Above

by Leah Bobet

  Who were you talking to? my mouth shapes, but no. Not now.

  A little hump grows under the back of her shirt, and then she shakes herself, shakes it and my hand off her pale little arm and knocks, three knocks on one of the plain brown doors.

  There’s a shuffle, a mutter. The lock clicks from somewhere inside.

  When it opens it’s a girl with red hair, a deep fake-color red all standing up straight from the middle of her shaved-sides head. Her skin’s almost Freak-thin, pale enough to see the blue, tired veins under her dark eyes. One hand’s in her pocket. Where people keep their matches.

  Her eyes don’t look like Safe.

  There’s no brand at my shoulder. I don’t have fire. Get behind me, I want to say, let me handle this, but I don’t know what I’m handling, and the words stick like cold toast in my throat.

  The girl doesn’t look at me. She looks at Ariel, and her face is smooth and hard as crab shell.

  “Bee,” I think I hear Ariel say, blurry and small.

  “Hey, baby,” the girl says and takes that hand out of her pocket, rubs it tired along her skinny, nubbly scalp. “Welcome home.”

  WHISPER’S TALE

  Whisper always whispered. From when she was small.

  There were ghosts living (well, not living, she laughed) in the attic of her old redbrick house, and they toppled the umbrella stand, stole the silverware, kicked the pipes, and gossiped when she slept. Whisper’s mama cried and carried on and got a prescription for female troubles. Whisper’s papa denied he heard any such thing, but he spent most of his day at The Company and slept like a dead body himself. Whisper’s big sister got quiet and grave and talked lots about windspeeds and coincidence. Whisper was little, and Whisper heard voices. So Whisper whispered back.

  The ghosts (she said, and smiled so her wrinkles folded and stretched) didn’t expect any of that. They stopped their rattling, paused mid-kick, plucked air instead of pinches under the bedsheets at night. “I’ll send you to bed without supper,” Whisper scolded them, the worst punishment she knew, and after a month of prospector’s silence they whispered back.

  It was okay when she was a child. Little girls with imaginary friends were little girls who didn’t need to be minded. When she was too old for dolls, she would sit with the phone to her ear for hours, and her sister and mother made suffering faces and let her talk to the air. But once she finished school and all her girlfriends were Missus Something, whispering got hard.

  There were ghosts in the trees and ghosts in the alleys, but the shiny new apartments built for respectable young women did not have any ghosts, and the ghosts who were her best friends were firm about not leaving. Ghosts can be strong about their places (she told me) and sometimes don’t even quit ’em when the house goes down. So she stayed in the old attic room, and that was what made the trouble.

  There were no young men, you see. Young men weren’t much conversation after years and years of ghosts, who swore and laughed and told you dark true things (and I begged Whisper to tell me the dark true things, but she only smiled a little sad smile and shook her head). Whisper’s father thought there ought to be young men; there comes a time (Whisper said, and the lines came out sharp in her face even by lamplight) when respectable young women need to be out of their fathers’ houses for the good of all involved. He introduced her to the sons of neighbors and bought her tickets to community center dances and even had words with the shy young banker down the street.

  So when he walked by her attic door that last night, he thought it was young men.

  He beat the door open roaring, his face red like gunfire and fists ready for whatever young man his grown-up daughter was whispering to in that giggling, singsong voice. But it wasn’t no young man, and fathers can’t see the ghosts in the walls.

  Whisper’s father brought in the same doctor who had helped her ma with the female trouble. The doctor sat Whisper in his office, took her pulse and made her breathe into a tube, asked her about her dreams and whether she had boyfriends, and pronounced her Sick.

  They sent her to the hospital that same morning.

  Whisper was part of General Population: That meant that she was Sick, but not scary or a Freak or someone who couldn’t be let out of her room. In General Population there were other Sick girls. They talked to walls too, except for her roommate, who didn’t talk at all, but pointed to stray sentences in books and newspapers to ask you for the salt. They told her about midnight visits from angels and colors shifting bright inside the potted plants.

