by Leah Bobet
This time I don’t keep my eyes shut, drag it out, play my silly what-ifs about being Normal my own self. It’s been a whole day now. Long enough for shadows to cut, or break, or count up who’s gone missing.
So many things can happen in a day. And I’m responsible to Safe.
I claim the muggy bathroom once Ari’s done and wash under spitting, lukewarm water. The shower’s yellowed, streak-stained along the tiles, and the towel smells like other people’s skin. My clothes piled up on the bright white toilet lid are near-wet from the steam. Whisper would scold; damp rots cloth. I flip over my puddled jeans and stuff one hand in the pocket. The twenty-five dollars are still crisp and dry.
I let a breath out, and it comes out foggy. I put on my clothes.
I stop before the shirt goes on. There’s a big mirror in Beatrice’s bathroom, bigger than the one in Doctor Marybeth’s attic. I wipe the steam away with one hand and the wet, frayed towel; crane my neck over my shoulder to see.
I’ve only seen the scales once or twice. There aren’t mirrors bigger than a grown man’s hand in Safe. Whisper gifted me once with a picture from her precious camera, held to develop under the kitchen lights, but the mirror is clearer.
The scales are speckled black and a little silver on top of the brown hollows of my shoulders. They race down, layer on layer, halfway to my hips and stop. Trickle away.
And they shimmer. Iridescent.
Someone bangs on the door. “Come on!” I jump, yank the shirt on in three strong pulls, and head out to breakfast.
Beatrice’s people hunch six around their square plastic table with some left over and sitting on the floor, holding mumble-conversation in the way that means late nights, bad mornings, long duties. “Morning,” Bea says, and “This is Matthew.” They all turn around and look. A drip of water wends down my shoulder, chill and itchy. “They’re staying a few days.”
Ariel shrinks down in the mattress-mussed corner. Embarrassed of me, I think before I bite it back, imagining my measure with all these Normal Above people: some jump-up kid who can’t navigate one good street and weighs ’bout as much as a plastic bag, wet hair to wet hems of someone else’s jeans.
Still. Nobody says no.
There’s no coffee here, and no Doctor Marybeth telling us gentle where the toast and eggs are, but there’s a box of open cereal and mismatched dishes in cream-painted cupboards naked enough to beg for carving; a half-empty carton of milk in the fridge. I fill a bowl for me, one for Ari, and set them down on the floor with the others; runaways, maybe, ’cause they’re skinnier than me though just the same clean. The cereal crunches loud in the quiet.
“So what can you do?” asks a tall scar-lean boy out of nothing, and he’s looking at me.
“Ah,” I say. Look at Bea.
She shakes her head no.
“I carve,” I say, voice small and shy in my throat. Ariel’s knees draw up to her chest, her bowl to one side. The cereal looks soggy.
“Carve?”
Doors. Tales. The remembering that ends up in other people’s heads. “Wood.”
He bites off a smile that’s not smiling; a smile that warps all the lines of his face into a naked baring of teeth. “Great. Fucking artist.”
He ain’t looking at me. He’s looking at Ariel.
“Darren,” Bea snaps, and he turns away. The bite goes out of the air with a little sigh. “That’s fine. Matthew can go out on bottles with Cat tonight.”
Duty. My shoulders ease down. I know how to do duty roster to earn my bed and board, and there’s a long time between morning and tonight, time to visit four safehouses if we’re quick and careful about it. “What’s bottles?”
“Getting bottles from the dumpsters to return for deposit,” says a little girl who must be Cat. She’s curly-haired like Seed — smashed-horns, shadow-foot raising up to kick again. “It’s only good on weekends, ’round the university. Rest of the time s’all picked over.”
Her hair’s black as the night sky Above, and her eyes too. But she gives me a smile that puts lines at the corners of her eyes.
“Chick duty,” Darren puts in, watching Ari again, cool and flat. “Fag duty,” and then Ariel’s on her feet with a rush of air. She crosses the room in three quick steps and tangles her fist in the front of his shirt, long pale fingers curling like stingers in the fabric, up against his throat. I’m the only one behind her. I’m the only one who sees it: the second when his face goes limp and scared.
