Archivist Wasp

by Nicole Kornher-Stace

  “One of those goddamn things took out our complex,” one of the men was telling Foster. “Came out of nowhere. Took about ten seconds. Think it was aiming for the barricade.” He gestured toward the crowd. “We’re what’s left.”

  Foster gave the crowd a once-over. “Sixty?”

  “Sixty-two,” said the woman. “Eighty to start. It’s been a rough few days.”

  Foster nodded grimly, her device pressed to a teenage boy’s shattered knee. After a moment it beeped three times and powered down. She cursed a streak, and the ghost—Wasp didn’t know what else to call him—took an identical device out of his pocket and tossed it to her wordlessly. Foster caught it and addressed the queue waiting to be healed. “If you can walk, get out of line and bring me somebody who can’t,” she said. “Fast. Then get ready to get the hell out of here.”

  She lowered her voice to keep what she said next from spreading. “You’re in the wrong place at the wrong time, and things are about to get pretty hot where you’re sitting, believe me,” she said to the men and woman beside her. “And you need medical attention. More than we can give. But we can clear a path.”

  The ghost raised one eyebrow at her. “Hospital’s still standing, last I knew,” Foster told them, shooting him a complicated look as she spoke. It was clear from his face what he thought of playing medics and escorts, but after a moment he swept his gaze over the assembled crowd and nodded. “Food and blankets,” Foster continued. “Worst soup you ever ate, but plenty of it.”

  The noise of whatever Wasp had heard approaching suddenly changed pitch and got much louder. The ghost drew his sword. “You just ran out of time.”

  Foster didn’t look up. “How many?”

  “Enough.”

  The crowd started rustling, drawing guns, adults herding children back behind them. Foster stood between them and the mouth of the alley, hand on her sword-hilt, warning them with her eyes. “Heads down,” she said. “No heroes. I mean it.”

  “Thank God they sent you in for us,” said one of the men. “We never hoped—”

  Foster, halfway into the street, shot back a look over her shoulder like she’d swallowed a bug. “They didn’t,” she said, and left. The ghost went with her. Wasp found she had no choice but to follow.

  Immediately she realized what had been making that horrific noise, though she had no idea what to call them. They were shaped almost like people, though were made entirely of metal and stood several times her height. There were three of them, coming down the street in a V formation. They ran on two legs in a slickly gliding gait, with gun barrels the diameter of a tree where their hands would be.

  “Best of three?” Foster said.

  “Why bother?” he replied. “You never win.”

  Her eyes glinted. “Neither do you.”

  Blue fire sparked in one of the gun-arms. Without any further warning, the street exploded at their feet, at Wasp’s a few feet away.

  If the Ragpicker were dangling Wasp headfirst over His maw, she might not have been this terrified. She threw herself toward the nearest wall and crouched there as Foster picked up a piece of rubble the size of her head and hurled it down the street toward the machines. It was an impossible throw, but it cleared its hundred-odd feet and lodged in one of the gun-arms in the split second before it fired. There came the sound of a muffled detonation, then a larger, less muffled one, and the machine collapsed in flames.

  The other two advanced, and suddenly Foster was dashing up the front of the fallen one, leaping off, catching the gun-arm of another, swinging herself up onto it, then dropping to the street as the third one, aiming for her, shot off the gun-arm instead. As Foster fell, she threw her arms out, fingers laced, making a step for the ghost as he launched himself off the street, off the falling gun-arm, off Foster’s push, high enough to grab some sort of handhold far up on the machine and hang on one-handed. The other hand drew the sword and plunged it into a crack in the thing’s armor. Someone inside it screamed, and as the machine fell to its knees the ghost landed lightly beside it.

  Running, they were much faster than the shrine-dogs in full chase. Wasp had nothing to compare their apparent strength to that would suffice. She gaped. Who are you people?

