by Leah Bobet
FOR ALL THE PEOPLE WHO
MADE SAFE FOR A PRICKLY
BEE-STING GIRL, AND WERE
STEADFASTLY PATIENT UNTIL
SHE LEARNED TO BE KIND.
I LOVE YOU ALL VERY MUCH.
CONTENTS
TITLE PAGE
DEDICATION
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
EPILOGUE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
COPYRIGHT
My last supply duty before Sanctuary Night, I get home and Atticus is waiting.
It’s half past three already, and nobody awake except for Hide and Mack and Mercy and me, unloading our week’s ration of scuffed-up bottles and tins into the broad-wide kitchen cabinets. Most supply nights that’s all there is to it: the swish and thunk of stacking tins, the slow quiet of faucets stopping, pipes sleeping, water mains humming lower as the city Above goes to bed. The air moves slower with everyone laid asleep; gets dustier, goes back to earth. There’s a light by the kitchen, run off a wire drawn down off the old subway tracks, and the rest is feel-your-way dark until morning, when Jack Flash lights the lamps with a flick of his littlest finger.
Jack’s got a good Curse. He might have made it Above if not for the sparks always jumping out of things to kiss at his knuckles. Me, the only thing good ’bout my Curse is that I can still Pass. And that’s half enough to keep me out of trouble.
But tonight it’s not the half I need, because there’s Atticus, spindly crab arms folded ’cross his chest, waiting outside my door. His eyes glow dim-shot amber — not bright, so he’s not mad then, just annoyed and looking to be mad. The glow’s enough to light up the tapestry on my door: the story of Safe as far as I know it, in bits of paint and pictures, carved so everyone knows the Teller lives here. Atticus blinking makes it flicker like firelight.
“Up late,” I say, stretching the knots out of my arms and pretending I’m not a little scared. Atticus’s eyes have made grown men cower and run for the sewers. I carved it myself on his twice-thick board-wood door: Atticus standing tall and pale-armed, his eyes the brightest red I could scrounge up. There’s no reason for that blink-glow, that flicker of Atticus’s eye.
“She’s got out again,” is all he says, and shifts his weight to his other foot.
Every ache in my shoulders catches and double-knots tight.
“Oh.” I can’t even get upset anymore. I was upset the first time, and the fifth — afraid she’d run into the bad things in the sewers or the tunnels, that she’d make it Above and get caught by the men in white coats; not afraid enough of what scares Atticus, which is the Whitecoats following her back and finding Safe. She’s run away too many times for me to believe that anymore.
“She’s your responsibility,” Atticus says. His claw-hands snap until the echo sounds like a hundred running feet: a sure sign he’s annoyed.
“She’s Sick,” I say faint. I’m not usually one for talking back, but it’s half past three and my mouth tastes sour and the ache in my back is a night’s bad work, and I know Ariel’s my responsibility. I stood up and swore her protection before everyone.
I’ve asked-told-begged her to stop running.
Now Atticus’s eyes flush red, and I gotta clench both fists to keep from going I’m sorry I’m sorry like a little kid. “Teller,” he says, calling me so instead of Matthew to say it clear: that I owe him my life, the food in my belly, the tin roof and plank walls and tapestry-carved door of my home. My Sanctuary. “She’s your responsibility. And you’re responsible to Safe.”
To keep Safe. To do my best for Safe, so there’s a place for people like us always.
I know.
“I’ll find her,” I tell him, and don’t meet his eyes.
Atticus doesn’t have to say You better find her.
I start fast down the footworn path, clenching and unclenching fists to get my body moving again. No time to stop at the kitchen for provisions, but I still have all the other things important for heading out of Safe: matches in my pocket, an unlit brand at my back, and twenty-five dollars tucked in my shirt. What Atticus calls emergency money; in case you have an emergency, he says, but really it’s if you use it, it had better have been an emergency.
Maybe I can sneak a dollar to buy her a chocolate. Maybe if I do that it’ll make her want to stay.
