Above

by Leah Bobet

  “Do you have someone?” the nurses asked, wanting to call hir sweetheart but not sure if they could, ’cause you couldn’t say sweetheart to boys.

  “No,” Corner said, watching the cart go. “Just me. Just me and my mama.”

  The nurses got hir a coffee. They sat hir in a chair. And they brought a man from Child Services, who knelt down to look at hir level with a clipboard in his hand.

  (Is Child Services Whitecoats? I asked, quiet as I could. There was a crash and a clatter outside, and the whispering of more voices than could rightly fit in Safe hissing up and down and through the walls.

  Child Services may as well be, Corner’s ringing bloodtouch said, and shut hir eyes ’gainst weeping.)

  It wasn’t a week before they found Corner was boy-girl.

  They caught hir pants-down doing what, sie don’t remember. But the nice lady they’d sent hir to stay with while the lawyers did their work took one look at hir, face and roundish chest and down, and went hauling hir before the Whitecoats in the examination room.

  They poked. They prodded and measured. They stood hir under bright lights (and this part I recognized, this part I knew) and talked about hir and got hir to stand wide, stand thin.

  (There were white walls and mirrors, I said. Yes, replied Corner. Hir lips didn’t move with the words no more. Yes. You know.)

  “It is too late,” they said. And: “You are not enough like a girl, and not enough like a boy.” And: “Your mama has ruined you for the world,” which made Corner clench hir fists and bare hir teeth and jump out snarling at the Whitecoat with the sad, twisted smile.

  That was when Corner learned sie had the bloodtouch.

  The bloodtouch feels like singing (Corner whispered in my ear from the inside on out, and my very bones shuddered as sie wept). The bloodtouch is sweet music, the very edge of life, the closer-than-close that you can hold someone at night with your fingers in their veins. Corner and hir mama were close, bound-tight close, and Corner didn’t know that Normal meant touching just on the skin, or more likely touching not at all and stiff clothes and awkward silences. Corner had suckled from hir mama’s breast. Hir mama never thought it odd that her baby child could feel her very heart beating.

  The bloodtouch sang, and the Whitecoat fell like an old oak tree, kicking and twitching at the toes.

  “My mama didn’t ruin me,” sie screamed as more Whitecoats hammered their way into the room, grabbed hir hands, left bruises about the wrists. “My mama called me her little angel. She said I was one of God’s children.”

  They put a needle in Corner’s arm. It numbed Corner’s tongue, took away hir thoughts.

  They took hir into the dark.

  When Corner woke up sie checked hir private parts first thing, scared that the Whitecoats had taken one or the other away. They were still there and safe, and Corner hugged hirself tight in the corner from the relief and fear, knowing they wouldn’t stay safe long. The knowing filled hir up and left no room for thoughts and air and food.

  There was also a bracelet on hir wrist, and it said Lakeshore.

  “Why am I in a crazy hospital?” sie asked the Whitecoat they brought to talk to hir, after they’d held hir down in a chair with straps that tugged and set hir near crying.

  “Because you killed your doctor,” the Whitecoat said, and the bloodtouch hummed and whistled like the happiest little bird in the world.

  There were appointments. There were questions, and the food came through a little slot in the door ’cause the nurses didn’t dare open it, and there was tying-down or needles whenever the Whitecoats came. Never a body to talk to, and there were no books.

  And it went on, day and night blurred bloody, until they brought Atticus in next door.

  Atticus didn’t do his banging at first. They came and went with Atticus, drawing blood that Corner could feel moving float-ways through the halls, blood that flickered halfway in hir awareness. Once a week had gone, three appointments and a day when the lunch was turkey and not egg salad, Atticus began to bang.

  (There was banging in my ears too. I startled, put a hand to my ear to feel the blood inside my eardrum; Corner echoing the shouts that door-beating Atticus made in his room in the burned-down Isolation ward. But no, it was real banging. It was hands breaking down the doors, the locked-shut doors where the people of Safe had crawled and hid and were dying.)

