by Leah Bobet
So: “Doctor Marybeth,” I ask, “will you tell me the story of how you came down to Safe?”
It’s not the right words for her. We don’t have no ritual words for those who came down to Safe and went back up, down and up with less, if not nothing, to fear. But she looks me in the eye and sees the words I mean.
“I will,” she says, and puts her battered blue kettle on for tea.
Once night falls, we move out.
We move down the street in clumps and batches. Walk the sidewalks like people who belong, signaling back and forth one group to the next. The trees whistle at us with wind and we lean into it, sour-smelling; it tastes thick like sewer and home. We walk the turns down to the sewer cap that runs closest to our tunnels and I bring out from my pockets a set of pins, tools that Whisper’s found somewhere in her ceaseless rummaging, to take the sewer cap off quick and clean.
My hands are clumsy-stung. Bandaged and thick. I work slow.
I fiddle clanking quiet for one minute, maybe more, while the whole of the first army of Safe stands around me back to back and watches every shadow for a twitch of movement that’s wrong.
And then “Open,” I say, remembering this time to speak low instead of whispering.
Down goes Jack, down goes Beatrice, down go Whisper and Bea’s black-clad sworn. The first lick of flame puffs down below, orange like something looking to be mad, and my fists loosen at the sight of the signal fire.
“Go on,” I say to Ariel, second-last, and she looks at me one fearful moment before firming up her chin and climbing down the long ladder, her lovely hair all bound up in braids and tucked away to keep it out of the fire.
Then it’s just me. Empty street, and me, and the wind.
I lean back and take in the surenesses of Above, the memory of match-struck sun burning through my eyelids so everything’s orange and there can be no shadows: not in my eyes, not in my heart. The first rule of Above: denying all the dark things that live inside. Sending those who bear shadows, who bear the marks of them down and down, into the hospitals, into the pits so everyone else can live their lie.
That’s why they have Asylum and we have Sanctuary. Or that’s what Atticus would’ve said.
I think I say different.
I put my bouncing shoes right, then left on the cold slippery ladder. Right, left. And pull the sewer cap closed above me, and take us into the dark.
DOCTOR MARYBETH’S TALE II
Doctor Marybeth is a Doctor. That is the whole of her Tale.
(There’s got to be more than that, I said, and she went hush, let me be done.)
Doctor Marybeth is a Doctor because she believes in making things well. She grew up in a place across more ground than a person can walk — more ground than you could imagine, Matthew — where nothing was well: where the uncles drank and the children were sent away to wicked schools run by white men and the mamas were all bent in despair. She got most of her real language torn away from her, ’til she could only hold a few words and cradle songs. She whispers them to herself every night before bed as proof against forgetting. Tsujus is one of her real words. It is the most important, because it means child. It’s the word her mama bid her remember when they took her away to the school: that no matter what, Marybeth would always be her mama’s child.
She escaped from the schools when she turned eighteen. And she went on to be a Doctor, because the only way to fight what was wicked in the world was to work, hands and heart, for what was good and well.
She couldn’t make her home well, so she left for the city and made money to send back, to put food in the cupboards for her mama and uncles and help build their own school to teach their own Tales. She couldn’t make Lakeshore well, so she left the door slipped for Atticus and Corner — and unknowing, Whisper, Violet, and Scar. She couldn’t make Atticus and Corner well, so she went down to one to plead for the other.
She can’t make the world well, so she gives to us for Safe, even though her money’s sometimes thin and her nieces and nephews draw down trouble that’s more time and money in the tending, and there are things in the world she wishes she had, things important to her heart.
And she never went down to Safe for good, because Safe’s about hiding, not well.
(Hey — I started, and she held up her hand, eyes hot and shadow-tinged. I let her explain.)
Healing’s not always natural, she says. Healing’s not always the way a body wants to go. Sometimes the body wants to run. Sometimes it can’t think of anything but what might stop the pain. And though stopping the pain’s important if you want a body healing, it isn’t the whole. Sometimes that just keeps you broke.
