He nods heavily. “But—”
“You asshole!” Josha knocks a chair to the floor. “You had us tell you all our plans so you could use them against us.”
“So I could figure out how to keep you alive.”
“Who knows that they’re making you be king?” Beckan says.
He rubs his forehead. “All the gnomes. Most of them haven’t known for as long as I have.”
“Tier?”
“Only recently. They . . . don’t tell him much. They were afraid he’d want the job.”
“They’re going to eat you?” she says.
“Only if I don’t take it.”
Scrap stays still for a minute, then he shakes off his boot and then his sock and holds out what remains of his foot. Three of the toes and half the side are missing.
He was what was cooking. He was the yellow smoke.
Beckan sinks to the floor.
“They already destroyed most of the arm,” Scrap says.
“What happens if they eat you?” Josha says. “Who’s king then?” “One of Tier’s brothers. No better for the city.”
Josha says, “This is fucked up.”
And then something inside of Scrap breaks.
“You think I don’t know?” he says. “Why are you standing here telling me it’s my fault? Why are you fucking lecturing me like you disapprove? I didn’t ask for this. There isn’t a good outcome here— do you think I can’t see that? There is no getting out of this.”
“Get out of the fucking city!” Josha yells.
“And leave you here to get yourselves killed with Crate’s sons in charge?”
“At least that would buy us some time, wouldn’t it?” Beckan says. “While they figure out how to organize around one of Tier’s brothers . . . we need time.” She sits down at the table. “I need to think.”
Josha says, “We could plan a strike against them while they try to organize.”
“They’d eat you. They know they’re about to be back on top. They wouldn’t hesitate.”
“Maybe we should all leave?” Beckan says, quietly.
Josha says, “We’re not leaving this city to be destroyed.”
Scrap shakes his head, breathing hard. “We can’t get out. You know they have guards around the entire edge of the city. They’re adding more every day. Th-the only solution I can see right now is to try to get the fairies back, and I’ve been making this gnome kid who owes me a favor go out every day looking for them, feeding this fucking kid all I have and he’s traveling farther and farther every day but he hasn’t found them.” He shakes his head quickly, then says, “Maybe if I did it . . . took the job. Maybe I could protect us. Protect you guys. They would never touch you.”
“We’d be two fairies in a gnome-dominated city. You couldn’t babysit us every second,” Josha says.
Scrap says, “Becks is half gnome.”
And for a second, they are quiet.
“That might help you,” Scrap says.
“Shut up,” she says.
“Did you ever think that this type of racial pride is what got us into this war in the first place?”
“Don’t talk to me about what started this war when you’re about to profit from it.”
“Being half gnome is going to save you,” he says. “The same way being half fairy saved all of us.”
“We’re not half. . . . ,” she says, because fairy is fairy, this is what she has been taught, this is what is real, this is the one thing she has never really thought to question and she will leave forever so shutupshutupshutup.
“What about me?” Josha says. He sounds like a kid for a moment, sounds like when he would chase after Beckan when her father came to pick her up from play group: what about me?
Scrap starts, again, “But I’m—”
Beckan feels the sudden overwhelming urge to go to sleep, to curl up on the floor while they yell and have to do nothing but close her eyes.
Scrap is very quiet now. “I didn’t know how to tell you guys,” he says. “You seemed happy lately.”
And Beckan’s about to laugh before she realizes that, yes, she has been happy lately.
I don’t hate gnomes, she thinks to herself. Not anymore.
“I have to find Piccolo,” Josha says, and he’s out the door.
Beckan breathes into her hands.
“What should I do?” He looks up at her. “What do I do now?”
“You take the job,” she says. “Because you’re not an idiot.”
He shakes his head a bit.
She says, “And then I hate you a little for the rest of my life.”
Beckan.
“You should have told us,” she says. “You shouldn’t keep secrets from us. How’d that work out for Cricket? Why didn’t you tell us, baby?”
He looks at his book.
“I thought I had time,” he says.
She runs after Josha.
Beckan.
Becks.
Beckan.
She is on the street now, charging toward Josha down this street, left on this one, right on this one, right on this one, and there he is, talking to the boy dangling from the ropes.
“Josha,” she says. “We have to go.”
He doesn’t look at her. “No.”
Piccolo says, “Beckan, get out of here.”
“No. We have to go.”
“I’m not going home.”
“I’m not talking about home! We need to get out of the city. We need to find the other fairies and we need to bring them back.”
“No one knows where they are,” Josha says.
“They said they were going—”
“And nobody’s heard from them. They sent no word that they reached their destination. They’ve made no contact. They could all be fucking dead. We don’t know.”
Beckan watches Piccolo. “He knows.”
Piccolo makes eye contact.
“I swear to you,” he says. “I swear to you that I don’t. I’ve been through all the papers. No one’s heard from them. I’m guessing they got absorbed right into the big cities. Your fairies don’t want to be found, Becks.”
“No . . .” That can’t be true. It just cannot be.
