Above (24 page)

A Passing smile.

I search for remorse in the first blush of that knowledge: Even if we win, I’ve opened up the knowing of Safe to people who don’t need Safe. We’ll go through our lives now with people who’d know us to look at in the streets Above, scavenging for our food, our clothes, our lives. People who might give us up.

Doctor Marybeth never did
, I tell myself, and set my jaw tight. Doctor Marybeth didn’t, and Bea won’t. I won’t be sorry. I won’t be shamed for this.

It can’t all be wickedness, Above.

“Tea?” Doctor Marybeth says mildly into the quiet, her eyes not on Bea’s face or tough hands but her feet. Bea falters just a second, flushes faint, and unlaces both her boots.

We’re silent for a moment while she carries them to the front hall and comes back, more slippery, in stocking-feet.

“Twenty of us,” Beatrice says, talking like Doctor Marybeth didn’t shame her but a scant minute ago. “No. A dozen, a good dozen who won’t talk shit around. And you three. And Matthew?”

“Not me,” Doctor Marybeth says, and there’s a flicker of shadow at her fingers as she turns her face away.

“And Ariel,” I add, before Jack can get in a word.

This quiet is harder to break. It stands up to mildness and shuffling and polite shame.

“I don’t know, Teller,” Whisper says. “She’s quite unhappy with all of us.”

That brings my head up. “Why you?”

“That’s Ariel’s way,” Whisper says gently, and Jack says nothing so loud it booms.

“I’ll talk to her,” Bea says, shuffling her stocking-foot against the tile.

“Upstairs,” Jack rumbles, and points with the tip of his chin. “Lucky if she listens to a word you say.”

There’s a noise beneath the table that might be a kick. I look right at the wall and try not to think about it.

“I took her in,” Bea says, quieter.

“So did Matthew,” Jack says, and she stands up a little faster than she looked to be planning and takes herself up Doctor Marybeth’s stairs like it’s a call to trial.

We wait.

“You trust them?” Jack asks. Not looking at me slantwise; just asking. Asking to hear the answer.

“Yeah,” I say. Ears aching from the need to hear, through the boards and carpets, every little word passed ’bout me and my failings, ’bout Ari and Safe and what might make it all right. “She said she and hers would carry our fire,” I add, to not look like I’m listening.

“And she knows what that means,” Jack says.

“Yeah,” I say, giving him my attention for real now. “She knows Sanctuary.”

“And we’re to give her people Sanctuary.”

“I don’t know why I promised that,” I admit.

Jack shakes his head, laughs soft. “It’s no more than your father did.”

We don’t talk again ’til Bea’s feet sound on the old creak steps,
squeak squeak moan
to the landing. It’s only one pair of feet, not two, coming down the stair.

“She won’t come down,” Bea says, and now her mouth is pressed unsure. The blood comes to my face, but I don’t dare look away. “But you might go up. She might hear you.”

I don’t know what I’ve got to say for hearing.

“All right,” I say, and wipe my hands on the legs of my fade-out Salvation Army jeans. If I got nothing to say for myself, I’ll speak for Jack and Whisper. I’ll speak like a Teller ought to, and speak for Safe.

I take the stairs one at a time, slow and loud so she’ll hear me coming, hear the tread and sigh of my thick-nail feet and not be scared when I turn the knob. I let her make herself ready.

I make Safe.

She’s curled up in the chair again when I open the upstairs door; curled up too-studied around her black book with a pencil loose in her hand. Her chin’s too high to be drawing. For sure, she heard me. And for sure she’s pretending she didn’t.

“Ariel,” I say, hovering in the doorway. Not moving, and likely to die of it. “Can I come in?”

She don’t say nothing.

The quilt on the bed is rumpled bright. The bathroom door is open, and I can see sparkles of shining here and there on the floor.
Chitin
, I think; Atticus taught me the word. The thing that makes insects’ armor, when they feel the need to be sealed ’gainst the world.

Her wings, smashed in pieces.

Her wings.

“I won’t come in unless you let me,” I say, watching them catch the faint yellow light of Doctor Marybeth’s surviving lamp. It turns each little prickle of wing sunshine-bright. Golden.

“Okay,” she mumbles after a moment, and I don’t lose my footing from the relief of it. Instead I walk deliberate and careful, hands out and at my sides, and sit myself on the edge of the big old creaky bed.

