Chapter 22 #2
Warm hands braced around my hips, Bas lifts me into the broken building himself. I scrabble through the gap, breaking already sore fingernails on the brick, twisting my ankle in take-out wrappers so old they’ve lost their logo. But hey, what’s a little pain after the day I’ve had?
Clearing the space for Bas, I plant my boots against the wall and, gripping him by the forearms, haul him up behind me.
His hands ghost my arms, gentle fingers tracing the edge of all my bruises, the scratches from the day ghosts attacked the school.
His eyes on mine ache. My fingers spasm, caught in the wreckage of his sleeve.
I want to kiss him.
I want to leave.
I want to pretend I never heard of anything to do with Hades or Hel or Morrigan or Persephone.
But I have a responsibility.
Bracing myself, I turn. My mother stands some distance away, cracking open her backpack on the hood of a car to check its contents.
She must have a science project stashed in there.
I recognize the deliberate care with which she approaches all her creations.
Of course she’d check on that first. Why would I need help climbing in?
And it’s stupid to get offended this late in the game.
I try to shove it down, swallow it back. Picking a fight won’t help us now.
But the zipper slips. The bag opens a little wider. A sucking rush of ravenous cold reaches out.
Mom zips it up in a hurry, but it’s too late.
“Ready?” she asks. “This way,” she says, and launches across the garage, headed toward a rusty metal door in the far wall.
Horror wraps its briars around my empty ribs.
“What’s in the bag?” I demand, flat.
Mom’s sure strides falter. She glances over her shoulders.
She meets my eyes.
“A… tool.”
“That thing in the basement, you mean?” I snarl.
Her face flashes with surprise, quickly smothered. She grimaces. “So it was you. You saw it. Did you… touch it?”
“Touch it?” I bark out a laugh. “It tried to kill me from across the room. It’s a weapon, same as that sick thing the nurse was wearing. Same as that travesty of a fence, calling ghosts so it can eat them. What in the hell do you intend to do with it?”
Mom swallows hard. She spins away, shoulders rigid, and wrenches open the stairwell door.
“We don’t have time to argue.”
Hand tight in Bas’s, I lurch after her.
“You never make time to argue!” I shout, pounding down the thin cement staircase after her. Chunks flake off beneath my boots, threatening to spill me, but Bas’s iron grip around my arm keeps me moving.
“Chloe!” I yell but she ignores me. One floor down, she strides across the flooded landing.
Despite water so deep it swallowed entire levels of the parking garage, a little red light shines above the door.
Digging in her pocket, Mom emerges with a battered little rectangle of plastic. The door beeps. The light flicks green.
badge access only, the sign said.
She kept it. Seventeen years, she’s kept it. Why? Some kind of trophy? Why would she do that…
Unless she always intended to come back?
In one smooth motion, my mother kicks the door open and swings her rifle down, slots it into her shoulder like a habit.
“No secrets, you said,” I growl, hot on her heels. “Fine, let’s start with who even are you? What are you doing here?”
“Believe it or not, I had a life before becoming a mother,” she casts over her shoulder, clearing corners like a soldier.
She hazes in my head like a migraine—this incongruous ghoul like fresh wallpaper over the woman I grew up with, her pristine beige perfection hidden under black fatigues and cold competence.
Or, no, that’s not time doubling on me again.
It’s this place. We must be inside the ghost fence now.
The white-tiled walls clamp around me like a throat swallowing, dragging me down.
Though thick with algae and decay, somehow the building hums with electricity.
Several intact fluorescent lights whine in the ceiling.
Office doors, ajar, leak the sound of whirring computer fans, cooling churning motors.
A big metal tower shrieks an alarm and flashes a hundred lights, all of them red.
How? How can this facility sink fifty feet underwater and not know it’s dead?
Bas and I stagger forward, following clumsily in my mother’s wake.
My head throbs. My seams blur. I press my palms flat to my temples but can’t keep my party trick inside.
My head hazes, ghost out of joint, only one meat eye working and the other moony blue, staring through the wreckage to the soul of this place.
Ley lines. Ley lines tangled and coiled, feeding into the ghost fence that surrounds this city—and we’re standing in the beating, sickened heart of it.
Every minute more ghosts pour inside this giant, terrible machine, drawn to this travesty.