  There was one machine left. While the ghost was drawing its fire away from the people huddled in the alley, Foster took off toward a vast pile of rubble in the street that looked like it used to be a wall, if walls were made out of garbage. Something in it seemed to have caught her eye, and a few seconds later she emerged with a looped length of cable over one shoulder.

  In the distance Wasp became aware of the drone of something low and fast approaching from the air. She squinted against the sun and saw nothing. She looked down, and a small group of people had broken from the alley and were standing ground in the street, small arms blazing uselessly at the oncoming machine.

  Shouting, Foster flung herself down the street toward them, dropping the cable as she ran. The ghost walked to it, picked it up, drew his gun, tied it into the end of the cable. Waited a second, listening. Threw that weighted end of the cable high up into the air, as some kind of flying vehicle banked around the blind corner of a building, guns strafing the street before him.

  The cable wrapped around the vehicle’s tail and caught, yanking the vehicle into an about-face. He dug his bootheels in and pulled hard on the cable, whipping the vehicle from the air and straight into the path of the machine, which by now was a half-dozen stomps behind him. The vehicle slammed into it, and as the machine toppled back, its gun-arm fired. The shot went wide, a ball of blue fire slicing silently past him by a few feet to smash through a building half a block away.

  The ghost walked back up the street to join Foster in the alley. Behind him, the machine exploded, shattering windows on buildings both sides of the street in a rain of glass.

  “I was just going to try to tangle its legs,” said Foster. She was sitting with her back to a wall in the mouth of the alley, still using the healing device on the queue of wounded. She worked one-handed, because one of the men was binding her shoulder where one of the flying vehicle’s bullets had gone in. As he tied off the bandage, she winced, then grinned. “But that works, too.”

  “There’ll be more,” said the ghost. “Soon.”

  “No rest for the wicked,” said Foster, getting up. “Okay, everybody, on your feet. We’ll have a roof over your heads by sundown, but you have to do exactly as we say.”

  Chapter Eleven

  And, with that, the city was gone. Wasp was back in the little cabin. Chair, table, basket, bowl. Her head was muzzy. It took her a second to realize where she was.

  The ghost was watching her the way a person would look at a water pail if he were on fire. Not really holding out hope, but hoping anyway.

  She winced as the nausea barreled into her. “How long was I—” Dreaming, she was about to say, though she’d never had a dream so vivid, so unreal. Then she realized the ghost was still holding the blade of her knife, and it all came back.

  “Two or three seconds,” said the ghost. “What did you,” it began, and stopped. She ducked her chin, but the ghost caught it, held it up to see her eyes, which she allowed.

  She pulled free, and it let her. “You saw something. Just now.”

  It was hard, this flickering out and in. The room was spinning. She burped and tasted bile. Those machines were going to show up in her nightmares, no question.

  Her eyes fell on the thread. It looked finer. Must be a trick of the light.

  “No rest for the wicked,” she murmured, staring at her hands to make the room stay still.

  The ghost looked like she’d slapped it. “You saw her.”

  “I don’t know. I saw something.”

  Wasp wasn’t sure it was even listening to her. “She used to say that,” it said to itself. “I’d forgotten.”

  It rounded on Wasp. “You have to go back in.”

  It did not sound like a question.

  “Not happen
ing.” Her ears were still ringing from the explosions. “Not a chance.” She paused. Shut her eyes. She was going to regret this later. “Why?”

  The ghost’s impatience was palpable. “Because you can see her and I can’t. Because there might be some clue in whatever you saw that tells us where she’s gone. Because if there were any other option, I would have taken it.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense. You were there. I saw you there. What could I possibly have seen that you—”

  The ghost gave her the bleakest look she’d ever seen. “Do you know what it is to be dead?”

  “Not really, but I have a feeling you’re about to—”

  “When you’re trying to remember something that’s slipped your mind,” it said, “and you can’t, but you know that eventually, if you stop thinking about it, look the other way, it’ll surface and you’ll catch it. Except that you won’t, and after a while you realize that, once half the things you used to know have been pulled out of you by this place, and the half you remember keep you wondering about the half you’ve lost. And you’re left with maybe one or two relics of it to anchor you.” Unconsciously its hand brushed the pocket where the folded paper was kept. “Until you lose those, too.”

