Page 77 of All Her Ghosts

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 nevermaketime 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 fencethat 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 stillon?”