Above

by Leah Bobet

  And the tiny sting, coming down.

  It screams.

  The shadow screams and hops and shakes. The sting lands again and again, stinger ripping that dark away from the inside, punching through it like paper ashing outward from the spot where a lit match head’s touched. The shadow, realer than real, unwinds bone by ridge by joint into the smoke.

  I blink. My back’s wet against the ground. My legs are wet, and I don’t know if it’s sweat. Ari’s bee circles me, once, slowly. Her wings beat once and she starts to sink from the lack of motion, and then she runs.

  “Ari!” I scream again and stumble up, running after her through the bodies and the wreck and the blood on the smooth-graveled floor, across the Pactbridge. Into the old abandoned sewers.

  I run light-blind. I run hands out in front of me, eyes shut, choking because it was the last time and there are shadows in Safe and I can’t let her get away, not now. My shoes slap against the cold ledges and my toes don’t even try to curl against them. You’re running away, I realize halfway down the tunnel that splits the old sewers from the new, stinking and scared and listening for the buzz of wings over the faded noise of fighting and bleeding and dying. You left them.

  I try to turn around and my legs shudder no.

  I keep running.

  I catch up with her after the cramp in my belly’s arrived, shifted, and settled, after my dark-vision comes back and then doesn’t matter for the sweat stinging my eyes. She’s sitting back to the wall like the very first time I found her: curled up tight in the remnants of bloody-edged wings.

  Everything’s burning. Everything’s burning bright.

  “Hey,” I whisper, not to be gentle but because there’s no more voice left to me. Her chin comes up like something hunted.

  Behind us, far and faint, there are footsteps in the sewers.

  Can’t stay. I reach out, teetering, and she hugs her arms tighter. It’s her book. She’s hugging her book like a baby child. “Ari?”

  She’s shaking. “You saw it,” she says. Her voice is taut and frightened and harsh. “You all saw it. It was real.”

  “It was real,” I say. It comes out more like a cough. I’ve been breathing smoke. My voice won’t work.

  She shudders again, one thick terrible one, like earthquakes.

  I brush her shriveling wings with my fingers. They flutter like curtains. We can’t take them with us. They’re too big to carry, and if we leave them they’ll show our trail for sure.

  I take Ari by the shoulders, light and slow. Turn her to face the wall. “Don’t look,” I breathe, smoke-mouthed, aching, and then I stomp them. I stomp ’til they break, tear apart their thick-paper membrane, dump them in the sluggish wend of sewer water — and thank you, thank you that nothing reaches up to receive them. No shadow-things left in the new sewers tonight. They’re all away in Safe.

  She flinches as they sink out of sight, and I’d stop, I’d stop to hold her but there’s no time for it now, not with the shadows behind us. I can hear their giggles coming up the tunnels. I can hear their rustling in the dark.

  “Gotta run,” I whisper, and she nods, clinging to my arm.

  We run.

  We’re in the new sewers when Ari stumbles to a halt and I do too, legs shuddering and stomach tight, everything silent except the slow-moving water and the sound of us breathing like waterfalls. “They’re gone,” she says, and they are: Those scraping hoots and giggles aren’t behind us anymore, and the smell of rust and rot and cold dirty fingers, shadow-smell, is all drowned out in people-smell and refuse and living things. Above things: all the smells that mean life and breath and light and terrible, terrible danger.

  “Where are we?” I ask. Ariel turns a blank and hopeless face on me, so smeared with damp from running it looks like her hair’s been shedding tears. I squeeze her shoulder — I’m scared, but she needs — and squint at the walls. If this is one of our pathways, I’ll know it; if it’s on our marker maps, there’ll be a sign on the concrete: paint, or clay, or circles chiseled deep pointing danger, or fallen path, or this is the way back home.

  There aren’t none.

  I search the walls twice. My sweat cools. By the third time Ari’s not going to believe me if I miraculously find something, so I stumble back to her, making real sure to put each foot in front of the other. “We’ll find somewhere to hide,” I say. “We can rest, figure things out.” There are places, dry places, with doors you can bar and good air and soft darkness: the four safehouses we hold outside of Safe.