  Atticus’s banging drove Corner nervous. It made hir pace the walls. It was more terrible than screaming, ’cause screaming was a thing done when one was already near-broken, and the pounding and shouting and banging of Atticus meant he thought he might someday go free. That he was tough and strong.

  He got less tough and weaker with every night that passed down the drains.

  It was the way the banging went shorter that broke Corner’s heart, not the act of it. It was the terrible wearing away, the way hir short sleep made hir nervous, the knowing sie could never bang like that and bust free and live good. One night the banging went on and on and on and Corner tossed in hir stretcher-bed and wept for hir mama and finally the bloodtouch rose, the bloodtouch beckoned, and it reached out the walls for Atticus’s guts and brain and heart and wrapped itself around them.

  “Stop!” sie shouted, bloodtouch humming ’round his heart, and the banging shut off so quick it might never have been there.

  And then: “Who’s there?” came into the silence, and it was rasping and carrying and scared.

  Sie told him. Sie told him Angel, and asked his name, and got it.

  “Why’re you here?” Atticus asked, low and thin and drawn-scared, a kind of scared that Corner knew because sie had felt it deep in hir belly for so long it was the same as breathing.

  “Because I’m Freak,” Corner said, and that is how Corner met Atticus.

  They were the only of their kind to talk to. They talked all through the nights. They were both woozy and stupid for their Whitecoat appointments during the day, and their therapists frowned and stroked their chins and took down scritch-scratch notes and none could make nothing of it. None could make a thing of it because the person in charge of Isolation in the nighttime was a student, Marybeth with shy glasses and a sour face and bedtime stories she’d tell herself in some strange language. She heard the noises and the whispers and didn’t tell a word.

  She read to them half-nights, stories and stories that Corner could close hir eyes against and imagine not-walls, not-floor, not-bed, and through the rest of the nights Corner stroked Atticus with the bloodtouch down every limb and in the middle. Through the long nights, locked cold in Isolation, they loved and loved and loved.

  (How’s the bloodtouch do that? I asked, feeling it prickle down my skin. Is it because you know both girl and boy things?

  I don’t know, Corner said. Hir eyes were shut now. Hir lips were blue under the blood. I think I’m just Freak.)

  Corner’s therapist got madder. He got mad at hir silences, hir things unsaid. “You must choose,” he said. And Corner trembled in the big chair that was supposed to make hir comfortable, because choosing meant the knife.

  Corner told Atticus, and Corner wept.

  “Please,” Atticus begged, one night when Corner was supposed to be sleeping against the threat of the knife and the choice that came tomorrow, his face pressed to the slot in the door that brought the food in. “I don’t care ’bout me. Please do something for hir. Keep hir safe.”

  Corner lay real still. There was a quiet.

  “They’re not gonna let you out,” Doctor Marybeth said, faint on the other side.

  “Yes,” replied Atticus, and the taste of sunlight-golden flashed through Corner’s bloodtouch and onto hir tongue. “I know.”

  Doctor Marybeth said nothing. She walked down the hall clack-clack in her Student Doctor shoes and closed the door behind her.

  It was only when Atticus swung wide hir cell-room door that Corner knew she’d left them open.

  And it lasted good, for years and years, until more came down for sh
elter and there needed to be ruling of Safe.

  (I’ve heard this Tale before. I could tell it from my skin.)

  There are differences in living Safe than living penned-up in Whitecoat hands. A person’s free, the prickling bloodtouch said; weak, and then weaker. They don’t take you ’way from your mama. But the food don’t come cut-up, and it goes bad for you when you don’t have hands.

  Atticus’s claws were good for cutting, for the shaping and carving of Safe. They weren’t good for eating. They weren’t good for dressing. They couldn’t brush a hair back out of your eyes.

  Corner fed him, every meal in secret, so the rest wouldn’t see. Who would believe me, he said, that I can lead Safe, when I can’t even change my own trousers? Sie drew his bathwater secret. Sie turned the pages of his books so they wouldn’t break snipped-up.

  He came to hate hir for it.

