Archivist Wasp

by Nicole Kornher-Stace

  Wasp’s throat was suddenly very dry.

  “Okay,” she said again. “Okay.”

  The ghost said nothing, and suddenly Wasp couldn’t hold it in anymore. “You said she was tortured to death,” she blurted. “This is—”

  “When there were twelve of us left, they partnered us up,” the ghost said quietly. “Not to help each other. To inform on each other. Who was getting sicker. Who was turning dangerous. After she . . .” It trailed off. When it spoke again there was actual defiance in its voice, defiance and pride. “It didn’t work out quite the way they wanted. But then everyone else was dying and it didn’t matter. The whole time, though, we’d been covering for each other, just . . . taking turns saving each other. That,” it said, eyes on the bloodstain, “was her turn. Her last turn.” It folded the remainder of the paper along those worn creases and pocketed it. “Now it’s mine.”

  Wasp sat, harvesting-knife in one hand, bloodstained paper-scrap in the other. This time she had arranged her position so that if she reflexively dropped the knife again, or collapsed again, both the knife and she would land safely in the moss. She trusted the ghost would see to it that the knife did not land under her.

  It wasn’t ghost blood, her specimen. At least, it wasn’t at the time it was spilled. The knife might well not be able to read it. Wasp took a deep breath. Only one way to find out.

  She steadied the harvesting-knife in one hand and carefully wrapped the paper around it, blood to blade. She shut her eyes and waited.

  Nothing happened.

  She blew her breath out sharply: exasperation and relief.

  Relief?

  Then she realized where it came from. Of course she wanted to find Foster, solve the puzzle, beat the clock before she was stuck down here for good and Foster lost forever, but that was the kind of wish she’d have to sell her eyes to the Ragpicker for, because no way was she landing it on her own.

  But say she did. Say she did find Foster. Her prospects afterward weren’t promising. She could fight her way free of the Catchkeep-priest and flee out into the Waste until she found some other crappy town to hide in, or else starve. It was all she could hope for.

  In the meantime, though, the Catchkeep-priest was not here. The Waste was not here. Crappy towns and probable starvation were not here. The world above, held next to the world below, seemed dull and faded, the less real of the two.

  And, hopeless as she knew this search was, for the first time in as long as she could remember, she was enjoying herself.

  “It’s not working,” the ghost observed.

  “Yeah,” said Wasp. “I can see that.” Holding the paper to the knife one-handed, she pushed herself up off the damp moss. “Well, here.” Reaching to unwrap the paper from the blade. So much for ideas gone right. Embarrassed and disgusted. If this was the best she could do—

  Her off-hand touched the bloodstain and she jumped.

  The high driving whine of a motor, small arms fire, and over that, Foster’s voice. Laughing. “They think they’re being clever. All right, we’ll play it their way.” The whine of the motor changed pitch, and another sound joined it, which Wasp couldn’t identify. “Engaging.”

  Wasp pulled away and the sounds disappeared.

  She blinked and poked the paper again.

  A boy’s voice, ten or so years old. Wasp, having seen the room of twelve beds, recognized it. “What’re you staring at up there?”

  “Not staring,” said a girl. Wasp recognized her voice, too. “Wishing. Shut up a second.”

  “You do this much?” All scorn. “Wishing?”

  “You care?” A pause might have been him shrugging, or her, because then she said, “Since they brought us here. Same wish, same stars.” Another pause might have been her pointing. “There. And then, you draw a line up through those two, you get the North Star. My mom taught me. Before she died. People used to—”

  “What’d you wish for?”

  There was a grin in Foster’s voice, fierce and sad. “Like I’ll tell.”

  And it was gone. Wasp looked from her moss-dampened hand to the bloodstain and back, then up to the ghost, her eyes narrowed. As gently as she could, she adjusted the paper wrapping on the blade, then licked one fingertip and pressed it to the stain.

