Above

by Leah Bobet

  Ariel went down to the city and the city wasn’t safe. So she went to Bea’s Sanctuary and that wasn’t safe, so she went flying down to the tunnels all wings and tripping horror, and cried ’cause she wasn’t a girl, she was a bee instead, she was Freak and Beast and monsters. And a boy took her by the hand, took her home, hung her wings, and then shadows burst through the walls and that wasn’t safe either, that was not safe and he was not safe and there was nowhere to go but back: back to the spit and spite and bite you know. Back to the place that might have been safe to start with if anything Above lasted, didn’t rot or break or fall. If anything Above could stay true, and not be a monster.

  (She went down to the Cold Pipes, and saw something that scared her bad enough to run and never tell it true.)

  What’s the moral of the story?

  People Above will hurt you. People Above will break you, and devour your heart raw.

  And so will I.

  Doctor Marybeth’s good as her word. She brings Corner’s file back after her day-and-night duty — it’s rounds when you’re a doctor — and changes the bandages on my swollen hands. She’s skinnier than night before last. Shadowier. But I can’t bear to look at her shadow-tinged edges any more than I can take the stairs one by one up to the landing, up to the turn, and call soft Ariel’s name ’gainst the locked-up door.

  “Shouldn’t draw attention like that,” is all Doctor Marybeth says, like she’s Jack or Atticus or someone who knows from hiding, and pats the back of my hand before she goes. I keep down the mad. Even the slightest hint of mad brings it all back, the feel of his skin and then hers, and then it’s hard to breathe or see or think from the haze of stupid misery.

  Ariel doesn’t come down. Whisper takes her a plate of supper, loaded full of beans and spinach and all the good things we can’t get often in Safe, and Whisper don’t come down for a bit either. When she does, her mouth is drawn tight as a satchel-bag. She don’t say nothing at all.

  Look what you’ve made me be, I want to weep at Ariel’s feet, arms clutched to her knees like a shadow. But I’ve heard enough Tales to know nobody’s made me do anything; I pick what’s for me to be. I picked to be Killer, and Whitecoat, and Beast.

  I know doing those things is wrong. And that makes me even worse.

  So I try to look at Doctor Marybeth’s files in her sitting room, read the tiny biting hand that talks ’bout medicine and meetings and all the other things Whitecoats do to keep you hushed and swaddled. I go over every word one by one, sound them aloud like I’ve not had to do since my papa taught me letters by lantern-light. Even then the words just stream through my head, thick as ghosts and just as catchable, until I shove the papers hard at Jack and say “What d’you think?” an inch short of snapping.

  Jack looks at me across the scratch-wood coffee table and says nothing either, just takes the file in the folds of his glove and settles in to read.

  Doctor Marybeth’s also brought a newspaper clipping: fire at the old Lakeshore Psychiatric Hospital. I read it slow to make sure I get every word, every chain-link between every word. They aren’t saying it was set, not deliberate like we did. Electrical failure, it says. Known homeless squat. Investigation pending.

  Jack Jack Jack, it says to anyone who knows from Safe.

  “Is there anything else in the paper?” I ask. I can’t ask it whole, about a boy beaten bloody and crumpled-up wings. I’m scared, I’m shamed to ask.

  Doctor Marybeth’s lips press together. “On television,” she says, tightly. “There’s a security video.”

  I don’t know what video is, but my stomach hollows out, like the hate and the oaths have destroyed each other inside and left a whole lot of nothing.

  “It means they saw you go in the building, Matthew,” she says, quiet and patient, and I know now that Jack isn’t actually reading, he’s listening close, close. “They only saw your back. But they’ll be looking for someone your height, your age.”

  They’ll be looking for me. “Is he —?”

  Doctor Marybeth gives me a look I can’t fathom, and shakes her head. “Comatose,” she says. Catatonic.

  “Is he going to —?” I move my mouth on the last word. Can’t quite make it come out.

  “He might not. People get better from that,” she says, soothing and slow.

  Jack turns a page. He’s a bad liar.

  “What do I do?” I say, and it sounds terrible small.

