Above (17 page)

Papa sad was frightening. I didn’t ask again.)

They broke my papa’s feet for the second time when he was ten years old, and put them back together to heal slow enough that he didn’t go to school for three months. Papa didn’t mind. He’d overstrained them, learning to run with the metal and buckles in the field behind school on empty summer nights. The other kids in school knew what to do with his kind, he said: shoving and teasing and bitter bite words. It was important to learn how to run. “You can’t do this to yourself,” his mama said, and she held his hand when they held the mask over his face to drive him asleep.

The braces were bigger. They stayed on longer. Papa had nightmares about walking man’s-foot, wrong-foot, until his ankles snapped and the lion in him fled, growling, into the dark.

They broke my papa’s feet for the third time when he was sixteen and old enough to really know pain. He screamed and screamed through the shot to take the hurt away, and screamed after when he woke up with his feet in plaster casts to make them grow out Normal. The lion-nails cut at the tight hard plaster. They curled in and cut his flesh, and it took two days of screaming to get them to open the casts at the toes.

Never again
, he thought to himself, sharp and tossing in the nights where the pain from walking heel-toe like a man around the house five times, six times, seven, beat him down. Soon he would be a man grown up, and never again would the Whitecoats take hammer and scalpel to his toes.

Papa learned his own kind of walking.

He learned to pad soft and bent-kneed on his flexing lion’s feet, and he followed his therapy careful to the letter except for the places it made him walk like a man. Lion’s-foot men should walk like a lion. He walked the hunt.

Papa graduated from school three months after his nineteenth birthday. He walked bent-kneed and soft up to the stage to take his diploma and looked down from it, golden-eyed and quiet, upon the children who’d pushed him in the halls, or treated my braced-legs papa like he was stupid, or turned away because he was Punjab people and could not run.

And then he walked sure and careful all the way down to Safe.

(
How did you find it?
I asked, because he was the only person I could have ever put to the asking.

Papa grinned, and he swore me to keep it secret, made me promise on Safe and on my conscience and, the worst, the grave of my departed mama, who I dreamt of every night for a solid month after, rising up in sad disappointment if I dared to lie or tattle.)

How Papa found Safe is he watched. He put his foot in strange footprints, and they all led down and down. Because he didn’t know what that meant, he began to hunt them. He followed the footprints back and forth from the sewer caps, down the ladders, along dark tunnels that he could only walk by feel, and all the while watched them, looking for their maker.

One night he hid, soft-foot, in the shadows of an alley when one of those sewer caps rose up. Four people came pouring in reverse out of the darkness, Atticus and Violet and Whisper and Scar, and left behind them, slip-scent quiet, Corner to close the lid.

(
Had Corner come up, I’d’ve been found out
, he said, smile crooked and funny and sharp. This was before Corner was exiled, before its name became a dirty word.)

Papa followed them, followed their footprints, placed his sharp-flex feet in each one and knew them for his prey. He traced them all the way to the back of a grocery, with its rattletrap door chained and locked to concrete to keep thieves away. Atticus cut the lock like paper with one sharp-edged claw. The other three crept in, and when they carried their crates and bags and boxes of cans down the alley and underground, Papa followed.

“I’m Freak too,” he said when he walked in on them, all jumped-up panic to protect their roughed-out cavern. He showed them his feet. He Told them the three-times breaking of them, and he stood wide, stood thin while they ran their hands over the thick gold fur and nails and bone. “If you stay here for safekeeping, I should get to stay.”

The first five talked about it for a long long time. Hours. Papa stood. There was no light but a candle. His legs shook.

He didn’t cry.

One by one they bent their heads and agreed to it. Atticus and Corner told him to bend his head and gave him Sanctuary, and promised he wouldn’t have to stand hard like so ever again. They built the big door and fit it with a lock, to keep intruders trapped outside, and they built the Pactbridge to it, in remembrance of their pact with Papa to let those who’d need their Sanctuary through. Those who could make it, cunning and sharp.

But Papa brought more home. He scoured the streets, pad-hunting, and he found people broken and scared and turned away. He whispered in their ears the right tunnel, the turns, the ways and ways of reaching where you might find Safe. When they arrived he stood off to the side, legs apart, feet bare, and reminded the founders with his presence of the pact they’d sworn to give Sanctuary.

