Above

by Leah Bobet

  “You saw something there,” I say. Not asking. She was talking to shadows.

  “I don’t know,” she whispers.

  And now I look up. Her eyes are bruised, but I can’t tell if it’s shadows, not if it’s Corner’s or our very own. “How d’you not know?”

  She shakes her head so hard her hair smacks ’gainst the chair like a slap. “I keep telling you and you never listen. There’s things you don’t talk about.”

  “Or what happens? Ari, I’m listening now. I’m listening. What happens if you talk about it?”

  When her voice comes again, it’s odd, tiny. Like a bee lost in empty tunnels where flowers don’t grow. “They lock you up.”

  I try to meet her eyes, and she looks aside, away. Color high. Shamed. “Ari,” I say real careful.

  “That’s not my name,” she mumbles.

  I know it isn’t. I know.

  “Ari, what happened at the Cold Pipes?”

  “Nothing,” she says, but the way she shifts in the chair, still won’t meet my eye, the way she’s so terrible, terrible calm gives her away.

  “Ari, it’s important,” I say, try to make it gentle. “Not just for us, for everyone. Ari, best-love, what did you see?”

  “I can’t,” she whispers, and this isn’t the usual hiding, the usual weeping; it’s agony. The lines of her body are aching to change, blurring down soft into fine hair and stripes and the hint of a long, pointed sting. “Please don’t make me, please —”

  I hold out my hands. I offer up the dirtying bandages like a sacrifice and say, soft, “Don’t run.”

  She peeks out at them a long, long moment. Caught by their moving, and held. I unwrap them before her, and she looks at the puffed-up, swollen stings.

  “I hurt you,” she says, going long again without even thinking, turning into arms and legs and girl and restless fingers plucking at each other.

  “I forgive you.”

  “You won’t.”

  “I do.” I swallow. “I hurt you too. We — neither of us meant it. Not for true,” I say, and hope to everything that’s not lying. “I love you.”

  “You won’t,” she repeats, toying with the corner of her notebook. Stubborn and hollow. A dead man’s voice.

  “I love you,” I repeat, and then more promises I might not be able to keep: “I will never turn you away. No matter what, okay?”

  She blinks at me, and I have to close my eyes to keep on going. To say it to the end.

  “No matter if you don’t — if you don’t love me no more. No matter what happens with us.”

  And to hell with your last time, I tell the ghost of dead, stupid Atticus.

  When I open them again she’s looking at me, measuring, caught and wing-grown and surprised past speaking, and then her chin droops and the wings shrivel, crush against the back of the patched-up chair. “I’m Sick, Matthew,” she whispers, two bright red spots on her cheeks.

  The weight in my belly gets heavy. It would do no good to tell her about Doctor Marybeth and files. Files lie, and stories are better Told from one’s own tongue. “What kind of Sick?” I ask.

  Her fingers play a little staccato on her knee: do re mi. “I … see things. Get mood swings. I hear —” she tightens. “I hear voices when there aren’t none there.” A swallow. “Here,” she says, and shoves her book into my hands, rough and sudden. I barely catch it. “Look.”

  I almost ask are you sure? but she’s turned away from me. Turned away like I’m to pull a bandage off, and her watching’ll make it just hurt worse. Her notebook is thick and worn in my hands.

  I open it.

  It’s pictures. Ari has a fair hand with them, light and dark shaded in careful in snap-broken pencils. It’s pictures of the tunnels, of Safe, and sometimes, between, words. Her handwriting’s thin and tiny, not Whitecoat-tiny but close; labeling the pictures. Writing down, with careful sketched-in dates, real or not real.

  “Ari —” I say, not understanding.

  “Doctor Wishnevsky said it was a good way of double-checking,” she says, low. “You put down what you saw. And if it was consistent, or if someone else verified it, then you knew it was real. Like running a checksum. And then if something came back, you could logically know it wasn’t real.”

  I don’t know what a checksum is. I’ve never heard her speak so even before, so matter-of-fact, so knowing. So shamed. “Doctor?” I ask, to stall.

  “My therapist,” she says, even lower. “From inpatient.”

  I can’t take it in. I can’t take in the look on her face. Instead I look down at the paper, turn the page.