(You don’t agree with Safe, I said, shocked out of the rote and memory of taking in a Tale.
That there should be such a place? Yes, she said, hands in her lap. With the whispering and hiding and teaching your children to fear and hate? No. I don’t agree with Safe at all.)
In Doctor Marybeth’s world, Safe’s what’s called a reservation. It’s a place that’s yours away from the world, where others won’t bother you; where you live your life without being locked in schools and hospitals and chains. But it’s its own set of chains, of walls. Doctor Marybeth grew up on a reservation. Her uncles drank and the children left and the mamas cried all day. It made nobody well.
It wasn’t Safe; it was Isolation.
So Doctor Marybeth stays Above. She works in the hospital, and she lives alone, but she keeps her guest room ready in case someone Sick needs helping. She sends the rare thing down to Safe, but not too much. Not since she broke with Atticus, because Atticus’s way is not going to make healing.
(Go make Safe, she said, and patted me on the shoulder. And I knew what she meant for real.
And she left me alone with the sunset, watching, before we moved out to retake what was ours.)
It is a dark, chill road to the gates of Safe from Above.
Jack takes the front: the most important spot on a duty, supply or sentry or any duty to step outside Safe’s doors. The man in front counts the turns, carries the light. The man in front swears an oath without talking: to take the blade or hit or shadowfall of anything that rises up before us, so the duty will be warned and Safe will go on.
I was the man in front the night we found Ariel. I went into her hollow and talked to her soft, and risked her stinging when I took her by the hand.
Whisper takes the back. The back’s second most important. If the man in front falls, the one in back has counted the turns too and leads us up and out and away, somewhere snug, somewhere with a wall where we can make a good stand.
I stand middle, and that’s important too in its way. The man in the middle’s kept safe as Safe, guarded by each body that walks the duty with the whole of their lives. The man in the middle’s job is to carry the Tale if everyone else falls, and by wit or stealth or sacrifice, take the word of their dying home to Safe.
I stand middle, and Ari stands with me. I stand middle ’cause I’ve got the knife.
There wasn’t much talk about the killing. Somehow, without speaking, Whisper and Jack agreed that it had to be me. Jack agreed about the forgetting, that the forgetting was wrong, but not about the killing, the scouring of shadow-feet from every bit of ground we’d claimed for our own. Fine, he said. We’ll tell it in the Tales. But we gotta fight for our own.
He gave me the knife. It is small and wide and neat, and it burns cold in the palm of my hand as we walk the dark, chill road to Safe.
Bea was clever about her choosing: She brought only half of her Sanctuary-sworn to the park by Doctor Marybeth’s house, and some I’ve never seen. There’s none of those that looked at me slantwise when Ariel fled away. But she brought Darren.
I don’t talk to him. He don’t talk to me. We go down and down and the tromp of boots and beat-up shoes turns into quiet splashing, a sound I know. An almost-home sound.
“’Ware,” Jack whispers as we turn into the old sewers, and ’ware, ’ware, ’ware mutters
down the line like a summons. Whisper sings it like a hunting-call, and if the ghosts she’s dredged from the alleys and nooks reply, I don’t know how.
The dark things skitter out of our way, rats into their nests and the wicked nothings into the mire, and all of them watch our progress down through the old subway tracks, along the vent that goes to the sewers, past the twist you have to be looking for. To Safe.
“Hold,” Jack says, soft, and strikes the match.
The fire passes from hand to hand. The brands are lit and smoking in the thin, sweet air before we reach the Pactbridge. By the time I feel its wood beneath my thin-sole shoes, everyone’s holding burning, light that’ll blind every last person left in Safe and keep the shadows at bay.
“We hold them off,” Whisper says from the back of our column of fire. “We get our man through.”
Nobody talks. But everyone nods and a few give me looks full of nerves and that stupid lip-twist sadness, and I wipe my hand on the side of my jeans and grip the knife tighter.
Ari takes my hand. Squeezes it once.
