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My breath catches. Doctor Marybeth’s eyes are shining wet.

“There was no telling him anything after that, you know. After people started to see things in the sewers — even before anyone got hurt. For Atticus, that proved everything: the killing, the motive, all of it. There was no explaining. And —” a shrug. A spill of crying that she doesn’t move to wipe away. “That was the end.”

“The end,” I repeat, hollow. My hand twitches; I should paint this, carve it; it’s a Tale of Safe. But I’ve got no paints, no carving knife, and I don’t know if it’d go on the martyrs’ door or my own. I put the hand in my jeans pocket and it sits itself still. “Who knows this?”

“You.” The corners of her mouth tighten. “Me. Jack.”

“Jack?” I ask, startled, remembering his hush-up looks and his
laters
— “Jack doesn’t come Above.”

“No,” she says, and looks me full in the face. “I go down.”

Oh.

“What’re you going to do?” she says after a minute, still crying midnight silent, chin still lifted high. “Corner killed Atticus,” I murmur, turning it over in my head, my free hand cupped like a ball around something too big to hold on to. “And its shadows … they hurt Violet. And Whisper’s ghosts, and Mack, and Mercy. And … and Seed.” My throat gets hard and hot. “And I don’t know who else yet.”

“You don’t know she killed Atticus.”

“I saw it with my own two eyes,” I snap, and the memory of pressure flickers beneath my right one, where something that knew my name — a shadow, a monster, low-voiced Corner with the bloodtouch in its furious hands — asked me for a Tale. “I don’t know what we’re gonna do,” I admit, and close my hand. “Everything’s broken.”

There’s no sound but the wind.

“It —” she pauses, and then takes a deep breath. “What do you need?”

I bite my lip. Think about monsters and not-monsters, and one lone shadow weeping. ’Bout all the Tales that don’t get told no more, and all the things we don’t know about Corner.

“We found Atticus’s file,” I start.

She shakes her head, out at the corner of my sight. “They don’t keep files at Lakeshore. When they closed it, they transferred it all.”

“‘Phantom limb syndrome. Post-traumatic stress,’” I quote her, and she blinks. “We need —” I pause, wet my bitten sore-chewed lips. “We need Corner’s file. We need to know about Corner.”

Doctor Marybeth puts a hand on my shoulder. Awkward, like she don’t know whether to be a mama or a friend or someone who oughtn’t to touch at all. “I know where the records were moved. You’ll have them. You’ll have them by tomorrow evening.”

She’s so relieved to give something, to trade something good for Violet and those white, white hands that I feel like dirt, like a crawling thing to smile. To take her hand, say “Thank you, Doctor Marybeth,” like a child.

And then to ask, quiet like sedition, “There’s another file too.”

When I get upstairs, Whisper’s perched in the attic bedroom in a pile of skirts and tumbledown, eyes reddened and living. She looks up at me from the center of a circle of paper scraps that radiates out like a summoning sign. Doctor Marybeth’s spare bed’s been moved to the side, and underneath it is dust and dust that goes on for half an age.

Dust is old skin
, I remember; Atticus’s teaching. Could be Corner’s dust. I step out of it and wrap my arms around my chest, like Doctor Marybeth did, to hold out the sudden cold.

“It’s done,” I say low, so to not disturb her ghosts. “I need to go get Ari.”

Whisper nods once, face bleak as the night sky Above, before turning back to her pictures.

“Bring that one to the left,” she says, and Jack looks up from the circle he’s pacing round Whisper’s scrap-heap fortress, shifts a flick of paper to where she’s pointing.

“What’re you doing?” I blurt, all knees and elbows, and Whisper settles another curl of scorched notepaper a precise finger sideways.

“I’m going to call out Atticus,” she says simple, and the hard, frowning concentration that’s normal Whisper, regular Whisper with a broken pipe or food shortage, is back in her face. “It’ll take half an hour. Close the door.”

The sun’s already going down. Ari’ll be mad at me for sure now. Bea might be too; I told her I’d be back before dark for bottles, and Bea I owe Sanctuary and don’t want to displease. But I’m sworn to keep Safe. To do my best for Safe.

I’m sworn to be here now.

So, “Why?” I ask.

“Because, Teller,” Whisper says, like I’ve just asked her why rock is hard. She inclines her chin downstairs, touches a finger to her nose. Doctor Marybeth. She doesn’t want Doctor Marybeth knowing.