  Doctor Marybeth lets out a short breath. “Stay inside. Unless it’s absolutely necessary. Cover your hair if you have to go out.” She pauses. “And get back into Safe as soon as you can.”

  Jack apparently don’t have anything to add to that.

  I watch him with his reading and make Safe in my mind, crawl into it and shut the big door behind me. Hope we can get there in time, before they find my back or my face or shake the truth out of Darren, and the Whitecoats come down with their crooked, grasping fingers.

  Hope Safe will still want me, after this.

  (Killer’s not a thing that gets Sanctuary, Atticus said.)

  “I think the Whitecoats didn’t know much about Corner,” Jack says, flipping through the copy-smudged pages of its file too quick to be really looking. He lets down one big leg from the pivot of his knee and lifts up the other, trading them off above the red-flowered cushions of Doctor Marybeth’s old stuffed couch. “There’s nothing ’bout shadows in here.”

  “Nobody knew about the shadows when Corner was in Lakeshore,” Doctor Marybeth says. “Just the bloodtouch.”

  “What’s the word for bloodtouch in Whitecoat?” I ask just for something to say, something to think about that’s not the bitter red glow that still turns and whispers in my gut.

  “There is none,” she says.

  “No,” Jack says, “these people don’t know from bloodtouch either. It’s gender identity disorder.” He says it like he’s reaching for a glass of water to rinse the words away.

  “That’s Corner being boy-girl,” Whisper says, shrouded in the corner chair, not speaking so long that I almost forgot she’s there. “They wanted it to be picking,” she goes on, looking at all of us with her mouth still tight and grudging. “Boy or girl. No use for something that was both. They’d pick for it if it didn’t pick for itself quick, and its quick wasn’t quick enough. There was to be an operation.”

  “That’s why they ran. Corner didn’t want the operation,” Doctor Marybeth says into the silence, hollow and far, far away. “Atticus begged me to open the door.” After a second she gets up, straight hands and old thoughts and all, and drifts into the kitchen to be by herself.

  “Says that here,” Jack assents, once she’s gone and it’s not a disrespect to be speaking. He sets down the file. His eyes are still on the doorway where she left. “And that’s all it says.”

  I rub my eyes; try to clear them of bad and mad. Of beasts, and memories, and angels.

  There’s a quiet, not a natural one but one you can feel and touch, and when I look up, Jack is watching me funny. “What’re you thinking, Teller?”

  I’m not half sure what I’m thinking. I’m thinking ’bout shadows. I’m thinking ’bout the limits to their knowing, and the way they fought and wept while burning, wept over different sins. The way Doctor Marybeth’s eyes grew dark and smoky when she told the tale of Corner like it was fingerprinted on her skin, and about the last shadow in Lakeshore, the way it said that’s not my name. “There anything ’bout Angel in there?” I ask.

  Jack reads, finger-close, pointing at every word as he goes. His face gets darker and darker until I figure he’s found something for sure, something wickeder than any of us could imagine. But finally he just says “I can’t read this chicken scratch,” and shoves the fluttering papers back at me, into an unready hand.

  Atticus would say that Whitecoats have poor writing ’cause they don’t want no one knowing ’bout the dirt that makes their deeds, but I’m worn and Whisper and Jack are tired and I don’t think now’s the time. I take
the folder and squinch my eyes close, promise myself that I’ll take all my smarts and focus and thought for this and just this. The writing is hard. It’s thin and blurry besides, faded out from the copying that Doctor Marybeth did so she wouldn’t get in trouble taking the real-life file.

  I almost miss it when I see the word Angel.

  “Here!” I call out, pointing at it with the big taped-together mass of fingers that the bandaging’s made of my hands. Whisper comes up from her corner chair and Jack from the couch, and they crowd up behind me to look where I’m pointing. It’s a form both set down printwise and written on, yet one more thing I don’t know from in Whitecoat language and Above. “What’s this?”

  Whisper leans over me, traces a finger on the paper. “Admission form,” she says quietly, and then even though it’s a copy I want to put it down, want to keep its own special cold from traveling up my hands. An admission form is what Whitecoats make you sign to take your life away. A deal with wickedness. The turn of a lock, and the dark.

  “Why’s Angel on Corner’s admission form?” I ask, small.

