“We need to move her,” Lissa said. Shouting toward the ghost: “Hey—”
Isabel looked down and Sairy was holding her wrist. Her eyelids labored open. “No,” she mouthed. Tried again. Coughed. Winced. “No.” Whispering now. “Help the others.”
“Screw the others,” Lissa said. “We’re getting you out of here. We won, it was supposed to be over, why was there a second earthquake now, this isn’t fair—”
Second earthquake, Isabel thought. Oh, Ragpicker slag me.
“Isabel,” Sairy whispered.
Hurriedly, Isabel leaned in.
“Listen. Don’t let my…my ghost turn bad. Like the one…like…in the tunnels. Thing was…seriously an asshole.”
Small chance of that, Isabel thought, but didn’t want to think about why. Far more likely, Sairy would go the way most ghosts went. No threat. No strength. No memory. Just a silver cutout, almost indistinguishable. The kind of specimen that, as Archivist, she’d be able to fit in a jar.
“I won’t,” Isabel said. “I promise.”
“And hey. Foster did…protect me. Not her…her fault. Just. Wrong…place.” Sairy coughed, spraying the Archivist-coat with blackish red. “Wrong time.”
Chooser, a body had a lot of blood in it. Isabel suppressed a shudder. For one horrible second she’d thought she was about to lick her sleeve. Then Sairy seemed to rally. “Tell you a secret.”
Isabel nodded. “I’m listening.”
“When I stayed too long in the tunnels and…and Jen shut me in with you. I lied. I wasn’t…wasn’t settling people in. I went down to the barricade. I wanted…I wanted to see if…it’s stupid, but…”
“You wanted to see if Aneko was there,” Isabel said, hushed.
How could Isabel tell her that no, she wouldn’t find Aneko in the ghost-place, no matter how hard she looked? How could she admit the reason? She wished she could open her stupid mouth and say I think Aneko’s ghost destroyed itself to help me, I’d probably be dead now if it wasn’t for her.
“Remember her,” she rushed to say instead, because Sairy’s eyes were glazing over now, full of moonlight. “Remember all of us. Remember everything. And when that place pulls on your mind you pull back harder. It’s the only—”
Sairy was furrowing her brow toward the hole in the ceiling, at something Isabel couldn’t see. “Catchkeep?” she said.
Isabel glanced up too. This time of year She was too low, resting behind the hills, regaining Her strength for the winter, when cold and illness and famine would give Her twice as many ghosts to carry.
No, slag her luck, that up there watching Sairy die was Carrion Boy. Blade in hand, reaching out to Ember Girl in betrayal even as He turned His face away.
Isabel wanted to say something comforting, but she couldn’t think of the words. She was unequipped for what happened on this side of death.
And then it was too late.
* * *
Isabel reached down and shut Sairy’s eyes, tracing a star over each lid. She’s strong, she told herself. She’ll remember. She’ll find her way. The idea lifted something from her, something she didn’t reckon she deserved to be lightened of.
“We need to help the others,” she said. “She’d want us to help the others.” Stepped down too quickly, rolled her ankle, was steadied by the ghost. “She’s strong,” she told him, though he’d said nothing. “She’ll remember. She’ll find her way.”
Then, knowing it would go nowhere, knowing it was used up, knowing she’d pitched it away in the archive room, Isabel’s mouth said anyway, as if of its own accord: “That healing device—”
“It only expedites the curative process. You know that. It can’t bring back the dead.” Such a light cool tone from someone who Isabel knew had attempted precisely that, and failed.
Around them, one by one, each ex-upstart set a hand to her Catchkeep-scars and raised it in salute to Sairy, then trudged off to help carry the injured.
“Find Foster,” she told the ghost. “Tell her—”
But he was already gone.
Isabel picked her way across the rubble toward Lissa, who was struggling to calm a screaming girl with a visibly broken leg. Midway there, she stopped. The blood-smell, or blood-whatever, was stronger here. It made her intensely uncomfortable on a personal level, but was bad in a whole lot of much bigger ways too. All it would take was one of the other Latchkey ghosts making its way down here, drawn by the blood. Tanaka, maybe, or Martinez. And all hell would break loose.
