“Josha,” Scrap says. “Get up. Did you hear her?”
“Yeah,” Josha says.
Late at night, alone in her room, desperate, she would tell herself that the end of the war would be the thing to fix Josha. Since nothing else has worked.
Since they can’t find Cricket.
“Get up,” Scrap says. Harshly. Cruelly. Finally.
“I’ll make waffles,” Beckan says. “Do you want waffles? You’ll feel better.”
Josha sits up a little and says, “It’s the middle of the night.”
“I’m making waffles. I’ll waste flour. We can have so much flour now, y’know? We can have anything. Everyone’s going to come back and the shops are going to open and so much fucking flour, kid.”
“I’m not hungry,” Josha says, but he does raise his eyes to Beckan and give her the smallest smile she can imagine. “I love when you’re happy,” he says.
“We’re all happy. You had to do this war too,” she says, even while she’s realizing that maybe the problem is that it isn’t Josha’s war anymore. That Josha’s war, somewhere along the line, became something very different.
“You should write a story about Josha and Cricket,” she’d said, months ago to Scrap, while they were laughing their way through scrubbing the kitchen floor and Josha and Cricket were drunk in the living room.
Scrap threw up his hands and said, “I don’t write love stories! I write epics and historical accounts and dry nonfiction!” and then grabbed a long, stale stick of bread with one hand and snapped it in half with the other, threw her the larger bit, and announced that they were now sword fighting.
Now Scrap pulls Beckan outside Josha’s room, closes the door on him. “He’s getting better,” he says. “He is. Talking and everything.”
“Yeah. Definitely. Definitely, he’ll be fine.”
Scrap nods.
A pause hangs between them.
Recently Beckan has developed a habit of trying to catch the moments on Scrap’s face when one thought chances to another.
When he starts to chew his cheek, she interrupts. “What do we do now?”
“Waffles.”
“After that.”
“I . . .”
She feels triumphant for stumping him.
Lately, she tests Scrap like you’d check a limb after a fall. Looking for a break.
It’s a hideous metaphor, considering the missing arm.
“I guess we wait for the cease-fire and go to work?” he says.
It feels wrong to go to work this morning, but at the same time, she doesn’t know what else to do, and she has no idea if the cease-fire has really changed anything. Probably, the gnomes still need them. Who knows if the gnome women are back yet, and if they aren’t, Scrap and Beckan should trick as much as they can before they are.
There’s no point in a real cease-fire without even a little bit of Cricket, anyway.
And without any of the other fairies home.
And without Josha out of bed.
And without Scrap smiling like he used to.
She heads to the kitchen, but she stops halfway to watch Scrap leaning against the archway to the hall, writing in his notebook. He balances it against his half arm and the wall while he writes.
“Midnight, 5/9/546.” he says. “The end.”
“You’ll have to find something else to write now.”
Scrap’s expression stays the same, but Beckan is good enough now at scanning his face to know that she has just terrified him.
A part of her likes that, and she doesn’t want to know why.
Enough. She shakes her head, remembers what is important, and goes back to her room and wakes up her father to tell him the news. She smiles with all her might.
An hour later, there’s cease-fire.
The thing is that (historically speaking) fairies are very, very bad at keeping histories. The thing is that they tend to give up.
In the morning, Scrap and Beckan take their usual route down to the mines. And shit, okay, a better author would insert a map right here. Remember that for the next draft.
Shit, what the fuck am I even doing? What kind of history book doesn’t have a map?
Once upon a time there was a writer who couldn’t write a fucking book.
I don’t know what comes next. That whole chapter’s going to need to get thrown out anyway. You completely forgot halfway through that you’d said it was raining at the beginning.
Was it raining?
No one’s ever going to know, and it’s all your fault.
Put a fucking map in the next draft.
Chapter two.
2
In the morning, Scrap and Beckan take their usual route down to the mines. The sun is so bright that her own glitter hurts her eyes. Somewhere above her head, a tightroper is playing a string instrument that doesn’t sound quite familiar. It’s beautiful. She hears a tightroper yell—maybe something mean, maybe something that has nothing to do with her—but it makes her smile, because they’re not in a war.
The glass in the abandoned storefront windows on 5th Street glints as she walks by. Her reflection doesn’t look as small and solid as it usually does, and the smears of dirt on the windowpane almost, at a certain angle, make it look like she has wings. This was once a jewelry store. She is allowed to feel lovely for a minute.
“Look,” she tells Scrap, but he says he doesn’t see it. He doesn’t much like to look at his reflection. He is small as fairies go and more inky than pretty. A little scrap of a thing.
They take the same route every time. To 6th Street, toward Fremont, cross at the shattered streetlamp, take the manholes to the mines at the intersection of 7th and West Streets. There are dozens of other entrances, but they always take this one, partly because it is the central way station with the manned elevator, but really because this is where they are expected and it is best not to surprise. Last night, they felt like bandits in a dangerous wasteland. Today, with the sun up, Ferrum and its shrapnel and split buildings look as harmless as a broken dollhouse (a broken doll city).
