Above

by Leah Bobet

  “Atticus’s house,” I say, sounding far away and even, and Ari flutters something that might be yes or no. I set my feet on the path away from the sloped-down wall, to the oldest house in Safe, and douse the light.

  The body of Atticus is gone rotten.

  The smell comes on when I open the door: thick and sick and horrid, sweet enough on the edges to make your mouth water, and the only thing that saves me from puking is the sight of slim Corner sitting above the body in a speck of vented sewer-light. Its fingers are splayed out on a stretch of crab shell, and its eyes are nothing. Not just nothing Normal, but black pits of shadow. Nothing.

  Corner is tall. Corner is thin. Corner’s hands stroke the dead shell of Atticus like a lover true, and it watches me in ways I can’t know, can’t read from the weird, torn-up smile on its face.

  Mad, I think, and my knees tremble and my heart aches like a mama’s.

  “Narasimha’s boy,” that voice says, that boy-girl clean voice gone raspy from not talking. A whisper in the dark ’cause it don’t know how to talk clean no more. “The Teller.”

  “I’m the Teller,” I say, and fix my hand on the knife’s handle.

  Corner’s empty-dark eyes follow the curve of my hand. “Come to kill me,” it says, dry and sad and hollow, and a tightness comes on my arms right through the elbow, leaks up into the shoulders, creeps down the byways of chest and ribs and lungs.

  For a second I feel it. Years of shadow; years of distance; unwanted and fear-bitten hungry stained filth and there’s no light in the tunnels, none but the light that they bring, fire-borne, smoke-choked, burning out the eyes for days. Pain, bright and noise and laughter and then they shut the door behind them shut you out.

  Dry dark smell for the Cold Pipes. Dry dark smell to keep you whole. Another Safe, dug out with spoons and sticks and fingernails, dry, and dark, and shadowed. But it’s not the same when nobody else comes with —

  This is what the bloodtouch feels like, I tell myself while my arms go weak and I stumble, and it’s familiar: a sharpness beneath the eye, what I thought was an edged fingernail and was worse than unseeing all along. I can’t think for thinking, for the cold and hate and endlessness of it all. Remember this. Remember it for Telling.

  “No,” I gasp out, and though it terrifies me to do it, goes against every instinct in muscle and bone, I sit down cross-legged — fall down cross-legged. I’m breathing hard, then trying not to breathe at all, gulping shallow from the mouth as the smell of Atticus’s dying curls up on my tongue and makes me weep and spit.

  The bloodtouch eases off my heart.

  It eases off my head, and I blink: The dark lines of wall, floor, the curve of Atticus’s dead claw get solid shape again. I spit one more time, dry, muffled; Corner don’t care but I’m still terrified to spit before it, before the corpse of rotten Atticus. I wipe the dribbles of snot on my sleeve.

  At least Ari’s not here to see this, I think.

  And she’s not.

  My heart tightens up again.

  I look around, breathing slow and thin, and try not to look like I’m looking. Maybe Corner’s bloodtouch can’t see whatever blood moves through long-winged bees. Please don’t have run, I think to her, out somewhere in the dark where she can’t hear; wailing. You promised not to leave me.

  Corner watches me. The knife sits poky chill against the side of my pants. I put my hands in my lap like Whisper might and try not to move.

  Listen for the sound of wings.

  “Your papa was good to me,” Corner says sudden, its hand playing along the ridges of dead Atticus, whose eyes glow no light at all. One fingertip, then two. Upstroke and down. “He wouldn’t leave, but he spoke out in quiet ’gainst the thing Atticus did.”

  “I didn’t know that,” I say, careful to talk even, talk like the lightest touch ever given. To remind it that I’m a person too. The ground is cold under me. The knife shifts on my hip. I can’t hear no noise but our breathing.

  “You wouldn’t,” it says, and smiles wide and terrible.

  I don’t look away. Oh god, I don’t look away.

  “Papa never told me,” I answer, trying to keep cool and careful, like the memory of someone who spoke out against Atticus.

  “He was gone soon after,” Corner replies, diffident, and its nothing eyes blink one, two.

  “What happened to him?” I ask past a dry throat, my hand wrapped ’round the knife-grip burning cold, cold.

