Ferrum is a stupid, beautiful, unsimple city.
Tier helps Beckan into her jacket. “Josha still has one of my books,” he says. “Thick brown one. Smear of blood on the cover. Not real blood. It’s part of the picture.”
“The love story.”
“Yeah.”
“He’s not going to read it. I’ll get it from him.”
He says, “You can keep it longer if you want.”
“Scrap won’t read it. He doesn’t like fiction, just history. No love stories.”
“You?”
“I read it before, remember? It was the first one you gave me.”
“Josha should read it. Maybe it will help.”
She shakes her head. “He shouldn’t. Leave it.” He’s never even met Josha.
Tier leaves it. Beckan feels the coins in her pocket and wonders who is in charge here.
Then Tier says, “What do you think you’ll do? When our girls come back.”
When we don’t need you.
Because the traumatized girls aren’t going to be immediately ready to jump into bed with them, presumably, but Beckan doesn’t know exactly how that works down here, how much say the girls have.
They might still need Scrap, but they will not need her. They’ll have their own girls. Fairy girls are sort of worthless, is the thing.
She says, “The city needs to be rebuilt. I’ve been welding some again. I could help.” This seems unstupid, uncomplicated.
“You could fix some of our tunnels,” Tier says. “If you wanted to keep working for us.”
She doesn’t say anything.
“You’ve been working for us for a year,” he says.
“I’ve been working for you, and I didn’t exactly do it out of choice, anyway. If the tightropers had been looking for prostitutes, maybe things would have been different.”
“You’d rather have worked for them?”
They’ve had this conversation a hundred times. “You eat us,” she says.
She’s said it a hundred times.
It’s not that simple, she’d like for Tier to say. Just this once.
But he’s just quiet. “Yeah.”
“Yeah.”
She stands to leave, and he kisses her. He catches her halfway out the door, asks her to wait. For some reason, this is when she realizes that he hasn’t complained about the glitter the whole time she’s been here. Didn’t gripe that he’d have to throw out the sheets.
Didn’t worry about what Rig would say when she came home and found glitter all over his floor.
But then he says, “About Rig,” and takes a deep breath. “I’ve changed,” he says, very slowly, like he thinks he’s speaking a language Beckan won’t understand.
She thinks for one terrible moment that he is about to say that he is in love with her.
And then she wonders if that really would be so terrible.
And she thinks about the money in her skirt.
And about how small Scrap’s hands are.
When was it that she realized that Scrap had the smallest hands of anyone she’s ever seen? There was a moment. She feels the moment, somewhere in the nape of her neck, gnawing on her brain, begging to be remembered.
It was a moment.
But she doesn’t know when it was.
Tier says, “I’m not the same,” and snaps her back. “I can’t . . . how could I even be the same after this? I don’t even know how it looked up there.”
She nods a little. She tries to pretend a bit of her mind isn’t still somewhere else.
“What if I don’t know what to say to her?” he says.
“There isn’t anything you can say. So say anything.”
“I’ll say something wrong.”
“What if you don’t?”
“Will you help me?” he says.
“What?”
“Just help me think of some things to say. How to connect to her. You know what I’ve been through. You were here. And you’re, you know. A girl.”
A girl.
He called her a girl.
Not an empty-girl. Not a worthless, infertile, waste of space barren no baby little empty-girl.
Just a girl.
And then he says, “You owe me, you know?”
“What?”
“For looking for Cricket.”
Beckan breathes out. “I’m so fucking sick of looking for Cricket. We’re not finding anything. How many nights do I have to comb through sidewalk cracks and not find anything?”
“Please?”
“Yeah, I’ll help you. But I’m going now.” She always tells him. She is always the one to make the decision. To put one foot back into the hall.
“Thanks for coming,” Tier says, and he shrugs instead of saying goodbye. As soon as she steps into the hallway, she hears Tier brush glitter off his sheets and blow out the candles he lit for her.
She goes home without waiting for Scrap. Josha is puttering around the kitchen, opening and closing cupboards, boiling water.
At least he’s out of bed. “You doing all right?” she says.
He gives her a smile that doesn’t part his lips. “Fine. Need tea?”
“I’m fine. It’s warm out.”
“You’re always hot.”
You’re always cold. It’s her default response to both her fairy boys, nowadays.
But the truth is, Josha isn’t. There is nothing cold and will never be anything cold about Josha. The entire world can try to trap him and soak him and freeze him solid, and he will stand in the kitchen burning like a lantern.
His eyes rush up and down her body, checking for wounds. She casually covers the bite on her neck and doesn’t think he notices.
“Good,” he says, and turns back to his cup. As if he needs his full attention, needs the strength of everything in him, to lift that cup and take a sip.
She comes up behind him and holds him for a while. Josha is the simplest part of her world, and has been for so long. He loves her and she loves him back, and it has been a long time since she realized she would never sleep with him, and even longer since she stopped wanting to, and now they are like two very different, very unequal halves of what might have been one very amazing fairy. Maybe even a pretty one.