It isn’t a big city, not really, but to them it is a whole world. None of them has ever been farther out than the groves right outside the walls. They weren’t allowed to visit the houses of the strange children in school who lived in the stilted houses in the orange trees. And they didn’t want to. They were in love with their city and anything not their city was wrong. Anyway, those houses are bombed-down now, so it shouldn’t matter anymore.
They stop at the tightroper shop, and Beckan digs around her pocket for enough money for some candy. Tightroper candy, she discovered early in the war, is phenomenal. They put sugar in their mouths and spin it like they do their ropes. Scrap gives the man behind the counter a quick nod. Beckan thinks his persistent dislike of the tightropers is very, very tiresome. They might be creepy at night, but they’re nothing to really worry about. After all, they’re on their side (sort of). They’re on their side more than they are not (probably). More than the gnomes, at least (possibly). After all, the tightropers came to help them. (Of course.)
“Thank you,” Beckan tells the tightroper soldier behind the counter, shooting him her biggest smile, and he smiles back and tells her, in his scratchy accent, that he likes her eyes.
She hums to herself as she and Scrap keep walking and she saws through the candy with her back teeth.
“C’mere,” Scrap says. She stops, and he blows extra glitter off the back of her neck. His breath itches and she squirms.
He says, “I know Tier is uptight about it,” and sneezes and waves the glitter away from his face.
I talk about Tier too much, Beckan thinks, since Scrap and Tier have only met a few times and all Scrap really knows about Tier comes from her stories. Then again, it hardly takes much knowledge of Tier to know that he is a gnome, and gnomes hate glitter almost as much as they hate fairies.
“What used to be here?” Scrap says. He points to a bombed-out building ahead of them, dow
n by Gramar Street (it always flooded a little here during big storms, and they would roll their eyes and call it the river Gramar and then hide behind this very building to watch the gnomes who lived underneath it come up shivering and half-drowned to gnash their teeth and warm up). “I can’t even remember anymore.”
“The bakery,” she says, and the minute the words are out of her mouth it’s filled with the taste of cracked crust, white chocolate cookies, gnome taffy hard as metal.
She so very rarely misses things. It always surprises her.
Scrap says, “I don’t think I ever went.”
“Missed out.”
“My mom and dad used to bake.”
Scrap’s mother was a backpacker. Their babies grow between the blades of their shoulders and their skin. Most of them die in childbirth, but she survived. Making an immortal baby wasn’t enough for her; she wanted to stay and raise it. She was stupid and stuck around the city, and she died mauled so badly that they buried her facedown.
No species any gnome had yet chewed was as sweet or as filling as fairy (once you scraped off that pesky glitter, anyway) but a hungry gnome is a hungry gnome, and generations of new, not-heartless gnomes who were taught it was bad manners to eat a fairy didn’t extend the rule to invaders. Everyone’s foreign mother either ran away or was eaten, and the fairies threw down lamb meat and closed their eyes.
They reach the manhole at 7th and West. Leak, the gnome elevator operator, is there, same as always, standing on the ladder beside his elevator car, halfway between the tunnels and the surface of the ground, the rope of his elevator car in his hands. He stands there every day and hauls gnomes and fairies up and down, and that is his only purpose.
He sees them and begins hauling the elevator up from the ground. “Did you guys win?” Beckan shouts to him.
Because they don’t know who won.
But Leak only spits and says, “Nah.”
She supposes this means the fairies won. She is still learning how wars keep score.
“Come on,” Leak says. “Aren’t you late?”
They clamber into the elevator and Leak stays at the manhole and lets them down, grabbing the rope, pulling, letting it slide between his fingers. They sink down into the tunnels, level after level of smooth, frozen mud and granite, all of it dimly lit into a soft brown.
“Be safe today, all right?” Scrap says. He isn’t looking at her.
Beckan’s throat hurts when she swallows. “Why today?”
“Always.”
She nods.
The elevator stops at the third floor and Beckan lifts the cage and steps off. When he pulls the cage back into place, he presses his hand against the steel for a half a second. Smiles at her.
Just this ghost of a smile.
Then he locks the grate in place and he’s gone. The elevator always seems so much faster to Beckan when she is alone and watching Scrap go away.
She starts down the tunnel. The gnome guards hiss dirty things at her, but they don’t poke her or gnash their teeth today. One of them licks his lips, but he’s just eating some sort of meat off a spit.
They’re all eating. They have food. Burned bits of tightropers, or something the tightropers gave them, or something they’d been saving. They aren’t hoarding it in preparation of the next cave-in. They’re celebrating.
The war is over.
She enters the third doorway on the right, like always, and Tier grabs her and hugs her tight, so tight, and then he is laughing and spinning her around and kissing her cheeks, and Beckan has never been more relieved by a smile. This is the smile she wanted from Josha, and this is why she does not hate to be here, even though she is supposed to.
She kisses him, hard, and he remembers to slip money into the pocket of her skirt before he slides it off her. He always does.
Since it’s a special day, she lets him chew on her neck a little. The risk tastes amazing to her, too.
He pays extra to fuck her twice, and she forgets for a while that they were never really on the same side.
