sky?”
She brings me up short with that, short enough that my hands forget all about being mad. “My first supply duty.” I’ve told her this story before, singsong in the drip-rustle nights of Safe, to bring us both to sleep. It’s my favorite of all the Tales, because the first supply duty leads to the second, and that’s when I find my beautiful Ariel. “A year past. It was cold. And I thought no wonder people were so cruel up here, if the wind bit your bones all day and the sky stared you down into nothing with stars.”
My eyes’ve slid shut. I open them after a minute of watching the stars glow behind my eyelids, and she’s still watching me.
“You wouldn’t miss it if you never saw it again.”
The wind rattles the leaves on the trees outside. It’s nothing at all like pipe-music. I think about it.
“No,” I admit.
“Well, I like the sky,” Ariel says, eyes pleading, sharp, important . “I need it.”
“I’d be your sky.”
It just slips out, quiet in the dark on soft-shoe feet. I put my hand up to my mouth, but it’s too late, and Ariel’s looking at me steady and keen like she’d never been close to weeping just five minutes before.
She looks at me and it’s sad like Whisper’s sad.
For the first time under daylight, the first time it’d ever count, I feel a hot and ugly blush come up like a blister.
And I run.
Through the door and down the hall, down the stairs to the ground, and I don’t wait to see if she follows. I can’t turn back, can’t look her in the face now, not like that. I push through the button-studded doorway, shouldering past a lady with a laundry basket filling up both arms who calls me a word I don’t know as I push the outside door open and let it swing free. The sun is hot and bright outside. It stings my face, my eyes.
That sadness cut hard enough when it wasn’t on my Ariel’s face.
I pause at the end of the walk and look right, look left. I don’t know where I am. I don’t know where I’m going, but I’ve got to get away. Somewhere I don’t have to look her in the eye, or Whisper, or Jack, and see that hateful faraway sick-sweet sad face.
Somewhere Safe? snips a little voice in the back of my head, and all my angry shame turns sour.
I’m being selfish. Thinking of nothing but my own little hurts, and I made a promise to keep Safe.
People could be dead, Matthew , I tell myself savage, and bite my lip ’til it’s sore. I can find them. There’s more than one way to find a thing. There are ways that’re dangerous, that could get you locked behind sharp metal doors.
This is an emergency.
I start walking.
The shelter that Atticus deemed a safehouse is at Queen Street and Bathurst — Queenand Bathurst Queenand Bathurst he would make us repeat when we first trained to go Above. I know the way there from two sewer caps and the big food store where we steal most of our tinned goods.
I don’t know the way from Beatrice’s place, from no-man’s-land. But I’m the Teller, and I can Pass.
Here’s Whisper’s other lesson: that even if people Above are monsters, they will point you on your way if you smile and meet their eye. So I do my best to look young and nothing-special and Normal, and I tilt my head and look them in the eye, bustling ’round ladies and kids waving fat chalk and men with no shirts on. They point and say east or south , and though I don’t know from east or south I thank them and make careful, meticulous, my way. I watch the street signs and tell myself Queenand Bathurst .
I walk with my shoulders down, watching feet, dodging the swift snips of music that leak on cool air out of the stores. After the first hour or two or year — who knows without clocks? — I can almost pretend I’m not upset anymore, can almost unsee the way her eyes went soft and shut and sad, but conversations still quiet as I go by: a different hush than the one that screams out Freak . I don’t know how I look to make that
She brings me up short with that, short enough that my hands forget all about being mad. “My first supply duty.” I’ve told her this story before, singsong in the drip-rustle nights of Safe, to bring us both to sleep. It’s my favorite of all the Tales, because the first supply duty leads to the second, and that’s when I find my beautiful Ariel. “A year past. It was cold. And I thought no wonder people were so cruel up here, if the wind bit your bones all day and the sky stared you down into nothing with stars.”
My eyes’ve slid shut. I open them after a minute of watching the stars glow behind my eyelids, and she’s still watching me.
“You wouldn’t miss it if you never saw it again.”
The wind rattles the leaves on the trees outside. It’s nothing at all like pipe-music. I think about it.
“No,” I admit.
“Well, I like the sky,” Ariel says, eyes pleading, sharp, important . “I need it.”
“I’d be your sky.”
It just slips out, quiet in the dark on soft-shoe feet. I put my hand up to my mouth, but it’s too late, and Ariel’s looking at me steady and keen like she’d never been close to weeping just five minutes before.
She looks at me and it’s sad like Whisper’s sad.
For the first time under daylight, the first time it’d ever count, I feel a hot and ugly blush come up like a blister.
And I run.
Through the door and down the hall, down the stairs to the ground, and I don’t wait to see if she follows. I can’t turn back, can’t look her in the face now, not like that. I push through the button-studded doorway, shouldering past a lady with a laundry basket filling up both arms who calls me a word I don’t know as I push the outside door open and let it swing free. The sun is hot and bright outside. It stings my face, my eyes.
That sadness cut hard enough when it wasn’t on my Ariel’s face.
I pause at the end of the walk and look right, look left. I don’t know where I am. I don’t know where I’m going, but I’ve got to get away. Somewhere I don’t have to look her in the eye, or Whisper, or Jack, and see that hateful faraway sick-sweet sad face.
Somewhere Safe? snips a little voice in the back of my head, and all my angry shame turns sour.
I’m being selfish. Thinking of nothing but my own little hurts, and I made a promise to keep Safe.
People could be dead, Matthew , I tell myself savage, and bite my lip ’til it’s sore. I can find them. There’s more than one way to find a thing. There are ways that’re dangerous, that could get you locked behind sharp metal doors.
This is an emergency.
I start walking.
The shelter that Atticus deemed a safehouse is at Queen Street and Bathurst — Queenand Bathurst Queenand Bathurst he would make us repeat when we first trained to go Above. I know the way there from two sewer caps and the big food store where we steal most of our tinned goods.
I don’t know the way from Beatrice’s place, from no-man’s-land. But I’m the Teller, and I can Pass.
Here’s Whisper’s other lesson: that even if people Above are monsters, they will point you on your way if you smile and meet their eye. So I do my best to look young and nothing-special and Normal, and I tilt my head and look them in the eye, bustling ’round ladies and kids waving fat chalk and men with no shirts on. They point and say east or south , and though I don’t know from east or south I thank them and make careful, meticulous, my way. I watch the street signs and tell myself Queenand Bathurst .
I walk with my shoulders down, watching feet, dodging the swift snips of music that leak on cool air out of the stores. After the first hour or two or year — who knows without clocks? — I can almost pretend I’m not upset anymore, can almost unsee the way her eyes went soft and shut and sad, but conversations still quiet as I go by: a different hush than the one that screams out Freak . I don’t know how I look to make that
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