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“We should get Ariel,” I say, trip-voiced. If this is a raid we’re running, we need her; her stinger that she was to give Atticus on Sanctuary Night. “She hurt shadows.”

Whisper looks down her straight statue-nose at me. “Not today, Teller.”

I bite my lip. “Why not?” It sounds bad: like tantrum and not being Community-Minded, which is what Whisper calls keeping Safe. I firm my feet in place and make sure they don’t shuffle. The edge in my voice is bad enough.

“She’s not sworn to Safe,” Whisper says, even, “and this isn’t her story to tell.”

And it’s not. It’s Whisper’s and Jack’s and mine. Ariel had to offer something up to Atticus on a Sanctuary Night before we might ask her into a Whitecoat place with us to do bloody, dangerous things; before she’s responsible in that kind of way to Safe and anyone sworn to it.

Even me.

She was right. I’m responsible. She’s not.

“She hurt Corner too,” I say, weak and suddenly hurting. “She stung it in the tunnel and it ran.”

“Corner’s flesh and blood,” Whisper says evenly, and holds out her hand. “Now come along. Jack’s waiting.”

Jack is waiting at the edge of the battered old sidewalk like it’s borderland, not one foot over the concrete curb that breaks it from the street. “Teller,” he says rough, my grown-up name. He don’t clap his hand onto my shoulder, and he don’t quite meet my eye.

“Jack,” I whisper, and duck my chin to my collarbone.

We turn together, the three of us, to the wicked building on the hill.

The Whitecoat place is long with shadow even in the thickness of the hot sunshine Above. It folds into the sky utterly silent, not a wind or a rattle or a breath from it, and even in midsummer, at the top of the afternoon, night steals out through its windows to turn the sky empty. The fence isn’t enough to cage it in: The streets are empty for a block around. Nobody, even Above, wants to get too close.

Shadow-place, it says to the world. Monster-place.

“We do this fast,” Jack says. “Quick in, quick out.”

“Then down to the sewers,” Whisper agrees, and draws the heavy thing from her little pack: a long pair of clippers, beaked to cut wire. The handles are scarred and bitten where the rubber’s fallen away. I don’t recognize them: conjured up from some box or ghost or Salvation, and not from the tool chest in the kitchen in Safe, full of comfortable things. When they close ’round the old fence wire there’s a
snap!
loud as a slammed door.

The day’s quiet for a fat, thick minute.

Nobody comes.

Jack breathes, and then I breathe, though I hadn’t even realized I’d caught my own breath back. He pulls away a board cautious with his gloved hands.
Snap! snap!
go the clippers, and Whisper and Jack cut us a hollow through the rust and bleached-dry boards. I stand back, hands in my pockets, feeling matches and emergency money, matches and money over and over again. I watch for the police who ain’t coming, the dogs that aren’t with them. I keep useful. I watch.

I watch all the way around to the slick-painted sign on the fence five feet sunwise, as faded down as the boards. “Coming soon,” I read aloud. “Another residential living project by CityCorp.” Someone’s painted scrawl over it. I can’t read those words.

“They’re taking it down,” Jack rumbles.

“Good,” Whisper says, and climbs on through.

The wires and boards prick my arms as I follow. I tuck in small, remembering every little thing Atticus used to say about rust cuts and tetanus, and keep my arms close for a count of three after the fence spits me out. We pull the boards back into place. Our feet dent the swamp of white-puffed flowers and clutter. “They’ll know we were here,” I whisper, toeing the holes my feet’ve made in the sway and pull of long, ghosty grass.

“They’ll know
someone
was here,” Whisper says, and creeps forward, heel-toe, to the broken doors of the asylum.

They used to be wood — good wood, and still — but they’re hinge-broken, paint-spattered, scratched up under years of bad handling. Even though it’s a place full of wickedness, it burns me up just a little to see good wood treated this way. There could have been Tales on this door. Now they’re all left to roam loose in the halls, stealing the sunlight away with their untelling.

The doors swing open silent under Whisper’s hand.

Inside stinks: dry air and sour and something that makes my nose tingle sharp. Hallways twist from a sweep of common area into the dark, and in front of us a great wood staircase crawls upward, beckoning and dirty, to two windows blocked up with boards.