She clears her throat. “Do you think Scrap would hate me forever if I stole his red notebook?”
“The war chronicle? Here’s what blew up today?”
“Yeah.”
He shrugs. “There’s nothing secret in there. He’s all about that blue notebook lately anyway. It’s in the basement, I think. On the shelf snuggled up with the real books.”
She kisses his cheek before she scampers downstairs. He gives her the same smile.
In the basement, she trails her fingers over the spines of Scrap’s encyclopedias and history books. The novels they’ve borrowed from Tier are collapsed on top of themselves on the bottom shelf, because even now that Scrap reads them in guilty binges he later denies (because he is a pretentious fuck), he won’t put them up with his real books, his nonfiction books. She mumbles to herself, maybe just reading the titles, probably something about him being a pretentious fuck.
She finds his red notebook and flicks it open. Each day is marked with its date, and each has a few bland sentences spelling out the events of the day. There are no feelings, no opinions. No fictions.
Beckan has seen this notebook a hundred times, and she knows she was stupid to hope that there might be something she hadn’t seen. Something secret in here. Something to remind her of his small hands.
But this will do. She brings the notebook up to her room. She begins to read. She waits for something.
There is no narrative.
There is nothing about Scrap.
There is nothing about her.
There is dry, pointless, objective, timeless history. The kind fairies never thought they could write. Maybe she should be impressed that someone finally took the time to sit in one spot, to write, to record. Maybe this should enthr
all her.
She falls asleep reading.
In the middle of the night, she wakes up and the notebook is gone. She finds Scrap in the kitchen, bent over it, writing in a blue book, folding over corners in a textbook, a pretentious fucking candle lighting his work. She is embarrassed and angry.
“I can’t look at it?” she says.
“I need it right now. Reference.” He glances at the red notebook, moves his pen back to the blue, writes faster. He looks up at her face like he doesn’t recognize her.
She says, “Scrap, what the fuck.”
She can hear Josha somewhere behind her in the hallway, pacing.
“You can have it back later,” Scrap says.
Something is very wrong about the way she feels, and about Scrap, and about everything, so she shakes her head a little and leaves before it can scare her. She goes back to her room and digs under her bed until she finds Tier’s book of poetry, the one with the very long poems, the very romantic ones, and she brings it out to the kitchen and throws it on the table. Scrap flinches.
“Read something not as fucking boring,” she says. She doesn’t know why she’s so angry.
Look at me, she thinks.
Scrap picks it up.
“I have to write mine,” he says.
“Your new book’s probably boring too. Read this. Maybe you’ll learn something,” she says, and she leaves. You’re always cold echoes in her head. He is always so cold, in the hot kitchen with his cold histories.
4
(Throw away all of that. Start the book here.)
The day the tightropers came, Beckan and Josha, who was avoiding his lonely high-rise apartment in center city and drinking Beckan’s coffee, watched from the window of her father’s apartment as the tightropers spit their ropes out and slung them across the tops of their buildings, creating lines and knots and nets up in the sky. They talked about how rude it was for a new race to come by without any notice.
“I wonder how they taste,” Beckan said, which was a little cruel of her. But all she could do when a new race came by was watch the fairy men sleep with them and the gnomes lick their teeth, and make a friend who would, one way or another, be gone in a few months. The last ones were the pixies, years ago, and they left Ferrum three fairy babies. By now, one of those babies was destroyed and lost (dead) and the other two were missing three limbs between them.
She took her father off the counter and held his jar to the window so he could see the threads rapidly expanding across the sky. Had he lips and a tongue left, she knew he would have clucked the predictable notes about foreigners and peculiar habits and that this had never happened back when he had a body.
“I know about these guys,” she said. “They spit up ropes. Scrap writes about them. They were here a few hundred years ago. They die young.”
“When have you been talking to Scrap?”
“Just sometimes.”
Josha didn’t know Scrap well, but he resented him for knowing Beckan first and judged him for having a short name that sounded suspiciously gnome-like (but there was never anything else to call a little dark bit of a thing, with rumpled hair and a lopsided smile). Josha was a boy full of prejudices. It was something Beckan loved. She needed someone to weigh her down, and she needed tall, dashing Josha to have a very obvious flaw.
“So who are they?” Josha said.
“They’re tightropers,” Beckan said. “They . . .” She let her voice die out while she watched the tightropers haul armfuls of explosives over their ropes, from one rooftop to another. To hers. “They build tightropes,” she said, quietly.
“So,” Josha said, later that same morning, his feet up on the railing of Beckan’s balcony, his ass on the porch swing. They were watching the tightropers continue to string their lines and the fairies on the streets rushing around with their heads covered, like they were expecting rain. “So. Scrap?”
“He’s teaching me to read.” She could read, a little, but her letters were always jumbled and backward and she gave up at a young age. Her father complained about it sometimes, but fairies were lax about school. Beckan could learn whenever.
She had plenty of time.
“How charitable,” Josha said.
“Not really. He wants someone to read his stupid stories. So boring. All of them true. He’s desperate for a reader.”
