Latchkey

by Nicole Kornher-Stace

  It was coming from the ghost.

  * * *

  He reversed it. Isabel gaped at the ghost, astonished. He reversed the flow. He’s drawing power off of Salazar.

  Light like black fire kicked up behind the ghost, rushed in a ring around his boots. No blue, no violet, but shot through with the same glacial green-white as his thread, silver’s uppermost register. If it were a sound, it would have shattered glass. So bright it silhouetted him in the heart of it: a paper cutout that held its sword lightly aside, raised its off-hand with an exploratory languor, set it just below Salazar’s throat, gave the gentlest of pushes, and watched with bland interest as Salazar sailed back a dozen yards easy, cratering a wall.

  A crack appeared in that wall. Started zigzagging up it. Hit the busted ceiling. A new smattering of debris rained through that wide crack, peppering the floor. Something in the ceiling groaned.

  “Stop! She’s done, okay? Just cut that thread before you bring the ceiling down on—what the hell are you—”

  The ghost had reached Salazar’s point of impact and slung her down easily. He stood over her now, boot to chest, and was making delicate, precise, comprehensive slashes with his sword as Salazar thrashed and fought ineffectually.

  Isabel had seen him dispatch a ghost before, cutting it into pieces like he was butchering an animal for meat. Effectively trapping it in place for eternity. She hadn’t known then what his aim had been. Whether he’d done it out of cruelty or mercy. She didn’t know now either, but she sure knew where her guess was going. Pieces of Salazar peeled off and scattered like petals, silvering as they fell.

  Foster’s not going to like that. This thought reached Isabel at low volume from a vast distance. Thinking was suddenly very, very hard. Her thoughts felt heavy, limp and deadweight, and she had so far to carry them.

  A change in the Director’s movements drew her attention back.

  She’d dropped the folder again, was kneeling to retrieve it. Except now she was…unraveling? Isabel didn’t have another word for it. Like she was coming untethered to herself, crumbling to pieces at her own feet. Well, her one foot. That too was fading fast.

  “Wait,” Isabel said. Not daring to look away. Like she could hold the Director together with her eyes. All her attention locked on to the pocket from which that device would appear.

  The Director dropped a pencil. Cursed, scrabbled, retrieved.

  After that went a clipboard. Then a folder. Papers flew from it and the Director knelt—no no no goddamnit no, scatter gather square stand. Then the device. It fell, broke, mended.

  The Director lifted the device through the light and that shallow square opening became glaringly visible.

  Gently, Isabel tried to lift it out of the Director’s grasp. Holding her breath as the device dissolved into black sparks for a second, jumping the gap between the Director’s hands and hers. There it reassembled, flickering, blurry, weightless. Already, removed from the Director’s hands, it was beginning to fade. If she squeezed it, her hand would pass through.

  Upon hasty inspection, she was surer than ever. That opening was the exact shape and size of one of those little silver squares. Tilting it into the light she could make out tiny perforations lining the opening’s inner edge that would fit the little nubs of the square’s stubby spider-legs.

  Heart pounding, she held it up. “What is this?”

  But it dissolved into silver mist and was gone, leaving Isabel staring at her empty hand. “No,” she whispered, “no no no—”

  The device subtracted from her junk collection, the Director wasn’t holding one too many things anymore. Slowly she straightened. Gained her balance on the remains of the ankle-stump. Like Ayres, her loop had broken.

  She stared, eyes lit with forlorn and terrible hope. “Catherine?” Her gaze raked the darkness, alighted on the middle distance, slid off like rain down a window. Touched on Isabel and locked on. “Is that you?”

  No, Isabel had to stop herself from shouting in frustration. I’m not. Why do you all keep thinking that?

  Then she realized she had a better idea.

  In a voice like edging out onto a frozen pond that might or might not hold your weight, she said: “I caused you a lot of trouble.”