  But Corner just shrugs. “Dunno. Went Above. I never saw him no more.”

  There’s no reading it. No seeing truth in those black pit eyes.

  But I bet Corner don’t know what happened to Violet either. I bet it don’t know what’s happened right outside, to Scar and Chrys and Hide. Or to Whisper’s Lakeshore ghosts, or what its shadows have wrought and unwrought in the alleys and attics and burned places Above.

  All wrapped up in its sorrows, it don’t care.

  Killer, my brain whispers, and I blink the tears off my eyes.

  “Why’d you do this?” I ask. “Why’d you take away our Safe?”

  And Corner’s head comes up and its teeth are bared, its terrible rotted teeth, brown-scarred and broken like a punch in the mouth. “I didn’t take no one’s Safe. Atticus took my Safe,” it spits, and its hand comes down hard on the invincible shell of Atticus.

  “You took our Safe,” I try to say, gentle, but I can’t make my voice so; I can’t drive away the thought of shadows leaking from the eyes and hands and smile of the scraped-up, blurry picture that’s all I remember of my papa. “You killed Atticus.”

  “He took my Safe,” it mumbles again, weeping slow shadow-things down its dead cheeks.

  Outside there’s a murmur. Outside the people of Safe toss and shudder in their beds, whispering Doctor give me something give me poison give me pills.

  I push myself standing from the floor of the house that was Atticus and Corner’s together.

  It flinches away from me. But “Tsujus,” I call it, and whisper and move slow, move like one needs to for making a body not feel vulnerable and hemmed-up inside. I hold out my hand to it and say comforting things, move slow, move like a body making Safe.

  Corner stinks when it takes my hand. It stinks of the Cold Pipes and shadow and hate when I wrap my arm around it: Corner Sick-thin, Sick in the head and the heart and the soul.

  I don’t flinch. Not when it puts its arm back ’round me, like it did when I was a child. And not when I reach down to my belt, to the handle.

  The moral of the story is to always keep something up your sleeve. Especially when you don’t think you need it.

  “Killer’s a thing you can’t give Safe to and make it well,” I say to it like a lullaby, like a good-night Tale, and push.

  It’s easy. It’s small and easy. Corner is small and it goes right in.

  The first stab stops short. The first scrapes on something hard, and the second, and whether it’s belt or bone or something more terrible I don’t know, but the third hits solid and hollow. The third makes the sound of a death-bell ringing.

  And then Corner screams, and it’s a worse scream than any I could ever bring out my lungs.

  Corner screams and the bloodtouch comes.

  My back stops working. My back goes weak and a chill sets in, cold like the stars stare down at you Above, and with it come the memories. With it come the shadows.

  “Teller,” the shadows whisper, and they lay their shadow hands on me and I can’t see.

  I close my eyes. I work the knife out, aim again, shove it deep into Corner’s back. I pretend it’s a carving, in some strange wood that moves soft. I pretend I’m setting down a Tale in my door.

  Higher, I hear Jack telling me, back years ago when he taught me to use such things. I hit higher, and harder, clumsy, screwup, blind, the shadows numbing my face and then my hands. There’s no more world, no more Above, no more Safe. There’s just shadow everything, and I’m going to die tossing and screaming, and I keep hitting. I wo
rk the knife.

  Then there’s a buzzing and a shout and a shove, and I can feel again, can feel my hands. Corner’s not there but got away, and I fall back onto my bottom and try to stop my breath from fleeing wild.

  Seeing comes back slow. I open my eyes to darkness, and everything’s coming up blood. Everything’s coming up sunburns.

  It is blood, I realize. Blood on Atticus. I look up and the first thing I’ve got for thinking is Atticus is dead, blood-covered and slumped, and I know that, I knew that, but for true I know it now.

  Corner, though. Corner ain’t dead.

  Corner’s fallen ’gainst the body of Atticus, is bleeding smear on the body of Atticus, and the ringing in my ears isn’t the shadows stealing away my hearing. It’s the sound of furious honeybees.

  “Ari,” I breathe as Corner waves its hands again, slams one ’gainst the floor, kicks out and rattles the stinking bones of Atticus so they clack one on the other. Saved me, I think fleeting, sight swimming, hands cold and useless as the buzzing wavers and falls and sinks to the floor. Goes quiet.

