Above

by Leah Bobet

  And: “Oh, honey,” the Whitecoat nurse says, melting down to sweet before I can blink, and looks at me with big eyes that I don’t right trust. She pats my arm, hot callused hand that smells of chemicals and gag-sweet flowers, and I pull back before I think about Passing.

  “Shy,” Whisper says, her own hand on my shoulder, and steers me into Violet’s hospital room before I can undo all my own good tricks.

  I’ve never been in a hospital room before. And they are different from how they are in Tales. The walls are blue, all blue, not pale sick-up green. They’re hung with pictures of houses and flowers, things that go soft and blurry when you look at them too close. There’s thin flower curtains on the one short window, scratchy-looking even from ten steps back. And there’s four beds cut off by nests of curtain, four restless bodies moving. I take in the sound of breath made echo-loud and strange, the soft slow beepings and the burrows of wire, and then Whisper prompts me through the narrow curtains to the far end, to the window, inside.

  “Violet,” I say, just like Whisper did when we found her hiding, curled up, fled from the touch of shadows.

  There’s a machine to breathe for her. It covers her face in a clear strangle-mask like something to pump out your soul. Her fingers tap a little on the side of the bed, made up white against blue walls against the blue of the papery dress she’s wearing. It’s terrible thin. It wouldn’t get you through a fall day without freezing.

  (First, Atticus says, they take your clothes.)

  She don’t make no sound ’cept her smacking, the lip-curls and shapings she always does. She don’t look up and see us. She lies still, stately. Stares.

  “Violet,” Whisper breathes, and her eyes flick over to us, bright hunted Violet-eyes like I know from my first-born days. Her mouth shapes something that’s not just a twitching and I reach forward without thinking to move away the clear and muffling mask.

  “Don’t,” Whisper says, not loud or sharp but still enough to freeze me. “There’s an alarm,” she adds, quieter. I drop my hand to my side.

  “Vee?” Whisper says again, leaning over her, and takes her twitching hand. The hand stills, I think. I don’t see it move no more in the grasp of Whisper’s smaller, thicker fingers. “Vee, baby, it’s Annie. You’re all right. We’ll be back home in two shakes, and we won’t let it hurt you no more.”

  Violet’s voice is a husked-out thing. I don’t recognize it proper as a voice for a few moments, and so I lose the first few words of it to the hiss of the breathing machine. “— didn’t hurt her,” is what I catch, and I mouth it after her.

  Violet isn’t stuttering, I realize. And: Didn’t hurt her —

  Doctor give me poison give me pills.

  My heart jumps halfway through my rib cage, and I lean in careful, careful, slow.

  Violet’s eyes are dark-chased with shadow.

  “It was Corner,” Whisper says, voice low, lips right by Violet’s old-woman ear; too close, shadow-close, not seeing it yet. “Corner’s shadows. Remember, Vee? In Lakeshore, and then we — then it burned.”

  “She was cold,” Violet rasps, not Violet at all. Her fingers taptaptap on the bedside, playing pianos, playing bright music. “She was cold and the light was hurting her. I took her somewhere warm.”

  “Whisper,” I say. Slow and careful, because it’s scared things cornered that bite, and if shadows rise up out of Violet in the middle of a Whitecoat hospital, there’s none of us here who’ll get out alive. Whisper glances at me, and I jerk my chin slow, toward the darkness in her eyes.

  Whisper drops the hand.

  Her eyes are burning bright. They’re bright as Atticus’s and harder yet, and even though her fists are small and she told ghosts, long ago, that she wasn’t the hitting kind, they’re balled up like they could take walls down, rip up the curtains, burn the whole Whitecoat hospital and everyone in it.

  “Whisper,” I say again, and turn real obvious toward the open hospital room door.

  The glare she turns on me is fifty-seven years of dead-ends and dead things and nights spent cold alone. “It took my Violet,” she manages. Tears sneak ’round the corners of her eyes.

  Violet glances one to the other. Her eyes are thick and confused, three shades too dark. I don’t know if she even knows who I am. She ain’t Violet no more. Just us four now left to Safe. Us four, and shadows.

  — shadows, which tell you true names. Shadows which’ll tell you secrets.

