Scrap groans. “Josha, I’m just down there a lot.”
“Yeah, and why? You didn’t used to go down nearly this much—”
“There’s only two of us tricking now!”
“Wow, really? You think I didn’t know that?”
Beckan looks at Scrap and shakes her head. “Not cool.”
“I wasn’t trying . . . to be cool.”
Beckan gets up and hugs Josha.
Scrap says, “Look. What happened to Cricket is all the more reason for us to be really careful. To not be running around stealing things.”
Again, another moment where Beckan and Josha look at each other.
“You’re overreacting,” Beckan says. “The war’s over. We’re just trying to keep it that way.”
“I hope I’m overreacting. I seriously hope so. Are you sure no one saw you go down?”
Josha says, “Stop hovering.”
“There are ways to have fun, okay? There are ways to have fun—”
“We’re looking for Cricket, you asshole,” Josha says.
“So the paperwork is what, then? What does that have to do with Cricket?”
“You’ve been trying to get me out of the house for weeks, you think you’d be okay with me freaking multitasking. And you want to talk about intentions?”
Scrap says “What’re you talking about” like it’s a statement, not a question. Like he already knows exactly what Josha’s talking about and doesn’t have the words to stop him.
And sure enough, Josha takes the blue notebook off Scrap’s nightstand and throws it at the bed before he walks out. The pages flutter open, and clippings from newspapers and older books come loose and fall onto the comforter.
“Shit.” Scrap starts stuffing everything back in. He is very adept now with his fake arm. He balances the notebook on it, uses the wrist to tuck pages back into the pockets, scoops up pages between the fingers.
But Beckan stops him. “What is this?” she says.
“It’s nothing. Just something I’ve been working on. A journal.”
“I saw my name.”
“It’s nothing,” he says, but he doesn’t fight when she takes it out of his hands.
She opens it near the beginning and reads a little.
“Even though Beckan was only a tooth, an eye, and an ear away from living alone, Scrap and Cricket’s parentless house felt lawless to her in a way hers never did. Maybe that one eye was enough to make her feel watched—though she had to admit that, more and more often, she was leaving her father tucked away in corners or stuffed, as he was now, at the bottom of her tote bag—or maybe it was that her father’s apartment could somehow never feel small and bright and reckless in the way of this cottage, where every corner felt filled with something easy and significant, like family.”
“You’re writing about me?” she says.
“No, it isn’t about you. It’s about the war. I’m using us, but just as a device.”
“What? I’m not a device!”
“No, that’s not what I—”
“No, but you’re pretending to be in my head,” she says. “You’re writing as me.”
“And Josha! Josha, too. And sometimes Cricket, even. Not just you. It’s just . . . easier than being in my own head. I don’t know.” He runs his hand through his hair. “I can’t write from me right now.”
She flips through the pages. “Some of this is familiar.”
“Yeah, from the old notebook, parts of it, some of the descriptions from back then, a few pages from Tier’s books, and the conversations we’ve had, the scenes I’m in, those should look familiar, I have a good memory, the dialogue’s off some of the time I’m sure, but it’s close—”
“This must have taken you ages.”
He keeps talking like he didn’t hear her. “The stuff from during the war is in past tense, the stuff happening now is in present tense, but that’s just to make it clearer. I’m a few days behind, always, I’m always a few days behind, and I don’t know if that’s good because then maybe I can have some perspective, but on the other hand it would be nice to be at the same time as something and I’m writing about you meeting Rig, now, the parts when I was sick were tricky and the parts I wrote when I was sick are these crazy ramblings, but I think I figured it out from how we talked later—”
“Writing about me meeting . . .” She tries to find the passage in question, but he finally comes to his senses and takes the book away. “You write about things you’re not there for?” she says. “Things that I do? Are you spying on me?”
His eyes get huge. “No, no! It’s made up. Here.” He opens the notebook. “Here, here. Here’s you talking to Rig.”
