Chapter Sixteen

She landed in a drift of dry leaves. The first thing she did was look up, straining her ears for some clue as to how the fight above, between the lurchers and upstarts, was going. But the bottom of the well, where she’d mostly expected to land, was no longer there.

Neither was the ghost.

She thought of calling out to it, and stopped, her mouth half-open. What would she say? Ghost? Here, ghost! She was a long way off from that desperate.

And she couldn’t get the upstarts out of her mind. A wink of the Chooser’s good eye to you, Becca, she thought, and touched her fingers to the scar on her cheek, and raised that hand to the empty air. Then, because she knew she could do nothing to help them now, she got up and looked around.

She did not know a name for the thing she found herself in. Certainly it wasn’t the crossroads with Foster in it, which would have disappointed her more if she’d been at all confident that her idea of navigating the waypoints with memories would work.

There were long walls to three sides of her, higher than her head, higher than the ghost’s, but made of bushes or low wide trees: some flowering, some fruiting, some evergreen, some bare. She couldn’t begin to guess at the season.

The walls still kept some of their shape, though not much. It looked like someone used to maintain them, trimming back the branches, but hadn’t done so in some time. The fallen leaves were everywhere, half a foot deep in places, and when she kicked some away she found a floor beneath, the stones of it arranged in a simple pattern of dark and light, alternating.

If she set her eye to a gap in the bare branches she could peek through. Beyond she could see a wall of what looked to be part blackberry bushes, part holly. Marking the corner of that wall was a massive evergreen bush that had been cut into the shape of some sort of towering animal, long since overgrown so that extra limbs jutted out from its sides, strange appendages from its head. It reared up on its hind legs, higher than the surrounding walls. It reminded her partly of a bear with antlers, partly of Catchkeep Herself. But there was something else about it. Something that snagged at her mind, made her itch to examine it closer.

In front of her a path opened out, walled in brambles on the left side, yellow flowers on the right. Off in the distance she could make out objects caught in the brambles, though she couldn’t tell what they were.

She started down the path toward them, hating how much noise her feet made in the leaves, hoping she would find the ghost before something else found her. She reached the brambles and the things caught in them were pieces of ghosts. Hundreds of pieces of ghosts, silvery and fluttering, fastened tight to the brambles as though someone had pinned them there lovingly. The bodies from which they’d been subtracted were nowhere to be seen. Many of the pieces were hands, with or without partial arms attached, and they seemed to wave at Wasp as she hurried by.

In the wall of yellow flowers opposite, a low gap appeared, mostly overgrown, and she ducked through it. To her left and front, more paths branched off. She could see gaps through the walls even from here. Behind her, on the other side of the gap she’d ducked into, she could sense the ghost-hands fluttering their fingers. She shivered. Trying not to connect missing ghost with ghost pieces pinned to thorns. Wondering if she had any way of recognizing any of those pieces, silver and identical, if she wanted to get closer and try. Which she didn’t.

She’d wandered maybe five more minutes when she heard a crashing sound off behind her. She thought of that animal-shape carved out of a tree, overgrown into something unrecognizable. She thought of the ghost-faces, breeze catching their mouths so it looked like they were about to speak.

Whatever was making that noise, she wasn’t about to give it the satisfaction of dragging her out of some hiding place in the bushes, kicking and screaming. If it wanted her, it was going to have to earn her.

Wasp drew her knife. “I’m here,” she shouted. “Let’s get this over with.”

“And lucky to be here,” came a voice, behind her. Close behind. Wasp spun, slashing with the harvesting-knife, and her blade had struck the blade of the ghost’s sword before she saw who’d spoken. “If you’d waited any longer to jump down that well,” it continued, “who knows where you’d have ended up.”

“I was delayed,” she said, fighting down annoyance—but also a small upsurge of pride. She’d made the ghost draw its sword to block her. She wasn’t going to dwell on how it had gotten so close without her noticing.

“This way,” the ghost said, halfway through a gap in the wall. “I think I found our exit.”

