Archivist Wasp

by Nicole Kornher-Stace

  “I need you to break my sword,” she was saying.

  He practically recoiled. “What.”

  Foster spoke fast and low, not much above a whisper. “You had to apprehend me. We fought. You broke my sword. You took me into custody. You brought me back to headquarters. You turned me in.”

  “I’ve got a better idea.”

  “This is the only way. They’re going to be here any second. There’s no time. I’m not going to drag you into this.”

  “So all that talk of running was only that. Talk.”

  “I guess I decided I didn’t want to leave on my own.” She gave a little smile, defiant and sad. “Out there we’re just monsters anyway. But here, at least—”

  There came a sound of many booted footsteps approaching fast. Over that, another sound, which it took Wasp a second to place as the humming of the kind of floating vehicle Foster had taken the hostage away on. There had to be at least ten of them. Close and closing.

  Foster’s eyes widened. She cursed and set her boot against the blade. There was no doubt in Wasp’s mind that Foster could have broken the sword with her foot, with her bare hands, with her teeth if it came to it, but it seemed to be proving difficult in a way that had nothing to do with physical ability. She glared at him. “Are you really going to make me do this myself?” She caught sight of one of the floating vehicles speeding toward them down an alley and she cursed again, softer and more elaborately. Down other sidestreets, more approached.

  “Too late,” she whispered. Her hand tightened on the hilt. “Defend yourself.”

  In one motion she unfolded from her crouch, got her boot planted, and sprang up slashing. He leaned slightly to the side, and her blade hissed through the air half a centimeter from his ear. He looked down his nose at her, utterly unruffled. “I’m not fighting you, idiot.”

  Her miss lost her no momentum, gave no opening. Nor did it really look like a miss. She simply seemed to somehow pause in mid-whirl for a fraction of a second and then whiplash back the way she came. The tip of the blade took him across the cheek, light as a snowflake falling. “Then I’ll make you.”

  The next swing came out of nowhere, and he caught the blade in one gloved hand right above the guard. He glanced at the vehicles. He looked to be counting them. Wasp couldn’t quite name the thoughts warring in his face. His expression shifted like water over stones, then to stone and nothing more. At odds with it, his voice was strained.

  “Run,” he said.

  But a kick was already on its way to his head, and as her leg swung up she dipped her whole upper body toward the ground, hauled on the hilt with all the force of her momentum behind it, then let go suddenly, unbalancing him just enough for a solid connect. It wasn’t enough to knock him over, but it was enough to stagger him.

  It gave her the second she needed.

  “Not today,” she replied softly, and as the vehicles touched down, guns out, she flung herself to the ground, bloodying her face on the street. Leaving him bleeding from one hand, standing over her in a circle of bodies with her own sword as the approaching footsteps caught up with the vehicles and a hundred guns sighted on them at once.

  He hauled her up by one arm, and she started shouting.

  “I surrender. Don’t shoot. They’re alive. They’re all alive.”

  There was a second as the uniformed men and women pointing their guns toward that circle of bodies processed the scene before them. Wasp noticed that they were all dressed exactly like the bodies themselves. In that pause Foster started whispering, hardly moving her lips, so fast and quiet that Wasp, lacking their enhanced senses, could barely hear it even from so nearby.

  “I owed you three days, remember? Looks like this is where I pay up. I’m going to show them you had no part in this. Then if you decide you want out, we get out. If you want to stay—if I don’t screw this up—you’ll be able to.”

  “I’ve decided,” he said.

  Foster sighed, though whether it was the sigh of a person laying down a heavy burden or picking up a new one, Wasp couldn’t quite tell. “You haven’t.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  It felt like waking from a nightmare. Wasp’s heart was pounding and she was in a cold sweat head to toe. The paper-scrap was pink pulp around her blade. She must have been out for hours—except the position of the sun hadn’t changed. The ghost was sitting as it had been when she’d left. She herself was kneeling on a rock by a pond, but the lack of cold and pain in her knees assured her she hadn’t been there for more than a minute or two.

