Above (6 page)

If disguise is a resource, money’s twice as much. Whisper and Jack count the money at the table: five hundred dollars in creased old bills, stained from pocket-sweat or sewer water, packed together in a sealed sandwich bag. Not including the twenty-five still tucked in my pocket, which I can’t offer up with Ariel watching, her eyebrows drawn down like wings. A peach can’t be that expensive. And a chocolate is only a dollar.

Doctor Marybeth has to go to work, trouble or not, and I clear the dishes quick while Whisper hustles Ariel upstairs with a measuring tape in hand. “I’m not going for clothes twice,” she says, Ariel looking over her shoulder like I’m gonna disappear if she lets me out of sight.

Jack keeps on pacing while I wash up, running the hot water over the plates again and again ’til my fingertips pucker. His mouth doesn’t move one bit, but I can see some dark argument rip and spit in his head. “Turn off the lights on the way up, Teller,” he says when I switch off the water — a hot faucet and a cold on the sink, and part of Passing’s knowing what that red and blue mean. “I think I’d like a shower.”

I hit every white-panel light switch I can find going up the stairs, snuffing Doctor Marybeth’s dangling glass lamps one by one. Jack never comes up on supply duty, or patrol duty, or any duty outside the big carved door and the Pactbridge. Nobody ever asks why, because Jack lights the lamps and you need him downstairs. I don’t know why I never realized how that couldn’t be the all of it.

Even if he wore his sleeves down to cover his snowflake scars, Jack’s never, ever gonna Pass.

“Hold still,” Whisper’s saying in the buttery sunshine bedroom, pinching the measuring tape around Ariel’s waist. Ari squirms like she’d love to grow wings then and there, her head down to the side, staring down at the floor away from Whisper’s tugging, smoothing hands.

“I know my size,” Ari mutters, inching away from the tape. Her eyes are small and angry.

I step in fast. “What size?” and she gives me a look so full of scorn that I’m ready to promise her peaches all over again.

“Eight on the bottom,” she says, with a strange and stolen pride. “And a small on the top.”

“And the inseam?” Whisper snips.

I don’t know what an inseam is. Neither does Jack, I think, who I hear come up the stairs tiptoe, pause, then decide to stay out of it.

Ariel flushes, strawberry-red cheeks. But Whisper withdraws her tape and rolls it up, sharp little jerks. “It’ll be you hemming those pant legs, missy.”

Ari glares all the way through Whisper fixing me up to go: a tidy pair of jeans Doctor Marybeth’s left us, the cleanest of my dirty shirts, then lifting my shoulders with her own two hands ’til I stand like we’re in houses and not tunnels that hunch.

“Forty minutes,” Whisper says, to Ariel and Jack both. “Be ready. We’re leaving again as soon as we come back.” To visit the safehouses and find our missing. With food and water and clean Passing clothes.

A splash of red, terrible red flickers at the corner of my eye. I swallow.
And matches.

“We’ll be back soon,” I tell Ari, not like she wouldn’t know it. It makes her feel better when I say it. Like a promise.

She turns to the window. Away.

“C’mon, Teller,” Whisper says, her voice a little funny. There’s a crooked sad look on her face that I suspect is all for me.

I hate it.

We get moving.

I’m not scared of the sun. There is — was — never enough light in Safe to see the ceilings anyway, so it may as well be sky, dark starless sky. But I still don’t like feeling daylight on me Above. It’s harder to Pass, for one. Daylight shows what you really are: beast beast beast beast beast.

Just remember
, I tell myself,
you belong here. You grew up here. You’re nothing else but Normal.

Thinking it hard enough lets down my shoulders. I swing my arms a little more as we hurry past the woven-wire fences and the lean, muttering trees, breathe deep instead of in little puffs; inhale the rare, sweet scent of living dirt ’til it crowds out the smell of the dead kind. There are pigeons in the greyed-out gutters, beaking at nothing and fat with feathers. No rats, which is good: There’s no brand over my shoulder. I feel in my pocket, though, and there are still matches, bent but dry; nine whole heads left in the pack. I close my hand around them, snug and tight.

“Teller,” Whisper says, four steps ahead.

Normal people don’t think about fire. I put the pack away.

