Archivist Wasp

by Nicole Kornher-Stace

  As her face broke the surface, it did.

  For some minutes after she did nothing but breathe, glorying in the swelling and shrinking of her lungs, kicking feebly at the water as the ghost towed her to shore.

  It seemed to be some kind of lake or inland sea, dotted with rotten boats. Like the river they had crossed and the pond with its tree of bone, the water was black. “It draws all the colors out from the ghosts that die in it,” the ghost explained to her unasked question, and Wasp was suddenly very careful to keep any of that water from splashing into her mouth.

  After a while, the ghost pulled her up onto shore. Ageless houses lined the bank of the water, gangrenous with flamboyant mold. They seemed unoccupied. Wasp sat up, feeling the beach shifting oddly beneath her. She looked down to find the ground composed of countless objects that looked like wide flat pebbles made of metal. She picked one up. A locket. If it once had an engraving, it had long since eroded to a smudge. She popped the catch with a thumbnail. The hinge had rusted and the whole front snapped off. Inside was a spider crouching on an apple seed. She bent to flick it at the black water. It skipped once and sank.

  “What now?” she asked. But she already knew the answer. She sighed and tilted her head toward the houses. “I’ll look around in there.”

  She stood. Her legs trembled but held. She picked a house and tried the door. The handle was gone, but the door gave way to her shoulder, splintering damply.

  Inside was darkish, lit only by one high warped stained glass window. A wide staircase rose up before her, and a hall swept off to either side of it, lined with bloated doors. The air smelled of salt. It was as though the sea had reared up and drowned this place some time ago, maybe more than once. Wasp, having seen enough water for the day, hoped it wasn’t due to do so again anytime soon. Quickly she opened what doors she could, found nothing approximating a waypoint, turned around and left the house to try the next one.

  In the following three houses there was nothing. In the next, she’d taken a few steps down a dim hall when she stopped dead, knife-hand on the hilt. Movement out of the corner of her eye. Not now, she thought, her muscles still shaky from lack of oxygen. She pulled her knife and turned.

  It was a mirror. Cracked across, its frame tending toward verdigris, it still showed her the clearest reflection of herself she had ever seen. She gave herself a once-over, head to toe, and scowled. The mirror-Wasp scowled back.

  Without warning the ghost appeared beside her in the mirror and she jumped, cursing. “Don’t do that!” As the shock wore off, she began to notice something. This mirror was giving her the same unnamable feeling she’d had looking at the overgrown bear-thing in the maze, the hatch hidden in the snow.

  She nodded at their reflections. “I think . . . this looks like it might be something.”

  The ghost followed her gaze to the mirror. It didn’t appear to share her confidence.

  “The mirror?”

  Wasp nodded.

  “In what way?”

  “It’s huge.”

  By its standards, the ghost looked amused.

  “Not only that,” she snapped. “It looks . . .” She thought of the dry well in the desert of rocks, the bear-thing in the maze, the door in the clearing she had stepped through, long ago. “Out of place.”

  The ghost raised one eyebrow faintly. “Out of place.”

  She wanted to dismiss the feeling, but it wasn’t going away. Instead she fumbled for words. This time she’d get it right. “Like it’s supposed to be a door. It just isn’t yet. Like something’s in the way?”

  The ghost hmmed at her. Raised one hand to set its glove to the reflection of its glove. Pushed forward lightly with its fingertips, and the glass cracked around them into webs. It took its hand back and stepped aside, deferring.

  Wasp stared her reflection down, recalling how she had gotten below Execution Hill to begin with. The ghost’s voice ran through her mind. Don’t think: the rock is insubstantial. It isn’t. Think: I am stronger than the rock.

  “Open up,” she demanded. “Let me in.”

  It did not.

  “There are other houses to check,” said the ghost. “No time to linger here.”

  “You go on,” she said. “I’m going to figure this out.”

  “Splitting up could be dangerous. What happened in the maze could have gone a lot worse. You were lucky.”

