Above (13 page)

“Ghosts caught us.” Her voice is muffled. I don’t look into the cracked glass for even a glimpse of her face.

Jack sticks with Whisper until we get to the double-metal door and stop. “Here,” she says, and draws her arm from Jack’s, shoves her hands in her pocketed skirt like she’s slow freezing. Ariel I’d comfort — and
Ariel’s safe
I remind myself firm to stop the sudden ache — but Whisper, like this, I’m scared to touch.

Jack studies the door, its double-thick glass window all seamed and spidered with cracks. “Keypad lock,” he says brief, and grins mean and tight. He taps his metal bar just so on the scuffed box beside the doorknob, and it shudders with sparks.

The door clicks open slow.

First we hear nothing. Not even wind. The walls are concrete, and the floor despite its cracked-up tiles and colors is concrete beneath, and an empty counter runs along the right side of the doorway into the dark that’s a hardship again now that my eyes are all ruined with sunlight. There aren’t no windows in Isolation.

The thick cell doors hang open at broken-neck angles, row upon row upon row.

I strike a match and nudge it between the twists and wrappings of my brand until it catches. When I hold it high, Isolation is grey too, and there’s no crayon-dust, no crushed-up cans, no ashes. Isolation is empty as a scoured pipe.

Jack pads forward to the nearest cell and pushes it open with one gloved fist. The room inside is smaller than my own little house, nothing but a bed stuck to the wall and a fancy metal bucket for a toilet, the edge of a wall for pacing. He squats down in the center, poking through mouse shit and nothings with the end of his wicked crowbar. “Keep going, Teller,” he says grim.

I move out to the second door. Toe it open with one foot.

The fourth cell still has a mattress, and I lift it away with my bouncing right shoe, checking careful for shadows like I’d do for bugs back home. Nothing ’gainst the wall, nothing behind the mattress —

Except when it moves, bleeding stuffing and smell, there’s a rustle beneath like pigeon wings.

I lean in careful, making sure it’s not the sound of something that’ll bite. Nudge the mattress off its shelf. Dead center, pressed like a flower between the stained old mattress and rusty springs, is a file.

It’s ripped and dark-stained and falling apart, nibbled at the edges by time and bad deeds. I ground the brand clumsy between two springs, open it careful and flip through. It’s notes and notes, written in a neat hand —
Whitecoat hand
— covering each side of the paper. I spread it on the mattress and press nose to paper to read.

Malignant osteosarcoma
, it says.
Phantom limb syndrome. Post-traumatic stress.
Farther down:
experimental treatment to halt rejection of prosthetic limb.

Whitecoat words. Words that twist. But I know enough to read the Tale they’re twisting. I know that Tale back and front, carved onto my good front door as well as my hands and my heart, because nobody else ever heard it told true and I repeated it every night before bed for a full month afterward to guard it ’gainst forgetting.

I gather the file up careful, touching the soft yellow paper only on the edges, where there’s no words for my sweaty fingertips to stain. Take it out into the ward.

There’s a flicker of something behind me; a change in the dark. I turn with my brand out, knees bent, ready, but the air lies flat, still.

Just the firelight moving, I tell myself, and walk in my own footprints back to Whisper.

She’s sitting slumped on the tall counter, her legs dangling loose like a kid’s. “Look at this,” I say, and she sits up. Her eyes are red and much too big, a trembling big that makes me want to look away. I hold the file out. Maybe she’s just teary from dust. Maybe it’s a sneeze.

Jack intercepts it with one thick hand, peeks over clumsy fingers at the worn-down paper beneath. It’s not a minute before he gives up on the bad light and the long Whitecoat words and passes it to Whisper. “Corner’s?”

“This ain’t Corner’s.” My hand’s shaking. The touch of the paper’s like a touch of stain; it stays on your skin long after you’ve put it down, stays your own trouble forever.

“No,” Whisper says, and the skin around her lips is a very sickly white. “It’s Atticus.”

That’s why we’re not ready when the shadows come.

