by Leah Bobet
All five of us. Me and Whisper and Doctor Marybeth and Jack and my Ariel. Happy ever after in hurt and hate and secrets.
“I got hands,” I say, and stand myself up to go. “And I got fire.”
This time, Beatrice just lets me in through the buzzing-misery door that keeps the world off their toes. Just three visits, and they’re used to my coming at strange hours of the night. Used to me coming to bring them sorrows.
I don’t even tell myself to hush up for that as I kick and stumble up the steps to the most important task of my life.
They ain’t all waiting at the door this time. I’ve worn my welcome thin and clear too quick for that, but Beatrice shifts me quick inside and there’s no time to think about it.
She looks bad. She looks tireder than tired, and wary. The spiked red of her hair is drooping soft down her stubbly scalp.
“Beatrice,” I say, and bow my head to her formal, ’cause she’s the founder of this Sanctuary.
“You found her,” Beatrice says, and the misery takes me for a full five seconds before I remember what I’m here for.
“Yeah,” I say, soft, and she looks away.
“Safe?” she says after seven, eight, nine breaths, and it muddles in my head for a tenth. I’ve not freed Safe yet. And then I figure out what she means, and “Yeah,” I say. Swallow against the prick of hurt that I’m already getting used to at the thought of Ari, of her wrist in my hand. “Safe ’nuff.”
I look behind her but I don’t see Darren; Darren who’d know about newspapers and beatings and bodies sprawled out on the floor punched to blood, police searches for a boy this high. I shouldn’t even be outside, but this is an emergency. This is more of an emergency than twenty-five dollars can fix.
When I look back she’s watching my hands, my bandaged-up, taped-together, red-puff hands. “Safe enough,” she repeats like she don’t believe it, and her eye goes cooler.
“I made it Safe,” I say, the truth, and swallow down the sick.
“You did something,” she says, flat and hard.
I nod my head. Yes. Yes.
Her face shutters up. Her eyes close, and open, and she’s quiet.
“Were you even telling me the truth?” she asks finally. “You don’t really come from somewhere else, do you? Just another fucking runaway with a good story.” She rubs her scalp like it’ll itch clean off. “God knows where she picked you up.”
(I got hands, I told them. Like it was a certain thing.)
“I spoke true,” I say, my voice hitching. “I found her on my second time up, and she was curled up little in a crack in the wall and when I held up the brand to see if she was real it was …”
Iridescent. I see it, bright and flicker in my head.
“You found her,” Bea repeats.
“She had wings,” I say, soft, and look up to meet her eye. “She had wings from her running. You saw it true.”
And between one blink and the next her eyes widen and go yet harder, ’cause I’ve found the thing she really no longer believes, the thing that scares her and keeps her turn-toss at night: that maybe she didn’t see wings, and maybe the bee was just a bee bumbled in, and all this has been teasing, a terrible mistake.
“Matthew,” she says, not turned like Doctor Marybeth but with the same grief, “why are you here?”
I clear my throat. “I need to ask you something,” I say pitched clean, every syllable made sharp and careful as to not break the ritual of the thing.
She lifts her head up a little higher. “What’re you asking?” Hands out of her pockets, and standing tall like a founder ought to be. The rustle of feet behind her, in the dark at the bedroom door, goes quiet as the nighttime breathing of the boards.
I kneel down. I get down on one knee that digs into the blurred wood floor and strip off my sweat-stuck shirt, pulling scales with it where it’s dried to them; sharp little yanks of pain that peel up to my shoulders. Beatrice watches. Keeps quiet and still.
“Beatrice,” I say, in my best Telling voice, the voice that makes every sound sweet and clear. “We go down to Safe tomorrow to drive out the shadows. We go down to take back our home. Will you and yours carry our fire?”
She looks down at me, arms crossed across her chest, Normal and regular pink. She’s ten fingers, ten toes, eyes, nose, ears. One of those hands flicks down; I feel it pass over the scales on my back, touch them, and I dare look up long enough to see her mouth open a little in fear. Fear of wings. Fear of gills and lion’s toes.
