by Leah Bobet
Already too long.
Ariel bites her lip. I can see the why? in her eyes, though she’s afraid to ask it; afraid I’ll walk out again and break the delicate thing between us last night: my hand on the edge of her wingtip. Her head on my shoulder.
But I can’t shake remembering the morning before it, and that sad, dry look on her face.
“I found the Whitecoat place,” I tell her. “It’s all broken up with shadows.” And I tell her my Tale of yesterday: empty safehouses, too-full tunnels, shadows running hop-skip through the dark calling and hollering my name.
Her hands go still like dead things, sink into her lap. She knows what that place is. I told her our Tales every night to let her sleep without screaming, to help her love the people who raised me up from a child. I don’t know that it worked. But she knows all the Tales, beginning to end.
“We can’t go in there alone. We’ve got to find Whisper,” I finish.
“We can’t,” she says, sharp and immediate this time, and I see the scared in her eyes for a full second before she gets the chance to look away.
“What d’you mean? What’d happen?” I ask.
She’s quiet for a moment, quiet like empty houses. “He won’t let me back out if I go there,” she says, and I know right away she means Jack. Someone opened the door, he said, and the burn of lightning in his eyes was the same as when she stung him, when she ran. The terrible words he said.
She’s right. He wouldn’t.
“Ari,” I say, cool and soft and careful. “I think you better tell me why you were fighting.”
She shifts under the blanket, just a titch. “He thinks I was talking to them,” she says, toneless. “So he thinks I opened the door.”
She doesn’t need to say who them is: shadows, who could melt down a drainpipe, into a desk drawer, slink away. All of I sudden I realize what was so bad yesterday morning about responsible.
“Jack didn’t say that —”
“I’m not stupid,” she snaps, and when she turns around her eyes are huge and hollow. A cornered thing. “I know what he thinks.”
I let out my breath. She never yelled at me before we came Above either.
“We’ll just explain it,” I say, and it sounds weak. “We’ll tell him true what it was.”
She just looks at me. She don’t say a word. The sound of rustling bodies whispers out from the shut bedroom door.
“Who were you talking to?” I finally ask.
Her mouth curls up into a smile that’s no smile at all, something dead and bitter. “Myself,” she says, and her little mouth quivers and firms. “Nobody.”
And then the bedroom door opens and spits the first of Beatrice’s sworn out, foot-drag stumbling across the scuffed wood floors like a night of shadow dreams. It’s the lean one — Darren. He’s too tired to be hard-faced this morning, even when Ariel gives him a dirty, dirty eye. He just looks at us, hunched-up and blurry, and shuts the bathroom door behind him.
Ariel lets a breath out and seals her lips tight behind it, staring at the crack in that door, where sound travels clean and clear.
What do you mean nobody? I want to ask, my hands open-closing; I want to ask if Darren’s the one who broke her apart, sent her down into the tunnels to shake like something dying. But she won’t tell me nothing with other ears listening in. I know there’ll be no answer.
So later, when Beatrice is taking out the trash, I pick up two fat bags and follow her, fixing for a few moments alone. Ariel’s lips go even thinner as she shuts the door behind us.
“What happened?” I ask Beatrice, walking down the stairs with her to the dumpsters out behind.
“Mm?” she goes. Her black boots sound thunk against the steps, squeaking where there’s no carpet laid down.
“Between Ari and Darren.”
A corner of her mouth tucks in all ladylike, like a sheet out of place or a mussed-up hair. “Fight,” she says, and rounds the corner with a sigh. Fourth floor says the scratched-up sign on the wall. “Not serious. I’d’ve kicked his ass out if he touched her.”
Named him Killer, I fill in and nod, the knots working out of my restless hands. There’s no fighting in Safe either, not with fists. Atticus wouldn’t have it.
“It went down … two weeks before she left? They had a real goddamn screaming match, and he wouldn’t tell me what the hell he’d said,” and the tidy corners go down, down. “That’s when I saw it,” she says, softer. Looking away from me, at the smudges and burns and scars on the brown plastic rail.
