Archivist Wasp

by Nicole Kornher-Stace

  As soon as she realized what was happening, the tugging intensified, turned her completely around, and started reeling her in. She dug in her heels, leaning back against the pressure until it nearly swept her feet out from under her and dragged her up the Hill on her ass. She planted her feet and leaned harder. Either it would drag her back, or break. Either way she was dead. At least this way she’d die fighting.

  The thread yanked her forward a step, then two. Then she stopped. The ghost had caught her and held on, stronger than the thread.

  The thread pulled back, and she cried out. Any minute she expected it to tear free of her chest, and that would be that, and she would be done. The idea of dying so—she couldn’t honestly say so close to what I came for, as she had no certainty of that, but so far from where I’ve come, and so near to it—infuriated her.

  “Don’t let go,” she heard herself say.

  “Do you see me letting go?” the ghost replied.

  “I screwed up,” said Wasp, with a deathbed honesty. “I couldn’t find her. I should never have said I could. When you asked me to find a ghost, what I expected was . . . well, it sure as hell wasn’t this.”

  “And I never meant to get you hurt,” said the ghost. “I gave you plenty of reason to want to walk, but you stayed. Despite everything, you stayed. For what it’s worth, I was glad to have you fight beside me. I had . . . almost forgotten.” A pause. “She would have liked you, I think.”

  “Then you can tell her all about me,” said Wasp, “when you find her.”

  The ghost either laughed or sighed. She couldn’t tell which. She let her head fall back and found herself gazing up at the sky, where Catchkeep’s sixteen stars twinkled serenely, riding low over the hills. Maybe you’re real, she thought at them, and maybe you’re a lie made up by men who got too used to living off of other people and giving nothing back. And maybe you’re something in between. But if you’re up there listening, you mangy bitch, know this. You owe me.

  She would never know if what happened next was coincidence or not.

  Everything went still. Wasp hadn’t really noticed the small distant sounds of the place—breeze, nightbirds skirmishing in the orchard, late work-noise carrying up from the town, someone laughing on the road—until they stopped.

  Then out of nowhere came that same ferocious blast of wind that had brought her back to the peak of Execution Hill when the Archivist had cut her thread. And out of the crack in the rock past the ledge there came ghosts.

  They were small, flickering in the onslaught of that wind, but she recognized them. Every one of them was a ghost that the Catchkeep-priest had ordered her to destroy and she instead had set free. The one that had torn up the baker’s kitchen just before her last fight was not among them, but she recognized others. One that had struck her and fled when she’d tried to capture it, and she’d respected the fight in it enough to let it go. Several that must have died during infancy or childhood and so were useless as specimens for study. One that had kept clawing back toward the rock it had come from, mewing a name over and over, until Wasp had released it to find whoever it was calling out to. There were dozens.

  And then there was one she knew at once for an upstart, from its clothes and its scars and from the way it kept going after her knife instead of the salt.

  It walked a little funny, as though a leg had been broken in life, and its left ear was shredded, and it had blood in its ponytail, like someone had cleaned a knife on it. Strangely, it was swollen up around its many wounds, as though it had taken longer than most upstarts did to die.

  Wasp stared at it, wide-eyed, but didn’t dare call to it by name for fear it would not answer.

  The ghosts gathered around her in a faintly glowing silver mass. Each of them was doing something complicated with its hands. It was like and unlike the string-games the town children played, stretching cups and watchtowers and wolves between their fingers. It wasn’t until their color started fading that Wasp realized what the ghosts were doing—but by that time each had gathered a handful of silvery strands from the fabric of its form, and one by one, bit by bit, they began feeding the strands into Wasp’s thread.

  Above or below, it was the first and only time she had seen lone ghosts unite in anything like a common goal. She stared, and the ghosts slowly faded, and the thread slowly lengthened, and was reeled in, and the ghosts worked faster, and for an instant the thread fell slack.