  The Director gave her the tiniest, weariest smile imaginable. Her face was flaking off, blowing away in a nonexistent wind. “That you did.” She looked like she wanted to say more, so Isabel waited. One cheek and down that side of the neck was totally eroded now. The Director looked like a victim of her own treatments gone wrong. She looked like Salazar. “I wasn’t at all fair to any of you children. I should have…” and her voice crackled into slurry, cutting out and in as Ayres’s had done. “…stick their funding.” Her rueful headshake said too late, too late. “One can be proud of the work one is doing,” she said, lapsing into sudden clarity, “and less so of one’s methods.”

  Ragpicker’s gambit, Isabel told herself, and rushed to say, “I found the silver squares you took out of our brains.”

  The Director’s face darkened. “Good. Burn them. I never approved…phase of the project. It was directly…my vision of…insult to those children…through so much. I wouldn’t…light of day again.”

  Isabel swallowed. “What are they?”

  “A glorified salvage operation,” the Director spat. “Desecration…dead.” Then something angrily unintelligible. Then, calming somewhat: “A failsafe.”

  Failsafe, Isabel mouthed, committing the unfamiliar word to memory.

  “…much of the project was handled so badly. Too rushed, too uninformed, too…desperate unfortunate decisions…my watch. After…point, all I could do…archive the results. Those data chips…that archive.”

  Data chips, Isabel thought. Recording the syllables in her mind the way Foster had recorded Salazar.

  This broke off into a blur of white noise that lasted a couple seconds. “…losing subjects. So many…fast. Side effects…treatment. What better…learn from our mistakes than…the inside? The first stage…hallucinations…night terrors…early warning system…cascading organ failure. The results were catastrophic. We partnered up…remaining operatives. Encouraged them to report…unusual behavior…witnessed. We needed more. We…see what they were seeing, when…seeing it.”

  Another sizzle before the Director’s voice cut back in. “Vision isn’t…eyes. It’s in the brain. The eyes…information relay…more. To find where…system broke down…deeper in. Hopefully…avoid…same mistakes next time.”

  Next time.

  Something returned to Isabel in that moment. Something the ghost had said, long ago.

  They kept us on, but Latchkey was disbanded. Its methods were too expensive, its success rate too low. Its funding was cut, and no new subjects were recruited for treatment. Latchkey was dead in the ground. Foster put her life on the line to keep it there.

  She thought of that room full of children. She thought four percent survival rate. She thought of Salazar, her skin and nails and eyeballs sloughing away like her own body was rejecting them.

  What Isabel wanted to ask the Director was: What the slag hell do you mean next time.

  What she said was: “Director?”

  The Director’s face was nearly gone, along with much of her body. No eyes, no nose, just mouth and chin, bridged to the patchy back half of her skull by a narrow spit of silver. “Yes, Catherine, what is it?”

  Isabel had time for one question, maybe, before it was too late.

  “What happened to my…chip?”

  Even with two-thirds of her face gone, the Director managed to convey surprise. “How on earth…I know?” she said. There was an unmistakable bitterness in her voice, which Isabel couldn’t begin to make sense of. Not until the Director nodded the remains of her head in the direction of the ghost and said, “Ask him.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Isabel stared, speechless, unable or unwilling to process what she was hearing. Finally she found her words. “What?”

/>   But the last of the Director’s head had already flaked away. What remained of her body, tenuously held, now collapsed like a house of cards to scatterings of silver.

  Isabel turned toward the ghost in a kind of betrayed outrage. He looked to have finished up with Salazar and was now methodically, dispassionately pacing through that pile of silver scraps, kicking it apart the way children will kick apart a pile of autumn leaves. Dirt rained down around him from the crack in the ceiling. He didn’t seem to notice.

  Isabel wanted to kick him in the shins.

  Is it true? Did you take Foster’s chip? Do you know where it is?

  What the hell did you do?

  But she never got the chance.

  A horrible sound came from above, from the place on the ceiling where the new damage met the existing crack. A sound like some vast thing under vaster stress. Something creaked and buckled, then gave. Above, beyond the crack, somebody screamed.

  Then there was nothing, only darkness and dust.

  Isabel, racked and helpless with coughs, could do nothing but wait for it to clear. Her eyes and nose were running what she hoped was only tears. It felt like she’d swallowed a bucket of burning ash.

