Above (25 page)

I walk down the steps heavy and scuff-feet, not to warn them ’bout my coming but because I can’t bear to lift myself farther off the ground. I go down into the kitchen and stand in the doorway, trying not to touch the door frame with my prickling, gauze-trail hands.

They’re looking at me. I know I’m crying too, bare-handed and jaw tight shut so it don’t make a sound. I know what they’re looking at.

“She’ll come,” I tell them, “and I know how the shadows got into Safe.”

The whole of the next day is tense and still.

There’s no going down to the tunnels before dark. No matter how the ground pulls me down harder than yesterday, knowing we’ll be set for home so soon, there’s enough people on the streets and sidewalks that going into the tunnels can’t be done before night. There’s a lot of things you can do or say or be Above and everyone will think you’re just permitted, but jumping down sewers ain’t one of them.

We have nothing to do until dark.

Not nothing: Jack plans. He draws maps and maps, something never before done in the history of Safe and a small blasphemy besides. He sits with Beatrice tracing them, saying
here there’s a fall and step careful
, or
here we can draw off their ambush
. Whisper and Doctor Marybeth go out for a wealth of supply: water bottles squeaking clear ’gainst each other in the box, cereal bars and protein bars and rolls of sticky bandages, and hid behind the whole of it a small crate-box that’s familiar. I open it while they’re stacking it all in the sitting room, careful against the walls.

Matches.

Ari comes down, but she sits in the corner with strong tea, ducked away from our gazes. She grazes through Doctor Marybeth’s fridge like it’s all ready to go off: strawberries and cream and cheese and all the things we don’t see often, things that don’t keep good in Safe. She’s preparing. In case we die. In case she never gets to have them no more.

In case I keep her down in Safe and never let her back into the light.

I’m out on the back lawn when Jack comes looking: plucking at grass spikes, plucking at stupid thoughts. “You ready, Teller?” he asks me, and there’s layers and layers and deeps in that question. I don’t even need to look at him to know it.

“No,” I say, and pull another stem. Put my hands in my pockets to keep them off Doctor Marybeth’s lawn.

They come up with matches.

He doesn’t pat my head or nothing. He just asks “You gonna be ready?” and sits down to the side of me when I shake my head. An invitation, from Jack Flash: an open ear, a hand on the back. A Teller for the one person who never gets to tell a Tale.

“We know how to break the shadows,” I say, turning my matchbook ’round and ’round in the careful cup of my hands.

“Something you’re not saying ’bout that, Teller,” Jack rumbles, and he’s watching me with lightning-eyes, hot and serious in a way so different from Atticus that it can’t but remind me of his hard-face ways all over again.

I have four matches left. Four more and they’ll be done, and I can burn no more. “We know how. I’m wondering if we should.”

His eyes get no less hot, no less grave, but something in them changes. A tightening. A spark. “Go on,” he says, and sits still and listening like into a strong wind.

I flip the matches again. Turn, flip, turn. Matches eat the faces off weeping shadows and light your safe way home. “I don’t think we oughta kill Corner.”

And I’ve said it. There.

“You’re afraid we’ll be named Killer,” he says. He’s not looking away. My hand closes tight around the matchbook, a proper fist around its rounded, creased-up corners. I’m already named Killer.

“No,” I tell him. “There’s no one to name us that. It’s about how Atticus kept Safe going.” I pause, trying to get both hands ’round the thought; pull it through all the holes and tears and silences in every Tale ever given me about Safe. The one big untruth repeated every year, to celebration, on Sanctuary Night. “It’s about the lying.”

Jack sits precise and watching. He waits.

Some people ain’t no help in a Tale.

“Corner was forgot. If it’d been remembered, remembered right and true, that would have broken Safe.” I lick my lips, uncomfortable. Atticus is only six days dead. It’s not strange after all to feel like speaking ill of him will summon him up to look at us with smoldering orange-mad eyes to punish us for gossip.

It’s not strange that I should be a little scared.

“Atticus knew that,” I keep going, to spite that fear, to kick it down. “Safe needed to be strong, and if everyone knew he made such a bad mistake with Corner, believing someone Killer and doing exile to them just because of their own fighting …”

“It would have broken Safe,” Jack agrees, still perfectly still. It makes me ache to fidget even more. “And besides, it would have meant the end of Atticus as founder.”