At home, Josha traces words on his pillow, mouths words to himself, sings words in the back of his throat that he can’t force into the air. The war is over. The war is over. This is the end of something.
He hugs the pillow to his chest and closes his eyes. He should be used to the empty house by now. Every day, he had stayed here, too afraid or too proud or too spoiled to go down to the mines with Beckan and Scrap and Cricket and strip down and suck up. He’d stayed here and cooked, or read some of the hideously boring history textbooks in the basement, or fussed over the bean sprouts he had taped to the window. He’d listened to gunfire and maybe worried a little, but the sun still shone up here at the edge of the world and he never forgot that in a few hours he would hear that laugh bubbling up the hill like it was a brook and this was a fairy tale.
He can still hear it. He squeezes his eyes into slits.
Beckan and Scrap will be home soon, and maybe he’ll find something to say to them, or the strength to scrounge up something for dinner or to check the bean sprouts that are still taped to the window.
3
While Tier is zipping up, Beckan says, “So I guess this is the last time we’re going to be doing this.”
Tier clears his throat but doesn’t say anything.
She says, “Because Rig is coming back, yeah?”
It’s still funny for her to say yeah with Tier. With her fairy boys, she is unapologetically casual, but as a diplomat’s daughter she was raised to be polite with the gnomes, to be formal, to be so careful, and it’s hard to forget that, just because of a job or a friendship or whatever this is.
She touches Tier’s drawing. It’s the only image she’s ever seen of Rig, and it and Tier’s stories have made her royalty in Beckan’s mind. Rig is a capital-letter Her to Beckan, always, and she knew that even before she was good with letters.
Tier never talks much, but after a pause, he says, “The tightropers are letting the girls go tomorrow. Preparing them today. My uncle said.” They’ve been kidnapped for months.
Whenever Tier mentions his uncle, Beckan hears a roughness in his voice that probably isn’t really there. The word uncle points to a great glaring hole where Tier does not say the word father.
“Scrap came down long before the war,” Tier says. “Maybe he still will.” He doesn’t say maybe you still will.
She plays with the quilt.
“Scrap goes up on the ropes sometimes, doesn’t he?”
“Just for food.”
“He never sees the girls?”
“No. He asked, but they wouldn’t tell him where they are.” She speaks faster. “He isn’t friends with them, you know? He goes up to buy things, that’s it. When you guys don’t have stuff to sell us. You guys don’t usually have stuff. You give us money and we have to buy things. We have to eat. Scrap goes. He goes now. Cricket used to.”
“He won’t have to go up anymore,” Tier says. “Tightropers are on the streets. Setting up shop.”
“There’s no reason for them not to. It’s space no one was using.”
“You guys.”
“There are three of us. You all should have come up a long time ago. You still just have those two guys up every other day.”
Tier says, “We aren’t really welcome.”
She picks a hole in the quilt. “Because we’re afraid you’ll eat us.”
“I don’t eat you, do I?”
“No.” Never. Not any of her, and she doesn’t fully understand why, and every day when she gets home she sees the fear in Josha’s eyes that he might have harmed her, but no. Scrap comes home with nibbles out of him sometimes, deep teeth marks in his shoulders that will never fully fade away. It’s not at all the same as the day they came home without half of his arm. (There are no longer four fairies who haven’t been maimed.)
“No word on Cricket?” Tier says.
She shakes her head.
“I’ve been poking around down here. I can’t fi
nd anything of him. Or Scrap’s arm. I’m not giving up, okay?”
“We don’t care about the arm.” Scrap must be able to feel it, but he never mentions it, doesn’t want to talk about it. So they talk about Cricket. They’re used to some discomfort of that, after all; as children they learned very quickly not to cry when someone trampled over their glitter. Beckan’s currently ignoring the crawling feeling of Tier scraping a speck of glitter off his jeans. It doesn’t surprise them, anymore, what they can learn to ignore.
“How’s it healing?” Tier says, without any real worry.
So she says, “He’s fine.”
She looks at his bookshelves, twice as tall as Tier and stacked with books so thick they scare her. At the bottom, level with her chest and below, are the books she’s read and the ones Tier has decided she’s ready for. She still doesn’t read well.
“Anyway,” she says. “Who cares if we make you feel welcome? It’s not like we have much say.” Beckan’s inkling that the fairies might somehow be influential has been squeezed out of her. “And it was an amicable ending to the war, yeah?”
“Amicable.”
“You taught me that word.”
“I may have taught you too many things.”
But before the war, the gnomes frequently were aboveground. They were behind the scenes, always—unloading trucks into their stores, digging ditches for their buildings, scraping muck off their streets. She learned from a young age not to look at gnomes.
And then the tightropers came, and they told the fairies that they were there to rescue them from the tyrannical rule of Crate and his hungry gnomes. The fairies in their shiny apartments found out that the rest of the world thought that, metaphorically speaking, the gnomes were on top.
What I’m saying is, before the tightropers came, no one in Ferrum had any idea that the fairies needed to be rescued.
When really, you don’t stare at the gnomes because it’s rude to stare at the help.
And sure, maybe especially so if the help eats you from time to time.
A History of Glitter and Blood Page 2