  She’d fallen. No. The ghost had pushed her out of the way? It was like he’d vanished from his post across the room and reappeared in front of her, standing between her and whatever had dropped down from the sky. Her ears were ringing. If he was talking, she couldn’t make it out. She rubbed at her eyes, blinking furiously, until she could force her eyelids open against the irritation. Pain or no pain, she had to see what had happened.

  A nearly-full moon hung directly above her, huge and vibrant, and her eyes took a moment to adjust to the sudden brightness. When they had, there was stuff at her feet that hadn’t been there before. Greenery that didn’t grow underground. Clots of roots and grass. Summer flowers: three-eyes, rainstealers, suns-and-moons. Ghostgrass. She felt it before she saw it. Even from paces away, it felt like her memory of the Catchkeep-priest’s whip across sunburned shoulders, except over every inch of her body, and deeper than the skin.

  Was that what was making her so dizzy, so disoriented? Or was she going into shock? Still so much screaming. Or maybe the echo of it had gotten trapped in her ears, was looping there, the way a ghost’s last—

  She grabbed blind for the thread.

  It swam in her vision and gradually focused. Like she’d plucked it and the vibration was stilling as she watched. Dull, gray, thin—but there. Still there.

  “Wasp.” The ghost was shaking her as gently as he knew how, which was not very. “Hey. Stay with me.”

  “I’m good,” she lied. Even her voice sounded off, like there was a delay between her mouth moving and the sound of it reaching her ears. It sounded like her head was full of whining mosquitoes. Maybe forty feet away in deep shadow was the massed shape of a huge pile of rubble. She squinted toward it. “What is that?”

  “I don’t know,” the ghost said impatiently. “Look, we have to—”

  “Enough, okay?” She shook him off and stumbled toward the pile. It was like the fallen building at the corner of the garden, miniaturized. But still taller than most Sweetwater houses, a hill it would take her some effort to scale.

  But it was a route to the surface. “I can climb that.”

  “That thread isn’t going to hold much longer.”

  “I know.”

  “You didn’t do this,” he said quietly.

  “No,” she said, rounding on him. “You did.” It wasn’t wholly fair and she knew it. The ceiling had been partway broken when they’d gotten here, and he might not have had such a hard time with Salazar if they’d just taken out the Director immediately as he’d suggested.

  Still, though. “Come or don’t. I’m going.”

  She powered forward a few more steps—and stopped.

  That ghostgrass on the floor wasn’t fresh. It was dried, bundled, tied off with string. Older, smaller bundles than what they’d brought down into the tunnels. More like what the people of Sweetwater would hang in the topmost corners of a door.

  Gripped in a chill that wasn’t cold, Isabel looked—really looked—at the ground at her feet. Stones had been flung free of impact, scattering wide of the main pile. Regular, evenly-shaped stones, perfect for building with. And dark. Very dark. Almost black.

  There were only two places where she’d seen rock that color. Execution Hill. And the building that had been pieced together out of rock chiseled, painstakingly, centuries past, from Execution Hill. Because that high lightning-blasted peak was sacred to Catchkeep, and its rock could only be put to use in Her name.

  Chiefly to build Her shrine.

  A few yellower, rounder stones had also fallen. Isabel toed one over and its eyeholes gazed up at nothing. A green stone rolled out from between its jaws.

  Oh, she thought. Oh no.

  * * *

  She twisted past the ghost and scrambled toward that pile of rock. The hole in the ceiling was much bigger than before, the moonlight streaming through blinding after so long in the dark. By the looks of it, the entire shrine had fallen in.

  Surreal to see people standing above her, squinting into the gloom. They stood there, silvered in the moonlight, and for one brief addled second Isabel thought they might be ghosts, the fresh dead of the day’s battle, drifting above the burned-out buildings, waving goodbye to the world. Passing time until they heard Catchkeep’s Hunt thundering across the sky, come to claim and carry them to that far green shore.

