She takes the book and puts it away. “No,” he says. “No, I need it.” She caves and gives it back. He clutches it to his chest like a baby.
She pulls him up and to the kitchen and pours him glass after glass of water. His teeth chatter.
“You’re an idiot,” she says. “How high is your fever?” She puts her hand on his forehead. He is immediately icy with sweat and then quickly burning, scalding hot.
He doesn’t say anything, and her mind and her eyes travel to his stump of an arm. He pulls away as if she’d touched it.
She sighs. “Is it infected?”
“I don’t know.”
“Scrap.”
“I mean it, I honestly don’t know. I need to write.”
“Yeah, what’s with that ‘how to write fiction’ book anyway?” she says, mostly just to distract him as she keeps edging him along, but he doesn’t answer.
She takes him to the bathroom and sits him on the floor. She’s used his first-aid kit a hundred times, but only for little things—a broken finger that time Cricket was shoved, a burn on Josha’s face from a bomb too close the day before he decided to apply for the army, various whoring injuries of Scrap’s. She hasn’t touched his arm since it was bitten off. It’s been his own project.
She unwraps it. A sliver of skin falls to the ground and keeps shivering. She pets it gently and Scrap calms a little.
He can still feel that arm.
“I think they’re planning something,” he mumbles.
“What?”
He’s breathing so hard. “That they want something from me. They won’t say . . .”
“Okay, you have a fever. Calm down.” She leaves her hand on his back.
His arm has healed more than she thought, but the jagged cuts of the teeth are red and swollen. She sees thin skin that sparkles. “The glitter’s in it,” she says. “It got in the cuts.”
She wets a towel with peroxide and dabs his arm. He doesn’t cry out, just grits his teeth to make them stop rattling and pushes his forehead into the wall.
“If you weren’t sick, you’d be doing this,” she says. Because she knows it will comfort him.
“I know.”
“You don’t need me. You could do it all on your own.”
Then he starts to cry.
“No, no, stop.” Her lips shake. “No, stop. You don’t cry.”
He wipes his face, hard.
“No, I cry when you cry. Don’t cry. Please stop.”
He does.
“I’m done now,” she says. “It’s clean, all done. Tomorrow I’ll go underground and get medicine and you’ll be okay.”
Then he leans over the toilet and throws up.
“Don’t cry.” Her voice breaks. “Don’t cry. I’ll fix it.”
Josha stands outside the bathroom and listens. He wants to be close, but the bathroom is small and so is his throat, trying to breathe, trying to swallow, reminding himself over and over that Crate is dead and nobody knows where Scrap’s arm is (or if maybe there are bits of Cricket, bloodboneglitteranything clinging to it) and that there is nothing he can do. But if Crate weren’t already dead. Shit, if Crate weren’t already dead, the things Josha would do to that fucking gnome king. The things he would do.
But there is nothing left for him to do.
He hasn’t done a single fucking thing for his pack.
The problem is that he alternates between wanting to hug Scrap and wanting to hit him, and hearing Scrap weak and desperate pushes him firmly and horribly into the latter category. Because there it is, the reason for all of his anger, the reason everything is fucked up: Scrap was weak. Scrap turned Cricket into a prostitute. Scrap got his Cricket killed.
Scrap wanted someone to go down into the dark with him and he took the only two things Josha ever loved and one never came back.
“It’s going to be okay, buddy,” he calls through the door, and Beckan says, “Hear that? Josha is always looking out for us.”
What is there to be scared of, anyway, from a sick fairy? They do not die. (That is not how they die.)
I can’t remember much more of this part, anyway.
6
After that first bomb, Beckan spent a week and a half wondering where the war was, because she heard just faint gunfire far away and saw no carnage.
“Then there’ll probably be a big meeting with all the fairies,” Josha said. “And they’ll tell us what’s going on.” Fairies love big meetings.
“I guess we have to go.”
“You don’t sound like you’re dying to know what’s going on.”