“That’s when you saw her change,” I say, because I know that look from Tales, the kind where people stare five feet into the distance for the Telling and you need to help to Tell them, like a hand light on the curve of the back.
She stops. Scuffs her boot on the landing. There are grey embroidered skulls listing along the ankle, gazing out hollow-eyed and grinning at the chip-paint walls. “She kept going at him,” Bea whispers. “I thought she was gonna kill him. And he was swatting and I didn’t know if he was gonna kill her either.”
“What’d you do?” I ask gentle.
“Opened the window.” She bows her head. Scuffs one more time, hard enough to leave a streak of black on the sticky plastic tile. “She booted it.”
I lean back a moment, close my eyes. “You did the right thing.”
“I should have stopped her,” Bea mutters.
“The best thing to do is let her go.” Light-shapes swirl and flutter inside my eyes. Inside them I don’t sound like myself. Older. Hollow. “She always comes back.”
She’s quiet so long I open my eyes up and look at her, and she’s watching me funny, watching with that curious sad look on her face that Whisper gets sometimes talking ’bout Atticus in the old days. About Ariel in the now. “She didn’t come back.”
“No,” I say after a second, and look down at my old-new sneakers. “She came down to Safe.”
She starts walking again. I walk beside her.
“There’s a house on the hill,” I say. “A big redbrick house in a park, with boards over the windows.”
“The asylum,” she says and rattles her hand along the metal stairway bars. I nod. Asylum, in books, means Sanctuary. Above it means Sanctuary too, because Above, knowing enough about asylum to tell the difference between the two is something to fear. But it’s not Sanctuary; it’s everything good in Sanctuary turned ’round hard and bad.
Beatrice shifts her feet, back-forth, back-forth. “Shouldn’t go there. It’s a squat. People disappear.”
I don’t know what a squat is. But I won’t be asking now, with don’t and shouldn’t and oughtn’t being pushed about. “Disappear how?”
She waves a hand in the air, explodes the fingers out like smoke, like flames going out. “Poof.”
Poof, I think, and swallow.
We’re five steps out the back door when I feel the first pinch.
I drop the garbage bags hard, go knees-bent and wary, hand in my pocket for matches. But there’s no voice, no shadows or whispers, and the smell’s green-cut lawn, not sewers. Two breaths go by. I stoop over and pick the bags back up.
Nobody cuts me throat to belly.
“You okay?” Bea is three steps ahead, her forehead crinkled and watchful again. Sick. Freak.
I let out a breath. I’ve not slept enough, not by half. “Yeah. Just — I felt something,” and that just makes it look wronger yet. The crinkles don’t go away.
When the second pluck comes at my sleeve, I bite hard to keep in the scream. I look around, beside, behind, but nobody’s between me and the door, me and Beatrice, me and the fence she’s edging around. Green grass turns to grey concrete ’round back of the building, and Beatrice opens the first garbage bin with a clang.
The place where my sleeve pulled is burning, cold and —
— pinches under the bedsheets at night —
— familiar.
“Ghosts?” I whisper under the clatter of Beatrice’s garbage landing in the bins. H
old my breath for a long second, under the buzz of flies and a brown bird singing, sharp and harsh, on the fencepost.
The nothing tugs at my arm again. Three, then two. The signal for Safe people come knocking.
My stomach goes tight — Safe people, dead and head-smashed-in and ghosty — and then I think, slow down; no. That doesn’t for sure mean they’re dead. It’s Whisper. Whisper’s sent them for me.
It worked.
Bea tosses the last bag into the blue bin and closes the lid with a clang. “You coming bottling tonight?” she asks turning, dusts her hands on her pants.
I nod. Chill small hands are prying into mine, between my fingers. Yanking. “There’s something I gotta do first.”
“Your people,” Beatrice says, carefully.
I flush bright red and nod. I’ve never been good at hiding things. It’s not a skill a Teller ought to need, Reynard used to say, back when he was Teller and I was young, as if maybe he had some notion of what would eventually come to pass. But there’s no harm in admitting it. Not if she already knows. “I’ll be back before dark.”