  “So you keep telling me.” Wasp turned to eye it straight. “Okay, so you’ve been looking for Foster for a long time. You know how the waypoints work. I don’t. I get it. But if what you were doing was working, I wouldn’t be here. You brought me down here to figure this out, and I’m going to figure it out. If you don’t want to split up, then help me. Or find a chair and sit in it.”

  The ghost held her gaze. “I’m going to check the last few houses,” it said at last. “First sign of trouble, run outside. I’ll find you.”

  Wasp nodded absently, still inspecting the mirror. She wedged her fingers in behind the frame and pulled. It was bolted to the wall. She slid a grimy fingernail into the long crack down the middle of the glass, as though she could pry the two halves of the mirror apart.

  Still nothing. Nothing, and her time down here was still ticking away. Soon she’d have to go find the ghost and let it heap its silent scorn on her stupid stubborn head and show her the waypoint it had taken ten seconds to find.

  Well, she wasn’t backing down quite yet.

  She paced back and forth before the mirror for a minute, thinking. As she turned, the harvesting-knife caught hard on a chair-back, making her stumble. “Weird,” she muttered. She hadn’t thought she was standing that close to anything.

  Her hand dropped to rest on the hilt, and she stopped walking. She bit her lip and looked sidelong at the mirror. Then she drew her blade.

  The point of the harvesting-knife tapped against the mirror, like any blade-point against any glass, so she set it next to the palm of her off-hand and pressed until a few drops of blood welled up onto the blade. Again, no vision came to her when she did. Perhaps when she became a ghost for good, it would be different. Wouldn’t be long now.

  This is stupid, she thought. Stupid and desperate.

  She set the blade back to the glass, and this time it sank in.

  Wasp couldn’t help shouting. Inside five seconds, the ghost was there. She turned to it, beside herself with triumph. “Look.”

  She bloodied the knifepoint again and set it to the mirror, right inside the frame. It sank in to the exact depth of the bloodstain on the blade, and she drew it down the length of the glass, then across the bottom, then up and across the top to end the line where it began.

  The mirror did not shatter or fall in as Wasp half-expected it to do. In fact it looked much the same, except for the line she had drawn, which shimmered wetly, though was not wet.

  The ghost stared. “What did—” it began, and stopped. The look on its face suggested it didn’t like being outdone any better than Wasp did. She was beginning to enjoy this.

  “It looks like,” she said, trying to keep the I told you so from her voice and doing a wretched job of it, “I made a door.”

  She stepped toward it, fixing that moment once again in her mind: crossroads, bodies, Foster—then drew back. She had no idea if she could make another door. She had no idea how she’d made this one. Maybe a ghost-culling knife and some not-quite-ghost blood were actually able to, if not tear the fabric of this place wide open, at least snag it a little and ladder it down. Or maybe there was a door there all along, waiting to be found. Or maybe it was just this place messing with her.

  In any case, she couldn’t afford to waste it. She had to be sure.

  The city appeared so often in the ghost’s memories and in Foster’s, it had to be right, had to if anything was, but maybe her focus was slightly wrong. She replayed the memory in her mind as best she could.

  Start talking, the ghost had told Foster. Just as it had said to Wasp, back on Execution Hill. If t
here was any proof that this was the moment the ghost couldn’t move past, it was—

  She froze.

  If she was right about what was causing her thread to dissolve so quickly, she was about to embark on a terrifying prospect.

  But as far as finding Foster went, it might just be enough.

  “So I’ve been . . .” The time for secrecy was past. She had to level with the ghost. At least to a point. “I’ve been trying to control the waypoints. As we go through them.”

  The ghost narrowed its eyes. “Control them.”

  “Get them to take us to where we want to go. Concentrate on . . .” She ran an impatient hand through her hair, back and forth. What she really wanted to do was start squinting at the thread, gauging how much more decay it could take before it dropped her, but if she did that she might well lose her nerve, and then they were done. “Okay, so it hasn’t worked. But this—” she gestured at the door—“this is new. If we can just . . .”

