“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. “S
hit, 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.
“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.
A History of Glitter and Blood Page 21