Nobody moves.
“Babe,” Bea says, low.
“Don’t even,” is all Ari says, and stomps away into the bathroom.
Underneath her shirt writhe stillborn baby wings.
She don’t come out until they’re all gone, a subdued blob of leather and broken-laced sneakers, and us left with instructions to not open the door for nobody. She waits five minutes for the quiet to settle in and then turns the brassy bathroom knob. It creaks loud enough to set me jumping.
She presses plucked-out baby wings in my open hand and stalks into the corner kitchen without a word.
“What was that?” I ask. We’ve lost half an hour of good searching time already. No time to argue right now, but I can’t, I can’t have her run.
“You never asked me to touch them,” she says, every word snipped short.
It takes me a second to realize: my scales. Bea’s hand on my back, and Sanctuary. Ariel’s never really mad about what you think it is. I move, but she won’t meet my eye. She stares at the dangled-open kitchen cabinets for a few long seconds, and then slams them shut.
I close my hand around the tiny wings and they crumple.
“You never asked me to touch your wings,” I say back, soft and even.
“Don’t talk to people about your back,” she says, her voice thin and strange again: Don’t you know what happens —
“It’s my back,” I snap, even though she’s right.
“Then don’t talk to people ’bout my wings,” she replies, and goes into the bedroom with her shoulders round and tunnel-hunched.
I tidy up the kitchen while she does whatever in the bedroom. The faucet’s jerky here; one long crowbar-handled knob not labeled blue or red. I yank it until the water gets warm, never finger-wrinkle hot. The plastic plates clack in the draining board and drown out the noise of Ariel moving. All the while I’m biting my lip against the memory of fifteen hundred kitchen duties full of cold-water scrubbing: not enough cloth to dry, company to keep your hands from chapping cold; someone telling a Tale or a bit of music while we worked. Here there’s nobody to tell the Tale to, nobody to listen, and when I raise my voice to sing the first lines of “Frère Jacques” like my ma sang to me as a little baby, they come out thin and wrong.
When there’s no more dishes or excuses, I nudge open the bedroom door. She’s sitting on a mattress under a wall piled with posters, back to me, hair across her face like wings.
“I’m sorry,” I say. A hand maybe twitches. “She already knew.” She shifts on the mattress. The tangle of blankets, red and blue and faded no-color, is shoved against the wall. A pillow hangs from the mess like a stained, dead hand. I sit down on the one chair, a busted one shoved beside a cobbled-together desk covered in half-empty mugs and bald capless pens. The metal seat squeaks with give. “Ari, why’d you grab him?”
“He doesn’t like me,” she mutters, and plaits her fingers together.
“Why?” But she just shakes her head, shakes it off once more. Like Jack. Like running. Like everything.
I almost ask her what her favorite color is.
“We’ve gotta go. We’ve only got ’til dark to find everybody else,” I say. “They’ll know what happened. We can make some kind of plan.”
Ariel stops fidgeting. Her face has gone pale as the light on my first night ever Above. “Why us?” she asks, trying to make it sound not scared. “Why not Whisper and —”
“’Cause we’re sworn to uphold Safe. We’re responsible,” I say, ’round the ache in my throat.
Her eyes go big. “That’s not fair,” she nearly chokes. “That wasn’t my fault,” and I don’t know what the hell I said by accident, ’cause that sure ain’t the thing I said on purpose. And then — oh.
“You think it followed us home.” I still can’t say it. I still can’t say the name.
“You don’t know that.” She’s still as a dead thing.
“It asked us Safe things,” I stand too fast and the chair creaks like it’s dying. My face is hot. It makes sense, terrible sense. This is all my fault, and hers. “It asked us, and I told, and it knew our names —”
“It wasn’t you,” she says so forceful that I step back into the chair, half-thinking I might find her hands in my shirt-collar. She sees it somehow and backs down; falls into herself like her own shriveling wings. How many times can she grow them in a day? How much upset and panic and fear before the skin over her spine goes raw, chaps from mad, starts bleeding? “It wasn’t you,” she says again, and wipes her nose sharp on the back of one hand.