Ari and I tuck ourselves away behind the Pactbridge. There’s a tunnel-hill of scree cleared down and smooth to keep Safe from just this kind of ambush. We dig both our bodies into the crack in the wall behind it, a tight little space five feet deep that drips groundwater slow and clicking. Ari goes in first, all legs and short-stepped scramble. I look over my shoulder as she tucks herself tight and climb in after her.
“The door,” Jack says, not bothering to whisper no more, and he and Bea grasp the rivet-through handles and bang three times on the door to Safe.
“Corner!” Jack roars louder than anything ever uttered in Safe, rattling the walls and rock-roots and gullies of the dark pathways underground. Every tunnel and curve of Safe sings that forbidden name.
Corner Corner Corner lingers in the cracks and worm-mounds. The torches crackle. The torches burn.
The door opens, and the shadows come.
They come screaming, screaming their awful hissing shadow song. Over the Pactbridge they come, and Jack drops both gloves and takes the fire to them.
Fighting’s beautiful in Tales. But the fighting for the doors of Safe is all darkness and sparked burning. I can’t see who stands, who falls, without peeking out from our hiding place, and I don’t dare. There’s flashes of things: a burned shadow howling with a flame-scar on its head. Whisper shouting silent into the fray, skirts swirled about her, her face wide and bare-toothed as her ghosts tease and march. None of it’s louder than the blood moving in my ears. I press farther and farther into the wall, farther so I can’t see a thing. When I wrap an arm around Ariel and hold her close, not just for her comfort but to still my own shaking, she don’t argue.
And then: “Back!” Jack calls, loud enough to reach us even through the stones. And like they’re breaking, like this whole thing wasn’t planned all along, our people scatter, stumble, run down the tunnels.
The shadows start at their heels. Stare. And with a terrible howl, run after them.
The fight roil-rumbles past us, into the old sewers and fleeing toward the new, fire and shadow-dark and yelling racing along the one bit of wall I can still see. I huddle against Ariel, driven near to weeping by the smell of death and her skin. I close my eyes and count backward from ten down to zero.
When it hits nothing, I force my head out and look around.
The path is empty. There’s nothing but silence, footprints, the stubs of smoldering brands still smoking their last. The Pactbridge, decorated with a body I don’t dare look to, and the big door to Safe.
Standing open.
“C’mon,” I tell Ari, soft and not a whisper, and she melts and twists and shortens, growing faint, growing small.
When I can’t smell her no more and her buzzing whispers through the concrete and dirt, we slip back onto the Pactbridge and steal into Safe.
Safe is strange-familiar. Safe is home, and the smell of smoke, the cold of it, the echo-roar of shadows dying stiffens my back like nothing ever did in our travels Above.
It didn’t used to be so cold. It didn’t used to smell like dust, like old water standing too long. Ari hovers at my shoulder, a faint hum that carries I don’t want to think how far. There’s no sound but her wingbeats and the slower noise of my breathing as we move heel-toe, crunching and shuffling through a dark we don’t dare break.
Safe is a shell.
Nobody’s in the kitchen. There’s a smell there that makes me half-hungry and sick all at once, thick and oversweet: cream gone sour. Ari lights on my shoulder for a moment, and I draw in a breath and turn away. She can’t give language when she’s turned like this — I don’t think she’s ever tried — but she jumps and settles, jumps and bounces like brand-new shoes on my shoulder. I don’t need words to translate that: Hurry up. Come on.
“Okay,” I breathe, and shut my eyes. Carve in my head, in wood and paint, the map of my own Safe.
Safe is not like Above. There are only four ways to go, right-left-front-back. The paths, the common, and then just the walls, and I’ve walked them since I learned walking, walked them through the words of others in every Tale I’ve kept.
Safe is a Tale I know.
I walk.
The houses rise in ridges on the other side of the common, Whisper’s and Hide’s and then dimness. I walk like my papa, lion-foot, with Ari circling like a Curse ’round my hair. Supply, I think, cans and tools and sacks of beans kept ever-tidy and stacked. There’s brands there, to make a light. I turn a little to the left, skim the kitchen counter with one hand, and reach out five paces forward to the metal supply shelves.