She reads for a minute, mouthing the words to herself. Then she shakes her head. “No. I didn’t say this. We never said this.”
“I know. I’m not trying to . . .” He breathes out. “I’m just trying to write what makes sense.” He shakes his head. “I’m just trying to get it out of my mind.”
She touches the notebook and hands it back.
He says, “I’m trying to put it together in a way that makes sense.”
“But you’re not in my head really. So you’re going to miss stuff. This isn’t really me.”
“I know. . . .”
“Stuff is going to happen that you weren’t expecting and it’s not gonna work with what you’ve already written and then what? Books are supposed to make sense. Stuff is going to come out of nowhere.”
He’s breathing fast. “I don’t know. Shit, I don’t know. It’s just to keep my mind clear. It isn’t important.”
She shakes her head for a minute, slow.
“You can keep doing it,” she says. “If it helps. Just don’t forget you’re getting everything wrong.”
Get out of my head get out of my head get out of my head get out of my head
11
After Scrap was trapped, the war changed.
It was no longer a harmless little thing, an inconvenience keeping them inside, like a thunderstorm or a case of the flu. It was a gray monster hanging over the city, with growls like bomb blasts and claws as sharp as gnome teeth. They had never felt more disconnected from the city, up in their little cottage, and Josha and Beckan responded by locking themselves inside, and Cricket and Scrap stopped coming home every night and started sleeping in shattered doorways and the remains of blasted sidewalk benches.
“We’re the ones who grew up in the city,” Josha said. “What the fuck are they trying to prove?”
They couldn’t explain it, and neither could Beckan, but somehow it seemed to keep both Scrap and Cricket’s nightmares at bay when they crashed in the city, together but not together, each on the opposite side of a destroyed grocery store, empty tin cans and cardboard displays upturned around them like covers, feet stretched out toward each other like they were trying to reach across the rows of black-and-once-white tiles. They found bits of food the armies had left behind. They brought most of it back up to the house. They ate some of it crouched in corners, devouring old coffee grounds and stale jelly beans. They made pinky promises, like they did when they were six and seven, that they would not tell Beckan and Josha. “I love you most,” Scrap told him. “Don’t ever forget.”
“I don’t,” Cricket said, but he did sometimes. The city smelled like smoke and something rotten, something sick, something growing in the sores on their skin.
“You look like shit,” Beckan said on one of those days.
Scrap was drinking coffee beans mixed with rain water, swirled in an empty can of split pea soup, wrapped in one of the tightroper army’s homemade newspapers.
“I’m just tired,” he said.
“And cold. And skinny as fuck.”
“We’re all skinny. There’s no fucking food.” He pulled a mouthful from the cup, swished it around his mouth, and spit it out.
“Charming,” she said.
He coughed a little.
“We’re all freaked out from you being tra
pped, okay?” she says. “You don’t have to do this wounded mysterious act. We know what’s going on. Come home.”
But they were headed to work.
He said, “I’m not pulling any act. I’m not trying to make any sort of point. I’m just . . . doing what makes sense right now.”
“Sleeping on the ground in the cold makes sense? When you already have a cough like that?”
“Being here, in the city, where I can see what’s going on.”
“Where you can die the next time they fling a bomb in the right direction.”
He wiped his nose on his hand. “They know we’re down here. Cricket talks to them. Haven’t been any bombs in forever.”
“Yeah, since the one that almost killed you. What about the gnomes?”
“I’m only worth one thing to them now, and it isn’t fucking food, I’ll tell you that.” He pinched his skin. “They couldn’t eat me. I’m skinny as fuck.”
“Cricket’s been bringing home a lot lately,” Beckan said. “Did you ever talk to him about how he’s getting that much money?”
“No. Did you?”
“Yes.”
He looked at her, and he didn’t ask.
He said, “I don’t want to know. I have this image of Cricket in my head and he’s just like a big brother and I don’t want that to get ruined, okay?”