  We burned all the shadows in Lakeshore, all the marks young-Corner left there, hugging the file of its lost-beloved Atticus, and none of them showed no sign of knowing Violet, of knowing Whisper’s face.

  This one’s from the tunnels. This one knows things.

  Whitecoats rustle on their Whitecoat business outside the door. In the bed opposite, foot-to-foot across the flower-curtained window, someone who ain’t got no Safe to flee to turns over on his side. We’ve got a chance here.

  We don’t got much time.

  I take a deep breath and bring my shoulders down. I think low and slow and careful things. I think about what makes a person vulnerable, and the avoiding of it. I think about making Safe.

  “Corner,” I say quiet, like a summoning.

  Violet’s chin ducks into her skinny collarbone, tangled and tangled in wires. “I hate that name,” she slurs, faint and damaged under her plastic mask.

  “Angel,” I say, watching every fingertip for the reach of fingers not human. “You did right. You kept Violet hid away out of the light.”

  Whisper sucks in a breath. I hold up a hand, hold off her rage, her hurt. I’m the Teller, and this is the middle of a Tale.

  Violet’s face under the clear mask twists into a look I’ve never seen her bearing: a flushed smile, shy. The kind of smile that looks away, that’s made by a wounded thing waiting to see if you’ll praise or hit.

  “Is there anyone else Above?” I ask, eyes half-shut. Pretending it’s Ariel, who needs to be handled gentle. “Anyone else you’ve kept out of the light?”

  “They’re down below,” the shadow whispers, letting out a breath in the gap between Violet’s stutters. “I can’t let anyone up wandering. That’s not keeping Safe,” it scolds, Atticus to a first-duty child. Violet’s fingers open and close on the sheets.

  “Are they still alive?” slips out, and I know it’s a bad idea the second I say it.

  The beeping of the machines gets faster, more insistent. “It was just once, they were Whitecoats and it’s been years, and you — you can’t keep holding that ’gainst me —” the shadow says, tears beading up in Violet’s staring eyes. “I never hurt no one. I never even saw Jonah, and —”

  And: “Shh,” Whisper murmurs, pushing past me, face a red-eyed mask and tear-streaked. Touching, careful, Violet’s hand. “You know we don’t blame you for that,” she says rough, rough-worn too, like it’s a talk had fifteen hundred times, over and over in the dark.

  Violet’s puppet-nose sniffles. Violet’s eyes blink back something else’s tears.

  “So everyone else’s back beyond the Pactbridge,” Whisper says, her voice hitching, but no matter ’cause the beeping alarm machine by Violet’s bedside’s slowing again, turning over to sleep.

  “Yeah,” Violet’s voice says, “’cept Reynard and” — catch — “little Matthew and Narasimha and Jack. I can’t find them.” The keening eyes look up at me. “You’ll find them for me, right?”

  It’s only that this is a hospital that keeps me from sicking up right then and there.

  Whisper leans down urgent, just as I’ve turned away. “Who else is walking patrol duty?” she asks. “Are you watching anything but the Pactbridge?”

  Violet shakes her head. Her tongue makes staccato clicks four times before she can bring it to speaking, and when she does, Violet’s face is bitter, twisted, hurt. “I can’t watch the tunnels. It’s just me. Who else but just me?” Its voice twists in the same way I told Whisper that nobody, no one, ever tells Tales about Corner. “Who ever helps?�
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  Part of Passing’s knowing when to cut your losses. Part of Passing’s leaving before they throw you out.

  “Is she your girl?” asks the lady Whitecoat when we pass her counter again. She’s at the edge where Whitecoat space meets the hallway, hovering near as a raised fist and watching us with her spiky-syrup eyes.

  Whisper draws herself up tall, and there’s a moment where I’m afraid she’s just gonna toss it all, say yes this is my broken Sick Violet love and get us both locked in with her. And then she smiles, sad and hard and awful, and goes, “No. She’s someone else completely.”

  Whisper leads me out of the hospital slowly, hand in my hand, fingers ’round my fingers, and it ain’t to keep me from Passing false no more.

  I hold on.

  It’s cooled down out of doors, finally cooler than a kitchen stove though the wind’s still as wet as sewers. I breathe it on my own and not helped by machines, tasting air that doesn’t smell like medicines and dying. Air that smells like things that live, even if they live bad lives rooted down Above.