“Yeah, about that,” she said, hanging back as the ghost returned through the gap. “There’s something I saw back there. It looked, I don’t know. Weird. Like a monster cut out of a tree.” She stuck a thumb over her shoulder. “Back that way.”

The ghost glanced toward where she was pointing, then back at her. Wasp bristled under its look. “I thought we were looking for things that were out of place,” she said. Knowing she sounded defensive. Not caring.

“We are and aren’t,” said the ghost. “Show me.”

She led it back through a series of guesses at turns toward where she’d seen the bear-thing through the gap in the wall, hoping with everything she had that she wouldn’t make a wrong turn and run them into real trouble. Or, at the very least, make her look like a fool. So far, she wasn’t exactly feeling any closer to getting her hands on that healing device. Chooser knew how, but she was going to have to seriously step up her game here.

After a minute they stood at the base of the thing, looking up at it. It was even taller than she’d thought, seeing it from a distance. It had to reach five feet above her head.

“Here,” Wasp said.

“This?” said the ghost.

She nodded.

“This isn’t anything.”

Wasp reached up a hand and touched the bear-thing’s flank. Somehow it was hard for her to turn and leave without investigating further. The ghost narrowed its eyes at her. “You think this is a door.”

“I don’t know. I just have a. A feeling. I guess.”

“How does this feeling propose we get in?”

“I don’t know. Cut through it? Climb it? Maybe there’s something hidden—shit.”

She bent to retrieve the harvesting-knife, which had somehow managed to fall out of its sheath to land with a soft crunch in the leaves at the bear-thing’s feet. “Stupid,” she said to it, or to herself, replacing it at her belt. A fine time for it to start coming unsheathed. Her one weapon and her one way to access the clues that might eventually lead her to Foster. If she lost it down here she was cooked.

Wasp started circling around the bear-thing, peering at the drifted leaves in its shadow.

She got most of the way around the back when she stopped, feeling a strange tugging in her chest. She turned, and the ghost was holding her thread, thumb-and-forefinger.

She nearly gasped. Without a doubt the thread was dissolving fast. She stared at it, shaken. Her mind raced. The change in it had not been as gradual as she’d expected. She’d first noticed it weakening in the cabin where she’d first read the ghost’s blood. Then again as she lay in the moss outside the cabin. And now. Each time it had been fainter than the last, and this time the change was especially distinct. It looked like if she breathed on it it would break. But as far as she could tell, she’d only been gone one night.

At last she made the connection. Not only the first time, but each time she noticed a change in the thread was after she’d read the blood. If she hadn’t been so furious the last time she’d surfaced to reality, she suspected she’d have noticed it sooner.

The good news was that if she’d already seen what she needed to see, and she didn’t need to read any more blood, she might well get out of this alive. But if she hadn’t—

When the ghost had her attention, it let go. “As you can see, we don’t have all day.”

Wasp gave the bear-thing one last once-over but saw nothing of note. She wasn’t even sure why she had this feeling, or where it had come from, or how to put it into words beyond the vaguest possible surmise. And certainly not how to put it into action. And of the two of them, she wasn’t the one who’d been down here, navigating waypoints, for longer than she could begin to guess at.

“Fine,” she said, and followed the ghost as it began cutting its way straight through the walls of the maze to a clearing where a lonely stone fountain stood. A pedestal rose from the center of the basin, terminating in an upright stone ring a little over a yard across. Whatever used to be in the center of the ring had fallen or been knocked out, leaving jagged teeth of stone around the ring’s inner edge, like the glass around the frame of a broken window. Without it, the fountain’s water couldn’t spray. It trickled down the sides of the pedestal to collect in the basin, black and cold.

Yellow leaves floated on that black water. Coins glinted, silver and copper, farther down. Each of the leaves had something written on it, many in alphabets Wasp didn’t recognize. She picked up a few. What was written on them was names. Not even sure what she was looking at, Wasp skimmed the surface of the basin with her eyes, scanning for one that said Foster. She didn’t find it.

