Around midday Jen took her aside to explain how Foster had led the ex-upstarts into the shrine to take out the Clayspring raider army leaders. How Foster had saved them all, and destroyed the shrine in the process. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” Jen told her. “It was like a storm of light just…coming out of her. It cut through everything it touched. Do they have some kind of Before-relic that does that, or…?”
“You and your Before-relics,” Isabel said. Awkwardly forcing out the teasing tone, the bantering words. When what she was really thinking about was how the timeline of the prognosis between Foster’s condition and Salazar’s might be rather shorter than Isabel had thought.
When the workday was done, she thanked Ruby for the use of her house and took up residence in one of the empty outbuildings of the Catchkeep-shrine, a storage shed that had, by a wink of the Chooser’s good eye, withstood the fight for the town unscathed. The ghost and Foster came with her.
“At least keep the quilt,” Ruby said, and wouldn’t take no for an answer.
So later that evening they sat, leaning against the outside wall of the shed, the quilt bunched under them like a cushion, and Isabel explained to Foster about the device, the silver squares, the one she’d seen removed from Salazar’s brain, and—after slight hesitation—the broken blade she’d forgotten in the archive room.
Nothing for that now. That whole sublevel was lost. The tunnels beneath Sweetwater must’ve spanned acres. The lake was visibly lower, the shoreline extending fifty feet further inward than it should. Even the big room where the shrine had toppled in had finally flooded, sometime in the night. Isabel didn’t know whether those massive doors across the tunnel hall had failed at last, or the pressure of the water had breached new gaps elsewhere in the maze, only that she’d walked out there that afternoon to find the shrine-rubble lost beneath the water.
Now, summer night-breeze brought the sound of the ex-upstarts from somewhere in town, a few wine-jugs into a very noisy drinking-game. “Sure,” Kath was laughing at someone, “you say that now.” The air still smelled like a warn-fire from all the burned wood of the houses. Also like lakewater.
Isabel was holding the device out in both hands. “The sun powers it,” she explained to the ghosts. “I think. Jen told me once a long time ago that there used to be Before-relics that worked like that. And then I left it in the sun by accident and, well.”
She’d brought out one of the little black boxes at random. SUBJECT #2122-02-C, KHOURY, SAFIYAH. She slotted the silver square into the device.
“Safiyah Khoury,” Foster read off the box. Listening to the words leave her own mouth, like she hoped in that way to find them familiar.
Isabel was gripped by a sudden image: Foster and the ghost attached to Salazar’s threads as the Director had been. Salazar, regrown and somehow hideously strengthened, feeding them tiny sips of power the way Foster had done with the others. Just enough to keep them alive and observe them. Keeping them manageably small, and silver, and shapeless. Ghostgrassed into some room. And if they’d lost enough of themselves by that time, they’d be powerless to stop her.
She pressed the button, harder than maybe necessary, and the device powered on.
What appeared on the device was a long, long string of numbers, marching down and down the screen. 15 01 2122. 16 01 2122. 17 01 2122. And so on.
Isabel frowned at this puzzle. Then, remembering somewhat-similar devices in Foster’s memories, she reached out and slid her finger up the screen. The numbers scrolled along obediently until she poked one at random: 29 04 2122.
For a second, nothing happened. Then came a jumble, a mishmash of moving images sped up faster than real life, as though Isabel was looking out from what were presumably the eyes of #2122-02-C Safiyah Khoury, as she did…nothing much of note. Spooned up breakfast. Walked down a long white hall. Laced a child-sized pair of boots. Cleaned her teeth. Isabel made particular note of Khoury’s face in the mirror, quickly sketching and labeling it as the images rolled on.
All the while, all along one side of the display, there was a constantly changing column of numbers, different numbers than the ones before. These were beside multicolored lines that changed as the numbers did. They reminded her of the maps of the tunnels, except these only traveled up and down, like waves.
There was also a cute little image of the cross-section of the inside of what must have been Khoury’s head. It didn’t look like anybody’s real head, just that basic shape, like a child’s drawing of one cut sideways in half to reveal a stylized brain.
