Above (23 page)

And: “Shh,” Whisper murmurs, pushing past me, face a red-eyed mask and tear-streaked. Touching, careful, Violet’s hand. “You know we don’t blame you for that,” she says rough, rough-worn too, like it’s a talk had fifteen hundred times, over and over in the dark.

Violet’s puppet-nose sniffles. Violet’s eyes blink back something else’s tears.

“So everyone else’s back beyond the Pactbridge,” Whisper says, her voice hitching, but no matter ’cause the beeping alarm machine by Violet’s bedside’s slowing again, turning over to sleep.

“Yeah,” Violet’s voice says, “’cept Reynard and” — catch — “little Matthew and Narasimha and Jack. I can’t find them.” The keening eyes look up at me. “You’ll find them for me, right?”

It’s only that this is a hospital that keeps me from sicking up right then and there.

Whisper leans down urgent, just as I’ve turned away. “Who else is walking patrol duty?” she asks. “Are you watching anything but the Pactbridge?”

Violet shakes her head. Her tongue makes staccato clicks four times before she can bring it to speaking, and when she does, Violet’s face is bitter, twisted, hurt. “I can’t watch the tunnels. It’s just me. Who else but just me?” Its voice twists in the same way I told Whisper that nobody, no one, ever tells Tales about Corner. “Who ever helps?”

Part of Passing’s knowing when to cut your losses. Part of Passing’s leaving before they throw you out.

“Is she your girl?” asks the lady Whitecoat when we pass her counter again. She’s at the edge where Whitecoat space meets the hallway, hovering near as a raised fist and watching us with her spiky-syrup eyes.

Whisper draws herself up tall, and there’s a moment where I’m afraid she’s just gonna toss it all, say
yes this is my broken Sick Violet love
and get us both locked in with her. And then she smiles, sad and hard and awful, and goes, “No. She’s someone else completely.”

Whisper leads me out of the hospital slowly, hand in my hand, fingers ’round my fingers, and it ain’t to keep me from Passing false no more.

I hold on.

It’s cooled down out of doors, finally cooler than a kitchen stove though the wind’s still as wet as sewers. I breathe it on my own and not helped by machines, tasting air that doesn’t smell like medicines and dying. Air that smells like things that live, even if they live bad lives rooted down Above.

But that’s wrong. It’s not just bad lives that spend their days Above. And not just good ones that take root down in Safe.

And Safe is held against us by nothing more than Corner, fetched up alone in the dark.

I quicken my steps, looking for the bus stop. We’ve got to get this home to Jack: four against one, not four against a thousand. We’ve got to make plans, careful ones, and soon. But: “No,” Whisper says and turns down the street, leading me by her tight-grasp hand.

“Where we going?” I’m near-afraid to ask, afraid of being tangled in another thing I don’t want to keep secret. My hands still hurt from the last thing I tried to hold.

“I need some dark, Teller,” Whisper says, and doesn’t look back. “I need underground.”

I walk with her down the street a different way, to a flight of steps set odd into the concrete. We go down them into a dimness that smells familiar, full of metal stands and machines and bright big posters.

The trains, I realize. This is the way to the trains.

Train’s normally a danger noise; the worst danger noise of all. It’s enough to beat the rustle of biting rats or the whisper of shadows, the moving of things we don’t even have names for. Train means people, Normal watching people, and one sight of you caught in one corner of their eyes through the windows can mean work crews and police and Whitecoats come down into Safe. That’s why train’s the most dangerous. The others can kill you, but they can’t kill Safe.

It’s hard to forget that as Whisper pays the fare and the train grumbles into the station, pulling all the wind in the world behind it. The beat-up silver doors slide open one after another after another. There’s just a few seconds to hurry into the car before they close tight behind us, and then it catches and pulls into the tunnels, the bright tiled platform speeding up and then left behind as the train takes us into darkness.

