Above (5 page)

“A couple times?” and my voice is rising now, fright and echo and all those things that don’t make a person feel Safe. “Ari —” I say, and then we both look up ’cause we hear it.

Another voice.

It’s a little mutter on the air,
rightwise or left, look in for me
, all on one note like the scales’ve been cut out of its throat. My back seizes up, terrified, but just a second after, my Teller-memory kicks in: I know that kind of song-talk.

It’s how you talk to ghosts.

“Whisper?” I breathe. “That you?”

“Teller?” Her hoarse little voice comes out of the dark.

“Whisper!” I call as if we’re not in danger, feeling through the dark for her. I make contact too hard, wrap both arms around her. “You’re all right, you —”

She doesn’t hold up her hand like Atticus might or shush me or nothing: She just lets me babble out the panic ’til I’m out of breath for true and shivering. “Something’s happened to Atticus,” I finish, broken down, beaten. “Corner killed Atticus.”

“I know,” she says, pinched. “My folks showed me.” Whisper’s folks are her ghosts; the ones that’re always about, whispering her secrets about everything.

“Who else?” I manage, but she shakes her head.

“I’ve a pain in my side, Teller.” I can barely hear her on the stuffy air of the sewer. “I need some medicine.”

There’s medicine in the kitchen, in the carefully counted stores that Atticus keeps for emergencies: pain-killers like you can only get in hospitals Above, bandages and gauze and tape and splints, little sick-sweet lozenges for the coughs that come every wintertime.
Not any more Atticus
, a little voice in the back of my head whispers. I close my eyes tight and see it all over again: shadows in the kitchen, throwing our medicine to the ground.

“I don’t think we can go back,” I say. Dirty words.

“Nuh-uh,” she agrees, and steadies herself one hand on my shoulder. “It’ll have to be up.”

“Up?”

“Above,” she says like it’s repeating herself, and Ariel makes a little noise from her corner. Whisper looks at us both, and her mouth hardens like she’s not to brook any arguing. I reach down for Ariel and help her to standing.

“We don’t know where we are,” I say, all my calm run halfway home now that someone elder’s here.

Whisper shakes her head minutely, makes that keening noise again. “They’ll lead us,” she says, and strains her neck forward like she’s listening for beautiful music.

We follow her through the slippery new sewers, over pick-foot catwalks and pitted rock, holding hands in a chain to keep together.
Above
. I’ve never gone without provisions, two days’ good rations and matches and wood, sacks and a crew and Passing clothes. I’ve never gone without warning. Nobody ever goes up
alone
.

Roach-feet skitter on the walls, the tunnel roof. A rat tail curves around a corner and plops into the flow, and Ariel lets out a little moan. I squeeze her hand tight. She doesn’t shy away this time.

Whisper turns a corner and finally stops, head stretched up like a mouse feeding on the air, her stringy white hair falling like emergency rope and wires. “Thank you good friends always,” she murmurs into the dark, and then reaches out for the ladder.

It’s rubber-runged so we don’t fall off, but still slick and deadly cold, and for a moment it’s like all the cold of Above is being forced through the palms of my hurting hands. I lift one up and get a good look at it. I was holding the brand too tight. It’s pocked red with splinters.

“C’mon,” whispers Ari behind me, quiver-shake and shivering, and I put down my aching hand and climb.

Whisper pushes the top of the world aside with a metallic stutter, and the light, oh god the light comes pouring in. And then I’m breathing droopy heat and there we are, there we are, dizzy and sick with running and strange air and stars.

Above.

There are Whitecoats and there are Doctors. Doctor Marybeth was in medical school when she helped Atticus and Corner go free. Doctor Marybeth saw me born and sewed up my mama afterward, and one of the first lessons I learned about Passing was telling the difference between a Doctor and a Whitecoat. Whitecoats never smile, Atticus told me back in those days when me and Hide and Seed, who was a teenager but hadn’t had much school on account of his horns, learned at his feet in the afternoons. That was how you could tell Whitecoats; you knew them by the smoothness of the corners of their eyes.

