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 tickling 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.
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 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.”
“And Scrap goes to our shops, like you.” He clears his throat. Scrap’s name, like every time he’s said it, sounds funny, and he must notice, because he says, “I don’t feel like I can use their names, because . . . you don’t think that I know you.”
She looks at him.
He has a sad little smile. “Cricket talked about you.”
“We were fine.” She kicks her feet and watches specks of glitter float down to the ground. “I didn’t know him like the others,” she says. “I mean, I knew him really well. I just . . . Scrap was like his brother. They grew up together. And he and Josha were in love like nobody I’ve ever seen.”
“What about Scrap and Josha?”
“They fought over Cricket like it was a game and now Cricket’s dead and they have nothing to fight about and no more games.”
“Sucks.”
“Scrap killed the guy who killed Cricket, and we all want that to be some positive heroic thing, except now we’re living with a killer and Scrap has to keep this with him, and Josha’s half in love with Scrap for killing Crate and half furious at him for having Cricket in the mines with him in the first place. Josha and Scrap had to have a relationship because the rest of us all did, so they made that as easy a relationship as they could just to be a convenience to everyone, and now the reason they had to have a relationship is gone and they’re still living six feet away from each other and they still care about each other and that’s no longer convenient, because Josha would rather hate him and Scrap would rather disappear.”
“And you’re still there. And they both love you.”
She flops down on her back, and Piccolo grabs her before she slips. She says, “Why is that always how it works? Cricket dying. The ones who are in love the most die, the ones who are going through the motions live forever and never really care about it.”
“Like fairies.”
“We care.”
Piccolo says, “I think that’s only in stories. I don’t think those who die are any better than those who stay alive. They just look better. They can’t mess anything up anymore.”
“I only know stories.”
He laughs. “I need to teach you how to live.”
It’s a stupid line, but she looks at him and she believes it. The only other lessons she’s had, after all, have been from a man in a jar, a boy who lives underground, and a boy who can live forever.
Never a girl.
Every once in a while, a book.
Cricket got Beckan ready on her first night of tricking. While Scrap and Josha argued in the kitchen, he put her hair up and set to work scrubbing the glitter off her neck. “They hate it,” he said. “You want as little as possible.”
“I thought glitter keeps them from eating us.”
“They won’t eat you. You’re too expensive.” He took glitter from her chin and pressed it onto her eyelids instead.
“What are they fighting about?” Beckan said.
Cricket rolled his eyes. “You know them. Josha’s being bitchy. He’s just worried about you,” Cricket said. “And me. But now that it’s both of us . . . really, now that it’s all of us, I guess. You know how he feels about tricking. Like we have much of a choice.”
But Cricket didn’t hate it.
Cricket took stupid risks and liked to feel important.
Cricket was alive.
“He does care about Scrap,” Beckan said.
Cricket shrugged and said, “I guess,” because whether or not Josha cared about Scrap was the subject of the majority of Cricket and Josha’s arguments. While the other two trusted Scrap as their leader, even if Josha’s acceptance was typically begrudging, Cricket still thought of Scrap as his little brother. Withdrawing that protective arm from around Scrap’s shoulders was one of the few things that Cricket would not do for Josha.
“He does,” Beckan said. “He loves him.”
Because how else was there to describe how they were than to say they loved each other? Even on Josha and Scrap’s worst days, one would have run into a burning building for the other. Beckan had long thought of family as a concept so simple she could keep it in a jar in the bottom of her tote bag. She hadn’t known much at all about love and now she was in love with the concept of it, in love with hugging her boys and watching them hug each other, and she didn’t want to believe that it could really be so much more complicated than that.
Cricket said, “They don’t know what to do with each other. Scrap’s willing to compromise a lot to keep us alive. Josha isn’t.”
“I’m with Scrap on this.”
“Josha thinks there are more important things than staying alive.”
“Like what?”
Cricket laughed. “Fuck if I know. I hope the gnomes drug me tonight. Makes it easier. I’m so tired.”
When they left, Cricket said, “We’ll be fine,” softly in Josha’s ear, and somehow tonight that was enough for Josha to lower his shoulders, to nod a little, to breathe.
“Don’t be delicious,” he yelled to Cricket, as always, as he left.