“What then?” I ask. “What do we do?”
“We’re here now,” Ariel says, dismayed and red-eyed and unlovely. “There’s no monsters here. We don’t have to go back.”
My breath catches.
I ease forward. I step slow and careful, and push in the chair with a little lift so as to not scratch Bea’s scuffy floor. My hands linger on the metal rods of the chair for a long time, until I can peel them out of fists.
“Yes, we do,” I say hard and even, and walk into the big room, grab my shoes. One lace knotted up, two. My voice is shaking. My hands are shaking. “That is my home. People could be dead.”
“Matthew?” she says, shocked, small. Tiny. “Teller?”
She never calls me that.
“Matthew, please —” and her hand’s on my arm, tugging, light and useless. I turn around, ready to shake it off me. “When was the first time you saw the sky?”
She brings me up short with that, short enough that my hands forget all about being mad. “My first supply duty.” I’ve told her this story before, singsong in the drip-rustle nights of Safe, to bring us both to sleep. It’s my favorite of all the Tales, because the first supply duty leads to the second, and that’s when I find my beautiful Ariel. “A year past. It was cold. And I thought no wonder people were so cruel up here, if the wind bit your bones all day and the sky stared you down into nothing with stars.”
My eyes’ve slid shut. I open them after a minute of watching the stars glow behind my eyelids, and she’s still watching me.
“You wouldn’t miss it if you never saw it again.”
The wind rattles the leaves on the trees outside. It’s nothing at all like pipe-music. I think about it.
“No,” I admit.
“Well, I like the sky,” Ariel says, eyes pleading, sharp, important. “I need it.”
“I’d be your sky.”
It just slips out, quiet in the dark on soft-shoe feet. I put my hand up to my mouth, but it’s too late, and Ariel’s looking at me steady and keen like she’d never been close to weeping just five minutes before.
She looks at me and it’s sad like Whisper’s sad.
For the first time under daylight, the first time it’d ever count, I feel a hot and ugly blush come up like a blister.
And I run.
Through the door and down the hall, down the stairs to the ground, and I don’t wait to see if she follows. I can’t turn back, can’t look her in the face now, not like that. I push through the button-studded doorway, shouldering past a lady with a laundry basket filling up both arms who calls me a word I don’t know as I push the outside door open and let it swing free. The sun is hot and bright outside. It stings my face, my eyes.
That sadness cut hard enough when it wasn’t on my Ariel’s face.
I pause at the end of the walk and look right, look left. I don’t know where I am. I don’t know where I’m going, but I’ve got to get away. Somewhere I don’t have to look her in the eye, or Whisper, or Jack, and see that hateful faraway sick-sweet sad face.
Somewhere Safe? snips a little voice in the back of my head, and all my angry shame turns sour.
I’m being selfish. Thinking of nothing but my own little hurts, and I made a promise to keep Safe.
People could be dead, Matthew, I tell myself savage, and bite my lip ’til it’s sore. I can find them. There’s more than one way to find a thing. There are ways that’re dangerous, that could get you locked behind sharp metal doors.
This is an emergency.
I start walking.
The shelter that Atticus deemed a safehouse is at Queen Street and Bathurst — Queenand Bathurst Queenand Bathurst he would make us repeat when we first trained to go Above. I know the way there from two sewer caps and the big food store where we steal most of our tinned goods.
I don’t know the way from Beatrice’s place, from no-man’s-land. But I’m the Teller, and I can Pass.
Here’s Whisper’s other lesson: that even if people Above are monsters, they will point you on your way if you smile and meet their eye. So I do my best to look young and nothing-special and Normal, and I tilt my head and look them in the eye, bustling ’round ladies and kids waving fat chalk and men with no shirts on. They point and say east or south, and though I don’t know from east or south I thank them and make careful, meticulous, my way. I watch the street signs and tell myself Queenand Bathurst.