Doctor Marybeth has wrinkles at the corners of her eyes, wrinkles from smiling, but when she opens the door of her little old house there’s no smiling on her. “Matthew,” she says, looking over my shoulder, face paling the color of road dust.

“Atticus is dead,” I blurt, and Doctor Marybeth looks at me, at Ari and Whisper. Opens her mouth and shuts it again.

“Inside,” she says like I was hoping she would, like good people always say in Tales when you tell them there’s bad, bad news. I stumble through the door, tugging Ariel behind me by her limp little hand.

“S’okay,” I tell her. She’s gone big-eyed and still again. “Doctor Marybeth’s a good doctor.”

“Doctor —” Ari mumbles, and her hand spasms in mine. I hold it tighter, insisting, ’cause it’s hot to sweating here and my back’s prickling and I can’t take one more person leaving me tonight. She follows me slow, crouch-kneed, like something cornered. Whisper stays tight behind her, making sure Ariel doesn’t run, and she don’t say a word about it. I thank her in my gut for that and hope she can hear it like ghosts.

Doctor Marybeth’s kitchen is polished wood and tile, too bright even though the wood is pale and the placemats a soft-glowing purple. I cover my eyes with my free hand. They sting even in the shade.

“What happened?” Doctor Marybeth says. She looks ready to be sick.

“I lost Violet,” Whisper gasps, and it’s not the whistle of singing no more.

Doctor Marybeth’s face goes even grimmer. “Shh. Don’t talk,” she says, and takes out her stethoscope.

I hold Ariel’s hand.

She listens to Whisper’s heart, Whisper’s breath, and her round brown hand makes Whisper look even skinnier for being there. “Tell me,” she says, hooking one rubber-tipped prong out of her ear. Her hands move, ceaseless, ’cross Whisper’s back and wrists and heart.

I tell her, ’cause that’s what I’m there for. Telling the bad news. Telling ’bout death.
Once upon a time on Sanctuary Night there was a fight between Corner and Atticus.

But I can’t tell it far before I’m hiccuping and Whisper’s crying, harsh little inhales like a sock-foot sliding along stone. “Shh,” Doctor Marybeth says, and puts her soft hand on my back. “You’re safe here. You’re safe.”

You’re Safe here
, I translate without thinking, fever-scared, splinter-palmed, and even though Ariel’s watching, that’s when I start to cry.

A
TTICUS’S
T
ALE

Everybody knows Atticus’s Tale, but I asked for it anyway. I told him it was because we wouldn’t all be here someday, but really Atticus’s Tale was all tangents and whispers and I wanted it for real. I wanted Atticus to tell me his Tale true.

Atticus measured me all up with his eyes and then nodded quiet; sat himself down on the chair that was made, like everything he has, to not be snapped to cinders by his claws. He sat straighter than straight and took three deep breaths before he started Telling.

Once Atticus looked and walked and talked just like the other people Above. He had a ma and pa and brothers, and a girl he took to movies on Saturday nights. (Jack had already explained movies, and I was afraid to interrupt.) He worked in a shabby bookstore that was crammed every crack with old things, and his job was to straighten the books that people brought to get rid of or trade or sell. He liked to read the ones that nobody came for; he didn’t understand all of what they said, but he read them just in case. He liked the way they made the world tilt different ways in his vision.

One day Atticus was putting boxes and boxes of books on the old shelves of the bookshop and the world tilted a way he’d never seen before. The world went dark and he saw fire, fire at the center of everything, building and yanking itself upward into a mountain of light.

Then he fell down off the ladder and cracked his head.

They took him to the hospital, and a nurse felt him all over for broken things. They put him in an X-ray machine (and here he explained X-rays, the whole experiment where they were discovered, how they made shadows out of your flesh and brands out of your bones). They kept him sitting an awful long time, and then another man came into the waiting room with pictures of his arm bone, of a shadowy bulge latched on to it, made of bits and scraps of his own body gone wicked. “We’re sorry,” he said. “You’re Sick.”