“Up we go,” said the ghost, and Wasp stood eyeing the pedestal and the ring doubtfully.

“That’s the door?” she asked.

“One way to find out,” said the ghost, and by the time Wasp had climbed up onto the basin’s edge, the ghost was already on top of the pedestal. Its boots didn’t even look wet.

“I hate you,” she said.

It squatted down, holding out a hand. It crooked two fingers at her. “Jump.”

She jumped and caught, and got her other hand up on the edge of the pedestal, and pulled herself up. “See you on the other side,” the ghost said, then stepped through the ring and disappeared.

Wasp paused, feeling stupid, glad the ghost was not there to witness what she did next.

She went down flat on her belly, reaching with the knife until she’d hooked one of the yellow leaves from the water’s surface. Whatever it had used to say was now obliterate. She cast about for one futile moment for something to write with, then cut into her fingertip—to her relief, touching her own blood to the knife showed her nothing—and began to scrawl out kit foster on that wet leaf as best she could.

“City,” she said. “Crossroads. Bodies in a ring. She didn’t kill them. She wants to run and can’t. Three days, she said. I need to find her.” She paused. If she felt stupid before, she felt beyond absurd now. She shut her eyes. “Please take me to her.”

She dropped the leaf back into the water and waited until it touched down.

Halfway through the ring, she felt a strange prickling at the back of her neck. For a second she was convinced that if she turned, she would find the bear-thing padding silently up behind her, ghost-shreds caught in its claws from the last victim it had pinned to the bramble-hedge.

She turned. Of course, there was nothing there.

At first she thought she’d come out on the high ledge of Execution Hill. The same dark rock, the same long drop.

The ghost was half-sitting half-leaning on an outcropping, arms folded, staring out at a paste-colored sky. It was unclear to Wasp how long it had been waiting. Below them was a snowfield, pocked with pits and trenches of what looked to be greenish fire. The city in its meadow was nowhere to be seen. Neither was the maze they’d left, or the rocky plain with the well in it, or anywhere else Wasp might have recognized.

So the one idea up her sleeve was going the way of every other idea she’d ever pulled out of there before. It didn’t need to surprise her to disappoint her. Or to piss her off.

“What,” she said, “so we keep bouncing back and forth through these things until one of them randomly drops us where we want to go? That’s how you’ve been trying to find her?”

“When you arrive at a better idea,” said the ghost placidly, “I’ll be delighted to hear it. Until then—”

Wasp’s patience was patchy to begin with, but between her encounter with the upstarts, the ghost’s dismissal of her efforts, her failure to get through to Foster, her failure to bargain for the one thing that would let her escape the Catchkeep-priest, and now this, her temper stretched to snapping. “What do you call that back there? I had an idea.”

“You had a feeling.”

“You didn’t have a better one.”

“I got us through.”

“Through to what?” Wasp waved at the drifted expanse below. “If she’s down there, I hope she’s got a nice warm coat, because if she wasn’t completely buried in snow we would see her.” She cupped her hands to her mouth and started shouting. “Catherine Foster! Are you there? Stand up and start waving if you can hear me, because your friend here is about to get me killed looking for you, and I’d really rather not die down here in this ditch of a place, okay?”

She set a cupped hand to her ear with a flourish. “No? Not here, you say? Huh. Interesting. Maybe next time your friend wants someone’s help, your friend might try listening to that someone’s ideas.”

Wasp turned to the ghost. “What about those ghosts that told you to find me? Trusting them but not the person they pointed you to seems pretty stupid.”

She was getting used to reading the ghost’s silences. This one stopped her cold.

“There weren’t any ghosts telling you to find me,” she said dully. “Were there.”

A moment passed.

“Oh, I don’t believe this. You’re a real piece of work, you know that? You—I could—” She wanted to walk. Right there, just turn and walk, and don’t look back. How low she had sunk, to be lied to by a specimen and have to stand there and take it because their bargain was the last straw she had to clutch at. She could walk, but only so far without that thing to heal her.