  All that was different now was that she found she was shaking with rage. She jumped to her feet, knife still out before her.

  Now, Wasp understood being different. She understood being an outcast, an efficient monster, respected and feared in almost equal measure. She understood what it was like to be a tool fashioned by, and wielded by, the hand of powers not her own. She understood having nothing else beyond the life that had been shaped for her: no family, no friends, no past, and probably no future.

  So she understood, even if she had never experienced, the desire—the need—to stick with the one person in the world who was exactly the same, even if it ended in disaster: like Carrion Boy and Ember Girl, endlessly drawn together, endlessly colliding, two against the world.

  And while she certainly understood wanting to escape, she also understood that it was easy enough for her, having no Carrion Boy and no Ember Girl of her own to turn her back on and walk away from. What she did not understand was—

  “You just gave her to them? After all you’d been through, you gave her to them so you—” The notion was too freakish for her to process and say at the same time. She gaped a moment, dumbstruck “—could stay?”

  The ghost looked up at her, and despite her fury she backed a step, almost landing in the pond. She tightened her grip on the harvesting-knife. “Have you ever seen a wasp?” it asked her. “A live one?”

  Still with that unbearable tranquility. She wanted to cut that studied mildness from its eyes. “Get to the point.”

  “The namesake fits. Good with a stinger. Useless otherwise.”

  Wasp laughed, utterly irate. “Really.” She stepped down off the rock. “Well then. I’ll be on my way.”

  She started walking. Ten steps uphill, the ghost spoke to her back.

  “What you said a minute ago. That I gave them to her so I could stay.”

  She stopped.

  “It wasn’t like that,” it went on. “But by all means, berate me over what you know nothing about. You could have stood there shouting for a thousand years and never told me anything I haven’t told myself already.”

  Its unending calm was about to make her head explode. Well, she knew now where to find the knife to twist. In what wound it remained.

  What the ghost hadn’t seen.

  “I was there when they tortured her,” she murmured.

  Part of her regretted the words as they were leaving her mouth, but part of her was watching the ghost’s face with a perverse satisfaction. That part won out. “Don’t you dare look at me like that,” she spat. “Isn’t that the wall you’ve been beating your head against all this time? At least, oh, I don’t know, hundreds of years? Thousands? That’s a long time to wonder and imagine exactly what they did to her. What you let them do to her.”

  Something had lit in her, and she couldn’t shut it down. “If I—”

  The sentence died on her tongue, half-formed. The mental glimpse she caught of what it might have been mortified her. She scrambled to cover her tracks. “No wonder she doesn’t want you to find her.”

  The ghost had that look about it again, like it was holding something vast and dangerous inside it precariously in check. Wasp thought of it fighting those machines with Foster in the city, flinging however many tons of fast-moving metal out of its original trajectory with no more effort than it would take Wasp to pick her teeth. Wasp thought of what sort of force of will it must take, keeping a lid on that kind of str
ength if it wanted out. She was acutely aware that the only reason the ghost hadn’t reduced her to a grease-spot on the ground was probably because its anger at her, no matter how hard she tried to rile it, paled to nothing beside its anger at itself.

  “They couldn’t have stopped her if she tried to leave,” it said. “Neither of us figured they would risk damaging us, not after all the effort they . . .” A pause. “We figured wrong. We were young and we were stupid and we . . . we were brought up to think we were special. If we survived development, we had to be invincible. She . . . we used to break their rules. It was like a contest. Who could push the hardest.”

  Wasp had a pretty good guess as to which one of them made up that contest, and which one tended to win. She bit her lip, but the ghost caught the smirk she hadn’t made.

