Beckan says, “Josha, stop.”
Tier says, “It was war.”
“Can we keep using that excuse forever? It was war? How long do we say that? Is that going in the history books, Beckan?”
“Stop.”
“A thousand years from now, we’ll be chewed up gnome food, and someone will open up a book, what, Scrap’s book? And they’ll say, it’s okay, it’s just a war. It’s just history. Crate and Scrap’s arm and Cricket and everybody.”
Beckan doesn’t mention that there is no way any of them but Crate will make history books.
Does that mean Crate wins?
Who would have to write that book, anyway? (Please no, please no, please.)
Tier says. “I get that you’re restless.”
Beckan puts her hand on Josha’s arm, because she senses he’s about to explode, but he doesn’t. She watches him exhale something, and he says, “I am. I’m restless.” He shakes his head a little. “And I’m mad at Scrap.”
“Me too,” Beckan says quietly, because the truth is that Scrap killed someone, and the fact that who he killed was horrible doesn’t change that. And it doesn’t make him sexy and dangerous, it makes him scary, and she wants to hold him and get rid of the fever and she wants to hit him and she wants to run away.
Tier says, “Guys, give him a break. He’s suffering for it.”
“Suffering doesn’t do shit,” Josha said, and really, he would know.
Tier looks at Beckan hard and says, “He takes care of you. You tell me that all the time. He makes you food and cleans the house and worries about you. Do you know how rare that is? Do you know how few of us are left who are at all capable of taking care of anyone?”
It was amazing how quickly things became normal. Beckan and Josha shared a room, officially, and they tended house while Cricket and Scrap went out and came home with enough food to get them through the day, or fabric for a new shirt for Beckan, or pills for Josha’s cold. They got used to chasing the mice around, staying up late singing folk songs their fathers had taught them, comparing imperceptible battle scars and finding the bits of them that looked like the other species they all were.
They were just so close and all so crazy about each other, so quickly. Beckan had a space on Cricket’s shoulder that she told Josha was only for her, and she would rest her head there when she was tired and kiss it over and over when she wasn’t. She had a favorite place on the floor to stretch out with Josha and take a nap. And Scrap. Scrap was giggles through the walls, secret smiles, notes passed back and forth, but they were slow, they were childish about it, they never stepped over any kind of line. For some reason, it felt important to them both that they be careful. Because they would look at Cricket and Josha and see how crazy they were for each other and wake up gasping hard in bed, freezing cold, thinking about how dangerous it was to love someone that much during a war.
Anyway. They had plenty of time.
The guns got louder and louder and closer and there was more blood and gradually, around the time Josha started spending more nights in Cricket’s room than Beckan’s, they began to live their lives in new pairs. Josha and Beckan were still, in their way, ridiculously in love, but they spent less and less time together as Cricket and Josha threw themselves into shared sweatshirts and last-bite-of-ice-cream kisses, and Beckan and Scrap lived like (mythical) parents, teasing each other for sleepwalking and flat gnome noses, curling up together with a book after the kids were in bed.
It wasn’t long before Beckan found out about tricking; Cricket had told Josha within days—the kind of indiscretion Cricket lived and died with—and Scrap never made much of an effort to hide it, coming home with half his glitter rubbed off, sometimes drugged and giggly, always in the mood for a kiss on the cheek and a bit of babying before he was sent off to bed. They never talked about it. Beckan washed bloodstains out of his underwear and rubbed his shoulders when he looked tense and comforted him after nightmares and Josha worried the three days a week Cricket accompanied each-night-every-night Scrap. “I don’t make as much as Scrap does,” Cricket said once to Beckan, explaining his part-time work. “He’s the best little whore in Ferrum.”
A few weeks into the war, the tightropers invaded the mines and took the women captive, and business boomed for Cricket and Scrap. The gnome men had been wanting before, surrounded by women who instead of getting into bed with them waited around and dreamed about fairy boys and fairy babies—a piece of immortality—instead of another generation in the mines, but now with the women gone entirely they needed Cricket and Scrap more than ever, and the boys were happy to oblige. During that initial surge, when sex was valuable and food wasn’t, quite, they ate and drank and fucked like kings.
And somehow, in the war, Scrap came alive. While Josha and Cricket nervously discussed weapons and production, Scrap tried three-ingredient recipes with whatever three ingredients they had left and made Beckan guess what he was trying to make. He invented card games called Treewoman and Cabaret and lied when he said he would let Beckan win. He once lay half naked on the kitchen floor and laughed hysterically while the other three rubbed him as hard as they could to get glitter off him, and he kicked and screamed and tackled them back on the floor.
And one night he and Cricket came home too late and nearly empty-handed for the fourth night in a row and sat in the kitchen in silence, their fingers laced together and Josha and Beckan sat with them and eventually there was no way to avoid the fact that two prostitutes was no longer enough, in a time when the gnomes were clinging to each bit of meat like it was made of gold and licking their teeth and smacking their lips whenever Cricket and Scrap came down, to secure food for four mouths.
“Teach me,” Beckan said, and most of her was excited, most of her had been waiting, most of her wanted to feel everything that Scrap had ever felt, because that was where she was then. “I’ll go.”