  The next page isn’t familiar: a fall of rock, packed loose. Heaped junk in the gutter where the sewer water ran. A thin, frail fire, and gaping outflow pipes, pipes that are dry and dead and go nowhere. The stones are each laid down precise and neat; the way of somewhere you’ve seen a lot; somewhere that’s a years-long home, though the date scribbed next to it’s only five months past. And etched in, with horrible detail and the thickest line a pencil can give, are the outlines, the limbs of shadows.

  “The Cold Pipes,” I breathe out. How often could she have been down there? And then the panic draws in with the very next breath. “Ari, did they touch you? This is really important — did the shadows touch you?”

  She looks up, sudden, anguished. “I didn’t know they were real,” she says. “I didn’t know you were real for —”

  She doesn’t finish. It’s good. I don’t want to know how long.

  “Ari, love. Did they touch you?”

  She swallows. Nods, and I’m out of words. Wordless. Undone.

  I knew it true from the first.

  “No,” she protests, stung and absolute. With all my trying to walk soft, talk soft, she’s still seen it on my face. “I never.”

  I think of shadows pouring down my throat, pouring out of my hands into two legs two arms and a nose and head and elbows on the floor of Lakeshore Psychiatric, and realize no shadow ever had to make my Ari open the door to Safe. Atticus was right: Safe wasn’t safe no more from the first time she ran. Safe wasn’t safe from the day Corner laid shadows ’tween her fingers and they trailed to and fro through the Pactbridge door.

  “We won’t send you out. We’ll keep you safe,” I say, even though it’s the wrong thing, ’cause it’s the only thing I know to offer, the only thing I’ve been able to give, in its insufficiency, all along.

  Her voice is bleak and certain. “You can’t.”

  “Help us try,” I beg, and that’s all I’m doing here, not asking, not speaking, not telling no Tales but begging. “Help us so we can try.” I take a guess, wild and stupid. “Help us so you’ve got somewhere to go next time.”

  She’s crying when I leave her. She’s crying, but she don’t turn her face away.

  I walk down the steps heavy and scuff-feet, not to warn them ’bout my coming but because I can’t bear to lift myself farther off the ground. I go down into the kitchen and stand in the doorway, trying not to touch the door frame with my prickling, gauze-trail hands.

  They’re looking at me. I know I’m crying too, bare-handed and jaw tight shut so it don’t make a sound. I know what they’re looking at.

  “She’ll come,” I tell them, “and I know how the shadows got into Safe.”

  The whole of the next day is tense and still.

  There’s no going down to the tunnels before dark. No matter how the ground pulls me down harder than yesterday, knowing we’ll be set for home so soon, there’s enough people on the streets and sidewalks that going into the tunnels can’t be done before night. There’s a lot of things you can do or say or be Above and everyone will think you’re just permitted, but jumping down sewers ain’t one of them.

  We have nothing to do until dark.

  Not nothing: Jack plans. He draws maps and maps, something never before done in the history of Safe and a small blasphemy besides. He sits with Beatrice tracing them, saying here there’s a fall and step careful, or here we can
draw off their ambush. Whisper and Doctor Marybeth go out for a wealth of supply: water bottles squeaking clear ’gainst each other in the box, cereal bars and protein bars and rolls of sticky bandages, and hid behind the whole of it a small crate-box that’s familiar. I open it while they’re stacking it all in the sitting room, careful against the walls.

  Matches.

  Ari comes down, but she sits in the corner with strong tea, ducked away from our gazes. She grazes through Doctor Marybeth’s fridge like it’s all ready to go off: strawberries and cream and cheese and all the things we don’t see often, things that don’t keep good in Safe. She’s preparing. In case we die. In case she never gets to have them no more.

  In case I keep her down in Safe and never let her back into the light.

  I’m out on the back lawn when Jack comes looking: plucking at grass spikes, plucking at stupid thoughts. “You ready, Teller?” he asks me, and there’s layers and layers and deeps in that question. I don’t even need to look at him to know it.

  “No,” I say, and pull another stem. Put my hands in my pockets to keep them off Doctor Marybeth’s lawn.

  They come up with matches.

