A History of Glitter and Blood (12 page)

“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.”

“Oh. I made those.”

“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.”