  The ghost didn’t hesitate. He seized her arm and pulled her back around, and the wind ate her shriek as she felt her shoulder give, then pop. Still the ghost didn’t let go. He pressed her hand to the wall and held it there. She couldn’t see what the other ghosts were doing, down on the ledge. Whether they would keep on feeding themselves into her thread until they vanished down to disembodied pairs of hands plucking at each other, until those vanished too.

  The tearing in her chest felt like it was about to rip her heart out. She felt her feet leave the ground. Still holding her hand to the wall, the ghost set his other hand over hers. Wasp understood instantly. She got the harvesting-knife in a death-grip and poised the point over her hand, the ghost’s hand, and the wall beyond, then glanced one last time at the ghost. The ghost nodded once. Wasp nodded back and plunged the blade in.

  The last thing she thought on her way through the door was this.

  Whatever the ghost had said to her so softly, just now, right before her time had run out for good and her thread began pulling her back toward her body, she had to have heard it wrong.

  Because what it had sounded like was I should have killed her.

  Chapter Twenty

  Wasp stepped through into a long dark room lit by small running lights of such pure high vibrant colors that they hurt her eyes.

  She had seen this place before. The beds full of doomed children were gone but otherwise it appeared much the same.

  Her wounds burned cold. Her arm hung useless at her side. The thread pulled but not so sharply as it had. She pictured the ghosts unraveling themselves into it and knew she couldn’t have much time. She began walking forward, into the room.

  As she did, lights came on overhead, so white that she saw spots.

  In the middle of the floor where the beds had been, there was a chair. Foster sat in it. She was wearing the jumpsuit. Her weapons were gone. She was cuffed to the chair twice at each arm, twice at each leg, with a wide belt around her middle. She was sitting uncharacteristically still. There was something strange about her hair.

  The ghost was standing in front of the chair, at the head of a group made up partly of men and women in white coats and partly of uniformed men and women with guns.

  At first Wasp thought the guns were trained on Foster. They weren’t. They were trained on the ghost.

  Wasp got closer. The strangeness to Foster’s hair was that in places it had been shaved off. Where it had been, there were scars on her head, where incisions made by something not a knife had been cauterized.

  “—thought you might want to see her,” one of the men in white coats was saying to the ghost. “Now that she’s stable. She was all over the place there for a while.” He tapped a screen on a stand beside the chair. Wires snaked from it to Foster. “It took some doing, but we got her back in the green. Truth is, this all took some doing. More than it should. You wouldn’t believe how much sedative we had to shoot her up with just to get her on the table. She’s . . . well, she’s really something.” The others were nodding a little at this, grimly, as at an unpleasant memory put behind them. “As I’m sure you are aware.”

  Nobody was looking at the ghost. Nobody but the guns.

  Finally he spoke. “What did you do to her.”

  The man looked offended. “Do to her? We saved her life. She just couldn’t take the stress anymore. She was getting paranoid. She was getting people hurt. Our people. You know we can’t have that. If we hadn’t intervened, it would have . . . ended badly. For everyone. But mostly for her.” The man cleared his throat. “Don’t
worry. She’s still herself. She could still kill me with her pinky finger without breaking a sweat. So cheer up. You’ll get your partner back. As soon as she earns her way clear of the meds, she’ll be right as rain.”

  The ghost looked at Foster. Foster looked through the ghost.

  “She doesn’t know who I am.”

  The man in the white coat took another of those lit panels out of a woman’s hand and tapped at its screen with his fingertips. “Now that we’re not sure about. It might come back in time. Some things already have. Some things haven’t yet, but should. Some of it—” he gestured, tipping his hand back and forth like a balance that wouldn’t calibrate—“comes and goes. We’ll have a better sense of what’s on which list the more time goes by. Already we’re seeing improvements. We ran some psych tests, tested some basic self-help skills. Even managed to get her in the combat simulator for a few minutes last night. Things are progressing. Eventually her weapons and uniform will come back out of the vault and she’ll go back into the field. But that’ll be some time coming.” The man checked a device on his wrist. “Now. She’s due for Program reintegration therapy in five minutes, but, well, she’ll be sitting through that three times a day for the foreseeable future. Missing a few minutes from one lousy session won’t kill her. Not for an old friend.”