  “She was better at it,” it admitted. “They pushed back, and it was a day in solitary, or a few missed meals, or they’d send us out with incinerator carts to clear the rubble and bodies from the streets. She got too comfortable. She grossly overestimated the thickness of the ice she was standing on, and she grossly underestimated what was waiting for her beneath. It was only a matter of time before they decided to cut her funding permanently.” It took Wasp a moment to realize that this was the ghost’s idea of a joke. “Well, she finally went too far. She sabotaged a hostage transfer. Nothing was going to convince them that she wasn’t trying to switch sides. That she hadn’t gone turncoat. That all she wanted was for it to be over so she could get out. They assumed she’d turned double agent. And they treated her accordingly.”

  It stared into the black water of the pond. Something flicked and seethed below the surface of that water, and it did not look like fish.

  “Still, any twenty of them were no match for her. She could have gotten away whenever she wanted. But she didn’t even try. So I thought . . . I thought she was safe. Three days, she said. I trusted her. I thought she had the situation under control.” The ghost made a contemptuous sound. “She did. Only . . . not in the way I was expecting.”

  Under the weight of the ghost’s words, Wasp’s rage had smothered to a smoldering. In its absence she felt dizzy and sick. Foster was still there in her head, the ghost of her ghost, laughing in the last bloody light of the sun. Two against the world.

  “No. You’re wrong. She didn’t want to die. I saw her in there. She wanted to live.”

  The ghost’s face contorted. It was slight, but it was real anger. Real anger, slipping out from behind the mask. When it spoke, however, its voice was still calm as a stone. “Is that right. Then explain to me why she sat there and let them cut into her. Explain to me why I dug a grave and put her in it.”

  It stood. “We’re going to find her. And when we do, if she wants me to walk away, I’ll walk away. But first I need to talk to her. One last time.”

  Of course you do, Wasp thought. You’re a ghost. You need answers. You need closure. You need them like the living need air to breathe. You think it’s just you, but from what I’ve seen, most of us die without getting either.

  And maybe that’s all a ghost is, in the end. Regret, grown legs, gone walking.

  But Wasp was still no closer to finding her.

  Whatever was in the water was still moving. Absently the ghost drew its sword and stabbed it down into the center of the commotion. Pulled it out and there was the upper half of a tattered old ghost stuck to it, silvery and worn. It was unguessable how long it had stayed stuck down there, alive but immobile, clawing toward the surface.

  The ghost considered it for a long moment, then slung it down off the blade onto the grass, cut it into pieces, and kicked it back into the water. Sheathed its sword and started walking toward whatever lay behind the willow. It might have been a path.

  After a few steps it stopped.

  “Has her blood given you any more ideas about where she might be?”

  Wasp pondered this.

  —incredible. We knew you would

  —going to fight you, idiot.

  —lose one than risk two.

  —not going to drag you into this.

  —up, it’s going to be okay.

  —was only that. Talk.

  —ones who didn’t die.

  —monsters anyway. But here, at least

  Thanks to Foster’s blood, Wasp was more overwhelmed than before. It must have showed in her face, because the ghost sighed. “I didn’t think so. Well, this way might take us closer to the city. If there’s anyone left who’s seen her, chances are they’ll be there. Who knows.” It gave a sardonic, bitter little laugh. “Maybe today we’ll be lucky.”

  Without waiting for a response the ghost set off again down the path, leaving Wasp staring at the ground, ashamed. She had been underestimated before. It had won her fights more than once. Having been overestimated, and falling short—this was new. She liked it rather less.

  “Wait.”

  The ghost took a few more steps, but slowed to a halt. “Yes?”

  “What about everyone else who was involved in this Latchkey Project? And whoever you worked for? And the people who . . .” Tortured her, she thought. “Questioned her,” she said. “They must be down here somewhere, too. If we find their ghosts, we might . . .” The ghost was looking at her over its shoulder, and she trailed off when she saw its face. “What.”

  “Oh, those ones I found,” it said. “Long ago. We won’t be finding them again.”

