Tier spits her toe on the table and comes around with Rig and holds her for a while. They have plenty of time to share the little thing. It isn’t going anywhere.
Her foot is wet with blood and somehow this soothes her. Tier takes a wet washcloth and very carefully rinses her foot with cold water, guiding all the glitter away from the wound. “We really do not need you to get an infection,” he says.
“I won’t die,” she says, faintly, with the glorious thought that Tier does not want her to die. Her heart drums and the pain energizes her as if she has eaten something too.
When she’s feeling a little better, she finds it doesn’t take much concentration for her to be able to make the toe move, walk around the table, dance a little, and they all laugh together, so weakly. They discuss whether to cook the toe before realizing she will feel it, and they shake their heads hard and turn off the stove and put Beckan to bed. She thinks the pain will keep her up, but she sleeps for three hours with dreams of monsters and infections and severed arms, and she screams in her sleep when they eat her toe, feeling every bit of broken skin and crushed bone as cleanly as if it were still attached. They are blissfully quick. They love her; they were just so hungry.
A clean cold washcloth against her face, and she opens her eyes and Rig is there.
Beckan doesn’t feel her toe inside Rig’s stomach, she doesn’t think, but she doesn’t really know how that would feel.
“Hey,” Rig says, gently. She sits on the side of the bed and mops Beckan’s face. “How are you feeling?”
She feels young and sick, and like her father has kept her home from playgroup until her fever goes down.
Rig has lit one small candle on the nightstand. The rest of the room is a very soft kind of dark. Beckan’s vision is blurry, but she can make out the stars through the window, like a hundred thousand slits of light. They are the same stars she saw when she had ten toes.
“Sip,” Rig says, and hands her a glass of water. “And try sitting? I’ll prop you up.”
Beckan drinks and lets Rig ease her back into a stack of pillows. Something sweaty and foggy drains from her head down to her sore foot. “I’m better,” she says.
Rig laughs a little, and Beckan smiles.
“Okay,” Beckan says. “But I do feel better.”
“Good.” Rig tucks Beckan’s hair behind her ear. “You’re a mess.”
“Mmm. How was my toe?”
Rig gives a nervous laugh. “How should I answer that?”
“Honestly.”
“Honestly, it was tough but sweet. Kind of like its owner.”
Beckan rolls her eyes, but she smiles. “Glitter tastes horrible, I know.”
“No. Like electricity. But you must be so hungry.” Her hand remains on Beckan’s face, cupping her chin now.
Beckan says, “Now there’s a little less of me to feed.”
Rig laughs again and says, “Oh, Beckan,” and she leans into her and puts her arms around her. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I’m sorry. I’d let you eat my toes.”
Beckan rests her forehead against Rig’s. “I’ll get by. Eat grass. I’m so tired.”
“We should get you home,” she says.
“We don’t know where home is. Maybe I’ll never go home.”
It starts to rain, hard, and when Rig gets up to close the window, Beckan wraps herself up in her own arms. “I’m scared,” she says.
Rig sits back down on the bed. “That’s okay,” she says. “I’m scared of everything.”
They sit looking at each other for a long minute, until Beckan leans in and kisses her.
This part is going to sound like some sort of irritating fantasy on my part, but I swear this really happened.
They start quietly, seriously, undressing each other with nervous precision, but as they go, they start to smile and laugh, touch hair, fingers, lips. Rig picks Beckan up and pushes her against the wall. They kiss down to their bones.
Rig is soft and smells like earth, and she kisses Beckan like she is special instead of like she is a nine-toed prostitute. They tangle their hair and lie down, side by side. They silently decide not to care whose body is whose. They touch each other and themselves, they make sounds without apology, they hold all their flaws between their bodies and cradle them with each kiss.
Which is not to say that it is entirely gentle, painless, unremarkable. They gasp, they claw, Beckan begs Rig to rest her teeth against her neck. They knock elbows and hip bones.
