by Leah Bobet
“Teller,” Whisper says, four steps ahead.
Normal people don’t think about fire. I put the pack away.
The Salvation Army doesn’t look especially like salvation. It’s a brown, squat brick building with a huge black-topped lot for cars. They have metal boxes outside, the kind we take pry bars to, but Whisper breezes right past them and through the hard glass-and-metal doors.
Inside it’s the opposite of Passing: The plasticky floors make my shoes squeak, and the lights are bright and sharp. They show every splotch of brown on my sneakers. My neck gets the tight feeling right at the back as the girl at the counter looks up, but I keep my head down, shoulders up. Follow Whisper. Nothing behind you, I tell myself. Nothing but Normal here.
Whisper drives her hands into racks of clothes — red and blue and green and orange; more clothes, I realize, than I’ve seen in my whole life — and pushes them here and there, feeling fabrics, peeking at tags, fluttering like a fussy old Above lady. She pulls blue jeans and faded shirts and socks off shelves and bounces to the next stack, and it takes me a full four racks to realize what the change in her is, what’s making her walk like a stranger.
Whisper likes it here.
“Here,” she says, bent over a plastic bin now and fishing out some prize. “Put these on.” It’s new sneakers, thin at the soles but scuffless, tough. She knows my size. I wonder how many sizes Whisper knows. I tuck my thick-nail toes deep into their socks and tug my sneakers off, slip on the new ones fast and sharp. They fit.
The old ones sit abandoned on the white tile floor, chewed-laced and muddy. I blink; off my own feet, they look like throwaway. They look like something stained and bad.
That’s not mud, I realize, catching the smell of them off my fingers, cold and dead and metallic. The sick comes up through my chest, and I manage to stop it in time. Sicking up’s bad Passing. I wipe my hands careful on my jeans.
I can still feel where the blood on those shoes touched me, every inch.
“That’s you and me, then,” Whisper says, already off across the whole massive hoard. I rock back on my feet and think about balance, muscles. The new shoes bounce different. I want to bounce in them, find all the springy spots, but I don’t know if people Above bounce. “What’s your girl’s favorite color?” she asks once I catch up, her fingers deep in a round pants rack.
My head’s full of Tales. A whole book of them: every grief and joy and trouble that ever crossed the Pactbridge. None of them are about Ariel or if she has a favorite color.
I never asked.
Whisper looks at me with her white-grained eyebrows up, skeptical as you please. And I don’t rightly know what I say, but I mutter something and scuff my toe and flee outside into the quiet, the paint-stripper light and thick, choky air of Above.
The concrete stairs of the Salvation Army are hot in the sun — afternoon, I think. Maybe. I should go back inside, ask if the Salvation Army has wristwatches. I can’t count minutes steady in my head, and there aren’t clocks here like — like I’m used to.
It’s too late. The picture of Atticus bleeding swims up behind my eyelids, then Seed, Mercy, Beak —
“Ready then?” Whisper says sudden behind me, arms full of plastic bags with dirty red slogans flaking off the sides, and I jump. She passes me one; it’s packed so full the handles sting the insides of my knuckles.
“They don’t have any wristwatches, do they?” I ask, and she shakes her head. So: “Yeah,” I mutter, and kick a rock down the steps with my brand-new worn-out shoe. The shoes are soft blue fabric. They wouldn’t last two nights in the new sewers.
She don’t say nothing ’bout my bad temper, just sets off down the steps to the browning grass.
Doctor Marybeth’s left the back door unlocked for us, since it’s too dangerous to leave one’s front door open Above. Whisper opens it brisk as you please, though we’ve likely not been gone that whole forty minutes. “Jack?” she calls as she steps into the cool kitchen. “Let’s go!”
Jack doesn’t answer.
Whisper’s eyebrows draw down until her whole forehead frowns along with her mouth. “Jack?” she says again, and starts for the stairs. The door’s wide open behind me; bad tactics, Mack would say. I close it snug as a voice rumbles low under the upstairs door. Jack’s. And angry.
I take the matches out of my pocket.
Whisper shoots me a glance when I catch up, halfway up Doctor Marybeth’s winding steps. “Houses burn, Teller.”