  “You killed them.”

  It was not quite a smile. “Eventually.”

  Wasp shut her eyes. Wondering which would come first. Her thread snapping or the ghost realizing that she’d lied and calling off the bargain. She could do nothing about the thread. But she stood some tiny chance of bluffing her way out of the other thing. Buying some time.

  “Fine. Fine. Let’s go to this city and start knocking on doors and hope she’s behind one of them, because I’m all out of ideas that you haven’t sabotaged.” She went storming around the pond’s edge, circling the willow, avoiding the plaits of bone that reminded her altogether too much of the plaits of dead upstarts’ hair she’d cut away in tribute to the bridge, and headed toward the path. “You blew up every road that might lead us back to her. Every single road. And your memories are useless, and her memories are useless, and I’m going to run out of time and get stuck here or disappear any minute and what am I supposed to do then? What exactly am I supposed to—”

  Suddenly the ghost was before her, staring at her with such intensity that she shut up and stood there, her mouth hanging open.

  “Keep moving forward,” it said. “Even if it doesn’t get you anywhere. You stop long enough for this place to catch up with you, it’ll trample straight over.”

  “It’s pretty much the same up there,” Wasp muttered, pointedly shading her eyes against the sun to get her bearings. Anything to get away from that stare.

  Behind her and to her left was the fall of mossy rocks where the cabin had appeared. To her right was that path tacking off through a grove of fruiting trees. Past the pond, the earth sank in a series of declining swells toward a broad meadow, yellow with tall grass, a black river slicing through it. Off in the distance, Wasp could make out the city they had seen the night before.

  “Down there,” she said. “Looks like we can walk it. It doesn’t seem too steep, but I can’t gauge the distance. Might take the day, but—”

  “No,” said the ghost. “Not that way.”

  Wasp pointed. “But it’s right—”

  “Haven’t you figured out by now that that isn’t how it works down here?”

  “Isn’t how what—”

  The ghost turned on its heel and took off down the path without her. Wasp swept one last dubious glance from the city in the meadow to the path heading off in the opposite direction, then sighed and followed.

  “Think how we got here,” the ghost was saying. “How we found the bridge. You don’t travel in straight lines in this place. You want to get somewhere, you see it out of th
e corner of your eye, you keep it there. You look at it head on, it’ll disappear. What we’re after is another waypoint. Hope it gets us closer than the last one.”

  “Another cabin?” Wasp asked, squinting through the trees.

  The ghost shook its head. “I’ll know it when I see it.”

  “How long did it take you to figure all this out, anyway?”

  The scornful sound the ghost made was not, Wasp thought, directed at her. “If I’d figured it all out,” it said, “I wouldn’t be here.”

  The path curved gently, tending upward between rows of trees. The trees themselves were about the size of apple trees, though their fruit looked more like blueberries, if blueberries were white as snow, with thorns the length of Wasp’s little finger. Unappetizing though they looked, they reminded her that she hadn’t been hungry or tired since the night in the cabin, despite having slept little and eaten less while there. Maybe she was getting used to this place. Or maybe it was because the thread connecting her to her body was weakening, slackening, and would soon wear through, stranding her here or else returning her to Execution Hill. She pushed it from her mind.

  It was getting on for midday, and they had passed beyond the grove and onto a rocky plain, scorched and desolate, when the ghost stopped. “There.”

  At first she took it for a heap of rocks. Nearer, it was a well. A big well. It had to be eight feet in diameter, and a rope ladder disappeared down the inside into the dark. From the surrounding terrain, there wasn’t likely to be any water in miles. From the stone Wasp dropped down the hole, there wasn’t any here either.

  “Because it’s out of place?” Wasp asked. “That’s how you know?”

  “That’s part,” said the ghost, jumping neatly up onto the rim. It didn’t bother with the ladder. It vanished down the well, and Wasp counted seconds until she heard its boots hit bottom.