“All right,” she says, and jerks her chin up sharp in a way I guess is meant to be good-bye. She walks ’bout twice as fast going back to the door; much faster than we managed coming down.
The chill hand tightens ’bout my own.
“I have to get Ari,” I whisper under my breath to whoever — whatever — Whisper’s sent the second Bea is out of earshot. The cold gets deep and scowling. Tug tug on my fingers, my pant legs, my hair. “It’ll just be a second.”
The shove comes from nowhere. It nearly takes me off my feet.
Now.
I glance up at the window where Ariel is as they drag me to the curb. It’ll be all right. I can find Whisper, sort it out with her and Jack so there won’t be another fight.
I can come back for her.
“Hey,” I call after Bea; “Hey! Tell Ari I’ll be back before dark?” Bea pauses in the doorway, holds a thumbs-up high.
She’ll be safe here. Just for a little.
I flip a little wave at Bea, an Above-smile that’s fake as fake. Invisible fingers tug my sleeves, shove my back forward, come on, come on. My heart’s going like a subway train, and I understand for the first time, real down deep, why Whisper’s pa and the Whitecoats and the girls in General Population were so sore scared of ghosts.
I follow them down the walk and into the empty street. Away from my Ariel, to the people who raised me from ten; who I left, selfish, high and dry.
When’d you learn running, Teller? asks the little voice in my head, and I wish it was a person so I could snarl at it.
It’s a full hour walking and trying not to trip, ducking ’round Above-people and stoplights and trying to keep the turns before I realize where the ghosts are taking me.
Lakeshore Psychiatric.
Whisper’s waiting.
“They told me,” she says simple, leaned back ’gainst the black fence that keeps the Whitecoat place from the world.
The ghost-hands light away, shiver off me like bee’s-wing. “M’sorry,” I say, and stuff hands in my pockets. My mouth tastes foul, and I’m all over sweaty.
She don’t answer; don’t say when’d you learn running, runaway boy? And I can’t take a thing from her face, blocked as it is by the angry noon sunlight. “I taught you better Passing than to lose your way Above,” she finally says, and sits down on a knocked-down newspaper box, shoulder bag sagging and skirts spread like a lady. Now that she’s sitting down, I can see her face: like a Society lady, as always. Perfectly composed.
“I’m sorry,” I say again, heart-flutter and a little helpless. I’m not the kind of kid who disappoints my teachers. Who curses, who runs.
Wasn’t.
“Report.” Like it’s my first supply duty: Tell me everything you saw, and I’ll tell you everything you missed. Every way those things could’ve put you away in a cell five by five with cinderblock walls, with nothing but ghosts about to laugh and babble and weep for your weeping.
I report.
“There wasn’t no one at the shelter. And I couldn’t get through the sewers, to the warehouse —”
“We went there.” Her voice comes tight and sharp, and that’s how I know there wasn’t no one there either. An ache starts down in my belly. Two safehouses, empty as tin cans. “We couldn’t reach the tunnels.”
“No,” I say, and squeeze my eyes shut. Soak in darkness. Open again. “There were shadows. They knew my name, and they went —”
Whisper nods; she knows. ’Course she knows: I told it to the ghosts, and they brought me here. Where shadows are.
In the outline of Whisper’s bag, there’s the edges of something hard and heavy.
Suddenly my throat is very dry.
“They were waiting for us at the sewer entrances. They knew we’d try to go back.” Whisper’s frowning, her hands in her lap where it’s best manners to keep them, ’cause that’s just the place where nobody ought to be staring, so nobody’ll see if they shake.
“Whisper,” I ask, and don’t watch her hands for trembling. “How are we gonna get back home?”
Her eyes are sharp now, and not ghosty or faraway. “We’ll destroy all the shadows in Lakeshore, young man,” she says, and stands up smooth as a dancer. And I realize, sudden, why she’s brought me here. What the heavy thing in her bag is for.