Fear and wonder.
“Why should we?” she asks, but her voice trembles. “Why’re you asking us?”
“You didn’t turn her away,” I say, and I’m stammering, I’m stumbling. I can’t afford to stumble. “You didn’t turn us away, her or me. That’s … that’s what we’re ’bout” — (and Ariel looked up at me like a barely alive thing, vibrating, looked up like she was waiting to see what I’d do next). “It’s about giving people someplace warm to be.”
She’s watching me. She’s still watching me, and I can’t figure out why, or how. Desperate, I think back for what Tales I have about Bea, and it’s half-nothing; it’s that she came from outside the city, from some northward town, and then just Cat and Darren and the way she’s put them all together away from the street-Whitecoats, to make Safe —
Sudden, wild, I add: “She’ll never be on the streets again. Not her, not nobody like her. You send them to us. They’ll never have to sleep there again.”
Beatrice runs a hand through her drooped-down hair, scratches the naked side of her head idly. And then her shoulders go down, and she lets out a breath so heavy with old things, remembered things, that down on my knees I near lose my balance.
“Yeah,” she says, shy and rough. “Fine. We got your back.”
There’s a breath, a sigh, a squeak from the other side of the door. And there’s a breath from me, a fall of my back and my chest, ’cause it’s done and I might live to see my own house warm again after all.
I feel as old as Atticus. Older.
“Why?” I whisper before I can help it, knowing that deal or not, it’s a gift; knowing there’s nothing less wise than to question a gift lest it go right back to the giver.
She looks down at me, arms crossed again, but not in the way that shuts a body out. Showing the weight and heft of her, of her people. Of Sanctuary. “S’good to have a home.”
Were there lesser light, were there a private place to go where no one listened shadow at the door, time enough and memory to hear it once, again, I would ask Bea her Tale.
I will carve this on the doors of Safe, I promise her, and let out a breath to seal it.
“What do we do?” she asks and steps back, lets me stand, lets me pull the Passing down over myself again and zip it up tight.
“We have to talk to my people,” I say, and open the door.
I take her hand and lead her down seven flights of stairs, to the wet-slicked streets of Above.
There’s phoning before I take her back to Doctor Marybeth’s. Phoning with one of my extra quarters, ill-spared and precious, from a black-handled slick dirty phone tucked away between two shopfronts, to make sure it’s all right to bring her. They fight for six minutes by my counting before I say: “Can’t wait this long,” mild and quiet. Doctor Marybeth stops and then says “Come,” and hangs up just as Jack and Whisper start to shout again.
We come.
Two buses and rain-damp streets, a walk down the block, and we’re there, knocking at Doctor Marybeth’s door three-and-two, muffled by the bandages slipping on my right hand. Doctor Marybeth opens up near right away.
“This is your friend?” she asks, her shoulders hunched enough in the yellowy hall light that I know the fighting went on all through those two bus rides and up to the door.
Ariel’s friend, I almost correct. But I look over at Bea and think of the trust she’s laid down in me, the trust I’ve returned in her even though it’s the highest of fool things in the world to trus
t Normal people Above.
“Yeah,” I say, and smile to show each of them the other’s nothing to fear. “Doctor Marybeth, this is Beatrice.”
Bea nods her head. Wary. But Doctor Marybeth don’t take it as rude.
“They still against it?” I ask.
“Yeah,” and Doctor Marybeth straightens a little. “But it’s my house.” She leads us inside, trailing the door open. I shut it tight behind us.
Bea doesn’t shed her shoes like everyone else. Her boots creak soft soft down the tiny tiled hall, and she stops a half step behind me in the door of Doctor Marybeth’s kitchen.
“Hey,” I say, and Jack and Whisper both turn to me with wicked scowls.
“We didn’t say —” Whisper says, and before she can finish I move over and make room. Bea takes the signal and slides thin into the kitchen. She looks half-ready for anything. I dunno that she’s ready for Whisper and Jack.
“This is Bea,” I say. A silence. “She knew Ariel before.”