  “They’re betting on us,” Foster said. She sounded a little older here, thirteen at most. She had her voice pitched like she wanted it to carry, but there was some undercurrent it kept breaking on, rage or horror. “Who pulls through this sickness. Who doesn’t. They have it all written up. I saw it.”

  Several other children’s voices, muttering together. Wondering whether to believe her. Wanting to know their odds. Someone among them had a nasty cough. “Now Foster,” came a woman’s voice, “you have been told time and time again about these fabrications of—”

  “The Director lost a thousand on Salazar last week,” Foster shouted over her, and Wasp knew the silence that curdled after. It was the silence following the mention of a death it was forbidden to mourn. “And Sorensen, let’s just say she’s really not happy about that cough.”

  “Catherine,” said the woman, all concern, “it’s clear you’re upset. Are you tired? Hungry? Did you have a bad—”

  “We’re not special,” Foster was yelling. “No matter what they say. Martinez was special. Tanaka was special. Salazar was special. You know what we are? We’re just the ones who didn’t die.”

  Wasp surfaced, nauseous, shaken, pulse pounding at her ears. Looking anywhere but at the ghost. Thinking about the dead little kid she’d seen, earlier, strapped into those white sheets, bled out—she hoped—in its sleep. Thinking also about the gamblers on the Archivist-choosing day, how they’d grabbed at her for spoiling their show, and Catchkeep had not struck them down.

  Both spoke at once.

  “Tell me,” it said.

  “Water,” she said.

  Momentarily, the ghost looked bewildered. “Could you possibly be a bit less cryptic?” There was an edge of fear in its voice, low and broken, as it struggled to remember what it could not.

  “No,” said Wasp. “I didn’t mean . . .” She made an exasperated sound and began again. “The blood’s too dry. It’s just voices without it. It—” She inspected the paper scrap, already so old and so worn, beginning to disintegrate where the moisture had touched. She forced herself to meet the ghost’s eyes and hold them. “I think it will only work once.”

  “But you’re confident it will work.”

  Wasp shut her eyes, exhaling. It was all too easy to put herself in the ghost’s position. It was stuck down here for eternity. Only a matter of time before its paper was destroyed, its gun lost, its sword shattered, and all that would be left to it was a memory that was already doing its best to betray it.

  She wondered what it must be like to be so ruthlessly competent—except where it was needed most. As soon as she thought it, it felt like something she could relate to.

  The least she could do was tell it the truth.

  But she couldn’t back down now. She needed that device.

  “Yeah,” she said. “I’m sure.”

  The ghost gave one tight nod. “Do it.” It looked away. “It’s only an old paper anyway. I’ve been carrying it long enough.”

  There were many things that Wasp could say to this, but she kept them to herself and began making her way down to the pond.

  The wet moss against the steep rock hill was slipperier than she’d guessed. By the time she reached the bottom she’d nearly fallen twice. She found a spot at the water’s edge as far from the ominous lilies as she could, near a likely stone. There she suffered a sudden attack of honesty. “Last chance to back out.”

  The ghost folded its arms and answered her with a stare.

  “All right,” said Wasp. “This is it.”

  She flattened the paper against the pond-dampened stone, and set the harvesting-knife down beside it. Moisture began leaching up into the bloodstain immediately. She had to be careful
. Too little water and she’d have to try again, and she knew what risk she took of damaging the paper with every new attempt. Too much water and it would dissolve.

  When the stain had darkened sufficiently, she eased the paper up and draped it over the blade. It stuck and tore, but the dampness of the paper adhered it to the blade and to itself, at least for the moment she required.

  For a second she paused, knife-hand hovering over the hilt. It was hopelessly gummed and filthy with gore from the ghosts of the dogs whose leather had gone to wrap its grip. She took a steadying breath and exhaled it slowly. “Going in.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  “—phase of your learning,” the woman at the head of the room was saying. Her voice was rich and bright. Her shoes sounded crisp on the floor. She looked very, very tired.