  He doesn’t pat my head or nothing. He just asks “You gonna be ready?” and sits down to the side of me when I shake my head. An invitation, from Jack Flash: an open ear, a hand on the back. A Teller for the one person who never gets to tell a Tale.

  “We know how to break the shadows,” I say, turning my matchbook ’round and ’round in the careful cup of my hands.

  “Something you’re not saying ’bout that, Teller,” Jack rumbles, and he’s watching me with lightning-eyes, hot and serious in a way so different from Atticus that it can’t but remind me of his hard-face ways all over again.

  I have four matches left. Four more and they’ll be done, and I can burn no more. “We know how. I’m wondering if we should.”

  His eyes get no less hot, no less grave, but something in them changes. A tightening. A spark. “Go on,” he says, and sits still and listening like into a strong wind.

  I flip the matches again. Turn, flip, turn. Matches eat the faces off weeping shadows and light your safe way home. “I don’t think we oughta kill Corner.”

  And I’ve said it. There.

  “You’re afraid we’ll be named Killer,” he says. He’s not looking away. My hand closes tight around the matchbook, a proper fist around its rounded, creased-up corners. I’m already named Killer.

  “No,” I tell him. “There’s no one to name us that. It’s about how Atticus kept Safe going.” I pause, trying to get both hands ’round the thought; pull it through all the holes and tears and silences in every Tale ever given me about Safe. The one big untruth repeated every year, to celebration, on Sanctuary Night. “It’s about the lying.”

  Jack sits precise and watching. He waits.

  Some people ain’t no help in a Tale.

  “Corner was forgot. If it’d been remembered, remembered right and true, that would have broken Safe.” I lick my lips, uncomfortable. Atticus is only six days dead. It’s not strange after all to feel like speaking ill of him will summon him up to look at us with smoldering orange-mad eyes to punish us for gossip.

  It’s not strange that I should be a little scared.

  “Atticus knew that,” I keep going, to spite that fear, to kick it down. “Safe needed to be strong, and if everyone knew he made such a bad mistake with Corner, believing someone Killer and doing exile to them just because of their own fighting …”

  “It would have broken Safe,” Jack agrees, still perfectly still. It makes me ache to fidget even more. “And besides, it would have meant the end of Atticus as founder.”

  And then Atticus, proud Atticus, would have had no place to go, because he couldn’t have stayed among us any more than Ari could tell me in words ’bout the Cold Pipes.

  Shame’s powerful. Shame’s stronger than claws.

  “But that’s what sent Corner mad,” I say, ’cause if Corner’s not mad, with all that bleeding and fighting and wanting to die, I’m a — I don’t know what I am. “It went mad because of the lying. All of us inside, keeping up this Tale about how it was Killer, and not letting it back home. We —” and I pause, feeling notebook pages under my fingers. “We said its real wasn’t real. We left it out to die.”

  He watches.

  “That’s what set the shadows on us,” I say faint.

  “That won’t matter, though,” Jack says, and there’s something sharp in him, keen as a wire.

  “But the shadows are Corner’s. They came on because Corner was forgot. What if they don’t fade? What if we keep on going just like we did before, keep on telling false, and the shadows don’t fade?” My hands hurt. They’re dug into themselves in little puffy fists. But not mad. Not for hitting.

  Not mad.

  “There won’t be no more shadows if we kill Corner,” Jack says.

  “Corner’s Sick,” I protest, fainter still. “Sick’s the same as Freak Above.”

  There’s tears in my eyes. I don’t move to touch them, because in Safe’s and Atticus’s and all of Above’s teaching, those tears ain’t there if you only don’t move your hand to wipe them away, and bad things don’t happen if you just don’t cry.

  “Matthew, Corner’s Killer,” he says gentle.

  “Corner wasn’t Killer.”

  “It is now,” he says. “And Killer’s a thing you can’t give Safe to and make well.”

  “It’s just wrong, Jack,” I burst out, for once in my life not finding words, not able to fit the sounds to the Tale. “It isn’t making Safe.”

  “To kill Corner.”

  “To kill Corner and pretend it was all just wickedness,” I snap, and look up at him, not sure what storm might come down. “I was there. I saw what color Atticus’s eyes were when he exiled the first Beast from Safe.”

