Above (4 page)

It’s in looking at her that I miss it. I take a moment to look away, and that’s when the knife slips under Atticus’s raised arm.

Finds home inside his throat.

I was wrong, I realize, as the claws go up, claws that can’t hold his own good blood in. Atticus’s eyes in anger weren’t the reddest thing I’ve ever seen. He falls, ankle-twisted, to the floor. The light of his eyes turns golden, yellow like sunshine. Goes out.

And: “Fire!” I finally scream, choking, scrambling to my feet. “Fire to Atticus’s door!”

There’s a shout, and it’s not others taking up the call. It’s Jack, booming out louder than he’s ever done, “Arms to the big door
now
!” Ariel’s up in a flash, flailing, running, wings humped and unfolding, streaking toward the big door.

“Ari!” I yell and set off after her, tripping around the corner through the darkness.

The door is open. The big door is open and the Pactbridge is swaying, stuffed full with shadows, all two arms two legs and a head dark as your third wrong turn at midnight. More shadows than we’ve ever seen, more than I thought the old sewers and new could hold. They howl empty on the Pactbridge and shake it with their stomping feet. And between them and me is Jack Flash, hands sputtering light, burning from nothing but the lightning in his bones.

Corner’s brought them
, I realize, sudden and sick.
Corner’s come for Safe.

“Arms!” I call, and scramble to the kitchen for something that’ll burn.

The brands are in storage, lined up careful on our shelving beside food, gear, clothes, everything else we smuggle in from Above; tucked away tight against prying hands. They’re not close by for an emergency. There’s never meant to be emergencies in Safe. I shove through boxes and bags and rows of rope and empty bottles before I find them, a stack of split wood and old fabric, and yank down as many as I can carry to the door.

Fire in Safe is dangerous. There’s not a lot of air where we are, even with the tunnels and vents that the founders dug night after night to funnel good air down from Above. But I burst into the common and nobody hesitates. Nobody stops Seed from grabbing a brand from my cradled arms and readying a match.

Every clock in Safe strikes the hour, cacophonous hour, and the shadows burn darkness through the door.

I’ve never seen shadows straight on before. Nobody’s ever seen more than a foot, a finger in the tunnels, or couldn’t describe more than that after, not even for a Teller and a whole stack of founders doing their level best to ask the right questions instead of thinking
monsters
. Seen straight on they’re tall and spindling-thin, muscled even stronger than Heather’s wheelchair arms, and darker than nighttime, darker than sleep. They’ve got no eyes, just dips and dents where the eyes should be; no wrinkles or creases or hairs or bumps all down the chest and into their tough runner’s legs. They run compact like rats and just as nasty, and puddles drip into their footsteps, slicking the ground deadly.

I drop the brands, all except one, and kick them back behind me. Seed’s match flares for a moment against the shadows,
iridescent
, and I swing.

My unlit brand passes right through the first body.

There’s no trail of dark, no drag following my swing; the tendons of the shadow’s neck just go paler, translucent, and swallow the brand like black water. The shadow laughs like metal cutting into bone: It’s fingernails dragging down a million chalkboards, across an eyelid, down my spine. The color leaks back into it like ink into water, turns the curves of its face and fingers solid again. It looks down at me, weighty, heavy, and raises its hand.

“You need fire!” Seed shouts over the noise that’s suddenly everywhere, and touches his lit brand to mine. I swing up into the shadow-fist, trail the smoking beginnings of fire through its chest and neck.

There’s a smell of damp things burning. The shadow stumbles back, bats at its smoldering, vanishing arm.

The laughing stops.

“Thanks,” I say faint, and Seed jogs my elbow:
C’mon. Let’s go.

“Form a line!” Jack hollers, his voice a pop and crackle, but it’s too late: The shadows are across the Pactbridge. They tread like giants across the kitchen cabinets, knock down jars and cans and heads that all smash the same,
shatter clunk smack
. They lean quivering into the concrete, somebody’s throat between the rag-ends of their fingernails.

“C’mon,” Seed presses, and we scoop up the fallen brands. I shove them into any hand I see, any hand that’s skin and bone and not variable dark. Behind us come the gouts of smoke, bloody firelight. Shadow-screams.

