Above

by Leah Bobet

  — and I open my eyes not to Safe, but Doctor Marybeth’s white ceiling, Doctor Marybeth’s soft blue drapes over her glass-paned window, Doctor Marybeth’s yellow-painted, slope-roofed attic room. Hot, damp summertime air. It’s thick like the new sewers but hotter, hot like it never gets in Safe, where a season’s nothing more than a bit of warm or cool, the pipes freezing slower or running quicker than before. The air’s sweet with the smell of coffee and toast: Safe things. Morningtime things.

  This is how Normal people wake up, I realize, fuzzy-headed, tired. This is how I’ve imagined it, some cold and sleepy nighttimes, when I told myself made-up stories where I wasn’t Freak. Not that I go ’round wanting that. It’s just foolishness to spend your time wanting not to have a Curse, and that was my pa’s lesson, not Atticus’s. But just imagining it. What if.

  I lie still three whole breaths. I drift alone in a little shell of myself, floating, and nothing in the world makes a difference where I am, between half-asleep and awake.

  Then something moves in the corner.

  I reach for a brand but there’s no brand, just pillows and soft things. I throw the blanket between me and it, me and every shadow in the sewers come to take my blood, and it squeaks.

  I stop. Let down the blanket, slow.

  It’s not shadows.

  It’s Ariel, curled up in a patchwork quilt in the big green plush chair on the other side of the room. Her eyes are big and frightened, fist tight around a stubbed yellow pencil, reared up to strike. There’s sunlight tangled in her hair.

  I lift my hand, careful. The bed’s warm and a little damp next to me; warm like another sleeping body, smaller and softer than mine. I close my hand to keep that warmth in and try to breathe slow. “Ari?” I say, and sit up the rest of the way, slow and safe and careful. “What time’s it?”

  “Dunno,” she mumbles, cheeks bright red. The pencil comes down, tucks into a fold of the quilt. The rumpled pages of her book crinkle somewhere beneath it.

  I look at the nightstand, a rickety white-painted kid’s thing with one chipped drawer. No clock there or on the walls. The walls are full of paintings instead, clumsy-brush things like the first I ever did back when my pa stole a set of acrylics for my sixth birthday party. In Safe there were always clocks. The clocks chimed the hour, every hour, a shout of bells echoing against the walls. You always knew what time it was.

  I don’t know how many of us made it free.

  Suddenly the Normal air is terribly hard to breathe, but Ari watches me like it’s just the damp, the heat, a tickle of the throat, no expression on her pale pointy face. “We should wash up,” she says. There’s something in her eyes I’ve never seen, can’t name. “There’s soap. I looked.”

  “Okay,” I say, slow-brained, slow-ache, rubbing my chest with one hand to make the hurt ease up. “You go on.” She hesitates. “I’ll keep watch.”

  Her shoulders unwind just a bit as the quilt comes off, as she pads across the floorboards to the bathroom door in clothes that are ripped and layered one atop the other to keep the good heat in. Warm is what matters down below, in Safe, where it’s cool and dark even in summer. In the full light of morning, Above, they look wrong. Ari, who works so hard to look Normal, looks Freak.

  She goes into the washroom. I wait until she shuts the door behind her before I bury my face in the bedsheets and breathe her smell in deep: sweetness, flowers, spring.

  The shower runs cold. I grit my teeth underneath it and rub soap between my hands as fast as they’ll take; scrub armpits and ear backs and myself wide awake. Where I’m cut up it stings: palms and elbows and knees. There aren’t band-aids in Doctor Marybeth’s medicine cabinet, so I leave the scrapes and scabbed bits bare. Then it’s towels and clothes again, heavy with damp, and all the warmth of the bright new morning’s gone.

  The coffee smell in the bedroom’s turned bitter when I open the door again. Ariel’s at the window, looking down into the street. Her hair’s clean and golden, brushed back from her face in a long, mussed braid. She’s found a rubber band somewhere and tied it ’round the end. I scuff my foot on the floor a little to let her know I’m coming. Still, she sits up tenser the minute I get near.

  I try not to let that hurt.

  “Ready?” I ask, and hold out a hand that’s still stinging. She doesn’t take it, but she follows me downstairs.

