knee, unsteady on the ankle-stump, and began to gather them one-handed. Moaning under her breath in soft frustration: no no no goddamnit no—
Oblivious to her audience, the Director got the papers squared back into their folder, flipped it under an arm, rose smoothly—and a glossy-paneled device fell and cracked.
It looked an awful lot like the kind of device Isabel had found on the high shelf in the archive room. It lay there, broken. When the Director picked it back up, it was whole.
Isabel didn’t notice what fell next. All her awareness was locked on that device, because as the Director retrieved it from the floor the light had fallen on and cleanly illuminated an opening near its bottom edge. A shallow square imprint about the size of her thumbnail.
The right size to fit a little silver square.
The Director dropped the device, half-knelt to pick it up—goddamnit no—and as she did, Isabel could see over the white slope of her shoulders. Could see those countless
threads trailing away into the darkness behind. Could just make out what was back there along the wall, maybe thirty feet away, lit only by its own faint glow. A shapeless silver roiling.
Isabel had wondered earlier why she’d only seen Latchkey ghosts in the tunnels. No sign of any that’d just happened to wander through the ghost-place waypoints. She was formulating a pretty good guess as to where they’d gone. Who’d brought them here to assemble and power the Director with was another question entirely.
“I’ve seen enough,” said the ghost. Readying sword and stance for a clean kill. “I’m taking the one in the front. We’ll deal with the ones behind it after.”
“Wait,” she shouted. All her attention locked onto that device. “I have to try to—”
Suddenly she felt the quality of the ghost’s stillness change.
“Wasp,” he said, with perfect clenched evenness, easily translated as trouble. “I thought you said you trapped…”
He nodded at something emerging from the dark beyond. Something whose name he trailed off before saying. Something Isabel was supposed to have trapped.
Only one thing that could mean.
She followed his line of sight—and there was Salazar. Drifting up out of the darkness behind the platform. Attached to the Director by a brand-new, gleaming silver thread.
She must’ve picked that up from watching Foster, Isabel thought, stunned. There’s enough of her mind left in there that she can still learn.
“Well,” Isabel said shakily. “I guess she got out.”
She pictured Salazar, cut off from Foster, escaping the cave-in and crawling blind down the tunnels until she’d found enough material to create another energy source to link up to, and burned it like fuel.
But why would Salazar go to the trouble of putting the Director back together?
As soon as she wondered it, she realized she already knew. Salazar had been the Director’s favorite, or one of them. Isabel had seen as much reading Foster’s memories before. And it had been the removal of Salazar’s silver square that had convinced the other operatives that things weren’t quite what they seemed. Salazar herself wasn’t around to benefit from the knowledge. As far as she was concerned, the Director was probably more like a teacher. A parent. Someone who had the child operatives’ best interests at heart.
That still didn’t settle the more pressing question, though. Salazar had been direly weakened. The Director was a wreck. The amorphous roil of lesser ghosts behind her wouldn’t have given her enough power to create those threads from. Isabel was missing a piece of this puzzle, and she wasn’t yet sure what it was.
Then Isabel saw—really saw—what she was looking at.
Two other Latchkey ghosts, about half-formed, were detaching from the silver turmoil. Isabel recognized the black-haired girl from Ayres’s memory, but not the other. A few shapeless silver ghosts detached with them, deflating even as they fumbled their way forward after Salazar.
Two Latchkey ghosts, Isabel thought, looking at the Director and her bundle of threads. Yeah, that’d do it.
Isabel squinted. For the state they’d left her in, Salazar looked pretty good now. The other ghosts, meanwhile, looked like hell. Worsening by the second. At the edge of the platform there was now a silver puddle ten feet wide, and even the two other Latchkey ghosts were beginning to weaken visibly.
And Salazar’s thread was brighter than the moon through the crack in the ceiling.
“Shit. She’s sucking ghost-energy out of all of them. Look at her thread.”
“I’m looking at it.”
A humming sound as Salazar’s thread drew more power down it, silvering and crumpling the other ghosts even as her own ghost-energy roared up around her, lashing at the high shadows of that room, bright enough to see by.
Light lingered on Salazar’s blade and the glistening pits of her eyes. “Why isn’t it killing you?” she was saying, again and again, under her breath, in a voice like a wet sponge stuck in her throat. Silver blood dribbling down her chin as she spoke. “Why isn’t it killing you?”
“Disengage,” the ghost said, not taking his eyes off of Salazar. “Get out. I’ll cover you.”
Isabel took a step backward and Salazar was there, intercepting her, already so close Isabel could see her own startled face reflected in Salazar’s blade.
