Archivist Wasp

by Nicole Kornher-Stace

  “No,” he said. “Get up. You idiot, you can take worse than this, don’t you dare let them break you, get up.” He shook her. He slapped her. Blood ran out of her mouth. He lowered her back to the floor, his grip so tight Wasp heard bones crack in Foster’s shoulders. “Not like this, Kit,” the ghost was saying, softer now. “Not like this.”

  He let go and knelt beside her, eyes shut, face a blank. He did not close Foster’s eyes. He stayed there for a long time before Wasp joined him.

  “I always thought I was the one with . . . with more discipline,” he told her. Not looking at Wasp, not at Foster, not at anything. “I followed orders. Whether I wanted to or not. I was—” his mouth twisted—“reliable. To all the wrong people.”

  He paused, and Wasp settled in to wait him out, not daring to break that silence.

  “Most of us, we . . . we took the easy path. We did what they told us because we had nowhere else to go. We had no idea how to live out in the world. We never would have passed for people, real people, living normal lives, with—with—families and houses and—and pet dogs and—”

  He trailed off, a muscle working in his jaw. Clearly at a loss. “Leaving this place is the hardest thing any of us could possibly have done. And she was the only one willing to do it. She was the only one of us who’d rather die her way than live theirs. That was Foster’s discipline.” A long pause. “She trusted me. After . . . after everything, there was still some part of her that trusted me. And I failed her. The last thing she ever asked of anyone, and I failed her. I let her bleed out on the floor of a place she spent her life trying to escape, let her lie there drowning in her own blood while I stood there and watched—”

  “But you didn’t want her to die,” Wasp said lamely. Realizing how stupid it sounded. Realizing she had to say it anyway, say something, say anything, to try and block out the pain and rage and shame in the ghost’s voice, if only for a moment. It was a ragged voice, frayed to breaking, like a thing too often mended to be saved. It was a voice like the sword you fall on when you see no better option, and Wasp found herself wondering, suddenly and for the first time, how this ghost had died. “You wanted her to live.”

  But then the upstart Aneko was back in Wasp’s mind, festering at a dozen wounds, dragging herself through town on that broken leg, scratching at doors that would not open, and Wasp’s wanting-her-to-live had been worth its weight in shit.

  She shut her eyes.

  “She didn’t even know me anymore,” the ghost said softly. “Our whole lives together and she had no idea who I was. What I can’t stop wondering is, if I’d given her a reason to trust me—if I’d done as she asked and cut her down—in the split second before her mind shut down, would she have remembered?”

  Wasp swallowed, or tried to. Her mouth tasted like dust.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  Gently Wasp took Foster’s hand in her own. It was a darker brown than hers, and, except for the blood smeared on it, much cleaner. Its nails looked chewed. Wasp was down to one useable arm, so she passed Foster’s hand to the ghost and drew the knife. Set the blade, already slick with her blood and the ghost’s, red and silver, to that dead palm. Blood welled up. Wasp shut her eyes.

  Foster got up out of her body, off the floor. Her ghost did not match her corpse. Her corpse was wearing a bloodied jumpsuit and had strange sutures on its head. Her ghost was back in the uniform of a Latchkey operative, with the sword and gun at its belt.

  Foster’s ghost walked to the door and tried it. Locked. She drew the gun and shot the lock off, but the door still wouldn’t open. Pushing at it with all her impossible strength couldn’t break it. Battering at it with her fists couldn’t dent it. The sword couldn’t cut it.

  The Catchkeep-priest’s voice in Wasp’s head from a lifetime ago. What are you proving? She’s still dead, and people are saying her ghost will walk for all time because it’s caught in-between and Catchkeep can’t take it across.

  And something else, something the ghost had said. Down here, you die alone, you walk alone. Unless you find the ones you walked with, up there in the world, and keep moving, and keep reminding each other, and when this place pulls on your mind you pull back harder.