In the memories she’d seen, the ghost’s and then Foster’s, those devices had had limited power. Foster healing the people in the alley. The ghost healing Foster in the rotting tunnel. Both times, one device had died and been exchanged for another. Both times, Wasp hadn’t really gotten a great sense of how much healing they had done before they made those sad little three beeps and powered down, so it was a matter of blind hope that this one had enough juice left in it to fix her up from whatever damage her next and final escape would leave on her after—

That sound. That weird sad little sound those devices made when they died. She’d heard it before. In her house, before the fire, as the swelling faded from her ankle.

For a long moment there wasn’t enough room in her for words and rage together and she stood there trembling with the effort not to attack the ghost right then and there.

She’d wanted to trust it. She’d needed to trust it. She’d fought down every instinct she had to not trust it, and all that had earned her was the novelty of an emotion she’d never before been in a position to feel.

Betrayal.

“Show me that thing you healed me with,” she said, her voice thick. “You know. That thing you said you’d trade me if I helped you.”

The ghost’s eyes widened slightly. For a second the assurance fell from its face and it was nearly unrecognizable. “No need,” it said, recovering itself smoothly. “It’s secure where it is. Think about what you’re saying. Do you really want to risk me losing it in the snow just so you can reassure yourself I haven’t lost it alrea—”

Wasp held up the arm the lurcher had bitten, the ghost had bandaged. “Why not heal this?” she said. “Don’t you need me in peak condition if I’m going to live long enough to hunt Foster down for you? In fact.” Unwrapping the bandage. Hurling it at the ghost’s feet. “I think it’s getting infected. Maybe you should do it now. Just to be safe.”

“Later,” said the ghost. “We’re too exposed out here. This isn’t the time or place for—”

Wasp folded her arms and stared at the ghost, its all-wrong voice, its wary eyes, and she could feel her rage rolling back from her, leaving an icy certainty in which rage would do no good, because all at once she knew that there was nothing left to her future worth raging for.

“You know what the worst part is?” she said softly. “The worst part is that I was starting to trust you. I thought that this—this ridiculous search you’ve dragged me into—was somehow better than what I came from. Like down here I could be different, I wouldn’t just fuck up everything I try to fix. Guess I was wrong.”

Wasp took a few steps from the ghost, then swung back around. “Actually, no. The worst part is you’re an asshole. And I’m stuck down here with you. And you don’t for one second deserve my help.”

The ghost’s hand was on its sword-hilt. Wasp didn’t know why until she noticed the harvesting-knife in her hand. She wasn’t entirely sure yet what it was doing there.

She looked at the knife. Then she looked at the thread. Then she looked at the ghost.

“Truth is, compared to what I’m used to, this place isn’t so bad. I’m not starving. I don’t have to look at the Catchkeep-priest’s stupid ugly face every day. Nobody’s plotting to slit my throat and put my head on a wall. Do you know, I saw dead upstarts back there and they were working together. They pulled fifteen lurchers off me. Up above, they would have tried to kill me. And I would have been supposed to try to kill them back. Maybe I cut this thread and I go join them. Maybe I just disappear. Wherever I go, the Catchkeep-priest won’t be there, and neither will you. Doesn’t sound so bad to me.”

The ghost’s mouth opened slightly, then shut. It eyed her. “You’re not bluffing.”

“You have no idea,” she said, “how right you are.”

She slid the knife in under the thread. She could see the dark stones of the blade through it. She swallowed.

“Wait,” said the ghost.

“Nothing to wait for,” she said. “Deal’s off. Go back to wandering around down here with your head up your ass for another thousand years. Oh, and you can keep that piece of garbage. I hope it keeps you great company for the rest of forever. I mean, look at it this way. At least you have one thing in common. You’re both already broken.”

A second from cutting the thread, one last stray thought surfaced for the others she’d tried to help and failed—the four-days-to-die upstart, the child-ghost whose parents had looked upon her with such hate, and all the rest.