“Where’s Atticus?” Mercy shouts, hoarse and coughing in front of the Sanctuary Night canopy, five feet or a million years or the end of the world away. I’m out of brands and can hardly see; there’s too much smoke in the air, too much unpeeled dark.

Gone
, I think, and stab fire into another shadow until its lean belly catches and burns.
Gone. Corner’s killed him.
It’s not one second before another, broken black teeth and giggling murder, pushes forward to take its place. There’s hundreds of them. There’s more of them than us.

“Teller!” Seed calls, and I turn just in time to see him sprawled flat on his back on the churned-up common floor. The shadow above him has delicate, long-fingered hands. It would make a good carver, I think, as it raises one black rope-muscled foot and kicks Seed in the belly. Seed is looking at that foot. There’s blood on his mouth. He’s looking at me.

“Hey!” I call, turning heads elsewhere, every head but the one I need to: the one craned down intent like the fastening of a strap. “Hey, shadow!” I choke, and stumble toward it with my brand out like a flag.

It watches me one full second, whuffing and trembling with held-back power, before it brings the foot down.

Seed’s head breaks below the horns.

He makes a noise, a terrible strangled noise as his skull hits floor, bounces, and hangs broken in a way it never ought to be. The second stamp breaks the horns in half, blood coming everywhere and painting the floor terrible bright colors, and then he don’t make no noise at all.

My scream comes raw, a formless nothing next to those bent toes and slick arches and the ankle flexed to kick. The shadow looks up as I rush it, screaming hard and wild and
wrong
, and shove the torch into its fat grinning mouth. It ducks and pales, trying to disappear, but I shove it there and hold it ’til the fire takes its wicked head clean off.

“Seed?” I croak when it’s collapsed into ash — no, into nothing, a tidy stack of nothing and I’ve got no time to think about that now. I ground my brand in the gravel and kneel down close, feeling automatic for pulse, for the rise and fall of the chest just like Atticus taught us. Wet soaks through the knees of my pants. “Seed?”

His eyes aren’t brown no more, but big and stained bloody. He don’t breathe, and he don’t answer. My brand tips over, totters onto the floor and smokes out.

Heather
, I think as its smoke blobs and thins. She’s strong but she can’t fight fast, not from her chair; not heavy with Seed’s half-orphan child. I’ve got to find Heather.

I’ve got to find Ari.

Seed’s fallen brand sputters high as I stand up, look around. There’s fighting around the common and to the door, between the banged-up metal storage shelves, on the Pactbridge where the smoke is pouring out. A shadow bursts into flame, wailing train-squeal high, and the Sanctuary Night canopy steams and catches. I can’t see Heather anywhere, and I can’t see —

The hand ’cross my throat brings me down before my tearing eyes even track it.

I hit the ground hard, back and ankles and the back of my head, everything gone bright white for one second too long. The brand bounces out of my hand, and when my eyes clear up, the last thing in the whole Tale of my life I see is an outstretched arm, five delicate carver-long fingers, a pair of shadow-eyes, terrible and sparking and
sad
—

And the tiny sting, coming down.

It screams.

The shadow screams and hops and shakes. The sting lands again and again, stinger ripping that dark away from the inside, punching through it like paper ashing outward from the spot where a lit match head’s touched. The shadow, realer than real, unwinds bone by ridge by joint into the smoke.

I blink. My back’s wet against the ground. My legs are wet, and I don’t know if it’s sweat. Ari’s bee circles me, once, slowly. Her wings beat once and she starts to sink from the lack of motion, and then she
runs
.

“Ari!” I scream again and stumble up, running after her through the bodies and the wreck and the blood on the smooth-graveled floor, across the Pactbridge. Into the old abandoned sewers.

I run light-blind. I run hands out in front of me, eyes shut, choking because it was the last time and there are shadows in Safe and I can’t let her get away, not now. My shoes slap against the cold ledges and my toes don’t even try to curl against them.
You’re running away
, I realize halfway down the tunnel that splits the old sewers from the new, stinking and scared and listening for the buzz of wings over the faded noise of fighting and bleeding and dying.
You left them.

