A History of Glitter and Blood (23 page)

And then there is another set of hands on her, this one so familiar, this one bringing her back to familiar and dirty places, to nights in his room, to the way it hurt the first time and the boys never asked her if it had, the way she cried and they teased her because she was so lucky, because he looked gentle, and now his hand is
on her shoulder, not gentle, but not scary, necessary, near, the only possible option—

And they run, through a hole that was once a tunnel, through the smallest passageways Beckan has seen. They gasp behind boulders, they run themselves ragged and out of the city.

fuck fuck what was that noise I'm sorry I'm sorry this is it the end

the end

Sorry about that.

Here's what happened.

Before long,
the tunnels close off again, where the city has not been exploded, where they are maybe not still in the city, and Beckan and Rig and Tier can slow to a walk because there is no one else. They inch along in the total dark, Beckan between the gnomes, all of them clasping hands. Beckan doesn't know where she is, only that this is a part of the tunnels she's never been to before. Maybe there are rooms back here. Maybe gnomes live here that she's never met, and never thought about.

But there's no one here now. The silence is so heavy, Beckan feels it on her skin. There's no noise from the city. There is no city.

They do not talk because there isn't anything much to say.

Eventually, they all say, at once, “I'm so thirsty,” only Rig says
very
.

They stop walking then and pant, holding on to each other.

“We've got to go up,” Tier says.

“What?”

“Up. Aboveground. The air.”

Beckan tilts her head back. She can't see the sides or the ceiling of the tunnel. She has no idea how tall it is. It's hard to imagine
that there is an above the ground, anymore. She stretches her arms out, still holding their hands, and does not hit the sides of the tunnel.

“Up,” she says.

“Yes.”

“How?”

She can feel them look at each other, then hear them start to laugh.

“We dig,” Rig says.

“With what?”

They laugh again, and she is momentarily terrified, and then they lift themselves up, they climb the walls, and they begin to dig with their mouths and their nails. They are faster than the tightropers' jackhammers. How did she think they made all their tunnels?

She'd never considered that gnomes might have natural talents, that there are ways that they do not need to teach themselves—that they do not need fairies to teach them—to be good. Her stomach hurts.

“I'm sorry,” she says, and they don't ask why.

They emerge, coughing. Beckan chokes on dry glitter.

Around them is something Beckan hasn't seen, in anywhere near this abundance, since long before the war, when she used to take the trolley out of the city, when she would bring her father and eat a peach and think of nothing.

Grass.

She'd forgotten the smell, how it tickles the inside of her nose, and the feel of it around her ankles, how sleepy it makes her. She'd forgotten bugs and earthworms.

These are the things that they lose. They're so aware of the big things, and they miss them constantly and loudly and mumble about them in their sleep—the fresh food, the heat, the family. They miss
them so sorely that in a way they're not gone. When you miss something as much as they miss autonomy, or peace, or Cricket, you can never forget how it felt when it was here.

The little things—grass, earthworms, notes under the door—slip by unnoticed.

But besides this grass and their hole in the ground, there is nothing anywhere around. Nothing for miles. Only hills and grass and grass and grass and every few hills, a dandelion.

No food, no water, no other creatures, and no hope. Nothing but the two gnomes on either side of her, and it is the most beautiful thing Beckan has ever seen. No explosions, no screaming. She turns around and cannot see the city and has no idea in what direction it is. Then the three of them are holding each other, running their hands through each other's hair, shaking and whispering how glad they are that the others are alive. And she breathes as if she has just discovered how. Her brain throbs with
ScrapJoshaPiccoloFerrum
but her lungs breathe.

“We should get moving,” Tier says.

Beckan says, “Where?”

Tier looks around and lets out something between a laugh and a cry. “I don't know.”

“Someone is looking out for us,” Rig says, when, just before they are about to faint, they find a stream.

They drink with hands clenched on the banks, faces in the water like animals.

Beckan coughs. “What?”

Tier looks at Rig, his eyes somehow still, steady.

“It's just something the tightropers used to say,” she says. “At first we thought they were mocking us—if one of us got a little extra food, they'd tell us,
someone is looking out for you
, but then we started
noticing they'd say it to each other. If one of the generals' small sons fell and didn't get hurt—
someone is looking out for you
.”

Beckan is confused. “Who's looking out for you?”

“I think someone you met once or twice who you didn't know was important,” she says. “You just passed by them and had no idea they were secretly taking care of you. Maybe they don't know either.” She scoots back from the water and lies on her back, her eyes closed. Beckan cannot imagine how she could stop drinking. She thinks she will never stop drinking. Her dry cake of a tongue absorbs all the moisture before she can swallow. She pours water directly down her throat. She burrows in the mud and absorbs water through her skin.

Tier says, “Rig likes to extrapolate.”

Rig laughs a little. “I always thought about this woman I once knew. She lived in the deepest tunnel, and she sat with one candle, and she'd knit.”

“Rig,” Tier says.

“That's all she ever did, knit, and tell stories, with her head down. She only knew a few stories. Maybe three. When I was a kid, I liked to imagine she was knitting the stories. Grabbing the familiar bits from the air and winding them around on the needles and turning them into the story about the girl who learned to sing when her lover left, and the boy who traded places with the girl rabbit and saw how brave she was and how brave he had to be. But she knitted and knitted and no new stories came out. So I started reading to her, and she'd repeat the stories back to me.”

Tier isn't drinking anymore. He's watching Rig.

“Except she'd always give the stories I taught her a twist,” Rig says. “She'd add in a girl. Not a girl who needed to be rescued, but not instead of her. There would be a whole new girl who didn't have to do anything, who did things when she wanted to and when she
thought they were right and nothing else. And someone still got to be rescued, and everyone still got to be in love.”