My hand closes on nothing.
I kneel down and feel in the dust, shift tins with my hands. The bags are ripped and the tins dented, beat-up like they’ve been thrown all about. I count them, like turns, noiseless with my mouth.
It don’t look like nobody’s eaten for days.
It’s killed everyone, says the bad voice that lives in the back of my head: Atticus, or Jimmy, or shadows whispering my given name one over the other over the rest.
I swallow. It can’t possibly be so. Killing would mean bodies. Bodies would mean smell.
“Ari,” I whisper, and forget the carry of sound, ’cause I’m scared to speak above a whisper in the death-silence of Safe. “Ari, you smell anyone living?”
She bobs a second, circle-search, and bounces slowly down the pathways, around Whisper’s silent house into the old crumbling pile that belongs to Scar. I follow, push the door open with my palm. Scar’s house was always dark; Scar and Violet both were the ones afraid of light, and so he built its entry turned away from the kitchen where Jack sat with his glove off and drew steady electrical fire into the lamps. There’s not even an echo of light to see by in the corner where Scar’s house opens, not on the brightest of nights. I reach down to my pocket, strike a match.
It burns my fingers. It burns at my eyes, half-adjusted for darkness as they are, and I duck away from it, blinking. The light catches, steadies. Ari flutters and halts.
I step inside.
Scar’s laid out on his bed like a corpse-wake, thin and pale and his scars standing out: bright pinkish smears against the grey shrivel of his skin. Ari lights on the fold of Scar’s T-shirt. His hands twitch to swat her, but he don’t have the strength to move them; the bones stand out in his wrists and the tendons twitch thick and scared once, twice, before they give up.
The smell in Scar’s house is a wicked violence: toilets and tears and fear.
The smell’s hospitals.
“Scar?” I say, careful, just as unsure as Whisper taking Violet’s limp-laid hand in the hospital room where she’s still laid out, mindless and shadow-stained.
He don’t answer.
“Scar, talk to me,” I say, and my voice is shaking. I take his hand, and with the touching his head turns, snaps over so fast I’m scared his neck might break right in two.
“I’m a Beast,” old Scar whispers, tossing li
ke he’s caught between both hands of a wicked chill. “Beasts get Sanctuary.” And then heart-broke: “Killer’s the same as Freak Above.”
I drop his fingers to the mattress. From them drips a faint wisp of shadow.
Doctor Marybeth’s word comes back to me. Catatonic. No-think no-do no-see. Shadow-bound.
I swallow hard, real hard.
Scar curls up, or half-curls, which is all he can do so terrible twitching thin. His knees drag up to his belly and I can’t take the sight of it, even as the match burns itself down. I open my water bottle and slip a bit of water into his throat, my free hand holding up his struggling, haunted head. He coughs. Some comes up to his chin. I don’t know how much of it goes down right.
Ari hovers near the door, nervous, sharp. Come on, I imagine her saying, foot-tap big-eyed nerves. “Okay,” I say. “Okay.”
Scar watches us sharp as we leave him there. The light of my new match glints off his eyes.
We go from house to house, wasting our time. Chrys and Hide made it to their beds. Mack’s just laid out on the floor, tilted at odd angles, broken-up and dirty. Heather’s chair is overturned and abandoned behind her and Seed’s house. There’s blood beneath it. I can’t tell if it’s hers.
Half of them aren’t breathing no more.
You can’t tell just by looking. I have to reach down and feel their throats. I have to touch. I try to close their eyes at first, but their eyes don’t close proper; they spring right back open, watching me, watching nothing.
I knew all their Tales.
Ari buzzes at my shoulder, and I lift my head up, catatonic. Not catatonic, but not feeling, shut off and hollow. I look down at my fingers, but there’s no bleed and play of shadow. Just hurt. Sting-hurt and heart-hurt, and a crunched-up, distant breaking that I don’t dare feel if I value my own life.
