Running lights appeared around a sort of palm-sized dome, which she set her hand to, her fingertips fitting into little grooves set around its perimeter. She shifted her hand slightly and the vehicle shot off down the alley in total silence, dodging debris—
—Wasp was in a strange room, as big and empty and echoing as one of the town storehouses at the backdoor of a bad winter. Eight children stood along one wall, still and silent beside a uniformed man. Six of the children were visibly in varying degrees of illness, slouched and glassy-eyed and clammy, but stood to attention as best they could.
The man read from a handheld panel. “Salazar, Foster,” he said. “Floor’s yours.”
Two girls stepped forward. One of them Wasp thought she’d have recognized as Foster even had the man not said her name. The other one, Salazar, had olive skin and dark patchy hair. A raised open lesion covered most of one cheek and several smaller ones tracked down that side of her neck. Her eyes shone with fever. Both girls walked to a metal rack, took down wooden training swords, and faced off in the center of the room.
Wasp was put uncomfortably in mind of the dueling in the sand on the Archivist-choosing day. The only differences seemed to be that these children were about twelve years old, she saw boys and girls alike, and there was no blood on the floor.
Salazar stood behind her training sword, swaying slightly but glaring hard, her mouth pressed into a line. Her grip on the sword was iffy, due to a calcified-looking growth that had come up between the fingers of her right hand, nearly fusing them together in places. Someone had tried to cut it away at least once, from the look of it, but it’d grown back. Small noises leaked from her throat from the cough she was suppressing. Foster was furrowing her brow at Salazar in interest or concern.
The uniformed man blew a whistle and Salazar rushed Foster. Fast, so fast, but not quite fast enough. Foster sidestepped neatly, leaving Salazar wide open—and made no counterattack. Salazar stumbled, cursing, and the cough she had been suppressing came out. It sounded wet. It lasted for the better part of a minute. She took a tissue from her pocket and spat into it, keeping her hand close to her lips and tucking the tissue away instantly. But Wasp could still see the clots of blackish red caught in the corner of her mouth.
Foster saw them, too. She stuck the training sword in her belt and stood with hands raised, a gesture that even Wasp from centuries later could read. “Mia, you need to see the medic,” she said gently.
“No way,” said Salazar. “If you can fight, I can fight. You’re not better than me.”
Without taking her eyes from Salazar, Foster raised her voice to address the uniformed man by the wall. “Sir, Operative Salazar requires immediate medical attention.” To Wasp it sounded strange, such crisp phrasing in such a distraught tone. Operative. Either of the girls might have come up to Wasp’s shoulder. “Give her the point. I forfeit the match.” She turned and headed off the floor.
“Oh no you don’t,” Salazar shouted, and ran at her again, swinging the training sword high for Foster’s head, low for Foster’s knees, thrusting the point at Foster’s throat and belly. Foster dodged it all. Salazar kept shouting, her voice thick with anger, her attacks losing focus and accuracy until she was three beats behind Foster and hacking with the training sword like she was chopping firewood at face-height in midair.
“You don’t even get it! Look at us! Look at this!” Salazar threw her training sword aside to tug at a hank of her own hair. It came away easily in her hand. She threw it at Foster. “Look at this!” She held up her hands so that Foster could see where three of her fingernails had fallen out, the empty nail-beds oozing pinkish serum. Another coughing fit took her and she doubled over, gagging, drooling gore, as the uniformed man began shouting into his panel for the medic.
Foster ran to hold her up. Salazar shoved her away with the last of her strength and fell backwards, scooting away from Foster along the floor, her scrabbling feet smearing a black-red trail before her. Foster grabbed her anyway, grabbed and held on while Salazar batted at her weakly.
