Page 78 of All Her Ghosts

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 mehome, home, home.

But the ghost fence screams louder, drowning out every thought in my head. It echoes from everywhere, above and around us, thunderingwith 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 understandlife. 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 thegovernment.”

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.

“Not me. I was… naive. For my research… myactualresearch—not the farce I used to gain access to government equipment—I needed a vast amount of power. More electricity than any extant grid could supply. More… spark. Something closer to the nature of life itself. So I took the government funding, I told them what they wanted to hear, and I built a machine—a hexeract of magic and mad science—to harness that power.”

Teeth gritted, she sucks a deep breath through her nose.

“I gave them what they claimed they wanted. Clean, infinite energy. Enough to power every electrical grid in the country for pennies, forever. In my arrogance—my… distraction—I was so fixated on whyIneeded it, I didn’t question whattheywould do with it.”

Mom bites down hard on her lip. She glances away, breathing heavy through her nose.

“Mysuperiors”—she sneers the word, phlegmy with disgust—“had the unmitigated audacity to consider my work a ‘mixed success.’ They weren’t interested in clean energy. At least, not to waste on the masses. They used my prototype to power the facility only begrudgingly. Later, they took my research and perverted it, built the ward-wall you saw around the city to test the scale at which it could effectively be wielded and found a way to use the ley lines to power that too. They got the technological breakthrough they wanted. They only got as far as using it to power the campus, but they were exploring further applications when”—she turns her head away, can’t face me, a muscle jumping in her jaw—“when I finally used my device for what I’d always intended.”

“Further applications?” I press. “You mean a weapon of massdestruction, right? Cain said they were trying to make a weapon, that I am that weapon—”

“You are mydaughter,” Mom snaps, a furious reflex so fast I wonder how often she’s sat up at night repeating it to herself. She swallows hard and shakes her head. When she speaks again, her voice is so soft I barely hear it in the echo of our footsteps. “But yes. They were trying to weaponize the tech. I knew—and knew better—but I was desperate. Foolish, maybe. At the time, I didn’t care about how they used it if it meant I gotyou.”

The ocean in my chest thrashes, stomach clenching on the pain of every word. But my mother is not the only one hurting. This place doesn’t run on electricity anymore; it runs on ghosts and ley lines—and ley line power can’t be cut. This awful machinecan’tturn off. It willneverturn off. And every day, it draws in more wandering dead with its bastardized magical science. They come like moths to a flame, seeking a death they can’t find, a death Mom inadvertently broke. It’s hurting them, trapping and torturing them—maybe beyond repair—and no one cares.

No one but me. I’m responsible. Ihaveto be responsible. It’s my nature, vast and undeniable, swelling at my mortal seams.

“Two wrongs don’t make a right,” I croak, the knot in my throat catching my voice before it rises into something loud enough to get us caught. “You told me thatconstantlygrowing up. So why spend seventeen years running from ghosts, buying yourself time to build a new accidental maybe-weapon in your basement and bring ithere? Did it not do enough damage the first time?” I demand, throwing up my hands. “What, are you trying to just blow the place up or something?”

Mom glances at me and the guilt/fear/determination on her faceadmits everything. She turns away—at least she doesn’t lie—staring at a small, unassuming door built into the rock face. Her badge trembles in her hand. Her boot shifts forward, then inches back. Glittering, her eyes squeeze shut.

“When I pulled you out, I ripped a tear in the fabric of life and death,” she whispers. “It’s leaking—anyone can see that. By subverting the natural order, I—I must have rewritten it. Like a bad line of code. I just need to patch it. This machine is a refined version of my hexaract, far more sophisticated than the prototype in operation here. If I deploy it properly, I can stop the dead from leaking out and getting stuck up here. Then you…”

Her eyes open, tears spilling down her cheeks. She looks at me, pleading, and with a sickening churn in my gut, I know what she meant to do here. I know why she tried to warn me away.