Above (2 page)

Hello?
I want to say again, and bite down hard on my tongue, remembering everything Mack and Atticus ever said about traps, tricks, fire; the pale gleam of dead fingers poking up from the water. The way there was so little attached to those fingers when we heaved and pulled them out, and the laughing after, coming deep dark from a mouth we couldn’t see.

There are things in the sewers that don’t believe in Atticus and Safe.

I reach for the brand at my back.

“I know you,” a voice says too close, thin and dry and too close, and I whip around.

The tunnels are always dark, but I know from dark. Right now they’re darker than they ought to be, the outlines of things gone blurred and strange. I put up a hand to my face; my fingers wiggle vague, black on black. The skin around my eyes is tingling, numb.

I can’t tell if that was an arm I just saw. A sleeve. A face.

I can’t see.

“You’re Narasimha’s boy.” The voice rustles the hair ’round my ear; rasp and darkness and the edge of something foul. I strike out at it with both arms, flail, hit nothing. “You’re the Teller.”

“Who calls?” I squeak too loud and reach out again. Nothing’s there, nothing but air and the slightest breeze, but I can smell somebody now, feel them: the difference between old sewer and old sweat. A flicker of something living and warm.

“You are the Teller then,” the voice says. Dry, short, bloody. I can’t tell if it’s girl or boy. And in the other ear: “Then I’ll ask you a Tale.”

My breath’s coming too fast. I fumble a match, drop it between the twisted old tracks; it skitters into a crack and vanishes forever —
damn
. Fumble another and I can hear the catch and hiss as I strike it bright, but I can’t see nothing, not a thing.

“No Tales,” I manage as it flares and burns out, and my voice rises and cracks like rockfall. Match to the sandpaper, pull once — nothing — twice —

The brand’s yanked full off my back, hard enough to pull me stumbling backward. I shout, and the echo of it mixes with the clatter of my one good weapon, tossed somewhere away. The voice breathes laughter on my face.

“What color were Atticus’s eyes when he exiled the first Beast from Safe?” The words come hot, dirty, filth and waste and dead things rotted through, and I can’t find it anywhere, not anywhere.

“Corner,” I say, stupid, stalling, and the name’s been forbidden so long it feels like licking mud. “It was Corner he exiled.”

“What color?” it spits at me, burning on my cheek where I can still feel. “Teller, what color?”

The burning on my cheek shifts, turns into pressure just below my eye, and sharpness, a nail —

“Red,” I choke out.

The pressure falls away; a poke and it’s gone. I back up panting, free hand up high to protect my face, thick with panic. “All right, Teller,” it whispers, whispers like worms; the little breathy laugh that follows is the opposite of real laughing, colder than winter Above. Something damp pats my cheek. “Go on home now.” I feel it turn, feel the terrible weight of
something
’s attention lift away from every breathing bit of my skin.

And then a long-bodied honeybee comes screaming out of the darkness.

It stings and stings at the air, buzzes furious figure eights around the tunnel, past my hair, down low to the tracks. That awful voice calls out in terrible, muffled surprise, and the feeling rushes back into my face like it’s me the match set afire. I hit the floor, press both hands hard against my face to block out the rush of nerve-prickle pain. The buzz gets low, heavy, and that attention suddenly scatters, clatters down the tunnel, little light footsteps that I don’t dare and can’t bear to see.

I blink against it, against the pain. Open, slow, my eyes. The blurred shape of my skinny fingers, twitching, tight, swims in front of me.

Oh thank god thank god.

I don’t dare look up until the shapes come clear, until I know that I’m seeing what’s there for true. When I finally do, the bee is drifting back toward me, floating, tired. It circles once around my head, tickles my ear, and lands in my outstretched hand.

“Oh, Ari,” I whisper, because she won’t let me call her anything sweeter. I close her in my trembling palm and the stinger hovers, pressed to my lifeline, for one long, long moment. And then I open it and she goes long again, wider, firming up into legs and arms and bone. I open it and she turns back into a girl with honey-colored hair and eyes that’re red from crying, tucked in the skinny circle of my arms.

The wings change last. They go long with her and then fall out plucked, fall to the concrete like petals. We used to save them, hang them on the walls until we lived in a hollow that was veiled with glittering wings. We ran out of places to put them after the first three months. Ari runs away a lot.