She pushed a handful of her hair back and put her welding goggles back on. “Doesn’t feel real.”
But it was only a few days after that when the fairies gathered for a meeting in the school building on the south end. The flier plastered to the front door of Beckan’s apartment assured them that there would be protection at the event, and sure enough, when she approached the auditorium with Josha, two fairies stayed by the double doors, longer shotguns than Beckan had ever seen slung over their shoulders.
She’d fired a gun, once, the day a set of gnome teeth snapped a few inches from her arm on her way home from Josha’s house. She was nine. Her father, still intact, took her on the tram to the edge of the city, and they proceeded on foot to the outskirts of the farmland, where sheep grazed on dandelions. He held her arms in place and pushed her finger down on the trigger. “Next time you do this alone,” he mumbled in her ear. “I’m not your safety net.” He kissed her cheek as the recoil launched them back.
He helped her carry the sheep back to the city. They handed it to the gnome clearing trash by the hospital. He took it and promised to remember her face, and they didn’t eat Beckan that day.
“Nice guns,” she told the fairies by the door, with a coy little smile, even though they were much too old for her. Josha smacked her. He’d learned to shoot when he was barely out of diapers. Guns were a lot of things for Josha, he told her a few days later. Sexy was not one of them.
Inside, three hundred fairies milled around with juice and bread, mumbling to each other, comparing old battle scars, telling stories of the dozens and hundreds of wars they’d all lived through (most of them lying). Beckan knew many of their ages by heart, as a matter of principle. She knew that the youngest was three, the oldest was four hundred forty-seven and a half (kept in an envelope) and that there were only four who were intact.
Beckan, Scrap, Cricket, Josha. All of them sitting together, somewhat coincidentally, waiting for the meeting to start. All of them without a scratch.
Four. And none of them over twenty, because how long could any fairy truly escape being torn up?
Not very long. Not even in Ferrum, and if you couldn’t do it in Ferrum you couldn’t do it anywhere.
The thing is that Ferrum was the only place that had never been abandoned.
The thing is that those four thought that that really meant something.
Jenamah, the oldest fairy in Ferrum who could still speak, stood on a chair and called the meeting to order. Scrap recorded this and the time in his notebook, and Beckan rolled her eyes at him and pretended to fall asleep on Josha’s shoulder. Scrap shoved her and stuck his tongue in his cheek as he smiled.
One by one, the eldest fairies stood up and gave great speeches that meandered and fought to their deaths against making a real point. Beckan slid down in her chair and traced the edges of the tiles with her heels.
It was one of the younger ones, a fairy man who couldn’t have been older than one hundred, who finally said, “Ferrum is a lost cause.”
While the four of them looked up, everyone else nodded.
“It’s undersized and out of date, and its history isn’t worth dealing with these escalating threats.”
“History,” Scrap scoffed. “Fucking mythical history, maybe if there were more than ten fairies who could fucking spell history.”
Cricket said, “Shut uuuup.”
“We’ve hel
d on to Ferrum for as long as we could,” the man continued. “I know we all feel an affection for the place, but we can’t stay here just to prove a point.”
“Prove what point?” Beckan said.
Josha played with his cuticle. He was not interested. “That fairies don’t always leave.”
The thing is that fairies always leave.
“It’s time we evacuate the city and settle somewhere stronger,” the man said.
“This is why books are written about us and not by us,” Scrap mumbled.
“No one cares about books,” Beckan said to him.
Cricket leaned over to whisper, “I have to listen to this shit all the time,” in Beckan’s ear.
Another woman stood up and started talking. “We’ve already talked to some of the major nearby cities. Kelleran and Rankel have both agreed to absorb parts of our population. Kelleran offered wagons to help with the journeys. We would be around thousands of other fairies. We’re not demanding a permanent relocation. And of course nothing is mandatory. You could take your family and move to a hill town, if you can arrange for deliveries from one of the other cities, since we will be shutting down production here next week.”