One more on that list would make no difference. She would die with that curse on her head all the same. Let the Ragpicker gorge Himself on her should-have-dones. She hoped He choked.

And then she paused.

Something she’d said. I wouldn’t just fuck up everything I try to fix.

From the look of everything she’d seen lately, that curse wasn’t on her head alone. It was the exact same misfortune that had gotten Foster killed.

Even if she’d known she could cut and run, and survive it, there was no way she could leave now.

Now it was personal.

“You’re right,” the ghost was saying. It took a step closer to her, palms out. She knew that stance. She leapt back.

The ghost shook its head. “I’m not trying to disarm you,” it said. “I’m trying to tell you the truth.”

“You’re no better than anything I left up there,” Wasp spat at it. “You all just feed me some story so I’ll do whatever you say, laugh behind my back when I fall for it. Catchkeep chose you, Wasp. Kill some upstarts for Her, Wasp. Go live in some freezing little hut with no friends. Oh, help me find my poor lost lonesome ghost, Wasp, I’ve been searching for you special. What? You want to escape your shitty life? I have just the thing to help you fight your way out. Just help me out here and it’s yours. Not sure when I’m going to get around to telling you that it doesn’t work anymore. Pretty clever, huh? Yeah, well, I’m done.”

She sheathed the knife. “I’m staying here. But not with you. I’m staying because I realized I want to find her. For all I care we can go our separate ways. See who gets there first.” She started walking.

“Will you listen to me for a minute?” the ghost said. “I know you don’t owe me that. I’m asking.”

“And I’m telling you I don’t care,” she said. “I don’t have time for this.”

“I’m asking for one minute.”

Wasp stopped. “You get five seconds.”

“The truth is nobody told me those things about you.”

“Yeah, I gathered that. Two seconds.”

“I wouldn’t have believed them if they did.”

“Outstanding. One second.”

“Everything I said I saw for myself.”

“I’m not interested in you trying to make nice with—”

“I wouldn’t know how if I wanted to. It . . .” The ghost paused, momentarily at a loss for words. “It isn’t easy for me to learn to work with someone . . . new. After working with . . . with Foster . . . my whole life, you understand, my whole life, I—” It made a noise, not quite a laugh, short and sharp. “Clearly I didn’t work with her as well as I should have, either, or you wouldn’t be here.”

“Clearly.”

“I should never have deceived you. I realize that. I didn’t want to do it. But I needed your help, and I had nothing else to offer. If I had, I would have offered it. All of it. Anything. I’ve tried for so long to do this on my own, and I . . .” The ghost’s face twisted, and there was a space of silence before it continued.

Wasp could hear the can’t it hadn’t said. She didn’t push it. It wasn’t a word she much liked having to say herself.

“As for your methods,” the ghost went on. “Maybe you think I don’t mind in the slightest, standing by and letting you browse through my memories, knowing full well that I will never see them again for myself.” It gave her a long cold look. “You would be mistaken.”

“I’m not trying to pry,” Wasp shouted at it. “I’m trying to help. You think this is only hard for you? At least you’ve done this before! How easy, exactly, do you think it is for me to learn to work with anyone?”

“Going by what I’ve seen of your predecessors,” the ghost said drily, “I can see how that might be difficult.” It sighed. Shook its head very slightly. “You’re far from the first Archivist I tried to convince, you know. I don’t even remember when that started. Or why. It feels as though it’s been going on for some time.”

“They didn’t take the same shit from you, huh? Lucky me.”

“That isn’t what I meant. Of all of them, you’re the first who was willing to listen. To look for her. To help me. You put your life on the line for two dead soldiers you never knew. And in return I betrayed your trust, as I betrayed her trust, and lost her. For what it’s worth, even if you go no further, I’m grateful you were willing to come this far.”

“Agh,” said Wasp, uncomfortable. “This is getting way too dramatic for me. I’m going now, if you’re finished. Like someone told me a while ago, I don’t have all day. Up to you if you want to follow.”

She took off walking. The ghost followed.