“I heard you shouting,” she says, and wipes her eyes. Her voice shakes worse than my hands. I can’t help it. My arms tighten around her even though I know she’s skittish, know she doesn’t like to be held ’cause someone hurt her bad Above, so bad she still wakes me up some nights with crying.

“Came to save me,” I say to cover her stiffening, to talk out what I mean even if I can’t show it. I’m not good with her this way. I don’t know the right way to move. “What was that?”

She half shakes me off, trying to sting without a stinger. The wings shudder and bend against the floor, refracting dim tunnel-light against the walls. There’s a soft crunch as one snaps.

“Ariel,” I say softer, even softer.

“I hate you.”

I don’t answer. I pet her bloody-golden hair until her chest stops heaving with tears.

“I’ll get you a chocolate next time I’m up. Or a peach, you’d like a peach,” I murmur, rocking her clumsy in my arms that’re still learning touching. “I’ll get you little bee clips for your hair.”

“I don’t want,” she whispers, hiccupy, but she’s not crying anymore.

“Come home,” I ask into her ear, and she finally, eventually nods.

I take her hand. I listen for the footsteps.

It’s grave-silent all the way home.

We don’t get back ’til morning. The lamps are flickering on one by one through the cavern, each a different color from the rainbow of lampshades that Jack Flash bids stolen every fifth supply run. Half of everyone’s already awake, and they watch us stumble all the way back to my house on the west wall, blind and time-muddled and tired. The clocks aren’t chiming — morning bell must have already rung. That late out; later than anyone’s stayed out in years if they planned on coming back.

It could be a Tale if I wasn’t so tired. It’d be told to the young ones in the school Atticus and Whisper keep, recited singsong on the common. I’d carve it on my sill: the big door pushed open, my back straight instead of hunched over like the old tunnels make you do. Our arms around each other, framed against the tunnels and everything that’s outside, everything that’s bad. I could carve my Ariel beautiful.

Atticus is by my door again, or never left, his arms crossed like a statue. “Back late,” he says. He doesn’t look worried. His eyes are amber, though, fading down to nothing fast. Just another light by daytime.

“There was … trouble,” I say, and swallow.

Ariel takes my arm and holds it tight. I glance back and her eyes are narrow, warning:
Don’t.
But Atticus is watching, waiting.

I tell him about the voice, the smell, the questions. I tell him like it’s a Tale:
Once upon a time there was a monster in the tunnels that struck me gasping blind, and it asked ’bout your eyes, and it knew all our names.
Ariel’s hand digs into my arm and then, just as quick, pulls away. I spare a glance and she’s drawn herself back, hiding behind her hair. Her mouth is tiny and sour.

Atticus’s eyes light up switch-flicked when I get to the part with the tingling ’round my eyelids, the dimming, darkening pain; the question. I drop my head, not ’cause I’m scared, but shamed of it, dizzy and shamed. I told Safe things to something outside. A sewer-thing. A monster.

That’s not keeping Safe. It’s not doing my very best.

“Mm.” Atticus grunts once all my polished story-words run out. “You kept yourself whole.” He pats me awkward on the shoulder and it turns me absurdly proud, proud like when I was a kid and I’d done well at my lessons. “Just don’t tell this around.”

“Sir,” I say, breathing better now that he’s forgiven me the whole of it, backtalk and telling and Ari running and all;
Sir
, like I called him when I was a kid with no mama or papa, sleeping foster in his house. “What was it?”

“What happens when you let unsafe things in Safe,” he says, which is no answer at all. And then: “Last time,” Atticus repeats, looking at me and then Ari with his molten-amber eyes. I put an arm around her, tighten my hand on her shoulder. She ducks away from it, one ugly jerk, and I drop it back to my side. She won’t look at me.

Atticus’s right claw is tapping against the left,
rat-tat
,
rat-tat
, open and close. He’s not looking at us either; he’s far away somewhere else and pacing. Atticus is nervous. Atticus is
upset
. He stalks along the gravel and tile,
crunch crunch
past his own door, past the scuffed-up furniture and chattering breakfast line in the kitchen and into the north side of the cavern. I count steps; he pauses at Whisper’s clutter-house cave. Taps on the door, and waits ’til she lets him in.

