Above

by Leah Bobet

  Where’m I learning running? From Corner, maybe. From the shadow-taint that comes from fighting them, from shadows brushing up against your skin. Maybe from Atticus, passed on in the very air, after he made a mistake too big to take back and ran from it by pushing Corner out of Safe. I slept without my ma or pa for years inside his house, learning his lessons. Carving his histories into our people’s good doors.

  Atticus leaving. Corner leaving, no good-byes.

  Whisper looks up as I get to my feet. “Where you going?” She’s long-necked and alarmed, like a deer, a rabbit. Something that’s scared that you’ll move to hurt.

  “To find my Ariel,” I say, give her a last, twisted little smile, and go.

  PAPA’S TALE

  Papa didn’t walk until his second birthday, and after that, it wasn’t often.

  (He told it softer ’cause I was his child. He told it to me long before I was the Teller, once it came clear that maybe one day I would be, and with it he put paper and stub-snapped crayons in my hands to teach me the art of clean straight lines. Whisper told me some when I was the Teller for true, and she told it softer too, running skirt between finger and thumb whenever she left a bad thing out. Reynard was the only one who didn’t tell it soft, and he wouldn’t tell it to me at all. A boy can hear his own papa’s Tale, he said, with that quirk of the eyebrow and the jump his hands did to make up for his legs never working, without going to pester the Teller.)

  (So I don’t have the whole of it. I don’t have the worst.)

  Papa didn’t walk until his second birthday, and after that they took him to the specialist to look at his feet.

  Even as a baby, Papa’s feet were hard like a lion’s. The gold fur hadn’t yet come in; the tough pads were soft and new from want of walking, and the nails were tiny if they were thick and sharp. It wasn’t ’til he grew a little longer that his parents realized he wasn’t a baby like their others.

  Know this, he’d say: Your dadi and dada loved all their children. Back on the farm in the old country, they would never have minded, so long as I could walk and plant wheat and bring your dada water in the afternoons. I’d have danced in the Jaggo for your aunties’ weddings. But here (and he’d stop, and gesture upward, taking in the whole of Above with his one scabbed muscled hand) here there are Whitecoats, and they knew much better than we did at home.

  You listened to the Whitecoats. You did what they said.

  They broke my papa’s feet for the first time when he was three years old, and put them back together before he was four.

  He didn’t remember the first breaking. What he did remember was before it: a bright small room all glass and mirrors, white light on white walls, white tables. “Stand up,” the head Whitecoat said to him, over and over, and took from him his mama’s hand; stand straight even though the standing hurt him.

  The Whitecoats came in and he stood for hours. They got him to stand wide, stand thin, poked at his feet with rods and took pictures, the flashes popping on all sides. The light snapped off the white walls and dazzled his eyes so he could no longer see his mama, standing with her five brown fingers pressed up against the thick glass window. He stood stripped down to his undies until his legs shook and he fell and cried for her, and the Whitecoats frowned at him and called for the breaking of his feet.

  (Maybe they wouldn’t have done it if I didn’t cry, he never said, but he had a thin stern frown every time he told it, and by the time I was old enough to understand what that frown meant, he was dead and far past asking.)

  There were leg braces (Papa took the grey crayon and drew braces). Every morning Dadi strapped him into the metal and leather and tightened them up, and Papa walked about the house hurting and hurting as the braces bent his feet Normal. “Be brave,” his own papa said. Papa was brave.

  When he could walk ’round the house ten times without falling they sent him away to school.

  Papa watched the other kids run the track in gym class (he explained with a great relief how good it was that there was no such thing in Safe). He followed them around and around in circles from indoors, where he sat with his cane and leg braces, and bit his lip down until nobody could see him wanting. It’s a bad thing to be caught wanting, he said. Especially when you could not run.

  (They didn’t know what to do with my kind back then, he’d say with a gentle smile, and I’d ask, lion’s-foot people? and he’d laugh and laugh, his rich Papa laugh, and go no no, people from Punjab. Indian people.

  One place Above was much like another for me, especially when I was knee-high to my papa and followed him everywhere except the dark duty shifts Above. Do they now? I asked him once, and the smile went away and his eyes looked elsewhere. No, he said. They do not.

  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 agai
n 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.