  Wasp could picture it, freshly dead, its memories hammering and blazing away inside it in a swarm. Those memories, one by one, going silent, going dark, leaving the fading fabric of its life more holes than weave. She decided not to ask.

  “But you know all this already, ghosthunter,” it went on. Suddenly it looked very weary. “You and your salt and your notebooks, you prey on it.”

  Wasp didn’t think she’d ever heard the ghost say so much at once. It made her think of water forgotten in the catchment bins at either side of winter when the rains were good. Freezing and thawing, expanding and contracting, until the bin cracked under the pressure and the next melt sent all the water rushing out.

  And it still wasn’t done.

  “Down here, you die alone, you walk alone. Unless you find the ones you walked with, up there in the world, and keep moving, and keep reminding each other, and when this place pulls on your mind you pull back harder. That’s really all you can do. Or you end up like those ones in the river, so far gone you think water’s for walking on.” It shook its head very slightly, wonder or contempt. “I think that must be better than this.”

  “Well, then I’m doomed,” Wasp said. She was half joking, or at least thought she was. Her tone was artificially bright. She hardly recognized it. “No family, no friends. My colleagues all want me dead.” She shrugged. “I have myself. It’s enough to get me through.”

  “It won’t be,” said the ghost.

  “Yeah,” she whispered. Then, louder, shaking off what had settled on her: “Well, we’ll see.”

  But she took the knife, and she went back in.

  She was standing at the crossing of two wide streets in the middle of a city. It looked like a different section of the same city she’d seen before. Now that nothing was shooting at her, she had a better chance to get a look at it.

  By Wasp’s standards it was ancient. The streets were straight and regular, and the buildings, swords of glass and steel, stabbed into the sky. Some of the largest buildings didn’t even touch the ground, but stood on vast concrete pillars, so that the streets ran along underneath. Behind some of the windows Wasp saw trees, misted by gentle sprays of water, heavy with fruit. Behind one she thought she saw corn growing.

  The streets showed signs of a recent skirmish—bloodstains, bullet-holes, shouts and screams; the front wall of a nearby building had blown out, beds and rugs and water-pipes dangling over the street—but like a summer storm it had drifted off, leaving echoes. Wasp could hear gunfire but not locate its source. Small arms fire, panicked hollering, and then the retort of a gun much larger. Wasp thought of those stalking metal monsters and shivered. A second of perfect silence, and then the screaming resumed, fresher and more vivid. From down a blind side-street an oily black smoke went up, smudging the walls it rose along.

  In the middle of the crossroads stood Foster. She was a little older here than in the other memory, but not by much.

  At least a dozen bodies in uniform lay prone around her feet. Wasp couldn’t tell if they were breathing. If they bled, she couldn’t see it.

  Three men and two women were still standing, aiming their guns at her. They wore the same uniforms as the bodies on the ground, which bore a slight resemblance to Foster’s, to the ghost’s. They looked afraid. At some unseen signal they fired.

  And Foster moved, too fast for Wasp to track her with her eyes, and within seconds their bodies had joined the pile on the street.

  She hadn’t drawn her weapons. She wasn’t even out of breath. Wherever those bullets had gone, they weren’t in her.

  Foster sighed, gazing down at the pile as though it troubled her. At least a couple of the bodies, Wasp could see if she squinted, were breathing. Foster dropped into a crouch to set two fingers to the pulse-point in a neck and nodded slightly to herself. Stood, brushing her palms off on her legs. Turned, vaulted the pile of bodies easily, landed without a sound, and started running.

  And the ghost—though not a ghost—stepped out of nowhere and collared her, swinging her out of her own momentum and up into the air.

  “Start talking,” it—he—told her.

