Above (22 page)

Four or five days ago I would have dragged out the thread of how he’s spoken rough about my Ariel. I would have stomped and fought and told him she was Sick and that kind of talking wasn’t right. But the words of Whitecoat files are swimming in my eyes, and I don’t know what way’s home no more. “It’s not enough,” I say, strained and too-old. “It’s never gonna be enough to make it good.”

“No,” Jack says, not gentle, but gentle as he ever speaks to anything.

“Doctor Marybeth told you, didn’t she?” I ask, finally seeing what’s behind that stony sad-faced look. I raise the file, shake it. “She told you ’bout this.”

“She did,” Jack says, even.

I’m bright-red furious for one long second.

“She’s Sick,” I say, when I can get back my voice. “She needs us. Me. That’s what Safe was made for.”

“Teller,” Jack says, and he never raises his voice, not once. “You’re making yourself reasons.”

A light goes off in the house ’cross from us. A dinner-light — people long risen from the table and the dishes cleared, a family made of Mama and Papa and little kids putting themselves to bed for dreams that don’t taunt you past morning. New shadows fall across us, a stripe of light put down to bed as well. I wonder if those shadows touch Doctor Marybeth, tied as she is to the shadows that come of touching too deep the world below the tunnels, the old sewers and the new.

“I’ll stay with her Above,” I say. “I’ll get thicker shirts and pluck the scales more. She’ll pull them for me. I’ll stay and make it good.”

It’s just foolishness to go ’round wanting not to have a Curse
, my pa’s voice whispers inside, in the dark.

From that stripe of darkness Jack looks at me measured, measuring, long. “Above’s not a place for you, boy,” he says in that soft slow way.

“It’s not so bad,” I say. Taste Ariel’s lips on the words, salt like tears:
It wasn’t that bad
.

Jack looks at me, long and cool, and the longer he looks the less I feel like he’ll ruffle my hair or point me the way that needs going. I open my mouth and there’s nothing but silence in it, a silence that grows as if from seed to reach out over the whole of Doctor Marybeth’s lawn and hush up the eveningtime birds.

And then Doctor Marybeth’s at the door, head poked outside into the shadow-driven night.

“Come in,” she says, and opens the door wider. “Violet just woke up.”

It’s Whisper and me who throw on our shoes and go, go, go for the hospital.

Whisper and me and not Jack or Doctor Marybeth. Jack would spark the bus that takes you there into dying, and Doctor Marybeth needs to stay home in case Ariel comes down — and to pretend like she doesn’t know us besides. And there’s no keeping Whisper away after hearing those words. Ghostless or not, small and old and soft or not, nobody’s even fool enough to suggest it. But they both draw the line at Whisper going into Whitecoat places alone.

So it’s a quick wash for me, a change into the jeans and shirt that were bought new only a few days past with Atticus’s careful-hoard emergency money. Doctor Marybeth lends me a cap, shows me how to pull it down low to hide my face from cameras and policemen and Whitecoats. It keeps half the world out of my view. Mack would hate it.

“You know where the hospital is?” I ask ten minutes later when I get downstairs to Whisper waiting, tidied and still edgy-frantic, a sharp I recognize: someone you love dearest in danger.

“I know,” she says, and takes off down the street, between the streetlamps, to the bus.

I’m an old hand at bus riding now. I’m the best Passer of bus riding in all of wide Above. I get my paper transfer and get up to the seats halfway through. Whisper sits down next to me. Her hands are twitching, and they aren’t folded in her lap to keep me looking away.

I don’t know what I’m expecting for
hospital
. Something like Lakeshore, all old brick and ratted grass and wooden beams gone dry and hard. But the hospital Whisper leads me to is nothing like that at all. It rises up bright-lit and yellow from a lawn with a circle drive cut through it, and the lawn is a short sharp green as even as a barred window. The white vans that Doctor Marybeth called are parked all through that drive with their lights at rest, the men who work them standing outside and crackling with a watchfulness that makes me know it’s a prison.

I stop there. I tell my feet to move and they won’t do any more moving.

Hospital. Oh my oh my god.

“C’mon, Teller,” Whisper says, hissing quiet from the corner of her mouth.