  Eleven children sat at desks before her. Their eyes tracked her, four steps and turn. There were wires attached to their temples, running down into the collars of their shirts. They might have been seven years old. “But before we begin. Who can tell me how a garden works?”

  A couple of tentative hands went up.

  “Ayres,” said the woman.

  A boy lowered his hand and spoke. “You plant seeds and water them. They need dirt—and sun—”

  “Very good, Ayres.” The woman beamed. “You plant lots of seeds, right?”

  A few nods.

  “But they can’t all thrive, so you have to thin them out. Do you know what that means?”

  Wasp thought of the ghost, saying four percent survival rate. She thought of the sea of scuff marks on the floor around those dozen little beds.

  “You remove the failing, weaker seedlings for the good of the healthier ones,” the woman said. “They get more nutrients, more light. They get stronger. Taller. Brighter. A beautiful garden.” She turned the full force of her smile on them. They smiled back, a few of them, but Wasp saw distrust in their eyes. She began to wonder whether the thinning of those beds was gradual or all at once, leaving the occupants of the remaining dozen to find their way to sleep in a room full of sudden echoes, like a cave.

  “What’s sad about a garden,” the woman continued, “is that even then, despite the gardener’s best efforts, some of the plants will die. But do you think this makes the plants sad?”

  “No?” said a girl. The woman looked at her, and she flinched.

  “No is right, Martinez,” said the woman. “They do not care. They cannot care. They only concern themselves with their own survival. If they didn’t, they would die, too. Now.” That smile again. “I want you all to close your eyes and listen.”

  “Yes, Director,” they all chorused. Some eyes shut immediately, but many hesitated.

  “You aren’t fooling me,” the woman sang out. “All the way closed. And don’t scrunch them. Relax. Listen.” She dialed up the soothing voice, which sounded enough like the Catchkeep-priest’s gentling voice to make Wasp shudder.

  “You aren’t just ordinary children anymore. You are special. You are irreplaceable. When we’re done with you, you’re going to be superheroes. Would you like that?”

  “Yes, Director,” they said, with varying degrees of enthusiasm.

  “You will be given important jobs to do—jobs that nobody else, not even grownup soldiers, can do. Some of these jobs will be dangerous, and you may see each other in trouble. When this happens, you will be like those plants we talked about. If you see someone in trouble, you will not help them unless you are told to. You will do whatever you can to stay safe. Remember that you are special. You cannot be replaced. It is better to lose one than risk two. Say it.”

  They said it.

  “Again.”

  They did.

  “Now open your eyes.”

  They opened, and the woman was holding a kind of panel, similar to the ones Wasp had seen above the children’s beds. This one was the size of Wasp’s palm, the thickness of a few pages of field notes, set with a number of buttons. She ran her gaze over the desks. A finger followed it, tapping at the air above each head. Where it stopped, she crooked it gently.

  Trembling visibly, a boy approached. At the front of the room, the woman bent down before him, setting her hands on his shoulders to look him straight in the eye. “I want you to know,” she said, “that I do not enjoy this.”

  And she pulled his head back by a handful of his hair and punched him square in the face, five times in an instant, before she let him fall. He lay there, stunned, bleeding from the nose and lip, the corner of an eye. He tried to get up and failed.

  Eight of the other ten children were on their feet. Four of those were staring in mute shock, but the other four were screaming at the woman to stop. Three of those were running toward the front of the room. The woman glanced them over, pressed eight buttons on her panel, and those eight children dropped deadweight to writhe on the ground, clawing at the wires on their heads, choking on their cries.

  The woman pressed a button, and whatever was happening to them stopped. “Salazar and Tanaka,” she said, smiling at the two children who had remained in their seats. She sounded slightly out of breath. “Well done. You have each earned a cookie. The rest of you—” She reached down, set the boy swaying on his feet, raked her gaze across the children, struck him back down with a fist to the hollow of his throat. He toppled, retching for air.