  They’re in the kitchen. Whisper’s chair is wedged back to the wall, facing watchful the door. Her white hair’s tidied and pinned up in the way she does for Passing: what she calls her Society style. Doctor Marybeth sits across from her in her light green doctor shirt and slacks, elbows on the round wood table, cradling her coffee cup like it’s the last match in the pack. There’s cold eggs in the pan, white and curdled yellow, everything bright and sunstruck like colors get Above. My eyes water from the cream wallpaper. It sparkles hard between the patterned flowers.

  I squint against it and then let out a shout, ’cause leaned back in the dimmest soft corner, scabbed and scratched-up along his old, hairless arms, is Jack.

  “Good morning,” Whisper says. She’s wrapped up in a long shawl with holes in it, soft sky-colored crochet. She pronounces every letter. Whisper never skips words ’less she’s whispering.

  Jack levers up from the wall and squeezes my hand. His gloves scratch my fingers. “Glad you’re living,” he says. I can’t tell if it’s to me and Ariel both, or just me and she’s a nuisance. But I nod and smile much too big at him, squeeze his hand back, and go pour myself a mug of coffee.

  “Ari?” I ask, and she shakes her head bee-tiny.

  “Do you prefer tea?” asks Doctor Marybeth, fixing her in smiling regard, and I wish I could have told her not to, not to give Ariel hard attention or put her on the spot. Ariel just stands there unmoving, big-eyed and wet-haired and half behind my shoulder, and the quiet stretches long enough to swallow once, twice. Doctor Marybeth seems to get it quick, though. She turns her eyes down to the crook of Ariel’s arm. “It’s in the cupboard. Help yourself,” she says, softer, and turns back to Whisper, cross-legged in her five-spoked chair.

  I fill two plates up with eggs and toast and two rare, dear strips of bacon each. There’s two chairs left in the kitchen, what with Jack standing back to the wall like he’s got watch duty ’gainst the encroaching sun. With a look that says oh please I ask Whisper to move over, put our plates on the table side by side, and sit.

  “Who else?” I ask into the silence.

  Jack lets out a breath and shakes his head. Don’t know. Or at least I pray it’s that, don’t know and not nobody, nothing, that’s it. “Those things are still in there. Shut the door behind themselves this morning.” He pauses. “I didn’t meet anyone else on my way up.”

  I can’t help but picture it: shadows in Safe. Shadows in my house, spreading darkness not soft or loving through my Ariel’s shed wings.

  Corner, in my house.

  “What’re we going to do?” I ask hoarse.

  Whisper squints from Jack to Ariel’s faded red sleeve, sticking out beneath another one that’s black and just as moth-chewed. “Whoever else got out wouldn’t just come here. We need to get some Passing clothes and check the safehouses before we get to choosing about anything.”

  The safehouses: Mack and Atticus made everyone in Safe memorize them, in case we ever got stuck Above. One in an old warehouse down by the lake; one through a door from the tunnels that’ll lock from the inside, and a seven-day stash of food and water there; a homeless people shelter on a busy busted-up corner that don’t ask no questions so long as you can Pass good; and here. Doctor Marybeth’s. And but four of us here of forty-three Safe-sworn.

  I stare at my plate and the food stares back.

  “Mm,” grunts Jack, and that’s when I notice how far he is from the coffeemaker, from the electric stove Violet once said she’d give up her house and everything in it for, from the panel on the wall where the kitchen light turns on. The lights are off, the back door blinds open. His fing
ers flex and close in the left asbestos glove. “Get Passing clothes with what?”

  Whisper’s mouth firms up tight. “The emergency money.”

  “How much?”

  “All,” she says, and Jack straightens with a wild look in his eye.

  “How’d you get the whole stash?” He’s pacing a little circle on the tile, one step in each direction, tucked away from the glimmering machines.

  “Atticus gave it to me,” she says, every word crisp. “Yesterday morning.”

  My hand goes still on my heavy table knife. Yesterday morning, when he said last time and walked away from us, and went into Whisper’s house more upset than I could ever remember seeing him but once.

  “All but twenty-five dollars,” she says.

  I put down the knife and reach into my pocket, feel the crush of bills inside. “I have that,” I say, face hot and prickly. “I went out on duty and forgot to put it back.” Keeping duty things is wrong. It’s near-stealing, but I was so tired, thinking of nothing but getting Ariel back in and falling into bed. The feel of something cold and numb up against my face. Any other day I’d have caught such trouble for that: Atticus’s eyes brick-orange and his raspy voice precise, going and what if there had been an emergency?