She took Jen by the shoulder. Jen flinched at her touch. Frostbite and vertigo, Isabel thought, and drew her hand away, strangely embarrassed. “There’s a lot of blood here.” She tilted her head toward the silvery rags that used to be Salazar, the Director, the ghosts off which they’d fed. Weak now, but she wasn’t taking any chances. “Get as much ghostgrass as you can and block them in. Then look for entrances and block those too. I want this fucking room locked down. Remember ghosts can shrink. I want it airtight.”
Jen nodded. Then she kept nodding. She looked like she was trying to put a puzzle together in her mind. Her eyebrows shot up as it clicked. “You’re a ghost?”
“Yeah,” Isabel said, because it was easier than soon.
“What happened?”
“I’m fine. Don’t worry about me. Ghostgrass. Perimeter. Get it done.”
“Won’t I be blocking you in here then? If you’re a…” Jen trailed off, like she’d be chasing the Chooser’s cape just by saying it. She tried again. “If I put ghostgrass…”
“Secondary concern,” Isabel said, suppressing the reflex to glance in the direction where the ghost had gone. The next—last—part of her plan was coming up fast, and if she lost her nerve now she wasn’t sure she’d get it back. “Go.”
Jen knew better than to press. She shut her mouth and hustled off.
More people had come down from above by now. The midwife had been summoned and was patching wounds on-site, setting bones, readying the last of the dozen or so wounded for transport. Isabel did a double-take when she noticed Rina was with her.
Isabel turned so fast she cracked her neck. Scanned the room—and there were Onya and Andrew, working together to move rocks from somebody’s trapped foot. There was Glory, checking the knots on a rope before a wounded body was ferried up into the night, Bex shouting instructions at her from above.
So it was true. Foster had gotten them out of the tunnels somehow. It was over. For better or worse, it was over.
That just left her with one more thing she had to do.
First she had to find a quiet place, away from everyone. The ghost especially. He understood her—almost too well sometimes—but he was absolutely not going to understand this.
I’m sorry, she thought at him. This is the only way.
Off along the wall behind the platform, there were some metal staircases leading up to a kind of walkway that ran the whole room’s perimeter. She climbed them and found that the walkway used to be enclosed in glass, long since shattered.
She located the most secluded corner, sat herself down, and drew the harvesting-knife. With her off-hand she picked up the thread.
It was silver, pure silver, without the blackish violet of Salazar’s, the searing white-orange of Foster’s, or the glacial greenwhite of the ghost’s. It was of the gauge and tension of strangling wire. Right now it was the surest path she knew to anywhere.
She wrapped it around the blade.
“Wasp.” She jumped. The ghost was at her side. Where the hell had he come from? “A moment.”
“Look,” she said, flustered. “Can it—”
“No. It can’t. I’ve waited long enough. This is important. Because the water is going to find its way into that room eventually, and I’m not sure you’ve fully considered what will happen when you drown.”
“You don’t think I’ve—”
The ghost raised one black-gloved finger. “Fully. Considered.”
“I’ll die. I’ll turn ghost. Obvio
usly.”
“And if your ghost gets stuck in the room where you left your body? If it can’t find a clear path to a waypoint? You’ve seen what happens to trapped ghosts. You would have been one yourself if I hadn’t managed to pull you out of the ghost-place river yesterday. You’re welcome for that, by the way.” Then, when no response was forthcoming: “I would have thought you’d be aware of the risks.”
In light of everything, this weird angry solicitude struck her like a fist. The ghost’s appearing here was not supposed to happen, had shoved her resolve off-balance. She struggled to right it.
“Pretty sure if I wasn’t explicitly aware of what happens to a trapped ghost, I could have left you in the archive room no problem and spared myself this little talk.” she said. “You’re welcome, by the way.”