  She trailed off, feeling childish. Wishing on stars. As though stars had ever brought her anything but misery.

  “The memories I see keep showing me this city, right? Foster freeing the hostage. I keep trying to get there, and I can’t. Here’s the thing. When I first met you. On the ledge. You attacked me.” She didn’t wait for a response. “Do you remember why?”

  The ghost looked faintly puzzled. “I blacked out. I said it was an accident. I don’t see—”

  “You attacked me because you took me for Foster,” Wasp said.

  It favored her with a withering stare. “Now why would I have—”

  “I have no idea. But you did. What you said to me was exactly the same as what you said to Foster when you caught her freeing the hostage. You were there, in that memory, more than you were on the Hill with me. After I saw it for myself, I knew why. That’s the moment you can’t move past. So that’s what I was trying to get back to. For most ghosts it’s their death, but—”

  “I don’t see what this has to do with—”

  “There were two,” Wasp said, her voice catching in her throat with excitement. “You said that stuff, same as in the memory, and then you sort of flickered, faded out but then back in. Then you told me . . . you said the plan changed. You told me to get up. You said we were leaving.”

  The ghost paused a moment, narrowing its eyes at the wall.

  “Nothing?”

  The ghost looked away.

  She didn’t like reminding it of its lost memories, but Wasp couldn’t afford to back down now. “Your memory of the city isn’t getting us anywhere. I saw it when I read her blood, too, so I thought it was working, but it’s wrong. All this time I thought we were looking for the back door in. So maybe what we’re looking for is the back back door.”

  She took a deep breath. “Whatever that other memory is, I haven’t seen it yet. Maybe you don’t remember it anymore. But it’s there. You said she was tortured to death,” she plowed on, her mouth outrunning her common sense, not able to look the ghost in the face as she said it. “Maybe you tried to bust her out. Get up. We’re leaving. Okay, but maybe it was too late, she was too far gone. Most ghosts, they . . . they imprint on their deaths, on the very moment of—”

  As she said it, she remembered standing on the ledge of Execution Hill, nothing but a knife and some salt and a wild guess keeping her alive. Drily she thought to herself: how far I’ve come.

  She waved the knife at the door. “I saw the room where she was tortured. If she died there she might still be there. But I can’t—”

  I should probably have told you about the thread, she thought. Well, I might fall down dead after this, but there are worse ways to die than trying. The only way out is through.

  She palmed the knife and flipped it over, holding it hilt-out toward the ghost. If the ghost noticed her hand shook, it said nothing. It looked unaccountably preoccupied.

  “I need to try to see what you saw,” she said. Talking through her teeth to ground herself. Repeating those few phrases in her mind—the plan changed, get up, we’re leaving right now—as though she could pull herself along them, down into the dark or out of it. “I need to see where she died.”

  She was in a tiny white box of a room, smaller even than her house. There was a kind of shelf built into one wall that she assumed was a bed. A kind of pot built into a corner, whose use she also guessed. The door had no handle, and on it, from around the level of her ribs to a bit above her head, was the second-largest single piece of mirror she had ever seen.

  Foster was sitting on the edge of the bed-shelf. Her weapons and uniform had been exchanged for a simple jumpsuit, and she bore about as much resemblance to her old self as a pile of ash did to a wildfire, but Wasp knew her at a glance.

  She looked like she’d recently lost a fight. Badly. Or that she had, long ago, and then something had gone very wrong with the recovery. All the injuries Wasp had seen Foster take during her interrogation had been healed almost completely, leaving just enough for her to remember them by. Keeping the memory of the last round of questioning fresh for the next one, maybe for the one that would kill her. Her hair fell around her face, doing nothing to soften it.

  Less subtle were the horrors Wasp could read in Foster’s hands. It was as if every bone in each hand had been methodically snapped, and healed, and re-broken, and healed, more times than Wasp could guess at. There was a lattice of scars on the back of each hand as well, as though each were a fish that had been gutted, then meticulously—almost—repaired. Wasp’s own voice in her head: You die that way, you’re a long time dying. It’s a little late now.