I don’t put them back.
Whisper’s shoes barely sound on Doctor Marybeth’s soft green carpet. I know to walk quiet too, but behind her I sound like clumping. “Don’t tell me nothing,” Jack says on the other side of the door, close enough now, coming into focus. “I heard you not one minute ago.”
There’s a mumble; a buzz and a mumble.
“Who were you talking to?” he says, and the scuffed metal doorknob arcs with blue light.
“Jack?” Whisper says, softer than she steps.
“Don’t open the door —” he booms, and then Whisper turns the doorknob.
“Fuck!” Jack shouts, glove-shed and furious. He’s twisting like the lightning’s caught him again, his hair wet and clumped and his white undershirt damp, the whole of him strangely undone. “Fucking motherfuck —” and something shoots out past us, something small and dark and bright at the same time. Something about the size of a bee.
Ariel.
“Jack!” Whisper snaps, rushing to him.
“She was talking to someone, I swear to God —” he spits, lightning in his eyes, sparking and singeing his tiny little eyelashes into smoke. The bathroom light flickers. Doctor Marybeth’s bedside lamp rocks, sputters, and dies, and there’s no Ariel. There’s no Ariel anywhere. “That little bitch stung me —”
“Don’t you call her that!” I yell, searching the hall frantic for yellow and black against yellow walls, short steps, green green carpet.
“Teller, she’s spinning us some bullshit,” Jack snaps, and I half don’t hear it. Last time, Atticus’s cut-out voice is reminding me. I don’t know who’s living and who’s dead right now, and I don’t even know her favorite color.
Down. She went down.
I stumble down the stairs, yank open the front door, and reel into the naked street, scenting for bees.
I had it good in the tunnels, I realize, five steps down pavement that burns hot as brands through the soles of my new shoes. In the tunnels there were only so many places to go, and the sound of humming buzzing echoed long against the walls. In the tunnels she had to come back for food, clean water, rest.
Above, there is everywhere to go. Including up.
“Fuck,” I echo, staring up into the pale aching blue sky, and taste the rough Jackness of the word on my tongue. It doesn’t stop the rattling, shaking sob working itself under my ribs. I thought I couldn’t be upset anymore. The rattle turns into a laugh, and it sounds fake and sick.
“Matthew —” I hear behind me; Whisper, high and sharp. Whisper yelling.
I look both ways down the street and catch a glint of —
— and run after it with everything I got.
The shoes bounce. They bounce good running down the rough sidewalk, running faster than you can in the tunnels without slipping. All the streets have signs and they’re meaningless, the names of Tales I don’t know. I ignore them all, ignore cars, ignore people; ignore the tiny differences in plants or roof tiles or paint colors that’re the only way of telling Above houses apart. I’m not Passing. I’m looking for bees.
There are lots of leafy, hiding trees Above, garden after garden with the same incredible, windblown flowers. I run past them with my eyes moving, watching orange and purple and bright red petals for a bee cowering behind them. A bee who sits down still and just waits to see what you’ll do to it.
I run right into the end of the road. I run over the white stone curb and onto grass, lumpy ground like I’ve never been able to keep my balance on despi
te how many trips Above, and I stumble, go down hard on my knees.
When I look up it’s all flowers.
I blink. Rub my eyes. But no, it’s sky-to-toes flowers, red and purple and yellow-sun-golden, all sweet enough, big enough to shelter whole handfuls of bees. It’s a whole Sanctuary Night storehouse of flowers in tidy strips of dirt, baking in the afternoon sun. Any other day they’d be beautiful. Any other day I’d bring one home, press it between the pages of one of Atticus’s books and hang it, spinning, from my rafters.
Park, I think. The word is park.
There are bees everywhere: fat and skinny, crawling along tree bark, nosing through flowers and moving to the next. The park is full of bees doing their supply duty, and none of them sing to me Ariel, even though I know I’d know her anywhere, I have to know her anywhere.
“Ari?” I say. “Ari, please?” and not one of them turns.