Ariel is Sick, I remember her saying. She knows Ariel, right and true. Better, maybe, than all of us.
“And she’s hands?” Jack says, right over her head.
“She’s got a place,” I say, ignoring Jack’s mouth. “She keeps twelve sworn clean and safe and gives them Sanctuary.”
She’s Atticus, my eyes say to him, just as hot and spark, and maybe they gleam red just a little bit, because Jack backs off and looks Bea up and down for the first time.
“Got twenty more who owe us favors,” Bea says, cool as you please, and she is Atticus indeed, ’cause nothing you ever said to snip back at Atticus ever moved him a step out of place. She walks right in and takes a chair, straddles it crosswise and folds her arms on the back. I near expect to see impatient claws clicking. “Matthew says you want us to help you take your place back,” she continues, and tucks her hands in the crooks of her elbows. “And he says you’ll help keep our people off the streets in return for it.”
I bite my lip. I had no right, promising that.
Whisper and Jack pass a long look at each other, eyebrows raised in mimic on both sides. “Well, he’s Narasimha’s kid, all right,” Jack finally says, dry and wry, and I only get half of what that means before they turn back to the rest of us.
“We do, and we will,” Whisper says. There’s a smile on her face I don’t know I’ve ever seen, half-curved and attentive and not at all the sharp-tongued, sharp-mind Whisper I’ve known the whole of my life.
A Passing smile.
I search for remorse in the first blush of that knowledge: Even if we win, I’ve opened up the knowing of Safe to people who don’t need Safe. We’ll go through our lives now with people who’d know us to look at in the streets Above, scavenging for our food, our clothes, our lives. People who might give us up.
Doctor Marybeth never did, I tell myself, and set my jaw tight. Doctor Marybeth didn’t, and Bea won’t. I won’t be sorry. I won’t be shamed for this.
It can’t all be wickedness, Above.
“Tea?” Doctor Marybeth says mildly into the quiet, her eyes not on Bea’s face or tough hands but her feet. Bea falters just a second, flushes faint, and unlaces both her boots.
We’re silent for a moment while she carries them to the front hall and comes back, more slippery, in stocking-feet.
“Twenty of us,” Beatrice says, talking like Doctor Marybeth didn’t shame her but a scant minute ago. “No. A dozen, a good dozen who won’t talk shit around. And you three. And Matthew?”
“Not me,” Doctor Marybeth says, and there’s a flicker of shadow at her fingers as she turns her face away.
“And Ariel,” I add, before Jack can get in a word.
This quiet is harder to break. It stands up to mildness and shuffling and polite shame.
“I don’t know, Teller,” Whisper says. “She’s quite unhappy with all of us.”
That brings my head up. “Why you?”
“That’s Ariel’s way,” Whisper says gently, and Jack says nothing so loud it booms.
“I’ll talk to her,” Bea says, shuffling her stocking-foot against the tile.
“Upstairs,” Jack rumbles, and points with the tip of his chin. “Lucky if she listens to a word you say.”
There’s a noise beneath the table that might be a kick. I look right at the wall and try not to think about it.
“I took her in,” Bea says, quieter.
“So did Matthew,” Jack says, and she stands up a little faster than she looked to be planning and takes herself up Doctor Marybeth’s stairs like it’s a call to trial.
We wait.
“You trust them?” Jack asks. Not looking at me slantwise; just asking. Asking to hear the answer.
“Yeah,” I say. Ears aching from the need to hear, through the boards and carpets, every little word passed ’bout me and my failings, ’bout Ari and Safe and what might make it all right. “She said she and hers would carry our fire,” I add, to not look like I’m listening.
“And she knows what that means,” Jack says.
“Yeah,” I say, giving him my attention for real now. “She knows Sanctuary.”
“And we’re to give her people Sanctuary.”
“I don’t know why I promised that,” I admit.
Jack shakes his head, laughs soft. “It’s no more than your father did.”
We don’t talk again ’til Bea’s feet sound on the old creak steps, squeak squeak moan to the landing. It’s only one pair of feet, not two, coming down the stair.