  Good thing there was an emergency, I think, and tuck my chin to my chest to keep in the terrible laughs.

  Whisper pats my hand. Her skin’s soft, like wing-light. “Well, it’s where we need it now, isn’t it?”

  “Ma’am,” I murmur, and bend back over my breakfast. Bacon’s a privilege. I shouldn’t waste it.

  “Irresponsible of him,” Jack rumbles after a moment, and I cringe. “No, not you, Teller. Atticus. We don’t know who else made it out.” Or where they are. Or what they’re doing for food and shelter while we eat Doctor Marybeth’s toast and coffee.

  “Who do we know didn’t make it out?” Whisper asks.

  The toast and coffee stick in my throat. “Seed,” I say.

  “Kimmie,” Jack adds, subdued and dark. “Mercy. Maybe Scar.”

  “Heather?” I ask soft.

  “I can’t say, Teller,” Jack replies.

  The sun flutters through the long lavender blinds. Heather and Seed’s baby comes due in not two weeks. If she’s alive. If the child inside her still is, on short emergency rations somewhere, knowing in the way babies do that its papa isn’t ever coming back.

  Doctor Marybeth frowns. “I have a friend who works the street patrol. I can ask him if anyone’s come in.”

  The old-woman lines in Whisper’s face deepen. “No.”

  “They won’t be far in the system. Most times,” Doctor Marybeth says, speaking delicate around foul medicine-taste words, “they just disappear again.”

  Ariel is still beyond still. I reach out my foot for hers. Hold it there. She twitches for a moment, shies away.

  Whisper sits back in her chair, hands flat on the dainty purple placemat. “Atticus told me to take care of Safe when he’s gone, and he wouldn’t want anybody put into the system. He wouldn’t want anyone looking for us.”

  Jack stops in the middle of his circling. “He told you that?”

  Whisper doesn’t answer. She just looks Jack in the eye.

  “We don’t know that —”

  “He’s dead, Jack,” Whisper says, her lip shaking a little. She reaches into one of her million pockets and pulls out a picture from her precious Polaroid, white-rimmed and slick on its special picture paper. The shapes don’t make sense for a moment: round center, a splash of color, darkness that rights into two open eyes. I turn it so it’s watching me straight.

  It’s Atticus, bleeding amber, with a knife in his throat.

  “Oh,” I say, and set it carefully down. My fingers tingle hot where they touched it. This year’s Sanctuary Night picture.

  Doctor Marybeth’s mouth opens, then closes, and she puts down her coffee cup and pushes out the chair fast enough to make Ariel flinch. “Excuse me,” she says, sharp and short and like a Whitecoat after all, and stalks to the bathroom where she closes the door.

  The egg bleeds yellow onto my toast.

  “Poor woman,” Whisper says after a moment.

  “Poor somebody when we find the others,” Jack says. His eyes are on the photo, and they’re lightning-sharp.

  “Jack —”

  “The big door only opens from the inside.”

  Whisper frowns at him, fierce upon fierce. And a little cold hand pokes into my belly, taking away the last of the morning’s quiet, the smell of mellow honey and wax that I took in from the pillow and held close to keep me warm.

  “Everyone inside swore to uphold Safe,” I murmur, and Jack and Whisper look over like they’ve just remembered we’re here. “Every one of them raised me from ten.”

  “Teller,” Jack says none too gentle, “someone opened the door.”

  “Jack —”

  “Corner,” Jack says, “had hands in Safe.”

  Down the street from Doctor Marybeth’s is the Salvation Army. “Full of clothes,” Whisper says, and parts my hair with the comb to make it look like I belong here. “Let’s go get us some disguise.”

  I used to play in the disguise chest as a kid, back when my pa was still around; Atticus didn’t allow using important resources — disguise is a resource, Teller — for a kid’s toy. Disguise clothes are clean and neat. My second run Above was a disguise run: I kept watch in the see-your-breath cold while Hide’s pa Mack broke the lock on a frost-covered metal bin and we filled up three garbage bags with everything inside.

  “We don’t have a pry bar,” I point out, and Jack laughs.

