by Leah Bobet
And then a long-bodied honeybee comes screaming out of the darkness.
It stings and stings at the air, buzzes furious figure eights around the tunnel, past my hair, down low to the tracks. That awful voice calls out in terrible, muffled surprise, and the feeling rushes back into my face like it’s me the match set afire. I hit the floor, press both hands hard against my face to block out the rush of nerve-prickle pain. The buzz gets low, heavy, and that attention suddenly scatters, clatters down the tunnel, little light footsteps that I don’t dare and can’t bear to see.
I blink against it, against the pain. Open, slow, my eyes. The blurred shape of my skinny fingers, twitching, tight, swims in front of me.
Oh thank god thank god.
I don’t dare look up until the shapes come clear, until I know that I’m seeing what’s there for true. When I finally do, the bee is drifting back toward me, floating, tired. It circles once around my head, tickles my ear, and lands in my outstretched hand.
“Oh, Ari,” I whisper, because she won’t let me call her anything sweeter. I close her in my trembling palm and the stinger hovers, pressed to my lifeline, for one long, long moment. And then I open it and she goes long again, wider, firming up into legs and arms and bone. I open it and she turns back into a girl with honey-colored hair and eyes that’re red from crying, tucked in the skinny circle of my arms.
The wings change last. They go long with her and then fall out plucked, fall to the concrete like petals. We used to save them, hang them on the walls until we lived in a hollow that was veiled with glittering wings. We ran out of places to put them after the first three months. Ari runs away a lot.
“I heard you shouting,” she says, and wipes her eyes. Her voice shakes worse than my hands. I can’t help it. My arms tighten around her even though I know she’s skittish, know she doesn’t like to be held ’cause someone hurt her bad Above, so bad she still wakes me up some nights with crying.
“Came to save me,” I say to cover her stiffening, to talk out what I mean even if I can’t show it. I’m not good with her this way. I don’t know the right way to move. “What was that?”
She half shakes me off, trying to sting without a stinger. The wings shudder and bend against the floor, refracting dim tunnel-light against the walls. There’s a soft crunch as one snaps.
“Ariel,” I say softer, even softer.
“I hate you.”
I don’t answer. I pet her bloody-golden hair until her chest stops heaving with tears.
“I’ll get you a chocolate next time I’m up. Or a peach, you’d like a peach,” I murmur, rocking her clumsy in my arms that’re still learning touching. “I’ll get you little bee clips for your hair.”
“I don’t want,” she whispers, hiccupy, but she’s not crying anymore.
“Come home,” I ask into her ear, and she finally, eventually nods.
I take her hand. I listen for the footsteps.
It’s grave-silent all the way home.
We don’t get back ’til morning. The lamps are flickering on one by one through the cavern, each a different color from the rainbow of lampshades that Jack Flash bids stolen every fifth supply run. Half of everyone’s already awake, and they watch us stumble all the way back to my house on the west wall, blind and time-muddled and tired. The clocks aren’t chiming — morning bell must have already rung. That late out; later than anyone’s stayed out in years if they planned on coming back.
It could be a Tale if I wasn’t so tired. It’d be told to the young ones in the school Atticus and Whisper keep, recited singsong on the common. I’d carve it on my sill: the big door pushed open, my back straight instead of hunched over like the old tunnels make you do. Our arms around each other, framed against the tunnels and everything that’s outside, everything that’s bad. I could carve my Ariel beautiful.
Atticus is by my door again, or never left, his arms crossed like a statue. “Back late,” he says. He doesn’t look worried. His eyes are amber, though, fading down to nothing fast. Just another light by daytime.
“There was … trouble,” I say, and swallow.
Ariel takes my arm and holds it tight. I glance back and her eyes are narrow, warning: Don’t. But Atticus is watching, waiting.
I tell him about the voice, the smell, the questions. I tell him like it’s a Tale: Once upon a time there was a monster in the tunnels that struck me gasping blind, and it asked ’bout your eyes, and it knew all our names. Ariel’s hand digs into my arm and then, just as quick, pulls away. I spare a glance and she’s drawn herself back, hiding behind her hair. Her mouth is tiny and sour.