They took off his arm at the elbow, and the Sick kept coming. They took it off at the shoulder and gave him a plastic arm whose fingers didn’t close right. He had to quit the bookshop and be full-time Sick. The plastic hand wouldn’t turn the pages of a book.

“We may have to try some new drugs,” they said, and injected liquid amber burning into the crook of his shoulder. It made him toss and shake and throw up ’til he could only eat soup and water for seven days, and at the end of that week he started to change. His arms stretched and grew, and it was the worst hurt he’d ever felt, the claws growing in, shell taking shape, blood flowing through.

(
So you weren’t always a Beast?
I asked, and Atticus shook his head with his golden-eyed sad smile.
I was always a Beast
, he said.
It was always inside of me to have my real arms.
I wanted to ask if he’d ever cried tears, not light, but he went on talking and the chance never came again.)

Atticus’s doctors saw the crab-arms and were scared.

“We’re going to have to take you in for more study,” they said. They brought him to a brick building with big lawns and high hedges, gave him a room, and locked the door. The crab-arms were still soft. He was afraid to pound ’til they let him out. They drew his blood, and it shifted red-orange to gold in their needles, like liquid amber burning.

They came back again and again for it, and Atticus didn’t know where they’d spent the last. His arms ached from needles. They ached when the crab-arms hardened and his Normal-people muscles stretched against the weight. The Whitecoats gave him books. His claws cut the pages to shreds.

At the night desk was a student named Marybeth. She was just as old as he, and when the crab-arms got strong enough to
bang bang bang
on the door, she was the only one who heard him. She looked through the double-plastic windows and saw the books with cut pages, the words opened up at the belly and spread on the floor. Student Doctor Marybeth put down her needles and tubes and took a book from her pocket. All night she read it to Atticus through the crack of the locked-tight door.

(And he didn’t need to say what that was, or what it meant. Because here, his eyes glowed like sunflowers.)

She brought more. She read against his door until dawn every night for months, and the Whitecoats muttered to themselves and wondered why he slept so late daytimes.

One day (he said quiet, after a long stop that made me think it was time to tiptoe out), Student Doctor Marybeth said she was leaving. Her time in this hospital was done, and she had to take her examinations and then she would be sent to other hospitals. “They’re not gonna let you out,” she whispered through the tray slot on the door.

“Yes,” Atticus told her. “We know.”

“Good luck,” she said, and slipped the locks open.

He wouldn’t tell me more. The story of flying from the Whitecoats down to the tunnels, from dry place to dry place until they found Safe, was a story I could get from the others. His story ended there, he said, with the slip of the lock.

Atticus used to be one of them, he said, leaning forward hard, and his eyes were fire like I’d never seen them. He used to be one of them and then it didn’t matter, when his arms grew back Beast. They cast him out, his ma and pa and brothers and friends, and none of them were sorry, not one bit.

And that’s why we have to be careful, and sharp, and stick together and uphold Safe, he finished. That’s why we work together. Because even if we’re strange and Cursed and Beasts, the people Above are monsters.

I wake up in the morning in a wide bouncing bed, warm and soft and safe — until I realize how bright it is. There’s light in my eyes, hard, wingless light; light that does you burning. I turn over and it’s still no good: Everything under my eyelids is red. Red and long-fingered and slicked in blood, and the curve of a broken horn —

— and I open my eyes not to Safe, but Doctor Marybeth’s white ceiling, Doctor Marybeth’s soft blue drapes over her glass-paned window, Doctor Marybeth’s yellow-painted, slope-roofed attic room. Hot, damp summertime air. It’s thick like the new sewers but hotter, hot like it never gets in Safe, where a season’s nothing more than a bit of warm or cool, the pipes freezing slower or running quicker than before. The air’s sweet with the smell of coffee and toast: Safe things. Morningtime things.

This is how Normal people wake up
, I realize, fuzzy-headed, tired. This is how I’ve imagined it, some cold and sleepy nighttimes, when I told myself made-up stories where I wasn’t Freak. Not that I go ’round wanting that. It’s just foolishness to spend your time wanting not to have a Curse, and that was my pa’s lesson, not Atticus’s. But just imagining it. What if.

