Above (9 page)

When there’s no more dishes or excuses, I nudge open the bedroom door. She’s sitting on a mattress under a wall piled with posters, back to me, hair across her face like wings.

“I’m sorry,” I say. A hand maybe twitches. “She already knew.” She shifts on the mattress. The tangle of blankets, red and blue and faded no-color, is shoved against the wall. A pillow hangs from the mess like a stained, dead hand. I sit down on the one chair, a busted one shoved beside a cobbled-together desk covered in half-empty mugs and bald capless pens. The metal seat squeaks with give. “Ari, why’d you grab him?”

“He doesn’t like me,” she mutters, and plaits her fingers together.

“Why?” But she just shakes her head, shakes it off once more. Like Jack. Like running. Like everything.

I almost ask her what her favorite color is.

“We’ve gotta go. We’ve only got ’til dark to find everybody else,” I say. “They’ll know what happened. We can make some kind of plan.”

Ariel stops fidgeting. Her face has gone pale as the light on my first night ever Above. “Why us?” she asks, trying to make it sound not scared. “Why not Whisper and —”

“’Cause we’re sworn to uphold Safe. We’re responsible,” I say, ’round the ache in my throat.

Her eyes go big. “That’s not fair,” she nearly chokes. “That wasn’t my fault,” and I don’t know what the hell I said by accident, ’cause that sure ain’t the thing I said on purpose. And then — oh.

“You think it followed us home.” I still can’t say it. I still can’t say the name.

“You don’t know that.” She’s still as a dead thing.

“It asked us Safe things,” I stand too fast and the chair creaks like it’s dying. My face is hot. It makes sense, terrible sense. This is all my fault, and hers. “It asked us, and I told, and it knew our names —”

“
It wasn’t you
,” she says so forceful that I step back into the chair, half-thinking I might find her hands in my shirt-collar. She sees it somehow and backs down; falls into herself like her own shriveling wings. How many times can she grow them in a day? How much upset and panic and fear before the skin over her spine goes raw, chaps from mad, starts bleeding? “It wasn’t you,” she says again, and wipes her nose sharp on the back of one hand.

“What then?” I ask. “What do we do?”

“We’re
here
now,” Ariel says, dismayed and red-eyed and unlovely. “There’s no monsters here. We don’t have to go back.”

My breath catches.

I ease forward. I step slow and careful, and push in the chair with a little lift so as to not scratch Bea’s scuffy floor. My hands linger on the metal rods of the chair for a long time, until I can peel them out of fists.

“Yes, we do,” I say hard and even, and walk into the big room, grab my shoes. One lace knotted up, two. My voice is shaking. My hands are shaking. “That is my
home
. People could be
dead
.”

“Matthew?” she says, shocked, small. Tiny. “Teller?”

She never calls me that.

“Matthew, please —” and her hand’s on my arm, tugging, light and useless. I turn around, ready to shake it off me. “When was the first time you saw the sky?”

She brings me up short with that, short enough that my hands forget all about being mad. “My first supply duty.” I’ve told her this story before, singsong in the drip-rustle nights of Safe, to bring us both to sleep. It’s my favorite of all the Tales, because the first supply duty leads to the second, and that’s when I find my beautiful Ariel. “A year past. It was cold. And I thought no wonder people were so cruel up here, if the wind bit your bones all day and the sky stared you down into nothing with stars.”

My eyes’ve slid shut. I open them after a minute of watching the stars glow behind my eyelids, and she’s still watching me.

“You wouldn’t miss it if you never saw it again.”

The wind rattles the leaves on the trees outside. It’s nothing at all like pipe-music. I think about it.

“No,” I admit.

“Well, I like the sky,” Ariel says, eyes pleading, sharp,
important
. “I need it.”

“I’d be your sky.”

It just slips out, quiet in the dark on soft-shoe feet. I put my hand up to my mouth, but it’s too late, and Ariel’s looking at me steady and keen like she’d never been close to weeping just five minutes before.

She looks at me and it’s sad like Whisper’s sad.

For the first time under daylight, the first time it’d ever count, I feel a hot and ugly blush come up like a blister.

And I run.

