Archivist Wasp

by Nicole Kornher-Stace

  She understood, all right. Probably better than she wanted to.

  “Okay, so,” she said, half to change the subject. “There was a city. I saw it twice. I think it was the same one both times. There were . . .” She trailed off, trying to push words together in the shape of those impossible machines. Came up empty. “Foster, she . . . she helped some people. You both did. A lot of people. I saw that first. Then she attacked some other people, but I don’t think she killed them. Then—”

  The ghost was eyeing her stonily. She spread her hands. “Maybe if we can see more of where she used to be, it might help us narrow down where she is now.”

  Even as she said it, she didn’t see how, although the longer she thought about it the more it started to itch in her mind. If a ghost was strong enough, when it appeared above it looked more or less as it did in life. In that case, at least in part, she guessed that what a ghost’s aboveground strength must be truly measuring was the potency of its—

  “Memories,” she said. The nausea was wearing off now, nudged aside by the cautious elation of a new-hatched plan. She knew full well that by now she should know better, but there it was. “This whole place is built of memories. All the ghosts coming into that huge room, they were all wearing their deaths on them so clearly, like uniforms. The doors going in and out of that room. My name, my past. More memories. Even the stuff the bridge was made of. Maybe even this—” She looked up at the ceiling of the cabin, hazy in the moonlight filtered through that tall, tall grass. “This place. The food, the bed. This all belonged to someone.”

  It hit her with a jolt. “The city out there in the field. Is that—?”

  “Your guess is as good as mine, Archivist,” said the ghost. “Didn’t you notice? We could go out there and walk toward it for days and it wouldn’t get any nearer.”

  Wasp was on her feet before she knew it. She was thinking about all those ghosts milling around in the waiting room below the Hill, stuck there until they remembered their names. If they ever did. And if they didn’t—

  “Yeah, but don’t you get it? Maybe it’s another test, and you can’t get there because it’s important to you and you don’t remember it. Maybe, just now, me seeing the memories you can’t see anymore, maybe we just found the back door in.”

  The ghost did not appear to share her enthusiasm. In fact it looked downright hesitant.

  She went for the direct approach. “These memories I see. I seem to be seeing them in pieces. You need to fill in the blanks for me.” Wasp thought how she’d react if someone posed this to her, and it made her add: “You can’t keep secrets. I need to know everything.”

  The ghost said nothing. Its silence was starting to pique her. “Look, if being down here by yourself is so unbearable—”

  “Nothing is unbearable,” it said, too quickly, and would not look at her, as though she’d caught it out in a lie. But she’d said nothing.

  Wasp was just tired enough to let it slide. “Fine. So.” She pictured Foster running off, down that city street, toward a destination Wasp could not begin to guess at. “We’ll start from the top. Foster left you there for fifteen minutes in the crossroads. Didn’t she come back?”

  “Oh, she came back,” the ghost spat, glowering. It didn’t seem to want to elaborate. Instead it put the glove back on its cut hand, wiped Wasp’s blade and passed it over, then stood, swept its chair over to the door, stabbed its sword into the floorboards beside it, and sat. “Get some rest. I’ll keep watch.”

  She couldn’t argue. Whatever had happened with the harvesting-knife had drained what little had been left of her energy. She might well fall asleep walking over to the bed. “Okay. You want to split the night or take it in shifts?”

  The ghost, in silhouette against the fire, might have been a statue. “Don’t worry about it.”

  “I guess you don’t have to sleep anyway,” said Wasp. Starting to kick off her shoes, then thinking better of it. They might have to make a quick escape. Mournfully she pulled her aching feet up under the quilt. “I guess that means I don’t have to either.”

  Be that as it may, she was fading fast. She’d lost count of all her unasked questions, and at the moment she just plain didn’t care. She slid the knife beneath her pillow. Just like home. Except that this pillow was softer.