Different-colored areas of the drawing-brain brightened at different times in inscrutable patterns. It reminded Isabel of the long tendrils she’d seen detached from Salazar’s chip. She pictured them worming through Salazar’s brain, or Khoury’s—or Foster’s, she thought, or the ghost’s—poking each of these areas to light them up red blue green.
They watched as, under the Director’s eye, Safiyah Khoury sparred with an operative who looked like a nine-year-old Ayres, and the peaks of those wavy lines spiked higher. Later, the session over, she retreated to her cot, pulled a book out from under the mattress, and began to read, and the numbers bottomed out. Then, later still they spiked again—when she slept, and dreamed.
Night terrors, the Director had said. Early warning system…
The screen blinked, and the device kicked over to display 30 01 2122. Wake, clean teeth, lace boots, eat breakfast, so forth. A quick glance at 31 01 2122 and 01 02 2122 revealed much the same.
“There’s no sound,” Foster observed. “There, right there, that kid she’s looking at, his mouth is moving and there’s no sound.”
“Broken, I guess,” Isabel said. How long must it have sat in the archive room? Surprising enough that it worked at all.
As if on cue, an inexplicable little symbol flashed three times in the corner of the screen and then the whole image—currently, a room of children sitting at desks, the Director standing at the head of it, holding a device of her own—went dark. Isabel watched the screen long after it powered down, unsure what she expected it to do.
“You were both in that room,” she said. “I saw you both in that room in one of Foster’s memories before, but it was—” she stopped herself just short of saying real— “right there.”
“I saw,” the ghost said, hushed and uncharacteristically unsteadied. At least Isabel had seen these memories before somehow, and they weren’t hers to forget. “That was us. Wasn’t it?”
“You must have been, like, eight years old,” Isabel said. “You were practically babies.”
The ghost shook his head slowly, like he couldn’t even imagine. The way Onya would shake her head at you if you told her that one day she would grow old.
Isabel didn’t dare ask whether seeing themselves in someone else’s memory was helping to bring back memories of their own. Intellectually she realized it was probably a bit of a stretch. But she was hoping it in silence with all of her being all the same.
If it was, the ghosts gave no sign.
“We really did spend our whole lives in that place,” he said. Eyes cast toward the grass like he could see through twenty feet of soil and four flooded sublevels beneath. “Didn’t we.”
“Yeah. Right down there,” Isabel said, and shivered a little, considering it.
“So those things,” Foster said at last, in a voice like she’d just discovered a worm in her bite of apple, “were in our brains?”
“Yeah,” Isabel replied. More unsettling the longer she thought about it. It was like the Catchkeep-priest keeping tabs on his upstarts and Archivist. Only from the inside, and without their knowledge, and comprehensively.
Isabel had lived for years with upstarts. A dozenish people, in rotation as they died off and were added in, all crammed into the same quarters, curtained alcoves the only halfassed nod to privacy. She had walked in on a lot of things. Overheard a lot of things. Somehow, she’d never felt so much like she’d intruded as she did now.
“Well,” she told Foster, unsure whether she was making things better or worse, “there wasn’t one in your drawer. Maybe they never gave you one.”
It was anybody’s guess what the chips had been meant for in the first place. From what the Director had said, Isabel didn’t reckon this device was their final intended destination. The device didn’t seem to be anything except a kind of display.
Still, that night she curled up in Ruby’s quilt right there in the grass and slept, and the next morning she set the device in the sun and waited. Frustrating. A full day of powering up would give her a few minutes of use at most. It put her in mind of the archive room, the last dried-up dregs of power remaining to it.
But she set out those black boxes and separated the names of operatives she could match faces to from the names of those she couldn’t.