The dark’s familiar and soft and good; I can close my eyes into it without the memory of too-bright things taunting and poking inside my lids. My breath goes out before I think ’bout it. My breath goes in and I breathe damp; faint tunnel-smell, dirt and must and metal and time, the smell of almost-home, the smell that’s in my bones and belongs there more than grass and trees.

Tunnels. Pipes. Safe.

The homesickness comes up like any regular kind of sick, strong and dirty and no denying it, but this time I let it come.

Whisper’s watching me, but not direct. She’s watching me bounced off the window, which shows nothing but dark right now, dark and the ribs of tunnel-supports. “Almost there, Teller,” she says, and I nod, wordless for a minute as the homesick cradles me like a child, ebbs slow away.

The train pulls into another stop with a squeak and scratch of wheels; pulls out again before she turns and asks me, quiet, “What’re you thinking?”

“Dark true things,” I say, unbidden; I always begged her to tell me what the dark true things her ghosts whispered were, but I’m not sure I need to ask anymore.

She chuckles, empty of anything that laughter ought to be: delight or ease or good companionship. “Dark true things,” she says, hands in her lap, between the roll of wheels and the hum and clunk of tracks. There’s a silence, ten chugs long. In the tunnels you can mark time proper. “You know, I lied,” she says, with a soft little smile, staring out the window at my safe ghost-reflection. “It was only ever one dark true thing.”

“What was it?” I ask, tired, empty.

“That you can’t save them,” she says. “You can’t save other people. And most times, child, you can’t save you either.”

The train rattles. I sit still and quiet until it chimes to a stop. Whisper sits like a lady in a Polaroid photo, and all the while she stares out at the dark-reflecting glass, looking at nothing. Looking at ghosts.

V
IOLET’S
T
ALE

Violet’s Tale is much like every other in Safe. Violet used to be Normal and then it didn’t matter no more when she turned up Sick; when her mouth began to sing and she didn’t drive the singing. Her lover called the Whitecoats, weeping ’gainst their white hands. They took her away, and she tried in Lakeshore three times to die.

She went, with Whisper and Atticus and Corner and Scar, down to Safe and swore she’d never go back.

After a while, every Tale is like every other.

’Cept Violet came back up from Safe (said the shadow in her body, husked-out and weak behind the plastic-tube mask). She came up running from shadows, running from the burning, eyes scorched by the sight of Atticus dead and the night fading out and so much light, so much terrible strip-naked light.

The wind rattled through the streets of Above, and it shook her flesh and bone.

The shadows boiled up from the sewers after her, red-eyed and spitting, and ’cause her mouth wouldn’t let her even scream she ran ran ran, back to the only place she knew, to the last place she’d dropped foot in the whole of Above. Lakeshore was terrible. But it was quiet, and dark, and it would not shake its head at her, sad or unloving.

The shadows ran faster. The shadows were waiting.

And when we finally found her, the people who loved her, who carried her out of Lakeshore a second and final time, we gave her to the Whitecoats, weeping.

Before we left, before the Whitecoats and the hurry and hurt drove us out into the full cool night, Whisper leaned close to Violet’s ear and said where I wasn’t supposed to hear it:
I will come back for you.

“We move,” Jack says, his hands ’round a mug of late-night coffee. His face is just as twisted and acrid and sharp. “Tonight.”

Whisper sits at the other side of the table, hands in her lap, and twists her fingers through her many-colored skirts. She’s gone past weeping. “We can’t tonight. We aren’t rested. We’ve got no hands. No fire.”

“Don’t need hands,” Jack says, and the light in his eyes is forked and splitting. “There’s no helpers in Safe. All we got to do is get through the door, take down Corner, and then we don’t have to worry ’bout its shadows.”

“You sure?” I ask.

Jack’s face is thunder-grim. “They want what it wants. If there’s no Corner? Corner doesn’t want a thing.”

“That’s all we’ve got to do?” Whisper looks over to Doctor Marybeth for a back-me-up, a word against Jack’s plan, but Doctor Marybeth’s shutter-faced and silent, sitting in the fullest swath of light to keep the shadows from between her ears. Jack sees the reminder, and it ain’t a kind one.

