Above

by Leah Bobet

  Killer’s not something you can fix with Safe.

  “Someone said something?”

  She didn’t know named you Killer, or the words for a Teller that lies.

  “No,” I said. “But I did.”

  She rubbed her wrists. The bruises were near gone. Not all. There was a quiet.

  “You’ll come up with me?” she said, carefuller even than before.

  I turned my head to look at her. The line of her face was jumpy and quick, and she half-turned away before she forced herself to meet my eye, but under the nerves and scared was something else. Was serious.

  “I need it here,” I said. “The dark. The quiet.” A pause. “The sunlight drove me near mad.”

  “I’d be your dark,” Ariel said.

  I felt something like the bloodtouch burst inside. Except it was warm; warmer. It was warm like the sunshine ought to be; it was light and heat without burning. And the tears it brought on weren’t for sad, or for grieving. They were iridescent.

  “You don’t mean that,” I whispered, finally, scared at the thought that she didn’t. Scared at the thought that she did.

  She looked at me a long minute — a tunnel minute, a guess, in the place where there’s no clocks — and licked her puffy lips. “I dunno. If I could, I mean.” She looked away. “But I’d try.”

  “Doctor Marybeth said you’re Sick,” I said quietly.

  “Yeah,” she said. And then she looked down. “Won’t get better.” Won’t get well.

  “Not here,” I agreed, and it wasn’t ’til she looked at me, looked and saw me freely crying, that she knew for true what I meant.

  Ariel was a hero. She was the best hero Safe ever had, and she was Sick.

  Sick may be like Freak Above, but we weren’t Above no more. We were in Safe. And Safe could make it easier to be a Freak, to be Beast, but there was nothing we knew to do about healing up those ones who were Sick.

  We don’t have fancy machines. We can’t keep pill-times and talk out ways to tell real from not. We weren’t Whitecoats. But we ain’t Doctors either.

  And there wasn’t no shame in healing.

  Ariel was a hero and I loved her. So I was gonna try.

  I bought her peaches. A whole basket. Not stolen either, but bought proper, and every single one fat and sweet and kitten-soft against your mouth before you bit down. We went out into the old sewers and found a corner that was almost fallen in, where two could huddle in close and warm without being spotted. And we ate every single one.

  It didn’t cost twenty-five dollars. Barely five.

  They tasted like Atticus’s gaze gone sun-golden. I almost lost the first mouthful from gasping, from the sweet and soft and iridescent shimmering in my mouth. “You’ve never had a peach before,” Ariel said, and I shook my head, and she put a finger onto my lips where they tingled from too much sweet and smiled, just a little.

  Smiled not clean or free. I don’t know if Ariel could ever smile clean or free, stuck-over with her own shadows as she was. So not clean. But halfway to forgiving.

  We washed our hands on a clean pipefall, and I held her halfway as the day wore down: not full, not holding her in one place, but my hands draped on her shoulders, my chin at rest on her crown. Breathing in and out the smell of girl, of hair, of Ariel.

  I ran breath-soft fingers across her shoulders, touched the blades of bone where they might become wings. The skin was all healed up, red at the edges. There hadn’t been no reason to fly as a bee since Corner went in the ground.

  “D’you want to —?” she asked, small like a little kid, fingers plaited one between the other. Do you want to touch them? She looked over her shoulder at me, and her eyes were scrunched and uncertain. Like the old Ariel. Like the girl I fell in love with.

  “No,” I said, soft and edgeless and sweet as she’d let me be. “Just be you.”

  She let out a breath, and the edge of wings that had peeked out sank away.

  We were just us ’til night came on, and the pipes began singing Above.

  I told her I’d be her sky and her sea, and then I put her hand in Doctor Marybeth’s, and Doctor Marybeth took her away.

  After Ariel went Above, I carved the big door top to bottom.

  Safe was always built on the bones of its martyrs. But now there were more martyrs, old and young and those we hadn’t even known would uphold us. We had to put them all into memory, and my memory is wide and sure and trained to its edges, but not wide enough to hold so much gone, so much death. I carved them first thing while the arguing went on over who would lead Safe in Atticus’s place, while wood still felt strange under my blade and every time I picked it up I trembled, remembering the way flesh gave, flesh carved so much different. When they were done I had the rough of it on the door. Not the all, but enough to look at and remember. Enough so I’d finish it right.

  The argument went four days and it would have gone twenty, but for lack of food and lack of fire and the hurt that everyone felt like a shadow-stain sunk deep. They wanted Jack; I know they did, and it was nothing but Jack’s straight refusal that brought them ’round and ’round, slow-spiral and late nights, to me.