It isn’t love, exactly. It’s that they are dear to each other, and that they have been careful with each other in a way the rest of the world has not. Rig has been under the ground and high above their heads but she has never been here, on the land, steady, and Beckan has been a dirty little secret and a kiss in an elevator but never anything but an empty everyone wants to fill.
It is somehow a kind of sex that brings them closer to everyone else as well. It is shared, it is equal, and it is not the powerless thing Rig thought she wanted, but something so much more. It is power shared between them, stretched from one to the other like a tightrope, like a power line, like electricity. And to Beckan, it feels like a promise. That her life is not over, it is just over in the way that it was. That she will get out alive. That there is a whole world out there with stories and sweet kisses and someone with small hands and poetry about those small hands.
Kisses, fingers, nineteen toes, they remind each other, teach each other for the first time maybe, how to feel safe.
Beckan wakes up in the morning to sunlight, a dull pain in her foot, and mattress-squeaking, mouth-breathing, voice-breaking sex next door. She expects to feel jealous, at least momentarily, but all she feels is panic that she won’t get her pillow over her mouth before she starts squealing and laughing. She does, barely. She kicks her nine-toed feet in the air and laughs and feels every bit of herself. For a few hours, she isn’t hungry. She rolls in her own glitter.
(I wanted to write Rig’s point of view here, something about the conversation she must have had with Tier, something even about how their room looked, how they lay when they slept, how it feels to be this woman in this story. I tried. But I can’t do it. There are things I don’t know, and I’m not going to take those from her. I can pretend to be a lot of things, but I cannot pretend to be this girl. This woman. I hope you write a book someday, Rig.)
Tier digs up what seems to be an onion and simmers it on the stove for Beckan, and she nibbles on it in her rocking chair. She has finished all the books, so she watches their lamb, who gallops around, gnawing greedily at the grass and lapping up every drop of water Rig pours into the hole Tier dug for her.
Beckan heals well, and soon she can walk around with nothing more than a vague limp. It helps that any time she wobbles close to Rig or Tier, they gather her into their arms like she is the most precious thing.
“Do you need more?” she asks, weakly.
“No,” they say. “Absolutely not.”
It’s midday, and she is chewing on a blade of grass and downing cup after cup of water when she hears something. A voice.
Calling, “Miss Beckan! Miss Beckan!”
“Tier!” she yells.
He comes running. Rig clambers onto Tier’s shoulders to see better. And there it is, a puffy white shape coming over their hill. “It’s a sheep!” Rig says.
They’re so excited, it takes Beckan a minute to remember that she heard a voice.
“Is there someone with it?” she says. “Anyone?”
Rig narrows her eyes, and a few seconds later she breathes out. “Oh, Tier. It’s Shug.”
Beckan uses Tier’s elbow to pull herself to her feet. “Who’s Shug?”
“A gnome,” Tier says. “This kid.”
He isn’t just any kid, Beckan realizes when he’s a few feet closer. He’s the boy she wouldn’t give meat to, the one who bit Scrap’s leg down in the mines the day Scrap decided to harden up.
The look on his face makes her believe he doesn’t recogn
ize her, which is silly, because with four—three—fairies in the city, who could forget them? “Are you Miss Beckan?” he calls.
Beckan and Tier yell at him to come up and he does, his sheep at his heel. Rig jumps off Tier’s back and hugs Shug hard, like a mother. Beckan hates herself for being surprised that the two of them have a relationship she never knew about, as if a few visits to the mines and a few days alone with Rig and Tier makes her privy to everything that happens underground.
“What are you doing out of the city?” Rig says. “Oh, baby, do you have food?”
“Of course,” Shug says, and he takes a parcel of jerky out of his pocket. Rig and Tier take one small piece each and give the rest to Beckan. It is dry and tastes like bugs and Beckan devours every bit of it.
Tier brings Shug a glass of water, and Shug says, “So glad I found you, Miss Beckan. Mr. Scrap would be so mad at me if I hadn’t—”
“Scrap?”