I lie still three whole breaths. I drift alone in a little shell of myself, floating, and nothing in the world makes a difference where I am, between half-asleep and awake.

Then something moves in the corner.

I reach for a brand but there’s no brand, just pillows and soft things. I throw the blanket between me and it, me and every shadow in the sewers come to take my blood, and it
squeaks
.

I stop. Let down the blanket, slow.

It’s not shadows.

It’s Ariel, curled up in a patchwork quilt in the big green plush chair on the other side of the room. Her eyes are big and frightened, fist tight around a stubbed yellow pencil, reared up to strike. There’s sunlight tangled in her hair.

I lift my hand, careful. The bed’s warm and a little damp next to me; warm like another sleeping body, smaller and softer than mine. I close my hand to keep that warmth in and try to breathe slow. “Ari?” I say, and sit up the rest of the way, slow and safe and careful. “What time’s it?”

“Dunno,” she mumbles, cheeks bright red. The pencil comes down, tucks into a fold of the quilt. The rumpled pages of her book crinkle somewhere beneath it.

I look at the nightstand, a rickety white-painted kid’s thing with one chipped drawer. No clock there or on the walls. The walls are full of paintings instead, clumsy-brush things like the first I ever did back when my pa stole a set of acrylics for my sixth birthday party. In Safe there were always clocks. The clocks chimed the hour, every hour, a shout of bells echoing against the walls. You always knew what time it was.

I don’t know how many of us made it free.

Suddenly the Normal air is terribly hard to breathe, but Ari watches me like it’s just the damp, the heat, a tickle of the throat, no expression on her pale pointy face. “We should wash up,” she says. There’s something in her eyes I’ve never seen, can’t name. “There’s soap. I looked.”

“Okay,” I say, slow-brained, slow-ache, rubbing my chest with one hand to make the hurt ease up. “You go on.” She hesitates. “I’ll keep watch.”

Her shoulders unwind just a bit as the quilt comes off, as she pads across the floorboards to the bathroom door in clothes that are ripped and layered one atop the other to keep the good heat in. Warm is what matters down below, in Safe, where it’s cool and dark even in summer. In the full light of morning, Above, they look wrong. Ari, who works so hard to look Normal, looks Freak.

She goes into the washroom. I wait until she shuts the door behind her before I bury my face in the bedsheets and breathe her smell in deep: sweetness, flowers, spring.

The shower runs cold. I grit my teeth underneath it and rub soap between my hands as fast as they’ll take; scrub armpits and ear backs and myself wide awake. Where I’m cut up it stings: palms and elbows and knees. There aren’t band-aids in Doctor Marybeth’s medicine cabinet, so I leave the scrapes and scabbed bits bare. Then it’s towels and clothes again, heavy with damp, and all the warmth of the bright new morning’s gone.

The coffee smell in the bedroom’s turned bitter when I open the door again. Ariel’s at the window, looking down into the street. Her hair’s clean and golden, brushed back from her face in a long, mussed braid. She’s found a rubber band somewhere and tied it ’round the end. I scuff my foot on the floor a little to let her know I’m coming. Still, she sits up tenser the minute I get near.

I try not to let that hurt.

“Ready?” I ask, and hold out a hand that’s still stinging. She doesn’t take it, but she follows me downstairs.

They’re in the kitchen. Whisper’s chair is wedged back to the wall, facing watchful the door. Her white hair’s tidied and pinned up in the way she does for Passing: what she calls her Society style. Doctor Marybeth sits across from her in her light green doctor shirt and slacks, elbows on the round wood table, cradling her coffee cup like it’s the last match in the pack. There’s cold eggs in the pan, white and curdled yellow, everything bright and sunstruck like colors get Above. My eyes water from the cream wallpaper. It sparkles hard between the patterned flowers.

I squint against it and then let out a shout, ’cause leaned back in the dimmest soft corner, scabbed and scratched-up along his old, hairless arms, is Jack.

