A History of Glitter and Blood (30 page)

“Becks, Becks, stop,” Piccolo says. “They're roots. Trees.”

“Oh.”

It isn't as if Beckan has never seen a tree, or that she didn't know that they had roots, but even when she was in the cabin with Rig and Tier, she'd forgotten to think about how things grow.

“The city we were in before was full of trees,” Piccolo says. “It wasn't much of a city, really. Houses and grass and big steam plants. And ropes slung between the trees.” He clears his throat. “Dig up. I'll stick my head out and make sure we're safe. If you hear yelling or anything, you guys run back to the cottage and plug the hole.”

“Bullshit,” Josha says.

“Shh.”

They lift Beckan up so she can dig into their ceiling. She stops periodically to cough up the dirt that falls down her throat.

She breaks through the surface, and Josha kisses her cheek. “You did it.”

She coughs for a while and takes off the gloves.

“Are you all right?”

“Just exhausted.”

“It'll be over soon.”

Something will
, she thinks. What if they've already eaten him?

Piccolo sticks his head up and immediately they hear him spit up a rope and throw it high above their heads. He holds out his arms for them, and they latch on and climb with him up to the tree branch where he's fastened the other end of his rope. They sit in the tree and pant. Beckan can't believe the smell—so alive it feels almost like a creature, like she could curl up and sleep and it would tell her stories. It makes her miss her cabin and her gnomes. She takes a bottle of water out of her bag and they drink like it will wash the dirt off their bodies.

“I can't even see our cottage,” Beckan says.

“There, I think, look,” Josha says, and they squint for a while and think that perhaps they can make it out. They can see the wall, but not the guards; maybe they have gone in for the night, or they were never on this side. Or maybe they are really that far away.

“You are a champion digger, Beckan,” Piccolo says.

“You should see the full gnomes. They're incredible.”

“We'll see them soon,” he says.

Josha says, “How?”

“Yeah, that's a good question.”

Because they are outside the city, yes, but they are all the way at the south side, where the cottage is. And the cabin where she stayed with the gnomes, judging from the route she took back to the city with Shug, is miles from the north side of the city. Far enough away that they couldn't see the—admittedly meager, nowadays—skyline. Far enough that the journey back with Shug seemed to take a lifetime.

“We should get down and start walking,” Josha says, but Piccolo laughs.

“You know what's a lot faster than walking?” Piccolo says.

They look at him.

“Flying.”

Beckan startles. “Flying?”

“I mean, in a manner of speaking.”

“Oh.”

Piccolo climbs farther up the tree. They follow, shakily, after him.

“See that tree?” Piccolo says, pointing, and they shrug and say “Yes,” though he could mean any number of trees, truly, because they continue like skyscrapers as far as Beckan can see. How did she never truly process that they were here?

She looks at Piccolo and is glad the tightropers came, and she almost laughs.

“That tree,” Piccolo says, and he spits out a new rope and throws it, hard. It goes so much farther than she was expecting, but Piccolo tugs a little and smiles and she knows it stuck.

“No low branches,” Piccolo says. “We have a really clear path. Shit, I was made for this jailbreak.”

And then he winds the other end of the rope around his wrist, grabs Josha under one arm and Beckan under the other, and jumps.

It takes everything in her not to scream.

Their rope goes taut and they stop falling down and swing, hard, toward the faraway tree, and Beckan feels the wind on her cheek and she opens her eyes. Piccolo is right. There was no way they could have walked this fast.

They are flying.

They clear the city in a matter of minutes. From there, everything rests on Beckan's direction and some extremely blind hope.

“Shit,” Beckan says, when they're taking a break.

“What?” they say.

“I just wish we could have brought them a sheep.”

Piccolo looks at her like she's crazy, but Josha laughs.

And shit, is that boy great when he laughs.

Before she can hug him, Piccolo does, and she can tell he's thinking the same thing.

Beckan drops to the ground in front of the cabin and runs at the front door. She is almost, but not quite, too anxious to notice that there are now three other sheep besides their lamb grazing out in front of the house.

She pounds on the door and hears immediate panic inside, shuffling, whispering.

“No,” she says. “It's Beckan. It's just Beckan. It's okay.”

The door swings open. Tier reaches her first, and he grabs her and spins her around. “Hey,” he says. “Fed up with Ferrum so soon?”

Rig points behind Beckan as Josha and Piccolo jump to the ground. “Tier, look.”

The boys shake hands with Tier and kiss Rig's cheeks. They tell each other they're looking well when it's only the gnomes who are. “Tightroper soldier washed up in the river,” Tier says. “Um . . . and well . . . we saved the gun, and it looks like some sheep family came looking for our lamb after all, and Rig can hunt rabbits like . . . where's Scrap?”

“He didn't get off,” Beckan says.

Rig says, “What? I thought the fairies were in charge.”

So the three of them tell the gnomes everything, overlapping, cutting each other off, arguing—
no, I didn't say that the first day, that was during the closing speech; I was never going to shoot anyone; don't bring Cricket into this any more than you have to
.

Tier and Rig are holding hands, and their grip gets tighter and tighter the more the others talk, until their fingers are white.

Beckan says, “We need your help.”

“Okay,” Tier says.

“We need to get back into the city, through the tunnels.”

“Scrap is underground?”

“Yes.”

“Where?”

“We don't know.”

Tier takes a deep breath. “Are you sure he's still . . .”

“We don't know.”