“What are you?” Salazar was saying. Her voice was softer now, garbled and sodden, as though there was a wet sponge caught in her throat. Tears stood in her eyes, but she didn’t let them fall. “We’re dead. We’re all dead. We all know it. So why are you okay? You and that other one over there.” She glared at something along the wall. “Why aren’t you like us? Are you even human? Why isn’t it killing you?” Her breath hitched and hitched until she had enough to shriek with. “Why isn’t it killing—”
The third coughing fit was the worst yet. It seized her in its teeth and shook her, the way a dog shakes a rat, and when the medics loaded her onto the stretcher her lips were blue from lack of oxygen and her eyes were red from the capillaries she had burst in coughing.
Foster sat staring at the smear on the floor where she’d been. “I don’t know,” she whispered to it, wide-eyed, one perfect red palm-print on her cheek—
—and Foster sat at a table. On it was a smallish black box and a stack of papers that looked much like the front of the one the ghost carried: big pictures, words printed above and below. Two men stood near her. They wore dark suits. Wasp hadn’t seen them before.
Foster was cuffed at the wrists, elbows, ankles, and knees to her chair, with wide straps across her chest, waist, and the tops of her thighs. The chair, in turn, was bolted into the floor.
“Wish you’d reconsider,” said one of the men. “I hear they dial down the pain receptors on you Latchkey freaks. Makes you harder to . . . question . . . effectively. Never did know if that was true. Well. Learn something new every day.”
“Come on, Catherine,” said the other. “I can call you Catherine? Look, we’re giving you an out here. Take it. Give us something to work with. Listen, we read your file. We know what they did to you in Latchkey. Hell of a thing. Forty-four failures, two successes. Two survivors. That kind of thing, you know, it pushes people together. Makes ’em hard to break back apart.”
“Can the soap opera, will you?” said the first man. “Let’s just get her cracked and get out of here. This is starting to eat into my lunch break.”
“Shut up a minute,” said the second. His tone became urgent, sympathetic. He took a seat to get her at eye level. “You have to put yourself in our shoes, Catherine. You have to see how hard it is for us to believe that those two survivors showing up in a pile of their own incapacitated subordinates is a coincidence.” He gave her a moment to think this over. “If he’s working with you, protecting him will only get you killed. But if he is—and you put that on the record—”
“Have you met him?” Foster laughed bitterly. “Working with me. He gave me to you! Somehow that’s supposed to inspire such friendly feelings in me that I’d sit through this circus of yours to protect him? He’s made it very clear to me whose side he’s on.” She snorted. “Guess his obedience training or whatever you call it took better than mine, huh? That son of a bitch is one hundred percent incorruptible. You think he gives a shit about—”
“We should bring him in here,” he said. “Let him see what you’ve been reduced to.”
Foster’s hands went white-knuckled on the chair-arms. The chair-arms, solid steel, crumpled like paper in her grip. When she noticed it, she stopped squeezing.
He chuckled. “You should see yourself.” He stood, shaking his head. “I’m done here. It’s your show now.”
The first man was standing in a corner, sleeves rolled up, his jacket slung across the back of a chair. He had a shiny glove on one hand and he was slowly wrapping a strange-looking chain around it, the thickness of two fingers. When he came to stand in front of Foster he gave his wrist a turn so that a couple feet of chain fell slack. Then he did something to the wrapped part of the chain and the whole thing hummed to life, blue with electricity.
Foster glanced from it to him, unimpressed, then away. Her gaze fell on the stack of papers on the table. Wasp’s followed it, and her eyes widened when she recognized th
e topmost one. Foster stared at the photo on the paper a moment, something hardening in her face, then tore her gaze from it. “Look, I told you—”
The chain tore whistling through the air to connect across the side of her head, rocking her sideways in the chair. Both Wasp and Foster cried out, once, and clamped down on it—Wasp biting her lip and staring, Foster drawing huge shuddering breaths through her teeth.
“Guess they don’t dial ’em down that far,” said the man. “Gonna be home for dinner after all.”
Wasp lost count of the blows before his partner interceded.
He squatted down before Foster, gave her a moment to gather herself before he spoke. She swallowed wetly and raised her head. One side of her face was a wash of blood from the flap of skin that had unpeeled from her forehead to hang in one eye. She regarded him evenly out of the other one, already swollen to a slit though it was.
