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.

“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.