“All we got to do,” he repeats, lower. “We go in and make the door. And two of us hold them off while the third goes through and does for Corner.”

He’s not counting Ariel. Ariel’s stings mark up shadows. With her we’re not two and one but three and one, and one who can move quick and quiet through the air and leave no footprints.

I don’t say nothing. I don’t know if we ought to count Ariel no more.

“Nice plan,” Whisper snaps.

“We can hold ’em off long enough,” Jack says, and though he doesn’t look at me, that gives me no question ’bout who he means to send to put a blade in Corner’s heart.

“Don’t know ’bout you,” Whisper shoots back, “but I mean to live.”

Jack won’t look at her then, and he still doesn’t want to look at me. For the first time in my life I see Jack Flash drop his eyes to the table and then the floor, muttering like a little boy caught out eavesdropping. “There’s others down there. Waiting on us. We can’t plan selfish,” he says.

I know it even though nobody wants to say nothing: That means we can’t plan.

I close my eyes, fingering through Tales, thinking and thinking with the whole of my worn-out head. Not even Atticus and Whisper and Violet and Scar and Corner — yes, and Corner — made Safe with but the five of them against the world. They had hands Above to help them. They drew secret money from old friends, begged from strangers, kept secrecy and stashed it away. They saved food from Doctor Marybeth and picked up the boxes she left them to vanish down into the tunnels below.

Their hands from Above. Hands that stayed Above when the building was done.

“It doesn’t have to be just the three of us,” I say, and they both look at me.

I lick my lips. Doctor Marybeth in particular’s watching me peculiar. Flickering shadow-doubt lingers in every place her hands go for a second after they’re gone. “What d’you mean?” she asks.

“I know some people,” I say. “People who might help.”

“Where from?” Jack asks.

“Here,” I say, and wait for the shout to come.

“We can’t let people Above find the way to Safe,” he says, and Doctor Marybeth sits up straighter a little, the shadow-gleam red and angry in her eye.

“Oh, come on,” Jack snaps. “You know you’re different.”

Doctor Marybeth doesn’t reply.

“We don’t
have
Safe,” I say, trying not to snap right back; to be calm and cool like someone not to be ignored or put down as a kid. I’ve been Teller since I overtook thirteen and it’s near five years since then. “We draw the shadows into the tunnels, and our help can burn them out. They don’t see Safe. They don’t see our ways.” I wait a moment. “And then we all live.”

All five of us. Me and Whisper and Doctor Marybeth and Jack and my Ariel. Happy ever after in hurt and hate and secrets.

“I got hands,” I say, and stand myself up to go. “And I got fire.”

This time, Beatrice just lets me in through the buzzing-misery door that keeps the world off their toes. Just three visits, and they’re used to my coming at strange hours of the night. Used to me coming to bring them sorrows.

I don’t even tell myself to hush up for that as I kick and stumble up the steps to the most important task of my life.

They ain’t all waiting at the door this time. I’ve worn my welcome thin and clear too quick for that, but Beatrice shifts me quick inside and there’s no time to think about it.

She looks bad. She looks tireder than tired, and wary. The spiked red of her hair is drooping soft down her stubbly scalp.

“Beatrice,” I say, and bow my head to her formal, ’cause she’s the founder of this Sanctuary.

“You found her,” Beatrice says, and the misery takes me for a full five seconds before I remember what I’m here for.

“Yeah,” I say, soft, and she looks away.

“Safe?” she says after seven, eight, nine breaths, and it muddles in my head for a tenth. I’ve not freed Safe yet. And then I figure out what she means, and “Yeah,” I say. Swallow against the prick of hurt that I’m already getting used to at the thought of Ari, of her wrist in my hand. “Safe ’nuff.”

I look behind her but I don’t see Darren; Darren who’d know about newspapers and beatings and bodies sprawled out on the floor punched to blood, police searches for a boy this high. I shouldn’t even be outside, but this is an emergency. This is more of an emergency than twenty-five dollars can fix.