  On the fourth day the whole of Safe came to the big door where I was working sketch-and-cut, and Jack asked: “Teller, will you give Sanctuary for Safe?”

  I breathed it in. I breathed in the smell of wood and damp and earth and old, dead fear before I answered.

  “All right,” I said, uneven, and the first of them knelt to me and lifted his wrists to show the scars. “But I gotta finish being the Teller first.”

  I carved Doctor Marybeth, and the chain of half-Sick or Passing or just plain tired that she led before me, each of them saying we want to go up. We want to have a life. She watched me cool and even while they each bent down and pled their case, and I know she saw Atticus’s eyes, Atticus’s head shaking no, no, no as I listened to each one. “It wouldn’t be right away,” she said, mild, when they were done. “The attic room only holds one or two.”

  We needed their hands. We needed to rebuild, and to mend, and to not lose anyone no more, to not keep looking for yet more missing faces around corners and in the midnight duty light.

  But I couldn’t say no. Right away or later, I couldn’t force no one to stay.

  “We’ll draw up a schedule,” I said. And: “You can come back. Come back if it’s not good. Come back if it is.” Most of them were young: Beak and Flick and Santamaria and others whose Tales I knew but did not count friends.

  The oldest was Whisper.

  Whisper I just held on to long and long, and tried not to show how the parting of her from Safe tore me. She had to go care for Violet, she said. The shadows had gone out of Violet, and so Violet was coming out from the hospital. She still couldn’t speak without her stutters, and her hands still shook, and she needed someone to stand surety for her and turn the pages of her books the way Whisper had turned them for Atticus after Corner went broken-backed out of Safe. And Whisper, Whisper had sworn to come back for her Violet love.

  Doctor Marybeth had promised them the first use of her yellow-paint attic room.

  There were so few of us now. We were so small. But I was in charge now. I couldn’t kick the walls and go screaming. I held on to Whisper and shuddered instead.

  “Even Atticus cried,” she said to me, right in my ear, sun-golden, and then my back loosened and my chin and in front of all my people who’d watched me grow, I wept.

  So I carved Whisper.

  I carved Ariel, golden-haired. Golden-haloed. Resplendent in the shadow of massive bee-wings that took layers and layers and scratches and swears to get right, to make so the light caught them just so on the change of sentry duty: iridescent.

  I carved her in green. Her favorite color is green.

  I carved Corner, and I carved hir thousand black-hand shadows.

  I carved me killing Corner.

  The color I gave my eyes was the brightest red I could scrounge up, the red of Atticus astri
de the rocks of Safe when he looked over its founding. My eyes burned as I took the life of Corner and it was not proud, for around us the shadows were weeping, and so was the Teller, knife in hand.

  I wasn’t no martyr of Safe. I had no place on that door. But the story needed Telling, and Telling every day.

  Come Sanctuary Night, I told the story. I told the shadows, and I told the deaths, and I told the founding and refounding of Safe.

  I told the stories of Doctor Marybeth and Beatrice and those who swore to her, whose fire and boots and words took back Safe. I told the stories of Ariel and Corner, the ones who were not there.

  Then I gave Sanctuary.

  I’m writing to you as myself. Atticus said that writers of memoirs shouldn’t talk about themselves in the first person, but it’s not myself that mattered here, not in the end. It’s the people who aren’t for speaking: the dead, the banished. The ones who we can’t know what they have to say for themselves, but it’s important to make our best try.

  That’s what’s meant by Telling. That’s why we keep the Tales.

  I know what there is to say about me.

  I was born here. My ma had scaly gills down the sides of her neck and my pa had the feet of a lion. When I was three, my ma died of a cold that didn’t get better. When I was ten, my pa went up on his supply shift and didn’t come back, and I was given as foster to Atticus.

  I don’t have lion-feet, though they’re big and have claws instead of nails. I can’t breathe underwater. I have scales down my back that shine iridescent, and I likely won’t get children or live long as Atticus, forty-seven years before we put him in the ground with a wailing and singing that wasn’t made small by the things we knew he did, the hurt he sowed on Corner and on Safe.

  I was Teller, and I am Killer, and I keep the Sanctuary of Safe, even as I betrayed its every reason when I sent my one beloved up to be well. I am every bit as capable of breaking a body, breaking a heart, as Atticus and the Whitecoats ever were.

  I can Tell, and I can Pass. And maybe, I can change.

  Because when Corner asked me, bloodtouch-thumb, shadow-thumb to my soft hot eye, what color were Atticus’s eyes when he exiled the first Beast from Safe? I did not answer true.