And then Atticus, proud Atticus, would have had no place to go, because he couldn’t have stayed among us any more than Ari could tell me in words ’bout the Cold Pipes.

Shame’s powerful. Shame’s stronger than claws.

“But that’s what sent Corner mad,” I say, ’cause if Corner’s not mad, with all that bleeding and fighting and wanting to die, I’m a — I don’t know what I am. “It went mad because of the lying. All of us inside, keeping up this Tale about how it was Killer, and not letting it back home. We —” and I pause, feeling notebook pages under my fingers. “We said its real wasn’t real. We left it out to die.”

He watches.

“That’s what set the shadows on us,” I say faint.

“That won’t matter, though,” Jack says, and there’s something sharp in him, keen as a wire.

“But the shadows are Corner’s. They came on because Corner was forgot. What if they don’t fade? What if we keep on going just like we did before, keep on telling false, and the shadows don’t fade?” My hands hurt. They’re dug into themselves in little puffy fists. But not mad. Not for hitting.

Not mad.

“There won’t be no more shadows if we kill Corner,” Jack says.

“Corner’s Sick,” I protest, fainter still. “Sick’s the same as Freak Above.”

There’s tears in my eyes. I don’t move to touch them, because in Safe’s and Atticus’s and all of Above’s teaching, those tears ain’t there if you only don’t move your hand to wipe them away, and bad things don’t happen if you just don’t cry.

“Matthew, Corner’s Killer,” he says gentle.

“Corner wasn’t Killer.”

“It is now,” he says. “And Killer’s a thing you can’t give Safe to and make well.”

“It’s just
wrong
, Jack,” I burst out, for once in my life not finding words, not able to fit the sounds to the Tale. “It isn’t making Safe.”

“To kill Corner.”

“To kill Corner and pretend it was all just wickedness,” I snap, and look up at him, not sure what storm might come down. “I was there. I saw what color Atticus’s eyes were when he exiled the first Beast from Safe.”

Jack sits straighter, and turns to me with a look in his eye that’s sharp and considering, popping with sparks. “Did you now?” he asks.

I don’t flinch away from it. I don’t run.

“Yeah,” I say. “I did.”

Jack gets up.

He gets up and puts himself down on one knee before me, puts his head low to the green prickle lawn. He bares his arms to the elbow so the lightning in his veins plays along every snowflake scar and to his burn-red fingertips. “There’s lightning in me,” he says, husky, hollow. “It came into me when I was young. I can draw down fire to keep us warm and give us good food to eat. I can give us light. But I can’t Pass.”

He takes my hand. He lets me feel the lightning.

Jack is asking me Sanctuary.

It stings. I hold tight to his burning hand because my own fingers won’t let go and ask: “Why me?”

He unbows his head. He looks right up at me and says: “Because you know what needs forgetting and what ought to be remembered.”

I look around, but it’s grass, fence, trees. Nobody in the houses ’round is looking out the window; nobody in Doctor Marybeth’s kitchen is at the strip-curtained back door. They must be in the sitting room, or upstairs, or out.

Nobody’ll save me from this.

“You can’t decide this yourself,” I say, frantic. “You can’t just say who’s to be leader in Safe.”

“No,” Jack rumbles, and even though my teeth are chattering from the ache of his ungloved touch, I see the little glint in his eye. “But where I go, the lights turn on. My word’ll carry.”

It’s true. In all of Safe, there was one man not fearful of Atticus, and it was Jack.

“I’ll give you Sanctuary,” I whisper, and the lightning kisses me bone to bone as he squeezes and the pact is sealed.

“So what’re we gonna do?” I ask him later, after we’ve stared up at the leaves and the sun and sat awkward, like there wasn’t no swearing or giving or deal-making done away from everyone else’s eyes.

“Go down. Draw the ambush. Kill Corner,” Jack says. “And then tell the Tale true.”