When I look back she’s watching my hands, my bandaged-up, taped-together, red-puff hands. “Safe enough,” she repeats like she don’t believe it, and her eye goes cooler.

“I made it Safe,” I say, the truth, and swallow down the sick.

“You did something,” she says, flat and hard.

I nod my head. Yes. Yes.

Her face shutters up. Her eyes close, and open, and she’s quiet.

“Were you even telling me the truth?” she asks finally. “You don’t really come from somewhere else, do you? Just another fucking runaway with a good story.” She rubs her scalp like it’ll itch clean off. “God knows where she picked you up.”

(
I got hands
, I told them. Like it was a certain thing.)

“I spoke true,” I say, my voice hitching. “I found her on my second time up, and she was curled up little in a crack in the wall and when I held up the brand to see if she was real it was …”

Iridescent.
I see it, bright and flicker in my head.

“You found her,” Bea repeats.

“She had wings,” I say, soft, and look up to meet her eye. “She had wings from her running. You
saw it true.
”

And between one blink and the next her eyes widen and go yet harder, ’cause I’ve found the thing she really no longer believes, the thing that scares her and keeps her turn-toss at night: that maybe she didn’t see wings, and maybe the bee was just a bee bumbled in, and all this has been teasing, a terrible mistake.

“Matthew,” she says, not turned like Doctor Marybeth but with the same grief, “why are you here?”

I clear my throat. “I need to ask you something,” I say pitched clean, every syllable made sharp and careful as to not break the ritual of the thing.

She lifts her head up a little higher. “What’re you asking?” Hands out of her pockets, and standing tall like a founder ought to be. The rustle of feet behind her, in the dark at the bedroom door, goes quiet as the nighttime breathing of the boards.

I kneel down. I get down on one knee that digs into the blurred wood floor and strip off my sweat-stuck shirt, pulling scales with it where it’s dried to them; sharp little yanks of pain that peel up to my shoulders. Beatrice watches. Keeps quiet and still.

“Beatrice,” I say, in my best Telling voice, the voice that makes every sound sweet and clear. “We go down to Safe tomorrow to drive out the shadows. We go down to take back our home. Will you and yours carry our fire?”

She looks down at me, arms crossed across her chest, Normal and regular pink. She’s ten fingers, ten toes, eyes, nose, ears. One of those hands flicks down; I feel it pass over the scales on my back, touch them, and I dare look up long enough to see her mouth open a little in fear. Fear of wings. Fear of gills and lion’s toes.

Fear and wonder.

“Why should we?” she asks, but her voice trembles. “Why’re you asking us?”

“You didn’t turn her away,” I say, and I’m stammering, I’m stumbling. I can’t afford to stumble. “You didn’t turn us away, her or me. That’s … that’s what we’re ’bout” — (and Ariel looked up at me like a barely alive thing, vibrating, looked up like she was waiting to see what I’d do next). “It’s about giving people someplace warm to be.”

She’s watching me. She’s still watching me, and I can’t figure out why, or how. Desperate, I think back for what Tales I have about Bea, and it’s half-nothing; it’s that she came from outside the city, from some northward town, and then just Cat and Darren and the way she’s put them all together away from the street-Whitecoats, to make Safe —

Sudden, wild, I add: “She’ll never be on the streets again. Not her, not nobody like her. You send them to us. They’ll never have to sleep there again.”

Beatrice runs a hand through her drooped-down hair, scratches the naked side of her head idly. And then her shoulders go down, and she lets out a breath so heavy with old things, remembered things, that down on my knees I near lose my balance.

“Yeah,” she says, shy and rough. “Fine. We got your back.”

There’s a breath, a sigh, a squeak from the other side of the door. And there’s a breath from me, a fall of my back and my chest, ’cause it’s done and I might live to see my own house warm again after all.

I feel as old as Atticus. Older.

