Caitlin Kittredge - The Mirrored Shard

“Hello?” I said.

“Don’t cry, Aoife,” the voice whispered again.

I swallowed hard. My scar wasn’t throbbing, so I knew it wasn’t a monster, but a disembodied voice was never not going to be unsettling.

“How do you know my name?”

“I know a lot of things,” the voice said. “Been here a long while. Long before the Storm. Saw it all.”

“Are you …,” I started to ask, but my question was answered when the same kind of unearthly glow the leviathan had manifested sprang to life in the corner of the cell.

A small girl, younger than me, sat there, dressed in the sort of clothes you only saw in old magazines: pinafore, bloomers, a giant floppy bow holding back meticulous barrel curls.

She would have looked pretty normal, if out of date, except that she was almost entirely translucent, like one of the reels for an Edison lamp held against a light. She had the same oily, filmy quality, like she might flicker out of existence at any second.

“I’m dead,” she said in confirmation. “I died right here, in this room.”

“You don’t seem too upset about that,” I ventured. I stayed where I was, not sure if I even could move.

Ghost stories were popular among my old classmates at the Academy, but they’d always been just that—stories. Things to scare one another with that wouldn’t get us locked up for heresy, like stories of the Fae, or magic, or anything that wasn’t based in science would.

Ghosts, nobody could quantify. I’d certainly never expected to be sitting here talking to one.

Then again, I’d never expected to be locked up in the worst Proctor prison in the country, either.

“Of course I am,” she said. “I was the daughter of a guard. I had diphtheria, and I was in a fever haze. I heard a voice calling me, calling me.… In the fever, I thought it was an angel sent to take me home. But then I was here, in front of this door. I went in and I collapsed. Prisoners found me, shut my eyes, watched over me until my father came. But it was too late. This place drags you down. It always has.”

“How old were you?” I asked.

She sighed. “Just nine. But they always said I was bright for my age.”

“You talk to everyone who gets thrown in here?” I asked. Normal conversation was the only way I could keep my mind from screaming, There’s a dead girl, right in front of you, talking, and you need to panic .

“Oh no,” she said, and gave a smile that was a black razor slash across her face—a strange oily substance dribbling from her mouth, her eyes, her nostrils. “Just you, Aoife Grayson. Just you.”

Her voice wasn’t a little girl’s voice any longer. Had never been, I realized. She wasn’t a sad little ghost trapped here, dead of diphtheria. She was a recording, left in this place by someone who knew I’d be here.

“Why me?” I said again, a whisper this time. I was terrified. I’d traveled by the Gates, hopping worlds, and I’d spent enough time around the Fae that their cold skin and silver smiles hardly bothered me.

This, though—this wasn’t Fae or human, just pure malice talking to me, using my name.

“Because you’re looking for something you cannot have,” the ghost hissed. “You’re traveling to a place none of the living should go. And if you come any closer to the cold flame of death, it will burn you, Aoife Grayson.”

She flickered, and was so close to me we could have shared breath, if she’d had any. “Then you’ll come and you’ll stay,” she growled at me in a voice that sounded like rusty nails raking across bones. “You’ll stay in the Deadlands, just like all the rest who came before.”

She grabbed me by the chin, and her mouth was full of teeth, black lava glass bursting from her little-girl mouth. She was going to tear out my throat, and there was nothing I could do. Nothing except let pure panic flood my brain.

The cell door opened with a clang, and I screamed as light flooded in, burning the ghost out of existence and causing my pupils to react painfully.

“Come on,” a guard said, grabbing my arm. He was tall and rail-thin. I hadn’t seen him before. I struggled, still sure the thing in the cell was going to burst from the shadows and sink its teeth into me.

“Be quiet,” he snarled. “Come.”

Once I realized I was being taken out of the cell, I practically ran. The guard clamped down on my arm.

“Stay calm,” he said. “Act normal.”

I twisted my head to look at him, and I saw the flicker as his features changed, just for a second.

“Cal?” I hissed.

“I said, act normal,” he growled, and moved me to the side as two Proctors passed, holding flashlights and passkeys, doing cell checks.

“Where you taking the terrorist?” one asked, curiosity lighting his eyes. “They got her in the box already?”

“Top floor,” Cal said authoritatively.

“What, already?” said the other. “They ain’t even gonna ask her any questions?”

“Hey, I don’t give the orders,” Cal said, and I could smell the sweat seeping through his ill-fitting uniform. I decided I didn’t want to know where he’d gotten it.

“I hear that,” said the first, and they walked on.

Cal exhaled. “That was close. Conrad’s waiting down at the dock. We have to be fast, before they realize anything’s amiss.”

“Conrad?” I blinked in shock. It took me a moment to realize the only way my brother could have known where we were going, or that we’d been caught and taken to Alcatraz, was if he’d been following us. And for him to follow us, Cal would have had to tell him our eventual destination.

“I cannot believe him,” I said. “Or you. Of all the bone-headed, stupid risks to make Conrad take … He doesn’t even have a Weird, Cal! He could be in real danger coming after us!”

“Shut up,” Cal said. “You’re a prisoner, remember? Act like you’re afraid of me.”

I lowered my eyes, realizing he was right. If I wanted out, I had to act obedient. And Conrad might not have been able to change his skin or create Gates, but the plain fact was, he was outside the prison and we weren’t. I was going to give my brother the largest hug. Right after I slapped him for taking such a huge chance and putting himself in real danger.

Cal and I hustled down what seemed an endless maze of halls, taking sharp rights and lefts, while the entire time my heart was screaming that at any moment this was all going to end with a bullet or the zap of a shock pistol.

Cal and I came to a mesh-enclosed staircase, which led down, into darkness, or up, toward the pulsing blue light.

This close, I could discern another sound over the buzzing of electric current—screaming. It was so high and sustained I’d taken it to be background noise, but it was the droning cry of a creature in unbearable pain.

Cal’s nostrils flared and he began to shake. I couldn’t move, shackled as I was, so I nudged him with my elbow. “What’s wrong?”

“I know that sound,” he whispered. “I remember that sound.…”

Before I could stop him, he was up the stairs, leaving me to follow awkwardly.

I had some inkling of what had Cal so upset, but nothing could have prepared me for what we saw when we crested the stairs and came to a small room at the top of the cell blocks.

Six tables were arranged in a circle, the sort of tables I’d often seen in the madhouse while visiting Nerissa—hard enamel surfaces fitted with leather straps to keep the patients still. A wheel and spring on the underside allowed the tables to be tilted this way or that.

My stomach lurched as I looked at the ghouls strapped to the tables. They didn’t look like Cal—they had the gray sagging skin, stringy hair and vaguely canine faces of depth-dwelling ghouls, ones that had rarely seen the light.