A History of Glitter and Blood (8 page)

She finds the light of their cabin. “That's us. I live nearly outside the city now. But I grew up right in the middle.” She tries to point, but doesn't know where to start. There's a yellow glow rising up, as if something underground is breathing out gas. “What is that?”

“Something the gnomes do,” he says. “No idea what. Every few days it pops up. Glittery smoke, look at it.”

“You can't see it from down there. . . .”

“Hmm. Dunno.”

She shakes her head a little.

“You've never seen them do anything weird?” he says.

“I . . . go to one room down there. I don't wander. I don't even know what's on the other floors. Scrap does.”

“I guess he would have mentioned if it were important.”

She nods, though she isn't sure.

“Because, I mean, he clearly told you exactly what it's like up here.”

She realizes he's being sarcastic.

“He's my friend,” she says.

“Oh, yeah, he seems like a good guy, I wouldn't worry about it.”

Now she can't tell if he means it. There's something about his voice that catches her in a place that isn't prepared to be touched. He talks too quickly or too steadily. He doesn't trip over his words. He possibly doesn't think enough.

The last one she knew who didn't think enough . . . well, it didn't work out well for him.

As if reading her mind, Piccolo says, “I saw him, Scrap. And you. The day the gnome king died. And that other one, Cricket?”

“Yes.”

“I just . . . I've been interested in you guys since then. I don't know. In you.”

And she doesn't wonder
why her
, and she doesn't wonder what his watching means, and she doesn't spiral into flashbacks about that day (she doesn't she doesn't) she just thinks,
What kind of interested?

“Anyway, I just wondered what you were like. And there's the tall one. Josha? Same color as you. Is it okay to say this stuff? The color thing? I'm not trying to be controversial.”

“No, it's fine. That's Josha.”

“He's the one who applied for our army.”

“He wanted to be helpful. He doesn't trick like us.”

But it wasn't just that. Josha was desperate and detached and alone and all he wanted was a gun on his shoulder and someone to stand beside him and squeeze his arm and tell him he was doing a good job.

Instead he was alone every day in that cabin.

“They didn't give him a fucking chance,” Piccolo says. “Laughed him away. Just 'cause he's not a tightroper. Fucking moronic, all this racial stuff, the prejudices . . .” He shakes his head. “I look exactly like all the other tightropers, and I don't think anyone's ever felt less like . . . anyway. Less like anything but a messboy. Anyway. Do you like it?” He gestures out toward the view.

“Yes. Absolutely, yes.” She shakes her head a little. “
Yes
isn't the right word.”

“Try
yeah
.”

She laughs. “We say
yeah
. Just . . . not when we're talking to strangers.”

“Oh yeah?”

She bites her lip and looks at him.

“Yeah,” she says.

Something stirring underneath them breaks the moment, and she sees Scrap walking toward home, alone. He looks small but not scared. He's limping a little.

“I have to go,” she says.

“No problem.” He doesn't try to help her stand. She doesn't need it.

“I'll . . . see you again?”

“I'll be here. You ever want to come back up . . . you know? You should come back up. Just—”

Scrap is walking faster. “I have to go,” Beckan says.

“Just that it's your city. So you more than anyone deserve to be up here to see it.”

“You sound like a fairy.”

“I wish.” He laughs. “Get outta here, kid.”

He leads her to a hole in the net and talks her through lowering herself down on the threads. She shakes the whole time, and twenty feet from the ground she looks down and sees Scrap underneath her, watching, his arms crossed. Ten feet later, the rope around her wrist won't stretch anymore. She loosens it and lands on top of Scrap. She feels as useless as a pillow. Somehow he catches her with one arm.

She's on her feet as if he had never held her. She dusts herself off.

“What the fuck?” Scrap says. Gentle. Curious. Suspicious. A lot of things.

“What do the gnomes do underground?”

“Sleep, eat, us—”

“The yellow smoke.”

They stand there and stare at each other. It's so much darker than it was half an hour ago.

“We should go home,” Scrap says.

“Yeah. Let's go home.”

Back to the cottage. Away from her city.

Her city.

When they get home, Josha is putting together an old puzzle at the kitchen table. Scrap, who Beckan had thought would hole up in his room all night with a cigarette (he gets them from the gnomes) and a bad mood, sits right down next to him and starts to help.

“I'm bad at this,” Josha says, after a minute.

“Beckan's amazing. Beckan, c'mere, fix it?” Scrap takes his hand off the table and pulls at the bandage on the rest of his other arm. It's been so slow to heal.

She sits and tugs apart the pieces they forced and clicks the real ones in place. Josha and Scrap watch her, fascinated like little boys. She blows glitter off a piece. Josha laughs at Scrap sneezing, and Scrap shoves his head to the side when he stands up.

“Are you hungry?” he says.

Josha and Beckan nod, together, their heads bent over the puzzle still.

Scrap digs through the cupboards and announces, “I'm making bread!”

Their heads snap up like they're on strings. “Noooo you're not,” Beckan says. “No no no, you're not.” They've been living on stale, molded pieces, a new loaf once a month,
maybe
, through the war, but the loaf they have now is only three-quarters done and almost still soft enough to chew. Making new bread now sounds decadent, incredible, reckless,
peaceful
.

He smiles big, and soon the whole kitchen smells hot and deep. Josha shows them pictures that he drew today, and they aren't nearly as good as the ones he used to do (and he's never been as good as Tier) but it is so good to see him drawing again. They knock their heads together and Josha makes them laugh with stories about Cricket that they pretend they don't already know, and Scrap sends Beckan secret smiles across the table and lets himself trace shapes and write letters on her arm, lets himself daydream, and maybe this is how things get
better, Beckan thinks, maybe one loaf of bread, maybe one piece of the puzzle at a time.