There’s a tight seam about her eyes that says more:
Because I need Atticus.

The frown surfaces before I can turn away. I know she sees it because she draws her shoulders up and looks at me until I close the door behind me. “It’s her house,” I say. Jack keeps up his pacing. He don’t say a word.

“She sent Violet away,” Whisper replies, and Jack’s frowning now too, but he shakes his head once and lets be. I look over Whisper’s head at him. We need to talk, me and Jack. Somewhere we don’t need warnings. Somewhere quiet.

But now he stoops down and moves one last finger of paper just so, and Whisper spreads her hands for us to give her a good lot of room. I back right up to the door, feel for the handle — too high, at my side. If Doctor Marybeth comes upstairs, I can warn them, or her. I can get it open quick, or keep it shut.

There’s a funny feeling in my belly at the thought of the ghost of Atticus.

“Maybe I should go back down —” I say, and Jack quells it with a look. I know he knows what I really mean:
I don’t want to be here.

“Need you, Teller,” he says, rough.

I lean back against the door, and Whisper starts to sing.

There ain’t words to this one; not that I can pick. It’s low and keening and roundabout like the way Whisper sings at funerals; the songs she makes when we put our people’s bodies in the ground. It’s a sound that wraps ’round an absence, and the shape of the absence is Atticus, and Whisper sings.

Something answers from the bits and snips and shards of Atticus’s file. It comes like a chill, the chill that hangs in the pipes sometimes and in the Cold Pipes all the time, the one I thought once might mean ghosts though until today, there was no way to prove it. It rises from the floor, a seeping brush of cold painted right in a circle, thus to thus.

Whisper squints, leans in, not breaking the stride of her sweet-wail, mumbling song. “Atticus?” slides swift into it,
Atticus-Atticus-Atticus
sibilating into her hum and building, drawing circles ’round her circles of paper and blood. The cold gathers in. The cold shimmers.

“I can see it,” Jack says, low and surprised. Nobody ever sees Whisper’s ghosts; nobody would believe in them but for the things they tell her that always prove sound and true. We don’t ask those kinds of questions in Safe. Not against people who’ve earned and kept their Sanctuary.

But: “I see it too,” I say, and Whisper scrunches up her face even further in scolding us to silence.

The ghost looks like a new carving. Its lines are thin and tentative and it’s all washed-out color, scratched on the air so light there’s no saying for sure that it’s really there. It looks like memory badly kept; a six-foot picture from Whisper’s Polaroid, half-developed and wasted. I can’t tell when its mouth sets to moving, but I
feel
the air change when it speaks.

“Atticus,” Whisper breathes, and falls silent herself to listen.

“What’s he say?” Jack says, and I search it for arms, for lamplit, glowing eyes, to see if they’re red or sun-golden.

“He —” She stops, sits back on her hands. Her face’s gone soft for a moment at the sight of him, the sight that must be so much stronger for her than it is to our stupid, ghostless eyes. And then her voice catches, harsh and broke: “He don’t know who we are.”

It hits me in the belly where my true oaths live.

“How can he not know us?” Jack asks, and his arms hang loose and useless, his mouth open on other words he don’t yet want to say.

“Lost his mind,” I choke out. “Stolen.”

“No,” Whisper breathes. “No. It’s not our Atticus,” and she leans in listening, seeking. Her hand strays to a shard of paper, smudged with Whitecoat notes. “It’s Atticus from Lakeshore. It’s Atticus twenty years past.”

“But he wasn’t
dead
twenty years past,” I snap too-loud, half not knowing why ’cept that Atticus is
gone
, real gone and not just dead, and that’s the end. We’re all alone up here.

“He wants his doctor,” Whisper breathes, voice high and cracking. “He thinks he’s dreaming. He … he wants to go home.”

Only then do I look hard, look through the mess of paper and strange-tinged air to the edges, the lines: see how soft the arms, how small the shimmer of claw at the end of them. How skinny and fierce the man is behind them. See the lines, and how they’re drawn with darkness.

Whisper smiles that twisted, sad smile, and drops her hands to her lap. “He wants Corner.”

“Send him back,” Jack snaps.

“Jack —”

“It’s
not him
.”

Then the bed-dust rustles like a train’s coming through, pushing all the wind in the world ahead of it on its metal cheekbones. The dust builds up and up, pulling into a hand, a small nose, a sharp-boned familiar face.