How many bees are there Above? I realize, throat tight and everything sweating, and then my chest aches and my eyes get hot with running and I don’t know where I am no more, so I sit down on the prickly grass and let them cry.
She finds me inside a playground tube. A mini-tunnel, thick red plastic that changes the light coming through it; just small enough to curl up in and hide from the sunlight, the daylight, Above all huge and cut up with hate. I look up after five minutes or an hour and there she is, scrunched in next to me, her braid all mussed up. Enfolded in wings.
“Why’d you go?” I ask. I keep my voice soft, tunnel-soft to cut the echo. She smells like sweet and fear-sweat, like flowers. Real flowers.
I’ve never asked her that since the first time she ran. The first time, she cried and cried, and I let her get away with not answering. Her left wing brushes my arm. My skin’s damp from running; it tickles, drags, and sticks.
“He was yelling.” Ariel stares at her clasped hands. Her voice is hot and hollow, every letter heavy as the last.
“Ari, what happened? Who did he think you were talking to?” Who were you talking to? I stay soft. I am soft and edgeless and quiet and kind. She doesn’t answer.
It could be Normal people, neighbors. It could be someone come in from Safe, shimmying up the drainpipe for god knows what reason. It could be herself, fake Tale-telling conversations like I used to have late at night, before I had an Ariel to talk to. But I know what Jack thinks.
Jack thinks shadows.
It couldn’t be, I tell myself. It couldn’t. She was with me, in our house, the whole day. She couldn’t have let Corner in. Except when you were sleeping, and thought she was sleeping too —
I lean my head on my tucked-in knees, close my eyes. Light bounces and sticks out its tongue behind them. Light won’t leave me the hell alone. “I yelled at him. I ran,” I say.
Nothing.
“They’re gonna think I left ’cause I was mad.” The space between my legs and my torso is dark and clean. My eyes don’t hurt for the first time all day.
“Sounds like you did,” she says, funny and tight.
“No —” and I look up, and the sunlight wipes that clean soft dark away. “Above’s not like Safe. You can get lost here.” I talk square at her pointed, skinny face so she knows I’m serious now, deadly serious. “There’s dangerous people out Above.”
Ariel looks at me a second. And then she laughs.
She laughs and laughs, leaned back against the inside of the red plastic tube, and it echoes so loud it’s hard to tell where the real thing stops and the ghost of her laughing begins. “Oh, Matthew,” she says, again and again. “Oh, Matthew —” until I start to get angry for real.
“Hey,” I say soft, then louder. “Hey, shut up. I came for you.”
She doesn’t stop like a bulb going dark but slowly, in sniffles and eye-wipes and the occasional gulp. Not scared of me, I realize, and my heart does a little bounce. But Above they laugh at you, Atticus’s voice said at lessons, his arms crossed, claws rattling each other with every shift of his weight. Freak’s for teasing Above. Don’t ever stand to be teased.
She never laughed at me in Safe.
“Don’t laugh,” I say, softer than I meant to, and her face goes slack and small and edgeless and she puts her hands on mine.
“Oh, Matthew,” she says, real different now, and leans our foreheads together.
I breathe in spring. I breathe spring and gold and the smell of powdered honey, sweet as peaches on the back of your tongue. My eyes water. It’s a thousand kisses in a breath.
Five minutes or an hour and she leans back against the wall, pulls apart that quiet mixing of breath. The quiet stays inside me though, in a warm and steady ball just above my heart. I breathe into it. It keeps me warm.
I don’t know where we are. All the streets Above look the same, houses and houses and the blank blue sky, and the signs don’t mean a thing and there aren’t no walls or landmarks. I’ve broken the first rule of traveling Above: I wasn’t counting right, running like I was. I’ve lost the turns.
“I don’t know Above,” I tell her, wiping my nose on the knee of my jeans.
Ariel tugs a thread from the sleeve of her shirt, holds it up to the light. It shines silver. Iridescent. “I do.”
Ariel leads through the dying afternoon, and I follow.
We walk slow and steady through row after row of peak-roofed houses, green-brown lawns, shut blinds. My feet hurt after the first ten blocks and they hurt more after twenty, and the buildings, the streets, the sloped-round corners blur. There’s no nuances to Above; nothing close or made of comfort. The buildings hunch each away from the other, not one house touching the next, standoffish with bricked-up suspicion.