Through the door and down the hall, down the stairs to the ground, and I don’t wait to see if she follows. I can’t turn back, can’t look her in the face now, not like that. I push through the button-studded doorway, shouldering past a lady with a laundry basket filling up both arms who calls me a word I don’t know as I push the outside door open and let it swing free. The sun is hot and bright outside. It stings my face, my eyes.

That sadness cut hard enough when it wasn’t on my Ariel’s face.

I pause at the end of the walk and look right, look left. I don’t know where I am. I don’t know where I’m going, but I’ve got to get away. Somewhere I don’t have to look her in the eye, or Whisper, or Jack, and see that hateful faraway sick-sweet sad face.

Somewhere Safe?
snips a little voice in the back of my head, and all my angry shame turns sour.

I’m being selfish. Thinking of nothing but my own little hurts, and I made a promise to keep Safe.

People could be dead, Matthew
, I tell myself savage, and bite my lip ’til it’s sore. I can find them. There’s more than one way to find a thing. There are ways that’re dangerous, that could get you locked behind sharp metal doors.

This is an emergency.

I start walking.

The shelter that Atticus deemed a safehouse is at Queen Street and Bathurst —
Queenand Bathurst Queenand Bathurst
he would make us repeat when we first trained to go Above. I know the way there from two sewer caps and the big food store where we steal most of our tinned goods.

I don’t know the way from Beatrice’s place, from no-man’s-land. But I’m the Teller, and I can Pass.

Here’s Whisper’s other lesson: that even if people Above are monsters, they will point you on your way if you smile and meet their eye. So I do my best to look young and nothing-special and Normal, and I tilt my head and look them in the eye, bustling ’round ladies and kids waving fat chalk and men with no shirts on. They point and say
east
or
south
, and though I don’t know from east or south I thank them and make careful, meticulous, my way. I watch the street signs and tell myself
Queenand Bathurst
.

I walk with my shoulders down, watching feet, dodging the swift snips of music that leak on cool air out of the stores. After the first hour or two or year — who knows without clocks? — I can almost pretend I’m not upset anymore, can almost unsee the way her eyes went soft and shut and sad, but conversations still quiet as I go by: a different hush than the one that screams out
Freak
. I don’t know how I look to make that so.

Selfish
, I remind myself, and pinch the side of my leg. And instead I dredge up everything I know ’bout Corner.

Corner met Atticus, Corner of the bloodtouch hands, in the Whitecoats’ house on the hill. The ghosts loved it for its weeping, loved it for the way its hands touched through walls, clothes, flesh.

Atticus stood before Corner like a shield, and Corner took that protection gladly.

After that there aren’t really Tales about Corner. Corner founded Safe with Atticus, and Corner took care and gave Sanctuary with Atticus up until the year I was seven years old and they found Jonah struck dead in the tunnels, and then Atticus didn’t give Sanctuary to Corner and called Corner Killer instead of its right name. My pa hid me behind his pant leg when they closed the big door against it. And then nobody told Tales about Corner.

(And here I catch the sign that says
Queen Street West
and mark the corner; turn.)

There’s nothing in that little Tale to help me; nothing that’ll tell me why Corner would come with swoops and waves of shadows and speak sweet and sad to Atticus, and then put a knife square center in his throat. Keeping histories is as much about knowing what needs forgetting as what ought to be remembered, and Corner’s been forgot.

Maybe that shouldn’t have been so.

The shelter at Queen and Bathurst is huge: swooping brown brick with an iron gate, and I don’t know if it’s a gate to keep bad things out or the kind to keep you locked in. A couple men are spread out on the steps, wrapped in layers of dirty shirts and the four-day beard I can’t even grow in twenty. They watch everyone passing with bright rat eyes, eyes that go
bite or run away?
I keep good and wide of them as I go up the steps to the door.

You can’t just walk into a shelter. They got rules about in and out Above, and a frowning someone behind a desk to enforce them. This someone’s a wrinkle-faced man who sits crooked on a dim orange rolling chair, making faces at the papers on his desk like they hurt him. The walls are grey, but they’re hung all over color; blankets and weavings like Doctor Marybeth has in her house. I wonder, quick, if it was her who found this place for Safe. If I stayed long enough, patient and quiet and Normal, would she come to fetch me back?

“Can I help you?” says the man behind the desk in a voice rough like first-cut carving.