Piccolo takes the gun out of the pocket of his jacket. She notices, for the first time, that Josha is wearing one just like it. How long has he had it?
Why hasn’t she been watching him?
Piccolo loads the gun. “You need to go, Beckan.”
“What are you doing?”
Josha says, “What do you think we’re doing? We’re saving Scrap.”
Beckan looks at Josha and sees something in him that she hasn’t in a long time.
“He’s going to be okay,” she says.
“Look.” Josha points.
There is Scrap, aboveground, at the end of the block. He is arguing with a gnome they don’t recognize. He is being pushed and pulled around. The gnome is laughing at him.
Piccolo says, “Go home, Beckan. Somewhere safe.”
“Home isn’t safe.”
And then she hears Scrap’s voice, louder than anything she’s ever heard—“NO!”
And the last she sees before the ground explodes, before there are gunshots, crying, screaming, is Scrap’s face, at the end of the block, as he is finally, finally overwhelmed.
So much happens at once.
There’s yelling, there’s growling as the gnomes drill up through the ground, there’s Josha and Piccolo’s absolute panic. There’s tightropers coming down from the skies with rifles and orders belted in that language Beckan doesn’t speak, and there’s dust, so much dust in her throat, and she coughs, it’s in her eyes, and she can’t see anything.
Josha’s voice, somehow far away: “What do we do?” and she doesn’t know, she doesn’t know, because she has no idea what’s happening.
She hears ropes break, and feels nets coming down on top of her, and it sounds almost like wings—
And she’s thrown to the groun
d. She sees orange bodies coming up, climbing with pickaxes and bare hands and horrible smiles. She feels the ground crumble underneath her and she falls, hard, into what was once the top level of the gnome tunnels.
She sees Leak.
And he says, “Are you all right?” and he looks like he might really care (so many days in the elevator and he never drops her), but she can barely hear him.
The gnomes have broken through. She is lying in what was once a tunnel but is now open to the sky and only a ditch in the ground. The gnome beds, their clothes, their books, are scattered to the streets, are blowing everywhere.
The gnomes are snatching up tightroper soldiers and bringing them to their mouths—
“Josha!” she hears, but she doesn’t know if it’s her voice or Scrap’s or Piccolo’s or a hungry gnome’s—
“Beckan!”
“Scrap!”
It’s chaos, it’s dust, it’s three races in the same space at the same time. This is what Piccolo wanted and he thought it would be so different. This is what Beckan was afraid of and she hoped that she was wrong. This is what Josha needed to finally be a part of.
And she sees glitter.
More glitter than she has seen in so long, and a young voice she doesn’t know yelling, Scrap, I did it! I found them! King Scrap! and what is happening—
Then there’s a hand on her arm, it’s a body, it’s someone, and she falls into it and she clings and she does not care who it is, but then she feels the roughness of the clothes and the height of the shoulders and the curls in her hair and it is Rig, it is Rig, it is Rig.
And then there is another set of hands on her, this one so familiar, this one bringing her back to familiar and dirty places, to nights in his room, to the way it hurt the first time and the boys never asked her if it had, the way she cried and they teased her because she was so lucky, because he looked gentle, and now his hand is on her shoulder, not gentle, but not scary, necessary, near, the only possible option—
And they run, through a hole that was once a tunnel, through the smallest passageways Beckan has seen. They gasp behind boulders, they run themselves ragged and out of the city.
fuck fuck what was that noise I’m sorry I’m sorry this is it the end
the end
13
Sorry about that.
Here’s what happened.
Before long, the tunnels close off again, where the city has not been exploded, where they are maybe not still in the city, and Beckan and Rig and Tier can slow to a walk because there is no one else. They inch along in the total dark, Beckan between the gnomes, all of them clasping hands. Beckan doesn’t know where she is, only that this is a part of the tunnels she’s never been to before. Maybe there are rooms back here. Maybe gnomes live here that she’s never met, and never thought about.
But there’s no one here now. The silence is so heavy, Beckan feels it on her skin. There’s no noise from the city. There is no city.
They do not talk because there isn’t anything much to say.
Eventually, they all say, at once, “I’m so thirsty,” only Rig says very.
They stop walking then and pant, holding on to each other.
“We’ve got to go up,” Tier says.
“What?”
“Up. Aboveground. The air.”
Beckan tilts her head back. She can’t see the sides or the ceiling of the tunnel. She has no idea how tall it is. It’s hard to imagine that there is an above the ground, anymore. She stretches her arms out, still holding their hands, and does not hit the sides of the tunnel.
“Up,” she says.
“Yes.”
“How?”
She can feel them look at each other, then hear them start to laugh.
“We dig,” Rig says.
“With what?”
They laugh again, and she is momentarily terrified, and then they lift themselves up, they climb the walls, and they begin to dig with their mouths and their nails. They are faster than the tightropers’ jackhammers. How did she think they made all their tunnels?
She’d never considered that gnomes might have natural talents, that there are ways that they do not need to teach themselves—that they do not need fairies to teach them—to be good. Her stomach hurts.