7
Beckan browses the tightroper shops and is wandering around, looking up at the sky, when a hand pushes down hard on her shoulder and a little blue and pink fairy catapults over her shoulders and onto the ground.
She hauls him off the ground. “Someone’s feeling better.”
“Much.” Scrap bends over and pants. The brass locket she made jingles around his neck. “Had to run ages to catch up to you. What are you doing out? Are you working today?”
“No.” Now that the girls are back, Beckan goes down much less frequently, despite the silence still between Tier and Rig. “What, are you?”
“Yeah.”
“You’re still sick.”
“No.”
“Their girls are back. Why do they still need you?”
“They love me. I went down back when the girls were still here, remember?”
“Well . . . I guess we need the money.”
“Yeah. Hey.” He grabs her, suddenly, and hugs her. “Thank you for taking care of me. You’re amazing. I owe you. Really big.”
“Shh, no. You sure you’re better? You’re still all pant-y.”
“Yeah, I’m going to hit Tier up for another one of those pills when I’m down there. But I’m much better.”
“You look good.”
He smiles at her. “Hey,” he says. “I found some old board game in the basement. Want to play tonight? I think we can get Josha to. He’s having one of his better days.”
“Absolutely.”
“I’ll invite Tier if you want,” he says.
“No, no, he needs to stay down there. Girlfriend and all.”
“You got it.” He stands up, finally done panting, and smacks a kiss on her cheek. “See you. Thank you, Beckan. You help with all of it.”
She touches her cheek for a while before she starts scanning the sky again. It isn’t long before she finds him, that smiling figure in the sky, leaning against the rope. Patient, hopeful, incredibly young.
What bothers her, she realizes, is that’s the most happy Scrap’s been since the war ended, and it is a far cry from ti
ckling him on the floor.
But there’s a boy in the sky smiling at her.
Scrap brings Tier’s history book home and sits down and tears through it, and Josha takes the opportunity to steal Scrap’s notebook. Not the one he kept during the war, not the boring three-line descriptions of each day, but the blue one he keeps hidden under his pillow, the one with loose pages and glued-in ripped-out paragraphs and spaces for illustrations and horrible, fevered handwriting.
Josha reads it and now he knows everything.
Scrap sees him and his mouth opens, and he is very quiet for a minute.
“I didn’t know it was this bad,” Josha says. “I thought you were just . . .”
“Don’t tell Beckan,” Scrap says, eventually. “For the love of . . . please don’t tell Beckan.”
“Shouldn’t you tell her?”
“I do,” Scrap says. “Every day.”
“You’re a coward.”
“This is . . . this is all we can handle right now.” He looks down. “I’m getting there. I’m working on it.”
“That’s abuse,” Piccolo says. “Pushing you into prostitution like that. You know that, right? You could pretty much arrest him or have him killed or whatever for being a sexual predator.”
“He’s younger than me.”
“Oh. Well then you have no case, sorry.”
Beckan rolls her eyes and cranes her neck further over the rope under her chin. In the afternoon sun, the city looks so much different from the last time she was up here, when everything twinkled with an imaginary magic. Now, everything is sharp, real, and almost comical in its smallness. It must be so easy to come into a city, to invade, to kill, when you see how small everything can really be.
He says, “There’s something inside you, Beckan. I can see it. You have something. A spark.”
“It’s called glitter.”
He laughs. “All of you have that. This is just you.”
“I’m the only girl. I know how these things work. It makes me look more special. Process of elimination. You know Scrap used to think he was interested in me? And I used to think I was interested in him? Just because we were the only ones not paired off.”
Piccolo says, “There are a lot of soldier’s daughters and a lot of cute nurses up here and I’m talking to you. What does that say?”
She looks away and rolls her eyes and feels so much different from when Scrap kissed her cheek. “That you have a thing for fairies.”
He laughs. “That’s not what makes you interesting. The fairy thing or the girl thing. They listen to you. And that’s really interesting.”
“Who?”
“The other ones. Scrap especially.”
“You are a bad spy.”
“Nah.”
“Scrap’s our leader, no question.”
“That’s not how it looks from up here.”
“You’re reaaally far away, Piccolo.”
“They listen to you. They’re careful with you.”
“I’m crazy. They think I’ll explode. Too much spark.”
“Scrap wouldn’t have gone down to the mines just now if you’d told him not to. Or he would have given up on that board game. Or believed you if you said Josha wasn’t having a good day.”
“You saw that?”
“I was hanging right there,” he says. “You’re a bad spy.”
She flops back and laughs. Her legs slip down a little, her feet dangling in the air, and she feels dangerous and amazing.
“Is Josha okay?” Piccolo says, softly.
“No.”
Piccolo is quiet for a minute, then he says, “Anyway, the little one. He was waiting for you to ask why he had to go ho around in the middle of the day, or to tell him where you were going, but you didn’t and he wasn’t about to push you. He tried to cheer you up a little and then he left you alone. You’re in charge.”
“Maybe.”
“And Josha doesn’t even come out without you.”
“He’s not okay.”
“The loud one. Cricket? He liked you, too,” he says. “The one who used to come up here.”
