Free Above by Leah Bobet

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.
    “Why’d you go?” I ask. I keep my voice soft, tunnel-soft to cut the echo. She smells like sweet and fear-sweat, like flowers. Real flowers.
    I’ve never asked her that since the first time she ran. The first time, she cried and cried, and I let her get away with not answering. Her left wing brushes my arm. My skin’s damp from running; it tickles, drags, and sticks.
    “He was yelling.” Ariel stares at her clasped hands. Her voice is hot and hollow, every letter heavy as the last.
    “Ari, what happened? Who did he think you were talking to?” Who were you talking to? I stay soft. I am soft and edgeless and quiet and kind. She doesn’t answer.
    It could be Normal people, neighbors. It could be someone come in from Safe, shimmying up the drainpipe for god knows what reason. It could be herself, fake Tale-telling conversations like I used to have late at night, before I had an Ariel to talk to. But I know what Jack thinks.
    Jack thinks shadows.
    It couldn’t be , I tell myself. It couldn’t. She was with me, in our house, the whole day. She couldn’t have let Corner in. Except when you were sleeping, and thought she was sleeping too —
    I lean my head on my tucked-in knees, close my eyes. Light bounces and sticks out its tongue behind them. Light won’t leave me the hell alone. “I yelled at him. I ran,” I say.
    Nothing.
    “They’re gonna think I left ’cause I was mad.” The space between my legs and my torso is dark and clean. My eyes don’t hurt for the first time all day.
    “Sounds like you did,” she says, funny and tight.
    “No —” and I look up, and the sunlight