Free Above by Leah Bobet Page B

turns into brown or white and smooth, the kind it’d take months of polishing to get for one cavern wall, and then they start melting together in rows. The road beside us is wider: more cars noise by like the sound of coming trains, and more people. Don’t touch me , I think at them as they pass, chattering and weaving and heads upturned to the darkened sky. I can tell my breath’s coming fast.
    You belong here , I tell myself over and over. You grew up here. You’re nothing else but Normal.
    A lady with a rattling blue cart passes by, leaving a gap, a gasp in the crowd. I reach through it and take Ariel’s hand. It’s warm, dry. Mine is damp and it holds too tight.
    She doesn’t shake me away.
    The streets have quieted and narrowed and settled again when Ariel stops, squares her shoulders, and takes me up a rounded, sloping walk to the double doorway of a towering brown building. There’s washing hanging on the balconies, little hoards of goods and chairs stacked up those white box walls. Apartments , I think, holding tight to her hand. Atticus had an apartment once; people and people living stacked up like soup cans, locked together inside a giant kitchen cabinet.
    Ari opens the glass door and slips inside a room smaller than Doctor Marybeth’s bathroom: nothing but glass doors both ahead and behind, dark tile, yellow bug-stained light. It smells musty, like smoke and old food.
    I slip a hand in my pocket. Find my matches. Hold on.
    There’s a button beside the second door: no, racks and racks of buttons, and names in a long list beside them. The light behind them hums and spits in the dark. I raise my eyebrows at Ariel and she just flicks her eyes over like I’m a kid who doesn’t know right from left. She runs one finger down the list, kissing-distance away.
    “Ari?”
    “ Shh. ”
    She does it until someone comes in with their keys, looks over at us and away again, and lets himself through the heavy glass door.
    Ari waits ’til he’s around the corner, then catches the door with her foot, quick as shadowfall. It lands loud and heavy on her shoe. I’ve known her long enough to catch the grimace.
    “Ari —” I say. She doesn’t even need to shush me this time. She just looks .
    A few heartbeats later she opens it and slips through the gap between door and dirty wall. She holds it open for me, impatient, sharp like I’ve never seen her. “C’mon,” she says through her teeth. She’s annoyed at me, and I don’t know why.
    No; it’s for not following the rules. Not knowing the rules of this, of here. That ain’t fair , I want to say, but this isn’t the time and it’s not the place. I bite it down and follow into the soft, dim hallway.
    We go up thin-carpeted stairs, seven flights that give under my shoes in a way so much more kind and even than the rubber tire and rock of the common. Ariel opens the thick metal door at the top real soft, and closes it even softer behind us. Leads me into a hall with dull green carpet, dull beige walls; doors and doors and doors. She goes up and down the hall twice, hands stuck into fists, lips trembling around some word I don’t know the shape for. Talking to herself. Talking to someone else.
    Who were you talking to? my mouth shapes, but no. Not now.
    A little hump grows under the back of her shirt, and then she shakes herself, shakes it and my hand off her pale little arm and knocks, three knocks on one of the plain brown doors.
    There’s a shuffle, a mutter. The lock clicks from somewhere inside.
    When it opens it’s a girl with red hair, a deep fake-color red all standing up straight from the middle of her shaved-sides head. Her skin’s almost Freak-thin, pale enough to see the blue, tired veins under her dark eyes. One hand’s in her pocket. Where people keep their matches.
    Her eyes don’t look like Safe.
    There’s no brand at my shoulder. I don’t have fire. Get behind me , I want to say, let me handle this , but I don’t know what I’m