The Salvation Army doesn’t look especially like salvation. It’s a brown, squat brick building with a huge black-topped lot for cars. They have metal boxes outside, the kind we take pry bars to, but Whisper breezes right past them and through the hard glass-and-metal doors.

Inside it’s the opposite of Passing: The plasticky floors make my shoes squeak, and the lights are bright and sharp. They show every splotch of brown on my sneakers. My neck gets the tight feeling right at the back as the girl at the counter looks up, but I keep my head down, shoulders up. Follow Whisper. Nothing behind you, I tell myself. Nothing but Normal here.

Whisper drives her hands into racks of clothes — red and blue and green and orange; more clothes, I realize, than I’ve seen in my whole life — and pushes them here and there, feeling fabrics, peeking at tags, fluttering like a fussy old Above lady. She pulls blue jeans and faded shirts and socks off shelves and bounces to the next stack, and it takes me a full four racks to realize what the change in her is, what’s making her walk like a stranger.

Whisper
likes
it here.

“Here,” she says, bent over a plastic bin now and fishing out some prize. “Put these on.” It’s new sneakers, thin at the soles but scuffless, tough. She knows my size. I wonder how many sizes Whisper knows. I tuck my thick-nail toes deep into their socks and tug my sneakers off, slip on the new ones fast and sharp. They fit.

The old ones sit abandoned on the white tile floor, chewed-laced and muddy. I blink; off my own feet, they look like throwaway. They look like something stained and bad.

That’s not mud
, I realize, catching the smell of them off my fingers, cold and dead and metallic. The sick comes up through my chest, and I manage to stop it in time. Sicking up’s bad Passing. I wipe my hands careful on my jeans.

I can still feel where the blood on those shoes touched me, every inch.

“That’s you and me, then,” Whisper says, already off across the whole massive hoard. I rock back on my feet and think about balance, muscles. The new shoes bounce different. I want to bounce in them, find all the springy spots, but I don’t know if people Above bounce. “What’s your girl’s favorite color?” she asks once I catch up, her fingers deep in a round pants rack.

My head’s full of Tales. A whole book of them: every grief and joy and trouble that ever crossed the Pactbridge. None of them are about Ariel or if she has a favorite color.

I never asked.

Whisper looks at me with her white-grained eyebrows up, skeptical as you please. And I don’t rightly know what I say, but I mutter something and scuff my toe and flee outside into the quiet, the paint-stripper light and thick, choky air of Above.

The concrete stairs of the Salvation Army are hot in the sun —
afternoon
, I think. Maybe. I should go back inside, ask if the Salvation Army has wristwatches. I can’t count minutes steady in my head, and there aren’t clocks here like —
like I’m used to
.

It’s too late. The picture of Atticus bleeding swims up behind my eyelids, then Seed, Mercy, Beak —

“Ready then?” Whisper says sudden behind me, arms full of plastic bags with dirty red slogans flaking off the sides, and I jump. She passes me one; it’s packed so full the handles sting the insides of my knuckles.

“They don’t have any wristwatches, do they?” I ask, and she shakes her head. So: “Yeah,” I mutter, and kick a rock down the steps with my brand-new worn-out shoe. The shoes are soft blue fabric. They wouldn’t last two nights in the new sewers.

She don’t say nothing ’bout my bad temper, just sets off down the steps to the browning grass.

Doctor Marybeth’s left the back door unlocked for us, since it’s too dangerous to leave one’s front door open Above. Whisper opens it brisk as you please, though we’ve likely not been gone that whole forty minutes. “Jack?” she calls as she steps into the cool kitchen. “Let’s go!”

Jack doesn’t answer.

Whisper’s eyebrows draw down until her whole forehead frowns along with her mouth. “Jack?” she says again, and starts for the stairs. The door’s wide open behind me;
bad tactics
, Mack would say. I close it snug as a voice rumbles low under the upstairs door. Jack’s. And angry.

I take the matches out of my pocket.

Whisper shoots me a glance when I catch up, halfway up Doctor Marybeth’s winding steps. “Houses burn, Teller.”

I don’t put them back.

Whisper’s shoes barely sound on Doctor Marybeth’s soft green carpet. I know to walk quiet too, but behind her I sound like clumping. “Don’t tell me
nothing
,” Jack says on the other side of the door, close enough now, coming into focus. “I heard you not one minute ago.”

