A History of Glitter and Blood (29 page)

I can't remember what we did while we were waiting.

I don't want to make something up.

I don't want to remember.

JUDGE PEONY LACHTURN: Council, have you prepared your verdict?

GNOME COUNCILMAN PLUG: We have, Your Honor.

JUDGE PEONY LACHTURN: What is the verdict?

GNOME COUNCILMAN PLUG: While the court was impressed by Miss Moloy's statement, for the charge of the murder of the gnome king Crate, the court finds the defendant . . . guilty.

Whereupon there is silence
.

Absolute silence
.

GNOME COUNCILMAN PLUG: We therefore sentence the defendant to be divided and eaten by the gnomes.

JUDGE PEONY LACHTURN: The court approves the verdict. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen of the council. Court is adjourned.

Scrap stays calm at first.

They knock the new uniform off his back and drag him out the back door, away from Beckan and Josha and Piccolo screaming his name, away from the fairies covering Beckan's mouth to make her shut up, down through a hole, back underground. There are an inexcusable number of hands on him. They jeer at him and gnaw on his ears and drag him back to his cell. And he is calm.

And then it hits, at once.

He thrashes and yells and does the one thing he can think to do; he throws himself against every wall they pass and leaves as much glitter everywhere as he can. He scrapes himself against the
corners and falls to make them drag him across the ground. He leaves a trail.

And they lock him up, just him, his metal hand in that fist, and his notebook, and he throws his head back and screams.

Beckan, Piccolo, and Josha
sit at the cottage's kitchen table, their glitter and mud uniforms on their backs, their heads in their hands.

They are sore and heavy from crying, and their throats hurt from shouting, and they just do not know what to do.

“I'll put on some tea,” Piccolo says.

Beckan and Josha nod without lifting their heads, and Josha says, again, a version of what they have been saying to each other for the past hour since the trial ended.

“We've got to get him out. We have to save him. It can't end like this. We have to get him out tonight.”

And they launch into the same frustrated protests.

“We don't know where he is.”

“The city is crawling with guards.”

“They'll capture us and eat us, too.”

“If Scrap knew we were risking our lives for him—”

“How would we even keep him safe after we got him?”

“We don't know where he is.”

“The tunnels are huge, torn open, anyone could see us—”

“—not to mention how the fuck would we get down there in the first place?” But they come, again and again, to the same conclusion.

“We've got to get him out.”

Beckan stands at the window drinking tea. She looks out at the guards standing around the hill, the same ones who rounded them up and dragged them here immediately following Scrap's sentencing. She's sure in the morning there will be someone knocking, someone ready to put the three of them on trial. Obstruction of justice. Refusal to conform to race guidelines. Camaraderie. Something.

She says, “There's no way we'll be able to get to him from here,” she says. “We have to get out and strike from somewhere else.”

Josha looks at Piccolo. “Maybe you could string ropes?”

Piccolo says, “The highest point is the chimney. Hardly high, and I don't even know where I'd string the other end. There's nothing around. And no way the guards wouldn't see.”

“What about the power lines?” Josha says.

“Yeah, that's definitely better than the chimney.” Piccolo smiles at him. “But still the problem of the guards. We'd definitely be seen, and even if we got out of the city that way, we'd still have to get into the tunnels.”

They keep thinking.

Beckan goes to the bathroom and draws thick stripes of war paint under her eyes and cries them off.

And draws them again.

Below them, in a final and accidental act of kindness, Leak is the one guarding Scrap.

“Not that it's really necessary,” Leak says. “How the fuck wouldya escape from this one?”

Scrap gives a small laugh from the corner.

“Anything I can get you, son?” he says.

“I'm glad you're here.”

“I'm not gonna eat any bit of you,” Leak says. “Already decided.”

Scrap leans his head against the wall. “Could you get the transcripts from my trial? I can put them in my book. Someone can glue them in for me. Maybe someone will edit them up and make them more interesting. Add commentary or something.”

“What're you writing about?”

He looks at the notebook and the pen in his hand as if he has forgotten. His metal hand and real hand are bound to each other, so writing goes slowly, but he continues. “Right now what it looked like when you guys broke out of the ground and the fairies came back. How panicked it was.”

“A whole book about that?”

“Oh, no. The book is about a girl.”

“I'll get you those transcripts.”

“You're allowed to leave me here?” Scrap says.

“Supposed to do rounds. Circulate the tunnels, make sure we don't see signs of a break-in. Fairies delegated me and me alone to stand guard while the other gnomes go back to work. Must make the most of my one self.”

“Would have thought I'd be higher priority than that.”

“Heh, maybe there's hope for you yet.”

Scrap ducks his head.

“I'll be back,” Leak says. “You going to be lonely?”

“I'll be okay.”

As soon as he's gone, Scrap, naturally, throws himself against the bars, looks for weaknesses around the edges, tries to pry them with his teeth. Anything.

He looks at the only other living thing in this cage with him—the twisted, bloody remains of his arm that they've thrown in here to keep him company—and feels his stomach heave. But he pries his metal fingers just a little bit out of their fist and remembers there is maybe one thing, maybe there is a bit of something left, and between that and the words on his pages he is able to survive the loneliness for a while.

Josha says, “If we're talking about coming from outside the city, it's stupid not to think about our main resource out there.”

They look at him.

“Rig and Tier,” he says. “Of course. You know they'd want to help. And they know the tunnels better than you do, Becks.”