For a few seconds they just glared at each other. Then she realized this might be the last conversation they ever had. She took a deep breath and relented.
“And I don’t plan on drowning.”
At last he noticed the harvesting-knife in her hand. The thread wrapped around the blade.
Very slowly, he drew himself up and back, like a snake. “You can’t be serious.”
“It’s the only way that makes sense.”
“The hell it does.”
“Think about it. Because I have. And I do remember the ghost-place river, and I do remember what happens to a ghost that’s destroyed beyond repair. And I can’t let that happen. Not like that. Not to you. And not in this place. Of all places. I couldn’t in the archive room before and I can’t now.”
And I’m getting those little black boxes, she could have added but did not. Foster’s wasn’t there but there’s a chance yours might’ve been. Whatever ends up being on those chips, that black box knows your name.
“But I’m just, what, going to sit here and let the same happen to you. Do you honestly think—”
“I have to go now,” she said, though it felt like ripping herself in half to do so. “If this works, I’ll be back soon.”
“And if it doesn’t? What exactly is the plan here? How exactly do you—”
“Hold my breath,” she said, and cut the thread.
Chapter Twenty-Three
This time she is not in the ghost-place when her thread is cut. So no whirlwind came to claim her, deposit her in the living world. Instead, she walks.
At some point she’d realized she wasn’t in the big room where she’d left the ghost. Nor is she in the little room where she’d left her body. It might not really be a field where she is now, though it looked like one. Some other kind of wide open place, same suggestion of unbounded emptiness. She’s been flickering, like the lights in the archive room running on tertiary auxiliary power supply, emergency conservation mode. Like stars viewed through an ash-pall. Like a ghost half torn free of its loop. Not here, not there. Not anywhere.
Teetering on the boundary between two worlds. Her feet didn’t touch the ground. Caught in between, she’ll think, and keeps walking. Everything was hazy here, as though she walked in thick fog, but shapes materialize from it, shooing her silently along. They had the wide-sleeved silhouettes of upstarts. Sairy, she thought. When she turns her face to them they vanish.
Time has long since abandoned her. She’d been here a minute, an hour, a year, before she’ll realize this. None of these words meant anything to her anymore. Minute, hour, year. Her tenses are jumbling together.
A few useless inches of thread-end hang out of her chest. Nothing she can follow. There was no landscape, no road, no sky. Only fog. She couldn’t hear her breath, her heart. In between go her steps, in between in between. There was nobody around. There’d never been anybody around. Someone might come, if she only waited. She’ll wait. Nobody comes.
She knew what’s happening to her. The process that had started in the tunnels was finally complete. How many times can you fall back and forth between the ghost-place and the living one before you get stuck half-in half-out for good? It’d be like straddling a fence, one leg in each world. Perfectly balanced there. Impossible to fall.
Was this what Foster had felt like, her ghost trapped in the room where she’d died?
Soon she’ll start running toward nothing in particular. She’s already been running forever. It was the slow-motion shambling of a nightmare, her soles striking air six inches above unseen ground. In between, go the tempo of her footfalls, in between in—
At some point, one hand drops to the hilt of the harvesting-knife. The knife wasn’t moving exactly. Probably it never has been, and moving was just the best translation into words her brain has for the impulse it lays on her now and again. To turn around. To head in the direction it compelled her in. Certainly, now as before, it’s doing something.
She held the knife out in front of her.
She’s going to follow it home.
* * *
Isabel opened her eyes to darkness so complete she thought at first there was something covering her face. Winced. Her whole body was one great slug of pain. Everything from her nose down her throat and deep into her chest felt like it was smoldering. Her coat was soaked. She was lying in three inches of lakewater. The boxes and device were still in her pockets. Foster’s broken blade was missing somewhere in the dark.
The thread was gone.
“Light?” she hazarded, but nothing. The room was silent, its ghost run down.
Up, she told herself, and levered to her feet, hauling her weight by main force up the drawer-handles, splashing her way by feel around the wall back toward the door.