  “Not in the sewers. They sleep in the sewers.” She’s picking at her palm. There’s something in her right hand, dark, like a shadow-tooth. I pluck it out, brush away the blood that comes after it. The stinger, her own stinger. Her offering. She looks down at it and goes quiet, shrinks into herself. “I’ve seen them.”

  I go still. Careful-still, the kind I’ve learned to make people forget I’m there while they Tell the most real nightmares they’ve ever lived. “When? Where?”

  She shrugs, uncomfortable. Ariel doesn’t like being the center of anyone’s attention, good or bad. “A couple times. Where the ceiling’s fallen in. The Cold Pipes.”

  Nobody goes down to the Cold Pipes. Not even with fire. Every sign that points them out reads danger, fallen in, do not go. If we had a sign for monsters, it’d be carved in there two feet deep. “When were you at the Cold Pipes?”

  I can’t keep the strain out of my words. She ducks away from it; hides behind the fall of her mussed-up sunshine hair. “It was only the couple times.”

  “A couple times?” and my voice is rising now, fright and echo and all those things that don’t make a person feel Safe. “Ari —” I say, and then we both look up ’cause we hear it.

  Another voice.

  It’s a little mutter on the air, rightwise or left, look in for me, all on one note like the scales’ve been cut out of its throat. My back seizes up, terrified, but just a second after, my Teller-memory kicks in: I know that kind of song-talk.

  It’s how you talk to ghosts.

  “Whisper?” I breathe. “That you?”

  “Teller?” Her hoarse little voice comes out of the dark.

  “Whisper!” I call as if we’re not in danger, feeling through the dark for her. I make contact too hard, wrap both arms around her. “You’re all right, you —”

  She doesn’t hold up her hand like Atticus might or shush me or nothing: She just lets me babble out the panic ’til I’m out of breath for true and shivering. “Something’s happened to Atticus,” I finish, broken down, beaten. “Corner killed Atticus.”

  “I know,” she says, pinched. “My folks showed me.” Whisper’s folks are her ghosts; the ones that’re always about, whispering her secrets about everything.

  “Who else?” I manage, but she shakes her head.

  “I’ve a pain in my side, Teller.” I can barely hear her on the stuffy air of the sewer. “I need some medicine.”

  There’s medicine in the kitchen, in the carefully counted stores that Atticus keeps for emergencies: pain-killers like you can only get in hospitals Above, bandages and gauze and tape and splints, little sick-sweet lozenges for the coughs that come every wintertime. Not any more Atticus, a little voice in the back of my head whispers. I close my eyes tight and see it all over again: shadows in the kitchen, throwing our medicine to the ground.

  “I don’t think we can go back,” I say. Dirty words.

  “Nuh-uh,” she agrees, and steadies herself one hand on my shoulder. “It’ll have to be up.”

  “Up?”

  “Above,” she says like it’s repeating herself, and Ariel makes a little noise from her corner. Whisper looks at us both, and her mouth hardens like she’s not to brook any arguing. I reach down for Ariel and help her to standing.

  “We don’t know where we are,” I say, all my calm run halfway home now that someone elder’s here.

  Whisper shakes her head minutely, makes that keening noise again. “They’ll lead us,�
�� she says, and strains her neck forward like she’s listening for beautiful music.

  We follow her through the slippery new sewers, over pick-foot catwalks and pitted rock, holding hands in a chain to keep together. Above. I’ve never gone without provisions, two days’ good rations and matches and wood, sacks and a crew and Passing clothes. I’ve never gone without warning. Nobody ever goes up alone.

  Roach-feet skitter on the walls, the tunnel roof. A rat tail curves around a corner and plops into the flow, and Ariel lets out a little moan. I squeeze her hand tight. She doesn’t shy away this time.

  Whisper turns a corner and finally stops, head stretched up like a mouse feeding on the air, her stringy white hair falling like emergency rope and wires. “Thank you good friends always,” she murmurs into the dark, and then reaches out for the ladder.

  It’s rubber-runged so we don’t fall off, but still slick and deadly cold, and for a moment it’s like all the cold of Above is being forced through the palms of my hurting hands. I lift one up and get a good look at it. I was holding the brand too tight. It’s pocked red with splinters.