“Only thing I know how to be!” Cricket called back. As always. Every night, now.
“Listen,” Piccolo says. “Can I ask you something?”
“Mmmhmm.”
“That gnome I saw you with yesterday. Are you . . . friends?”
“Good friends, yeah.”
“That’s amazing. Beckan, that’s amazing.” He smiles. “This is perfect.”
“What?”
“I probably sound crazy. I sound crazy. I just . . . I would really love to get a group of us together, and it will work so much better if we have a gnome too. Me, you guys, a gnome.”
“Like a study group?”
He laughs. “You’re thinking book club, I’m guessing.”
“Shut up.”
He keeps laughing lightly and gives his head a shake. “An antiwar group.”
“The war is over. Shit. Shit.” She looks through the ropes. “That’s Josha down there. He sees us. I should go.”
Piccolo glances down, but then looks immediately back to her. “Beckan, listen. This isn’t peace. The gnomes are still scared to go aboveground, the tightropers are opening up shops like this isn’t your city anymore, you’re afraid to be seen with me. There can’t be real peace during an occupation. We need to integrate, all of us. That’s why we need a group. Being peaceful on your own, being quietly antiwar, it doesn’t work.” He ties another rope to her wrist to help her down. “Just think it over? I’m really not asking anything. Just to get to sit down with all of you together, meet your gnome friend, maybe? See if we can get a few gnomes together who want peace?”
“Maybe,” she says, but she doesn’t see any reason why not.
“Us young ones . . . we’re the ones who can change things. We’re not jaded and horrible and willing to accept that this will keep going and going. We feel things.”
Yes.
Yes, Beckan feels things.
And right now she feels that Piccolo is a little beautiful.
He rips something off his jacket and hands it to her. “Here. It’s our flag. Get a gnome flag too. And a fairy flag.”
“There is no fairy flag.”
“We’ll make one! Perfect. Now our group has a mission.” He smiles. “And then we’ll make a joined flag. Combining features from all of them, stuff like that. It’ll be a great way to bring us together at the beginning. Plus crafts are fun. Plus,” he says, again, more quietly. “I wouldn’t hate spending more time with you.”
She says, “That’s not the only mission I want to do.”
“Yeah?”
She clings to the rope with both hands and says, “I want to find Cricket.”
“Then we will.”
Josha is still standing there when they drop down from the ropes, arms crossed. But he doesn’t seem angry. He seems playful.
“So who’s this?” he says.
“Piccolo.” He offers his hand, and they shake. Josha is trying to be polite, but Beckan can see him sneaking glances at Piccolo. The last time he saw a tightroper was probably when they were laughing at him when he tried to join their army.
“What are you doing out?” she says.
“Scrap wanted me to come find you. He has a headache and he’s all freaking out, worried because you said you’d be home.”
“Oh. Shit.”
He looks surprised. He expects her to be more formal in front of strangers. And now he’s realizing that she knows Piccolo fairly well if she’s cursing in front of him.
“So you made a friend, I see,” he says.
“He knew Cricket.”
“We’re going to find him,” Piccolo says. “We’ll get something organized. Search parties. I’m going to work on it.”
“Wow,” Josha says, quietly.
“He was lovely,” Piccolo says. “He had vision.”
Josha breathes out. “He totally had vision.”
She mills around while the two of them exchange small talk. They work in some more compliments of Cricket and some gentle ribs at Beckan’s gnome-nose or lack of climbing skills.
“Do you want to come by to the cottage?” Beckan says. “Grab a drink or something? Better than talking on the streets.”
Josha hesitates, and Beckan is confused; she thought they were getting along wonderfully, but he says, “It’s just Scrap. I think he . . . will want to talk to us alone about this. It’s not about you, it’s just, you know. Business.”
Piccolo nods.
Josha says, “Hanging out with tightropers . . . you know, it . . . didn’t do Cricket any favors.”
Piccolo looks down and swallows and says, “I’m so sorry.”
Josha is quiet for a long time, and Beckan waits, wringing her hands, knowing that the next thing Josha says will be very important.
“I believe you,” Josha says, softly, like he’s a little surprised.
No one had ever been louder than Josha. And then she met Cricket.