In one pile:
SUBJECT #2122-08-B, AYRES, NICHOLAS
SUBJECT #2122-28-A, SALAZAR, MIA
SUBJECT #2122-05-A, MARTINEZ, ELENA
SUBJECT #2122-33-A, TANAKA, SHIRO
And in the other:
SUBJECT # 2122-02-C, KHOURY, SAFIYAH
SUBJECT #2122-42-C, SORENSEN, EMIL
SUBJECT #2122-21-B, PATEL, NIDA
SUBJECT #2122-11-B, SONG, JIN
SUBJECT #2122-17-C, DEEGAN, ZACHARY
SUBJECT #2122-38-B, HALE, TIFFANY
She surveyed her handiwork, then moved Safiyah Khoury’s box from its pile to the other. It was a start, anyway.
Still, she was without a clear idea of what exactly she wanted the chips to teach her. These ghosts were lost in the tunnels beneath the lake. Even if she’d been able to retrieve them, she had no idea how to use this information to help them. Break them out of their loops somehow, as she’d done—temporarily, semi-accidentally, and at great risk—with Ayres? But she had no idea how to go about that. A few minutes here and there of watching an operative eat lunch or sit at a classroom desk or get poked and prodded by white-coated people in Medical wasn’t going to give her the kind of information she needed to rehabilitate a ghost.
Not that the rehabilitation of ghosts had ever appeared on her list of duties as Archivist.
Not that she had any ghosts to rehabilitate. At least, not any whose chips she’d found.
Or did she?
“Did you ever end up moving Ayres from where we captured him?” she asked Foster on a sudden surmise, not really daring to hope but asking anyway.
“I left him in the tunnels so I could go up with Sairy,” Foster said ruefully. “I figured he’d be safer there.”
“Oh,” Isabel said, crossing that idea off her list too. “Okay.”
I’m the last of four hundred years of dead Archivists, she parroted at herself, sardonically. I take spectacular field notes.
Use that, she thought, and developed a strategy. Ration those dwindling crumbs of power. Cross-reference. Extrapolate. Be meticulous.
She knew just who to go to for meticulous.
She found the ghost sitting on a rock at the edge of the floodplain, boots in the mud, staring out across the black water where the shrine used to be. “Look,” he said, not turning.
“What?”
He gestured hush, then pointed at something that had not yet, to her eyes, appeared.
Looking at that accidental pond, the ghost beside it, Isabel’s brain chose that moment to remind her of something she’d overlooked.
The damage to the tunnels. All those doors ripped off their hinges and flung. The pulverized walls. And then, in the archive room, that missing drawer. That junked metal ruin in the back corner she’d at first taken for broken shelving. Who could have gone through the facility, breaking everything in sight, with no other operatives to stop him? Who, more than anyone, would have had both the ability and the motive to finish what Foster had started and try to bring that whole place down?
Four percent survival rate, but in the end, only one left standing.
And it was terribly easy to picture him ripping his drawer from the wall and destroying it utterly, the way he’d destroyed the Director utterly, or Salazar. As if to say to Foster’s corpse: they can’t get both of us.
His drawer, his name and number. Lost now. It was beyond the reach of any scrap-diver, and that heavy gnarl of metal wasn’t about to float up on its own.
As if to underline her point, there soon came distant tiny bubbling. “Wait for it,” the ghost said.
“How long have you been—”
“There.”
Isabel shaded her eyes. An object had drifted up from the depths. A little flake of something, like a fallen leaf, but gray. It stayed where it surfaced, bobbing up against several other identical objects, not nearing the shore.
“I believe that’s Salazar,” the ghost said conversationally.
“Does Foster know you—”
“No.”
For a while Isabel stared out at that smattering of gray flecks on the water, a thought taking shape in her mind. “And they were all just down there when you and Foster showed up? Salazar, Martinez, Tanaka, all of them?”
“Yes,” he said. “Why?”
“Well. Ghosts don’t usually get stuck where they died. Unless something is physically stopping them from reaching a waypoint into the ghost-place.”
“So you’ve said. Such as your ghostgrass barricades. Or the way you would’ve been trapped in the room where you left your body, had you drowned.”