There’s a mumble; a buzz and a mumble.

“Who were you talking to?” he says, and the scuffed metal doorknob arcs with blue light.

“Jack?” Whisper says, softer than she steps.

“Don’t open the door —” he booms, and then Whisper turns the doorknob.

“Fuck!” Jack shouts, glove-shed and furious. He’s twisting like the lightning’s caught him again, his hair wet and clumped and his white undershirt damp, the whole of him strangely undone. “Fucking mother
fuck
—” and something shoots out past us, something small and dark and bright at the same time. Something about the size of a bee.

Ariel.

“Jack!” Whisper snaps, rushing to him.

“She was talking to someone, I swear to God —” he spits, lightning in his eyes, sparking and singeing his tiny little eyelashes into smoke. The bathroom light flickers. Doctor Marybeth’s bedside lamp rocks, sputters, and dies, and there’s no Ariel. There’s no Ariel anywhere. “That little bitch
stung
me —”

“Don’t you call her that!” I yell, searching the hall frantic for yellow and black against yellow walls, short steps, green green carpet.

“Teller, she’s spinning us some bullshit,” Jack snaps, and I half don’t hear it.
Last time
, Atticus’s cut-out voice is reminding me. I don’t know who’s living and who’s dead right now, and I don’t even know her favorite color.

Down. She went down.

I stumble down the stairs, yank open the front door, and reel into the naked street, scenting for bees.

I had it good in the tunnels, I realize, five steps down pavement that burns hot as brands through the soles of my new shoes. In the tunnels there were only so many places to go, and the sound of humming buzzing echoed long against the walls. In the tunnels she had to come back for food, clean water, rest.

Above, there is everywhere to go. Including up.

“Fuck,” I echo, staring up into the pale aching blue sky, and taste the rough Jackness of the word on my tongue. It doesn’t stop the rattling, shaking sob working itself under my ribs. I thought I couldn’t be upset anymore. The rattle turns into a laugh, and it sounds fake and sick.

“Matthew —” I hear behind me; Whisper, high and sharp. Whisper
yelling
.

I look both ways down the street and catch a glint of —

— and run after it with everything I got.

The shoes bounce. They bounce good running down the rough sidewalk, running faster than you can in the tunnels without slipping. All the streets have signs and they’re meaningless, the names of Tales I don’t know. I ignore them all, ignore cars, ignore people; ignore the tiny differences in plants or roof tiles or paint colors that’re the only way of telling Above houses apart. I’m not Passing. I’m looking for bees.

There are lots of leafy, hiding trees Above, garden after garden with the same incredible, windblown flowers. I run past them with my eyes moving, watching orange and purple and bright red petals for a bee cowering behind them. A bee who sits down still and just waits to see what you’ll do to it.

I run right into the end of the road. I run over the white stone curb and onto grass, lumpy ground like I’ve never been able to keep my balance on despite how many trips Above, and I stumble, go down hard on my knees.

When I look up it’s all flowers.

I blink. Rub my eyes. But no, it’s sky-to-toes flowers, red and purple and yellow-sun-golden, all sweet enough, big enough to shelter whole handfuls of bees. It’s a whole Sanctuary Night storehouse of flowers in tidy strips of dirt, baking in the afternoon sun. Any other day they’d be beautiful. Any other day I’d bring one home, press it between the pages of one of Atticus’s books and hang it, spinning, from my rafters.

Park
, I think. The word is park.

There are bees everywhere: fat and skinny, crawling along tree bark, nosing through flowers and moving to the next. The park is full of bees doing their supply duty, and none of them sing to me
Ariel
, even though I know I’d know her anywhere, I have to know her anywhere.

“Ari?” I say. “Ari, please?” and not one of them turns.

How many bees are there Above?
I realize, throat tight and everything sweating, and then my chest aches and my eyes get hot with running and I don’t know where I am no more, so I sit down on the prickly grass and let them cry.

She finds me inside a playground tube. A mini-tunnel, thick red plastic that changes the light coming through it; just small enough to curl up in and hide from the sunlight, the daylight, Above all huge and cut up with hate. I look up after five minutes or an hour and there she is, scrunched in next to me, her braid all mussed up. Enfolded in wings.