He says, “The problem is, with regards to the war, I understand you and you understand me, and everything else in the world points toward Rig.”
“I don’t want you,” she says. Her voice doesn’t sound like hers. “I point toward Rig, too.”
“Except—”
“We had different wars too,” she says. Hard. “No one did it like me and Scrap and Josha and Cricket.”
Tier studies himself in the mirror, then frowns, pulls his sleeve over his hand, and scrubs at the glass. “When your fairies come back, the war will be common fairy experience. Scrap can let them read that war he wrote, and then the elders will take the stories and insert their own little anecdotes. Lie about it so it seems real. Run away and find new fairy cities and tell them their valiant war stories.”
“Don’t.”
“Don’t what?”
“Act like all fairies run away, like it’s some given. Because I’m pretty sure there’s a fairy girl sitting on your bed right now.”
“Yeah.”
“Why do you always bring him up?” she says.
“Who?”
“Scrap.”
Tier doesn’t say anything.
“The jealous thing?” she says. “Do you pay extra for that, or what?”
“Noted.” He bites off the word.
And she looks down. “Rig will be here any minute.” She stands up. “Grab my face again and then I’ll go.”
He grabs her face again, and they keep working until the gnomes announce the women coming back, and then she slips out, arms around herself, and does not look for the one face she would recognize. She reminds herself, over and over again, that Rig will not recognize her, but she can’t quite believe it.
Josha’s favorite memory isn’t very old at all. Four months ago, in the dead of winter, bombs rolling in the mines like thunder, they sat in the kitchen with flashlights and cups of hot water and laughed themselves through card games. Cricket found a bit of bug-infested flour under the sink, and they drowned the bugs and filled napkins with wet flour and threw them at each other. They made Beckan scream with half-dead bugs in her face, and Josha picked up Scrap and threw him in the bathtub with a bucketful of white, pasty water. They all ended up coated and disgusting with sore stomachs from laughing, and they stood on chairs in the kitchen and pounced to squish the bugs flat. Then Cricket stopped them all and crawled across the floor with a cup and a jack of spades, and he gathered up all the live bugs and put them in a jar by the window. They lit up. They were fireflies.
“Beckan.”
It’s the tightroper boy. He hangs upside down from an ankle, his head only inches above hers.
“Why are you walking alone this late?” he says.
She shakes her head.
He says, “Shit, you’re brave. Do you know that?”
She hadn’t stopped shaking her head, but she does, now, very slowly.
He gives his ankle a few tugs and clatters to the ground with a noise like a xylophone. When he straightens up, he is half as wide as Beckan but several inches taller, and she can’t stop looking at his hair, black and thin and free, like something spilled on him.
“Hi, Beckan. I’m Piccolo.”
“How do you know my name?” she says, which is stupid, because there are three fairies and they are celebrities. He doesn’t answer, which she takes as a compliment.
She tilts her head up and tries to find where he was hanging, but she’s so quickly disoriented by the hundreds of threads, all nearly translucent and thinner than her fingers.
Piccolo looks up with her.
“You’ve never been up there?” he says.
“I don’t know how. How do you balance?”
He picks a foot up and shows it to her. Where she has five toes, he has two, dividing his foot in half with a narrow slit. “We slide,” he says.
“But me.”
“You hold on. And you can slide, with practice.”
She takes a step back. “Thank you. I’m all right.” She does not want to hold on to anyone.
“I’m not going to hurt you.”
“Yes. I know, maybe you won’t.” She shakes her head. “But my friends are waiting for me.”
“Scrap’s still underground.”
“Oh.”
“You really want to walk home alone?”
“Is that an offer?”
He shakes his head. “I can’t. I can’t wander off, I’m ridiculously controlled, it’s this whole thing.” He chews on the inside of his cheek. “It’s bullshit. Anyway. But I’ll wait here with you if you want.”