  “We’re already in disguise,” he grins, and taps his nose in the way he does when he means something’s hush-hush. “We’ve got money.”

  If disguise is a resource, money’s twice as much. Whisper and Jack count the money at the table: five hundred dollars in creased old bills, stained from pocket-sweat or sewer water, packed together in a sealed sandwich bag. Not including the twenty-five still tucked in my pocket, which I can’t offer up with Ariel watching, her eyebrows drawn down like wings. A peach can’t be that expensive. And a chocolate is only a dollar.

  Doctor Marybeth has to go to work, trouble or not, and I clear the dishes quick while Whisper hustles Ariel upstairs with a measuring tape in hand. “I’m not going for clothes twice,” she says, Ariel looking over her shoulder like I’m gonna disappear if she lets me out of sight.

  Jack keeps on pacing while I wash up, running the hot water over the plates again and again ’til my fingertips pucker. His mouth doesn’t move one bit, but I can see some dark argument rip and spit in his head. “Turn off the lights on the way up, Teller,” he says when I switch off the water — a hot faucet and a cold on the sink, and part of Passing’s knowing what that red and blue mean. “I think I’d like a shower.”

  I hit every white-panel light switch I can find going up the stairs, snuffing Doctor Marybeth’s dangling glass lamps one by one. Jack never comes up on supply duty, or patrol duty, or any duty outside the big carved door and the Pactbridge. Nobody ever asks why, because Jack lights the lamps and you need him downstairs. I don’t know why I never realized how that couldn’t be the all of it.

  Even if he wore his sleeves down to cover his snowflake scars, Jack’s never, ever gonna Pass.

  “Hold still,” Whisper’s saying in the buttery sunshine bedroom, pinching the measuring tape around Ariel’s waist. Ari squirms like she’d love to grow wings then and there, her head down to the side, staring down at the floor away from Whisper’s tugging, smoothing hands.

  “I know my size,” Ari mutters, inching away from the tape. Her eyes are small and angry.

  I step in fast. “What size?” and she gives me a look so full of scorn that I’m ready to promise her peaches all over again.

  “Eight on the bottom,” she says, with a strange and stolen pride. “And a small on the top.”

  “And the inseam?” Whisper snips.

  I do
n’t know what an inseam is. Neither does Jack, I think, who I hear come up the stairs tiptoe, pause, then decide to stay out of it.

  Ariel flushes, strawberry-red cheeks. But Whisper withdraws her tape and rolls it up, sharp little jerks. “It’ll be you hemming those pant legs, missy.”

  Ari glares all the way through Whisper fixing me up to go: a tidy pair of jeans Doctor Marybeth’s left us, the cleanest of my dirty shirts, then lifting my shoulders with her own two hands ’til I stand like we’re in houses and not tunnels that hunch.

  “Forty minutes,” Whisper says, to Ariel and Jack both. “Be ready. We’re leaving again as soon as we come back.” To visit the safehouses and find our missing. With food and water and clean Passing clothes.

  A splash of red, terrible red flickers at the corner of my eye. I swallow. And matches.

  “We’ll be back soon,” I tell Ari, not like she wouldn’t know it. It makes her feel better when I say it. Like a promise.

  She turns to the window. Away.

  “C’mon, Teller,” Whisper says, her voice a little funny. There’s a crooked sad look on her face that I suspect is all for me.

  I hate it.

  We get moving.

  I’m not scared of the sun. There is — was — never enough light in Safe to see the ceilings anyway, so it may as well be sky, dark starless sky. But I still don’t like feeling daylight on me Above. It’s harder to Pass, for one. Daylight shows what you really are: beast beast beast beast beast.

  Just remember, I tell myself, you belong here. You grew up here. You’re nothing else but Normal.

  Thinking it hard enough lets down my shoulders. I swing my arms a little more as we hurry past the woven-wire fences and the lean, muttering trees, breathe deep instead of in little puffs; inhale the rare, sweet scent of living dirt ’til it crowds out the smell of the dead kind. There are pigeons in the greyed-out gutters, beaking at nothing and fat with feathers. No rats, which is good: There’s no brand over my shoulder. I feel in my pocket, though, and there are still matches, bent but dry; nine whole heads left in the pack. I close my hand around them, snug and tight.