  “Don’t worry,” she heard herself say, sleepily. “We’ll find her.” The last thing she remembered was the ghost glancing over at her in surprise.

  Chapter Twelve

  When she woke, it was still full dark. Moonlight flooded through the windows where the grass had grown roof-high before, casting the whole room in blue. She blinked, disoriented. The windows had been blind when they’d come in.

  “There was a hostage,” the ghost said. Somehow sensing that Wasp was awake, though she was sure she hadn’t moved a muscle. “A child. Foster’s orders were to take him to the rendezvous point for extraction, where he’d be . . .” It trailed off, eyes narrowed, and decided on a different tack. “Where she said she had to go, what she said she had to do, that day—she was letting him go. Against orders. Dereliction of duty to help some useless idiot she didn’t even know. It was . . . a stupid thing to do. It was the sort of stupid thing she would do.”

  “How do you remember all this?” Wasp asked. “If you can’t remember anything.”

  The ghost’s silhouette went very still, then turned its profile an inch toward her. “I can see glimpses here and there,” it said slowly. “Like trying to remember a dream. I have had a great deal of time to try and connect the dots between them. Recalling where the lines should be drawn . . . requires effort.”

  At this Wasp found herself unsure whether the ghost had really realized she was awake before she spoke, or whether the monologue she’d interrupted was a discipline the ghost put itself through, from time to time, every night for all she knew, a litany to keep the memories it had fought to save from fading.

  Wasp stared at the quilt. In that weird blue light, the gridlike pattern on it could have been tall buildings on regular streets, seen from above. Maybe, if she squinted hard enough, in one of those pale intersections, she might find monsters quarreling. Or superheroes, Wasp thought idly, like a child parroting words it did not know. Whichever.

  “You were in a war.”

  “A civil war.” Its glance at Wasp was probably not designed to make her feel stupid, but did. “Do you know what that is?”

  “Yes,” Wasp lied.

  “It went on for a long time,” the ghost said. “A long time.”

  “And she was in your . . .” Wasp fumbled for a word she’d heard from ghosts now and again. Ghosts who, almost invariably, looked to have died deaths that were messy, though not necessarily without their dignity. Shot up, blown up, shouting for their “. . . unit.”

  That same hollow laugh that Wasp had heard in her vision. “In my unit. She was my unit. There were supposed to be a dozen of us. Nobody else made it out of development. Only her. And me.”

  Development. Not training. Wasp chewed this over. “They weren’t good enough to fight with you?”

  “Evidently not, because the treatment killed them.” A pause. “They didn’t die well.”

  Wasp sat up and waited, but it didn’t say more. Conversing with the thing was an exercise in tiptoeing and balancing. Any wrong move would upset or offend it back into that sullen silence.

  She wouldn’t get anywhere at that rate. It was time to push on through.

  “Who are you people?”

  The ghost gave her a long look, then shrugged. “This is going to sound ridiculous, but the most accurate thing I can say that you’ll understand is that we were developed to be weapons.”

  Actually, thought Wasp, that explains a lot. Somewhere in her head something tiny was clicking into place. It felt like the edge of something bigger. “You said she had an expensive brain.”

  The ghost made a disgusted sound. “For all the good it did her.”

  “So wait a minute.” This was
giving her a headache. “Let’s start from the beginning. Somebody . . . made you?”

  “Yes,” said the ghost. “And no. Our genetic material is human.” Again that pause as it searched for phrasing she could parse. “Is mostly human. We were born, like you.” Again the shrug. “They took us, as children. Orphans. Clean slates. They called it the Latchkey Project. Highly classified. We lived in the labs. We saw nobody outside. They—” It took a moment, visibly choosing words and discarding them, eventually settling on: “—changed us. Made us stronger. Faster. Smarter. At first in weapons training they gave us guns, like everyone else. Then they realized we were fast enough and strong enough that we’d be more efficient in close combat with swords, so they had some made. It was like a bad joke. Bringing a sword to a firefight. But nobody was laughing for long.”