“Okay,” Rig says. “Then we're going to need to dig our own set of tunnels so we don't risk running into one that's open to the rest of the city.” She starts sketching a map in the dust with her shoe. “Our tunnels go like this,” she says to herself, drawing.

“This one's a little more west,” Tier says.

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah.”

Rig says, “If we just dig around those, with spots to check at the major intersections . . . Can you guys remember what parts of the tunnels were still covered?”

Piccolo, who they are beginning to realize has a much better visual memory than the fairies do—is that a tightroper quality, or is that just Piccolo?—crouches down by the drawing and helps the best he can. Josha helps out with scaling the map to figure out how close to the tunnels they can get, and he turns his compass around on the drawing to help work out which way they should always be facing.

Beckan waits for someone to admit that this is very nearly impossible. That they can't possibly be expected to try this mission with so little information, for a fairy boy that half of them have only met a handful of times (and for most of those handfuls was not the nicest), on a quest that gives them a very good chance of being caught and tried and killed. If the council likes using Scrap as a good example for what happens when one race attacks another, they'll adore using the five of them to show what happens when you don't toe the line.

But nobody says anything.

Nobody gives up.

It isn't as if being young and stupid has been glamorous or has worked out so well for Beckan. She probably should have left Ferrum with the rest of the fairies. She probably should have given in and turned into a flighty little stereotype, setting cities on fire and running away. Probably her goal should have been to live thousands of years with as much of her body as she could.

Rig smiles at her and holds out her hand. “Come help,” she says, and Beckan kneels beside them and doesn't do much more than nod along when they talk, but they love her anyway.

She would choose this.

He sits on the floor of his cell, still writing, listening to the beat of Leak's footsteps as they come closer to him, pass by his cell, fade back away.

He is much too far underground to hear anything else, but he tells himself that the whole world is sleeping, and that Leak's footsteps are all in his head, and there are no reasons left to feel anything. There is no reason to be sad or to be scared. He is alone and ready and brave. He lowers his forehead to his knees.

He is not going to die with dignity, he realizes. He is not ready. He will never be ready.

He is going to die fighting and kicking and screaming and crying, and whether that's good or bad, it's just the reality. It's just Scrap. He doesn't know how to give up.

But he wishes he could almost as much as he wishes he could really die, that he wouldn't be torn apart and bits of him wouldn't rot inside gnome stomachs or lie discarded on the floors of the tunnels. It will get so cold.

And he will miss them, and how much he misses them will rip at every tiny scrap of him, until . . . there is no until. Forever.

He looks at his arm across the cell from him, and he makes it go up on its remaining fingers and crawl its way across the floor to him. For all these weeks, a bit of him has been with this arm, cold and lonely and scared. And it was so hard, but there were enough things happening, enough real life, for him to push it aside.

He strokes the arm with his good hand, and he feels it and his heart shudder and calm. A little.

But no one will take care of the tiny bits of him. No one will find them. There will be too many, and the little scrap fairy will finally just be too small.

Like Beckan's father, and Cricket, and everyone they write off and forget, he will blow around and get buried in the dirt and burn into ash in the fire, but he will never go away. He will be stuck in these tunnels forever.

Please let them find me
, he thinks.
Please let them keep a piece of me. Don't let all of me be lost forever
.

“Just a bit of me,” he whispers. “Just enough.”

He will haunt this city like a ghost.

The exit Beckan and Rig and Tier took when they fled the city, freshly dug, is still open. “They think they know everything,” Rig says, laughing.

They enter through there, but they don't continue down the tunnel Rig and Beckan and Tier took from the city. That's much too risky. They veer immediately east, and Piccolo and Josha are, as predicted, stunned by how quickly the gnomes dig.

The others stand back while Beckan blowtorches their way through the wall, and after that they proceed more slowly, always aware that one handful of dirt cleared in the wrong direction could have them in a tunnel with no ceiling for the whole city to see.

“What was that?” Tier says.

They freeze.

There is a sound coming toward them. It sounds like rain, at first, slow, coming down on the roof of their cottage.

“Someone's coming,” he says, and they flatten, together, against the wall of the tunnel. Beckan's ears are full of the sounds of them all breathing, hard and fast, at conflicting rhythms. They are a mess of panic. Her chest hurts.

“Breathe,” Piccolo whispers, and she takes a deep breath in. She hadn't realized she wasn't.

The footsteps are coming toward them. They stare at the other wall of their tunnel, where it sounds more and more each second like someone is about to break through.

But no, the footsteps turn, go back, and gradually disappear.

“We're close,” Tier says. “Must be whoever is guarding Scrap. It's got to be.”

“How do you know?” Beckan says.

“I . . . I don't know. I don't.”

“It does sound like patrolling,” Rig supplies. “The rhythm of the steps.”

“We're right up against their tunnels,” Josha says. “We should veer off. We're way too close.”

“Hmm,” Tier says, and then he pushes out the wall separating them from the gnome tunnels. Dirt rains down, and ahead of them are empty granite hallways, dim candles, and silence. Piccolo and Josha quickly click off their flashlights while whisper-cursing at Tier along with the girls.

“What the fuck are you doing?” Beckan says.

“We're not going to find Scrap by circling around. He's somewhere they can get to. He's in their tunnels.”

For a while, as far as they can see, the tunnels are covered.

Closed.

Besides the footsteps, safe.

“Someone else could be coming!” Beckan says.