Archivist Wasp: a novel by Nicole Kornher-Stace

Author:Nicole Kornher-Stace
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781618730985
Publisher: Small Beer Press
Published: 2015-04-12T17:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twelve

When she woke, it was still full dark. Moonlight flooded through the windows where the grass had grown roof-high before, casting the whole room in blue. She blinked, disoriented. The windows had been blind when they’d come in.

“There was a hostage,” the ghost said. Somehow sensing that Wasp was awake, though she was sure she hadn’t moved a muscle. “A child. Foster’s orders were to take him to the rendezvous point for extraction, where he’d be . . .” It trailed off, eyes narrowed, and decided on a different tack. “Where she said she had to go, what she said she had to do, that day—she was letting him go. Against orders. Dereliction of duty to help some useless idiot she didn’t even know. It was . . . a stupid thing to do. It was the sort of stupid thing she would do.”

“How do you remember all this?” Wasp asked. “If you can’t remember anything.”

The ghost’s silhouette went very still, then turned its profile an inch toward her. “I can see glimpses here and there,” it said slowly. “Like trying to remember a dream. I have had a great deal of time to try and connect the dots between them. Recalling where the lines should be drawn . . . requires effort.”

At this Wasp found herself unsure whether the ghost had really realized she was awake before she spoke, or whether the monologue she’d interrupted was a discipline the ghost put itself through, from time to time, every night for all she knew, a litany to keep the memories it had fought to save from fading.

Wasp stared at the quilt. In that weird blue light, the gridlike pattern on it could have been tall buildings on regular streets, seen from above. Maybe, if she squinted hard enough, in one of those pale intersections, she might find monsters quarreling. Or superheroes, Wasp thought idly, like a child parroting words it did not know. Whichever.

“You were in a war.”

“A civil war.” Its glance at Wasp was probably not designed to make her feel stupid, but did. “Do you know what that is?”

“Yes,” Wasp lied.

“It went on for a long time,” the ghost said. “A long time.”

“And she was in your . . .” Wasp fumbled for a word she’d heard from ghosts now and again. Ghosts who, almost invariably, looked to have died deaths that were messy, though not necessarily without their dignity. Shot up, blown up, shouting for their “. . . unit.”

That same hollow laugh that Wasp had heard in her vision. “In my unit. She was my unit. There were supposed to be a dozen of us. Nobody else made it out of development. Only her. And me.”

Development. Not training. Wasp chewed this over. “They weren’t good enough to fight with you?”

“Evidently not, because the treatment killed them.” A pause. “They didn’t die well.”

Wasp sat up and waited, but it didn’t say more. Conversing with the thing was an exercise in tiptoeing and balancing. Any wrong move would upset or offend it back into that sullen silence.

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