“The dead one.”
“So he counts as dead.”
“It’s just . . . the easiest way to call it what it is.” And it’s so much easier than saying, Yes, there have to be parts of Cricket somewhere but we can’t find them. So much easier than thinking about bones and fingernails calcified in a dead man’s stomach, the digested bits rotting in the stale air of the mines, the thousands and thousands of specks of glitter buried and blown who knows where, but not to Josha, not to any of them.
(Let’s just call it dead, okay?)
Piccolo squeezes her hand.
“We don’t even look for him anymore,” she says.
“Why not?”
“Because . . . it’s a whole city that’s getting more and more cleaned up every day and he’s tiny bits of one fairy. It’s impossible. And because . . .”
“Because now’s not the time you want to risk poking around making the gnomes mad.”
“Yes.” She feels horrible. “And it wasn’t working anyway.”
“It’s horrible,” he says, quietly. “This war. It was horrible for all of us.”
“I know.” And she does. She saw dead tightropers in the streets, heard Leak mumbling about the gnomes killed in a mine explosion. She knows that losing one fairy, even if that fairy was a quarter of their tiny population, does not make them the race with the most lost. “But it’s over now,” she says.
Piccolo very obviously does not say anything and does not look away.
Something sinks its way to the bottom of Beckan’s stomach.
“Isn’t it?” she says, softly.
“Is this your first war, Beckan?” he says.
“Yes.”
“It’s mine, too. So I want it to end. Not to peter out. Not for us to still be plotting up here and them to still be plotting down there. Finished. Done. No more occupation. No more.”
“What does ending the occupation even mean? You just go away?”
“Yep.”
“But . . .” But you’re my friend. She feels young and stupid and fluttery. “But why can’t we just share it? You stay, the fairies come back, and . . .”
He’s looking at her, waiting for her to figure it out. Patient.
“You guys aren’t going to let the fairies come back,” she says.
“No.”
“I knew that liberation stuff was . . .”
“Yeah. Tightropers are conquerers, not liberators. No one expected any fairies to stick around, and we thought the gnomes would be easy to take out.”
“So why are you different?”
“I asked my father that once, and he told me my lack of ability to correctly size up an enemy is why I’ll always be a messboy.”
“There go your dreams of being a warlord.”
“Right?”
“How do I know . . .”
“How do you know if you can trust me,” he fills in.
“Yes.”
He’s quiet for a minute, stretching his arms over his head. Then he says, “Why didn’t you run away with the rest of them?”
“Mmm. Fair enough.”
“We’re big ol’ blood traitors, you and me.”
She nods.
He says, “And the thing is nothing’s ever going to change if we keep clinging to the ideas of these stupid races. Because you guys are what, half fairy? A quarter now? A sixty-fourth? You get all diluted . . .”
“It doesn’t work that way.”
“Bullshit.”
“There aren’t that many generations of us. We live forever.”
“What’s your other half?”
She doesn’t say anything.
“Well, what was your father’s?” he says.
“I don’t know. It isn’t something we talk about.”
“But he wasn’t full fairy. He couldn’t be. No one is.”
“It doesn’t work like that.?
??
“So you have to be less than half. And unless he’s the, what, proto-fairy, he would have to be too.”
“It doesn’t work like that. It’s different for us. It’s any amount of fairy blood.”
“No, Beckan.” He’s gentle. “That’s not different. That’s just racism.”
“I’ll live forever and you won’t,” she says. “That’s not me being an asshole. That’s genetics.”
“Genetics is an asshole.”
“Fair enough.”
“So you don’t know anyone’s other half?”
“Well, I know theirs. My pack. We don’t have secrets,” she says. (Yeah, sure.) She’s known Josha’s for a long time, because it is something they eagerly talked about as children before they learned that it is improper. Beckan found out she was half gnome from the things they would yell at her when she walked by the mines with her father. When she was very small, she thought they were being friendly, calling her sister.
“I knew him,” Piccolo says abruptly. “Cricket. I don’t think we were what he expected. Cricket came thinking we’d whore him out like the gnomes do, but . . . I guess there aren’t as many of us, and we’re soldiers. We’re used to nice long dry spells.”
“But you’re not a soldier.”
“No, I’m too young to be a soldier, and I would never be anyway. But it’s the same deal with messboys. We’re also not, you know, monsters. We weren’t going to take advantage of some kid.”
“Cricket was older than you, I think.”
“Barely. Really he just wanted to make sure we wouldn’t let Josha into the army. And of course we wouldn’t. He’s a kid too. But in exchange for promising him that, he told the guys—my dad, his friends—that they could sleep with him for free. And they laughed at him. So I think that surprised Cricket at first, but then he . . . he kept coming up, which at first was really confusing.” He laughs. “But we like fairies. You know that, right? We like you guys.”
“You don’t know us,” she says, to do anything but think about Cricket coming up here and how stupid he was and how brave he was and how much she wishes she’d asked him to stop.
“Cricket came up a lot. The officers . . . I don’t know. There was something about him they liked. He got around really easily up here and they admired that, they’d give him cigars and things. He made money selling rings and stuff.”