Doctor Marybeth comes out for us when the sun touches the tops of the trees. She picks her way across the grass, dodging the shade; moving between bits of sunlight like an anti-shadow. Jack looks up at her and his face is a brief smile, tight;
I don’t know if I might see you again.

I’m sorry.

“We’ve got everything split into packs,” she tells him. Cool and sober, like it’s a regular day and this is regular work. “Whisper wants you to take a look.”

“Right, Mare,” Jack says, mild, and I wonder how it is between them; how they came to teach each other the turns down to Safe and up, and all the things that go unsaid. All the dark true things they tell each other, and how they get around them. How they live.

Jack pads to the door,
crunch crunch
and browning the grass a little. He looks over his shoulder for us, eyebrow up.

“I’ll be right there,” Doctor Marybeth says, and waits cool as you please ’til he’s through the door.

“Ma’am?” I ask, because the look in her eye’s a little like Atticus scolding. But she just holds out a hand to lift me to standing and leads me to her glass back door, out of the late afternoon heat.

“When you come back —” she says.

“If.”

“When,” she insists. “You remember what I told you.”

I nod. And look down to give her a chance to walk away, go back inside, busy herself with something safe and quiet and fake. There’s birds nesting in one of the trees. I watch the flash of wings that still makes me nervous — quick movement in the tunnels is a thing to fear.

She doesn’t walk away. She opens the door and waits for me, waits patient.

I wonder how much she has to wait patient, and where she learned how.

I step into the kitchen, and — the hell with it. I’ve only got tonight. I’ve only got two hours or three.

“Doctor Marybeth?” I ask her, back straightened up, formal and clear.

“Yeah?” she says.

I settle my shoulders. I put on my listening face, my listening air. I got no right to this either; I can’t put a Tale into my head without Atticus having heard it first, without it being offered up to everyone for Sanctuary and a share in what we are. But Atticus never thought to ask for this Tale, and Atticus is dead, and I’ve broken every rule there was and ever could be, and maybe it’s time to make my own. At least while I’m alive for tonight, with Jack sworn to me and the question of what Sanctuary means on my shoulders.

So: “Doctor Marybeth,” I ask, “will you tell me the story of how you came down to Safe?”

It’s not the right words for her. We don’t have no ritual words for those who came down to Safe and went back up, down and up with less, if not nothing, to fear. But she looks me in the eye and sees the words I
mean
.

“I will,” she says, and puts her battered blue kettle on for tea.

Once night falls, we move out.

We move down the street in clumps and batches. Walk the sidewalks like people who belong, signaling back and forth one group to the next. The trees whistle at us with wind and we lean into it, sour-smelling; it tastes thick like sewer and home. We walk the turns down to the sewer cap that runs closest to our tunnels and I bring out from my pockets a set of pins, tools that Whisper’s found somewhere in her ceaseless rummaging, to take the sewer cap off quick and clean.

My hands are clumsy-stung. Bandaged and thick. I work slow.

I fiddle clanking quiet for one minute, maybe more, while the whole of the first army of Safe stands around me back to back and watches every shadow for a twitch of movement that’s wrong.

And then “Open,” I say, remembering this time to speak low instead of whispering.

Down goes Jack, down goes Beatrice, down go Whisper and Bea’s black-clad sworn. The first lick of flame puffs down below, orange like something looking to be mad, and my fists loosen at the sight of the signal fire.

“Go on,” I say to Ariel, second-last, and she looks at me one fearful moment before firming up her chin and climbing down the long ladder, her lovely hair all bound up in braids and tucked away to keep it out of the fire.

Then it’s just me. Empty street, and me, and the wind.

I lean back and take in the surenesses of Above, the memory of match-struck sun burning through my eyelids so everything’s orange and there can be no shadows: not in my eyes, not in my heart. The first rule of Above: denying all the dark things that live inside. Sending those who bear shadows, who bear the marks of them down and down, into the hospitals, into the pits so everyone else can live their lie.

That’s why they have Asylum and we have Sanctuary. Or that’s what Atticus would’ve said.

I think I say different.

I put my bouncing shoes right, then left on the cold slippery ladder. Right, left. And pull the sewer cap closed above me, and take us into the dark.

D
OCTOR
M
ARYBETH’S
T
ALE
II