A History of Glitter and Blood (28 page)

Piccolo watches her.

He says, “If anyone can do it, you can, Becks.”

“But you don't think anyone can.”

“No. I don't.”

“I need to think. Go look after Josha?”

“Yeah. But one last thing, okay? There's a lot of gray area between talking and killing. There are a lot of things you can do that you won't like and that will scare the shit out of you but won't leave you believing someone has the right to eat you. You just . . . might have to meet in the middle.”

She nods.

“But for now,” he says. “Talk.”

So she walks. She walks with her head up and her hand shielding her eyes from the sun. She thought seeing dozens of fairies shining like dozens of ugly stars would comfort her. She used to lie awake during the war dreaming about all the glitter pouring back into her world.

But none of these fairies is pink and blue, and none of them has that chapped lip, and none of them is missing an arm (at least none cut from the exact right place, with a metal arm at the end curled into a very tight fist), and none of them is her boy.

She realizes where she's heading only a few steps before she reaches it. She is at 7th and West, where their elevator used to be, but the entrance has been sealed over. It is nothing but concrete now.

Here is where Cricket was eaten. Here is where Crate was killed. She has stood on this spot a hundred times since that day, and she never forgot. She has never tried to hide from Cricket's death. She doesn't need a minute here to think about him and be hit with grief she has suppressed. This is not her breakdown.

She grieved well. She knows that. But she spent so much time judging Scrap and Josha—fuck you, Scrap, how dare you stay up writing the same night your cousin died, the night you killed a man; Josha, it's been a month, get the fuck off the bathroom floor—as if her way, her beautiful, correct way, was doing any more good.

She closes her eyes and lowers her forehead to the street and tries to pretend she sees a bit of Cricket's glitter ground into the pavement, but she closes her eyes and she is right back to pink and blue and the missing arm and that smile.

Because there wasn't anything clinical about it, really. The gnome had the actions, the semantics of that day all right, but the whole thing wrong.

There are things you can't say out loud.

What always got to me was how incredibly quick it was. That one minute Becks and Cricket and I were standing there and Cricket was being stupid and not shutting up when he should've because Cricket thought he was invincible, but what kind of thing is that for me to say about him? Because we all thought we were invincible. Fuck, I still do. I still feel my arm, whatever's left of it, bone and tendon and some piles of ash.

We are invincible, but we can be so lost, and I guess Crate saw Cricket talking to the tightropers and got paranoid. Maybe he thought his little spy was a double agent. Maybe he thought Cricket was getting close to them. I don't know.

But Crate grabbed Cricket and had his whole head in his mouth and it was just so, so fast. His teeth crunched through bone and spinal cord like Cricket was made of twigs.

He was smiling, and then he was gone.

How do you deliver that in a testimony?

How do you write this?

How do you stand on trial and say you're not guilty when you pushed down on that throat with everything in you, when you pressed your thumb across that windpipe just the way you'd learned from those books, just in case you ever were in this exact situation?

He ripped off the one arm and I didn't even feel it, not for minutes afterward. My entire life was that remaining hand, that grip around his neck, that fist.

You can't go back from that.

I wasn't supposed to write about this. There aren't feelings in history books. This is where I should put an anatomical sketch. This is where I should explain how the fuck you kill a man.

That last second, the moment when he flicked his eyes to mine, I knew that was it. That was my last chance to let go.

I felt him die. That was something I hadn't prepared myself for. Crate wasn't as big as everyone thinks, but I felt all of that weight slump against me, and I fell. Crushed by two dead men. The king and the bones of my cousin.

The strangest part was how there were no repercussions. How the gnomes didn't try to stop us as we ran home. How when we came back, shaking, a few days later, starving, hands clasped together in that elevator, ready for anything, they accepted us gently and said nothing
of it until they offered me the throne a few months later. Needed to give me time to decompress, they said. To fall in love with the gnomes again. Needed to give themselves time to want another war.

I didn't know that killing him would make me king. Crate would never have told me that.

He wasn't that stupid.

And besides, the gnome said it himself in his testimony. I never took the job, Beckan.

I am that stupid.

What she will never forget isn't the blood and the glitter—so much blood, so much glitter—but Josha's face when they ran through the door. How he was first so worried about Scrap, seeing he had been injured, ushering him into a chair, cupping his face, comforting him. And then Beckan came in and then a pause where he realized that no one else was walking through that door.

And Beckan thought,
Why didn't I slit open Crate's body? Why didn't I dig into him and grab all the bits of Cricket I could find?

And Josha just kept waiting. Staring out the door like Cricket was at the bottom of the hill. Staying absolutely silent so he would hear Cricket if he called, staying crouched with his hand still around Scrap's cheek.

She sleeps in her own bed that night. No Josha, no Scrap, just her glitter and the stars and the vague sounds of foot traffic down in her city.

And when she wakes up, she starts writing.

The courtroom is
even more full today. The council arrived early. Everyone stands when Judge Peony Lachturn takes her place at the old librarian's desk. Twelve years ago, she sat there and taught a very young Scrap how to read.

They bring him in, chained and colorless underneath the glitter. A patch of it is missing on his cheek where a scrape is red and raw.

They drop him beside Beckan at the bench. She does not look at him.

She cannot get emotional right now.

She will not look at him.

If this is the last time she will see him alive, she does not want to know it. (She is terrified that she will already be able to see the life leaving him.)

“What are you wearing?” he says. She doesn't answer.