“Not fucking okay. What the fuck is wrong with you?”
“I need this. I need this thing to hold on to. He’s the one of us who’s changed the least and I just want to hold on to that, okay?”
Beckan didn’t say anything.
“Just tell me one thing,” Scrap said. “Just . . . what he’s doing. Is he safe? Is he going to get hurt?”
Beckan was quiet for a minute, then she said, “No. No, I think he’ll be fine.”
I. Do. Not. Blame. Her.
Just making that clear.
They were rewarded that day with a thigh of something they hoped was a chicken, and they were halfway through promising to bring it, intact, back to the cottage, where Josha had tempted Cricket into an extended visit home with promises of boiled-water baths and bedtime stories, when they both took rabid hungry bites of the meat right there in the mines, holding the carcass between them, chewing with teeth that had forgotten what it was like to do real work.
“Fuck, it’s rancid,” Beckan said.
“I can’t taste anyway.”
They heard a small murmur from the floor, and they looked down to see a gnome boy, younger than anyone they’d seen in a very long time, sucking on his dirty fingers and looking up at them. Or at their meat.
He was almost as skinny as Scrap and he looked a little like Beckan.
“We can’t,” Beckan said. “I’m sorry. Go ask your dad.”
“My dad’s dead. Just a little?”
Beckan shook her head, her eyes closed, her chin shaking. “No. We can’t.” She imagined how Scrap would judge her if she gave in. How he would shake his head and tell her she was soft, and stupid, and that she should be sleeping on the streets, that if she were cold and hard like he was, she wouldn’t need to hide under her comforter and cry herself to sleep. If she were cold, she wouldn’t cry. She would cough dust and dirt and dry air.
The gnome looked at Scrap. “Please?” he said.
Scrap hesitated.
Beckan’s eyes snapped open.
“Scrap,” she said. “Come on. Let’s go.”
Scrap said, “I don’t know. I don’t know I don’t know I—”
And then the gnome boy lunged. He wrapped himself around Scrap’s leg and stabbed his teeth through his pants.
Scrap yelled and cursed and Beckan shook the gnome boy loose with her foot and flung him across the tunnel, and they heard a guard yelling—at the child, not at them, because they were worth so much more, because there wasn’t enough meat on them to bother, they thought, they thought, they thought—all the way to the elevator. Scrap leaned on Beckan for support but they moved quickly.
He left Beckan holding the meat and went to the other side of the elevator and slammed his fist against the bars. “Fuck!” he yelled. “Fuck, this hurts.”
She didn’t know what to say.
They were perfect. They had nibbles in their shoulders, but none of them had really been touched. But Scrap’s pant leg was torn, and what was left was dark and wet with blood. It wasn’t an enormous bite, but it was a piece of him that he would not get back. Fairies are good at healing—it would close up and close over—but it would never, ever grow back.
“Fuck, I feel him chewing it.” He squeezed his eyes shut and swallowed hard. “I have to harden up,” he said. “I have to harden up.”
“No,” she said. But not because she wanted him to be soft. Because she honestly didn’t believe that he could be any harder. His hesitation hadn’t been tenderness; it was panic, it was hunger, it was delirium, it was fear, but it was nothing that the war could squeeze out of him, because he didn’t have anything left to squeeze. She had never known a sweet Scrap—from diapers he had been pragmatic, fixed, counting out pieces of candy to make sure everyone got the same amount. And she didn’t love him, how could she? How could anyone love him?
He came home only to clean his leg with the first-aid kit and finish off his share of the meat.
I don’t want to write about back then anymore.
But now I don’t know what else to write about.
Cricket, Cricket, Cricket.
A few weeks before he died it was grimy and awful and he was with a skinny gnome he didn’t know, and he was surprised when the gnome brought him down to Crate’s chambers with Scrap. He’d never been in there before. He’d never imagined the golden walls, the carved marble bed, the smell of earth so much stronger here than anywhere else.