“But how do we get to them?” Beckan says.

“Okay, so maybe that should be the first part of the plan.”

“But what about after we find them? How are they going to help?”

Josha breathes out, slowly. “That's the second part.”

Scrap keeps writing.

“Beckan,” Piccolo says, carefully.

She is on her fourth cup of tea. “Yeah?”

“Can you dig? Like a gnome, I mean.”

“I don't think so.”

“But a little? Better than average?”

“I don't know.” But she is biting her lip. “Maybe.”

“She was the best in the sandbox,” Josha says. “And she's so good with her hands. Her welding.”

“What's the floor in your basement?” Piccolo says.

“Nothing, it's just dirt.”

“Well,” Piccolo says. “That's something.”

Ten minutes later, they have gathered supplies. Josha brings a compass that used to be Cricket's. Beckan stuffs her welding torch and mask into her tote bag. Piccolo brings a knife.

“No,” Beckan says. “Not that one.”

“It's the biggest.”

“And I'm going to cut my hand reaching into my bag. Bring the switchblade if you have to.”

Piccolo grumbles and brings the switchblade.

In the basement, Beckan puts on her thick welding gloves and gives the dirt floor an experimental scrape. The ground gives under her as if it were sand rather than the hard-packed dirt they press down every day.

How did she not know she could do this?

“Look,” she says.

They were, of course, already looking.

“You guys try,” she says, but when they do, the ground stays firm and hard, which gives her confidence that a tunnel wouldn't cave and suffocate them.

So she starts to dig.

She is not full gnome, which becomes clearer and clearer as she goes on. It is difficult and rather slow. She keeps reminding herself that she does not need to go very far. But again and again, she's tempted to take a hard turn north and dig right into the gnome tunnels, to let the already-formed passageways do the work for her.

“They'll see you,” Josha reminds her every time her hand drifts too far to the left. “Chances are way too good that they'll see you. Just make it to the wall.”

“I know. I know.”

So she digs. Josha and Piccolo stand behind her with flashlights, clearing dirt out of the way, coughing, but if they are ever scared
that the tunnel will collapse and kill them here, or that Beckan will tire or hurt herself or give up, they don't say it. Both of them are slouching quite desperately to fit into a tunnel Beckan's height, but neither complains.

Her hands are bleeding under the gloves where her nails are bent back. She grits her teeth to stop herself from groaning every time she digs out another clod of dirt. “Stop and rest, Becks,” one of the boys says, she doesn't even care which.

Their tunnel is too narrow for her to sit down. She leans against the wall and pants and does not know how the gnomes do it.

“How far have we gone?” she asks, when she can breathe.

Josha looks behind them. “Fifty feet, maybe?”

She moans. “How much more?”

“Thirtyish? We should have measured or something. . . .”

She takes off the gloves and looks at her hands. “Shit, look at this.”

Piccolo winces.

She says, “I can't wait for my part in this to be over, let me tell you.”

“Except your part is all we have planned out. . . .”

She shuts her eyes. “Shut up, Piccolo.”

It's only twenty excruciating feet later that they hear footsteps above them. The heavy pounding of boots. With each step, a bit of dirt falls from the roof of their tunnel onto their heads.

“How far are we from the surface?” Beckan whispers.

“No idea,” Piccolo whispers back. “Ten feet, maybe?”

“That's enough. They can't hear us.” She holds her breath and waits for whistles, screaming, alarms. “I think.”

They laugh nervously.

“If those are guards,” Josha says, “then we must be right at the wall.”

Sure enough, three feet later, Beckan's hand hits metal.

“Shit,” Piccolo says, because they had been seriously hoping the walls did not extend underground.

“We were prepared for this,” Beckan says. She digs around in her tote bag. “You guys back way up. Cover your eyes.”

She turns around to see them ten feet behind her, hiding in each other's shirts.

Well
, she thinks, despite herself. Despite everything.
That's pretty cute
.

She secures the mask over her face, throws her bag behind her, and fires up the welding torch. She feels instantly at peace like she is back at her apartment or back in the basement of the cottage, like this is just another project, another piece of metal she's melting down to build something pretty. She has been in a trance since she started digging, wrapped up in what she is doing, not thinking about Scrap, really, just about where they need to go. Now the torch is scorching and heavy in her arms and she has turned back into herself, and everything hits her all at once.

She wishes all of a sudden that they'd brought the big knife, never mind her fingers. She wishes she'd had a gun in that courtroom.

She wishes she had killed Crate and she does not, does not give a shit anymore about the moral implications about it or what it would have done to her heart because they
got her boy
.

She keeps going until she has melted the wall out of their way, then turns off the torch and sets it off and slumps against the wall.

“Good job,” Josha says, softly.

There's nothing standing between them and the real world anymore.

“Just give it a minute to cool down,” Beckan says.

They huddle together and listen to the footsteps above their heads.

“This is meeting halfway, isn't it?” she asks Piccolo.

“Yeah,” he says. “Not so bad, is it?”

“I just burned up a part of our city.”

They can't surface immediately or the guards will see them, so Beckan keeps digging for quite a while. Eventually the boys tell her she can stop, that they're far enough away, but she isn't convinced. Even worse, all these long brown ropes are in their path now, tangling with their hands, threatening to strangle her. She reaches for her torch. She does not have time for this shit.