He is so tired. He puts his head down on the desk and waits for it all to be over.

“Don't you dare give up,” she whispers.

He opens his eyes. She still isn't looking at him.

His hand is still in that fist.

“I don't know how,” he says.

“You fucking idiot.” She grabs his hand.

Court Transcript
The Trial of Scrap Oregna
7/1/546

JUDGE PEONY LACHTURN: Miss Moloy, what are you wearing?

BECKAN MOLOY: A uniform.

However, Miss Moloy is wearing what appears to be a white T-shirt covered in mud and glitter with ropes twisting up the sleeves
.

JUDGE PEONY LACHTURN: That is not your correct uniform. That isn't any sanctioned uniform.

BECKAN MOLOY: No, Your Honor, it is not.

JUDGE PEONY LACHTURN: Immediately after the proceedings, you'll be changing back.

BECKAN MOLOLY: Fine.

The minutes from yesterday's trial are read
.

JUDGE PEONY LACHTURN: Now that the minutes from yesterday's meeting have been presented, today should go fairly smoothly. We'll proceed with the defense's argument, then go right into our ruling. Nothing should take much time. Miss Moloy, are you planning on taking a lot of time?

BECKAN MOLOY: I don't know. What you've just said changes everything, doesn't it?

JUDGE PEONY LACHTURN: Miss?

BECKAN MOLOY: If I talk forever, you can't kill him, right?

Whereupon the judge looks quite pained
.

JUDGE PEONY LACHTURN: You have five minutes, Miss Moloy.

BECKAN MOLOY: Five. Okay.

Look.

The issue isn't whether or not Scrap killed Crate. He did. We know that. For the crime of killing Crate, I have come up with a much more appropriate sentence that I hope the court will find acceptable. I suggest that he perform fifty hours of community service and consent to the destruction of the arm currently held in gnome custody to ensure that it can be responsible for no more murders.

JUDGE PEONY LACHTURN: That is the extent of the punishment you find fitting?

BECKAN MOLOY: Yes.

Whereupon there is much snorting and eye-rolling that Miss Moloy ignores
.

BECKAN MOLOY: And here's why. Because the issue isn't that he killed Crate. The issue is whether you can ethically kill him for killing Crate.

It was a war. Everyone was killing everyone.

But that doesn't make it okay. And that's not the defense I'm going to use. Mass murders of tightropers and gnomes and the very un-mass, very murderous-murder of our fairy don't make killing one gnome okay, as much as I wish it did. That's not why you shouldn't kill Scrap.

You shouldn't kill Scrap because it wouldn't make sense to do so.

Whereupon everyone is waiting for the girl to fuck up and get her friend killed
.

Look.

Whereupon Beckan takes a deep breath
.

Look.

None of you wants to kill Scrap.

Every single one of the gnomes on this council has slept with Scrap, and I know he was an absolute
gentleman about it and you all asked for him again and again.

The fairies know him. You know this boy. He brings you soup when you're sick. Soup from a can, because he can't cook worth shit, and are you really going to kill someone who's still such a freaking kid that he can't even figure out how to make soup?

Whereupon she gestures to the tightropers
.

And the tightropers—he kept your general's kid, so fed up with the horrible way you've treated him, from planning a rebellion that would have brought down your entire race.

None of you has anything against Scrap and none of you really cares that he killed Crate, because that isn't what this is about. This is about all of you wanting to have and to kill a common enemy. To improve race relations! And Scrap is convenient.

Killing Scrap to prove a point is ridiculous, because it's because of Scrap—and me, and Josha, and Cricket, our Cricket, who you took away—that we can even be here in this courtroom, that there is even any point to prove. Because without us, you could not have had your war.

We held your war together. Fairies, we gave you an excuse to come home. We proved for the first time in who the fuck knows how long that fairies don't have to be flighty and
irresponsible and heartless. We let you stay in the war from far away and then come in and be the heroes.

And the whole time you were fighting, the whole time you were gone, we gave everyone in this city sex and laughter and reminded you that there were real faces, real actual individuals behind this war. We fed your war like the gnomes fed us. And then it killed us and we killed it, because
that's what happens when you start a fucking war
.

But we did what we could.

Because nobody loves this city like we do. And we are not flighty little fairies who run away. If you keep Scrap alive, if you give us the slightest reason to stick around this city, we will stay and keep this place safe for a very, very long time.

Or you kill him.

Because why not, right? He's just one kid. He's worth the sacrifice, right?

But killing Scrap won't do it.

Whereupon two boys, one fairy and one tightroper, stand up behind the bench and cross their arms. They are wearing the same “uniform” as Miss Moloy
.

Whereupon the defendant pulls at his own dirty fairy uniform in annoyance until Moloy puts a jacket
around his shoulder that matches their T-shirts, and he smiles
.

JUDGE PEONY LACHTURN: Order!

Whereupon the two boys do not come to order
.

BECKAN MOLOY: Killing Scrap won't do it. You will have to kill me. And Josha. And Piccolo. And you will have to find Rig and Tier and kill them, too. And at some point, everyone will
stop listening to you
. They will stop killing. I have to believe that at some point you will realize that you have to stop killing.

But if you don't, and you try to kill every single creature who's stepped out of line, we will fight you and we will win.

Because we are young and we are tough and pissed off and we are missing
very few limbs
, and that, Your Honor, is what we call
good race relations
.

THE COURT REQUESTS A BRIEF RECESS.