This is what they saw
, I tell myself to steady my feet as we tiptoe slow inside.
This is what they saw when the Whitecoats brought them in.
I gather up a split board from the floor, test its weight. Not a good brand — not wrapped and made ready — but dry. Dry enough to burn shadows out of our way home.

We creep through the entrance hall under a ceiling lofted high on beams solid like the roofs of train tunnels; solid in a way that tells you they were held and hammered in place back when they didn’t build things to fall down. Something stirs atop one, flutters —

I shout before I think.

There’s no chance to reach matches, call fire. Between one breath and the next, the beams are full of birds: pigeon-fat and startled, fleeing into the dark. Their wingbeats blur and crackle like a thousand trains hitting a thousand rails, echo loud enough to bring out tears.

“I thought it was shadows,” I whisper when Jack looks down at me, my nose still itchy and miserable, and this time his hand pats my shoulder and brushes away.

Whisper holds up a hand,
wait
, ready for anything, but nothing comes for us down the wide wood steps. The board snugs tight to my hand, sends splinter-roots deep between the lines of my palm, and the building sighs. Whisper lets out a slow, slow breath.

“We roust them out, then,” she says to herself, and tilts her head back to the eaves.

Her whisper is just a murmur at first, mumble-lipped, slow, but the great high ceiling captures it and takes it traveling:
Come come my friends my lonely friends who held my hand my head —

Ghosts, I realize. She’s calling her ghosts to lead the way.

The tunnel-beams rustle: birds coming back in, creeping back to their safe-built nests.
Come come down and bring me news I’ve missed you long and long.
My hand aches; I shift the brand to the other, not as strong and not as sure, and wring the hurt one to shake off pain.

When she breaks off it’s like cold water to the skull.

“Whisper?” Jack says.

Whisper is pale in the bad, comforting light. “There’s no ghosts.”

The quiet gets deeper, falls different.
What do you mean, no ghosts?
I don’t ask.

“They wouldn’t go unless something went bad,” she says, hands in her skirts now, old-lady skirts that still look Freak even after her lecture about dressing clean and Passing good.

“They don’t … move on?” Jack asks.

“No.” She sounds small. Scared like a little girl and that’s enough to make me scared, because even when Atticus died and the shadows came into Safe, Whisper led us free without leaking fear into her step.

“We’ll walk careful then,” Jack says, and takes her by the hand. Whisper startles: It’s his naked hand, full of shocks and sparks. Even in the dim I can see his markings, the ends of latticed snowflake scars. “Up the stairs?”

Whisper’s hand closes around his. “No. Down,” she says, and circles the staircase, runs fingers over the walls until they close on a handle smudged and rusted the same color as the staircase. “They’ll nest down where it’s dark.”

Beyond the door it’s darker still. The building breathes out up plain grey stairs. Cold, and must. Abandoned things.

The smell of shadows.

No ghosts
, I tell myself, a calming hand on my back and a thrill of terror both, and follow Jack and Whisper down the stairs.

At the bottom the bird-smell fades down into dust and death and earth, the smell of the Cold Pipes where nothing flows and nothing lives. The door clangs shut behind us and then the quiet is absolute, dust tickling at my ankles like monstrous, long-fingered hands.

“Teller,” Jack murmurs, “strike a match.”

My brand’s already down between my knees, my free hand on the sandpaper.

The tunnel shows grey under light; grey under the wash of fire that blinds me as it catches and flares. Light fixtures stretch long-legged along the narrow grey ceiling, low as any tunnel. One full wall is panes of glass, webbed with wire, dirty and empty and cracked. They reflect the light, reflect everything oily-bright.

“No shadows,” Jack says, near-disappointed, and keeps walking.

Clump clump clump
go our steps on the hard grey concrete floor.
Clump clump hiss
the walls whisper back as we bunch together, moving fast, tied to the circle of light given out by my one quick-dying match. Jack’s sweating; gritted teeth and clenched-tight hands and a mumble that sounds awfully like a swear. “Faster,” he says, and we go on tunnel-blind, sweating through our Passing clothes, and let him hurry us up two steep flights of cold grey stairs.