They used the word loud, but it wasn’t volume that came from Cricket, it was magnitude. Words fell out of his mouth like it hurt to keep them contained, and he constantly laughed and touched and stole your clothes and tried them on in front of you and determined they looked much better on him than on you. He would tell anybody everything.
It was a fucking war.
Josha is very quiet on the walk back to the cottage.
“Sorry if I scared you,” Beckan says.
Josha startles and looks up. “What?”
She gives up. He isn’t with her. He hasn’t been in so long.
Scrap is in the kitchen, throwing dirty plates into the sink and scrubbing them with his whole arm. Nobody used to do dishes, since they all knew they were the first thing he headed for when he sleepwalked. They’d wake up to a spotless kitchen.
But he hasn’t sleepwalked in weeks, and the dishes are piling up, and nobody knows what to say about it.
“How’s your head?” Josha says.
“It’s fine,” Scrap snaps, shoving the dishrag back and forth across the counter. “I don’t have a headache.” The little wince he gives when he turns to look at Beckan isn’t very convincing. “Where were you?”
“Whoa.”
“You’ve been gone all day. Tier hadn’t seen you, Josha hadn’t, who the fuck else was I supposed to ask, your father? Where were you?”
“Maybe I’ll tell you if you calm down.” She takes the towel from him and shoves him toward a chair. “Will you sit down? You’re still all hot.”
He balls his hand into a fist and pushes it into his forehead.
This morning, everything was fine. They were fine.
This is why it’s easier not to give a shit. To just be high above it all.
“Did something happen today?” she says.
“In the mines? You were all calm earlier—”
“Where were you?”
She says, “Scrap, come on. I was up on the ropes. I made friends with a tightroper boy. That one you caught a glimpse of last time. He knows you. You’ve met him.”
“Which one?”
“Piccolo.”
“Piccolo?” He sits up straight and stares at her. “You go make a new friend, and you choose the son of the major general?”
“No,” Beckan says. “No, he’s not like that. He hates war. He hates the tightropers, for fuck’s sake. He’s their messboy.”
Josha says, “Listen to her, Scrap.”
“No. This is bullshit. Go hang out with Tier.”
“Are you kidding me?” She stares at him. “Don’t get me wrong here, okay? I love Tier. But he’s a gnome. You’d rather I be friends with a fairy-eating gnome—”
“Don’t say that about Tier,” Scrap says, and she feels bad, she does, but Josha is over Scrap’s shoulder, nodding, egging her on.
“—than a tightroper when they’ve never done shit to us . . . he bought my ring from Cricket, did you know that? He bought my ring. He’s trying to start a peace movement. He wants to talk to you. To get to know you for real. To help us find Cricket. He’s, I mean, he’s a messboy, right? He has a broom. He can sweep the streets and everything, maybe find a little bit of Cricket.” She’s fishing, obviously, and she knows it—they don’t need a tightroper to show them how to push a broom—but Beckan knows the cards to play to shut Scrap up and plays them well.
Because he does still think about Cricket. He thinks about too much. He gets headaches.
And right now he doesn’t say anything. Because Beckan knew Cricket and she knows how to use him. And she hates herself a little for it.
Beckan says, “Piccolo said he’s met you. What did you think of him?”
He breathes out, long and slow.
“I thought he seemed nice,” he says, quietly. He adds, “But I’ve talked to him all of twice. I don’t know the guy.”
“But he wants to know you. So maybe you could give him a chance before you freak completely out? I think you might actually like him if you took a second to stretch outside these weird prejudices you seem to have developed all of a sudden.”
Scrap looks like he’s about to say something, but instead he deflates. “Yeah,” he says. “You’re right.” He chews his cheek for a minute and says, “Sorry for yelling.”
“Did you have a bad day or something?”
He laughs, once. “Yeah. Yeah, you could say that.”
“Shit, honey. Did they hurt you?”
He shakes his head. “No. Everything’s fine. Nothing you need to worry about.”
“Please?”
He shakes his head again.
She gives up. She’s done enough today. She goes to her room and takes her father out of her nightstand, where she’s had him locked for so long it makes guilt pool in her stomach. She holds the jar and feels like a girl in a book, and for once that doesn’t make her happy. She’s not a hero anymore. She’s just helpless and written.