  Wasp nodded. The pile of bodies. The astonishing speed with which Foster moved. The way the ghost had torn into the lurchers, like a streak of lightning given human shape.

  “At the bottom of it, we’re not so different from you,” the ghost continued, as Wasp’s eyes flew wide, then away. “You Archivists. Am I wrong?”

  “I guess,” Wasp said, or tried to say. No sound came out.

  “They were going to do the same to the hostage. He was the son of, well, of an important woman. In the war. A very important woman. They could have ordered us in to deal with her, but they wanted to send a message. So they went after her son instead. They thought if they took him, and changed him the way they changed us, and sent him back to his family, he’d—”

  Wasp saw. “Do their work for them.”

  “After what happened to the Latchkey unit in development, and it was determined that the treatment couldn’t be survived, and we survived it anyway, our people were afraid of us. But they were more afraid of losing the war. 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. Last-ditch effort or not, a four percent long-term survival rate was insupportable.”

  “Wait. Four percent? You said there were supposed to be a dozen of—”

  “In the final phase of development,” said the ghost, its gaze fixed on something just past her head, “there were.” It paused for a moment, shook off something unseen. “Eventually it came out that they were still working to accelerate the process. They thought they were getting somewhere. The hostage would have been a test run. What took years to fine-tune in us might have taken months or less in him. Apparently the idea looked good on paper, anyway. Good enough to send us out to fetch him.”

  “If he lived through treatment,” said Wasp.

  “If he lived through the treatment.”

  “And didn’t decide to light up this whole Latchkey place instead.”

  The ghost shut its eyes, held up one finger. “I never said it was a good idea. But it wasn’t our decision to make.” Wasp didn’t argue, so it continued. “And Foster—as far as we knew up until those orders came down, Latchkey was dead in the ground. She put her life on the line to keep it there.” The ghost looked almost miserable. “The war ended soon after she freed the hostage. She saved a lot of lives.”

  “Your side won?”

  A sort of smile, a twisted triumph somewhere in it. “We lost. Or I should say they did. They tried to make it our war. It didn’t take. And they couldn’t win it without our help. She showed them, in the end, that there was more to us than what they’d made. But it was the last—”

  A shadow cut through the blue at the window, knife-sharp, there and gone. Another wandering ghost, come for the waypoint, Wasp thought blearily, contemplating fighting whoever it was for the bed.

  The ghost stood up, sword in hand, just as both windows blew in.

  Wasp threw an arm up to protect her face from flying shards of glass, and when she lowered it there were two lurchers in the room. She grabbed the knife, thinking Oh good, only two. Thinking, How did they fit through the windows?

  The question was in the midst of answering itself. Rolling through the windows was a kind of fog, the color of a struck spark, the color of a coal, and where it gathered near the floor it began to coalesce: bodies, heads, legs.

  The lurchers didn’t even bother snarling before they lunged. One for the ghost, who spun on its heel and cut it from the air, and one for Wasp, who threw the quilt at it as it leapt, lost her balance, and half-jumped half-fell off the bed. The lurcher came down tangled, flailing, snapping at her with a jaw the size of her whole head. Every moment of terror from every failed escape attempt came back to her at once and she stabbed at the quilt and the thing inside it, over and over, until both had gone still and the one had melted to slop inside the other.

  Each stab brought another vision, as when she’d fought the lurchers at the riverbank. She saw a shrine-dog standing guard in the snow, a shrine-dog eating table-scraps from an upstart’s hand, a shrine-dog being kicked at by a man dressed like the Catchkeep-priest, whom Wasp did not recognize.

  She pushed it from her mind and came to her feet in time to help the ghost dispatch four more newly formed lurchers in the middle of the room.

  Abruptly, Wasp found herself back-to-back with the ghost, each facing a broken window through which fog was still spilling.