“Cricket won’t read them?”
“You know Cricket?”
“I know of him,” Josha said. “Don’t they live together?”
“Yeah. I barely see him, though.” He was usually walking from room to room, most of the time humming. Scrap ordered him around.
Josha said, “So you’re really not crazy about him.”
“Scrap?”
“Either.”
“I told you.”
“Since you don’t know his family or anything. Don’t know anything about him.” He played with her welding torch and gave her a sloppy grin. “I mean, not like how you know me.”
She watched the tightropers instead of responding. Josha said “Cricket” quietly to himself a few times. “Cricket must be a genius if he avoids Scrap’s stories,” he mused.
“A coldhearted genius.”
“A genius is a genius. I don’t need another heart, anyway. My own is a bitch and a half.”
Then the first bombs went off, and they sprang toward each other as if they had previously been stretched apart. Beckan felt some heat on her cheek, like the city was breathing on her, but she couldn’t see where the bomb fell, and she couldn’t help but think that she expected them to be a little louder. That she had expected to feel a little more.
The day after that first bomb blast (of which there ended up being not so many; it was a quiet war, a starved war), Beckan took her father grocery shopping and found all the stores had been closed down in honor of a bomb that killed no one (no fairies, at least), nor was it meant to. The fairy women and their ancient missing limbs fretted and judged Beckan for her clothes, and Beckan was quickly bored and moved on.
The truth is that fairies are not very attached to the idea of possessions.
In what feels like an unkind bit of irony, given the lack of wings, fairies have a reputation for flightiness, for hastiness, for lack of compassion. It’s the explanation given for the large number of fairy cities with relatively low populations and no great amount of space in between. Fairies grow old, they grow bored, they leave and settle somewhere new and unnecessary. There is no real reason not to. They have plenty of time.
Ferrum is the oldest and the darkest and it serves as a token, a totem; here is proof that we are not heartless, here is proof that we are not without history, here is our iron city with its cobblestone streets and crackly electricity and a few more crumpled pages of literature than the other cities.
The fairies far away, they likely never think of Ferrum as anything other than a symbol.
They likely never think of it as someone’s home.
Before the war, it was the city’s secret: that it was loved, that it was beautiful, that it was their entire world and they were never unhappy with that. They liked that they knew who would eat them. They liked that no one outside the city would understand the balance they kept with the gnomes. There was grumbling, there was every once in a while a death of a baby on either side, but most of all there was this odd, buzzing type of harmony that no one who was flighty would ever understand.
It made sense.
Until, well.
Beckan goes to help with the renaissance project, of course, and she’s been painting for ten minutes when an arm, blue and pink and sparkly and scrawny, appears in her field of vision and dabs a spot of paint onto her nose. She turns around, and Scrap smiles at her.
She can’t believe he’s here, but more so she can’t believe how happy she is to see him. “You came.”
“Couldn’t miss this!”
“Oh, yeah. Painting. It’s really riveting stuff, lemme tell ya.”
“We should actua
lly rivet something. Would be a lot more interesting.” He makes stripes under his eyes and reaches out and drags the back of his hand across the damp surface of the hot-air balloon in the mural she’s been working on. Paint gets in his glitter and his glitter gets in the paint.
“That’s a fairy balloon,” he tells the tightroper women, who are watching in disgust. Even if they came for the fairies, they did not come for the glitter.
They work together for a while, laughing and pouring paint in each other’s hair. Beckan considers apologizing for their little fight last night but doesn’t, because she doesn’t think it will help, and because right now, getting along isn’t fake. They aren’t ignoring anything. This is just one of their sides. Beckan and Scrap are a lot of things, but they are never not Beckan and Scrap.
Scrap stabilizes himself on the wall with his half arm to reach a spot above his head, but very quickly it starts to shake.
“Does it hurt?” Beckan says. Quietly.
If he were a romantic hero, he would look at her immediately with a dashing smile and say, “No, of course not,” in a way that subtly reveals that it does hurt, very much, in fact, but he is strong and brave and rugged.
“Yeah,” he says. Straightforward. Calm. He takes the arm off the wall and tugs it back inside his sleeve. “It’s ugly, too.”
“It’s honestly really hideous.”
She probably shouldn’t have said that. (Did she say that?)
They smile at each other.
Their conversations are all wrong.
What the fuck is going on? The paper’s crumpling up and I can keep it straight and more later. Okay. I shouldn’t even be out of bed. I need to remember to take this part out. This is ridiculous. Fuck fuck fuck what’s wrong with me. I should be doing this in order. This is bad. I think. I think this is bad. Okay, I’m putting this down. More later. (Did that last bit really happen? Did she really smile?) More later.
Sorry about that.
After she saw the bomb site, that second day of the war, she went to Scrap’s manhole to meet him. His head slowly came into view as he hauled himself up in the gnomes’ elevator. He nodded to the gnome helping him pull (Leak, but she didn’t know his name then) and gave his usual tired smile to Beckan before he climbed up into the sunlight. Beckan offered her hand, which he took without pausing.