“Good morning,” Whisper says. She’s wrapped up in a long shawl with holes in it, soft sky-colored crochet. She pronounces every letter. Whisper never skips words ’less she’s whispering.

Jack levers up from the wall and squeezes my hand. His gloves scratch my fingers. “Glad you’re living,” he says. I can’t tell if it’s to me and Ariel both, or just me and she’s a nuisance. But I nod and smile much too big at him, squeeze his hand back, and go pour myself a mug of coffee.

“Ari?” I ask, and she shakes her head bee-tiny.

“Do you prefer tea?” asks Doctor Marybeth, fixing her in smiling regard, and I wish I could have told her not to, not to give Ariel hard attention or put her on the spot. Ariel just stands there unmoving, big-eyed and wet-haired and half behind my shoulder, and the quiet stretches long enough to swallow once, twice. Doctor Marybeth seems to get it quick, though. She turns her eyes down to the crook of Ariel’s arm. “It’s in the cupboard. Help yourself,” she says, softer, and turns back to Whisper, cross-legged in her five-spoked chair.

I fill two plates up with eggs and toast and two rare, dear strips of bacon each. There’s two chairs left in the kitchen, what with Jack standing back to the wall like he’s got watch duty ’gainst the encroaching sun. With a look that says
oh please
I ask Whisper to move over, put our plates on the table side by side, and sit.

“Who else?” I ask into the silence.

Jack lets out a breath and shakes his head.
Don’t know.
Or at least I pray it’s that,
don’t know
and not
nobody, nothing, that’s it
. “Those things are still in there. Shut the door behind themselves this morning.” He pauses. “I didn’t meet anyone else on my way up.”

I can’t help but picture it: shadows in Safe. Shadows in my house, spreading darkness not soft or loving through my Ariel’s shed wings.

Corner, in my house.

“What’re we going to do?” I ask hoarse.

Whisper squints from Jack to Ariel’s faded red sleeve, sticking out beneath another one that’s black and just as moth-chewed. “Whoever else got out wouldn’t just come here. We need to get some Passing clothes and check the safehouses before we get to choosing about anything.”

The safehouses: Mack and Atticus made everyone in Safe memorize them, in case we ever got stuck Above. One in an old warehouse down by the lake; one through a door from the tunnels that’ll lock from the inside, and a seven-day stash of food and water there; a homeless people shelter on a busy busted-up corner that don’t ask no questions so long as you can Pass good; and here. Doctor Marybeth’s. And but four of us here of forty-three Safe-sworn.

I stare at my plate and the food stares back.

“Mm,” grunts Jack, and that’s when I notice how far he is from the coffeemaker, from the electric stove Violet once said she’d give up her house and everything in it for, from the panel on the wall where the kitchen light turns on. The lights are off, the back door blinds open. His fingers flex and close in the left asbestos glove. “Get Passing clothes with what?”

Whisper’s mouth firms up tight. “The emergency money.”

“How much?”

“All,” she says, and Jack straightens with a wild look in his eye.

“How’d you get the whole stash?” He’s pacing a little circle on the tile, one step in each direction, tucked away from the glimmering machines.

“Atticus gave it to me,” she says, every word crisp. “Yesterday morning.”

My hand goes still on my heavy table knife. Yesterday morning, when he said
last time
and walked away from us, and went into Whisper’s house more upset than I could ever remember seeing him but once.

“All but twenty-five dollars,” she says.

I put down the knife and reach into my pocket, feel the crush of bills inside. “I have that,” I say, face hot and prickly. “I went out on duty and forgot to put it back.” Keeping duty things is wrong. It’s near-stealing, but I was so tired, thinking of nothing but getting Ariel back in and falling into bed. The feel of something cold and numb up against my face. Any other day I’d have caught such trouble for that: Atticus’s eyes brick-orange and his raspy voice precise, going
and what if there had been an emergency?

Good thing there was an emergency, I think, and tuck my chin to my chest to keep in the terrible laughs.

