Above by Leah Bobet

tunnel-hunched.
    I tidy up the kitchen while she does whatever in the bedroom. The faucet’s jerky here; one long crowbar-handled knob not labeled blue or red. I yank it until the water gets warm, never finger-wrinkle hot. The plastic plates clack in the draining board and drown out the noise of Ariel moving. All the while I’m biting my lip against the memory of fifteen hundred kitchen duties full of cold-water scrubbing: not enough cloth to dry, company to keep your hands from chapping cold; someone telling a Tale or a bit of music while we worked. Here there’s nobody to tell the Tale to, nobody to listen, and when I raise my voice to sing the first lines of “Frère Jacques” like my ma sang to me as a little baby, they come out thin and wrong.
    When there’s no more dishes or excuses, I nudge open the bedroom door. She’s sitting on a mattress under a wall piled with posters, back to me, hair across her face like wings.
    “I’m sorry,” I say. A hand maybe twitches. “She already knew.” She shifts on the mattress. The tangle of blankets, red and blue and faded no-color, is shoved against the wall. A pillow hangs from the mess like a stained, dead hand. I sit down on the one chair, a busted one shoved beside a cobbled-together desk covered in half-empty mugs and bald capless pens. The metal seat squeaks with give. “Ari, why’d you grab him?”
    “He doesn’t like me,” she mutters, and plaits her fingers together.
    “Why?” But she just shakes her head, shakes it off once more. Like Jack. Like running. Like everything.
    I almost ask her what her favorite color is.
    “We’ve gotta go. We’ve only got ’til dark to find everybody else,” I say. “They’ll know what happened. We can make some kind of plan.”
    Ariel stops fidgeting. Her face has gone pale as the light on my first night ever Above. “Why us?” she asks, trying to make it sound not scared. “Why not Whisper and —”
    “’Cause we’re sworn to uphold Safe. We’re responsible,” I say, ’round the ache in my throat.
    Her eyes go big. “That’s not fair,” she nearly chokes. “That wasn’t my fault,” and I don’t know what the hell I said by accident, ’cause that sure ain’t the thing I said on purpose. And then — oh.
    “You think it followed us home.” I still can’t say it. I still can’t say the name.
    “You don’t know that.” She’s still as a dead thing.
    “It asked us Safe things,” I stand too fast and the chair creaks like it’s dying. My face is hot. It makes sense, terrible sense. This is all my fault, and hers. “It asked us, and I told, and it knew our names —”
    “ It wasn’t you ,” she says so forceful that I step back into the chair, half-thinking I might find her hands in my shirt-collar. She sees it somehow and backs down; falls into herself like her own shriveling wings. How many times can she grow them in a day? How much upset and panic and fear before the skin over her spine goes raw, chaps from mad, starts bleeding? “It wasn’t you,” she says again, and wipes her nose sharp on the back of one hand.
    “What then?” I ask. “What do we do?”
    “We’re here now,” Ariel says, dismayed and red-eyed and unlovely. “There’s no monsters here. We don’t have to go back.”
    My breath catches.
    I ease forward. I step slow and careful, and push in the chair with a little lift so as to not scratch Bea’s scuffy floor. My hands linger on the metal rods of the chair for a long time, until I can peel them out of fists.
    “Yes, we do,” I say hard and even, and walk into the big room, grab my shoes. One lace knotted up, two. My voice is shaking. My hands are shaking. “That is my home . People could be dead .”
    “Matthew?” she says, shocked, small. Tiny. “Teller?”
    She never calls me that.
    “Matthew, please —” and her hand’s on my arm, tugging, light and useless. I turn around, ready to shake it off me. “When was the first time you saw the