  Oh, I told truth as we kept it in the Tales, and truth as we kept it in Safe, for nobody dared speak different and half of everyone had forgotten. I told truth as the histories held it, and keeping history is as much about knowing what’s to be forgotten.

  When Corner asked me, I did not answer true.

  And here’s the lie, and here, I’ll say it:

  When Atticus exiled Corner, his eyes weren’t red or hot. They were sun-golden.

  It’s a bit of a stereotype to say that the work and care of a lot of people go into making a first novel. It’s also true in ways that I never realized until I tried to make one myself, and found out exactly why all those other novel acknowledgment pages sound like they do: So many pairs of hands go into making a first novelist that it’s impossible to count them all, and deeply humbling to try. Here are a few.

  Thanks to Elizabeth Bear, Liz Bourke, Amanda Downum, Cathy Freeze, Kelly Jones, Jaime Lee Moyer, David Nickle, Michelle Sagara, Marsha Sisolak, Karina Sumner-Smith, Chris Szego, and Sarah Trick, who all read drafts or chapters or snippets and told me what sang right and what didn’t make sense. Chris Coen, Jodi Meadows, and Sarah Prineas graciously looked over supporting materials, the query and synopsis, and were incredibly generous with their thoughts, tips, suggestions, and confidence. They are all the sharpest readers a person could ask for.

  Thanks to everyone on the Online Writing Workshop for Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror for providing nine years of friendship, learning, recipes, silliness, and ripping each other’s work to pieces to find out how it ticks.

  Thanks to everyone at Bakka-Phoenix Books for four years that weren’t just gainful employment, but one of the best educations in publishing around.

  Thanks to Michael Cook of Vanishing Point and Agatha Barc of The Former Lakeshore Psychiatric Hospital Project/Asylum By the Lake for the reference photos that helped build Safe and my (heavily fictionalized) Lakeshore Psychiatric. I am bad at sneaking into storm drains and former asylums, and worse at photography, and the work they do to document Toronto’s geographic and social history is invaluable.

  Thanks to kaigou, for the Livejournal post on what it’s really like to live on the street as a teen and how fiction gets that wrong, which helped create Beatrice and her little world.

  Thanks to Eli Clare and his book Exile and Pride for the image that sent me rushing to the keyboard, and to Cherie Dimaline and her book Red Rooms for the perspective on being a First Nations person in the city.

  Thanks to the Toronto Arts Council, whose writers’ grant both kept a roof over my head for two rounds of revisions and gave me the confidence to not give up or settle for good enough, but to do the job right.

  Thanks to my agent, Caitlin Blasdell, for her sharp editorial eye, terrifying confidence in both the manuscript and me, and unerring sense of where this book belonged.

  Thanks to my editor, Cheryl Klein, for just generally being the smartest, for the rigor and care and excitement she put into every line of this thing, and for not just liking this book but getting it, really and truly.

  And finally, to my parents, Esther and Nigel Bobet, for the steady supply of both novels and blank notebooks while I was growing up, and for telling me I could do anything I put my mind to when I was young enough to believe it wholeheartedly. I’m sorry I kept stealing your books. Here’s one back.

  Leah Bobet lives in a hundred-year-old house in Toronto, plants gardens in alleyways, and wears feathers in her hair. This is her first novel. Please visit her website at www.leahbobet.com.

  Text copyright © 2012 by Leah Bobet

  All rights reserved. Published by Arthur A. Levine Books, an imprint of Scholastic Inc., Publishers since 1920. SCHOLASTIC and the LANTERN LOGO are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Scholastic Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Bobet, Leah.

  Above / by Leah Bobet. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Summary: When insane exile Corner and his army of mindless, whispering shadows invade Safe, a secret, underground community of freaks and disabled outcasts, Matthew, traumatized shapeshifter Ariel, and other misfits go to the dangerous place known as Above, where Matthew makes a shocking discovery about the histories entrusted to him.

  ISBN 978-0-545-29670-0

  [1. Fantasy.] I. Title.

  PZ7.B63244Abo 2012

  [Fic] — dc23

  2011012955

  First edition, January 2012

  Produced with the support of the city of Toronto through Toronto Arts Council

  Jacket illustration © 2012 by Nathalia Suellen

  Jacket design by Christopher Stengel

  e-ISBN 978-0-545-39220-4

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher. For information regarding permission, write to Scholastic Inc., Attention: Permissions Department, 557 Broadway, New York, NY 10012.

  Table of Contents

  TITLE PAGE

  DEDICATION

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  COPYRIGHT