Wasp had seen someone hit by lightning once. The mass of burns on Foster’s face looked like that. There was a cooked smell coming off of her.
“You’re incredible,” he said, true respect in his voice. “We knew you would be. You’re Latchkey. You’re a machine.” He produced a handkerchief and began dabbing gently at the oozing ruin of her head. She spat a tooth at him. “Look at you,” he said, delighted. “You take a shitkicking to the face and you just don’t care. Look at her,” he told his partner. “That’s discipline. We’re pushing buttons that aren’t there. Now,” rounding back to Foster, “you know, it got me thinking. If I were you, Catherine, which is to say if I had nothing in the world past the grounds of this building to call my own, nothing but a cot and a locker and the admittedly extremely impressive ability to swing an extremely expensive sword . . . where would my buttons be?”
Wasp looked at Foster, and the bottom went out of her stomach. It had shown in her face a split second, no more, but it was there. Wasp saw it.
Foster knew what was coming next, and whatever it was, it scared her.
The man saw it, too. Now he stood, smiling. “Let’s take a look at those famous hands, shall we—”
“—to me, Foster,” the ghost was saying. His tone was the one Wasp had heard the midwife use when a bleeder had to calm down and shut up before her heart wrung itself out onto the floor. “Foster. Can you hear me?”
The room was the one where Wasp had seen the children training with wooden swords. It looked the same, except that Salazar’s blood had been cleaned from it, and apart from these two, it was empty. Foster had backed into a corner, wide-eyed, screaming incoherently at nothing Wasp could see. Whatever it was, it was about five feet taller than Wasp, if the angle of Foster’s stare was any indication.
The ghost knelt beside her, sword across his knees. They were Wasp’s age, give or take.
“It isn’t real,” he was hissing at her. “It’s the fever. You’re burning up. Whatever you’re seeing isn’t real.”
As he spoke, he was slitting the back of his left hand open on the swordpoint, running the blade carefully up between the tendons, breathing hard through gritted teeth as he dug deeper, revealed, lost sight of, then unearthed a hard silvery chip the size and thickness of a fingernail. Wasp looked on, amazed, unable to fathom how difficult it must be for a person of such absurd strength to do such delicate work.
When it was finished he took Foster’s hand. She didn’t seem to notice. “Try to stay still,” he said, then pinned her hand palm-down to the floor and started cutting. She tried to leap to her feet, spraying blood, one fingernail catching and peeling back too easily. Glare fixed on something near the ceiling. With some effort, he pulled her down. It looked to be taking all the strength he had to keep her there. Eyes narrowed at the wound in the back of her hand where Wasp could see silver glinting. He kicked away the sword and dug in with a fingertip. Still talking, for all the good it was doing.
“Foster, you’re sick. You’re hallucinating.” She flailed free of him, slick with her blood and his, but the chip was out. He fished blind in a pocket for the device he’d healed Wasp’s ankle with and sealed up Foster’s hand, then his. He stacked both chips on the ground and crushed them underfoot, then retrieved his sword. “We can’t stay here.”
Foster was starting to holler again. “Sorry,” he told her, and touched the base of her neck, and everything went dark.
She awoke in a different room—tiny, windowless, bare but for heavy steel shelves bolted into the walls. It was colder here, damper, felt much deeper underground. The ghost was setting her down, locking the door. He took both guns and both swords and put them on the highest, farthest shelf.
She lapsed into awareness and stared at him, her skin papery and lucent with heat. “Get out,” she rasped. Her throat was shot to hell. How long, Wasp wondered, had she been screaming? “Find you.” Her voice went monotonous, her eyes glassy. “It is better to lose one than—”
He shook her. “Stay with me. Listen. I got through the sickness, remember? Martinez came close. You can do this. But they can’t—”
Foster barked a sudden bitter laugh, splitting her dry lips to bleeding. Fading out again, Wasp suspected. “They sent you after me again. Keep me out of trouble. Well, you can run on back and tell the Director she can—”
“No,” he said vehemently, and shook his head for emphasis. “Not this time. They can’t ever find out about this.” He sighed. “When they paired us up they showed me your file. Told me what to watch for. I should have told you sooner. They said you were a difficult case. That someday you’d be more trouble than you’re worth. If they see you’re sick . . . it’ll be bad, Foster, really bad.”