  “C’mon,” whispers Ari behind me, quiver-shake and shivering, and I put down my aching hand and climb.

  Whisper pushes the top of the world aside with a metallic stutter, and the light, oh god the light comes pouring in. And then I’m breathing droopy heat and there we are, there we are, dizzy and sick with running and strange air and stars.

  Above.

  There are Whitecoats and there are Doctors. Doctor Marybeth was in medical school when she helped Atticus and Corner go free. Doctor Marybeth saw me born and sewed up my mama afterward, and one of the first lessons I learned about Passing was telling the difference between a Doctor and a Whitecoat. Whitecoats never smile, Atticus told me back in those days when me and Hide and Seed, who was a teenager but hadn’t had much school on account of his horns, learned at his feet in the afternoons. That was how you could tell Whitecoats; you knew them by the smoothness of the corners of their eyes.

  Doctor Marybeth has wrinkles at the corners of her eyes, wrinkles from smiling, but when she opens the door of her little old house there’s no smiling on her. “Matthew,” she says, looking over my shoulder, face paling the color of road dust.

  “Atticus is dead,” I blurt, and Doctor Marybeth looks at me, at Ari and Whisper. Opens her mouth and shuts it again.

  “Inside,” she says like I was hoping she would, like good people always say in Tales when you tell them there’s bad, bad news. I stumble through the door, tugging Ariel behind me by her limp little hand.

  “S’okay,” I tell her. She’s gone big-eyed and still again. “Doctor Marybeth’s a good doctor.”

  “Doctor —” Ari mumbles, and her hand spasms in mine. I hold it tighter, insisting, ’cause it’s hot to sweating here and my back’s prickling and I can’t take one more person leaving me tonight. She follows me slow, crouch-kneed, like something cornered. Whisper stays tight behind her, making sure Ariel doesn’t run, and she don’t say a word about it. I thank her in my gut for that and hope she can hear it like ghosts.

  Doctor Marybeth’s kitchen is polished wood and tile, too bright even though the wood is pale and the placemats a soft-glowing purple. I cover my eyes with my free hand. They sting even in the shade.

  “What happened?” Doctor Marybeth says. She looks ready to be sick.

  “I lost Violet,” Whisper gasps, and it’s not the whistle of singing no more.

  Doctor Marybeth’s face goes even grimmer. “Shh. Don’t talk,” she says, and takes out her stethoscope.

  I hold Ariel’s hand.

  She listens to Whisper’s heart, Whisper’s breath, and her round brown hand makes Whisper look even skinnier for being there. “Tell me,” she says, hooking one rubber-tipped prong out of her ear. Her hands move, ceaseless, ’cross Whisper’s back and wrists and heart.

  I tell her, ’cause that’s what I’m there for. Telling the bad news. Telling ’bout death. Once upon a time on Sanctuary Night there was a fight between Corner and Atticus.

  But I can’t tell it far before I’m hiccuping and Whisper’s crying, harsh little inhales like a sock-foot sliding along stone. “Shh,” Doctor Marybeth says, and puts her soft hand on my back. “You’re safe here. You’re safe.”

  You’re Safe here, I translate without thinking, fever-scared, splinter-palmed, and even though Ariel’s watching, that’s when I start to cry.

  ATTICUS’S TALE

  Everybody knows Atticus’s Tale, but I asked for it anyway. I told him it was because we wouldn’t all be here someday, but really Atticus’s Tale was all tangents and whispers and I wanted it for real. I wanted Atticus to tell me his Tale true.

  Atticus measured me all up with his eyes and then nodded quiet; sat himself down on the chair that was made, like everything he has, to not be snapped to cinders by his claws. He sat straighter than straight and took three deep breaths before he started Telling.

  Once Atticus looked and walked and talked just like the other people Above. He had a ma and pa and brothers, and a girl he took to movies on Saturday nights. (Jack had already explained movies, and I was afraid to interrupt.) He worked in a shabby bookstore that was crammed every crack with old things, and his job was to straighten the books that people brought to get rid of or trade or sell. He liked to read the ones that nobody came for; he didn’t understand all of what they said, but he read them just in case. He liked the way they made the world tilt different ways in his vision.