Atticus’s eyes light up switch-flicked when I get to the part with the tingling ’round my eyelids, the dimming, darkening pain; the question. I drop my head, not ’cause I’m scared, but shamed of it, dizzy and shamed. I told Safe things to something outside. A sewer-thing. A monster.
That’s not keeping Safe. It’s not doing my very best.
“Mm.” Atticus grunts once all my polished story-words run out. “You kept yourself whole.” He pats me awkward on the shoulder and it turns me absurdly proud, proud like when I was a kid and I’d done well at my lessons. “Just don’t tell this around.”
“Sir,” I say, breathing better now that he’s forgiven me the whole of it, backtalk and telling and Ari running and all; Sir, like I called him when I was a kid with no mama or papa, sleeping foster in his house. “What was it?”
“What happens when you let unsafe things in Safe,” he says, which is no answer at all. And then: “Last time,” Atticus repeats, looking at me and then Ari with his molten-amber eyes. I put an arm around her, tighten my hand on her shoulder. She ducks away from it, one ugly jerk, and I drop it back to my side. She won’t look at me.
Atticus’s right claw is tapping against the left, rat-tat, rat-tat, open and close. He’s not looking at us either; he’s far away somewhere else and pacing. Atticus is nervous. Atticus is upset. He stalks along the gravel and tile, crunch crunch past his own door, past the scuffed-up furniture and chattering breakfast line in the kitchen and into the north side of the cavern. I count steps; he pauses at Whisper’s clutter-house cave. Taps on the door, and waits ’til she lets him in.
Ariel watches tightly after him, her hands in fists stuck hard in her pockets. “You shouldn’t tell things like that,” she says, so low I can’t quite believe it.
I blink. “What d’you mean? It could be dangerous —” Stupid; it is dangerous. It pressed sharp against my eye, and it knew all our homes and names —
“Don’t you know what happens —” she starts, and then bites it off. Her eyes are clear and hard and emptier than the sky.
“He’s just going to talk to Whisper,” I say. I reach out for her hand, but she pulls away.
“What’d he mean, ‘last time’?” she asks, half-challenge.
Ariel wasn’t here for the time with Corner. She doesn’t know what those words mean. “Don’t worry,” I say. I’m too tired to tell her now and set her crying, risk her running right back for the tunnels. Tomorrow, or tonight. After we’ve slept and she’s done hating me again. “We should get to bed,” I say, and open up our door.
When I turn to close it behind us, Jack is there too, leaning quiet against one of the rough-cut pillars that keeps our roofing up. Listening. Maybe all along. He pushes off it and pats me on the back with his scrapy grey glove. “Good work,” he says, out of Atticus’s hearing and everybody else’s. “Kept your head.”
I feel my face warm down in the dark. Jack’s rough with praise sometimes: He talks a crateload when you do something wrong, and that makes his kind words kinder. “Thanks,” I murmur back, tight so the sound won’t carry. And this I can tell to Jack, and not to Atticus who’s like my sterner pa: “I didn’t know what to do.”
“S’all right,” he says, and pats my back again. His gloves are like padded sandpaper, rough as his black beard, and wrapped round and round his fingers with duct tape and insulator. “There’s thing
s out there that none of us know what to do with.” A pause. One that’s got knowing in it, but when I raise my eyes to his, he looks straight elsewhere. “I’ll look around.”
And like that I feel better, less dirty, less beat. Jack gives me another stone-crack smile and he’s off across the common, soft gravel and shredded-up rubber tire crunching under his boots. Jack’s tough, but he’s good. He runs the wires so the city don’t see us sucking power off their littlest electric toe and come down with work crews, looking for what we might be. Jack’s not afraid of Atticus either, and for real; he don’t need to save up backtalk.
Where he goes, the lights come on.