Beckan tucks her chin onto her knees. She feels as if she's in that room now, listening to a story. But she is so aware of the outdoors and how alive she is. The sun is so warm and she is so hot.

“What happened to her?” Beckan says.

Tier drags his sleeve over his mouth. “My father ate her.” They're quiet for a minute.

“She was your mother,” Tier says.

Maybe it is thanks to Beckan's mother, somehow, that three hills later they find a cabin. Maybe she is looking out for them.

At first they think they've discovered a relic of another world. That there used to be a village here—maybe even a city—and they have uncovered it with the magic of the universe or Beckan's mother. The cabin is certainly old; it sinks into the ground in a way the cottage at home does not, and the windows are sticky and the wood is soft around the edges of the glass.

But it is sturdy and clean, and, upon closer inspection, they find hot water and a wind chime and dust conspicuously absent on top of the stove and the table and a few of the beds.

The cabin is old, but someone has already discovered it.

She feels like she is playing make-believe. She and Josha, sheets over the kitchen table, napkins folded into hats on their heads, used to pretend they were creatures no one had discovered yet and they were living their lives together, apart from everyone, and the rest of the world would never know. This house could be the house they were always imagining.

“Maybe gnomes were here,” Rig says.

“Gnomes live underground,” Beckan says, before she stops and reminds herself that they would rather not.

Tier hopefully checks the fridge, but there's nothing.

“Gnomes hate underground,” Rig says, and laughs a little. “And they wouldn't leave food.”

“Maybe it was tightropers.”

“No ropes,” Tier says. “Maybe nymphs.”

“Tigerladies,” Beckan says. “Or backpackers. They carry their babies in their backs, have to cut themselves open to get them out, it kills most of them. Scrap's mother was a backpacker. He has a mark on his back. That's how he looks like her.”

“What about Josha?” Tier says, gently.

“Nymph. He likes water and he's tall, fingers are longer. . . . I have

a gnome nose. But I'm no good at digging.”

“You don't know that,” Rig says, and Beckan realizes that, no, she does not know that.

“What about Cricket?” Tier says.

She can't remember.

Did she ever know?

She does not know what else Cricket was.

But then she thinks about his long, thin feet, his eyebrows always smiling even when the rest of his face was not, the way he wrapped himself around Josha like he was born to twist himself into Josha's every nook, the time he balanced on the top of the headboard and walked all the way from one end to the other. . . .

“I think he was half tightroper,” Beckan says.

They give her small smiles.

She goes to the living room and finds a half-gnawed piece of taffy, a hair bow that a child would wear, a used but empty glass.

And then the sun shifts from behind a cloud and the entire cottage drowns in sunlight, and they all start to laugh, first with wonder and then with everything in them, because every surface of every room is covered with glitter. Glitter of fairies who were
here, together, recently. Glitter of fairies who were alone and who sparkled and who were not ashamed.

Beckan drops to the carpet and rolls around in it, and she is stunned by how little time it takes before the other two join her, and they roll back and forth until Tier starts to sneeze, like Scrap, and suddenly she is crying so hard she can't breathe.

Beckan is surprised to find out how little Tier and Rig knew about Scrap and what he had to do.

“It didn't sound like there was a chance he was going to take the job,” Tier says. “He was . . . resigned to being eaten.”

Beckan shakes her head. “He told us he was going to take it.”

“He did?”

Now she can't remember. “I told him to.”

“Oh.”

She hears Scrap's voice now, saying
No
. She shakes her head hard. “I don't want to talk about this.”

He had to take it.

He had to.

“Did you see what happened to Josha?” Tier says.

She is dizzy. “No. No, no.”

Because the whole city was dust and smoke and blood, and the last thing she can imagine surviving in all of that is a fairy. Especially when one is unruly and one is a little scrap.

“He's . . . he's got to be dead,” Beckan says. “They've got to both be dead.”

The gnomes don't say anything.

She had heard someone call him King Scrap.

She does not know whether or not to cling to that.

Beckan looks around at the furniture, at the piles of glitter in the corners she'd thought were dust. “Maybe I'm the only one left,” she says.

“Then you're a gnome now,” Rig says.

“I love you guys,” she says. “But I don't know what I am.”

She tucks her chin on top of her knees and squeezes her eyes shut for a minute. She wraps her arms around herself and holds herself still and together. Hours ago, just hours ago, she was in her cottage. She hadn't made her bed yet. There were dishes in the sink. And now it could all be gone, it could all be dust and rubble and just the tiniest bits of glitter and
maybe she'll just never know
. Maybe she'll make like a fairy and never go back, and it scares her that, for the first time, she really understands why someone might. She understands why those fairies at that meeting, so long ago, laughed at her and her pack because it was their first war.

How do you go again?

Beckan sleeps alone in one room and hears, through the walls, the sound of Rig and Tier doing the same in the other.

She scoots herself against the shared wall and presses her cheek against it. She hears one of them roll over in bed and nothing else.

“Do it,” she whispers. “Clothes off. Do it. Come on.”

After a while she can no longer stand it. She gets out of bed and wraps the sheet around herself because suddenly she is cold. She tries not to care that she is getting glitter all over it.

She pads through the house in bare feet and opens all the cupboards as if she is looking for something. But it isn't until she cracks open a low one in the living room before she realizes that she has been, and here they are, three shabby books. She chooses the shabbiest.

It is too dark to read in her room, and she's afraid that if she lights a candle the gnomes will smell the match and worry about her. So she sits on the bed and pretends she can read the words with
her fingers, but these were printed like real books so she can't feel anything. Not like Scrap's notebook, with his bumpy left-handed writing that bleeds from page to page. Not like those stories that she already knows.