  No, said the ghosts, who had heard of Whisper through a chain of whispering that stretched from her attic to the hospital in the park. We don’t think those things are really there.

  She met with the doctors twice a week. They didn’t think the ghosts were really there. This made her wonder about the angel lovers.

  “Go look,” she whispered to the ghosts of Lakeshore Psychiatric, singsong in the group shower where the guard watched to make sure you didn’t fight or slit your wrists. “Find me out what’s going on, and maybe we’ll know what’s real.”

  The ghosts of the hospital were prone to making fuss. They had died in all the worst ways: hanging themselves in their Isolation cells, wasting away from turning down food, or under the electrodes on the shock table, back when they still shocked Freaks with lightning to see if it’d shock them right out of their Freakness. They sniffed out the blood and misery and to it they went, out of General Population to the Isolation ward.

  There’s a man there with crab claws for arms, they told Whisper when she was nose-deep in her roommate’s copy of Ivanhoe. She chuckled and shook her head: They must be putting her on.

  There’s a thing that can reach and touch skin through the walls, they murmured during her doctor appointments, distracting her from playing firm and sensible with the doctors. That was clearly silly. Nobody could touch through walls, and the walls in Isolation, the ghosts delightedly informed her, were made of stone, cold and thick.

  After months and months in General Population, where Whisper’s doctors told her there were no ghosts and the ghosts told her there were no angels and she smiled her half smile at all of them and treated them just the same, the ghosts came to her in the middle of the night: There’s a little squaw girl doctor reading to the Freaks. “Language,” she told the ghosts out loud, loud enough that her roommate tossed and flounced a pillow over her ears.

  The one who touches through the walls is listening, quiet quiet, and it weeps. The ghosts held their hands up to their chins praying, ’cause they threw their whole hearts behind anything that wept, and that’s when Whisper knew that they were telling true.

  There’s folks here odder than me, she thought, and dark true things rolled about in her head, and (she told me, smiling wry) there was not a little of her that was bored stiff of doctors and quiet and pretending.

  So she started trying to get into Isolation.

  It wasn’t as easy as you’d think. The nurses were always threatening it when the girls in General were bad and the doctors weren’t around to hear. Whisper threw all the pillows around in the common room and shouted at the top of her lungs. She spat on the floor and paced and fussed. All this bought her were trips to the Quiet Room. In Whisper’s doctor session that week, he asked why she was acting out.

  “You’re normally so well-behaved,” he said. He was mild, like her father.

  “I’m not going to make it,” she told the ghosts, knees drawn up in her narrow bed at night. They shook their delicate heads. They thought you had to be crazy to want to be in Isolation in the first place.

  Gotta hit someone, one said, proud. Bite ’em. Piss on the walls.

  Whisper was a little woman. She made a little fist. It looked soft. “I certainly will not.”

  Her roommate muttered something; made soft kiss-noises in her sleep.

  Then you’re not goin’ to Isolation, said the ghost.

  That’s okay, said another. I think Isolation’s comin’ to you.
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  Whisper slid her legs out of bed and tiptoed out into the hall. The nurse was at the other end of the ward, by the door: There was only so much trouble General Population could make inside the stacked walls of its little world. On the other side of the wall there was a shuffling. A moving of feet.

  “Oh,” Whisper said, and the opposite door opened.

  The man on the other side wasn’t a hitter or biter. He was lean and messy-haired and tall, and there was a trickle of light burning in his eyes that wasn’t light reflected. It blinded her enough that she couldn’t see the face of the even skinnier person behind him.

  (I held my breath at this part. I closed my eyes.)

  “You’re the man with the crab claws for arms,” she said.

  Atticus’s eyes — because of course it was Atticus, young and less muscled and shielding a straight-hipped young slouching thing with his thick arm — went dull matchbox red, and “Who’re you? Who’s told you ’bout me?” he asked.

  “The ghosts,” Whisper said, and he gave her that look like she was talking about midnight angels.

  Those claws can cut locks, Whisper’s ghosts whispered. The other could touch through walls, and put the nurses to sleep. You should think about it.

  She tilted her head. She thought about it.