Your papa’s feet were broken nearly four times
, I tell myself,
and if he could endure that, you can go in there
. It still takes all my doing to follow her inside.

The hospital is made for getting lost. It curves and twists and dead-ends into walls or doors with
Staff Only
written on them. Whisper walks it eyes half-closed. Angry smells fill up my nose, making the end tingle; I’m scared to sneeze for the thought of Whitecoats descending and declaring me Sick, police seeing my face and locking me up in chains. Either one feeling down to the bitten-off scales on my back.

Whisper’s drawn up with hurry, marching down another hall with the same walls, same doors, same tile-colored trail as the ones we’ve passed. “How do we know where we’re going?” I ask quiet as I can.

She nods ahead at something I can’t see. “Hospitals are full of ghosts,” is all she says, dry and urgent. “And keep your hands in your pockets.”

I look down. The bandages flutter like a signal light. I stuff them in my pockets.

I trail Whisper past a green-rimmed desk, hurrying to keep but one step behind. There are four Whitecoats behind it, hidden among racks and racks of files that block off exit from the back way. The files draw my eyes; I can’t even count how many people locked away they mean, how many admission forms. They’re orange and blue and green and stacked like fresh brands as far up as there is to go, and there’s no Doctor Marybeth here to let them all out.

“Hey,” someone says, and my hands are ’round my matches before I can tell myself
down!
Whisper stops sharp and turns back ’round, looking up with big innocent eyes at the Whitecoat behind the desk.

Anyone watching well can see the hint of red fire beneath that look.

“We’re visiting,” Whisper says, smooth as you please, never a flicker that lets you know she doesn’t live and breathe Above. She cocks her head; listening. “Room four-thirty-eight,” she adds.

“You family?” asks the Whitecoat. A girl Whitecoat, hard-faced and crag-nosed and with a look in her eye that says she’s fixing to turn us out the door.

“I’m her nephew,” I say, thinking on the move. Nephew’s good cover Above. They don’t expect you to look nothing like each other, and it’s still close enough that you can laugh, weep, hold each other’s hands.

She frowns. “There’s only one woman in four-thirty-eight, and she’s a Jane Doe.”

My hands freeze in my pockets ’til I remember the man at the shelter, the sad look in his eye. “We’re not sure,” I mutter, knees tensed to run. “We — she went missing. We came to find out,” I say, and hope.

And: “Oh, honey,” the Whitecoat nurse says, melting down to sweet before I can blink, and looks at me with big eyes that I don’t right trust. She pats my arm, hot callused hand that smells of chemicals and gag-sweet flowers, and I pull back before I think about Passing.

“Shy,” Whisper says, her own hand on my shoulder, and steers me into Violet’s hospital room before I can undo all my own good tricks.

I’ve never been in a hospital room before. And they are different from how they are in Tales. The walls are blue, all blue, not pale sick-up green. They’re hung with pictures of houses and flowers, things that go soft and blurry when you look at them too close. There’s thin flower curtains on the one short window, scratchy-looking even from ten steps back. And there’s four beds cut off by nests of curtain, four restless bodies moving. I take in the sound of breath made echo-loud and strange, the soft slow beepings and the burrows of wire, and then Whisper prompts me through the narrow curtains to the far end, to the window, inside.

“Violet,” I say, just like Whisper did when we found her hiding, curled up, fled from the touch of shadows.

There’s a machine to breathe for her. It covers her face in a clear strangle-mask like something to pump out your soul. Her fingers tap a little on the side of the bed, made up white against blue walls against the blue of the papery dress she’s wearing. It’s terrible thin. It wouldn’t get you through a fall day without freezing.

(
First
, Atticus says,
they take your clothes.
)

She don’t make no sound ’cept her smacking, the lip-curls and shapings she always does. She don’t look up and see us. She lies still, stately. Stares.

“Violet,” Whisper breathes, and her eyes flick over to us, bright hunted Violet-eyes like I know from my first-born days. Her mouth shapes something that’s not just a twitching and I reach forward without thinking to move away the clear and muffling mask.

“Don’t,” Whisper says, not loud or sharp but still enough to freeze me. “There’s an alarm,” she adds, quieter. I drop my hand to my side.