“I’m sorry,” she says, and they don’t ask why.
They emerge, coughing. Beckan chokes on dry glitter.
Around them is something Beckan hasn’t seen, in anywhere near this abundance, since long before the war, when she used to take the trolley out of the city, when she would bring her father and eat a peach and think of nothing.
Grass.
She’d forgotten the smell, how it tickles the inside of her nose, and the feel of it around her ankles, how sleepy it makes her. She’d forgotten bugs and earthworms.
These are the things that they lose. They’re so aware of the big things, and they miss them constantly and loudly and mumble about them in their sleep—the fresh food, the heat, the family. They miss them so sorely that in a way they’re not gone. When you miss something as much as they miss autonomy, or peace, or Cricket, you can never forget how it felt when it was here.
The little things—grass, earthworms, notes under the door—slip by unnoticed.
But besides this grass and their hole in the ground, there is nothing anywhere around. Nothing for miles. Only hills and grass and grass and grass and every few hills, a dandelion.
No food, no water, no other creatures, and no hope. Nothing but the two gnomes on either side of her, and it is the most beautiful thing Beckan has ever seen. No explosions, no screaming. She turns around and cannot see the city and has no idea in what direction it is. Then the three of them are holding each other, running their hands through each other’s hair, shaking and whispering how glad they are that the others are alive. And she breathes as if she has just discovered how. Her brain throbs with ScrapJoshaPiccoloFerrum but her lungs breathe.
“We should get moving,” Tier says.
Beckan says, “Where?”
Tier looks around and lets out something between a laugh and a cry. “I don’t know.”
“Someone is looking out for us,” Rig says, when, just before they are about to faint, they find a stream.
They drink with hands clenched on the banks, faces in the water like animals.
Beckan coughs. “What?”
Tier looks at Rig, his eyes somehow still, steady.
“It’s just something the tightropers used to say,” she says. “At first we thought they were mocking us—if one of us got a little extra food, they’d tell us, someone is looking out for you, but then we started noticing they’d say it to each other. If one of the generals’ small sons fell and didn’t get hurt—someone is looking out for you.”
Beckan is confused. “Who’s looking out for you?”
“I think someone you met once or twice who you didn’t know was important,” she says. “You just passed by them and had no idea they were secretly taking care of you. Maybe they don’t know either.” She scoots back from the water and lies on her back, her eyes closed. Beckan cannot imagine how she could stop drinking. She thinks she will never stop drinking. Her dry cake of a tongue absorbs all the moisture before she can swallow. She pours water directly down her throat. She burrows in the mud and absorbs water through her skin.
Tier says, “Rig likes to extrapolate.”
Rig laughs a little. “I always thought about this woman I once knew. She lived in the deepest tunnel, and she sat with one candle, and she’d knit.”
“Rig,” Tier says.
“That’s all she ever did, knit, and tell stories, with her head down. She only knew a few stories. Maybe three. When I was a kid, I liked to imagine she was knitting the stories. Grabbing the familiar bits from the air and winding them around on the needles and turning them into the story about the girl who learned to sing when her lover left, and the boy who traded places with the girl rabbit and saw how brave she was and how brave he had to be. Bu
t she knitted and knitted and no new stories came out. So I started reading to her, and she’d repeat the stories back to me.”
Tier isn’t drinking anymore. He’s watching Rig.
“Except she’d always give the stories I taught her a twist,” Rig says. “She’d add in a girl. Not a girl who needed to be rescued, but not instead of her. There would be a whole new girl who didn’t have to do anything, who did things when she wanted to and when she thought they were right and nothing else. And someone still got to be rescued, and everyone still got to be in love.”
Beckan tucks her chin onto her knees. She feels as if she’s in that room now, listening to a story. But she is so aware of the outdoors and how alive she is. The sun is so warm and she is so hot.
“What happened to her?” Beckan says.
Tier drags his sleeve over his mouth. “My father ate her.” They’re quiet for a minute.
“She was your mother,” Tier says.
Maybe it is thanks to Beckan’s mother, somehow, that three hills later they find a cabin. Maybe she is looking out for them.
At first they think they’ve discovered a relic of another world. That there used to be a village here—maybe even a city—and they have uncovered it with the magic of the universe or Beckan’s mother. The cabin is certainly old; it sinks into the ground in a way the cottage at home does not, and the windows are sticky and the wood is soft around the edges of the glass.
But it is sturdy and clean, and, upon closer inspection, they find hot water and a wind chime and dust conspicuously absent on top of the stove and the table and a few of the beds.
The cabin is old, but someone has already discovered it.
She feels like she is playing make-believe. She and Josha, sheets over the kitchen table, napkins folded into hats on their heads, used to pretend they were creatures no one had discovered yet and they were living their lives together, apart from everyone, and the rest of the world would never know. This house could be the house they were always imagining.
“Maybe gnomes were here,” Rig says.
“Gnomes live underground,” Beckan says, before she stops and reminds herself that they would rather not.