“This is the last time!” Atticus calls after me, his voice dry and hoarse-quiet from the things the Whitecoats put down his throat back before there was anywhere like Safe. Atticus can’t shout anymore, but when you’re Atticus you don’t need shouting. People shift in their sleep, rustling like roaches ahead of the sound of his voice.
The last time, I think, and shove fists in my pockets where the matches are. Oh, Ariel.
“All right,” I say out loud, and head back up the tunnel that goes Above.
It’s cold Above. The first time I went up I thought it’d be warmer, with all that stone and dirt and loose history trapping the cold into Safe. ’Course, I went up first in the middle of winter, with snow patching the dead lawns and thin scruffy ice on the sidewalks, and it was colder than anywhere in the whole of the world. I shivered under the beat-up jacket I thought was going to be enough and thought no wonder people were so cruel up here, if the wind bit your bones all day and the sky stared you down into nothing with stars.
I know about things like winter now, know them as more than a Tale, and even still the cold starts on me the second I leave Safe. I keep my hands in my pockets once I open the big barred door and cross the Pactbridge into the old sewers. My toes prickle through my shoes and start to scrunch up. I straighten them out and walk faster.
It’s eight steps, nine steps, ten before the big door shuts behind me.
I carved the big door too, on the inside, not out. Not Tales; just faces. On the big door is where we put our martyrs.
And outside it, the old sewers. Dead-dry, and cold. Footsteps echo here, no matter how soft you shoe along the ledges. The new sewers are louder, warmer, and damp, and I get to the new sewers before I settle my head down to think where the hell my Ariel’s gone.
I don’t know Above like most of them. Most of them ran from there when they were young, made it down to Atticus and Corner and made themselves a home. But I was born in Safe; the only one ’til this year, with Heather and Seed’s baby yet to come. There’s nothing Above in my bones.
So I can’t say if going up was worse for me or better. I don’t have the fear like Violet or Scar, who can’t bear light even after twenty years in Safe, but I’ve heard all their Tales. I spent my first supply run looking over my shoulder for Whitecoats and policemen, watching every sprawled-out lump on the sidewalks for a needle, a grin, a knife. I jumped so bad I almost didn’t Pass, and Whisper had to tell some starer in a suit how I was her little second cousin who’d never seen the city.
It was on my second run I found Ariel.
She wasn’t Above. It was on the way back we found her, huddled down in a corner that was halfway fallen in, down in the old sewers where most people don’t ever get. I wouldn’t have seen her except she was shaking just the tiniest bit, vibrating like sharks or bee’s-wing; moving because things that don’t move fall to the deepest depths and die.
I thought of that bee’s-wing thing before I knew her, I swear. That’s how I knew it, the first time she changed. That I’d understood somehow. That I can make her Safe again.
So the roster crew got their brands off their backs and lit the matches, because you can’t trust things you find in the old sewers, not things whose
names you don’t know. Whisper nudged me — another test from her, handle it, Matthew — and I crept forward with my own brand to see what I could see.
She was curled up small, wearing sweatpants and a dirty white T-shirt that hung loose and smudged to her knees. Her hair was tied back — I remember her hair and I think I will until I die — and when I held up the brand to see if she flinched, it sparkled honey-golden, brighter than Atticus’s eyes. Brighter than matches.
She backed up and straightened out a little, and I saw. She was … well. A girl.
Girls don’t make it down here, through the rattly old subway tracks, along the vent that goes to the sewers, past the twist you have to be looking for to find. Not many make it down, period, and even less are pretty girls. And none had ever had those long-fingered hands, or that tilt to the chin. That spark of light caught in their eyes, their hair, that lit like the first lamp switched on come morning.
“S’all right,” I called back to the supply crew, who were shaking and stamping with nerves, and to put her at ease as well. It’s scared things that bite, scared things cornered. She looked scared but not like I’d ever seen it, not like people did scared in Safe when they had nightmares about the needles, the Whitecoats, the knife. She just watched me, not moving one bit except for the shivering; waiting to see which way I’d move.