“Vee?” Whisper says again, leaning over her, and takes her twitching hand. The hand stills, I think. I don’t see it move no more in the grasp of Whisper’s smaller, thicker fingers. “Vee, baby, it’s Annie. You’re all right. We’ll be back home in two shakes, and we won’t let it hurt you no more.”

Violet’s voice is a husked-out thing. I don’t recognize it proper as a voice for a few moments, and so I lose the first few words of it to the hiss of the breathing machine. “— didn’t hurt her,” is what I catch, and I mouth it after her.

Violet isn’t stuttering
, I realize. And:
Didn’t hurt
her —

Doctor give me poison give me pills.

My heart jumps halfway through my rib cage, and I lean in careful, careful, slow.

Violet’s eyes are dark-chased with shadow.

“It was Corner,” Whisper says, voice low, lips right by Violet’s old-woman ear; too close, shadow-close, not seeing it yet. “Corner’s shadows. Remember, Vee? In Lakeshore, and then we — then it burned.”

“She was cold,” Violet rasps, not Violet at all. Her fingers
taptaptap
on the bedside, playing pianos, playing bright music. “She was cold and the light was hurting her. I took her somewhere warm.”

“Whisper,” I say. Slow and careful, because it’s scared things cornered that bite, and if shadows rise up out of Violet in the middle of a Whitecoat hospital, there’s none of us here who’ll get out alive. Whisper glances at me, and I jerk my chin slow, toward the darkness in her eyes.

Whisper drops the hand.

Her eyes are burning bright. They’re bright as Atticus’s and harder yet, and even though her fists are small and she told ghosts, long ago, that she wasn’t the hitting kind, they’re balled up like they could take walls down, rip up the curtains, burn the whole Whitecoat hospital and everyone in it.

“Whisper,” I say again, and turn real obvious toward the open hospital room door.

The glare she turns on me is fifty-seven years of dead-ends and dead things and nights spent cold alone. “It took my Violet,” she manages. Tears sneak ’round the corners of her eyes.

Violet glances one to the other. Her eyes are thick and confused, three shades too dark. I don’t know if she even knows who I am. She ain’t Violet no more. Just us four now left to Safe. Us four, and shadows.

— shadows, which tell you true names. Shadows which’ll tell you secrets.

We burned all the shadows in Lakeshore, all the marks young-Corner left there, hugging the file of its lost-beloved Atticus, and none of them showed no sign of knowing Violet, of knowing Whisper’s face.

This one’s from the tunnels. This one
knows
things.

Whitecoats rustle on their Whitecoat business outside the door. In the bed opposite, foot-to-foot across the flower-curtained window, someone who ain’t got no Safe to flee to turns over on his side. We’ve got a chance here.

We don’t got much time.

I take a deep breath and bring my shoulders down. I think low and slow and careful things. I think about what makes a person vulnerable, and the avoiding of it. I think about making Safe.

“Corner,” I say quiet, like a summoning.

Violet’s chin ducks into her skinny collarbone, tangled and tangled in wires. “I hate that name,” she slurs, faint and damaged under her plastic mask.

“Angel,” I say, watching every fingertip for the reach of fingers not human. “You did right. You kept Violet hid away out of the light.”

Whisper sucks in a breath. I hold up a hand, hold off her rage, her hurt. I’m the Teller, and this is the middle of a Tale.

Violet’s face under the clear mask twists into a look I’ve never seen her bearing: a flushed smile, shy. The kind of smile that looks away, that’s made by a wounded thing waiting to see if you’ll praise or hit.

“Is there anyone else Above?” I ask, eyes half-shut. Pretending it’s Ariel, who needs to be handled gentle. “Anyone else you’ve kept out of the light?”

“They’re down below,” the shadow whispers, letting out a breath in the gap between Violet’s stutters. “I can’t let anyone up wandering. That’s not keeping Safe,” it scolds, Atticus to a first-duty child. Violet’s fingers open and close on the sheets.

“Are they still alive?” slips out, and I know it’s a bad idea the second I say it.

The beeping of the machines gets faster, more insistent. “It was just
once
, they were Whitecoats and it’s been
years
, and you — you can’t keep holding that ’gainst me —” the shadow says, tears beading up in Violet’s staring eyes. “I
never
hurt no one. I never even
saw
Jonah, and —”