  But that’s wrong. It’s not just bad lives that spend their days Above. And not just good ones that take root down in Safe.

  And Safe is held against us by nothing more than Corner, fetched up alone in the dark.

  I quicken my steps, looking for the bus stop. We’ve got to get this home to Jack: four against one, not four against a thousand. We’ve got to make plans, careful ones, and soon. But: “No,” Whisper says and turns down the street, leading me by her tight-grasp hand.

  “Where we going?” I’m near-afraid to ask, afraid of being tangled in another thing I don’t want to keep secret. My hands still hurt from the last thing I tried to hold.

  “I need some dark, Teller,” Whisper says, and doesn’t look back. “I need underground.”

  I walk with her down the street a different way, to a flight of steps set odd into the concrete. We go down them into a dimness that smells familiar, full of metal stands and machines and bright big posters.

  The trains, I realize. This is the way to the trains.

  Train’s normally a danger noise; the worst danger noise of all. It’s enough to beat the rustle of biting rats or the whisper of shadows, the moving of things we don’t even have names for. Train means people, Normal watching people, and one sight of you caught in one corner of their eyes through the windows can mean work crews and police and Whitecoats come down into Safe. That’s why train’s the most dangerous. The others can kill you, but they can’t kill Safe.

  It’s hard to forget that as Whisper pays the fare and the train grumbles into the station, pulling all the wind in the world behind it. The beat-up silver doors slide open one after another after another. There’s just a few seconds to hurry into the car before they close tight behind us, and then it catches and pulls into the tunnels, the bright tiled platform speeding up and then left behind as the train takes us into darkness.

  The dark’s familiar and soft and good; I can close my eyes into it without the memory of too-bright things taunting and poking inside my lids. My breath goes out before I think ’bout it. My breath goes in and I breathe damp; faint tunnel-smell, dirt and must and metal and time, the smell of almost-home, the smell that’s in my bones and belongs there more than grass and trees.

  Tunnels. Pipes. Safe.

  The homesickness comes up like any regular kind of sick, strong and dirty and no denying it, but this time I let it come.

  Whisper’s watching me, but not direct. She’s watching me bounced off the window, which shows nothing but dark right now, dark and the ribs of tunnel-supports. “Almost there, Teller,” she says, and I nod, wordless for a minute as the homesick cradles me like a child, ebbs slow away.

  The train pulls into another stop with a squeak and scratch of wheels; pulls out again before she turns and asks me, quiet, “What’re you thinking?”

  “Dark true things,” I say, unbidden; I always begged her to tell me what the dark true things her ghosts whispered were, but I’m not sure I need to ask anymore.

  She chuckles, empty of anything that laughter ought to be: delight or ease or good companionship. “Dark true things,” she says, hands in her lap, between the roll of wheels and the hum and clunk of tracks. There’s a silence, ten chugs long. In the tunnels you can mark time proper. “You know, I lied,” she says, with a soft little smile, staring out the window at my safe ghost-reflection. “It was only ever one dark true thing.”

  “What was it?” I ask, tired, empty.

  “That you can’t save them,” she says. “You can’t save other people. And most times, child, you can’t save you either.”

  The train rattles. I sit still and quiet until it chimes to a stop. Whisper sits like a lady in a Polaroid photo, and all the while she stares out at the dark-reflecting glass, looking at nothing. Looking at ghosts.

  VIOLET’S TALE

  Violet’s Tale is much like every other in Safe. Violet used to be Normal and then it didn’t matter no more when she turned up Sick; when her mouth began to sing and she didn’t drive the singing. Her lover called the Whitecoats, weeping ’gainst their white hands. They took her away, and she tried in Lakeshore three times to die.

  She went, with Whisper and Atticus and Corner and Scar, down to Safe and swore she’d never go back.

  After a while, every Tale is like every other.

  ’Cept Violet came back up from Safe (said the shadow in her body, husked-out and weak behind the plastic-tube mask). She came up running from shadows, running from the burning, eyes scorched by the sight of Atticus dead and the night fading out and so much light, so much terrible strip-naked light.