Scrap's hand on her feels warm, burning.

“Aren't you eating?” Josha says to Scrap, when both he and Beckan are full.

Scrap rests his head on the table. “I'm not feeling very good.”

Beckan stops eating. “You can't get sick.”

“I know.”

Last time Scrap was sick, it was from a bad reaction to a drug one of the gnomes had slipped under his tongue. He threw up for hours while Cricket held him and made jokes and told Beckan and Josha not to worry, he knew his cousin, he got sick quickly and dramatically and it would be okay. But now Cricket isn't here.

“You can't get sick,” Beckan said. “We don't know what to do.”

That night, Beckan finds Scrap in the basement with the blue notebook and a fever, writing so fast his hand is shaking.

“Hey,” she says, gently. “Come on. Up.”

She takes the book and puts it away. “No,” he says. “No, I need it.” She caves and gives it back. He clutches it to his chest like a baby.

She pulls him up and to the kitchen and pours him glass after glass of water. His teeth chatter.

“You're an idiot,” she says. “How high is your fever?” She puts her hand on his forehead. He is immediately icy with sweat and then quickly burning, scalding hot.

He doesn't say anything, and her mind and her eyes travel to his stump of an arm. He pulls away as if she'd touched it.

She sighs. “Is it infected?”

“I don't know.”

“Scrap.”

“I mean it, I honestly don't know. I need to write.”

“Yeah, what's with that ‘how to write fiction' book anyway?” she says, mostly just to distract him as she keeps edging him along, but he doesn't answer.

She takes him to the bathroom and sits him on the floor. She's used his first-aid kit a hundred times, but only for little things—a broken finger that time Cricket was shoved, a burn on Josha's face from a bomb too close the day before he decided to apply for the army, various whoring injuries of Scrap's. She hasn't touched his arm since it was bitten off. It's been his own project.

She unwraps it. A sliver of skin falls to the ground and keeps shivering. She pets it gently and Scrap calms a little.

He can still feel that arm.

“I think they're planning something,” he mumbles.

“What?”

He's breathing so hard. “That they want something from me. They won't say . . .”

“Okay, you have a fever. Calm down.” She leaves her hand on his back.

His arm has healed more than she thought, but the jagged cuts of the teeth are red and swollen. She sees thin skin that sparkles. “The glitter's in it,” she says. “It got in the cuts.”

She wets a towel with peroxide and dabs his arm. He doesn't cry out, just grits his teeth to make them stop rattling and pushes his forehead into the wall.

“If you weren't sick, you'd be doing this,” she says. Because she knows it will comfort him.

“I know.”

“You don't need me. You could do it all on your own.”

Then he starts to cry.

“No, no, stop.” Her lips shake. “No, stop. You don't cry.”

He wipes his face, hard.

“No, I cry when you cry. Don't cry. Please stop.”

He does.

“I'm done now,” she says. “It's clean, all done. Tomorrow I'll go underground and get medicine and you'll be okay.”

Then he leans over the toilet and throws up.

“Don't cry.” Her voice breaks. “Don't cry. I'll fix it.”

Josha stands outside the bathroom and listens. He wants to be close, but the bathroom is small and so is his throat, trying to breathe, trying to swallow, reminding himself over and over that Crate is dead and nobody knows where Scrap's arm is (or if maybe there are bits of Cricket, bloodboneglitter
anything
clinging to it) and that there is nothing he can do. But if Crate weren't already dead. Shit, if Crate weren't already dead, the things Josha would do to that fucking gnome king. The things he would do.

But there is nothing left for him to do.

He hasn't done a single fucking thing for his pack.

The problem is that he alternates between wanting to hug Scrap and wanting to hit him, and hearing Scrap weak and desperate pushes him firmly and horribly into the latter category. Because there it is, the reason for all of his anger, the reason everything is fucked up: Scrap was weak. Scrap turned Cricket into a prostitute. Scrap got his Cricket killed.

Scrap wanted someone to go down into the dark with him and he took the only two things Josha ever loved and one never came back.

“It's going to be okay, buddy,” he calls through the door, and Beckan says, “Hear that? Josha is always looking out for us.”

What is there to be scared of, anyway, from a sick fairy? They do not die. (That is not how they die.)

I can't remember much more of this part, anyway.

After that first bomb,
Beckan spent a week and a half wondering where the war was, because she heard just faint gunfire far away and saw no carnage.

“Then there'll probably be a big meeting with all the fairies,” Josha said. “And they'll tell us what's going on.” Fairies love big meetings.

“I guess we have to go.”

“You don't sound like you're dying to know what's going on.”

She pushed a handful of her hair back and put her welding goggles back on. “Doesn't feel real.”

But it was only a few days after that when the fairies gathered for a meeting in the school building on the south end. The flier plastered to the front door of Beckan's apartment assured them that there would be protection at the event, and sure enough, when she approached the auditorium with Josha, two fairies stayed by the double doors, longer shotguns than Beckan had ever seen slung over their shoulders.

She'd fired a gun, once, the day a set of gnome teeth snapped a few inches from her arm on her way home from Josha's house. She was nine. Her father, still intact, took her on the tram to the edge of the city, and they proceeded on foot to the outskirts of the farmland,
where sheep grazed on dandelions. He held her arms in place and pushed her finger down on the trigger. “Next time you do this alone,” he mumbled in her ear. “I'm not your safety net.” He kissed her cheek as the recoil launched them back.