Scrap is alive.
Scrap is alive. (Of course I am, Beckan, who the fuck do you think is writing this?)
“Yes ma’am. I’m his messenger, see.”
She bites her lip when she smiles. Of course Scrap would pick this boy. Not because Shug owed him something to make up for the hole in his leg, but because Scrap needed someone he knew would not let go.
Shug says, “It was so hard even getting out of the city for the day! Everything’s crazy. Had to sign a pass to get out and I’m not even in trouble for anything! If they knew I was working for Mr. Scrap, though—”
Beckan can’t find the word what, but Rig can.
“What do you mean, sign a pass?” Rig says.
“They’ve gone crazy,” he says. “Everyone’s crazy. All these rules, everyone doing blood tests and filling out paperwork and registering. All these records being pulled, everyone giving . . . what’s it called? Talking about everyone else. Having someone write it down. Here’s this thing I did and who else was there.”
“Statements,” Tier says.
“Yes. Statements.” he says to Beckan. “I’m very glad to meet you,” he says to Beckan. “You’re a fairy!”
He really doesn’t remember. She forgives him. He looks different, too.
“They’ve got the rest of you,” he says. “The ones who were in the city. Gathered them up. The big tall one, he got off okay. He has to pick up rubble and sweep or something for a while. He and that dark, scary tightroper.”
“So Scrap took care of them.”
“Scrap? Scrap can’t take care of anyone! Scrap can’t take care of himself! He’s the one in trouble in the big trial today, that’s why I had to come get you! He sent me a message. They have him all tied up, see, but I went to see him and he told me to go out and see if I could find you! I’ve been leaving every day looking for you. Just in time!”
“Scrap’s in trouble?”
“For killing Crate!”
Tier grabs Beckan’s hand.
Beckan figures out a few things very quickly.
Scrap is not the king of anything.
Some group now has enough power to grab Scrap, try him, and convince everyone to come and see.
That group is not her pack.
If it is the tightropers, everything is going to be okay. If they decide to punish Scrap, they will lock him away. And a fairy can only be locked away for so long. Everyone who has jailed him will die or forget or give up, and he will sit in his cage until it rots away, and she will read him books through the bars. It will be tragic and romantic and he will write about it.
If it is the gnomes, they will eat him.
Every last scrap.
“Who?” Beckan says. “Who’s putting him on trial?”
Shug looks at her like he’s crazy.
“The fairies,” he says. “You didn’t know the fairies were back?”
See, the tightropers didn’t plan for the fairies to come back. They thought there wasn’t a chance that they would.
Beckan won’t ever be sure why they did. Maybe they realized that they wouldn’t have to do much of anything to get the city back. The numbers were on their side. There just weren’t that many tightropers. There just weren’t that many gnomes.
Her theory, as you’ll see later, is that the fairies were planning to come back all along. That they left so that the tightropers could take out some gnomes for them, and the whole time they were waiting for everyone to thin each other out and let their guard down and then they were going to fly in (so to speak) and the rest of the tightropers would move on like they were supposed to and the fairies would have a safer city, at the end of all of it, without having to do any of the dirty work themselves. And sometimes, when Beckan’s in a particularly conspiratorial mood, she’ll decide that the fairies planned the whole thing, that they intentionally got the tightropers to come by leaking some information that they were oppressed and so weak and so afraid, and oh yes, have you seen how beautiful our city is, let’s throw in a line about our accessible waterways and diamond mines and steel production, wouldn’t you like to come save us?
But there’s another theory, and it’s that none of it, nothing a single one of those fucking flighty fairies did, was planned. They left because they wanted to and came back because they wanted to, because fairies are impulsive, fairies are spoiled, and fairies have eternities to learn to be better and they never do. The fairies felt like coming back, so they did. And they felt like winning without fighting. So they did.