  She didn’t want to think about the other thing the ghost had said a minute ago. If he was right, and if the wounds on Foster’s corpse had been from his sword instead of Latchkey bullets—

  She’s stuck, Wasp realized. She’s been stuck here all this time. Because she can’t remember having anywhere else to go. Or anyone else to go there with.

  Foster’s sword came into the light, and Wasp, getting her first good look at it, was struck by how similar it was to her harvesting-knife. The sword was much longer, of course, but the shape of the blade, as well as the hilt and the guard, bore an uncanny resemblance. If someone took the sword and broke it, then set sixteen dots of contrasting metal into the flat of the blade and wrapped dogleather around the grip of that hilt that was always too big for any knife, howsoever holy, it would be hard to tell the two weapons apart.

  Wasp narrowed her eyes. “What in the—”

  Up until this moment she hadn’t even been sure if she and the ghost had truly passed through a waypoint or only strayed into a memory, or a bit of both, but when she spoke, here, now, Foster turned and saw her.

  Then she saw the ghost.

  The silence lasted a full minute before the ghost broke it.

  “I’ve decided,” he said.

  Foster tilted her head to study him, face and uniform and the odd ashy sort of no-voice he had spoken in. She looked confused, as though the ghost had addressed her in a language she used to know, and had mostly forgotten, and she was trying to piece a translation from what few words remained to her.

  In the end she said nothing. It came to Wasp that perhaps she didn’t remember how.

  Whatever invisible line the ghost had been hanging back from, he stepped over it now. He stopped before Foster, took the folded paper out of his pocket and pressed it into her hand. Then stood, hands in fists at his sides, watching her unfold it.

  Foster looked from the ghost to the photo on the paper and back.

  “Come with me,” said the ghost, so soft and low Wasp might have been imagining it.

  The last thing Wasp saw was Foster’s eyes widening.

  And the pressure on the thread, which Wasp had been ignoring or enduring, finally gave way. This time there was no wind, no ghosts, no door. There was nothing. She was there and then she wasn’t. She was nowhere at all.

  Time passed. Maybe a moment, maybe a day. A year. A lifetime. Dimly she was aware of footsteps approaching her. Booted footsteps, two separate sets of them, walking together. They vibrated in her head. She must have been lying with her ear to the ground. She couldn’t get up. She couldn’t feel her legs. Maybe that was because she was dead and her body had gone to the shrine-dogs already. Her mouth tasted funny. Maybe it was the taste of a green stone, which would taste like defeat. The footsteps stopped, and there came a sound of rustling fabric very near her head, as of someone squatting down beside her, rummaging through coat-pockets. Momentarily, something emitted two little chirps and started humming in a way Wasp could not hear so much as feel: belly, scalp, and teeth. One by one, her wounds began to burn, worse than ever, as though they were being seared down to the bones. She preferred feeling nothing to feeling this. It went on for a very long time. She rode the pain the whole way down—or tried to. She fell off somewhere along the way.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Winter had come to lay its claim on Wasp’s town. Snow lay in the branches of the apple trees, buried all the hill paths, stood knee-deep in her abandoned little house ever since the door had blown off in a storm. Around the Catchkeep-shrine the upstarts piled it away from the doors, and the shrine-dogs yellowed it with piss.

  Ghosts walked in it, leaving no footprints. Silver on white, back and forth, disobeying the shapes of the roads. Some walked singly, some in pairs or groups. Some b
unched and swarmed like bees. There used to be a network of tunnels below the town, before it collapsed, leaving white walls crumpled like paper, doors the thickness of a waist popped off their hinges. It had always been a prime hunting-ground for Archivists. It was rumored that these ghosts were coming from down there.

  But there was no Archivist anymore to cull them and keep them in line, no knife and coat to pass hands. The Archivist who had kept them was gone, her body never recovered, and the tokens of her office were lost with her, somewhere beneath the snow. In the spring it would melt, and a green stone could be placed in her rotten mouth, and these things could be recovered. For now, the people of the town walked single-file down the snow-walled paths, and ghosts walked through them.