She shuts her book and puts it down slow.

“I’m sorry,” I whisper.

She don’t reply.

“Ari, I’m so sorry,” I say, trying to keep my voice low and blowing it, hands gone to fists in my lap. Not mad; or not mad at
her
. Just — all my own stupid, to think I could hit and kick and scare the one what hurt her and that’d make it okay. That kicking would cure Sick.

That it’d make her love me good, like light made soft, unburning.

You’re doing this wrong, Teller
, says the quiet part of me, the part that ain’t still wailing and begging to be loved.
If you got nothing else to say, speak for Safe.

I shove back the hurt. I shove back the shame. I get down on my knees, knee-to-floor and head bowed, no sudden moving; nothing that’ll make her need to fear.

“Ari,” I whisper, aching to wrap my arms around her and wail
lover give me something give me poison give me pills
. I don’t; I’m not gonna touch her, not ’til she touches me. Not unless I can do it sweeter. “We’re going down to Safe tomorrow to take it back. Jack and Whisper and me, and your friend Beatrice” —
my friend Beatrice
— “and her sworn, and what ghosts who’ll lend arms that Whisper can muster.”

I take a breath. It drags in the back of my mouth. But she’s watching.

“It’s real dangerous. It’s dangerous ’cause the plan’s to kill Corner, ’cause the shadows are all its shadow, and that means getting someone in quiet to do it while everyone else holds ground. People —” and I stop. “People are gonna die.

“But you’re fast. You’re quick and small and when you stung it, you did harm. We need you.”

She’s silent a second. Then: “Why me?” she asks, and it’s a real question, not moaning. She’s looking at me small and grave.

I swallow. “You know Safe. You know us. You —” I pause, realizing; how she came careening out of the tunnels through the dark, knew exactly where to land, to sting. “You could see it before. Corner. When I couldn’t.”

She ducks her head. A tiny nod. “It smells,” she says quiet, far away in a deep tunnel in another world that was only one week past. “It’s hard to see, hard to touch, but I remembered that smell.”

I didn’t smell a thing. Not even when Corner’s bloodtouch-fingers were jammed up against my eyes. “Where’d you remember it from?”

She shifts. I keep my eyes off her, keep their pressure away.

“The Cold Pipes,” she says. The noise that jeans make against chair fabric quiets. “It smells like hospitals,” and the stutter-beat of my heart on ribs stops tight.

“You saw something there,” I say. Not asking.
She was talking to shadows.

“I don’t know,” she whispers.

And now I look up. Her eyes are bruised, but I can’t tell if it’s shadows, not if it’s Corner’s or our very own. “How d’you not know?”

She shakes her head so hard her hair smacks ’gainst the chair like a slap. “I keep telling you and you never listen. There’s things you don’t talk about.”

“Or what happens? Ari, I’m listening now. I’m listening. What happens if you talk about it?”

When her voice comes again, it’s odd, tiny. Like a bee lost in empty tunnels where flowers don’t grow. “They lock you up.”

I try to meet her eyes, and she looks aside, away. Color high. Shamed. “Ari,” I say real careful.

“That’s not my name,” she mumbles.

I know it isn’t. I know.

“Ari, what happened at the Cold Pipes?”

“Nothing,” she says, but the way she shifts in the chair, still won’t meet my eye, the way she’s so terrible, terrible calm gives her away.

“Ari, it’s important,” I say, try to make it gentle. “Not just for us, for everyone. Ari, best-love, what did you see?”

“I can’t,” she whispers, and this isn’t the usual hiding, the usual weeping; it’s agony. The lines of her body are aching to change, blurring down soft into fine hair and stripes and the hint of a long, pointed sting. “Please don’t make me, please —”

I hold out my hands. I offer up the dirtying bandages like a sacrifice and say, soft, “Don’t run.”

She peeks out at them a long, long moment. Caught by their moving, and held. I unwrap them before her, and she looks at the puffed-up, swollen stings.

“I hurt you,” she says, going long again without even thinking, turning into arms and legs and girl and restless fingers plucking at each other.

“I forgive you.”

“You won’t.”

“I do.” I swallow. “I hurt you too. We — neither of us meant it. Not for true,” I say, and hope to everything that’s not lying. “I love you.”