Narasimha’s child
, they don’t say. Nor:
Teller
, nor
Matthew
in their hiss-echo voices that mix and muddle ’round corners like a river ’round a silty block. They pour out of the cell I could have sworn was dead empty with hands outstretched, blacking out the floor tiles and smudging away the doors. By the time Whisper’s up on her feet they’re on top of us, wailing, snarling:
Give him BACK —

“Fuck!” Jack spits, hoarse and furious, and for a second I’m back there again in the ruin of Sanctuary Night, legs and eyes burning as Jack calls out fire and the Pactbridge down. I put my brand high, in a fighter’s grip. “Keep back,” I hiss at the shadows, hands trembling. My heart beats like the stamp of shadow-feet, shaking my chest down to pieces.

They ran from me before, I tell myself for courage. They ran from my words and my fire.

But they’re nothing at all like running now: They hiss back at us, furious; send Whisper fleeing back through the hard double doors. And I can’t tell if it’s the light or if their chests are thicker, their necks rounder, their black teeth surer and less jaggedy broken.
Don’t you don’t you touch touch touch
— they rustle through creased lips, my fire lighting every line, and then they leap.

I’m ready for the first hit. I’m ready for the second, the thin-veined black fist swinging a breath from my belly while a wide-open mouth howls wild. But there’s a shadow in every corner niche wall cranny and there’s only goddamned one of me, and the third takes me right in the nose.

Light explodes behind my eyes. I stumble back, blink them clear, and I’ve barely time to bury my torch through the shadow’s too-fat chest before the pain in my nose turns to chill. It’s cold like my first night Above; cold that nearly burns.
Shadow-touch
, I think as the cold seeps down my cheekbones, my mouth. It tastes like fear and endless dragging time, a flicker of
peas-medication-roast beef
, and none of those are things I know, things I’ve ever had up against my tongue.

My brand falters. I open my mouth, close it. Lick my lips, numb.

“Give him back,” comes out of my mouth, weak and whispery, and the shadows all around me, about me,
in
me, raise their heads and howl their horrible grief.

I drop the fire. I drop the fire and my hands go to my lips. The brand hits with a soft
whump
of dust rising.

“Teller!” Jack shouts, and scoops up the brand. He whirls it with his bad hand like a man gone berserk. “Back,” he orders, breathing like a furnace run hot too long. “Behind me,
now
!”

I scramble back, stumble ’til I’m through the double-metal doors into the hallway, where Whisper’s hugging the file to her chest like Ariel with her scuffed black book. My fingers bend stiff, strange, at the sight of it. They flex, and I swear I didn’t make them move.

I yank the other hand off my mouth fast, but it’s too late: The chill’s slipped into my hands from clamped-down lips. The chill moves my hands toward that creased brown paper, fills them with a terrible urge to grab: cardboard, paper, living flesh —

Oh no no no.

“Don’t touch him,” slips out, and this time I don’t mind it because I can’t talk for myself, can’t warn, and Whisper and Jack need to stay as far back from me as they can.

“Teller!” Whisper cries, big-eyed and short-armed and easy to snap in two. I snatch my hands away just before she takes them, shake my head as fast as I can.

“S’got my tongue,” I manage before the cold comes back in, wails
give him back give him BACK
through my own fumbling lips in a voice I halfway know and never wanted to. The cold roots in deeper, down my jaw, through my chin. I feel the first touch of shadow-fingers along my cold-scraped neck.

Oh god it’ll touch my heart.

I think about Ariel’s hands on my back, rough and numb through the scales under Bea’s old grey blanket. I’m glad she never saw this happen.

Whisper bats my hand away and puts rough little fingers on my lips, her eyes narrow and hard. “Come out coax out get free go clean —”

“Whis,
back up
—” Jack shouts from the doorway. The cold won’t let me turn my neck. It won’t let me see what’s happening to him.

“Come out I draw you out —” Whisper goes, and eye-glinting, puts her other hand on Atticus’s old browned-out file.

Something inside me
moves
. My throat twitches like a backward swallow.

All the shadow pours from my icehouse throat into the file in Whisper’s hand.