  Wasp thought of Foster cuffed to a chair at a table, refusing to talk. Let’s take a look at those famous hands. She thought of the little chirping device with which the ghost had healed Wasp’s fractured ankle, back in her house on the hill, a lifetime ago, and felt sick. She thought of Foster’s sword and the mastery with which she wielded it—then looked again at those mangled hands and felt worse.

  The jumpsuit covered the rest of Foster’s body, but her posture also spoke of recent damage. There had been an upstart, years ago, who had run off to find her parents. When the shrine-dogs chased her down and brought her back, she was dragged before the assembled upstarts, so that an example could be made of her. She’d come in, hands bound, head bowed, defenseless, and the Catchkeep-priest had stood the upstarts in a ring around her and forced each to take a turn with the whip, around and around, for a quarter hour. The next quarter hour was his turn. Before the girl had finally died of her wounds two days later, oozing and untouchable, begging the upstarts to smother her, she’d sat the way Foster was sitting now.

  There came a commotion outside the door. A voice, panicked, terrified: “Sir—you can’t—I’m sorry—express orders—”

  Another, with an icy calm Wasp knew too well: “I’m countermanding them.”

  “Sir, with all respect, you don’t understand. My orders were specifically that under no circumstances—”

  “It’s late. Why don’t you go get some sleep.”

  “But sir, the—”

  “I said,” and now there was no mistaking the warning in the voice, “get some sleep.”

  “Yes sir. My apologies. Thank you, sir.”

  Footsteps receded quickly down the hall. From the door, a few beeps and then a hissing as the lock released. Foster watched it open, watched the ghost step through, looking like he hadn’t slept in a while. Foster, for her part, was furious.

  “What in the hell are you—”

  What he was doing was drawing his weapons. Staring down the open door as though daring someone to come through it. Spoiling for a fight. Wasp had never seen anyone look so desperate to kill something in her life. “We’re leaving,” he said. “Right now.”

  Wasp’s breath caught.

  “That was not the plan,” Foster said. Spending no small effort to keep her voice pitched so it wouldn’t carry. “The plan—”

  “The plan changed. Get up.”

 
; Foster didn’t move. “Do you know what I had to go through to make this work? Do you have the faintest idea?”

  A silence, and when he spoke again, his voice was dangerous. “Did they hurt you?”

  Wasp found it difficult to believe he was oblivious to the evidence on Foster’s face and hands, but there it was. At that moment it came to her that no matter how calm the ghost might seem right now, it was a lie. He was utterly beside himself.

  Something in Foster’s face wrung and smoothed. Whatever decision she was trying to reach, it took her a few seconds to get there. In the end, she stood.

  “No,” she said, giving him a look of insulted incredulity. She walked over, managing not to limp, and punched him in the arm. If Wasp expected her to wince when her ruined fist made impact, she was disappointed. “Not me.”

  The tension in the room being what it was, this attempt at playfulness only looked grotesque. The ghost was staring at Foster, stricken, in a kind of rage. “Not you,” she added softly, but didn’t move to touch him again.

  He made a contemptuous sound in his throat, then turned on his heel and stalked out.

  As the door shut behind him, he stopped. Wasp could see now that what had been a mirror on the inside was, on the outside, a window into the room. He stood for a moment, perfectly still: back to the door, head cast downward, eyes shut. Then turned. Through the window, Foster was standing in the middle of the room, her back to the door.

  His hand went to the control panel by the door and hovered over it for a long moment without activating it. He appeared to be about to say something, then didn’t. For a second that rage got the better of him and he struck out at the wall opposite, denting the concrete.

  “Idiot,” he said, and walked away.

  Wasp came out of it grabbing at her thread. The integrity of the thing was shot beyond hope. It looked like a strand of syrup, all beads and gaps, and mostly gaps. Yet somehow, for the moment, it held.