Beckan narrowed her eyes.
“Where will we get food if we stay here?” Scrap said.
The man exhaled. “Have you been listening, boy? We’re not staying here.”
“I was listening. Well enough to hear that this isn’t compulsory. Which is a better word than mandatory. In this context.”
Beckan wasn’t so rattled that she couldn’t hear in her head a small bit of bitchy victory music for her small, bitchy friend.
Scrap said, “But shutting down production makes it compulsory. It makes the city unlivable.”
“We can’t order fairies to stay in an unsafe city to serve the stragglers who choose to stay behind,” the man said. “Anyone who wants to come back after the war can come back. But we expect many of you will find your new situations far more comfortable.”
Cricket sat up straighter. “You can’t leave the city for the war and expect to come back and pick up where we left off.”
The man sighed. “I don’t think anyone’s suggesting that.”
“They’re very young,” Jenemah said, in a voice she probably thought was gracious.
Josha said, “This war is for us. Did you see the fliers? The tightropers came for us.”
Cricket grabbed his hand and squeezed it. It was so small that Beckan almost didn’t see, but she could never have missed the look on Josha’s face, the world disappearing for him as he looked from his hand to Cricket’s hand to Cricket’s eyes.
“We’ve spoken with the tightropers and expressed our desire for peace, and both parties have determined that the best way to ensure fairy safety is for us to vacate Ferrum.”
“This is our city,” Beckan said.
Jenemah shook her head. “No city is worth losing limbs.” She crossed one ankle over where her other would have been. “Just because you four are whole, you think you’re invincible. You stay here? You won’t be whole for long.”
“We are invincible,” Scrap whispered. “We all are. That’s what being a fairy means.”
Scrap didn’t know shit.
The meeting progressed. The elders kept saying the same things. Josha and Cricket continued to fall in love in the middle of the auditorium.
Scrap is still so sick and the three of them spend the night in Josha’s bed. Josha sleeps between them, clinging. Scrap stays awake, sweating and mumbling and picking at his bandage. Beckan thought she would be too worried, but she sleeps like the dead until morning.
She carefully sits up, holding Josha close so she doesn’t startle him, and looks at Scrap. He’s watching her, whispering a little to himself, breathing like he’s been running.
“Hey, kiddo.”
He pushes his face into the mattress and huffs out a breath that sounds like a sob.
“Okay. Hey. Okay.” She shakes Josha gently and says, “Josha. Help me with breakfast.”
He wakes up and shakes his head and looks down at his feet in their socks and shakes his head again.
“Scrap needs us. Family first.”
“Family first,” Josha repeats, rolling the words around in his mouth, and he gets up, slowly, like everything hurts. Like he’s the one who’s sick. “I’ll make coffee.”
Beckan sits next to Scrap and puts a warm hand on his chest. She leaves it there and lies down next to him. They hold eye contact for a long time. He is tired and the way he looks at her, his eyes big and unblinking with fever, makes her feel like she is the only thing in the whole world.
“It’s okay,” she whispers.
He nods.
“You got Josha out of bed,” she says. “You’re a hero.”
He shakes his head.
“Yeah, though,” she says.
“I want to fix Josha. Help?”
“I’m doing all I can.”
“Okay.” He sounds so unsure.
“I’m going down to get medicine.”
“No! Don’t go underground alone.”
“I’ll be fine.”
“No . . .” He sneezes.
“Scrap.”
“Not alone.” He’s big again, big in that small, terrifying way he always has been, voice deep and teeth clenched and . . . well. Like he could do anything. Fever or not.
“Just stay in bed. Josha will bring you breakfast. You can whine at him if you want.”
“Why are you mad at me?”
She rolls her eyes but stops when her hand meets his forehead. “Your fever’s really high.” She hurries into her shoes. “I’m going. Drink water.”
“I led you in,” he mumbles. “Underground. It was me.”
She stops. “Don’t.”