  Wasp froze, remembering the rock wall at her back, the air going out of her, her feet dangling. So this is it, she thought. This is the moment you can’t move past.

  Foster chopped her hands down hard on the ghost’s wrists. He let go and she landed clean. “This isn’t what it looks like.”

  He narrowed his eyes at her, but stayed put. “Clarify.”

  “I will. I promise I will. But first I—there’s something I have to do.”

  His laugh had no humor in it. “Defection? Treason? This isn’t one of your games. These are our men you—”

  “Don’t ask if you don’t want to know. Anyway, they’re fine. I didn’t hurt them.”

  “And somehow that matters? From here you look like a traitor and a spy. You look like an experiment gone wrong. Where’s that expensive brain of yours? You know what they’ll do to—”

  “I don’t care what they think I am,” she spat. “I know what they are, and that’s worse. Do to me? What can they do to me that they haven’t done already? Answer me that.” A quick glance over a shoulder as she heard something Wasp could not. She started talking faster. “I’m done with it. I’m done with all of it. I’m gone.”

  “You’re out of your mind. They’ll find you.”

  She grinned, half nerves, half mischief. “Come with me.” It sounded like something she’d been meaning to say for a while.

  “And do what?”

  “Whatever we want! For the first time in our lives we will do whatever the hell we want. All this time they’ve been doing all the choosing. Take us. Change us. Make us into, I don’t know. Monsters. Superheroes. Whichever. And then stick us in uniforms and give us guns like everyone who actually signed up to fight, and assume we’ll shoot where they point. Well, now it’s our turn to choose. They won’t let us go? Then we let ourselves go. Be our own superheroes. Our own monsters. Whichever. Neither. Both.”

  Even raised in a house of professional zealots, Wasp had never seen anyone so on fire with an idea. It practically shone out her eyes. “There’s not a thing they can do to stop us if we don’t let them,” Foster went on, softer now. “Somebody told me that once. A long time ago.”

  Her hand went to her sword. Suddenly her eyes were hard. “I’m leaving now. I don’t want to fight you. But you have to decide which side you’re on.”

  He stared at her, expressionless.

  “Give me fifteen minutes,” Foster said, and toed the nearest body with a boot. “Keep these guys safe ’til they wake up. Think it over. I’ll be back. And then we can put all of this—” her gesture took in the bodies, the crossroads, the city—“behind us. For good.” Her face wa
s alight with a fury of hope. “Can you even imagine.”

  “Idiot,” he said, and looked away. Foster laughed, though her eyes did not, and took off running.

  Wasp dropped the knife. The room came back to her with a start. This time she did puke. The floor wicked it away.

  The ghost looked about ready to seize her and start throttling some answers out, but by some colossal force of will it passed her the bowl of water and gave her a minute. The nervous energy coming off of it was immense. It was like a thrown knife quivering in a wall.

  How to say what she’d seen? She didn’t even understand it. She was beginning to suspect, however, that she was in over her head. She cleared her throat, mentally framing charitable lies. She looked happy. You did the right thing. I’m sure she’s at peace.

  What came out of her mouth, though, was: “You didn’t go with her.”

  The ghost went very still. Wasp half-expected it to leap at her with her own knife, but its rage didn’t seem to be directed at her. “Now that I remember,” it said softly. There came a pause so long that Wasp thought the ghost had forgotten her there. “I never told her I trusted her.”

  What does that matter? Wasp thought, exasperated, but realized she already understood. The closest she ever really came to trusting anyone was the upstarts, when she trusted them not to try and kill her, three hundred sixty-four days of the year. Or the Catchkeep-priest, who was forbidden from trying to kill her at all, so she trusted him not to try—though he was free to use any other methods to make her life miserable, and did.

  She thought back on the fight with the lurchers on the riverbank, shoulder-to-shoulder with the ghost. It’d had her back, and hadn’t stabbed her in it. It was, to her, impossibly bizarre and impossibly beautiful in equal measure that such an arrangement could exist in the world.