  He turned to Foster, and suddenly his tone changed, as though he were speaking to a child. “Would you like that, Kit? You probably don’t remember me, but I remember you, and when you were just this high, five gallons of trouble in a pint glass, we used to call you that. What do you say? Want a few minutes alone with your partner? Have a nice chat? Get all caught up?” He patted her head. She looked up at him, then back to the ghost. Wasp couldn’t read her eyes. Nor could she read the ghost’s. “Consider it a welcome-home present,” the man said. “For services rendered.”

  He raised his voice. “Okay, let’s clear it out.” Then, quietly, to the ghost, as the others filed out the door: “The room is covered. I know they’re calling you a hero now, but—let’s not try to be one today.” A hero? Wasp thought, then remembered. What did you leave at the bridge? she’d asked. A medal, the ghost had replied. The medal they gave me for turning her in.

  “I don’t want to go through all that again,” the man was saying. “Any funny business, they might well just shoot you down like a dog. Both of you. Loose cannons. Tragic accident. I can see the headlines now.” He clapped the ghost on the shoulder and walked out, leaving him and Foster alone in the room.

  The ghost knelt, the better to see into her face. “Foster,” he said. “Foster.” A pause, and then: “Kit.” Her eyes drew him into focus, but in the way a person’s eyes focus on something in the distance through a window.

  “You don’t know me,” said the ghost. “Do you.”

  Foster furrowed her brow, tugging cauterization scars out of true. “I,” she said. She sounded thirsty. “I’m not sure.”

  Suddenly she was holding something. Even now, wrecked, she was so fast that Wasp couldn’t tell where it came from. First her hands were empty, and then she held a piece of paper, folded into a square. Foster shook it by a corner until it unfolded. On one side was a lot of printed text, above and below an image of an armed man and woman standing together in front of a ruined building. On the other side there were a lot of words, scribbled in a cramped and desperate penmanship.

  Wasp would have known it anywhere.

  Foster was looking from the picture on the paper to the ghost and back. At this point she seemed to notice the restraints on the chair, and tore herself free of them. From the look of it, they might have been made of lint.

  There was some commotion from the observation deck running the length of the room. “Oh, shit,” Wasp heard someone say. Then many heavy footsteps, sprinting.

  Foster was oblivious. “I think,” she said, holding the paper out, “this is for you.”

  Until this moment, Wasp had never seen the ghost look unsure of himself. He reached, and did not take, then took the paper.

  “Hey,” someone shouted from the observation deck. “Drop that and step away from her. That’s an order.” He ignored it. A rifle fired a warning shot. It embedded itself in the wall, and everything he was clamping down on began to leak out. He drew his own gun, held it out to the side, and fired back without bothering to sight or even look. One shot toward the shot that came, then three more shots toward targets Wasp couldn’t see. It was blindingly fast and over quickly. In the ensuing silence, he began to read.

  Here I am writing a letter to someone I don’t remember. Well, they keep saying my ideas were irrational. What’s one more? I took this paper off their table. This pen too. I don’t have much time. I’ve forgotten so much. I know I have, even if I can’t remember what it was. They tell me I’m imagining it, bad dream, there there, here’s something to help you sleep. But they’re wrong. I know they’re wrong. I have to get this out before I forget it too. There’s a photo on this paper. I see me in it. Looks like a copy of a newspaper. You’re there with me, whoever you are. You look like Latchkey. Like an operative. Like me. Maybe we worked together. Trusted each other with our lives. I’m trusting you with mine now. If we were friends, if you ever cared about me, hell, if you ever owed me a favor, I need you to pay up now. I need you to kill me. They say I was sick and they fixed me, but I don’t feel right. They put me in the simulator and I can still fight, and I can feed myself and lace my boots and spell these words, but I don’t feel like me. I don’t even know who I’m writing this to. I should remember you. I look at this photo and I know I should remember you. Anyway, this is what I want. This is all I want. I’m begging you to help me. I don’t want to have died for nothing but I don’t want to live for nothing either. And that’s what it feels like they’ve left me with. Nothing. I’m asking you to help me because I look at you in this photo and something makes me think you understand. Either way, I guess this is goodbye. I can’t say for sure but I bet it was fun while it lasted. See you around.