And all of a sudden, she trusts him. There’s something about a boy who isn’t allowed to wander off. There’s something about a boy in a sky who has limits.
“You can wait with me,” she says.
He nods. She shifts so she is next to him, and they stand together in the darkness. His way of breathing is louder than hers. She can’t believe how tall he is.
“You know,” she says, and he jumps. “You know,” she says again, “We could see better from up there, maybe?”
“We could.”
“So.” It’s Josha’s speech pattern, the unaccompanied so, but it seems in place here. She feels like Josha would be better at this than she is. It’s hard to be herself around new creatures. She always forgets how she is.
His face breaks into a smile, and then hers, and she looks up at the stars and at Piccolo spitting a new thread into his hand, and something inside her pounds like a drum.
He yanks a length of thread out of his throat, bites it off, and whips one end up to the sky. It sticks.
He offers his hand. She takes it so quickly that it isn’t until her fingers are in his that she realizes she cannot remember the last time she did anything with this little thought.
She thinks about Tier, probably holding hands with Rig. The different secret handshakes Cricket had with Scrap and Josha. About how Scrap will sometimes grab her knuckles when they’re walking home at night and something moves and they are afraid.
“Just hold on to me,” Piccolo says. He moves Beckan’s hands to his shoulders, slips the thread between his fingers, and zips up the line with Beckan on his back. The thread glides through his hands. Air whistles down Beckan’s throat—this is so fast. Has she ever gone this fast?
She watches the building beside her, the ruined mess of a skyscraper, as row after row of windows pass and disappear beneath them. It is so much higher than when she used to go up to the roof of her apartment building, before everything, to get a good view of the sunset while she melted scrap metal into sculptures. She’d dance around while her metal cooled and feel free, as if that was something otherwise hard to feel.
“It’s so blue up here,” she says.
“Hmm?”
“I thought it would be black.”
“Nah,” he says. “Not this time of night.”
“Nah?”
He laughs. “Yeah. Nah. Like no.”
“I’ve never heard that before.”
“You guys all talk really pretty.”
“Thank you.”
Piccolo says, “Hold on here,” and they surface through a hole in the massive net. The threads feel like water on Beckan’s skin, and they only cling for a fraction of a second before they let go.
“Is my glitter going to get all over . . . ?”
“You’re fine. I don’t mind. You’re safe now. Here, sit.”
She blinks the last threads out of her eyes. Around them, the net spins into a floor, with edges that curl up like the edges of a bowl. Everything under her gives and bounces and scares her. The air feels thicker here, and she smells smoke.
“Where is everyone?” she says.
“By the fire. See?”
She follows his finger across the sky, buildings and buildings away, where a low-slung hammock hosts the fire she could barely see from the ground. She can see a few tightropers laughing, but she can’t hear it.
“There really aren’t many
of us here, you know?” he says. “Just army. And we lost a lot of guys.”
“You’re in the army?”
“No, my dad’s a general. I’m a messboy.”
“What’s a messboy?”
“I clean up after them and stuff. Spills and things, after meals, latrine.”
“That sounds . . .”
“Oh, it’s shit. My dad volunteered me.” He flashes her a smile and flops down on the web. “We don’t get along. You can walk here. It’s packed together. Thick.”
She takes a few careful steps. Her feet feel so wide.
“Here.” He stands up and ties a thread around her wrist. “Lifeline. It won’t snap if you fall. You’ll hang.”
“Like you were.”
“Mmmhmm.”
His fingers are cool on her wrist. Her glitter gets all over his skin, but he doesn’t brush it off.
He doesn’t seem to mind.
He’s good at messes, though.
“My dad’s here,” she says, to share something with him. She roots around her bag but doesn’t find the jar. “Oh. I left him at home.”
“Your dad . . . is really small?”
“He’s in a jar. There’s not a lot of him.”
“Oh. I’m sorry.”
She shakes her head. “He’s alive.”