I rub my eyes with the back of my hand and look down at Ariel’s watching face, the dark circles under her own eyes. “Bed,” I say quiet, and follow her back inside to our own Sanctuary. To the house that’s hers, hers and mine, all broke up with wings.
I’m writing to you as myself. They say writers, especially of memoirs, shouldn’t speak in the first person. Atticus told me that’s because they don’t know what they have to say for themselves yet, but I’m pretty sure I know what there is to say about me.
I was born here. My ma had scaly gills down the sides of her neck and my pa had the feet of a lion. When I was three my ma died of a cold that didn’t get better. When I was ten my pa went up on his supply shift and didn’t come back, and I was given as foster to Atticus.
I don’t have lion’s feet, though they’re big and have claws instead of nails. I can’t breathe underwater. But I can Tell, and I can Pass.
JACK’S TALE
Once upon a time, Jack was born. His name wasn’t Jack then, and he didn’t spark yet. The sparking came later, when he moved to the city from his little backwoods town, past the forest and up the highway from the city Above.
Jack had a ma and pa and they fought a lot. Both drank (Jack had to explain this to me, along with forests and towns — I thought the first time it meant water, ’cause Atticus forbade anything harder). This wasn’t a big deal ’cause most of the mas and pas in Jack’s town drank, and the kids went out into the back fields to stay away.
The back fields went on until they met the roadway and the woods, and the boys in Jack’s town dared each other nightly to see how far they’d go from home, into the dark, before turning around and running back. One day when Jack’s ma and pa were yelling up a storm, he went farthest of all and stayed there until it got dark and the other boys went home for supper. Once they were gone he went farther, and then farther than that, and realized (with a strange glow in his eye when he tells this, like Atticus’s rubbed off on him) that he could go as far as he wanted until he fell down. That nobody would make him stay.
He went far.
It started raining after a bit, and Jack thought they really did yell up a storm, shivering wet in his T-shirt along the roadside that nobody drove on ’cause the town was so far from everything. It thundered like tractor engines over and over and he got scared, thought about finding somewhere to hide ’til the storm got done. He never thought about turning back, though — he’s careful to say that every time: I never once thought to turn myself back.
But he hesitated, stopped for a minute on the flat roadway in the flat land, where he was the tallest thing for a little ways.
And the lightning kissed him bone to bone and he wasn’t there for a while.
He woke up in the hospital three towns away, hurting bad from lying stiff (stiff like a body, he showed me, arms and legs all straight and locked and a weird blank smile on his face). His ma and pa had noticed him missing and come looking, but it was too late for that. A man and woman in uniforms (Whitecoats? I asked the first time, thrilled with terror, but he shook his head no) had come too, and they interviewed his parents and then him for a long time, and found out that his parents drank. When they let him out of the hospital the man and woman said he would go to the city with them instead of home with his ma and pa.
Once he was in the city, in a house full of rowdy boys and girls who didn’t have parents no more either, the sparks came.
They had televisions in the city, and he couldn’t turn them on for breaking them. They had microwaves, and he couldn’t warm up food ’cause they’d spark and smoke and the firemen would have to spray down the house. They had stoplights, and the stoplights flickered and died dead when he touched the buttons to make them change. The man and woman took him to the city hospital for testing. They ran tests. They prodded him and took his blood away.
They couldn’t keep him in the hospital. He broke all their machines: Tubes and wires leaned out to brush his fingers, a spark and then dials going wild everywhere, flashing lights, alarms. They took him out of the Normal-people hospital and to their Whitecoat place, a building by a park with big barred windows and different machines, ones that clipped on to his arms and legs and chest with little sucking sounds and measured the spark under Jack’s skin. The sucker-clips left marks like bruises.
Nobody cared, he puts in at this part, that the Whitecoats did things that hurt him. He didn’t have a ma and pa anymore to fight for him (like yours would have for you, Matthew, he said with a little twisted smile), and he was from a town back in the rocky brush that nobody’d ever heard of. It’s not just Beasts that are scared of the city Above; not just us who live under.