  Five of the eight children knew well enough this time to stay put. The other three joined them swiftly. One boy hit his head on a desk corner on his way to the floor. This time the woman let them lie there kicking for a solid half minute. Where their feet hit the floor, it cracked.

  The next time, only one stood. She was tiny, but Wasp recognized her from the white beds, the singing room. She had bitten her tongue, or her lip. Blood ran out her mouth. There was no rage in her eyes, only cold determination. The ghost’s voice in Wasp’s head: When there were twelve of us left, they partnered us up. It didn’t work out quite the way they wanted.

  “You disappoint me, Foster,” the woman said, with genuine sadness, and lay one soft finger on the button.

  Foster had her head down, her shoulders set, charging as if into a strong wind. She got two steps before she dropped. In her convulsions she puked and thrashed facefirst into it. None came to her aid. Wasp lost track of how long the woman left her there, spluttering, unable to roll clear.

  “This is what happens,” the woman told the children. “This is what happens when you lose sight of what is most important.” She switched Foster off. Foster did not move. Neither did the boy. The other children were hauling themselves back up into their desks, moving like old people in miniature. They kept their eyes averted from the two left on the floor.

  The woman’s sigh came up from deep within her. “Pretend this was a real mission,” she said. “One of those dangerous jobs we talked about. Now instead of one dead—” leveling a finger at the boy—“we have two. Two we can’t replace. It is better to lose one than risk two. Say it. It is better to—”

  —and the vision stuttered and resumed, changed. Wasp was back in the city, at the same intersection of wide streets.

  “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 was 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.

  She darted down a side street, where tall buildings to either side walled off the sun. She followed it along until she came to a failed old barricade made of big gray bricks, shop signs, trash, mattresses, and the carcasses of wheeled vehicles, which, despite having burned to black iron bones at some point, still looked a hundred times better than the fossil-like traces of them that Wasp had seen, on occasion, a lifetime ago at home. The Archivist in Wasp, taker of field notes, solver of his
tory’s mysteries, caught herself gawking.

  Foster was crouching in the ruins of the barricade. It was huge. It spanned the alley and had probably stood yards thick, and twice her height, before it fell. She cast a quick glance up and down the alley, then removed a tiny flat rectangle from the collar of her coat and pressed her fingertip to it. It glowed faintly, chimed a few soft tones in quick succession, sprouted a propeller, and levered up lightly off of her palm. She followed its tiny hovering glow and its repeating three-note signal farther into the wreckage, where the notes sped up increasingly until the thing alighted on a mass of garbage from an overturned plastic bin.

  “Rise and shine,” she whispered to the mass of garbage, then knelt and lifted part of it away in her arms. As she picked it up, it stopped looking so much like an armload of trash and started looking more like a cocoon roughly the size and shape of a child curled on its side. It looked like the spiderweb-camouflaged body Wasp had left atop Execution Hill, though much smaller. It must have weighed at least a third what Foster did, but she one-armed it like it was a feather pillow. The hostage, Wasp thought.

  Farther back, the device was perched on a tumble of scorched bricks and trilling its impatience. When Foster clicked her tongue at it, it hopped up her arm and nestled back into her collar. Meantime, she was squatting to feel around the bricks at ground level. After a second she got her fingers under the edge of something and tugged. There was a faint whooshing sound as the air went out of the something, and part of the fall of bricks turned whitish. She whisked her arms sideways, and another of the spiderweb-things came up in her hands. It crumpled to nothing in a palm and she pocketed it.

  Underneath was a vehicle unlike anything Wasp had ever seen, back at home or here in this strange old city. It had no wheels. It had no obvious steering controls. It was the exact right size for Foster, seated, and the hostage slung over before her. She bent forward to stare into a blinking red strip of light for a three-count, and the vehicle hummed to life beneath her, floating six inches off the street.