Ariel watches tightly after him, her hands in fists stuck hard in her pockets. “You shouldn’t tell things like that,” she says, so low I can’t quite believe it.

I blink. “What d’you mean? It could be dangerous —” Stupid; it
is
dangerous. It pressed sharp against my eye, and it knew all our homes and names —

“Don’t you know what
happens
—” she starts, and then bites it off. Her eyes are clear and hard and emptier than the sky.

“He’s just going to talk to Whisper,” I say. I reach out for her hand, but she pulls away.

“What’d he mean, ‘last time’?” she asks, half-challenge.

Ariel wasn’t here for the time with Corner. She doesn’t know what those words mean. “Don’t worry,” I say. I’m too tired to tell her now and set her crying, risk her running right back for the tunnels. Tomorrow, or tonight. After we’ve slept and she’s done hating me again. “We should get to bed,” I say, and open up our door.

When I turn to close it behind us, Jack is there too, leaning quiet against one of the rough-cut pillars that keeps our roofing up. Listening. Maybe all along. He pushes off it and pats me on the back with his scrapy grey glove. “Good work,” he says, out of Atticus’s hearing and everybody else’s. “Kept your head.”

I feel my face warm down in the dark. Jack’s rough with praise sometimes: He talks a crateload when you do something wrong, and that makes his kind words kinder. “Thanks,” I murmur back, tight so the sound won’t carry. And this I can tell to Jack, and not to Atticus who’s like my sterner pa: “I didn’t know what to do.”

“S’all right,” he says, and pats my back again. His gloves are like padded sandpaper, rough as his black beard, and wrapped round and round his fingers with duct tape and insulator. “There’s things out there that none of us know what to do with.” A pause. One that’s got knowing in it, but when I raise my eyes to his, he looks straight elsewhere. “I’ll look around.”

And like that I feel better, less dirty, less beat. Jack gives me another stone-crack smile and he’s off across the common, soft gravel and shredded-up rubber tire crunching under his boots. Jack’s tough, but he’s good. He runs the wires so the city don’t see us sucking power off their littlest electric toe and come down with work crews, looking for what we might be. Jack’s not afraid of Atticus either, and for real; he don’t need to save up backtalk.

Where he goes, the lights come on.

I rub my eyes with the back of my hand and look down at Ariel’s watching face, the dark circles under her own eyes. “Bed,” I say quiet, and follow her back inside to our own Sanctuary. To the house that’s hers, hers and mine, all broke up with wings.

I’m writing to you as myself. They say writers, especially of memoirs, shouldn’t speak in the first person. Atticus told me that’s because they don’t know what they have to say for themselves yet, but I’m pretty sure I know what there is to say about me.

I was born here. My ma had scaly gills down the sides of her neck and my pa had the feet of a lion. When I was three my ma died of a cold that didn’t get better. When I was ten my pa went up on his supply shift and didn’t come back, and I was given as foster to Atticus.

I don’t have lion’s feet, though they’re big and have claws instead of nails. I can’t breathe underwater. But I can Tell, and I can Pass.

J
ACK’S
T
ALE

Once upon a time, Jack was born. His name wasn’t Jack then, and he didn’t spark yet. The sparking came later, when he moved to the city from his little backwoods town, past the forest and up the highway from the city Above.

Jack had a ma and pa and they fought a lot. Both drank (Jack had to explain this to me, along with forests and towns — I thought the first time it meant water, ’cause Atticus forbade anything harder). This wasn’t a big deal ’cause most of the mas and pas in Jack’s town drank, and the kids went out into the back fields to stay away.

The back fields went on until they met the roadway and the woods, and the boys in Jack’s town dared each other nightly to see how far they’d go from home, into the dark, before turning around and running back. One day when Jack’s ma and pa were yelling up a storm, he went farthest of all and stayed there until it got dark and the other boys went home for supper. Once they were gone he went farther, and then farther than that, and realized (with a strange glow in his eye when he tells this, like Atticus’s rubbed off on him) that he could go as far as he wanted until he fell down. That nobody would make him stay.