Whisper pats my hand. Her skin’s soft, like wing-light. “Well, it’s where we need it now, isn’t it?”

“Ma’am,” I murmur, and bend back over my breakfast. Bacon’s a privilege. I shouldn’t waste it.

“Irresponsible of him,” Jack rumbles after a moment, and I cringe. “No, not you, Teller. Atticus. We don’t know who else made it out.” Or where they are. Or what they’re doing for food and shelter while we eat Doctor Marybeth’s toast and coffee.

“Who do we know didn’t make it out?” Whisper asks.

The toast and coffee stick in my throat. “Seed,” I say.

“Kimmie,” Jack adds, subdued and dark. “Mercy. Maybe Scar.”

“Heather?” I ask soft.

“I can’t say, Teller,” Jack replies.

The sun flutters through the long lavender blinds. Heather and Seed’s baby comes due in not two weeks. If she’s alive. If the child inside her still is, on short emergency rations somewhere, knowing in the way babies do that its papa isn’t ever coming back.

Doctor Marybeth frowns. “I have a friend who works the street patrol. I can ask him if anyone’s come in.”

The old-woman lines in Whisper’s face deepen. “No.”

“They won’t be far in the system. Most times,” Doctor Marybeth says, speaking delicate around foul medicine-taste words, “they just disappear again.”

Ariel is still beyond still. I reach out my foot for hers. Hold it there. She twitches for a moment, shies away.

Whisper sits back in her chair, hands flat on the dainty purple placemat. “Atticus told me to take care of Safe when he’s gone, and he wouldn’t want anybody put into the system. He wouldn’t want anyone looking for us.”

Jack stops in the middle of his circling. “He told you that?”

Whisper doesn’t answer. She just looks Jack in the eye.

“We don’t know that —”

“He’s dead, Jack,” Whisper says, her lip shaking a little. She reaches into one of her million pockets and pulls out a picture from her precious Polaroid, white-rimmed and slick on its special picture paper. The shapes don’t make sense for a moment: round center, a splash of color, darkness that rights into two open eyes. I turn it so it’s watching me straight.

It’s Atticus, bleeding amber, with a knife in his throat.

“Oh,” I say, and set it carefully down. My fingers tingle hot where they touched it. This year’s Sanctuary Night picture.

Doctor Marybeth’s mouth opens, then closes, and she puts down her coffee cup and pushes out the chair fast enough to make Ariel flinch. “Excuse me,” she says, sharp and short and like a Whitecoat after all, and stalks to the bathroom where she closes the door.

The egg bleeds yellow onto my toast.

“Poor woman,” Whisper says after a moment.

“Poor somebody when we find the others,” Jack says. His eyes are on the photo, and they’re lightning-sharp.

“Jack —”

“The big door only opens from the inside.”

Whisper frowns at him, fierce upon fierce. And a little cold hand pokes into my belly, taking away the last of the morning’s quiet, the smell of mellow honey and wax that I took in from the pillow and held close to keep me warm.

“Everyone inside swore to uphold Safe,” I murmur, and Jack and Whisper look over like they’ve just remembered we’re here. “Every one of them raised me from ten.”

“Teller,” Jack says none too gentle, “someone opened the door.”

“
Jack
—”

“Corner,” Jack says, “had hands in Safe.”

Down the street from Doctor Marybeth’s is the Salvation Army. “Full of clothes,” Whisper says, and parts my hair with the comb to make it look like I belong here. “Let’s go get us some disguise.”

I used to play in the disguise chest as a kid, back when my pa was still around; Atticus didn’t allow using important resources —
disguise is a resource, Teller
— for a kid’s toy. Disguise clothes are clean and neat. My second run Above was a disguise run: I kept watch in the see-your-breath cold while Hide’s pa Mack broke the lock on a frost-covered metal bin and we filled up three garbage bags with everything inside.

“We don’t have a pry bar,” I point out, and Jack laughs.

“We’re already in disguise,” he grins, and taps his nose in the way he does when he means something’s hush-hush. “We’ve got money.”