I walk with my shoulders down, watching feet, dodging the swift snips of music that leak on cool air out of the stores. After the first hour or two or year — who knows without clocks? — I can almost pretend I’m not upset anymore, can almost unsee the way her eyes went soft and shut and sad, but conversations still quiet as I go by: a different hush than the one that screams out Freak. I don’t know how I look to make that so.
Selfish, I remind myself, and pinch the side of my leg. And instead I dredge up everything I know ’bout Corner.
Corner met Atticus, Corner of the bloodtouch hands, in the Whitecoats’ house on the hill. The ghosts loved it for its weeping, loved it for the way its hands touched through walls, clothes, flesh.
Atticus stood before Corner like a shield, and Corner took that protection gladly.
After that there aren’t really Tales about Corner. Corner founded Safe with Atticus, and Corner took care and gave Sanctuary with Atticus up until the year I was seven years old and they found Jonah struck dead in the tunnels, and then Atticus didn’t give Sanctuary to Corner and called Corner Killer instead of its right name. My pa hid me behind his pant leg when they closed the big door against it. And then nobody told Tales about Corner.
(And here I catch the sign that says Queen Street West and mark the corner; turn.)
There’s nothing in that little Tale to help me; nothing that’ll tell me why Corner would come with swoops and waves of shadows and speak sweet and sad to Atticus, and then put a knife square center in his throat. Keeping histories is as much about knowing what needs forgetting as what ought to be remembered, and Corner’s been forgot.
Maybe that shouldn’t have been so.
The shelter at Queen and Bathurst is huge: swooping brown brick with an iron gate, and I don’t know if it’s a gate to keep bad things out or the kind to keep you locked in. A couple men are spread out on the steps, wrapped in layers of dirty shirts and the four-day beard I can’t even grow in twenty. They watch everyone passing with bright rat eyes, eyes that go bite or run away? I keep good and wide of them as I go up the steps to the door.
You can’t just walk into a shelter. They got rules about in and out Above, and a frowning someone behind a desk to enforce them. This someone’s a wrinkle-faced man who sits crooked on a dim orange rolling chair, making faces at the papers on his desk like they hurt him. The walls are grey, but they’re hung all over color; blankets and weavings like Doctor Marybeth has in her house. I wonder, quick, if it was her who found this place for Safe. If I stayed long enough, patient and quiet and Normal, wou
ld she come to fetch me back?
“Can I help you?” says the man behind the desk in a voice rough like first-cut carving.
“I’m looking for someone,” I say; stumble, more like. “My cousin.” Cousin’s good. Cousin could be girl or boy, young or old.
He peers down at me through thick glasses. The scratches on them glint in the sharp, flickering, Salvation Army lights. “I’m sorry, son. You can’t just wander in here.” He don’t sound sorry in the least.
I remember the metal of that gate, and the lock.
“You don’t understand,” I say, trying to sound young and small. I’ve got to Pass good. Mack could be in here, or Scar; Violet or Hide or Chrys, scared and waiting to be found — “They’re Sick.”
That ain’t no good argument here. Here Sick’s a thing to fear, to avoid and lock away. That’s an argument for Safe, and I’m botching this up, and then I have to turn my head away so this Whitecoat man doesn’t see my throat go all thick with failure.
He stands. I take a step back, brace my leg unthinking to give a punch or take one or run, but the look on his face ain’t punching, and it ain’t rats. He drags his own leg a little, limping ’round the desk. “Come on, now. No need for that,” he says oddly, and while my mouth’s still hanging open, he opens a stained brown door and lets me inside.
The shelter for homeless people is two dirty tile steps down into a big room set with folding chairs, spindly tables, and couches in different colors along the corners. There are posters on the walls, not pictures like in Bea’s place but cramped writing: warnings and signs and rules. A slow fan turns lazy on the ceiling, making a breeze that’s only halfway there. And everywhere there’s people: young and old, dirty like Safe-people, tired-looking ’round the shoulders and sunburnt and grave. Some turn to look at me, mid-wise the rows of white-top tables. Some don’t, huddled over food or drink, talking to each other or curled into themselves. I look around. Walk the rows, the Above man behind me every other step; hoping and hoping as I turn every corner.