  “’Cause Angel’s Corner’s name,” Jack says, and then I really do put down the file.

  Corner can’t have been in Isolation for real. Corner can’t have trailed us up Above and through Lakeshore and hid itself in shadows, speaking true names to drive us wild. And I must speak aloud because Whisper says, “No, it couldn’t,” in a funny-odd voice, and looks down at the file, wary and sick.

  “I thought Corner was its name,” I say, careful, knowing the ground I’m shoeing forward on is dangerous.

  Whisper shakes her head. She don’t even look up. “Corner was what the Whitecoats called it behind its back,” she says, but she doesn’t say it right; she draws the word out: Cor-oh-ner, and Jack sucks in a breath.

  “Whis, tell me that isn’t why I think it is,” he says.

  She tips her chin up at him, tiny, and a very un-Whisperlike grin flashes ’cross her face. “Corner stopped three hearts when it came into Lakeshore. One doctor and two orderlies. The coroner’s office didn’t ever figure out how it managed that.”

  Jack whuffs out his breath. Shakes his head. “Whitecoats don’t know from bloodtouch,” he says.

  “No,” Whisper says. “And they never found out.”

  “Why’d it keep a Whitecoat name?” I venture, quick and quiet as I can.

  “Atticus liked it,” she says, briefly, and the last of that bitten grin fades off her face. “Corner fought back ’gainst the Whitecoats. It made him proud.”

  Wasn’t the only one it made proud, I realize, but she’s already nose-deep back in Corner’s papers.

  If we still told Tales of Corner, I’d have known its Above name. I’d have known the Tale of how it tossed that name aside, and why, and took up the new one. But I don’t, and that means no one else does: not in Safe or Above or the whole wide world.

  Except shadows.

  “So how could shadows know that it was called Angel?” I ask, and the twitch, the discomfort, leaks back into the room.

  “It lied to us?” Jack puts forward, but even he don’t believe it.

  “It claimed itself Corner’s name,” I say. “It came for us when we took up Atticus’s file.”

  “What’re you saying?” Whisper says, quiet.

  I squeeze my eyes shut and see Atticus, thin and young and begging, a ghost or shadow or broken piece of memory aching to go home. “That the shadow in Lakeshore was Corner.” Not Corner-for-real. But part of Corner. Corner split up.

  “Corner twenty years past,” Whisper breathes, high-voiced and strange — half her whispering voice, I realize; drawing something down in memory of the not-ghost of Atticus burned asunder two floors up.

  “And there was a Corner from ten years ago in the attic,” I add, surer, stronger, remembering give me poison give me something give me pills. “And more between.”

  “The shadows,” Jack says.

  “Old Corners,” Whisper replies, and scrubs her face with one small hand.

  They look at each other over my head, a dark and grown-up look. “What’s a shadow, Whis?” Jack says, simple, quiet.

  “What a body casts,” she replies, just as small. “A dark-mark where we’ve been.”

  And the whole thing comes clean, the whole Tale twists, and I feel the click and sigh in my head as it unknots into something true. “How? And how’d it grab hold of them to send into Safe?”

  “Don’t matter,” Whisper says, still looking at Jack. “Maybe it didn’t have to. A shadow of Corner might want what Corner wanted anyways, without having to be told. It’d feel everything the same. What matters is it’s been nothing but Corner all along.”

  Jack’s eye is bright, a mean brightness. Not something I like. “So Corner wouldn’t have to twist someone to its side. One shadow touching someone out on a duty just long enough to burn its way in, and there’s shadows loose in Safe.” Like the shadow in Doctor Marybeth, his eyes say. Like Violet.

  Like the shadow that dripped, like medicine, into my mouth and leaped out through my hands.

  Lots of people go outside of Safe on a thousand separate duties: supply and exploring and just sneaking out for a little solitary quiet. It might have been anyone. It might be any of the people who told us ’bout seeing dark hands or feet moving in the sewers late at night. The shadows might have been in Safe for years.

  The spot under my eye burns like a bruise dealt harshly. I rub it, but the burn won’t go away.