I try to turn around and my legs shudder
no
.

I keep running.

I catch up with her after the cramp in my belly’s arrived, shifted, and settled, after my dark-vision comes back and then doesn’t matter for the sweat stinging my eyes. She’s sitting back to the wall like the very first time I found her: curled up tight in the remnants of bloody-edged wings.

Everything’s burning. Everything’s burning bright.

“Hey,” I whisper, not to be gentle but because there’s no more voice left to me. Her chin comes up like something hunted.

Behind us, far and faint, there are footsteps in the sewers.

Can’t stay.
I reach out, teetering, and she hugs her arms tighter. It’s her book. She’s hugging her book like a baby child. “Ari?”

She’s shaking. “You saw it,” she says. Her voice is taut and frightened and harsh. “You all saw it. It was
real
.”

“It was real,” I say. It comes out more like a cough. I’ve been breathing smoke. My voice won’t work.

She shudders again, one thick terrible one, like earthquakes.

I brush her shriveling wings with my fingers. They flutter like curtains. We can’t take them with us. They’re too big to carry, and if we leave them they’ll show our trail for sure.

I take Ari by the shoulders, light and slow. Turn her to face the wall. “Don’t look,” I breathe, smoke-mouthed, aching, and then I stomp them. I stomp ’til they break, tear apart their thick-paper membrane, dump them in the sluggish wend of sewer water — and thank you, thank you that nothing reaches up to receive them. No shadow-things left in the new sewers tonight. They’re all away in Safe.

She flinches as they sink out of sight, and I’d stop, I’d stop to hold her but there’s no time for it now, not with the shadows behind us. I can hear their giggles coming up the tunnels. I can hear their rustling in the dark.

“Gotta run,” I whisper, and she nods, clinging to my arm.

We run.

We’re in the new sewers when Ari stumbles to a halt and I do too, legs shuddering and stomach tight, everything silent except the slow-moving water and the sound of us breathing like waterfalls. “They’re gone,” she says, and they are: Those scraping hoots and giggles aren’t behind us anymore, and the smell of rust and rot and cold dirty fingers, shadow-smell, is all drowned out in people-smell and refuse and living things. Above things: all the smells that mean life and breath and light and terrible, terrible danger.

“Where are we?” I ask. Ariel turns a blank and hopeless face on me, so smeared with damp from running it looks like her hair’s been shedding tears. I squeeze her shoulder — I’m scared, but she
needs
— and squint at the walls. If this is one of our pathways, I’ll know it; if it’s on our marker maps, there’ll be a sign on the concrete: paint, or clay, or circles chiseled deep pointing
danger
, or
fallen path
, or
this is the way back home
.

There aren’t none.

I search the walls twice. My sweat cools. By the third time Ari’s not going to believe me if I miraculously find something, so I stumble back to her, making real sure to put each foot in front of the other. “We’ll find somewhere to hide,” I say. “We can rest, figure things out.” There are places, dry places, with doors you can bar and good air and soft darkness: the four safehouses we hold outside of Safe.

“Not in the sewers. They sleep in the sewers.” She’s picking at her palm. There’s something in her right hand, dark, like a shadow-tooth. I pluck it out, brush away the blood that comes after it. The stinger, her own stinger. Her offering. She looks down at it and goes quiet, shrinks into herself. “I’ve seen them.”

I go still. Careful-still, the kind I’ve learned to make people forget I’m there while they Tell the most real nightmares they’ve ever lived. “When? Where?”

She shrugs, uncomfortable. Ariel doesn’t like being the center of anyone’s attention, good or bad. “A couple times. Where the ceiling’s fallen in. The Cold Pipes.”

Nobody goes down to the Cold Pipes. Not even with fire. Every sign that points them out reads
danger
,
fallen in
,
do not go
. If we had a sign for
monsters
, it’d be carved in there two feet deep. “When were you at the Cold Pipes?”

I can’t keep the strain out of my words. She ducks away from it; hides behind the fall of her mussed-up sunshine hair. “It was only the couple times.”