  And that was the problem in the end, Corner and Atticus, bloodtouch hands and crab-claw arms and awkward, desperate loving. They were both Beasts, and when they were in hurt, they were Beastly to each other.

  Corner went walking one day after their fighting, fighting again ’bout all the things sie did for him that broke up his heart and reminded him, shell-sharp, how he’d never, ever be able to do for himself. Corner went walking one day Above, and when the day was over, there was nothing left that was home.

  (You could have stayed with Doctor Marybeth, I said, louder than before. It was getting hard to see the pictures before my eyelids; hard to hear hir voiceless whispering over the voices, the shouting, the weeping of Whisper as she tried to wake dead eyes-open bodies and they would not wake.)

  No, Corner said. There was nothing for hir Above. There was nothing in a world where everyone looked at hir guessing boy or girl, and where the red mad of hating it could bring the bloodtouch out like spit. There was only Safe.

  So Corner tried to make Safe.

  There was a place hid behind a fall of rock, packed loose; a waste gutter where the sewer water ran. Four dry outflow pipes that were dead and good for storing things so they wouldn’t spoil. The stones were neat and even. There was water nearby.

  It was a good place to make Safe. All it wanted for was the people.

  Sie went to them in the sewers. Sie went to them hands opened, pleading hir Tale, and they struck fire. Sie whispered bloodtouch in their ears to keep hir skin and hair and bone safe, and they ran. Sie howled at the walls, and nobody listened because Atticus was the one who smiled or scowled at the Tales, and everyone believed his word true. Everyone except for Narasimha, lion-foot, who said “I’m sorry. I have a son to think of,” and continued upward, up to the light.

  Nobody came.

  Corner lived alone in the sewers. Corner lived in the dark with hir memories to feed hir, and when hir sight went it wasn’t a trouble, because everything worth seeing had gone shadow-lined and strange, had taken on the edge of memories.

  Corner was always partway in Safe. Hir shadows curled into cracks and crannies, listened at the big door, heard the clocks strike the hour twenty-four times a day. Sie pressed them into the hands of a bee-girl, lost and lonely, who sat night after night in hir own hollow home and stared through hir like sie was a ghost. Daytimes they slipped free of the girl’s fingers and wings; wandered listening for the voice of hir Atticus love or the sound of hir own name.

  Corner waited outside Safe, darkening and darkening, for the day when Atticus might forgive hir.

  And then one night in the space between the old tunnels and new sewers, weeping past bearing, something living came down and rested its head. Something Safe-born. A Teller.

  What color were Atticus’s eyes when he exiled the first Beast from Safe? Corner whispered, and my own mouth said red for hir Atticus’s anger, for hate and spite. For everything that wasn’t loving or Safe.

  Corner went into the sewers and wept in the shadows, and knew nobody would ever love hir again.

  People unite against things. People fight when they’re scared and threatened, not to change, not for the future. They get it wrong in the other Tales. People don’t fight for heroes: They fight for the monsters. For fear of the monsters in the dark.

  Safe united against Whitecoats, and when the Whitecoats were too far away to keep Safe together, too quiet a threat to keep the arguments from crackling up, Atticus united Safe against Corner.

  Those are the things Corner Told me as sie died and Safe fell.

  I held hir hand until sie died, and after. Until my skin became my own again.

  They came to get me once the shadows died too. Their tooth-hands and their snarl-tails shriveled up once Corner’s heart stopped, once the bloodtouch took the life out of hir own tears scattered through the tunnels and warrens that led up and down to Safe. “Careful,” Jack said as Whisper took my hand from Corner’s dead one. Of me, he meant, not Corner. I didn’t understand why.

  They led me off the body, and we counted up our dead.

  ARIEL’S TALE III

  We buried the dead down in the caverns, in a place where the dirt was soft.

  The catatonic left most with the shadows’ dying; it drew out of them, leaving them dark and dark-haunted, tinged with Corner’s remembering like Doctor Marybeth was. But lots didn’t wake up: the old ones. The Sick ones. The ones that couldn’t live days and days without eating.

  Whisper and Jack counted our dead. I shuddered in the corner of my house, broken, breaking, and they counted up half of Safe.