You said you’d love me
, it whispers to the sometime-ghost of Atticus, and its voice is boy-girl and broken and clean as a bell.

Jack shrugs his gloves off and drops them to the floor.

The ghost of Atticus opens its mouth, and closes it, and reaches out one yearning hand.

The lights go wild, sparking and flailing and flickering in their sockets. “Jack, no —” I get out before they blaze bright as high daylight and
pop pop pop!
go the lamp and bathroom bulbs as their fire flows into his hands. Jack’s fingers spark as he plunges them deep into the heart of the thing that’s not our Atticus and burns it from the chill heart out, touches it with lightning from bone to not-there bone.

The dust-shadow watches.

The dust-shadow screams.

The door bursts open behind me and I yell, grabbing for anything that’ll keep shadows off, bolsters and pillows and the ruined bedside lamp, not thinking ’bout how shadows aren’t big and warm with eyes dark and scared — and then it’s Doctor Marybeth standing in the door, and my arm’s raised up to strike. I throw myself back, stumbling into Whisper’s careful-laid circle, slip on a snip of paper and fall against the bed-mattress hard.

“What’s this?” Doctor Marybeth breathes, faint and still piercing, and then there’s a rush of light, a rush of dark, and the shadow-thing is kneeling in a midnight puddle at her feet, chill arms wrapped ’round her knee-bones, aching with shadow tears.

Doctor give me something give me poison give me pills I can’t bear it
, it rolls one word over the other, and buries its face against her, half-solid and strange.

Doctor Marybeth stumbles. “Mare!” Jack yells, and his voice is cold with fear. But the shadow moves with her, fluid and swift, moving not-arm with her leg and not-face with the rest of her, flickering into position knee-bent at her feet.
Give me something to sleep tonight
, it begs, and flecks of midnight tear-dust scatter on the floor.

Doctor Marybeth breathes once, shallow, her face gone sick underneath her skin. “Corner?” she says small, and the shadow looks up.

That’s not its name
, I almost say, but Doctor Marybeth is shivering, shivering blue as she reaches down to lay a finger on that light-mote, broken face. “Oh, little child,” she says, teeth shaking in the way of her words. “Oh,
tsujus
.”

“Let it go, Mare,” Jack says low, his hands crackling sparks. “It’s nothing real.”

“It’s bewitched her,” Whisper says, and the first shadow-finger sinks into Doctor Marybeth’s skin.

Whisper’s on its back before I draw breath, yanking at its narrow throat before I can yell. Her hands go straight through. Her ghost-talk rises to screaming, the first time I’ve ever heard it not low, not sweet or quiet, and her arms pass through and through again as four more fingers soak through Doctor Marybeth’s slacks. Then an arm, a shoulder.

“Jack, kill it!” Whisper wails, tumbling back on her bottom, panting against the floor.

“I can’t, I’ll shock her —” he snaps. My hands are in my pockets looking for fire, but I can’t do nothing with fire. It’ll burn the house and scorch the rugs and take the whole thing down, and we’ve already burned one house today and it was a house we hated.

“My little
tsujus
,” Doctor Marybeth says, her eyes far away, off in another place or time or maybe just dying of shadow’s-touch. “I’ll go to him. I’ll make it right. Let things calm down; you know he won’t stay angry —”

I’m scared I’m scared I’m scared I’m scared
washes over me like rain, and the shadow’s head sinks into Doctor Marybeth’s belly.

“I’ll take care of you,” she whispers. “You stay here where it’s warm.” Her hand flickers over the shadow-head. Over her own belly.

The hand drops before she drops to the floor.

“Mare!” Jack screams, and scrambles over. I can’t see her chest. I can’t see if it rises or falls. “Teller! Give me wind!”

Flicks of paper scatter as I kick them out of the way, walk and stumble and crawl to Doctor Marybeth’s side.
Airway Breathing Circulation
I remember from way back, Atticus’s lesson, though delivered by someone else’s hands ’cause Atticus couldn’t clasp without pinching. Soft hands, and firm, grown-up hands. On my little-boy nose and chin to show me how.

Corner’s hands.

I stutter, latch my left hand on to her nose and tilt her chin with my right, far up. “She’s not breathing,” Whisper wails, and I put my lips down to Doctor Marybeth’s and blow.