  If any were left alive who knew the story it might have seemed fitting, for it was down in those tunnels that the man who would become the first Catchkeep-priest had found the broken blade that would become the harvesting-knife, back in the days when the town of Sweetwater was little more than a few lean-tos on a lakeshore. He brought it home and gave it as a gift to his daughter. She was a bright girl with a keen eye and an inquisitive heart, who, in the way of children leaving dishes of milk out for stray cats, left pinches of salt out for the dead.

  Upon discovering the blade’s strange power over ghosts, she gathered the townspeople together and told them that the only way to learn about the world Before was to pay attention to the dead and archive what they knew. Some believed her, some did not. But after that, whether in mocking or respect, they all called her Archivist.

  Soon after, she died young in an accident that left the right side of her face torn open, temple to mouth, as though she had been raked by giant claws. Already the people of Sweetwater regarded this ghostcatching girl as sacred in some way to Catchkeep, whose dominion was ghosts. The manner of her death only sealed it. She left nothing behind but a long knife, some salt, a notebook of ghost-sketches, and a father who’d gotten used to living off the respect and fear his daughter’s work had brought to his house.

  Before all that, though, down in those white tunnels, he’d found the harvesting-knife in a room whose widest wall was lined with huge drawers made of some lasting kind of metal, etched with names and numbers. There’d been twelve of them in all. There had been paper in them, lots of it, all ruined. Photographs and guns and child-sized uniforms. Devices whose purpose nobody could guess. Half an inch of reddish slime sloshing in sealed, lined boxes, four feet or so by a little under two, set with dials and gauges, all broken now. And one drawer was empty altogether. But another held the blade.

  In the Catchkeep-shrine, built above the deepest reaches of those tunnels, that story was barely recognizable anymore. All that was left to it was a blade underground, and a girl to whom it was given. Another story had slowly crept up to eclipse it, as stories will, about a star that had been knocked loose from the sky to fall to earth as a knife, but nobody knew anymore where that part had come from. Catchkeep Herself, and all the others, up in the stars: the Ragpicker, Ember Girl, Carrion Boy, the Chooser, and the One Who Got Away—as far as anyone knew They were as old as the tunnels or older, when They had gone on other business, under other names, along dead roads in an unknowable world.

  Now it was morning, and a low sun glittered on ice that had fallen overnight. In a space swept clear of old snow, ten upstarts stood in a ring around two in the middle. Behind them, the people of the town had gathered, talking amongst themselves, pointing, elbowing at each other, while the ten upstarts stood in silence and watched their sisters fight. The Catchkeep-priest sat on a high chair, cloaked and blanketed against the cold, squinting in the winter sunshine.

  There may have been no harvesting-knife and no Archivist-coat, but the system that was built up around them had four hundred years of resilience behind it and it did not die so easily.

  So the girls in the ring slashed at each other, their flimsy shoes skidding in the slush. Their hands were blue with cold. First blood spattered the snow, and there were those in the crowd who cursed under their breath and emptied their pockets clandestinely to their neighbors.

  And a hooded figure in a long coat pushed through the crowd, through the ring of upstarts, to where two girls, one cut, one limping, glared at each other across the few feet of space the ring allowed. The figure stood between them, put back its hood, drew a long knife from its belt, and leveled this at the Catchkeep-priest in his cozy chair.

  “Get down here,” it said. “Get down here and fight me.”

  The figure’s face was unrecognizable, gaunt and haggard, and its hair was cropped short enough in places to stand up in spikes, and it looked just about weak enough to fall over in the snow and not get up again, but the Catchkeep-priest’s eyes went from the coat to the knife and widened. “Wasp? But you’re dead.”

  Wasp dropped a mocking little bow, wincing only slightly as what was left of the deep wound in her side complained. “We’ll see.”

  The upstarts were watching her the way they might watch the Chooser if She came dancing down to earth, all bone cape and empty belly. Now they looked to the Catchkeep-priest, to see what he would do. The Catchkeep-priest saw them looking.