Even I understood, young as young, why such a thing would have to be kept secret.

“Come,” he’d said to Hide’s pa, and Seed little and strange, and my mama when she wasn’t mama but just Lise Marie Tremblay and wore damp scarves wrapped around her throat even on the hottest summer days, to hide the gills that gasped for breathing at the base of her narrow throat.

“Come,” he said to them, and took their hands, not planning to let go.

And they ran far.

This time I don’t walk to Bea’s brown building on the park. Doctor Marybeth gives me a token, gold and silver and light on the palm, and writes down directions for buses.

I’ve never been on a bus before. The rules of Passing Above are all about staying inconspicuous, staying out of places where people can have a good stare or rub up close, and that means traveling by foot. But it’s been more than half an hour, a whole evening into night, and I’ve been away from my Ariel too long.

The buses hiss softer than trains in the night, red-striped and lamplit just like the Whitecoat vans, but hum steadier, cleaner than that. I drop in my token and ask for the transfer just like Doctor Marybeth said, and the tall tired brown man driving hands me a slip of paper with numbers, cuts, and triangles all through. I hold it light and careful, trying to keep my sweat off, and take an empty seat.

The moving makes me sick, even sitting down. It’s too fast and unsteady: a rockless little tunnel that
moves
. When the driver calls out hoarse the stop I want, I step back down into the dark on legs I don’t trust to hold me.

I recognize the shrubs and the rise of the street, even though it’s dark and nothing looks quite the same. It’s full night now, full of crawling bugs and creaks and crickets. I tuck away my map and walk careful, heel-toe, down, down the sidewalk to where Bea’s building sleeps.

Where my Ariel is.

I can’t think what to say to her. It’s never been me who’s run off and left, just her fleeing something and the silence after, where I don’t ask and she’s not gonna tell me. Explaining’s a new turn for me; explaining how I’ve done wrong. The thought squeezes my heart like I’ve been running all night.

“You’re a Teller,” I scold myself, and pick up my drag-foot-slow pace. “So Tell it.”

There are shadows who aren’t just Killer
, sometimes it starts, and then
Let me tell you a Tale about Corner
, and sometimes just
I should have come back for you and I don’t know why I’m so taken with running. Sit with me, hold my hand. We’ll whisper it all into the dark.

I still don’t have nothing good to say when I walk into the entryway, boxed in with glass and people-smell and sharp-nose chemical things. I push the button and wait for the ringing; push the button and pretend to be brave.

The “Hello?” comes up from sleep, dense and annoyed, Atticus’s eyes when they’re tinged with orange and just looking to be mad.

“Hello,” I say back, not sure if you have to talk into the speaker, and there’s quiet. “It’s Matthew,” I say, and the door buzzes like a whole twisting city full of bees. I jump back with my hand in my pocket and nothing to throw, and then the sound goes out like candle flame.

“
Open
it,” Bea’s voice says over the speaker. The buzzing comes again, and this time I pull the sticky metal handle and the door comes open, asking me into the cold and musty lobby.

They’re waiting in the doorway when I tromp upstairs, seven flights with my heart drumming double like it’s the end of the world. I round the corner and they’re all peering out, talking hush-voiced, even husher once they hear my tread on the carpet.

None of them are beautiful, sunshine-golden.

Still mad.
I swallow, having known it all along. I stick my hands in my pockets so I can press the nails in and stop myself from just turning around and leaving again in front of every single stupid not-Freak person watching me out that door.

“You missed bottles,” Cat says, her mouth scrunched up and blotchy.

“I’m sorry,” I say, like someone who don’t really mean it. I sound little and mean, not proper like a Teller. I straighten my back, straighten myself out. “I just wanted to come for Ari.”

“Oh, come on —” Darren says, and shuts up quick when Beatrice looks him straight in the eye. Looks at me.

“Matthew,” Beatrice says, and her hand’s too tight on the door. “We thought she went after you.”

There’s no cold like shadow-cold, the touch of something not-alive and hurting and hating on your skin. But there’s cold near it. There’s the cold that gets to your skin from the inside coming on out.

My hands start shaking, this time for good.

“Shit!” Bea says, her big strong hands going ’round my arms hard enough to hurt. “Inside,” she snaps, and woe to the person who disobeys. I get my feet back, get them moving automatically like they’re walking Sentry through the apartment door.