Foster opened her mouth to speak, then went still. She looked down toward her lap. Set a hand to her belly, took it away, and stared at the palm, an unaccountable horror dawning in her face. “What the hell—”
“Foster. Foster, no.” Alarm blossoming in his voice. Trying, and failing, to tamp it down. “It’s in your head. I’m looking right at you and there’s nothing th—”
But she’d lapsed back out and now lunged at him in deadly silence, trying to get through him to her weapons. He tackled her down, and she struck out. The first kick pulverized a chunk of a cinderblock wall. The second unmoored the steel shelving from its anchors and brought it down on top of them both. In the chaos she twisted free and leapt for her sword. He got between her and it and without breaking stride she jumped up lightly and slammed both feet into his chest, torquing her body to spring off and up toward her sword as he fell.
He flew back into the wall—but he’d grabbed onto her ankles and took her with him. Through the wall they went, on into a stretch of dank-smelling darkened hallway, the walls furred with fungus, moisture warping the ceiling.
He was done talking now. It was taking all his concentration to try and keep her still, but Foster was having none of it. She threw him off and dove back through the broken wall, but he managed to catch her at the last second and sling her down, cracking the tile, and at that point she’d had enough. She sprang up into the darkness, plunged her hands through the rotten ceiling, grabbed a steel beam, and swung her legs out hard, giving the ghost both boots in the side of the head. As he staggered back she let go of the beam, backflipping neatly, and then he was under her with two fistfuls of her uniform and tore her from the air.
After some minutes he got her pinned and held her. She thrashed hard, and Wasp heard bones break, though whether hers or his she couldn’t tell, and she didn’t stop fighting, and he wasn’t letting go. “Shut up, Foster,” he was repeating, over and over, like a litany, “shut up, it’s going to be okay, it’s going to be okay.”
Wasp had no idea how long she waited. The quality of the light did not change.
At times she could hear footsteps off elsewhere, echoing down and down to however deep they were, but nobody came to forcibly return them. Looking at the hallway it was easy enough for Wasp to guess Latchkey’s motive: an expedition and all-out assault would bring the whole place down around their ears. The halls prob
ably dead-ended deeper down. Like the shrine-dogs treeing Wasp up Execution Hill, they’d wait Foster out.
At times Foster slept, but the ghost did not. He stayed awake like he was holding a vigil for the dead, and while she slept there was an almost constant chirping and whirring as he healed their injuries, first with his own device and then with Foster’s when his gave its three beeps and died, finally healing only Foster when her device was on its way out, too.
At other times Foster cried out and tried to fight her way free, and the ghost talked her down, or tried to, and maybe Wasp would hear another broken bone or dislocated shoulder, and maybe a bit more of the ceiling would fall in, and when Foster’d worn herself out, the hallway would be that much closer to caving in entirely, and the rotten ceiling-crumbs and groundwater and the spores from crushed fungi settled on them as she calmed.
At last Foster opened her eyes, and blinked, and the fever had gone its way, returning her to herself. She took the situation in at a glance.
“Where—” she said. She sounded like she’d been eating grit. She looked awful, but the ghost looked worse. Unless Wasp missed her guess, he was nursing at least a concussion. He drew her slowly into focus. “Hey,” she said. “Whatever happens up there—” eyes to the ceiling, what was left of it—“for now, you saved my ass. Seriously. I owe you. How long was I—” She had a device on one wrist, which she worked one arm free to consult. Then turned back to the ghost, incredulous. “Three days?”
—city. Streets crossing. Bodies in a ring. Whatever Foster had done to them, they were still out cold but breathing shallowly. She was standing in the middle of their circle again, her sword drawn, both hands on the hilt, the point braced against the street.
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