  “Wasp, our Wasp,” he crooned, playing to the crowd. “Our best and brightest, returned.”

  “None of that,” she said. “You have two choices. One is climb down and defend yourself. Two is pack your things and walk, and don’t look back.”

  The Catchkeep-priest whistled up the shrine-dogs. They did not come. Wasp shook her head. “They can’t hear you.”

  His face hardened. One hand came out of the cloak, something glinting between the fingers. A throwing knife. He flung it at her head. She brought up the harvesting-knife and cut it from the air. People scattered away from her, upstarts and townspeople alike. Scrambling up snowdrifts if they had to, sinking in to the knees. Wasp wasn’t sure if they were more afraid of the Catchkeep-priest’s knives or of her. They looked at her like she was a ghost herself. A few of the upstarts hurried back off toward the shrine and returned momentarily, armed.

  “You’ve gotten faster,” he said. “But still not quite fast enough.”

  Wasp spread her arms. “Show me.”

  He did nothing. She did nothing. Nobody intervened.

  “While we’re waiting,” she said to the crowd, “let me ask you a question. Sort of a puzzle really. Maybe we can solve it together. Don’t you think it’s strange that none of these upstarts came from families here in town? None of you recognize them, do you? None of you saw them born with Catchkeep’s mark. They don’t even know who their families are. Who they are. Who they should have been, if Catchkeep hadn’t chosen them for holy work. They just . . . sort of . . . appeared. With the clothes on their backs and the scars on their faces. With him. Can’t Catchkeep find babies here to trust to do Her work? Here, where Her ways are kept?”

  The next knife went flying past her head and embedded itself in the snow. A warning shot. She didn’t flinch. To strike her now would be to prove her right, and she knew he was nowhere near that stupid. She guessed she had a minute or two for him to try and discredit her first. Whether she walked away from this depended fully, she knew, on whether or not he succeeded.

  “On what grounds are you wasting our time here, Wasp? Playing back-from-the-dead is amusing, I’m sure, but if it’s a battle you’re itching for, there are two perfectly good upstarts here who are all warmed up already.”

  He gestured to them. They looked at each other, then at Wasp. They didn’t move. They were listening.

  “Have any of you looked at those scars?” Wasp went on, not taking her eyes off the Catchkeep-priest, who paled very slightly though his composure did not slip. “Really looked? Do they look like the scars made by Catchkeep’s giant claws? Or are they more like what you’d get if you, oh, I don’t know, cut into a screaming baby with a knife?”

  Most of the upstarts scoffed, or rolled their eyes, or spat and cursed at her, and soon were laughing. But a couple b
egan inspecting each others’ scars, one girl taking the other by the chin and turning her face into the light. It was almost as good as looking into a mirror. One by one, most of the others stopped laughing and joined in. After all, the upstarts knew knife wounds better than anyone present. They began muttering amongst themselves.

  “You want to leave?” the Catchkeep-priest said. Louder now, as if to drown her out, though she wasn’t even speaking. “You want to turn your back on your honor and your calling and go shiver in some cave and hoard your freedom? It will not feed you. It will not warm you. But I grant it to you. It’s yours. Take it and go.”

  One of the upstarts, the one who’d drawn the fight’s first blood, had begun circling around behind Wasp, knife in her sleeve. At the Catchkeep-priest’s words she stopped dead. “Why does she get to leave?” she demanded, and got no reply. The upstart looked from the Catchkeep-priest to Wasp to the other upstarts, still touching each others’ cheeks and talking amongst themselves. Their voices were getting louder now. None of them were laughing at Wasp anymore.

  The upstart’s eyes went wide. “You’re trying to get rid of her because this horseshit she’s spouting is true?”

  Most everyone stopped talking at once. All eyes were either on the upstart, on the Catchkeep-priest, or on Wasp. Wasp spoke into that near-perfect silence.

  “I’m not fighting you for my freedom,” she said. She lifted her chin at the upstarts, glanced over her shoulder pointedly at the one who’d been sneaking up behind. “I’m fighting you for theirs.”