Above (10 page)

And if so — and if not — it’s but twenty minutes along this line to Doctor Marybeth’s.

Mack, Hide’s papa, taught us to open a sewer cap blindfolded in the darkest dark; he stuck sock-scraps in our ears so we couldn’t hear the clicking and had to tug and coax with just our fingers to make the locks give way. It’s not much different from up top than below. The holes in the metal are small, but they let fingers have their way.

I lift the cover and peer down into the dark.

The smell of sewer comes up, thick, familiar. Above has grass-and dirt-and smoke-smells, but sewer is dark like life, like everything that ever lives and dies and bears a growing thing again from its waste. Sewer-smell is dark like home.

The tear falls into the tunnel with a trickle and a plop ’fore I even know I’ve shed it.

It echoes slow, quiet. And then a different smell comes up like an answer: It draws into my nose, trembles out my palms and the pores in my skin, thick and sweet and rough-fingered. It whispers like pressure behind your eye, whispers words no person child or grown stays clean for knowing. Metal, ruined and eaten, sour on the back of your tongue. It says
Teller Teller Teller. Down in the dark in the dark —

I blink. My hands are cold. They’re shaking. I look down and they’re covered in black, strange, every crease and bend and hair drawn so sharp ’gainst the thin sunlight that even looking at them feels like it’ll cut. Sharper than sharp; realer than real —

The grate slides down from my scabbed-up fingers.

Through my fingers the shadows come.

“Teller,” they whisper, trip-tongued, in layers, pouring up from the tunnel like soft mud and sewer water. They puddle on the cracked asphalt, blotting out the fat green garbage bags and the oil stains and the sun.

I stumble back. I stumble, reel, scrub my hands against my jeans, the wall, anything. The bricks scratch my palms and the shadow-stuff leaves dark slug-trails ’cross the paint, but nothing makes it come off. Instead it stretches, lazy and wicked, into two legs and two arms; a thin and grimacing face with a small kid’s nose and a smooth, blank space where the eyes should be.

The shadow steps off the wall, toward me.

Its footsteps sink through a scatter of stained paper and pavement, and then land firm, firmer as it darkens from thin grey to charcoal to black. I dodge sideways, angle for the mouth of the alley, for light and noise and the press of Above people, but too late. It’s cut me off.

Not it
, I realize, as I see the third foot land strong atop pavement, the fourth.
They
.

There’s another behind it. Five. Six. Dozens.

“Narasimha’s child,” they whisper dead and loving, like the rustle of wings; like a voice in the dark that knows all your Tales and names.

I run.

They follow in my feet, my footfalls. They jump between licks of sunlight like kids jumping the sewer flow, gone and then there again in the next bit of shade. They don’t breathe (and I’m breathing too hard). They don’t trip or slow or mess up (and there’s too much on the ground to keep track of, to scramble over, for me to not, sometime, mess up).

Smell something else
, I tell myself, limping past bright-paint rolling doors and ’round guttery potholes and weeds. The smell drew them up. The smell of home, and my own crying.
Breathe something else.
So I think:
sky air trash bird wall
, and none of them clean me out, none of them stop the heartbeat-fast tramp of dark feet coming ’round the corner, joining and circling and parting faster than I can go.

When I see the wall at the end of the alley it’s almost no surprise anymore. Dead end. The end.

Dead.

“Teller,” the shadows whisper as I skid on something slimy and barrel into the wall. The concrete blocks hit my right knee hard, hard enough to draw out a swear. I plant my back to it. “Teller, I’llaskyouatale —” they rustle in Corner-voice, in echoes that belong in a tunnel with your eyes blocked out and not under the bright sky Above, and oh please tell me true that I don’t hear one say
Matthew
.

They stop in ragged, mixed-up lines not ten breaths from my face, squirming solid to smoke like something hungry. They can’t keep still. They fade in and out of each other, push through chests and legs and clip each other’s ankles. They reach out as one with fingers extended; long knuckle-creased carver’s fingers with nails to scratch, to press against the flutter-lid of an eyeball, and all I can hear is the rasp of my own breath, the scratch of the wall ’gainst my T-shirt. The catch of my own swallowing.

