Free Above by Leah Bobet Page A

wipes that clean soft dark away. “Above’s not like Safe. You can get lost here.” I talk square at her pointed, skinny face so she knows I’m serious now, deadly serious. “There’s dangerous people out Above.”
    Ariel looks at me a second. And then she laughs.
    She laughs and laughs, leaned back against the inside of the red plastic tube, and it echoes so loud it’s hard to tell where the real thing stops and the ghost of her laughing begins. “Oh, Matthew,” she says, again and again. “Oh, Matthew —” until I start to get angry for real.
    “Hey,” I say soft, then louder. “Hey, shut up. I came for you.”
    She doesn’t stop like a bulb going dark but slowly, in sniffles and eye-wipes and the occasional gulp. Not scared of me , I realize, and my heart does a little bounce. But Above they laugh at you , Atticus’s voice said at lessons, his arms crossed, claws rattling each other with every shift of his weight. Freak’s for teasing Above. Don’t ever stand to be teased.
    She never laughed at me in Safe.
    “Don’t laugh,” I say, softer than I meant to, and her face goes slack and small and edgeless and she puts her hands on mine.
    “Oh, Matthew,” she says, real different now, and leans our foreheads together.
    I breathe in spring. I breathe spring and gold and the smell of powdered honey, sweet as peaches on the back of your tongue. My eyes water. It’s a thousand kisses in a breath.
    Five minutes or an hour and she leans back against the wall, pulls apart that quiet mixing of breath. The quiet stays inside me though, in a warm and steady ball just above my heart. I breathe into it. It keeps me warm.
    I don’t know where we are. All the streets Above look the same, houses and houses and the blank blue sky, and the signs don’t mean a thing and there aren’t no walls or landmarks. I’ve broken the first rule of traveling Above: I wasn’t counting right, running like I was. I’ve lost the turns.
    “I don’t know Above,” I tell her, wiping my nose on the knee of my jeans.
    Ariel tugs a thread from the sleeve of her shirt, holds it up to the light. It shines silver. Iridescent. “I do.”
     
     
    Ariel leads through the dying afternoon, and I follow.
    We walk slow and steady through row after row of peak-roofed houses, green-brown lawns, shut blinds. My feet hurt after the first ten blocks and they hurt more after twenty, and the buildings, the streets, the sloped-round corners blur. There’s no nuances to Above; nothing close or made of comfort. The buildings hunch each away from the other, not one house touching the next, standoffish with bricked-up suspicion.
    It takes me too long to realize it: We ain’t going back to Doctor Marybeth’s.
    Every step we take goes farther and farther from the bits of Above I know: the careful paths Atticus and Mack drilled us to remember in our sleep, sewer to supply and back again. Every step makes me more and more lost, and Ariel doesn’t talk. Her back is straight and solid, even though in Safe she hunched down sad all the time. I don’t know what to think about that. I follow her. I count the turns.
    They’ll think you ran away , I tell myself, strong beats down as my feet hit the raggedy pavement. They’ll think! You ran! A -way! I close my eyes between the stirring weak streetlights — Jack-magic, those — and picture all this carved on Doctor Marybeth’s solid white door. The curving arc of a bee in flight, running. Doctor Marybeth and Whisper and Jack, opening the doors of safehouses to dead bodies, or set upon by shadows, shadows that burn them into bones, or dust, or nothing; caught by Whitecoats with their needles and papers and cold eyes.
    “Where we going?” comes out before I know it.
    We ought to go back. We need to go back.
    “Somewhere Safe,” she says, and I follow, trip-footed, after.
    The buildings get bigger. They lose their pointed roofs and grow to three stories, five stories, up. They get plainer too: Red brick