  “Do you want to know the way outside or not?” she asked Atticus, and the ghosts plucked at his hair and pinched the crooks of his strange hard arms.

  He blinked; spotlights fading. “Yes,” he said after a minute. “All right,” and Whisper smiled.

  “All right,” she said. “Let me just get my roommate.”

  Whisper’s coming and going had woken her roommate up. She opened one eye and looked up all reproachful, and said (which was rare, even when it was too dark for books), “Are-are-are you gonna be quiet now?”

  “No,” Whisper said, and pulled her camera from the bedside drawer; the photo of her mama and sister and her from its frame. “Violet, we’re leaving.”

  The ghosts of the hospital led them, tumbling and giggling, through the grey service corridors and dusty, closed halls. They led them past the men’s unit where Scar lived and joined with them; tiptoed through the offices to a window that could be broken. Through it, one by one, they tumbled into the night.

  What’s the moral of the story? Whisper asked when she told me this, and smiled a little at how I sat up surprised.

  The moral of the story? I asked her, and she nodded. That that’s what’s wrong with Above, that even your own pa would betray you?

  Whisper’s smile went funny, and she shook her head. That’s Atticus’s lesson, she said, and before I could talk again: The moral of the story is to always keep something up your sleeve. Especially when you don’t think you need it.

  Ariel’s friend is named Beatrice. She tells me so once Ariel’s asleep, curled up on a broken-backed old mattress under an emergency blanket that didn’t start out grey. There’s a pile of other kids in the bedroom, roused awake by us coming in and back to bed inside fifteen minutes. I can’t count how many; they’re all limbs, and my eyes are aching.

  Beatrice closes the bedroom door almost all the way — just left a little open — and settles down on the cold wood floor, cross-legged, once Ariel’s asleep. I sit across from her and wait ’til I’m spoken to. She’s tall and walks quiet — heel-toe like she was taught it by Mack his own self — and thin around the wrists, but she’s got eyes as cool and bright as Atticus’s could ever be.

  “You don’t look like a runaway,” she says after a minute, and the way she says it lets me know all at once what kind of place this is. Low and soft and edgeless. Making Safe.

  This ain’t the one that hurt my Ariel.

  “M’not,” I say, and keep my eyes down in deference. Are so, my head rebuts. I was with Whisper and Jack in a safe place and warm, and I ran. And I was with everyone who raised me up from ten, all of them getting hurt or killed or taken, and —

  Okay. I ran away.

  “What’s a runaway look like?” I ask, because even when Atticus was cool and bright and sizing you up for something harsh like ten days of latrine duty, he never turned away a real question.

  “Looks like a smart mouth.” There’s an edge to it, but I don’t think she’s mad: Her head’s tilted back a little, not low like someone looking for a fight. “You’re not hungry ’nuff. And you’re way too clean.”

  I am. I can still smell Doctor Marybeth’s sweet white soap on me, under a full day’s sweat and tired and fear. And under that, edged and hiding, the hint of dead blood on my fingers.

  I don’t feel clean at all.

  “We got rules around here,” she says. Rubs her head again, but it ain’t distracted. She hasn’t stopped watching me for one second. “I don’t let in just anybody.”

  “You let in Ariel,” I say before thinking, and the quiet is hard as bright red light on wood.

  “She’s Sick,” I say to break it. My fingers twitch for a hospital bracelet to hold up, to dangle dirty between my fingers. I shove my hands in Doctor Marybeth’s jeans’ pockets and keep still.

  Beatrice looks me over again, taking the measure of me this time. “It’s good you get that,” she says carefully.

  I nod my head, feeling all of a sudden like I don’t get it at all.

  “So. Convince me I oughta let you two stay here,” she says, and leans back against the wall.

  Ariel rustles on the mattress. Turning over, blanket drawn tight. If not, the Whitecoats’ll get us, I think. The shadows’ll get us. I don’t know where I am, and whoever’s caught in the safehouses dead or scared or bleeding will starve from waiting and there’ll never be a Safe to keep again. None of that’s reasons. None of it means anything to Normal people Above.