“Aren’t you guys always alive?”
“He communicates. Blinks. That’s how we know.”
“So if he couldn’t blink at you, then he’d be dead?”
She doesn’t like this conversation, but she knows he can’t tell. “If I couldn’t talk to him, he’d be dead.”
“That sounds arbitrary.”
“We’re an arbitrary species.” She knows how to be glib about this the same way she knows to ignore the feeling of her glitter falling to the ground.
“Do you like it up here?”
“I can’t see anything.”
He points toward the edge of the web. “Lead the way.”
She does, on her hands and knees to feel a bit more secure. She sits at the edge of the web and holds a thread slung above her head for support. She checks the line tied to her wrist again and again.
“Stop worrying,” she whispers. He looks up. She says, “Tell me to stop worrying.”
He laughs. “No way.”
And she looks up and down and out at the world.
Nothing is gray from here. The city sparkles with blues, and she sees pockets of light from streetlamps and a few buildings still lit throughout the city.
“Are all of those your shops?” she says.
“And headquarters and stuff. There’s an office just for planning rebuilding. Selling paintbrushes and stuff.”
She finds the light of their cabin. “That’s us. I live nearly outside the city now. But I grew up right in the middle.” She tries to point, but doesn’t know where to start. There’s a yellow glow rising up, as if something underground is breathing out gas. “What is that?”
“Something the gnomes do,” he says. “No idea what. Every few days it pops up. Glittery smoke, look at it.”
“You can’t see it from down there. . . .”
“Hmm. Dunno.”
She shakes her head a little.
“You’ve never seen them do anything weird?” he says.
“I . . . go to one room down there. I don’t wander. I don’t even know what’s on the other floors. Scrap does.”
“I guess he would have mentioned if it were important.”
She nods, though she isn’t sure.
“Because, I mean, he clearly told you exactly what it’s like up here.”
She realizes he’s being sarcastic.
“He’s my friend,” she says.
“Oh, yeah, he seems like a good guy, I wouldn’t worry about it.”
Now she can’t tell if he means it. There’s something about his voice that catches her in a place that isn’t prepared to be touched. He talks too quickly or too steadily. He doesn’t trip over his words. He possibly doesn’t think enough.
The last one she knew who didn’t think enough . . . well, it didn’t work out well for him.
As if reading her mind, Piccolo says, “I saw him, Scrap. And you. The day the gnome king died. And that other one, Cricket?”
“Yes.”
“I just . . . I’ve been interested in you guys since then. I don’t know. In you.”
And she doesn’t wonder why her, and she doesn’t wonder what his watching means, and she doesn’t spiral into flashbacks about that day (she doesn’t she doesn’t) she just thinks, What kind of interested?
“Anyway, I just wondered what you were like. And there’s the tall one. Josha? Same color as you. Is it okay to say this stuff? The color thing? I’m not trying to be controversial.”
“No, it’s fine. That’s Josha.”
“He’s the one who applied for our army.”
“He wanted to be helpful. He doesn’t trick like us.”
But it wasn’t just that. Josha was desperate and detached and alone and all he wanted was a gun on his shoulder and someone to stand beside him and squeeze his arm and tell him he was doing a good job.
Instead he was alone every day in that cabin.
“They didn’t give him a fucking chance,” Piccolo says. “Laughed him away. Just ’cause he’s not a tightroper. Fucking moronic, all this racial stuff, the prejudices . . .” He shakes his head. “I look exactly like all the other tightropers, and I don’t think anyone’s ever felt less like . . . anyway. Less like anything but a messboy. Anyway. Do you like it?” He gestures out toward the view.
“Yes. Absolutely, yes.” She shakes her head a little. “Yes isn’t the right word.”
“Try yeah.”
She laughs. “We say yeah. Just . . . not when we’re talking to strangers.”
“Oh yeah?”
She bites her lip and looks at him.
“Yeah,” she says.