But the strangest part was seeing Scrap. They were used to being separated the second they came down. Of course he knew what Scrap did.
Of course he was curious how Scrap did it so much better than he did.
But he did not want to see this. Scrap making noises in his throat, twisting his hips against the wall, accepting everything, his hands above his head grinding his pelvis into Crate. He was smiling up at him and making his eyes bright and whispering in Crate’s ear. He was urging Crate’s clothes off, aiming him toward the bed, waiting for the part everyone knew he was best at, when he could moan and move at the right time and think about all the reasons he was doing this: for Cricket’s smile, for food, for notes slipped under her door. He knew why he was here.
And then Cricket was kissed, roughly, and a pill was slipped from the gnome’s tongue onto his. He swallowed and turned his head in time to see Scrap accepting an identical pill under his own tongue.
It made Cricket immediately woozy, and Scrap turned and looked at him, his eyes so big.
So Cricket took care of his boy. He put on his big-brother voice and said, “It’s okay. We’re fine,” because Scrap hated being drugged, even after all this time. Scrap had to be present.
Cricket would have rather felt none of it.
Oh yes, write that instead, you fucking genius. Brilliant.
Beckan brings welded trinkets to Piccolo and comes home with a feast for dinner, and she and Josha and Piccolo and Rig and Tier all chatter to each other while they wash stalks of imported corn and the gnomes debate whether they should give in and try a vegetable, if their stomachs could take it, and Piccolo prods the meat that they brought and wisely does not ask what creature it used to be.
Josha is wearing Piccolo’s jacket.
“Here, try these,” Piccolo says. He grabs a handful of pea pods from a basket and rinses them.
“Raw?” Beckan says.
“Best that way. C’mere, I’ll show you.” He backs her against the fridge and dangles one over her lips.
She laughs, low, and snaps at it.
Tier and Josha look, together, toward the bedroom where Scrap is reading or writing or something.
Beckan groans. “Oh, guys. Serio
usly? Give up.”
Piccolo says, “What’s going on?”
Beckan stands on her toes and kisses him. It isn’t comfortable. They haven’t been touching nearly long enough for it to be comfortable. It is new and passionate and hot enough that she can imagine steam coming from Piccolo’s lips. He is always hot.
“They have a crush on Scrap and me as a couple,” Beckan says.
“Oh . . .”
“Which we never were and never will be. Seriously, guys?”
Josha shrugs one shoulder.
Beckan goes back to the sink, munching on the rest of the pea, and rinses potatoes. “There’s too much,” she says. “Too much stuff. Too much bullshit and . . . history.”
“You just described Scrap,” Josha says.
She shakes her head. “Me and Scrap.” And she goes back to Piccolo and kisses him again, and he puts a hand on her back and a hand in her hair, and he is the perfect height for her, his chin on the top of her head, she fits into him like a glove, and she smiles and is happy.
Josha goes to get Scrap for dinner, and they sit at the table, suddenly quiet with their new addition, exchanging glances as they scrape at their plates. The gnomes try the vegetables and Piccolo tries the meat.
He wipes his mouth on his napkin. “Scrappy,” he says.
Scrap is so confused by the nickname that it takes him a minute to look up. Beckan chews on her lip and tries not to laugh.
Piccolo doesn’t seem to notice. “Have Josha and Becks filled you in on our plans?”
Beckan says, “Oh, I don’t think Scrap’s interested—”
Scrap looks at her, steady. “I’m very, very interested,” he says.
Piccolo smiles brightly. “Great! We’ve turned up some great stuff. The gnomes aren’t great at security, y’know? They’re useless without a king, really.”
Tier drops his fork, and Scrap picks it up before Tier can. They exchange a glance and a nervous expression—a chewed cheek, a raised eyebrow—when Scrap hands it back.
Josha and Beckan aren’t the only ones who can have secrets.
Piccolo says, “And the tightropers aren’t much better, especially with me on the inside.”