  “Hah —” Corner sighs.

  “Ari?” I whisper, and there’s no answer.

  I go rock-still, scared to put my foot anywhere in the broken bare-walled dark. “Ari?” I call, not caring if Corner hears it, and the buzz of her wings starts feeble, somewhere down on the ground, down and halfway to Corner on the right.

  Oh god oh god, I think, looking back and forth between them, between that buzz I can’t see and the doubled-over body of Corner.

  I have to do it. I strike a match.

  The light burns. My shadow-scorched eyes tear up all over again, and Corner flinches in the shadows it suddenly throws, even gaunter and more terrible in firelight than it was in the soft sewer-glow. There’s no color to Corner, even washed in fire. The only wash of Corner is grey.

  Corner’s curled up in Atticus’s bedding, curled ’round its belly where I stuck it through and through. It moves a little, weakly, like a bee walloped in the ear. But Corner is bleeding, and when Corner coughs, I know it’s dying.

  Done, I think, absent, sweaty-handed and cold. Done. All of us, Jack and Whisper and Bea and me, made Killer.

  Jack and Whisper and Bea and me and Ari.

  “Ari,” I whisper, and the buzzing starts again from the far wall, from a mess of books and treasures that only Atticus knew what they held for memory.

  A little bee wobbles over to me, crawling weak on its eyelash-legs on the bloody, slippery ground. I reach down and pick her up; hesitate just a second before offering my hand, my bandaged-up lifeline for her to sting and sting and sting. But she crawls in like it’s houses, like it’s someplace warm to go, and I lift her up close to see if she’s still moving. To see if she still lives.

  She twitches when I bring her close, my own breath ruffling her broken wing. The match flutters and dies and for a second I can’t see nothing, can’t even feel her in my hand.

  And then her fuzz hovers over my lips. For one breath in, one breath out, and she lands back down in my hand and stutters long, smooth and unlovely and bruised more than a hand could ever do on every bit of skin left uncovered.

  Corner sees it when her shattered-up wings fall out. But neither of us care anymore.

  “Ari?” I ask, and touch her light. The flesh on her flinches with the pain. Too pale, I think. Too wobbly and pale to be good or well.

  “It made you cry,” she says, simple, as if I should even dare to ask for explanation. Her eyes flutter as she leans back against the wall of Atticus’s broken-up house, and then they close.

  My heart takes a silence for a few terrible seconds, but I feel her face and she’s warm and breathing. Her heart’s still going true, and there’s no shadow bleeding through her skin.

  Sleeping. Passed out, or sleeping. But living.

  I leave her be and stumble across, through the blood, to Corner.

  I can tell when it sees me with those terrible eyes of shadow. “You lied,” it says, thin and almost hopeless. “You said you weren’t come to kill me.”

  I didn’t want to, I start to say, and bite down on it. Yes. Yes I did.

  “I said that,” I say, and then let out a tight breath. “I’m sorry.”

  “You’re not,” it says, and it’s not terrible now, just sulky and broke-up like Ariel caught after a night of running. I hate you. You don’t. You’re not.

  “Yeah,” I say. “I am.”

  I don’t ask it to forgive. To take it back. I came down here with Jack’s knife. I chose to be Beast.

  “You’re not,” it whispers. “Nobody is. Not you not the doctors not Atticus.”

  I choose my next words right careful, knowing they’re words to the dying. “I don’t know about Atticus,” I say. Thinking of what Doctor Marybeth told me. What she didn’t tell me ’bout speaking with Atticus, after and alone. What color I saw Atticus’s eyes turn, hidden back behind my papa’s leg and frozen-up with fear, back before I was the Teller and responsible for keeping straight and clean the Tales, on the night they took Corner’s Sanctuary away. “I bet he was sorry indeed.”

  “He never was.” The blood seeps through the squeeze of its belly and stains and stains and spreads.

  That ain’t true. I’ve been the hand, knowing and unknowing, that rewrites a Tale enough times to know when the Tale’s a falsehood. I’ve been too long the mouth that told false Tales to let this one stand anymore.