We tumble out into a room torn up so long ago that the dust’s wrapped arms ’round the chaos, given it a warm blanket, and made it a home to settle down. It’s ripped mattresses, ripped wallpaper; everything ruined and tattered and bent. The smell of shadow-must is gone. The building’s silent as tunnels.

“They’re not here,” I whisper, then risk a noise, clear my throat. “Maybe they went out,” which just sticks me thinking of all the things shadows might do gone roaming.

“There’s been people here, though,” Jack says, and points down into the dust to a lighter dust, thin rips and darns in the blanket of the floor. Footprints. He’s winded, a puff of air hiding out behind every word. I lick my lips and don’t talk for a minute ’til the stitch in my belly stops complaining.

“Bea said it was a squat,” I say.

Jack knows what a squat is. And it’s nothing good, because he pulls a twisted metal bar from a pile of hospital beds heaped in a corner and hefts it in his gloved left hand. “I didn’t hear no one,” he murmurs, grave like Whisper to her absent ghosts.

We pass a glance between us.
Dead
, his eyes say. I shiver.

“Walk careful,” is all Jack says.

We walk careful.

We go through the washrooms, red-cracked-tiled with their green basins stained and scummed with sour water. We go through the dormitories; we know them by the stacks of beds, the ripped drawings hanging on the walls, fluttering by one good corner and bleached too naked to see. The offices Whisper ducks away from, veering to the far side of the plaster-dusted hallways so I have to veer with her or lose the line. She’s moving funny: hands opening and closing on her skirts like they’re looking for matches. She’s got no ghosts, I remember, and though I always knew she’s so little I grew past her by my eleventh birthday, I see her in reach and speed and strength now, how much she doesn’t have; how much she’s gone quiet and old.

“Where are we?” I ask her, voice pitched quiet as I can.

“Activity room,” she says, cold and choked-up. “They kept clay and crayons, and the clay never got fired into nothing, just mushed up and put back in the bin….”

I might have known it; there’s wax tucked in the cracks between floorboards, little smooth blobs that catch slanted bits of daylight far away. A half-burned stack of cards huddles in an ashy trash can in the corner, wrapped with dirty blankets and guarded by a solemn duty of bottles and cans. I squint, not wanting to put my face near the smell of fire though it’s months dead at the very least, and snatch a card out. It’s lined, hatched; filled with numbers.
Charts
, I remember Atticus mentioning. Charts where they kept your medication numbers, the measure of everything that made you Freak.

“Jack,” I call, and wave it careful between thumb and forefinger.

“Bingo,” Jack says, looking over my shoulder. I fish another out. “No, the game. They’re game cards.”

“Oh.” Its flakes cling against my skin even after I drop it. Ashy, and still damp. Unclean.

My foot catches in the blankets when I stand: They’re dirty, worn, old. Good for brands. “Watch my back,” I say, like it needs saying, and tear one apart into long, tattered strips. I knot them tight ’round the end of my brand, layers worth, each so rotten the knots barely hold. The cloth won’t burn long, if it needs to burn, but it’ll burn truer than wood.

Jack turns when I’m done, hefts his crowbar thoughtful. “This smells wrong. The people-marks are too new.”

“What’re you thinking now?” Whisper says, harsh in a way that tells me without asking just whose idea it was to sneak into Lakeshore Psychiatric.

He jogs the bar hand to hand. “Where’s the hardest place to reach in here? Where’d they be able to defend best?”

“Isolation,” she says, suddenly fumbling.

Isolation.

Jack flashes me one of his dark-wise lightning looks,
you better watch out
, and takes Whisper by the elbow like an old-fashioned gentleman. He leans down to her ear like he’s asking to dance. “Come on. You show me where.”

The hallway to Isolation don’t have footprints. We make ’em as we shuffle forward in the dust, long smearing things to hide the size of our shoes. The windows are blown out all through, cracked and spattered somewhere in the browning grass below. The sunlight comes in dim and bloody.

Whisper puts her hand almost to a blue window frame, halfway between the steps and any room that’s got a door for opening. Her face is years and years away. “Where we climbed,” she says, fingers hovering. “We went out here. They moved General Population after that.” She chuckles, and there’s nothing funny in it.

I glance at it, passing by: two stories down to the ground, drowned in weeds. “How’d you land clean?”