Chapter Seventeen

They tromped through the snowfield for ages. They passed things that, to Wasp’s eye, might have been waypoints. A wind-shredded orange plastic tent. A cave hung with icicles that were mottled gray with ash. A distant huddle of dark birds circling and alighting on an unseen mass. A tiny pond, perfectly round, frozen into a mirror upon which no snow settled. The metal skeleton of something that had fallen from the sky and smashed there, its nose plowed deep into the earth. They walked on.

Wasp was getting tired, and the cold was ridiculous. The wind was whipping up in gusts that stung her eyes, then settling for just long enough that the next one surprised her into cursing. She could barely feel her legs, the sensation in her hands and ears was long gone, and the only thing that proved her nose was still there at all was that it was running freely, which didn’t seem at all fair, considering.

The ghost kept moving at the same measured, even pace, oblivious to the cold. Wasp knew it would slow down if she asked, and did not ask.

Miles later, she tripped on something in the snow and went down. Digging revealed nothing there that should have caught her up. She stood, brushing herself off. She reached her hip and froze. The knife was gone.

“No,” she breathed. It shouldn’t have been possible. Above, it had never fallen out of its sheath, not once, and now this was twice in one day, it made no sense. She splashed around in the snow, flinging it up in powdery armfuls. She couldn’t tell how far down it went, or if there was a bottom to it at all. The ghost stopped and helped her, kicking the drifts, fishing with the sword.

They found it eventually, yards away. Not back the way they’d come, either—alone, with no footprints in a solid four-foot radius of the knife. It had to be ten feet from where she’d fallen. They stood above it, staring down.

“No way,” Wasp said. Her skin was prickling, and not just from the cold. She looked at the ghost. It shrugged. “Glad one of us is used to this place anyway,” she said, stooping to swipe up the knife before something weirder happened to it, “because it is really, really—”

From beneath the snow came a muffled metallic sound, and Wasp stopped midsentence, mouth open, snot freezing on her lip. Poked around a little in the snow with the knife. Whatever was below it clinked when she tapped it. The ghost was beside her before she called. They shared a glance, then started digging.

It was a door, set into the ground beneath the snow, like the hatches that led down into the white tunnels beneath Sweetwater, ancient and lousy with ghosts. Even touching it she got a strange feeling in the back of her neck, like someone was watching her. Like she had back in the hedge-maze, staring up at a monster made of leaves.

There was a wheel on top. They cleared the snow away and turned it. The door opened onto light of the same greenish cast as the fires. Wasp, not relishing the notion of another jump, peered down.

There were the bare bones of stairs here, rusted and creaking, completely mismatched to the foot-thick metal door that had led down to them. They descended a few steps and pulled the door shut behind. Wasp descended the rest, while the ghost hung back, opening and shutting the door at intervals. A few knocks, listen, open, snowfield, shut, wait a bit, repeat.

Wasp took this opportunity to explore.

She couldn’t tell if this room was almost unbearably cold or almost unbearably hot. The walls looked like ice, but also like the fires she’d seen lit amid the snow. She was shivering and sweating at once. Words were scratched down the length of one long wall, in a language she couldn’t read. The tunnel went back and back, the walls shading to a dark glassy green farther down.

Shredded remnants of ghosts lay in the corners like wind-blown trash. Wasp took a few steps toward one pile, and a sound echoed up from the depths beyond.

It was like the howls of the lurchers on her scent—yet not. It was a shriller call, from something much larger or more numerous. It sounded like sheet metal tearing. She could feel the vibrations of it in her ribs.

She drew her knife and started backpedaling for the door. “Hey—” she said.

“Any minute,” said the ghost, pushing the door up and out. Snowfield. Leaden sky. Flare of greenish light as one of the pits erupted. Pulled it shut again.

“We don’t have any minute.”

The shrieking resumed, closer now. The walls were changing color, purpling like a bruise.

“I’m not staying here. That door locks from the top, and I’m locking it. Staying or going?”

Other hand on the door, the ghost set one finger to its lips. Hush.

She could not hear so much as feel something approaching. There were no footsteps, no sound of wings or slithering. The shrieking had not returned again. It came to Wasp that whatever was causing it might be right in front of her, savoring her confusion, breathing down her neck, choosing the choicest bite, and she simply could not see it.

Her flight instinct almost picked her up bodily and hurled her up the stairs.

“Fine. You’re on your own. Let me through.”

At that, whatever the light source was, it guttered wildly and went out.

Suddenly Wasp’s knife seemed very small.

The ghost rapped at the door with its knuckles. This time it sounded different.

An unseen hand locked around Wasp’s wrist and she yelped. “It’s me,” said the ghost. “Hold your breath.”

Then it opened the door.