  They were yelling something down at her. She couldn’t hear it. Her ears still weren’t quite right. It sounded urgent. Two people weren’t bothering with yelling. They’d gotten a rope tied onto something and were sliding hurriedly down it, alighting on the rubble-heap. Lissa and Jen. She looked up at them quizzically. She felt so out of it, so detached. I’m going into shock, she told herself. Can a sort-of-ghost do that?

  Several people were frantically pointing at something off to one side, trying to get Isabel’s attention.

  She turned. The ghost was already there. “Wasp,” he said quietly.

  Then she saw the bodies.

  The fight had been over for a while now, and a lot of them had been corpses before dropping thirty feet to the floor with the Catchkeep-shrine on top of them. Isabel saw people from Sweetwater—the baker’s wife, then the brew-mistress’s nephew, then one of the men who boiled and strained the lakewater for drinking—and some that must have been from Clayspring, because Isabel didn’t recognize them. Most of the previously dead were Clayspring people, which made sense. Invading Sweetwater, they’d only killed the townspeople they must. They had uses for most of them.

  But some of these bodies hadn’t died in the fight. Some had bandages over wounds they’d gotten earlier. Some were freshly dead. Some were moving brokenly in the rubble.

  One of them was Sairy.

  She must have been near the ruins of the building when it fell in, because some of it was on top of her. One arm was badly gashed, and her cheek had been ripped open. Everything from her midsection down was either concealed beneath the rubble or missing. A black-red stain soaked upward from where the black rock blanketed her, darkening the blue of her shirt.

  She dyed that cloth, Isabel remembered, inanely. Some of them got rid of the upstart outfits, burned or bartered them, but she dyed hers blue and made it hers. But she screwed up and it bled dye every time it got rained on…

  Isabel didn’t later recall clearing the distance, only arriving, the stonework jabbing at her as she dropped to her knees. “Sairy,” she said. “Sairy, hey.”

  Sairy opened her eyes. The moon was in them. Twisted away—and couldn’t. Something was holding her in place. “Foster?”

  “It’s me, Sairy, I’m right here.”

  “But you…” Sairy’s gaze traveled from Isabel’s thread to the silvery wash that edged her. “You’re a ghost?” Coughed. Winced. “Thought I told you not to…not to fucking die.”

&
nbsp; “Look who’s talking. I’m not the one lying here with the shrine in my lap.”

  Isabel listened to herself, horrified. Those four days while Aneko’s body rotted around her, they’d all sounded like that. Waiting for her ghost to pop free, like a sprout from the mush of a windfall. Empty words like a too-short rope paid out to a drowner. You threw it anyway because it was all you had.

  When she spoke again her tone had changed. “We have to get her out of there.”

  “If we move her,” the ghost said quietly, “it’ll be over very, very quickly.”

  “So, what, we let her suffer? We just sit here and do nothing and wait for her to die?”

  “Wasp—”

  “Where the hell is Foster, she was supposed to protect—”

  “She went back into the tunnels,” Sairy said. “To let everybody out.” She blinked up at Isabel. “You didn’t see her?”

  “Long story.”

  “I might need the…” Sairy coughed. Something popped audibly in her chest and she spat blood. “The short version.”

  The smell of Sairy’s blood shouldered its way relentlessly toward the forefront of Isabel’s notice. No—it wasn’t the smell exactly. But something. She could sense it. It called to her. She wanted to spit and spit until her mouth stopped watering.

  Jen appeared beside Isabel, hugging herself. Like she was the one whose guts needed to be held in from spilling. “Look, maybe I can get something from the midwife.”

  “No,” Sairy managed. “Be a waste. Others need…more.”

  “Slag it,” Jen said. “I’m going.”

  Lissa rushed over, going no no no like she’d forgotten other words. Reached Sairy’s side and her legs went out from under her. “But we won,” she was saying, all shocked disbelief. “We won.”

  She set to clearing away some of the rubble from Sairy’s hips and belly. It looked worse underneath.

  “Find the survivors,” Isabel shouted over her shoulder at the ghost.

  “On it,” he replied, and he was. Though he didn’t seem to be finding many.