  “Then they would carry its memories,” Whisper says, glancing at the darkened kitchen door; the silence that’s Doctor Marybeth bearing a shadow in her skin and someone else’s Tales in her head. “Anyone talk of Corner’s memories, Teller?”

  I close my eyes. I lean like I’m remembering, but what I really do is search every inch of me for a taste or smell of Corner, for that wailing glass-bell voice. For a whisper of Safe, pipes and dim and quiet, that ain’t really mine.

  Half of everything I know about Safe isn’t mine. It’s Tales and thoughts and things I see all mashed together as truth. But I remember the telling of most of them; the way the ground felt beneath me or the cool of the thin air when the story came to me.

  So: “No,” I say, knowing it’s so, that nobody told me a word ’bout how Corner lived in Safe and left it, even though it was a founder. Even though it lived beside us as family for thirteen long years. “Nobody talks ’bout Corner.”

  My voice comes out bitter, and it surprises me to swallow that taste right back down.

  Whisper’s sigh is a regular one, one more road home frustrated for the time being. But Jack’s frown goes all the way to his forehead and rucks up the landscape there to something deeper, something worse. I look at him, a question, and he shakes his head. “Something wrong ’bout all this,” he says, and retires up the stairs, creak creak creak to the room where Ariel’s hiding.

  She knew the way the Cold Pipes smell. I shiver.

  Whisper don’t look at me when he’s gone. She sinks her chin onto her knees and balances the file in one wrinkled hand to read, squinting against the afternoon coming down through the windows. Looking for shadows.

  I watch her a minute or two and then pick myself up, stretch out my legs, and go into the kitchen to find Doctor Marybeth.

  She’s still shadow-worn. I can see it in the bend of her head, slight and angled as she looks out her own back window. I can see it in the way her own shadow joins to her heels dark and thick, just out of focus, just out of true. The shadow that’s Corner’s rustles in the dark, moving at my footsteps. It clings tight to her heels like a baby child.

  “Does it hurt?” I ask, not meaning to until it comes out, slipped out in the dark where such questions are easier. Corner’s shadows burned cold when they poured down my throat, but they didn’t stay in me. They didn’t curl up inside and dog my sleep.

  “Yes,” she says, low-voiced, unturning. “It whispers when I step out of the light. It wants me to let it die. And I want
to.”

  She stops; more runs out of voice than stops talking. “Matthew, I don’t know that I did the right thing that night.”

  The shock takes me through and through, like lightning.

  “Of course you did,” I breathe, wanting to take both her arms in my hands and turn her to see the pure heat of my believing. There was no way to not tell Corner ’bout losing its Sanctuary, and no way to not offer a place to stay. And giving it something to let it die —

  “She was hurting,” Doctor Marybeth says, small as a little kid. “I should have done it. Then she wouldn’t have gone bad somehow.”

  I think about it: no Corner. No Atticus dead and lightless in his own blood, no Beatrice, no Above. Just Ariel and me down Safe in our wing-house, keeping on with the living we were fighting to do before.

  Until she ran away again. Until she turned and went running, and Atticus held her to that very last chance, and she became the second Beast exiled from Safe.

  And you, all fool and red-mad, would have followed.

  “No,” I say, staving off the vision of myself dark in the tunnels, wandering forever from the fear of going Above.

  “No?” Doctor Marybeth asks, half-turning; mistaking it for something said to her. But it should be something said to her too, so I don’t tell her ’bout last chances and bad dreams, the kind you can still have while waking.

  “No,” I say again, putting on calm, putting on soft. “You said you swore an oath when you became Doctor. Not to hurt.”

  “Yeah,” she says heavy, and turns all the way and puts her hands on her belly where her swearing’s kept. Her hair’s in her face. I can’t see properly her eyes.

  “That would’ve been hurting.”

  “This was hurting,” she snaps back.

  “You couldn’t know it then,” I say soft. And don’t think about real hurting, about fists and shoes and elbows smacking over and over into the wall of someone’s skin and bones. The kind where there’s no might-have-been.

  “No,” she says finally, quiet and kind of beat-up, and I can’t tell if I’ve talked myself into winning or losing when she lifts up empty, shadow-bleak eyes. “What d’you want, Matthew?”