My hand goes to my pocket without thinking; the emergency money. I should’ve just used it for peaches, a bottle of water, or five thick pairs of good socks; books like Atticus’s that we’d not read a dozen times before. I shouldn’t have hoarded hard before the shadows hunted me to death and I didn’t have time for any of it. My fingers close on that useless, stupid twenty-five dollars.

Touch the packet of nine matches between them.

I have fire.

I strike a match fast, throw it into one of the lidless metal garbage cans. It mutters, catches, smokes hot. Thirty or fifty or a thousand shadow-heads snap toward it, scenting, hesitant for just one second.

It’s enough.

I shove the can two-handed, and clumps of smoldering trash spatter through the alley. The flames melt into each other like anti-shadows, climb atop the backs of old papers and twigs and start to burn. It’s not a lot of fire: It’s small enough to step over. Small enough to stamp out on your Normal way by.

And it’s enough.

The shadow-mass stops. Those arms come down slow. The fire ducks, pops, and they inch back from the smell of burning.

“Leave me alone,” I manage. It ends in a cough. My throat’s full of smoke, and my hands are shaking. My hands are half-burned from the hot, fire-touched metal.

“Hey,” someone yells, down the alley, back in the world where there’s sunlight and quiet and nothing’s dead. “What the fuck?”

The shadows turn around: smooth pointed chins ducking, smooth hairless heads rising all at once. And then they spill back, fall back, sharp elbows pushing into bellies into thighbones into dark. They tumble into each other, crowding together like roaches, move like a river
away
.

They’re running. Running from
me
.

All Atticus’s
stay quiet
, all Jack’s
quick and careful
can’t stop me from letting a war-shout into the air.
That’s right
, says a part of me that’s red like Atticus’s eyes, like blood spilled under firelight on familiar floor. I’m gonna hurt those who made my people hurt.

I run again. I
follow
.

They flee around the corner, under a fence, across underpasses stuffed with frightened birds. They weep and chatter through all the places Normal people don’t go — through back alleys, past low empty lots grown fat with weeds — and I follow, legs numb, breath gone, knowing by rights I should be scared to be running full tilt through the death-empty parts of Above with nothing but a half-pack of matches. But I fix my eyes on them ahead of me like they’re a golden braid bobbing up and down through the endless crowds, and this time, this time I don’t mess up. This time I count the turns.

I follow right to another dead end, a beat-up black fence painted over and over with posters and papers, streaked white. They back against the fence and watch me, waiting to see which way I’ll move.

“Got you,” I croak, ’cause that’s all I got, and then as one they shrink down low and slip under the fence planks.

I grip the fence slats and even though it hurts, close my hands around the wire loops. My foot slides and kicks, looking for a foothold, and then I find one and pull myself up to see.

The place beyond the fence is weeds waist-high, elbow-high, running wild and thick. The shadows are already halfway across, diving under the few stunted trees beyond, fleeing for a building that sits on the grass heavy and dark. A building the sun ought to touch by rights, but doesn’t. Sunlight moves right past that place, whistling and carrying its watchman’s brand as fast as fast can be.

Knocked-out windows, narrow and arching. More arches around the door, a portico screened by bricks not half as solid as the ones that people Above use to shore up their alleys. Grey concrete foundations, and then bloody red brick dripping up to the fallen-in rooftops. Everything’s falling down here. Everything’s broken.

I know this place. I’ve seen it in pictures, in Tales. I’ve seen its window smashed and my friends and loved and dead tumbling free into the night in my dreams, a thousand times. Lakeshore Psychiatric. Where the Whitecoats live.

Or maybe lived.

The Whitecoat house in the park stands silent, window-broke and windblown in the middle of the overgrown field. Empty as a bricked-off subway tunnel. The shadows flow into it, stripping the sparkle from the bits of broken glass. They puddle darkness on its rooftops like a growing sore:
Whitecoat place. Bad place. Abandon hope all ye who enter here.

And then — they wink out. And gone.

I breathe in, hands raw, throat raw, legs shaking.
Sewer-things don’t run for Whitecoat places when they’re scared
, a nagging voice in the back of my head says.
They run for sewers.
Something’s up; something’s strange. Something’s wrong.