  I swallow dry, and then I get what she’s asking for. I can Pass, but I’m also the Teller, and I can Tell like nobody.

  “There’s a place for people like Ari and me,” I Tell her, seeing it in carvings, seeing it in paint. “There’s a secret place hidden away that my ma and pa and the other ones who were Freaks went to live in, and it’s been invaded by trouble.”

  “Where?” she asks, not at all believing, hard through and through like a girl made of bone.

  “I can’t say. I can’t. It’s gotta be a secret to stay Safe.”

  The corners of her mouth go down. “Bullshit.”

  “It’s not,” I say. And against the wind and road-noises and mutter of people dreaming, I Tell in Atticus’s cadences the story of the going down to Safe: Once upon a time there were four half-young people who were Freak and Sick and hated, and they went down and made a place for their own. I Tell it in his voice: the version painted-over, scratched-out. There’s no Corner in Atticus’s story; a hole he steps over, a blank place nobody reaches to touch. I leave it out.

  I think she thinks I’m Sick. I know she thinks I’m Sick because she leans back wary, every muscle hips to crown, and then she asks me, “So what’s your problem?”

  The air vent in the wall hisses. Someone says something in the bedroom, to ghosts or air or nobody. I know every betrayal in the history of Safe: the way Whisper’s hands flutter when she talks about her pa and Atticus’s claws quiver as the needles go in and how Violet don’t talk at all when it comes to the part where her lover called them in to take her away. She couldn’t scream, she said. They stuck her full of needle-juice and took away her screams.

  You can’t trust people Above. People Above are monsters.

  I take a deep breath. “You didn’t send her away,” I say.

  She didn’t.

  On Sanctuary Night the Cursed show their scars. My pa went without shoes on Sanctuary Night, and my ma let down her soft-wrapped scarf. Safe shows one and all their Curses, and Atticus looks on it and takes your pledge to the rest of us and lays one claw on your head and gives you Sanctuary.

  I take off my shirt and shoes.

  Here’s the scales that run down my back, along the spine. I take her hand and have her touch them
, the rough where they’re scraped away, the slick where they’re new come in; flicking bits of armor that don’t prickle cold like my arms and chest. Her fingers through them are blunted and mute. Here’s the claws, thick and dull, warping my toes but not my fingers. I clip them with old shears when they come in too long. They’re better than my pa’s. His were padded and bone-bent; his feet ached in the cold. I take her hand. I make her feel.

  “I can Tell, and I can Pass,” I tell her. “My ma had gills and my pa lion’s feet, and ’cause of them Doctor Marybeth says I’ll die young and leave no children behind.”

  That’s what my problem is. That’s my Curse.

  I bend my head, and wait.

  “What are you asking for here?” she says after a long time, while Ariel shifts in sleep that I don’t think’s really sleep no more, ’cause Ariel is cannier than to let me and her Bea alone. I lift up my head and look Bea straight in the eye, make her look at my Normal not–Freak person eyes.

  “Sanctuary.”

  “Why?” Her voice shakes and shudders.

  “You didn’t send her away.”

  (Ariel does not stir. She stays small and still and quiet.)

  “You saw wings, didn’t you?” I ask. “Tall brittle bee’s-wings, tall as a girl. Translucent. Iridescent.”

  She looks away. She nods her head.

  “Okay,” she says. “Okay. Just a few nights.”

  There are shadows in the edges of my dreams. There are shadows that I don’t know if I just took from some Tale, because Tales are my talent if fish-scales and lion-toes and a short, small life is my Curse. They whisper through the night, echo-words I don’t know the names of, between the noise of breaking glass and breaking hearts and the snap of muscle, of bone, all down into morning.

  I wake to the bang of a bathroom door and footsteps in the kitchen; bundles of tangled clothes lugged back and forth. It’s morning in Doctor Marybeth’s house, morning in Safe: the move down to the latrines and the smell of oatmeal, toast, tea. Except the people washing and yawning here are all soft and perfect, two arms two legs one head and all the toes. Straight long skin-and-nails toes. Normal. It’s Normal-people morning again.