It don’t get warmer once the door’s safe shut.

“When did you last see her?” Bea asks with me barely in the door. The rest of her people back up a little, retreat to chairs or the kitchen or the bedroom, too wound up to go too far. I fold onto the mattress on the floor. Her hair’s still on the blanket, twisted into the pillowcase.

“This morning,” I say, thinking that it couldn’t possibly be only this morning that I left with Whisper’s ghosts on the long walk to Lakeshore. And then she went away. Somewhere. I don’t know where. My eyes hurt, sudden; remembering how long since they’ve last had sleep, and how many ways there are to go Above. “When I went out for my duty.”

Bea looks at me strange, and I bite my lip. It’s
job
here, not duty. I’m not Passing right.

Oh lord my Ariel’s gone.

“I was going to be back by sundown,” I say. How many bees are there Above? How many people?

“None of the food’s gone,” Cat says quiet to Beatrice, like I’m not meant to hear, like I’m not right there.

None of it’s gone. She can’t be far.

“Where might she go?” Bea asks. “Has she got other friends in town?”
Other
, I repeat gratefully, like it’ll make a difference. Bea’s pacing like Jack, fingers twitching, hands clasped behind her back. Asking all the right questions I don’t got. And she ain’t just asking me. She looks ’round the circle, one by one, and a few turn their heads away.

There’s a soft closing of the bathroom door. I blink, and count again who’s here and who’s not.

Darren.

I think about their snapping, their avoiding, their fighting, and everything behind my eyes goes red, like Atticus’s.

“To Doctor — to our friend’s, maybe,” I say, licking my lips to keep the dryness off them, to keep myself from hurling after Darren with hammer-fists, shouting, doing anything I could to shake from him what he knows. I clench my hands under the sheet on the mattress where I’m sitting to keep them good and still.

“What’re you doing here if you’ve got friends?” someone mutters, and nobody says a thing against it. I draw my arms down looser, automatic, for a fight, even as I don’t care one bit what they think of my friends, me, my Ariel.

“Do you know your friend’s phone number?” Bea asks. I shake my head — I don’t know
phone number
; or I know it, but not as a thing with good or careful use. People listen to telephone lines. Whitecoats hear what you say on them. We don’t learn phone numbers down in Safe.

I’m not down in Safe
, I realize. For real now. For true.

I press my prickle-palms against my closed eyes to block out the light.

“Last name?” Bea presses. And I shake my head again.

She lets out a breath, a long, long breath, and when I dare to look she’s watching me, sad and tight and a little mad all mixed in, and now I care a little what they all think, now maybe I care, because otherwise I’m all alone and friendless in the bad hot world Above.

“Well,” she says. “Bunk here tonight. She’s held her own before. We sort it in the morning.”

There’s a grumbling, but Bea shuts it down with a flashing-eyed look that I’d swear reflects orange from the windowpanes. The rest straggle back to bed in ones and twos, stopping for water, for a peek out the window blinds. Darren gets into the bedroom somewhere in the mix of them; when I look up, the bathroom door’s open. Empty.

I sit on my hands. He’s one of their sworn, and they’d defend him. I can’t take all of them down.

Not yet.

“Nobody saw her go?” I ask Bea when she’s the last in the room, securing the lock tight and brushing stub-fingered the lights. My fists are trembling, and she sees it, and maybe she thinks it’s a scared shaking and not the flat hard fury that I’m choking down inside me, ’cause she stops on her way back into the bedroom and gives me a glass-edged smile.

“She always comes back,” Bea whispers to me. I swallow my own words and just nod to her.

She don’t look like she believes it either.

There’s no getting him that night. Too many people about. Too many questions, and Beatrice’s sworn are looking at me hard and unhappy, and I won’t push. I know what I’ve done.

I’ve taken Sanctuary. Taken it when I wasn’t in true, hard need. And I’m not half-welcome anymore.

I wake up early. Wake half-shamed for being able to sleep at all, but Mack always taught us that if we get caught in a bad spot, it’s best to face it half-rested than not at all. So I wake with the first touch of sun on the blinds and lie still and quiet, still and waiting for anyone to emerge from the bedroom. Bea’s place sounds of pipes same as Safe, just quieter and thinner, not the deep rumble of water that marks Safe’s daylight hours. The little baby pipes sing with people’s getting up; a scrape of furniture; a footstep; cars swishing by on the roadway below. None of it moves me. I watch.