“She won’t come down,” Bea says, and now her mouth is pressed unsure. The blood comes to my face, but I don’t dare look away. “But you might go up. She might hear you.”
I don’t know what I’ve got to say for hearing.
“All right,” I say, and wipe my hands on the legs of my fade-out Salvation Army jeans. If I got nothing to say for myself, I’ll speak for Jack and Whisper. I’ll speak like a Teller ought to, and speak for Safe.
I take the stairs one at a time, slow and loud so she’ll hear me coming, hear the tread and sigh of my thick-nail feet and not be scared when I turn the knob. I let her make herself ready.
I make Safe.
She’s curled up in the chair again when I open the upstairs door; curled up too-studied around her black book with a pencil loose in her hand. Her chin’s too high to be drawing. For sure, she heard me. And for sure she’s pretending she didn’t.
“Ariel,” I say, hovering in the doorway. Not moving, and likely to die of it. “Can I come in?”
She don’t say nothing.
The quilt on the bed is rumpled bright. The bathroom door is open, and I can see sparkles of shining here and there on the floor. Chitin, I think; Atticus taught me the word. The thing that makes insects’ armor, when they feel the need to be sealed ’gainst the world.
Her wings, smashed in pieces.
Her wings.
“I won’t come in unless you let me,” I say, watching them catch the faint yellow light of Doctor Marybeth’s surviving lamp. It turns each little prickle of wing sunshine-bright. Golden.
“Okay,” she mumbles after a moment, and I don’t lose my footing from the relief of it. Instead I walk deliberate and careful, hands out and at my sides, and sit myself on the edge of the big old creaky bed.
She shuts her book and puts it down slow.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper.
She don’t reply.
“Ari, I’m so sorry,” I say, trying to keep my voice low and blowing it, hands gone to fists in my lap. Not mad; or not mad at her. Just — all my own stupid, to think I could hit and kick and scare the one what hurt her and that’d make it okay. That kicking would cure Sick.
That it’d make her love me good, like light made soft, unburning.
You’re doing this wrong, Teller, says the quiet part of me, the part that ain’t still wailing and begging to be loved. If you got nothing else to say, speak for Safe.
I shove back the hurt. I shove back the shame. I get down on my
knees, knee-to-floor and head bowed, no sudden moving; nothing that’ll make her need to fear.
“Ari,” I whisper, aching to wrap my arms around her and wail lover give me something give me poison give me pills. I don’t; I’m not gonna touch her, not ’til she touches me. Not unless I can do it sweeter. “We’re going down to Safe tomorrow to take it back. Jack and Whisper and me, and your friend Beatrice” — my friend Beatrice — “and her sworn, and what ghosts who’ll lend arms that Whisper can muster.”
I take a breath. It drags in the back of my mouth. But she’s watching.
“It’s real dangerous. It’s dangerous ’cause the plan’s to kill Corner, ’cause the shadows are all its shadow, and that means getting someone in quiet to do it while everyone else holds ground. People —” and I stop. “People are gonna die.
“But you’re fast. You’re quick and small and when you stung it, you did harm. We need you.”
She’s silent a second. Then: “Why me?” she asks, and it’s a real question, not moaning. She’s looking at me small and grave.
I swallow. “You know Safe. You know us. You —” I pause, realizing; how she came careening out of the tunnels through the dark, knew exactly where to land, to sting. “You could see it before. Corner. When I couldn’t.”
She ducks her head. A tiny nod. “It smells,” she says quiet, far away in a deep tunnel in another world that was only one week past. “It’s hard to see, hard to touch, but I remembered that smell.”
I didn’t smell a thing. Not even when Corner’s bloodtouch-fingers were jammed up against my eyes. “Where’d you remember it from?”
She shifts. I keep my eyes off her, keep their pressure away.
“The Cold Pipes,” she says. The noise that jeans make against chair fabric quiets. “It smells like hospitals,” and the stutter-beat of my heart on ribs stops tight.