Clumsily, she launched herself out of range, shielding her thread with her body, knowing full well she was about a million times too slow. I’m going to die, she thought experimentally. I’m going to die today. It felt like poking an arm that had fallen asleep. She knew it was there, knew she should feel it. Couldn’t. Something had hold of her, some dark little hook in her heart that was yanking her forward through a veneer of perfect calm—
—and Salazar was skidding backwards across the floor on the ass of her uniform and the ghost was stalking toward her, swordpoint intended for the soft of her throat.
Salazar sprang lightly to her feet, unfazed, and tried again to get at Isabel. Again the ghost got in the way. Backhanded Salazar across the side of the head with a gloved fist that would’ve dropped a bear. Followed the punch with the sword. At the last possible second Salazar feinted out of the way, close enough to crop one of her ears into a silver mess. Popped up already lunging forward, slicing at the ghost, her blade an unseen whistle on the air.
The ghost was faster. Swatted Salazar’s strike away, and the one after that. The next one bit deep into his arm, which ran silver like a ditch runs meltwater. This exchange took, all told, less than a second. They paused and stared each other down at a distance of ten paces. Salazar, to all appearances, was unharmed.
The ghost glanced with that unbreakable false serenity at his rapidly silvering sleeve. Something in his face shifted, was crushed back into place. For the briefest instant he settled to an eerie perfect stillness, as if gathering something to himself. Then, all at once, he rushed Salazar, even faster than before. Hopelessly, breathtakingly, invisibly fast. They clashed and broke, and Isabel could literally no longer tell them apart, only hope that the blocks she heard were the ghost’s, and the silver she could see spattering the floor was Salazar’s…
It came to her that she’d taken a step forward, was frozen in the act of reaching out. Mouth hanging open idiotically around all the words that knotted, scrabbling for purchase, in her throat.
Chooser turn a blind eye, she thought, clenching her whole mind like a broken fist around that halfassed prayer. Chooser look anywhere but here.
She’d failed to stand against Salazar before. Her inability, her sheer outclassedness, had nearly gotten Sairy killed. And now—
Get to the platform, Isabel ordered herself. Cut her threads. Shut her down.
She tore her gaze away and hurtled toward the platform, knife already drawn.
There were more threads than ghosts, as if other ghosts had once been attached and drained, or cut away. The remaining threads were bundled into an accidental cable, densely packed enough that ghost-energy hemorrhaged from the loose ends and visibly dissipated across the floor. It hit the knifeblade like ghost-blood, but diluted, assaulting Isabel with a sputtering pinhole leak of memories. Disembodied whispers frail as spiderweb that bypassed her ear to be caught somewhere in her brain.
—told you he wouldn’t
—one than risk two
—catch me!
—gonna get worse before it gets
—makes you think I
—green one or the
—so smart now, huh?
—away. All of you. I said
—over now. Come on. Let’s get you
—keep doing this
—or dare?
Some threads parted for her blade with no resistance, but others had grown in wiry and tough, had twisted up with their neighbors into a brambly thicket of silvery light.
She sawed and cursed and heaved a massive sigh of relief as she finally broke through.
“I cut her off,” she shouted at the ghost in triumph. “I
cut her off, she’s done.”
As expected, the tailings of the Director’s borrowed ghost-energy slipped off down the last few slashed threads, through the Director and into Salazar. Who drank it down like water, then seemed to realize she was down to her last drops of stolen energy and decided to switch up her tactics.
Without a discernible pause, Salazar ripped a new thread free of her own chest and attached it to the ghost.
Isabel couldn’t pinpoint that thread. They’d blurred back into the fight too quickly. But she knew it was there from the green-white brilliance of its whip-arc, the tracers it left on the air, the single high pure note that was torn from the speed of its passage. A note that rang her bones like a tuning fork but only registered as the faintest itch in her ear.
“Cut the thread, you idiot,” she screamed at the ghost. “Cut it before she—”
Too late.
Dark lightning forked up and out of Salazar, searing Isabel’s eyes. She winced violently, wrenching away as if from a great wash of heat.
Recovering, she squinted, furiously blinking streaming eyes. A power surge, stronger than anything she’d seen from Salazar before, stronger even than the one that’d blasted along Foster’s thread to Isabel and blown a hole in the tunnels. She could hear it, a sound like thunder overhead, like tons of ice cracking all at once under spring thaw.
You underestimated her. He underestimated her. And now—
Half-blind, panicked at imagining what her eyes couldn’t see, Isabel started shrieking at Salazar like she could call her out, fight her, trap her, put her down. Something. Anything. Like Isabel could yell herself a line in the sand, a place where she could plant herself in the path of what was coming.
But Salazar paid about as much attention to Isabel as Isabel might to a mildly irritating bug.
Right now she had bigger problems.
That light—the piercing, suffocating, monstrous, crystalline, full-on coldfire onslaught of it—wasn’t coming from Salazar at all.
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