Darren comes out first just like the past morning, opening the bedroom door so it don’t creak and walking heel-toe, heel-toe to the bathroom. I drop my eyes half-shut, feel him watch for a second, two, before he opens the bathroom door with a slow squeak that echoes through the floor into my bones.

I’m up before it closes again.

I’ve slept in my shoes, careful and ready for this, and my bouncing-bottom sneaker squishes hard when I stick it between the door and the door frame. I burst into the bathroom with the door shut tight after and get the lock twisted true before he turns.

He’s got no chance to shout. I reach out, wrap fingers in his shirt, scared to touch his skin because then the rage in me might come pouring out and I’d push his thick pink Normal face into the mirror. I’m not big but I get him up against the cold beige plaster wall fast enough that I look it, and the set of my teeth does the rest. He doesn’t hit me. Just leans back against the wall and looks down with his eyes hard and snarling and cold.

“The fuck,” he says. Fingers curled against the plaster.

“I wanna know what you know about Ari.”

He sizes me up, man to man, looking for a straight or dirty fight. “That’s not her real name.” He spits. It glimmers on the yellowed bathtub and slides down inside.

Ariel’s real name.

I feel the touch of wings, fine pale brittle living wings under the slightest part of my fingertip. Iridescent. Delicate as shadows, as sunlight. As a story that’s not your own to tell.

I bite back the question. Swallow it down.

“It doesn’t matter,” I say. “I wanna know what you know.”

But he’s seen the wing-touch in my eyes. “Or what?” he says, not sneering but soft, soft and calculating and cool.

I didn’t bring no knives. Bea’s got knives in the kitchen, but when you pull a knife into a fight it gets serious, and bleeding means Whitecoats coming in white trucks, cutting your shirt off, seeing the scales that march up and down your back. Knives can be taken away and used against you, but I’ve got something else.

He doesn’t move when I pull the match and strike it on the beat-up cardboard backing. His eyebrow goes up a little,
whatcha gonna do with that
, and I let it burn halfway down to my fingertips before I reach out and touch it to his chin.

Darren yelps. He fumbles sideways into the bathtub, trips over his own feet and lands sprawling in the damp leftovers of somebody’s shower. “You crazy fuck!” he hisses, but not loud. Not so anyone’ll open the door. Not so anyone’ll see.

I’m little, I realize. He’s big. Even with the match tossed floating in the toilet, it wouldn’t be my Sanctuary Bea took away.

And he don’t got nowhere else to go.

I look him over with my hardest face, my Jack-face, my Atticus-face with eyes bright red with righteous fury and rage and punishment coming down from the heavens.

“I wanna know what you know,” I repeat, soft.

He tells me.

Once upon a time (he says, ’cause he don’t know no other ways to tell a Tale), Darren and Ari and his cousin Jimmy all lived in the same town. Back when he wasn’t runaway.

Before.

Things were off with Ariel (that’s how he says it,
off
.
FreakSickBeast
, I translate. I know every way that word’s said, every word that hides it). From the time they stopped being kids and went into high school, things were off. She didn’t play no more in the neighborhood; looked across her shoulder for things that were never there. But then things were off with Ariel’s papa too, big and broad, never smiling and seldom outdoors, who all the kids shied away from and all the grown-ups frowned ’bout whenever his name got mentioned. Ariel did good at school and was quiet and didn’t make trouble like Darren did, setting garbage-can fires and smoking out behind the mall, so nobody went asking about her.
Wouldn’t like them telling us how to run
our
family
, they said, watching Ari and her papa and her brothers disappear into their dark-shuttered house, and left it all alone.

Everyone ’cept Jimmy.

Jimmy saw Ariel and he wanted her.

(Why? I asked. And Darren shook his head, and said there was no knowing why Jimmy did what he did, just that once he was fixed on something he was methodical about getting it. About keeping it once it was got.

He wouldn’t look straight while he said it.)

Jimmy sat with Ari on the front porch in the summer. He stuck himself at her little back table in the cafeteria and wouldn’t be turned away. He bought her things or stole them, no knowing which. After a while she went into Jimmy’s house in the afternoons instead.