  The wind rattled through the streets of Above, and it shook her flesh and bone.

  The shadows boiled up from the sewers after her, red-eyed and spitting, and ’cause her mouth wouldn’t let her even scream she ran ran ran, back to the only place she knew, to the last place she’d dropped foot in the whole of Above. Lakeshore was terrible. But it was quiet, and dark, and it would not shake its head at her, sad or unloving.

  The shadows ran faster. The shadows were waiting.

  And when we finally found her, the people who loved her, who carried her out of Lakeshore a second and final time, we gave her to the Whitecoats, weeping.

  Before we left, before the Whitecoats and the hurry and hurt drove us out into the full cool night, Whisper leaned close to Violet’s ear and said where I wasn’t supposed to hear it: I will come back for you.

  “We move,” Jack says, his hands ’round a mug of late-night coffee. His face is just as twisted and acrid and sharp. “Tonight.”

  Whisper sits at the other side of the table, hands in her lap, and twists her fingers through her many-colored skirts. She’s gone past weeping. “We can’t tonight. We aren’t rested. We’ve got no hands. No fire.”

  “Don’t need hands,” Jack says, and the light in his eyes is forked and splitting. “There’s no helpers in Safe. All we got to do is get through the door, take down Corner, and then we don’t have to worry ’bout its shadows.”

  “You sure?” I ask.

  Jack’s face is thunder-grim. “They want what it wants. If there’s no Corner? Corner doesn’t want a thing.”

  “That’s all we’ve got to do?” Whisper looks over to Doctor Marybeth for a back-me-up, a word against Jack’s plan, but Doctor Marybeth’s shutter-faced and silent, sitting in the fullest swath of light to keep the shadows from between her ears. Jack sees the reminder, and it ain’t a kind one.

  “All we got to do,” he repeats, lower. “We go in and make the door. And two of us hold them off while the third goes through and does for Corner.”

  He’s not counting Ariel. Ariel’s stings mark up shadows. With her we’re not two and one but three and one, and one who can move quick and quiet through the air and leave no footprints.

  I don’t say nothing. I don’t know if we ought to count Ariel no more.

  “Nice plan,” Whisper snaps.

&nbs
p; “We can hold ’em off long enough,” Jack says, and though he doesn’t look at me, that gives me no question ’bout who he means to send to put a blade in Corner’s heart.

  “Don’t know ’bout you,” Whisper shoots back, “but I mean to live.”

  Jack won’t look at her then, and he still doesn’t want to look at me. For the first time in my life I see Jack Flash drop his eyes to the table and then the floor, muttering like a little boy caught out eavesdropping. “There’s others down there. Waiting on us. We can’t plan selfish,” he says.

  I know it even though nobody wants to say nothing: That means we can’t plan.

  I close my eyes, fingering through Tales, thinking and thinking with the whole of my worn-out head. Not even Atticus and Whisper and Violet and Scar and Corner — yes, and Corner — made Safe with but the five of them against the world. They had hands Above to help them. They drew secret money from old friends, begged from strangers, kept secrecy and stashed it away. They saved food from Doctor Marybeth and picked up the boxes she left them to vanish down into the tunnels below.

  Their hands from Above. Hands that stayed Above when the building was done.

  “It doesn’t have to be just the three of us,” I say, and they both look at me.

  I lick my lips. Doctor Marybeth in particular’s watching me peculiar. Flickering shadow-doubt lingers in every place her hands go for a second after they’re gone. “What d’you mean?” she asks.

  “I know some people,” I say. “People who might help.”

  “Where from?” Jack asks.

  “Here,” I say, and wait for the shout to come.

  “We can’t let people Above find the way to Safe,” he says, and Doctor Marybeth sits up straighter a little, the shadow-gleam red and angry in her eye.

  “Oh, come on,” Jack snaps. “You know you’re different.”

  Doctor Marybeth doesn’t reply.

  “We don’t have Safe,” I say, trying not to snap right back; to be calm and cool like someone not to be ignored or put down as a kid. I’ve been Teller since I overtook thirteen and it’s near five years since then. “We draw the shadows into the tunnels, and our help can burn them out. They don’t see Safe. They don’t see our ways.” I wait a moment. “And then we all live.”