  One day Atticus was putting boxes and boxes of books on the old shelves of the bookshop and the world tilted a way he’d never seen before. The world went dark and he saw fire, fire at the center of everything, building and yanking itself upward into a mountain of light.

  Then he fell down off the ladder and cracked his head.

  They took him to the hospital, and a nurse felt him all over for broken things. They put him in an X-ray machine (and here he explained X-rays, the whole experiment where they were discovered, how they made shadows out of your flesh and brands out of your bones). They kept him sitting an awful long time, and then another man came into the waiting room with pictures of his arm bone, of a shadowy bulge latched on to it, made of bits and scraps of his own body gone wicked. “We’re sorry,” he said. “You’re Sick.”

  They took off his arm at the elbow, and the Sick kept coming. They took it off at the shoulder and gave him a plastic arm whose fingers didn’t close right. He had to quit the bookshop and be full-time Sick. The plastic hand wouldn’t turn the pages of a book.

  “We may have to try some new drugs,” they said, and injected liquid amber burning into the crook of his shoulder. It made him toss and shake and throw up ’til he could only eat soup and water for seven days, and at the end of that week he started to change. His arms stretched and grew, and it was the worst hurt he’d ever felt, the claws growing in, shell taking shape, blood flowing through.

  (So you weren’t always a Beast? I asked, and Atticus shook his head with his golden-eyed sad smile. I was always a Beast, he said. It was always inside of me to have my real arms. I wanted to ask if he’d ever cried tears, not light, but he went on talking and the chance never came again.)

  Atticus’s doctors saw the crab-arms and were scared.

  “We’re going to have to take you in for more study,” they said. They brought him to a brick building with big lawns and high hedges, gave him a room, and locked the door. The crab-arms were still soft. He was afraid to pound ’til they let him out. They drew his blood, and it shifted red-orange to gold in their needles, like liquid amber burning.

  They came back again and again for it, and Atticus didn’t know where they’d spent the last. His arms ached from needles. They ached when the crab-arms hardened and his Normal-people muscles stretched against the weight. The Whitecoats gave him books. His claws cut the pages to shreds.

  At the night desk was a student named Marybeth. She was just as old as he, and when the crab-arms got str
ong enough to bang bang bang on the door, she was the only one who heard him. She looked through the double-plastic windows and saw the books with cut pages, the words opened up at the belly and spread on the floor. Student Doctor Marybeth put down her needles and tubes and took a book from her pocket. All night she read it to Atticus through the crack of the locked-tight door.

  (And he didn’t need to say what that was, or what it meant. Because here, his eyes glowed like sunflowers.)

  She brought more. She read against his door until dawn every night for months, and the Whitecoats muttered to themselves and wondered why he slept so late daytimes.

  One day (he said quiet, after a long stop that made me think it was time to tiptoe out), Student Doctor Marybeth said she was leaving. Her time in this hospital was done, and she had to take her examinations and then she would be sent to other hospitals. “They’re not gonna let you out,” she whispered through the tray slot on the door.

  “Yes,” Atticus told her. “We know.”

  “Good luck,” she said, and slipped the locks open.

  He wouldn’t tell me more. The story of flying from the Whitecoats down to the tunnels, from dry place to dry place until they found Safe, was a story I could get from the others. His story ended there, he said, with the slip of the lock.

  Atticus used to be one of them, he said, leaning forward hard, and his eyes were fire like I’d never seen them. He used to be one of them and then it didn’t matter, when his arms grew back Beast. They cast him out, his ma and pa and brothers and friends, and none of them were sorry, not one bit.

  And that’s why we have to be careful, and sharp, and stick together and uphold Safe, he finished. That’s why we work together. Because even if we’re strange and Cursed and Beasts, the people Above are monsters.

  I wake up in the morning in a wide bouncing bed, warm and soft and safe — until I realize how bright it is. There’s light in my eyes, hard, wingless light; light that does you burning. I turn over and it’s still no good: Everything under my eyelids is red. Red and long-fingered and slicked in blood, and the curve of a broken horn —