  His hands went to fists. The paper crumpled. He stood there, head down, eyes shut, for a moment. “I can’t,” he said. “You know I can’t.”

  Foster smiled. “’Course you can. Look at you. I bet you’ve killed a million people.”

  “That isn’t,” he said, and then the door burst in, and, too fast for Wasp to track, he was there to greet what came through. Shots rang out, but none of them were his. He didn’t even bother with the gun.

  A moment later, the door was still banging shut, and the floor was littered with bodies. The ghost slung the blood off his sword and turned back to Foster—and stopped dead. The look on his face was like nothing Wasp had ever seen before or ever wanted to see again.

  Wasp turned and stared, her breath caught in her throat like a fist.

  Foster had taken a few steps out into the room. Wasp hadn’t seen her so much as get up out of the chair. The expression on Foster’s face suggested she’d gone out there with a purpose, and Wasp had no way of knowing whether the bodies at her feet were ones Foster had put there with her bare hands, or whether they’d landed there when the ghost was done with them.

  There were two neat holes punched in Foster’s jumpsuit, below the collarbone, under the ribs. Reddened around the edges.

  As Wasp watched, Foster’s expression turned to bewilderment. She set a hand to her belly and brought it away slick with blood. She looked at the ghost. The ghost looked back at her. His eyes were terrible.

  He didn’t move. He seemed to have forgotten how.

  Foster stumbled back a few steps and went down, hitting her head on the leg of the chair. Not noticing. “There,” she said, or tried to. She sounded winded, as if she’d run too fast too long. “Makes it easy for you.”

  Still the ghost did not move. “I can heal you.”

  Foster grinned, then winced. “You’re a terrible liar. It’ll be over soon and you know it.” Her wounds drooled dark blood, black in the light. Her teeth were red. “Come on, don’t make me
break my own neck. If someone has to do this, I want it to be you.” Her laugh was despairing. It sounded like syrup boiling down to jam. “Whoever you are.”

  She got up, tottered sideways a few steps, and fell. She lay there, her breath racketing in and out of her. “Don’t leave me like this,” she said. “You could at least let me die with—with some kind of dignity.”

  Unbidden, the image came to Wasp of the fallen upstart Aneko kneeling in the sand, expecting a moment of pain and getting days of it instead. To see Foster like this, now, was unbearable. Unlike the upstart, though, Wasp blinked but could not banish her.

  The ghost was still standing rooted to the spot. He was hanging back as though there were an invisible line between him and Foster, and if he crossed it, that horrible noise of her breathing would stop altogether. He stood there like a spring too tightly wound, like an undetonated bomb.

  From his distance, he spoke, his voice desolate. “Why didn’t you run?”

  “I was going to.” Foster’s whole chest was working much too hard to gather air, and her voice was down to a whisper. “They snuck me. Had a needle. Whatever was in it . . . was new. Couldn’t fight. I couldn’t . . . couldn’t. Three days. That was important. I don’t know why. Three days. Three days. But they—”

  Her eyes wandered to the ghost. In them, Wasp could almost see the spark of her awareness receding, like a torch dropped down a well. “It’s weird,” Foster said. “There was someone in the picture with me. Someone I had to write a letter for. For a minute I thought it was you. But I guess I was—”

  She went silent.

  A long moment passed.

  The ghost dropped the sword and knelt beside her. He had that device in his hand, the one he’d healed Wasp’s ankle with, ages after Catherine Foster fell, was translated into memory, the memory in turn half buried or half lost. He set it to the hole beneath her collarbone. Lights came on and the device chirped and hummed, gauged the wound beyond the scope of its treatment, then beeped its condolences as it gave up and shut down. He powered it back up immediately and set it to the exit wound in her back. Lights, chirping, beeping, shutdown. He tried the wound in her belly. Again the same.