There she paused, both hands on the wheel. Reviewing in her head: swim out, down the hall, through another door, room with a hole in the ceiling, then swim up, up, and back as far as you can go toward the hatch before—
She couldn’t face the rest of that thought head-on without losing her nerve entirely. Already she felt faint. She was shaking so hard it set the harvesting-knife audibly rattling in its sheath. Nothing for it. At least if she drowned near the surface they might find her ghost. Nobody would get trapped down here coming after her. Chooser’s odds, but her only hope.
“I’m sorry,” she said aloud, because nobody was there to hear it. “I didn’t want—I wanted—”
Taking the deepest breath she could, she dragged the door open. Braced herself for impact as the lake rushed invisibly in. Water crashed against her, swirled around her shins and knees and thighs.
And stopped.
The muggy dark was so thick it was nearly tangible, so it was a moment before she could translate the evidence of her other senses into a scene in which she stood.
There was water up to her hips. Dank air above them. The flood—had stopped? She pictured the sublevel beneath this. Had it all drained down there?
Slowly, painstakingly, lake-mud suctioning at her shoes, then barefoot as her shoes were lost, collapsing with exhaustion, she battled her way back up the hall, Archivist-coat bunched and hoisted in both hands to keep the contents of the pockets dry, one foot in front of another, moving forward.
When she reached the doorway to the room with the hole in the ceiling, she stopped.
There was light coming from somewhere, so faint she might not have noticed it if the darkness wasn’t so otherwise complete. She’d stopped shaking, but the harvesting-knife rattled on.
She slogged her way into that room and stood under the hole, peering up. The light was definitely coming from far off up there.
Voices made their way down with it, growing louder as the light brightened. She held her breath and listened, convinced she was losing her mind.
“—drive a bus through the hole in this floor,” one voice said. “The hell did you do?”
“Down two levels through the hole,” the other voice replied, ignoring this. “Then out the door and to the right.”
You memorized this map at a glance, she thought incoherently, and you can’t even remember your name.
“I’m here,” Isabel shouted up to them. Half-laughi
ng, half-crying, voice cracking to shit under the strain of bearing such unexpected, breathtaking, selfish elation. “Here, I’m down here, I’m okay.”
* * *
Up through the ceiling, then another. Both ghosts climbed down to the hole just above Isabel’s head, then the ghost dropped down to her level to help her up. She was too tired to protest as he handed her up to Foster, then climbed up so that Foster could hand her up to him.
From there it was, of course, only a short distance to the second hatch, and soon they were standing on the lakeshore under the stars.
“I’m not sure why you look so surprised to see us,” the ghost said. “I told you before that I would find you. I would have thought I’d made that clear.”
“You could’ve been trapped,” Isabel said. “Both of you. I’ve seen drowned ghosts, you idiots, they fill with water and they burst, okay—”
Foster reached down and picked a clot of rotten vegetation off Isabel’s cheek with practiced tenderness. “Ragpicker’s gambit?”
Isabel coughed. “Last trick up your sleeve.”
With a jolt, she remembered. “Look,” she told them. Reaching into her pockets. Pulling out the device. Then one of the little black cases at random. She held it out to Foster like an offering. SUBJECT #2122-33-A, TANAKA, SHIRO. Her hands were shaking. Somehow she got the case open and removed the chip.
It slotted into the device without resistance. The fit was perfect. The box must have been water-resistant in the way of Before-things, or else she’d done a fantastic job of keeping the pockety part of her coat out of the flood, because the chip was dry. The spider-leg nubs fit down into the perforations, exactly as she’d guessed. She located the button that would power on the device. Held her breath and pressed it.
Nothing happened.
* * *
Ruby found her before she’d made her way fully into town. Isabel staggered a few steps away from the ghosts, and Ruby came forward and clasped hands with her, paused, then pulled her into an awkward embrace. It was a measure of Isabel’s exhaustion that she tolerated this.
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