“I’m so sorry. Never should have taught you. That day I did the walk . . .”
“Stop.”
“Sexed you up in the elevator—”
“Stop,” she says. “You did what you had to do. Nothing more. You needed a third one to go down there and I did a fucking good job and it was nothing more than exactly what we had to do, and why are you worrying about this now?”
“Gave Cricket nightmares. I’m sorry.” He shivers into his pillow. “I’m sorry, Becks.”
“You kept us from starving, asshole.”
“I killed him.”
Suddenly the room is cold, and Josha’s quilt is ugly, and nothing in the whole world has ever smelled as fiercely like Cricket.
“I’m not doing this today,” she says. “I’m not having this conversation with you. I can’t.”
“I killed him!” Scrap sits up. “I killed him and I’m trying to be good now and it still won’t go away.”
And Beckan realizes that he isn’t talking about Cricket. That he isn’t thinking about Cricket. That for who knows how long, Scrap has not been thinking about Cricket.
“Nobody cares that Crate’s dead, Scrap, we just care about how killing him fucked you up!”
Scrap wheezes for a while and doesn’t say anything.
“You are fucked up,” she says. “And you shouldn’t be, because you didn’t do anything you didn’t have to do.”
“I don’t know if that makes it okay.” He puts his chin on his knees and looks very young for a minute. He’s not big. He couldn’t do anything. He’s a kid who could never kill anyone.
A kid who would be way too messed up to function if he ever had to. Not like someone who could get up and clean the bathroom and make dinner and keep on living like he was normal, like there wasn’t a line separating him from anyone else, a line that has nothing to do with a dead cousin. Nothing to do with the missing arm and everything to do with what he was doing when he lost it.
“Could you ever kill someone?” he says.
“I can’t do this,” she says. “Not when you’re sick. You don’t really want to talk about this, and I’m not going to do this to you.”
“I don’t.” And t
hen he’s shaking hard. “I don’t want to talk about this. I don’t. I don’t.”
She stands there for a minute, watching him. She doesn’t know in which direction to move.
Then she clears her throat. “You’ll feel so much better with some medicine in you. I’ll be back soon.”
“Yeah.”
She walks past Josha, who’s frozen halfway through coffee-making. She stops at the front door and looks at him.
“Give him a book if he won’t calm down. One of the big old ones. It’s just the fever. He’s fine. He’s not saying anything we didn’t know.”
He doesn’t answer.
“You can do it. You can make breakfast. I know you can.”
She’s controlling them, telling them that they’re capable. She knows that. But there’s nothing else she knows how to say.
And anyway, men have been doing that to her since she was a girl in a field with a gun.
She doesn’t have time for this. She leaves. She has work to do, medicine to find, things that she can fix.
She hasn’t changed.
She was shocked by how quickly the streets cleared after the fairies left. How efficiently the stores closed, how old the newspapers and store displays seemed.
And she was shocked by how quiet, how simply occupied, the city was for a long time.
She didn’t grocery shop anymore. She brought her tote bag and her father across town—she walked, such a long walk—over to the farm and took whatever she wanted from the dying stalks. She missed chocolate and jam and cheese, things she had no idea how to make for herself.
The explosions hit the city walls from above—all the better to cave in the gnome tunnels—and were few and far between and so her city was not decimated; it was just ignored. It was a gray and empty space in between the buzzing above and below her. She hurried down the dusty sidewalks and felt drilling beneath her feet. She felt fleeting shade as tightropers above her zipped between her and the sun.
She thought maybe the fairies had been stupid, that this war wasn’t really going to happen. Just an isolated incident. Just a typical fairy flee.
Girls with infinite time don’t typically factor in planning stages.
She still hadn’t seen a tightroper up close. She was never much of an artist, but she tried to draw one, one night, from her imagination. It was a colder night than they’d had since early spring, and she was alone. She curled up with an extra blanket over her feet and drew while her father slept in the corner.