Archivist Wasp - Nicole Kornher-Stace by Nicole Kornher-Stace

Author:Nicole Kornher-Stace [Kornher-Stace, Nicole]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fantasy, Fiction, novel, young adult
Published: 2019-10-23T19:54:20+00:00

What came out of her mouth, though, was: “You didn’t go with her.”

The ghost went very still. Wasp half-expected it to leap at her with her own knife, but its rage didn’t seem to be directed at her. “Now that I remember,” it said softly. There came a pause so long that Wasp thought the ghost had forgotten her there. “I never told her I trusted her.”

What does that matter? Wasp thought, exasperated, but realized she already understood. The closest she ever really came to trusting anyone was the upstarts, when she trusted them not to try and kill her, three hundred sixty-four days of the year. Or the Catchkeep-priest, who was forbidden from trying to kill her at all, so she trusted him not to try—though he was free to use any other methods to make her life miserable, and did.

She thought back on the fight with the lurchers on the riverbank, shoulder-to-shoulder with the ghost.

It’d had her back, and hadn’t stabbed her in it. It was, to her, impossibly bizarre and impossibly beautiful in equal measure that such an arrangement could exist in the world.

She understood, all right. Probably better than she wanted to.

“Okay, so,” she said, half to change the subject. “There was a city. I saw it twice. I think it was the same one both times. There were . . .” She trailed off, trying to push words together in the shape of those impossible machines. Came up empty. “Foster, she . . . she helped some people. You both did. A lot of people. I saw that first. Then she attacked some other people, but I don’t think she killed them. Then—”

The ghost was eyeing her stonily. She spread her hands. “Maybe if we can see more of where she used to be, it might help us narrow down where she is now. ”

Even as she said it, she didn’t see how, although the longer she thought about it the more it started to itch in her mind. If a ghost was strong enough, when it appeared above it looked more or less as it did in life. In that case, at least in part, she guessed that what a ghost’s aboveground strength must be truly measuring was the potency of its—

“Memories,” she said. The nausea was wearing off now, nudged aside by the cautious elation of a new-hatched plan. She knew full well that by now she should know better, but there it was. “This whole place is built of memories. All the ghosts coming into that huge room, they were all wearing their deaths on them so clearly, like uniforms. The doors going in and out of that room. My name, my past. More memories. Even the stuff the bridge was made of. Maybe even this—” She looked up at the ceiling of the cabin, hazy in the moonlight filtered through that tall, tall grass. “This place. The food, the bed. This all belonged to someone.”

It hit her with a jolt. “The city out there in the field.

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