Young Jack was clever though, like he is now old. The lock on his door only opened from the outside, but it was a lock with numbers instead of a metal key kept hid away. He touched his fingers to the back of the door late one night and hunted deep bone to bone for his sparks.
He set his jaw and leaned into the door, and when it hurt he pushed the hurt farther, out from the pit of his belly where he kept his oaths safe.
Dragged light to his fingers, and cried as they burned.
They sparked and sparked, and when the door swung open he crept out into the hallway and then into the street and ran as fast as he could. Ran far.
And how did he find Safe? I asked him the first time, because my job is to tell the story about Safe.
Jack smiled his crooked smile at me and told me Safe is the farthest far of all.
Ariel sleeps ’til Sanctuary Night, and that’s fine by me.
Sanctuary Night’s exactly what it says. Everyone lines up before Atticus and he reconfirms their Sanctuary: their right to live in Safe. Nobody’s ever turned away, except for Corner eight years back when it all came out about Jonah and the killing, and after that it couldn’t have stayed and shared our plates and homes and duties no matter what Atticus said ’bout it.
There are stories that they loved each other once, that the Whitecoats took them as much for their loving as Atticus’s eyes and arms and Corner’s bloodtouch hands. But nobody ever told those loud enough to make a carving, and Jack once said it’s better that way. “Keeping histories,” he said actually, his voice all popping with sparks, “is as much about knowing what needs forgetting as what ought to be remembered.”
That’s something that sneaks up on me when it’s darker than the normal dark. I almost asked him to explain once what he meant, but his face was too serious, too hot with lightning when he said it, to ever bring it up again.
When the clocks strike night, I finally wake her up.
She’s muzzy but her eyes open right away, big and scared like they always are if anything touches her sudden in sleep. “It’s me,” I whisper careful, not moving fast or talking loud. She relaxes, muscle by muscle outlined under our thin blue blanket, ’til I can stand up without towering over her. You learn a lot about how not to make people vulnerable when you live with Ariel. You learn a lot about making Safe.
You learn a lot about what makes a person vulnerable too. I remember those things, each little bit that makes her flinch. I’m saving them up in case one day I meet whoever made my Ariel hurt.
She sits up and stretches out, looking for the clock through the layers and layers of wings hung from the rafters. She hated that I hung them at first. Ariel likes things Normal. �
�Sanctuary Night,” I tell her, and she shakes her head a little, like the thought needs settling.
“Gotta wash my face,” she half-asks, quiet, and brushes through the wings to the basin when I don’t reply. They rustle after her, dry and unbending, catching what bit of light comes off the bulb in the ceiling and spreading it soft: white on white on white getting gentler through every shed wing. In the morning, when Jack lights the lamps, the house glows like your mama’s arms: sourceless light and iridescence.
I read that word in one of Atticus’s thick old books once. When I went to Jack to ask what it meant, he held his hands out and they glowed so gentle I thought they might kiss the air, and since that day I wanted a place that was iridescent, that lit without burning. Being in love is sort of like that, when it’s real. When it’s true.
It’s like that to watch Ariel smile.
And when she burns, it’s not her fault. She’s Sick, and if I’m soft, soft and unsharp and patient, it’ll all turn out right.
She splashes in the corner. The sound's compact and quiet under the chatter outside the door: people carrying their offerings into the great empty circle between the houses and the kitchen to exchange them for Sanctuary from Atticus. Not Atticus the man, but him as the founder — one of the founders — of Safe. He takes it in for the whole of us, whatever token we have to show what’s ours to offer, and then he touches you on the head with his heavy old claw and you can stay.
My offering doesn’t get carried. What I give back to Safe is my arms for lifting, my hand for carving, my ears for listening sharp and careful, and my face, my Passable face. What I do is listen, and at the end of the night I Tell before everyone who went first and second, what they offered, and what it meant. I Tell them the Tale of themselves, and that’s how I prove I’m a good Teller. And then Atticus puts his claw on my head and we go to the kitchen to feast.