“Why?” I whisper before I can help it, knowing that deal or not, it’s a gift; knowing there’s nothing less wise than to question a gift lest it go right back to the giver.

She looks down at me, arms crossed again, but not in the way that shuts a body out. Showing the weight and heft of her, of her people. Of Sanctuary. “S’good to have a home.”

Were there lesser light, were there a private place to go where no one listened shadow at the door, time enough and memory to hear it once, again, I would ask Bea her Tale.

I will carve this on the doors of Safe
, I promise her, and let out a breath to seal it.

“What do we do?” she asks and steps back, lets me stand, lets me pull the Passing down over myself again and zip it up tight.

“We have to talk to my people,” I say, and open the door.

I take her hand and lead her down seven flights of stairs, to the wet-slicked streets of Above.

There’s
phoning
before I take her back to Doctor Marybeth’s. Phoning with one of my extra quarters, ill-spared and precious, from a black-handled slick dirty phone tucked away between two shopfronts, to make sure it’s all right to bring her. They fight for six minutes by my counting before I say: “Can’t wait this long,” mild and quiet. Doctor Marybeth stops and then says “Come,” and hangs up just as Jack and Whisper start to shout again.

We come.

Two buses and rain-damp streets, a walk down the block, and we’re there, knocking at Doctor Marybeth’s door three-and-two, muffled by the bandages slipping on my right hand. Doctor Marybeth opens up near right away.

“This is your friend?” she asks, her shoulders hunched enough in the yellowy hall light that I know the fighting went on all through those two bus rides and up to the door.

Ariel’s friend
, I almost correct. But I look over at Bea and think of the trust she’s laid down in me, the trust I’ve returned in her even though it’s the highest of fool things in the world to trust Normal people Above.

“Yeah,” I say, and smile to show each of them the other’s nothing to fear. “Doctor Marybeth, this is Beatrice.”

Bea nods her head. Wary. But Doctor Marybeth don’t take it as rude.

“They still against it?” I ask.

“Yeah,” and Doctor Marybeth straightens a little. “But it’s my house.” She leads us inside, trailing the door open. I shut it tight behind us.

Bea doesn’t shed her shoes like everyone else. Her boots creak soft soft down the tiny tiled hall, and she stops a half step behind me in the door of Doctor Marybeth’s kitchen.

“Hey,” I say, and Jack and Whisper both turn to me with wicked scowls.

“We didn’t say —” Whisper says, and before she can finish I move over and make room. Bea takes the signal and slides thin into the kitchen. She looks half-ready for anything. I dunno that she’s ready for Whisper and Jack.

“This is Bea,” I say. A silence. “She knew Ariel before.”

Ariel is Sick
, I remember her saying. She knows Ariel, right and true. Better, maybe, than all of us.

“And she’s hands?” Jack says, right over her head.

“She’s got a place,” I say, ignoring Jack’s mouth. “She keeps twelve sworn clean and safe and gives them Sanctuary.”

She’s Atticus
, my eyes say to him, just as hot and spark, and maybe they gleam red just a little bit, because Jack backs off and looks Bea up and down for the first time.

“Got twenty more who owe us favors,” Bea says, cool as you please, and she is Atticus indeed, ’cause nothing you ever said to snip back at Atticus ever moved him a step out of place. She walks right in and takes a chair, straddles it crosswise and folds her arms on the back. I near expect to see impatient claws clicking. “Matthew says you want us to help you take your place back,” she continues, and tucks her hands in the crooks of her elbows. “And he says you’ll help keep our people off the streets in return for it.”

I bite my lip. I had no right, promising that.

Whisper and Jack pass a long look at each other, eyebrows raised in mimic on both sides. “Well, he’s Narasimha’s kid, all right,” Jack finally says, dry and wry, and I only get half of what that means before they turn back to the rest of us.

“We do, and we will,” Whisper says. There’s a smile on her face I don’t know I’ve ever seen, half-curved and attentive and not at all the sharp-tongued, sharp-mind Whisper I’ve known the whole of my life.