  It wasn’t a good idea to bury dead down in the tunnels. They’d get found eventually, by workers or vermin or the carrion things that scuttle through the sewers, hunting scraps. So in regular times we burned our dead, and scattered the ashes somewhere out of the way. It was a simpler thing to gather all the wood, to gather in a place suitable for fire, to hide the scars of the burning in whatever empty star-spit field we chose.

  But we’d never had dead so much in quantity before, nights and nights of fires’ worth, and so we marked out a burial ground and dug it and piled the finished graves with stones, and hoped that’d be enough to keep the dark things out and away from the remnants of our friends.

  There were lots.

  There were lots and there was Darren, slick and troublesome, who went down head-crushed on the Pactbridge, trampled down by shadows. Bea held him long and long while I sat by Corner (they told me later), held him against her chest and didn’t cry but sighed, lips pressed tight together to keep the red rage in.

  “We can help you take him up,” I told her in the small hours, when I’d heard the news, when the clocks in Safe were wound again and the sleepers waking and I found her with Darren’s bruised-up body.

  “I don’t know who his people are,” Bea said. She looked up at me. I don’t know if she hated me that moment or no; there was no telling a thing from her voice. “We’d have to leave him in the street.”

  “You don’t have a place —” I started, and “No,” she said. Cut me off with just the word.

  I didn’t want this don’t-care biter buried down deep with my good dead, but Darren had died protecting Safe, and it wasn’t about what I wanted.

  “We’ll bury him here,” I said, and she gave me the body, and we put him with our dead in the ground.

  We laid them out straight next to each other, washed up in clean clothes. Heather and Seed’s little baby, born out of a dying mama and but a day old when it died thirsting, we tucked between them, in their arms. The second child born in Safe.

  We buried them down in the dirt.

  We buried them and Ariel stood beside me, and while she didn’t take up my hand, she didn’t look away from me when I said her name, when I stood half-close, when the time came for me to pass her the shovel and her to take a turn filling the graves.

  I looked at her bracelet when I came back to our house, dug it out from the box where it was hidden away.

  S-C-H-I-Z- it started to say, and then I couldn’t look no more for the tears.

  I went walking after. I went
walking through the sewers to the place near the Cold Pipes, the place where Corner haunted. It was late afternoon when she came for me in a hum that started up in my dreams, whisper-snap dreams of walking so far there’s no way back under the pipes and gullies and trains.

  “Found me,” I said when she’d set herself down, changed back to a shape where she could be talking. It echoed through the busted-up drained-out pipe. Found found found. The opposite of lost. The opposite of lost ain’t Safe.

  “Yeah,” she said, and sat down next to me veiled and shrouded in her wings.

  It was quiet between us for a bit. Not a quiet that needed filling.

  Then: “You’re sad,” she said, slow and guarded. I looked over at her, half-surprised, and the look on her face was a stubborn wary thing that made me almost think she was spoiling for an argument, but then I settled myself down and took a breath and thought Atticus-thought. That’s the thing Atticus would say.

  Look closer.

  Ariel gets bad when she’s scared. That’s when she stings; that’s what stings, scared things cornered. And she gets scared when she thinks someone might hurt her.

  I let my hands sit loose so she knew I wouldn’t push her away.

  “I’m sad,” I said, and something in her uncoiled. Something of the scared and bad.

  “Why?” she asked, simple. Waiting.

  My throat choked up dry and slow; I looked down at my hands, hands that weren’t now blood and dirt, blood and mad, that didn’t smell anymore like Atticus’s dying. “I hurt you,” I whispered. “I’m twice Killer: once for him and once for Corner.” I didn’t have to say that the first thing was worse by far than the two that followed. She knew what I meant: She was clear-eyed and ungrieving for the first time in so long, head-tilted and watching like a Teller. “I — I told a Tale for years and years that I knew wasn’t true, even if everyone wanted it so.” My hands trembled. I flattened them on my knees. “I don’t know that I belong in Safe,” I finished, lame and thick. Not knowing ’til I said it that it was true.