“You won’t,” she repeats, toying with the corner of her notebook. Stubborn and hollow. A dead man’s voice.

“I love you,” I repeat, and then more promises I might not be able to keep: “I will never turn you away. No matter what, okay?”

She blinks at me, and I have to close my eyes to keep on going. To say it to the end.

“No matter if you don’t — if you don’t love me no more. No matter what happens with us.”

And to hell with your last time
, I tell the ghost of dead, stupid Atticus.

When I open them again she’s looking at me, measuring, caught and wing-grown and surprised past speaking, and then her chin droops and the wings shrivel, crush against the back of the patched-up chair. “I’m Sick, Matthew,” she whispers, two bright red spots on her cheeks.

The weight in my belly gets heavy. It would do no good to tell her about Doctor Marybeth and files. Files lie, and stories are better Told from one’s own tongue. “What kind of Sick?” I ask.

Her fingers play a little staccato on her knee:
do re mi
. “I … see things. Get mood swings. I hear —” she tightens. “I hear voices when there aren’t none there.” A swallow. “Here,” she says, and shoves her book into my hands, rough and sudden. I barely catch it. “Look.”

I almost ask
are you sure?
but she’s turned away from me. Turned away like I’m to pull a bandage off, and her watching’ll make it just hurt worse. Her notebook is thick and worn in my hands.

I open it.

It’s pictures. Ari has a fair hand with them, light and dark shaded in careful in snap-broken pencils. It’s pictures of the tunnels, of Safe, and sometimes, between, words. Her handwriting’s thin and tiny, not Whitecoat-tiny but close; labeling the pictures. Writing down, with careful sketched-in dates,
real
or
not real
.

“Ari —” I say, not understanding.

“Doctor Wishnevsky said it was a good way of double-checking,” she says, low. “You put down what you saw. And if it was consistent, or if someone else verified it, then you knew it was real. Like running a checksum. And then if something came back, you could logically know it wasn’t real.”

I don’t know what a checksum is. I’ve never heard her speak so even before, so matter-of-fact, so knowing. So shamed. “Doctor?” I ask, to stall.

“My therapist,” she says, even lower. “From inpatient.”

I can’t take it in. I can’t take in the look on her face. Instead I look down at the paper, turn the page.

The next page isn’t familiar: a fall of rock, packed loose. Heaped junk in the gutter where the sewer water ran. A thin, frail fire, and gaping outflow pipes, pipes that are dry and dead and go nowhere. The stones are each laid down precise and neat; the way of somewhere you’ve seen a lot; somewhere that’s a years-long home, though the date scribbed next to it’s only five months past. And etched in, with horrible detail and the thickest line a pencil can give, are the outlines, the limbs of shadows.

“The Cold Pipes,” I breathe out.
How often could she have been down there?
And then the panic draws in with the very next breath. “Ari, did they touch you? This is really important — did the shadows touch you?”

She looks up, sudden, anguished. “I didn’t know they were real,” she says. “I didn’t know
you
were real for —”

She doesn’t finish. It’s good. I don’t want to know how long.

“Ari, love. Did they touch you?”

She swallows. Nods, and I’m out of words. Wordless. Undone.

I knew it true from the first.

“No,” she protests, stung and absolute. With all my trying to walk soft, talk soft, she’s still seen it on my face. “I never.”

I think of shadows pouring down my throat, pouring out of my hands into two legs two arms and a nose and head and elbows on the floor of Lakeshore Psychiatric, and realize no shadow ever had to make my Ari open the door to Safe. Atticus was right: Safe wasn’t safe no more from the first time she ran. Safe wasn’t safe from the day Corner laid shadows ’tween her fingers and they trailed to and fro through the Pactbridge door.

“We won’t send you out. We’ll keep you safe,” I say, even though it’s the wrong thing, ’cause it’s the only thing I know to offer, the only thing I’ve been able to give, in its insufficiency, all along.

Her voice is bleak and certain. “You can’t.”

“Help us try,” I beg, and that’s all I’m doing here, not asking, not speaking, not telling no Tales but begging. “Help us so we can try.” I take a guess, wild and stupid. “Help us so you’ve got somewhere to go next time.”

She’s crying when I leave her. She’s crying, but she don’t turn her face away.