It takes me too long to realize it: We ain’t going back to Doctor Marybeth’s.
Every step we take goes farther and farther from the bits of Above I know: the careful paths Atticus and Mack drilled us to remember in our sleep, sewer to supply and back again. Every step makes me more and more lost, and Ariel doesn’t talk. Her back is straight and solid, even though in Safe she hunched down sad all the time. I don’t know what to think about that. I follow her. I count the turns.
They’ll think you ran away, I tell myself, strong beats down as my feet hit the raggedy pavement. They’ll think! You ran! A-way! I close my eyes between the stirring weak streetlights — Jack-magic, those — and picture all this carved on Doctor Marybeth’s solid white door. The curving arc of a bee in flight, running. Doctor Marybeth and Whisper and Jack, opening the doors of safehouses to dead bodies, or set upon by shadows, shadows that burn them into bones, or dust, or nothing; caught by Whitecoats with their needles and papers and cold eyes.
“Where we going?” comes out before I know it.
We ought to go back. We need to go back.
“Somewhere Safe,” she says, and I follow, trip-footed, after.
The buildings get bigger. They lose their pointed roofs and grow to three stories, five stories, up. They get plainer too: Red brick turns into brown or white and smooth, the kind it’d take months of polishing to get for one cavern wall, and then they start melting together in rows. The road beside us is wider: more cars noise by like the sound of coming trains, and more people. Don’t touch me, I think at them as they pass, chattering and weaving and heads upturned to the darkened sky. I can tell my breath’s coming fast.
You belong here, I tell myself over and over. You grew up here. You’re nothing else but Normal.
A lady with a rattling blue cart passes by, leaving a gap, a gasp in the crowd. I reach through it and take Ariel’s hand. It’s warm, dry. Mine is damp and it holds too tight.
She doesn’t shake me away.
The streets have quieted and narrowed and settled again when Ariel stops, squares her shoulders, and takes me up a rounded, sloping walk to the double doorway of a towering brown building. There’s washing hanging on the balconies, little hoards of goods and chairs stacked up those white box walls. Apartments, I think, holding tight to her hand. Atticus had an apartment once; people and peo
ple living stacked up like soup cans, locked together inside a giant kitchen cabinet.
Ari opens the glass door and slips inside a room smaller than Doctor Marybeth’s bathroom: nothing but glass doors both ahead and behind, dark tile, yellow bug-stained light. It smells musty, like smoke and old food.
I slip a hand in my pocket. Find my matches. Hold on.
There’s a button beside the second door: no, racks and racks of buttons, and names in a long list beside them. The light behind them hums and spits in the dark. I raise my eyebrows at Ariel and she just flicks her eyes over like I’m a kid who doesn’t know right from left. She runs one finger down the list, kissing-distance away.
“Ari?”
“Shh.”
She does it until someone comes in with their keys, looks over at us and away again, and lets himself through the heavy glass door.
Ari waits ’til he’s around the corner, then catches the door with her foot, quick as shadowfall. It lands loud and heavy on her shoe. I’ve known her long enough to catch the grimace.
“Ari —” I say. She doesn’t even need to shush me this time. She just looks.
A few heartbeats later she opens it and slips through the gap between door and dirty wall. She holds it open for me, impatient, sharp like I’ve never seen her. “C’mon,” she says through her teeth. She’s annoyed at me, and I don’t know why.
No; it’s for not following the rules. Not knowing the rules of this, of here. That ain’t fair, I want to say, but this isn’t the time and it’s not the place. I bite it down and follow into the soft, dim hallway.
We go up thin-carpeted stairs, seven flights that give under my shoes in a way so much more kind and even than the rubber tire and rock of the common. Ariel opens the thick metal door at the top real soft, and closes it even softer behind us. Leads me into a hall with dull green carpet, dull beige walls; doors and doors and doors. She goes up and down the hall twice, hands stuck into fists, lips trembling around some word I don’t know the shape for. Talking to herself. Talking to someone else.