“S’all right,” I told her, and tried to smile. It came out bad. She made me nervous, with her flower-golden hair. “We can take you somewhere warm.”
We picked her up. Her eyes got big when she saw Seed’s horns and Hide’s skin with its twisting, spattered colors, and she hugged her big black book so tight ’gainst her chest that her arms shook. But she kept herself quiet and didn’t squeak or run, and we took her across the Pactbridge, through the big door, and into the cavern: into Safe.
We brought her into my house — I’d just got my house then — and settled her down with wash water, and it wasn’t until the rest were gone to get Atticus that I found two things. The plastic bracelet on her wrist was the first, scratched-up with initials for things only Whitecoats understood. I cut it off with my second-best carving knife and picked it up with a rag. It was dirty. Whitecoat things aren’t good to touch.
The shrunken wings falling out of her back were the second.
I was bad. I stared. One of the first rules of Safe was not to stare: not at Violet’s twitches, or Scar’s marks, or Chrys’s apple-peeling skin. I turned away quick, but not quick enough: Her face went an ugly, terrible grey. But one of us, I was thinking all the while, dizzy and strange and trying hard not to smile. She’s like us. She can stay.
“It’s all right. We won’t hurt you,” I said.
“Yes you will,” she whispered. Her eyes were pupil-big with worry.
“I won’t,” I told her, and put down her wrist. My hand brushed lightly her hand. “I swear.”
“She’s Sick,” I told everyone once they straggled into the common to make council. I’m no doctor, I don’t know from Sick, but I held up the sliced plastic bracelet and the circle shied from it like it was fire. “Sick’s the same as Freak Above.”
I didn’t mention the wings.
The ones who’d been in the hospitals, heard the screaming and heads banging against walls until the Whitecoats rushed in with needles and straps, they looked at each other in the bitty bit corners of the dark. Atticus crossed his arms and his eyes were dusty sunlight, the color they don’t get often. That’s the color they get when he cries, instead of crying.
The light caught her tangled-up hair; it sparkled. She scuffed one foot, dragging, on the torn rubber and gravel of the common floor.
They let her stay.
You take your own names here, down in Safe. Ari couldn’t pick one the first week or two, and after that she didn’t want to and wouldn’t tell us hers. So it was me who named her Ariel, after the girl caught in the tree in Atticus’s best-loved bedtime Tale. And she answered to it, and she stayed. And after three weeks her nightmares went quieter and she got to talking, and would smile here and there at things I said, and morningtimes I’d wake up sometimes with her head tucked on my shoulder and all the worry lines ’bout her mouth unraveled. But I could barely ever, almost never get her to talk about Above.
So I don’t know Above that well. I know the safehouses and the supply drops, the five doors down to the right sewer line to get myself quickly home. But I don’t know Above like Ariel.
I don’t know where she might have gone.
So I wait. I stand at the door between the old tunnels and new sewers like it’s my sentry duty, because the new sewers are the most dangerous part, and if she comes back, she shouldn’t run them alone. The old tunnels are different dangerous, Atticus’s kind of dangerous. People wander down in the tunnels sometimes: workers or explorers from Above who somehow know we’re tucked here hiding. But you hear footsteps coming back through the sewers late at night, and who’s to know if they’re from people living or things not people at all. We find bodies there sometimes, set up to trip over, one hand reaching out of the dirty water to whisper ’cross your ankle as you pass.
There are things in the sewers that don’t believe in Atticus and Safe. There are shadows that watch you there, too-still and solid, that don’t move with the light.
I have a brand. I have twelve matches. I make sure not to pace, and I listen.