“I’m looking for someone,” I say; stumble, more like. “My cousin.” Cousin’s good. Cousin could be girl or boy, young or old.

He peers down at me through thick glasses. The scratches on them glint in the sharp, flickering, Salvation Army lights. “I’m sorry, son. You can’t just wander in here.” He don’t sound sorry in the least.

I remember the metal of that gate, and the lock.

“You don’t understand,” I say, trying to sound young and small. I’ve got to Pass good. Mack could be in here, or Scar; Violet or Hide or Chrys, scared and waiting to be found — “They’re Sick.”

That ain’t no good argument here. Here Sick’s a thing to fear, to avoid and lock away. That’s an argument for Safe, and I’m botching this up, and then I have to turn my head away so this Whitecoat man doesn’t see my throat go all thick with failure.

He stands. I take a step back, brace my leg unthinking to give a punch or take one or run, but the look on his face ain’t punching, and it ain’t rats. He drags his own leg a little, limping ’round the desk. “Come on, now. No need for that,” he says oddly, and while my mouth’s still hanging open, he opens a stained brown door and lets me inside.

The shelter for homeless people is two dirty tile steps down into a big room set with folding chairs, spindly tables, and couches in different colors along the corners. There are posters on the walls, not pictures like in Bea’s place but cramped writing: warnings and signs and rules. A slow fan turns lazy on the ceiling, making a breeze that’s only halfway there. And everywhere there’s people: young and old, dirty like Safe-people, tired-looking ’round the shoulders and sunburnt and grave. Some turn to look at me, mid-wise the rows of white-top tables. Some don’t, huddled over food or drink, talking to each other or curled into themselves. I look around. Walk the rows, the Above man behind me every other step; hoping and hoping as I turn every corner.

No Mack. No Hide or Scar or Chrys.

Nobody.

“Not here, then?” he asks when I turn, and I shake my head fast, thinking ’bout busy streets. Thinking ’bout hospitals, and medical exams that strip out all your secrets.

“Nobody came in and was sent —” I ask, and this time I don’t have to pretend to be small and scared and lost.

“No,” he says, and the sympathy in his voice surprises me. “Do you want to leave a name and number?”

“No,” I say, eyes blurred, head aching. They have to be somewhere. I have to
think
. “Thank you,” I tell him quick, and hustle myself back out front, down the steps to the street. The warehouse next. Most of Safe can’t Pass. Surely they wouldn’t come here; they’d go to the warehouse.

One of the rat-men on the stairway laughs.

I take a few steps to the corner, look one way, the other, before I realize. I don’t know how to get from one safehouse to another Above.

There’s three breaths where I just panic, blind white broke-down panic, before it comes clear:
Then don’t go Above.
I know the way from here to two whole sewer caps, and through them to the tunnels. And I know the way through the tunnels to the warehouse.

I let out a long, shaky breath. Cross the street away from that big rusting gate and bring up my map of the world backward, turned around: Beatrice’s house to safehouse to sewers instead of the other way ’round. Count the turns.

The way to the tunnels is in a painted-wall alley, bright and narrow in a way that’s comfort ’cause it’s just as closed in as home. It’s stopping there that makes my legs finally hurt, makes the tired catch up with me. I lean against the wall a second, Doctor Marybeth’s jeans stiff ’gainst my knees, and swallow through a hurting throat. I’ve never walked this long, this hot.

I stick my hand in my pocket and press my twenty-five dollars between two fingers; they sip my sweat in. It could be an emergency to need water, even if I don’t need it so hard I’ll die. One bottle of water, clean and cold like water’s made Above; I could fill it up again in Beatrice’s sink. It wouldn’t be more than a dollar.

No
, I tell myself. Close my eyes tight and let my heart slow down.
Don’t have time. Come on.

When I open them I can stand on my own again, solid enough to put my eyes to the ground and look for the pathway down. It’ll be a sewer cap, the kind that tops off our line: round brown metal carved with words and punched with holes. Two steps, three, and my foot comes down hollow on something half-buried in litter and wrappers. I brush it off with my shoe and yes, there it is: brown and stained, something I know from dealing with. From here it’s into the tunnels, follow the sign, a quiet walk through the old sewers before coming Above again. Scar could be there. Mack could, and he knows everything about making it Above.