  Jack sits straighter, and turns to me with a look in his eye that’s sharp and considering, popping with sparks. “Did you now?” he asks.

  I don’t flinch away from it. I don’t run.

  “Yeah,” I say. “I did.”

  Jack gets up.

  He gets up and puts himself down on one knee before me, puts his head low to the green prickle lawn. He bares his arms to the elbow so the lightning in his veins plays along every snowflake scar and to his burn-red fingertips. “There’s lightning in me,” he says, husky, hollow. “It came into me when I was young. I can draw down fire to keep us warm and give us good food to eat. I can give us light. But I can’t Pass.”

  He takes my hand. He lets me feel the lightning.

  Jack is asking me Sanctuary.

  It stings. I hold tight to his burning hand because my own fingers won’t let go and ask: “Why me?”

  He unbows his head. He looks right up at me and says: “Because you know what needs forgetting and what ought to be remembered.”

  I look around, but it’s grass, fence, trees. Nobody in the houses ’round is looking out the window; nobody in Doctor Marybeth’s kitchen is at the strip-curtained back door. They must be in the sitting room, or upstairs, or out.

  Nobody’ll save me from this.

  “You can’t decide this yourself,” I say, frantic. “You can’t just say who’s to be leader in Safe.”

  “No,” Jack rumbles, and even though my teeth are chattering from the ache of his ungloved touch, I see the little glint in his eye. “But where I go, the lights turn on. My word’ll carry.”

  It’s true. In all of Safe, there was one man not fearful of Atticus, and it was Jack.

  “I’ll give you Sanctuary,” I whisper, and the lightning kisses me bone to bone as he squeezes and the pact is sealed.

  “So what’re we gonna do?” I ask him later, after we’ve stared up at the leaves and the sun and sat awkward, like there wasn’t no swearing or giving or deal-making done away from everyone else’s eyes.

  “Go down. Draw the ambush. Kill Corner,” Jack says. “And then tell the Tale true.”
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  Doctor Marybeth comes out for us when the sun touches the tops of the trees. She picks her way across the grass, dodging the shade; moving between bits of sunlight like an anti-shadow. Jack looks up at her and his face is a brief smile, tight; I don’t know if I might see you again.

  I’m sorry.

  “We’ve got everything split into packs,” she tells him. Cool and sober, like it’s a regular day and this is regular work. “Whisper wants you to take a look.”

  “Right, Mare,” Jack says, mild, and I wonder how it is between them; how they came to teach each other the turns down to Safe and up, and all the things that go unsaid. All the dark true things they tell each other, and how they get around them. How they live.

  Jack pads to the door, crunch crunch and browning the grass a little. He looks over his shoulder for us, eyebrow up.

  “I’ll be right there,” Doctor Marybeth says, and waits cool as you please ’til he’s through the door.

  “Ma’am?” I ask, because the look in her eye’s a little like Atticus scolding. But she just holds out a hand to lift me to standing and leads me to her glass back door, out of the late afternoon heat.

  “When you come back —” she says.

  “If.”

  “When,” she insists. “You remember what I told you.”

  I nod. And look down to give her a chance to walk away, go back inside, busy herself with something safe and quiet and fake. There’s birds nesting in one of the trees. I watch the flash of wings that still makes me nervous — quick movement in the tunnels is a thing to fear.

  She doesn’t walk away. She opens the door and waits for me, waits patient.

  I wonder how much she has to wait patient, and where she learned how.

  I step into the kitchen, and — the hell with it. I’ve only got tonight. I’ve only got two hours or three.

  “Doctor Marybeth?” I ask her, back straightened up, formal and clear.

  “Yeah?” she says.

  I settle my shoulders. I put on my listening face, my listening air. I got no right to this either; I can’t put a Tale into my head without Atticus having heard it first, without it being offered up to everyone for Sanctuary and a share in what we are. But Atticus never thought to ask for this Tale, and Atticus is dead, and I’ve broken every rule there was and ever could be, and maybe it’s time to make my own. At least while I’m alive for tonight, with Jack sworn to me and the question of what Sanctuary means on my shoulders.