I don’t know how long I wait. Time in the tunnels isn’t a set thing, like it is in Safe with its hundreds of clocks, like Above with the sun and stars staring down at you accusing from the sky. I lean against the wall after a while — check the old bricks first for wet or bugs or traps — and think, drift off into the darkness. ’Bout the tilt of Ariel’s head when she’s sleeping; the steady sweep of her hand the day I mussed up three times drawing the curve of Beak’s sharp chin and she just said here, gimme that and sketched it in perfect, four quick lines; the charcoal-dark fingerprints she left on my shoulder afterward. The heavy sound the paper of her writing book makes when she turns a page, pages full of things she won’t let me see. ’Bout last time and the last time I heard those words, and what I might say to make her tell her hurts to me instead of paper. What I might say so she’d stay put for good.
So I don’t know how long it is before I hear the footsteps.
It takes a second to realize; they’re light, quiet, patter-quick. I straighten up — I’ve been half-asleep, and that’s stupid, dangerous-stupid — and squint into the dark.
“Hello?” I call out quiet, knowing a second later that was also stupid and I shouldn’t have said a thing. It echoes hello-lo-lo through the tunnel, and when the echo’s gone I shift my weight one foot to the other and there’s no footsteps no more.
Hello? I want to say again, and bite down hard on my tongue, remembering everything Mack and Atticus ever said about traps, tricks, fire; the pale gleam of dead fingers poking up from the water. The way there was so little attached to those fingers when we heaved and pulled them out, and the laughing after, coming deep dark from a mouth we couldn’t see.
There are things in the sewers that don’t believe in Atticus and Safe.
I reach for the brand at my back.
“I know you,” a voice says too close, thin and dry and too close, and I whip around.
The tunnels are always dark, but I know from dark. Right now they’re darker than they ought to be, the outlines of things gone blurred and strange. I put up a hand to my face; my fingers wiggle vague, black on black. The skin around my eyes is tingling, numb.
I can’t tell if that was an arm I just saw. A sleeve. A face.
I can’t see.
“You’re Narasimha’s boy.” The voice rustles the hair ’round my ear; rasp and darkness and the edge of something foul. I strike out at it with both arms, flail, hit nothing. “You’re the Teller.”
“Who calls?” I squeak too loud and reach out again. Nothing’s there, nothing but air and the slightest breeze, but I can smell somebody now, feel them: the difference b
etween old sewer and old sweat. A flicker of something living and warm.
“You are the Teller then,” the voice says. Dry, short, bloody. I can’t tell if it’s girl or boy. And in the other ear: “Then I’ll ask you a Tale.”
My breath’s coming too fast. I fumble a match, drop it between the twisted old tracks; it skitters into a crack and vanishes forever — damn. Fumble another and I can hear the catch and hiss as I strike it bright, but I can’t see nothing, not a thing.
“No Tales,” I manage as it flares and burns out, and my voice rises and cracks like rockfall. Match to the sandpaper, pull once — nothing — twice —
The brand’s yanked full off my back, hard enough to pull me stumbling backward. I shout, and the echo of it mixes with the clatter of my one good weapon, tossed somewhere away. The voice breathes laughter on my face.
“What color were Atticus’s eyes when he exiled the first Beast from Safe?” The words come hot, dirty, filth and waste and dead things rotted through, and I can’t find it anywhere, not anywhere.
“Corner,” I say, stupid, stalling, and the name’s been forbidden so long it feels like licking mud. “It was Corner he exiled.”
“What color?” it spits at me, burning on my cheek where I can still feel. “Teller, what color?”
The burning on my cheek shifts, turns into pressure just below my eye, and sharpness, a nail —
“Red,” I choke out.
The pressure falls away; a poke and it’s gone. I back up panting, free hand up high to protect my face, thick with panic. “All right, Teller,” it whispers, whispers like worms; the little breathy laugh that follows is the opposite of real laughing, colder than winter Above. Something damp pats my cheek. “Go on home now.” I feel it turn, feel the terrible weight of something’s attention lift away from every breathing bit of my skin.