I stop. Drop off the fence. I can’t go in there alone.

I’m not no burning vengeance. I’m not something to fear. I’m small and smelly and worn right out, and I don’t know half as much as I thought I did ’bout shadows.

I need Whisper and Jack. I need Doctor Marybeth, and there are likely still shadows in the sewers to bar my path. There’s no passing through there; not for the twenty minutes through the tunnels to Doctor Marybeth’s house.

I need help.

I drag in a breath, let it out.

“Ghosts?” I say, small and like a kid, swallowing down the way that makes me feel even smaller, shamed. “If any of you know Whisper, tell her Matthew’s here. Tell her there’s shadows nested up in Lakeshore and I’m blocked off from my way home.”

The wind gusts. Back behind me, I hear a clatter. I turn right around, not sure if it’s ghosts or shadows or what, hand wrapped ’round my matches to strike.

It’s nothing. Some bit of wind. A crumple of newspaper blows and bounces down the sidewalk.

Nothing.

I let out a breath, wipe my palms on Doctor Marybeth’s old jeans gone soft in the seams from two days’ wearing. This is stupid. I need real help.

I need Ari.

She slides in next to me when the lights are out, my feet sore from running, my fingers sore from bottling three hours with Cat in the nervous, press-down dark. Four safehouses Above and there was still nowhere left to go for the night but back, back through the turns and blocks I counted careful to Beatrice’s apartment — and I
promised
. I promised them a duty for their board and roof and Sanctuary.

I promised Ariel I wouldn’t hurt her, and that I’d come back to her always.

So she waits ’til it’s dark, ’til the lights are out, when I’m tight-faced and troubled with thinking. That telltale hump is under her shirt, and I can’t tell if it’s fear that’s got her trembling or that constant pull to fly, to stay alive by moving.

You didn’t come
, is what she doesn’t say. I feel it in every line of her held away from me, legs and arms and back all kissing-distance and refusing to let me touch.
You left and did not come back for me. You. Did. Not. Come.

I didn’t. I left and let that fight hang in the air all the long day. I stayed away, angry and hurt, and for once, for maybe the first time ever, I didn’t come looking for her with soft words or soft hands to make one thing about it better.

I didn’t. She didn’t either.

But “I shouldn’t have said that ’bout not going back,” is what she actually says, tight and anguished. It jars me head to toe, jars me into looking at the space between my hands and her back, her skin and mine. How I’m already leaning forward, set for a fight.

I’m terrible. I’m cruel and bad and Beast.

“Ari,” I say, and slowly, careful slow, put a hand on her back. She flinches just a little, just enough so I pull back from a second of sweat-damp T-shirt, of fitful, living warmth. “S’okay,” I say, weak, even though it’s not. “I’m not mad. Honest.”

After an age of silence, two dozen lights streaming by through the window, a whole world turning over in sleep while she holds herself away from me, she says, “Doctor Marybeth said that?”

“Said what?” I blurt. And then I remember: my Curse. Dying with no children, and young. I never thought of Ariel wanting children. I try not to think ’bout her letting me close enough to get them on her. There’s no good in aching for the things you can’t have.

Awake and listening, then. I knew she was.

“How young?”

“Doctor Marybeth don’t know,” I say low in her ear. “Could be as many years as Atticus.” I pause. “Could be less.”

It doesn’t make me cry anymore. It did once. Now all I feel is shadow cold.

“Matthew?” she whispers, edgeless, soft, sad. “Touch them?”

I touch her wings.

They’re small, stiff, living. I trace the edges with one finger, watch my skin blur through their thinness like a light that don’t burn.

They feel like Sanctuary.

A
RIEL’S
T
ALE

Once upon a time Ariel lived Above with other girls and boys (Cat told me, leaning into a blue glass-bottle bin; walking along darkened sidewalks, over the rattle of a shopping cart). They slept like puppies on the floor in rags and tatters and shared everything down to their skin. In the mornings they squared their shoulders in the way a body does when it’s Passing, and went into the world to wait tables and clean bathrooms and lift heavy things and put them down again.