A wall of water slammed into her. Water went cascading down the steps, down the throat of the cave in the dark. The shrieking came again, horribly close—then receded, accompanied by a sound she couldn’t begin to place, not claws or fins or wings or feet, but all these things at once, or none, as whatever made the noise was borne away on the rising tide. The lights stayed out.

The amount of water was astonishing. The cave was filling fast, and in the dark she had no way of measuring how long she’d stand there gasping like a landed fish before the water level rose and caught her up behind. Wasp wound her arm around the stair-rail to keep herself upright as the force of it battered her, held her head free of the waterfall that used to be a doorway and started shouting at the ghost to close the door. Even as the words left her mouth, she realized that the door had opened outward, with all the colossal weight of the water against it. The fact that it had opened at all amazed her.

The ghost’s voice, near her ear. “We’re going up.”

“Through that?”

“That’s our door.”

Wasp looked toward the water, looked toward the ghost, and wrapped herself tighter around the railing. “I can’t swim.”

“You don’t need to. Just let go.”

It was that or drown. If she could drown. She pictured one of those silvery ghost-rags, filling with water at its nose and mouth until it ballooned and burst.

She let go of the railing.

“On three I’m going to lift you through,” said the ghost. “Hold your breath. Close your eyes. You’re not going to like this.”

Wasp considered the awful force of that water. Though it made her shiver to say it, she said, “We can wait here until the room fills, and—”

“I don’t know how long the door will hold. Whatever’s next might be worse, and trust me, it could be. I’ll be right behind you. On three.”

Wasp inhaled until her lungs burned. Be through there, Foster, she thought. Please. I can’t take much more of—

“Three.”

She felt herself being lifted into the water. It bore down on her. She thrashed her way up through it. Made no headway. Her lungs were on fire. Her entire body stung. It felt like the water was flaying her flesh from her bones.

Just when she thought she couldn’t take any more, the pressure was gone. She was through. Still underwater, still in the dark, flailing and breathless, and the suction from the whirlpool started pulling her back in. She gritted her teeth, got her feet under her, and pushed off against the silt and sand beneath.

She was strong but the water was stronger. She was starting to black out. Frantically she paddled forward, gaining no ground. In the dark she couldn’t see if there was anything along the bed of the—what? Lake? Sea?—to grab hold of. She reached down to sweep the ground blind in front of her and the current whipped her legs out from under, hauled her back down, convulsing now, willing herself not to breathe—

Suddenly, below her, the room had filled. The whirlpool stopped. All was still. She marshaled the dregs of her strength and kicked off again, as hard as she could. She couldn’t see light above. For all she knew she wasn’t even aiming up. Her arms scooped water, pushed it aside. Her legs kicked and floundered. Her chest felt like it was imploding.

Then the ghost’s hand found her wrist in the dark, and she was being pulled upward with such force and speed that she couldn’t keep the air in her lungs. It exploded out of her, and she clamped her free hand over her nose and mouth to keep from gasping water in. She shut her eyes and waited for her resolve to fail.

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 there 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.

The ghost was staring at her. It didn’t seem to have even noticed her thread.

“It wasn’t the same room,” she said slowly, and the look on the ghost’s face, on anyone else, she would have called alarm. She was getting the distinct impression there was something it wasn’t saying. “Like a white box, with a white hall outside. It . . .” Looked familiar, she’d been about to say, but that made no sense, so she discarded it. “She didn’t die there. At least, not then.”

“What you saw,” the ghost said, finding its voice. Its gaze flicked to the door shimmering in the wall. “Can you use it?”

Wasp made herself shrug. She felt like if she so much as sneezed, the thread would go. “I have to.”

She set her hand to the mirror and gestured to the ghost to do the same. She closed her eyes, unsure now of which memory to focus on. Thought of Foster in the white box. Foster lying about her injuries to the ghost. Foster in the torture room, staring down her interrogators unflinching, her eyes lit by something Wasp did not know by name. Thought take me to her. Steadied her hand against the glass and pushed—and her hand sank in to the wrist.

Her guess was that if she lost focus, she would lose any chance she had at making this work, so she stifled the reflex to turn wide-eyed to the ghost: See? See?

Instead she pushed her arm in farther. Instinctively she expected to hit an obstruction of some kind. The far side of the wall, maybe. The outside of the house. But she was to the shoulder in it, twisting to hold her face away, and her fingertips brushed nothing. It was like heading into deep water and trying to touch her toes to the bottom without letting her face slip under.

Foster gazing out at her from the picture. Find me, little girl-with-a-knife. Find me if you can.

Trusting the ghost would follow, Wasp stepped through the glass—and it must not have worked, because Foster was nowhere to be seen.

The city, however, was.