  “Still don’t believe the hunt is real?” Wasp shouted. She was having trouble modulating her voice. Her teeth were chattering too hard. She had never been so tired.

  “We bring our own monsters with us,” said the ghost. “It looks like these are yours.”

  New lurchers were still taking shape from the fog, but she wasn’t waiting. She sliced into a half-formed mass, connected with nothing, and the momentum of the failed swing almost tripped her. “The eyes,” the ghost said behind her. “Wait for the eyes.”

  Those few breaths of waiting were one of the hardest things she’d ever had to do. She held her ground, breathing faster than she ought, stalking her opening. There were six lurchers before her and she had no idea how many behind. She was frantically trying to calculate whether they would attack her at exactly the same time or whether she’d have a fraction of a second to evade at least one. They stood nearly as high as she did, and at least as wide, and pound for pound were several times as strong. Any three of their teeth together were the length of the harvesting-knife, and until the fog let up, those teeth went on forever.

  “We can’t outlast them,” she whispered.

  “We have to,” said the ghost, and the next lurcher sprang. Midway to her throat, its eyes came in.

  She ducked and slashed out at its legs. It gave one cry, cut off by Wasp’s knife in its heart.

  Out of nowhere it came to her that she and the ghost were standing in a way that was almost identical to the way it and Foster had stood in the image on that folded piece of paper. Foster’s smile, like a slap to the face. Come with me. It was a thing that Wasp had never been in a position to ask of anyone. Two alone against the world. And she had grown so used to being one.

  Even making the comparison in the privacy of her mind felt like something she had to earn. She tore the knife free, tossed it lightly, grabbed it backhand, and struck out with all she had, opening a throat. Dragged it down, lengthening the wound, changing her grip faster than the deadweight lurcher could pull the knife away.

  Showing off had opened her up much too wide. She didn’t even see the next one before its jaws closed around her forearm. Mentally she thanked the One Who Got Away that it was not her knife hand as she sank the blade into the lurcher’s gut and emptied it onto the floor. And thanked Him/Her again that the lurcher’s teeth themselves were melting and she wouldn’t have to figure out how to break them from its jaw to pry them out of her arm.

  Still, though, they came on, endless. Wasp’s burst of spite was wearing off. Now she was hurtling toward complete exhaustion. “Where are they coming from?”

  The ghost shook its head in reply. Its sword was black slime to the guard, and it was beginning to loo
k mildly annoyed. No matter how hard the damn thing fought, though, Wasp never saw it out of breath. She wondered if this was a trait of its ghostliness or of its person.

  So many lurchers. Wasp was fighting now on instinct, ducking and slashing, swinging wide and sloppy like an upstart with a short straw she never wanted. Fully aware that her strength was winding slowly, surely down to nothing. The door was blocked. The windows. The lurchers were coming in faster than Wasp, faster even than the ghost, could mow them down.

  Wake up, she shouted at herself. Think.

  She couldn’t begin to count the lurchers now. Each of them looked slightly different, though they all shared some traits in common. Their coats, pure black except for the gray star between the eyes. The ears that all came up in points. The back-curved wolfish plumes of the tails. The silence, except for that eerie howl they’d volley back and forth, sounding closing distances on a common target. Her.

  All in all they looked a great deal like the shrine-dogs back home. That made sense enough to her, as the shrine-dogs were bred to those traits carefully, being the earthly counterparts to Catchkeep’s hunt, as Archivists were the earthly counterparts of Catchkeep Herself. The process involved much trying and erring and countless rejects being drowned in the lake and put in the stew, but—

  We bring our own monsters with us.

  The vision of the lurchers, stalking those darkened windows. One of them had seemed downright familiar, and now she realized why. It was a dead ringer for one of the shrine-dogs from her first year as Archivist. It had even borne the scars she’d left on it from the three escapes it had dragged her back from personally, before it succumbed to the poison she’d left in its food as soon as she could limp out of bed.