Something stirring underneath them breaks the moment, and she sees Scrap walking toward home, alone. He looks small but not scared. He’s limping a little.
“I have to go,” she says.
“No problem.” He doesn’t try to help her stand. She doesn’t need it.
“I’ll . . . see you again?”
“I’ll be here. You ever want to come back up . . . you know? You should come back up. Just—”
Scrap is walking faster. “I have to go,” Beckan says.
“Just that it’s your city. So you more than anyone deserve to be up here to see it.”
“You sound like a fairy.”
“I wish.” He laughs. “Get outta here, kid.”
He leads her to a hole in the net and talks her through lowering herself down on the threads. She shakes the whole time, and twenty feet from the ground she looks down and sees Scrap underneath her, watching, his arms crossed. Ten feet later, the rope around her wrist won’t stretch anymore. She loosens it and lands on top of Scrap. She feels as useless as a pillow. Somehow he catches her with one arm.
She’s on her feet as if he had never held her. She dusts herself off.
“What the fuck?” Scrap says. Gentle. Curious. Suspicious. A lot of things.
“What do the gnomes do underground?”
“Sleep, eat, us—”
“The yellow smoke.”
They stand there and stare at each other. It’s so much darker than it was half an hour ago.
“We should go home,” Scrap says.
“Yeah. Let’s go home.”
Back to the cottage. Away from her city.
Her city.
When they get home, Josha is putting together an old puzzle at the kitchen table. Scrap, who Beckan had thought would hole up in his room all night with a cigarette (he gets them from the gnomes) and a bad mood, sits right down next to him and starts to help.
“I’m bad at this,” Josha says, after a minute.
“Beckan’s amazing. Beckan, c’mere, fix it?” Scrap takes his hand off the table and pu
lls at the bandage on the rest of his other arm. It’s been so slow to heal.
She sits and tugs apart the pieces they forced and clicks the real ones in place. Josha and Scrap watch her, fascinated like little boys. She blows glitter off a piece. Josha laughs at Scrap sneezing, and Scrap shoves his head to the side when he stands up.
“Are you hungry?” he says.
Josha and Beckan nod, together, their heads bent over the puzzle still.
Scrap digs through the cupboards and announces, “I’m making bread!”
Their heads snap up like they’re on strings. “Noooo you’re not,” Beckan says. “No no no, you’re not.” They’ve been living on stale, molded pieces, a new loaf once a month, maybe, through the war, but the loaf they have now is only three-quarters done and almost still soft enough to chew. Making new bread now sounds decadent, incredible, reckless, peaceful.
He smiles big, and soon the whole kitchen smells hot and deep. Josha shows them pictures that he drew today, and they aren’t nearly as good as the ones he used to do (and he’s never been as good as Tier) but it is so good to see him drawing again. They knock their heads together and Josha makes them laugh with stories about Cricket that they pretend they don’t already know, and Scrap sends Beckan secret smiles across the table and lets himself trace shapes and write letters on her arm, lets himself daydream, and maybe this is how things get better, Beckan thinks, maybe one loaf of bread, maybe one piece of the puzzle at a time.
Scrap’s hand on her feels warm, burning.
“Aren’t you eating?” Josha says to Scrap, when both he and Beckan are full.
Scrap rests his head on the table. “I’m not feeling very good.”
Beckan stops eating. “You can’t get sick.”
“I know.”
Last time Scrap was sick, it was from a bad reaction to a drug one of the gnomes had slipped under his tongue. He threw up for hours while Cricket held him and made jokes and told Beckan and Josha not to worry, he knew his cousin, he got sick quickly and dramatically and it would be okay. But now Cricket isn’t here.
“You can’t get sick,” Beckan said. “We don’t know what to do.”
That night, Beckan finds Scrap in the basement with the blue notebook and a fever, writing so fast his hand is shaking.
“Hey,” she says, gently. “Come on. Up.”