“Right. And, I mean. You weren’t stuck in the tunnels. Before, I mean. Neither was Foster. She was stuck in the ghost-place. But the others were right down there, in the actual tunnels in the living world.” She pointed at the flood, the vanished tunnels below. “You said they’d been there all along. Right there where they died. And I don’t get it. It doesn’t work like that.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know, it just doesn’t. Think of Ayres. I saw the memory he was stuck on, and it wasn’t the moment he died. Same goes for Salazar, and that little-kid ghost. The memory Ayres was stuck on didn’t even take place in the facility. That was the moment he couldn’t move past, there’s no reason his ghost should’ve been in the tunnels if…” She trailed off. “Unless.”
“Their data chips were in the facility,” the ghost said. “Mine wasn’t.”
“Their memories,” Isabel said slowly. “It’s all their memories on those chips.”
“But Foster did die in the facility. We know that definitively. If her chip wasn’t in her drawer, where was it?”
“Yeah.” Shrugging hard, like she wanted to dislodge the idea’s sticky weight. Nonetheless, it clung. “I know.” She paused, deliberating, then said: “About that. I asked the Director about Foster’s chip.” Another pause, and then: “She told me to ask you.”
This startled him into turning. “She what?”
“And you told me before that you buried Foster.”
The ghost narrowed his eyes, like he was trying to focus on something in the distance that he could see through Isabel’s head. “I did?”
The alarm in his voice was tamped way way down, but Isabel heard it. He didn’t remember. He’d told her three years ago about that memory, but since then it had been lost.
It made her think, again, of Salazar. Of the shapeless melted child-ghost. Of the ghost’s words the other day: if we’re past saving. If we’ve lost too much to get back. I need you to end us.
She plowed over it all.
“So if her chip wasn’t with the others, they probably never took it out,” Isabel said. “But if you don’t know where you buried her…” She blew out an exasperated breath. “That chip could be anywhere.”
“Is that what you came out here to ask me?”
“Even better,” she said, grateful for the change of subject. “I have a proposition for you.”
* * *
So they sat in the shed together, a stump of lake-driftwood serving as table between them. On it were the device, the chips, and a modest stack of papers: Isabel’s brand-n
ew field notes on the Latchkey ghosts. There was a sheet of paper for each operative, name and number. Several by now—Salazar, Ayres, Tanaka, Martinez, Khoury—had faces sketched in beneath.
One sheet—Foster’s—had a name but no number.
One sheet—the ghost’s—was blank.
“Do you want to go over the names one more time?” she asked him. “See if any of the ones we haven’t matched yet sound—” like they might be yours— “familiar?”
He just looked at her, then removed one glove and laid it on the table.
It’d been a long time since she’d sat down with the ghost like this, reading his memories. Prying into all the parts of him he’d lost. How had this managed to be less awkward when they weren’t doing it by choice?
“Okay,” she said. “You ready?”
In response he spidered his fingers on the tree-stump: am I not waiting?
“Now,” she said, aware she was stalling. “You might not like what’s in there to see.”
He breathed a little humorless laugh. “You don’t say.”
“I mean it. It might be bad. I need you to tell me, right now, no bullshit, if it’s bad, I mean if it’s really bad, if it’s something you’d be happier not knowing, if it’s that bad—”
“—do I still want to know?”
Isabel nodded.
The ghost picked up the nearest thing to hand—an empty cup—and winged it at her. She caught it and pitched it back. Recently she’d noticed both ghosts practicing adjusting their strength, their pure power output, to pass among the living. Good thing, too. Catching that cup would otherwise have shattered her hand.
The ghost was shaking his head at her in mock disappointment. “What do you think?”
“All right,” she said. “But no sulking if it’s bad news. Hear?”
He held his hand out like he wanted her to shake it. She put the blade in it instead. Just before he closed his fist around it, he said: “It’s all bad news. We both know that.”
Isabel took the hilt and braced herself, waiting to be shaken from the fabric of the world. But she was not. All that came to her were whispers, there and gone, and the vaguest hint of something just glimpsed and now receding.
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