Above (29 page)

Corner waited outside Safe, darkening and darkening, for the day when Atticus might forgive hir.

And then one night in the space between the old tunnels and new sewers, weeping past bearing, something living came down and rested its head. Something Safe-born. A Teller.

What color were Atticus’s eyes when he exiled the first Beast from Safe?
Corner whispered, and my own mouth said red for hir Atticus’s anger, for hate and spite. For everything that wasn’t loving or Safe.

Corner went into the sewers and wept in the shadows, and knew nobody would ever love hir again.

People unite against things. People fight when they’re scared and threatened, not to change, not for the future. They get it wrong in the other Tales. People don’t fight for heroes: They fight for the monsters. For fear of the monsters in the dark.

Safe united against Whitecoats, and when the Whitecoats were too far away to keep Safe together, too quiet a threat to keep the arguments from crackling up, Atticus united Safe against Corner.

Those are the things Corner Told me as sie died and Safe fell.

I held hir hand until sie died, and after. Until my skin became my own again.

They came to get me once the shadows died too. Their tooth-hands and their snarl-tails shriveled up once Corner’s heart stopped, once the bloodtouch took the life out of hir own tears scattered through the tunnels and warrens that led up and down to Safe. “Careful,” Jack said as Whisper took my hand from Corner’s dead one. Of me, he meant, not Corner. I didn’t understand why.

They led me off the body, and we counted up our dead.

A
RIEL’S
T
ALE
III

We buried the dead down in the caverns, in a place where the dirt was soft.

The
catatonic
left most with the shadows’ dying; it drew out of them, leaving them dark and dark-haunted, tinged with Corner’s remembering like Doctor Marybeth was. But lots didn’t wake up: the old ones. The Sick ones. The ones that couldn’t live days and days without eating.

Whisper and Jack counted our dead. I shuddered in the corner of my house, broken, breaking, and they counted up half of Safe.

It wasn’t a good idea to bury dead down in the tunnels. They’d get found eventually, by workers or vermin or the carrion things that scuttle through the sewers, hunting scraps. So in regular times we burned our dead, and scattered the ashes somewhere out of the way. It was a simpler thing to gather all the wood, to gather in a place suitable for fire, to hide the scars of the burning in whatever empty star-spit field we chose.

But we’d never had dead so much in quantity before, nights and nights of fires’ worth, and so we marked out a burial ground and dug it and piled the finished graves with stones, and hoped that’d be enough to keep the dark things out and away from the remnants of our friends.

There were lots.

There were lots and there was Darren, slick and troublesome, who went down head-crushed on the Pactbridge, trampled down by shadows. Bea held him long and long while I sat by Corner (they told me later), held him against her chest and didn’t cry but sighed, lips pressed tight together to keep the red rage in.

“We can help you take him up,” I told her in the small hours, when I’d heard the news, when the clocks in Safe were wound again and the sleepers waking and I found her with Darren’s bruised-up body.

“I don’t know who his people are,” Bea said. She looked up at me. I don’t know if she hated me that moment or no; there was no telling a thing from her voice. “We’d have to leave him in the street.”

“You don’t have a place —” I started, and “No,” she said. Cut me off with just the word.

I didn’t want this don’t-care biter buried down deep with my good dead, but Darren had died protecting Safe, and it wasn’t about what I wanted.

“We’ll bury him here,” I said, and she gave me the body, and we put him with our dead in the ground.

We laid them out straight next to each other, washed up in clean clothes. Heather and Seed’s little baby, born out of a dying mama and but a day old when it died thirsting, we tucked between them, in their arms. The second child born in Safe.

We buried them down in the dirt.

We buried them and Ariel stood beside me, and while she didn’t take up my hand, she didn’t look away from me when I said her name, when I stood half-close, when the time came for me to pass her the shovel and her to take a turn filling the graves.

I looked at her bracelet when I came back to our house, dug it out from the box where it was hidden away.

S-C-H-I-Z-
it started to say, and then I couldn’t look no more for the tears.

I went walking after. I went walking through the sewers to the place near the Cold Pipes, the place where Corner haunted. It was late afternoon when she came for me in a hum that started up in my dreams, whisper-snap dreams of walking so far there’s no way back under the pipes and gullies and trains.

“Found me,” I said when she’d set herself down, changed back to a shape where she could be talking. It echoed through the busted-up drained-out pipe.
Found found found.
The opposite of lost. The opposite of lost ain’t Safe.

“Yeah,” she said, and sat down next to me veiled and shrouded in her wings.

It was quiet between us for a bit. Not a quiet that needed filling.

Then: “You’re sad,” she said, slow and guarded. I looked over at her, half-surprised, and the look on her face was a stubborn wary thing that made me almost think she was spoiling for an argument, but then I settled myself down and took a breath and thought
Atticus-thought. That’s the thing Atticus would say.

Look closer.

Ariel gets bad when she’s scared. That’s when she stings; that’s what stings, scared things cornered. And she gets scared when she thinks someone might hurt her.

I let my hands sit loose so she knew I wouldn’t push her away.

“I’m sad,” I said, and something in her uncoiled. Something of the scared and bad.

“Why?” she asked, simple. Waiting.

My throat choked up dry and slow; I looked down at my hands, hands that weren’t now blood and dirt, blood and mad, that didn’t smell anymore like Atticus’s dying. “I hurt you,” I whispered. “I’m twice Killer: once for
him
and once for Corner.” I didn’t have to say that the first thing was worse by far than the two that followed. She knew what I meant: She was clear-eyed and ungrieving for the first time in so long, head-tilted and watching like a Teller. “I — I told a Tale for years and years that I knew wasn’t true, even if everyone wanted it so.” My hands trembled. I flattened them on my knees. “I don’t know that I belong in Safe,” I finished, lame and thick. Not knowing ’til I said it that it was true.

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 astride 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.