They’re hurting. Their suffering rings in my head, my bones, clearer than a bell.
I hear every one of their little lights shattering against the labyrinth of silver leading and crystal mirrors, trapped so far from home, and a storm screams in my ocean.
Glancing back, I catch Bas’s grimace. He feels it too, jaw set and aching.
“We need to turn that off,” he says, voice strained. “Destroy it. How is it powered?”
“Something’s really wrong,” I agree, raising my voice to be heard over the blaring alarm. “This building is flooded. How is the electricity still on?”
Rifle leading the way, Mom strides around the corner, plunging into another stairwell. Unclipping a flashlight from the strap of her backpack, she leans over the railing, peering down into the abyss.
Finding no water in her path, she plunges forward; Bas and I follow.
Far above us, a door crashes open. Bas spins.
He leans over the rusty stairwell railing that complains under his weight and cranes his neck, glaring at the stairs spiraling above us.
His fingers flex. Metal melts in his glowing hand, molten iron dripping white-hot down his fingers to form a slaggy kind of sword beneath his brilliant sunbeam.
But before he can launch himself at the threat, my mother overcomes her disgust of him long enough to grab him by the wrist, a finger on her lips for silence.
She presses him back against the wall, shakes his arm, sharp, until his sword fragments into ash and rust. Breathing hard, Bas closes his eyes. With effort, he dampens his light.
Boots pound overhead, several floors away. Something beeps. With a can-opener crack, a door bursts open. The boots pound away.
“Go,” Mom says, shoving us forward.
Heads down, running as fast as we can on algae-slick footing, we plunge forward.
A fingerling creek trickles alongside us.
Stalactites dangle from the stairs. Groping for purchase, my hands leave streaks along the dirt-caked white tiles, like an unraveling spool of yarn marking the path we take into the labyrinth.
No time to pick my footing carefully, I barrel down the stairs, slip-sliding around corners and slamming on my ass as often as I’m upright.
Mom barely stops long enough to breathe. The pounding of our boots hidden under the throbbing alarm, she throws herself around a final corner and slaps her badge to the keypad.
The doorway opens into a cave. Lights dangling from long ropes run along the ceiling. Iron grating rattles beneath our feet, a treacherous walkway stretched above an abyss so black that reality itself flakes away in the face of it.
I stare into that darkness, transfixed, its open mouth agape and waiting for me. But I can’t follow, can’t risk the lure of the heartbeat in its depths. I grab Bas’s hand, praying it’s enough to fight off this crazed impulse I have to—
Jump. I want to jump. Haunted by an instinct older than my bones, I want to close my eyes and leap. Every muscle in my body contorts itself to fly, to fall. And the wild thing in my chest keeps howling, calling me home, home, home.
But the ghost fence screams louder, drowning out every thought in my head.
It echoes from everywhere, above and around us, thundering with inescapable wrongness.
I spin in my tracks, but I can’t place the source of the malevolence.
It oozes from every surface, from every room carved into the walls around us, all fitted with mirrored panels and metal security doors like this kind of thing is normal—oh, don’t you know, every government facility has an underground lair?
I want to laugh, but I can’t breathe. Darkness seeps from the bottomless hole, an oppressive gloom too thick, I bet, for even Bas to burn through.
On the other side of the door from us, from the stairwell, someone shouts. Moving quick, Mom rips a section of chain from the front pocket of her bag.
“We didn’t set out to raise the dead.” She throws the chain through the door handles, ties it in a knot, and snaps on a bike lock for good measure.
“We were looking to understand life. The weight of a soul, its energetic composition, its function. We were trying to discover what the soul itself could accomplish.”
“You were looking for magic? You worked for the government.”
She stares back flatly. “Humans have believed in magic consistently across time and cultures. We have always believed supernatural forces not only existed but could be harnessed. So, we distilled their theories, their common practices.” She hesitates, her back to a corner.
Sucking in a deep breath through her nose, she steels herself, plunges forward.
“And we found it. Currents of naturally occurring energy running through the earth.”
“Yeah, ley lines.” My boots rattle too hard on the lacy steel in my mother’s rushing shadow. The void shivers, still beckoning. “Everybody knows about ley lines. Wiccans, conspiracy theorists—they’re all over the internet. What, were you trying to turn them into a weapon?”
Swallowing hard, Mom hesitates.