  “No,” I say, thoughtful, soft. “He cried. Couple times, that we knew. That’s what it meant when his eyes went golden.”

  “We don’t know that for sure,” Corner hisses, eyes so sharp I remember Atticus’s; Corner’s eyes bright, and the memory of Atticus’s fading as his blood spilled free. “We don’t know he ever cried, not for real. We took his word for it that crying’s what sun-eyes meant. He could have made that up. He might have lied.”

  “He didn’t lie,” I whisper.

  Corner’s cheek twitches. Its eyes close and hands crumple to cover them, shaking, shamed.

  “I know,” it croaks, dry of hate like it’s dry of water, and I think I hear it weeping.

  I sit by it. I listen to it cry, and the breath slowly comes back to me, fouled as it is, stinking from Corner’s blood and Ariel’s hurt and Atticus’s dying. The red goes clean from me. The mad washes away clean.

  Corner is dying and I am back in Safe.

  I am in Safe and I am the Teller and a once-sworn of Safe is weeping.

  “Tell me,” I say, as I hear Jack’s roar and the Pactbridge clatter and the rumble of living feet tumble and stride into Safe, where the last of Corner’s shadows are coughing and dying. I settle it down on the floor and hold its hand.

  Its mouth works. It’s running out of words, out of talking. There’s blood bubbling up on its lips. A wisp of shadow coughs out behind it and wraps itself about my fingers. I yank back without thinking as the bloodtouch crawls up my arm, cold cold, turning my eyes dark and the darkness behind them into pictures, remembering; the smell of someone else’s mama and the taste of black coffee and the scratch of a wool dress against legs at the age of four.

  A Tale in pictures. A Tale told the only way Corner ever could tell it: from the inside.

  “Okay,” I whisper, soft, tongue numbing, the world going black and dim. “Tell me how you came to Safe.”

  CORNER’S TALE

  Corner never loved in hir life until sie met Atticus.

  Corner was not the kind of person who got loved. When Corner was a baby sie was born with two parts, boy-girl, and hir mama went into hysterics every time the Whitecoats even thought the word scalpel around her baby child. Hir mama took hir home. There were dolls and trucks both. There were dresses and sailor shorts, whichever sie’d like. And Corner’s mama said, “When you grow up you’ll have to choose and I’ll buy you that surgery, because the way you are, I fear nobody’s gonna love you when I’m gone.”

  Corner’s mama loved hir. Hir eyes lit up at the thought of it. My mama was a
good mama, sie whispered dying, speaking without speaking as the men and women of Safe roared through the big door and Corner bled out on the floor ’round the blade of my gutting knife. My mama loved me how I am.

  (I nodded, and held hir hand. I couldn’t see. It was hold on or fall forever. Go on, I said, and squeezed my eyes shut. Show me all of it.)

  Corner took school at home. Sie studied math and art and languages, and took the tests distant to keep pace with Normal people in schools. Sie worked until sie was seventeen, and the next year meant a university or a job, and Corner and hir mama carefully did not talk about what would happen when it came time to go out into the world.

  Corner’s mama had a job. She kept order behind the counter at the community center down the block, and when Corner was young hir mama took hir to work and let hir play behind the wood-and-brick counters if sie would be good and careful and never breathe a word about being boy-girl.

  Corner stayed home when sie was older; sie liked books and quiet better than the stares when sie went out, because when you were older people took it bad if they couldn’t tell. But the women at the community center still remembered hir, and it was hir they called when the accident came on.

  “Your mama’s fallen down,” they said, tight and scared. It was summertime. The birds were pecking at the grass seeds the landlord had laid down, and the sun, the sun was golden like flowers. “Something’s burst up in her brain.”

  Corner ran the four blocks down to the community center foot-tripping and wild, and got there just as the ambulance was ready to take hir mama away. Sie rode with her to the hospital, holding her hand, and wept as hir mama rustled and gasped underneath tubes and mask.

  “I almost have the money,” Corner’s mama said dying. “Just a little longer,” before she bled herself out inside and died.

  Corner stared and stared and tried to weep, because that was what you did when your mama died, but the world had tilted sideways like a dream, and so sie just held hir mama’s hand until the Whitecoats came with the big black bag to take the body away.