So that’s another theory. Who knows, really. This isn’t a textbook.
Anyway. The fairies came back.
Shug agrees to bring Beckan back to the city. He also agrees to leave Tier and Rig his sheep.
Tier kisses Beckan’s cheek and Rig hugs her tightly. Tier says, “Be careful on that foot, okay?”
“What about you guys?”
“We’ll be fine.”
They will be. She knows that. She can picture them with a whole family of sheep, a field of flowers, sex, and stories they remember, and stories they make up. She knows that they would have kept her safe for a long time, but she also knows that those sheep are not ready for slaughter, so eventually they would have eaten her, and it is strange to know both of these things at once, but she is getting used to it.
And with each careful step behind Shug, she thinks less and less about them and more and more of the glint of glitter, the hiss of yellow smoke, the smell of her city.
This city that is hers to protect and hers to mold. She can do it. She and her pack can save everything.
It’s their job. It’s their burden.
They approach Ferrum from the North End, where the farms are still recovering from their long abandonment. And here they are, at what should be their usual stone walls.
But no, these walls are new; these walls are blocking their old walls. Smooth metal with dark, sharp wire, warnings of alarms, fairy guards (fairies, fairies) stationed on either side of a solid, locked gate.
A year of a sprawling war has made her forget how quickly things can happen.
“Shug,” the gnome boy tells one of the guards. “And this is Beckan Moloy.”
“She isn’t in uniform.”
“She’s been away.”
The guard puts a stamp of one color on Shug’s hand and another on Beckan’s. “Bring her straight to the hospital. Don’t delay.”
“Won’t. Thank you, sir.”
The fairies put keys in the locks and turn heavy wheels on the ground. Beckan leans into Shug and says, “Where did these walls come from?”
“They’ve put the gnomes to work,” he says. “Put everyone to work.”
“I can’t go to the hospital,” she says. “I’m not sick, I don’t need . . . I have to get to the courthouse.”
Shug says, “No, you can’t go anywhere looking like that.”
“Like what?”
The gates open, so slowly, and Beckan steps through and sees her city. She sees glitter, pounds of it, clinging to hundreds of fairies.
E
ach fairy in a gray uniform. Each gnome in blue. Each tightroper in white.
And everyone is on the streets. The tunnels are still open at the tops, and guards man the sides to stop anyone from jumping in. The gnomes all look so uncomfortable above the ground, their bare feet on the cobblestone.
There are no tightropes, just long, lean boys and men and women and children in white uniforms slouching against the buildings, snapping to attention when the fairies walk by, sweeping. A whole race of messboys (and if Beckan hadn’t recently been part of a three-member race, she’s not sure she would even count these tightropers as their own. There are so few left. And so many gnomes who just look so not-starving. The math is not hard.)
There is no one she recognizes.
There are uniforms and streets she knows and buildings that have been rebuilt since she left, but rebuilt shinier and newer and brighter than they once were, and the sun shines on everything and hurts her eyes, and she recognizes no one.
A whole city of uniforms and clean slates and blank faces.
“You won’t get anywhere unsorted,” Shug says.
This isn’t her city.
How could this have happened so quickly?
How could she have let this happen?
15
Beckan makes Shug leave her and walks to the hospital herself. She knows where it is. It’s where she kissed Scrap and his fever all those years ago.
The last time she saw it was the day Josha was burned. They were going to pick up Cricket together and a bomb—from aboveground or below ground or somewhere, did it really matter?—went off at the next block and destroyed the hospital. Josha, like an idiot, like a boy who had stayed inside the whole war, ran toward it to see if anyone was hurt. No one was, besides him, and that was just a shrapnel burn on the side of his face, but it was enough to make him terrified and angry and desperate to join the fight, to end it, to get hurt for a reason.
She passes a gnome pushing a broom behind a fairy. “How’s Tier?” he mumbles as she passes.
“Safe.”
He nods to himself and continues. She realizes that a part of her was afraid of him.