“We should get Ariel,” I say, trip-voiced. If this is a raid we’re running, we need her; her stinger that she was to give Atticus on Sanctuary Night. “She hurt shadows.”
Whisper looks down her straight statue-nose at me. “Not today, Teller.”
I bite my lip. “Why not?” It sounds bad: like tantrum and not being Community-Minded, which is what Whisper calls keeping Safe. I firm my feet in place and make sure they don’t shuffle. The edge in my voice is bad enough.
“She’s not sworn to Safe,” Whisper says, even, “and this isn’t her story to tell.”
And it’s not. It’s Whisper’s and Jack’s and mine. Ariel had to offer something up to Atticus on a Sanctuary Night before we might ask her into a Whitecoat place with us to do bloody, dangerous things; before she’s responsible in that kind of way to Safe and anyone sworn to it.
Even me.
She was right. I’m responsible. She’s not.
“She hurt Corner too,” I say, weak and suddenly hurting. “She stung it in the tunnel and it ran.”
“Corner’s flesh and blood,” Whisper says evenly, and holds out her hand. “Now come along. Jack’s waiting.”
Jack is waiting at the edge of the battered old sidewalk like it’s borderland, not one foot over the concrete curb that breaks it from the street. “Teller,” he says rough, my grown-up name. He don’t clap his hand onto my shoulder, and he don’t quite meet my eye.
“Jack,” I whisper, and duck my chin to my collarbone.
We turn together, the three of us, to the wicked building on the hill.
The Whitecoat place is long with shadow even in the thickness of the hot sunshine Above. It folds into the sky utterly silent, not a wind or a rattle or a breath from it, and even in midsummer, at the top of the afternoon, night steals out through its windows to turn the sky empty. The fence isn’t enough to cage it in: The streets are empty for a block around. Nobody, even Above, wants to get too close.
Shadow-place, it says to the world. Monster-place.
“We do this fast,” Jack says. “Quick in, quick out.”
“Then down to the sewers,” Whisper agrees, and draws the heavy thing from her little pack: a long pair of clippers, beaked to cut wire. The handles are scarred and bitten where the rubber’s fallen away. I don’t recognize them: conjured up from some box or ghost or Salvation, and not from the tool chest in the kitchen in Safe, full of comfortable things. When they close ’round the old fence wire there’s a snap! loud as a slammed door.
The day’s quiet for a fat, thick minute.
Nobody comes.
J
ack breathes, and then I breathe, though I hadn’t even realized I’d caught my own breath back. He pulls away a board cautious with his gloved hands. Snap! snap! go the clippers, and Whisper and Jack cut us a hollow through the rust and bleached-dry boards. I stand back, hands in my pockets, feeling matches and emergency money, matches and money over and over again. I watch for the police who ain’t coming, the dogs that aren’t with them. I keep useful. I watch.
I watch all the way around to the slick-painted sign on the fence five feet sunwise, as faded down as the boards. “Coming soon,” I read aloud. “Another residential living project by CityCorp.” Someone’s painted scrawl over it. I can’t read those words.
“They’re taking it down,” Jack rumbles.
“Good,” Whisper says, and climbs on through.
The wires and boards prick my arms as I follow. I tuck in small, remembering every little thing Atticus used to say about rust cuts and tetanus, and keep my arms close for a count of three after the fence spits me out. We pull the boards back into place. Our feet dent the swamp of white-puffed flowers and clutter. “They’ll know we were here,” I whisper, toeing the holes my feet’ve made in the sway and pull of long, ghosty grass.
“They’ll know someone was here,” Whisper says, and creeps forward, heel-toe, to the broken doors of the asylum.
They used to be wood — good wood, and still — but they’re hinge-broken, paint-spattered, scratched up under years of bad handling. Even though it’s a place full of wickedness, it burns me up just a little to see good wood treated this way. There could have been Tales on this door. Now they’re all left to roam loose in the halls, stealing the sunlight away with their untelling.
The doors swing open silent under Whisper’s hand.