She shrieks, quick and thin, and drops it to the floor. The brown cardboard of the file goes midnight black and cold, so cold it puts off winter into the whole room and turns our choking breath to frost. The shadows’ stomping, shrieking, kicking stops. Whisper and I both stumble back against the peel-paint wall in an ear-popping quiet.

Deep inside the file there’s a terrible, terrible
rip
.

Jack abandons the doorway in three long strides and plunges his brand into its heart.

The shadows yelp and Jack raises the brand again, but the dark is on the move, fading soft and smoke-thin grey, lengthening out into one soft-edge mocking of legs and head and arms; all the edges of a real person with nothing true or living underneath. It scoots back against the wall like water running downhill and I blink to clear my eyes, to separate out the dark that’s living and moving from the normal dark just lying still.

When I get it sorted there’s but one shadow on the creaking wood floor, short-limbed and curled forward, holding Atticus’s papers to its breast.

“Teller!” Jack throws me the brand. I let it fall to the floor, snatch it up by the handle, and shove the fire hard up beside the face of the last shadow.

“
Don’t run.
”

The shadow whimpers, and the mad furnace-roaring in my belly turns cold and sick. That’s not a right sound.

That’s not a sound a monster makes.

Whisper’s prim mouth is back from her teeth, wrinkles all contracted into vicious yellowed points. “What are you?” Nothing. “
Who?
”

Hesitating, hesitant, I push the fire closer.

The shadow keens, high and hurting like a lost little baby.
Who told you that you might gather my roses?
it murmurs. The sound rushes overlapping from corner to corner. It’s so close I can see its hair, long and flopping over a small brow, fine cheekbones.
That’s what it said, the Beast, the Beast, and her papa he had no good answer.

I squint. It’s not my imagining. This shadow’s fuller than they were in the sewers, in the streets. It’s the difference between a fed man and a starving one, and something here is very wrong.

Monsters don’t weep.

Send me a child, then, he said, the Beast, and they sent it into the big house with no windows and locked doors
, it sniffles.
Then you say: No. That’s not how it goes. It’s us that are the Beasts.

“Speak clean,” Jack says beside me. “Whisper, make it speak.”

“I can’t make it speak. Shadows aren’t ghosts,” Whisper snaps.

— and no little girl’s gonna save us
, it gasps.

I draw the fire back, guttering low and thin. A tear-drop smudge of darkness works down one of its cheeks, then the other, and this is not at all the same creature that swiped the Sanctuary Night dinner off the shelves and laughed as the glass broke into our blood.

“What are you?” I whisper. My mouth doesn’t taste like peas or roast beef or — I shiver — medication no more; it tastes like my own blood. I hold it in, scared to spit and feed what ghost-or shadow-mouth’d come gaping out of the floor. But my back’s curved, my shoulders down, my hands smooth and slow and unsudden: all the things that make a Telling, and from nothing else but habit, the habit of hearing something lost and in pain.

“What are you?” Jack booms at it, and the shadow
changes
. Its limbs grow darker, thicker, strong. It pours together like water coming down the drain and I can see pupils, lashes, the fold of a loose shirt made of dark. It narrows into waist and widens to hips, and the boards creak underneath it as its weight settles in.

I’ll be your rose
, it says suddenly, clear. Fifty voices collapsing into one, and it’s one like a bell, boy-girl clean, touched with the most terrible yearning.
I’ll be your Beast. Just take me away from here.

Whisper steps back, and she’s the color of dead things by torchlight. “Corner?”

Don’t call me that
, the shadow whispers, soft and plaintive.
I don’t like it when they call me that name.
It leans toward my torch like a cupped loving hand. The first bit of flame nibbles at the cheekbone, the chin. I yank it back, and it leans farther. A little hole burns into the delicate curve of shadow-jaw.

“What then?” I ask, frantic.
Ask something. Ask
anything. “What’s your name?”

Angel
, it says, and the flames lick at its face, reach from brand to shadow-skin and catch the edge of that soft shy smile. I toss the brand right down to the floor, but it’s much, much too late.
My mama said I was her little angel, and God loved me like every other —