A History of Glitter and Blood (2 page)

“Meet back here in an hour,” she says. “Don't wait past an hour and a half.”

Scrap swipes his hand under his nose. He's in all black, like she is, but he's wearing one of the lockets Beckan made, the heavy brass one he and Josha share. It's empty. “Okay.”

Scrap heads north and she heads roughly west, tracing the streets of the city she used to draw from memory when she was bored. Now, without the storefronts and street signs, she's embarrassed to say (she would never admit) that she gets lost. This is where the cheap apartments were, she thinks, where the newer immigrants, fairy families from other cities or visiting races foolishly trying to stay, usually ended up settling. There was a playground here once but it was gone long before the war, turned into a tiny restaurant with vats of vegetable soup served up by sweaty fairy teenagers. Josha worked there for a time. There were fairy protesters out front the year it was built with signs petitioning to get the elders to rebuild the playground.
Do we really need more food?
their signs said.

But they've already searched the square where Cricket died (was swallowed), and there isn't a trace of him there. The gnomes cleaned up and they cleaned up well, but he has to be somewhere. They only need a bit. Something to talk to and pet and give to Josha. Cricket could be a jar fairy like her father.

(And parts of Cricket have to be out there. Every time Beckan eats now, she counts crumbs that fall onto her shirt or onto the table. There are always a few. It's impossible to eat every single bit of bread. It's impossible to eat every single bit of fairy.)

Beckan feels her own glitter as it falls to the ground and crunches beneath her feet. She's used to it. She's used to feeling the ground and the bottoms of shoes and the grout in the bathroom tiles with the bits of her that slough off and stay sentient. She never used to think about these wimpy bits of pain until Scrap's stupid books about fairy anatomy started showing up everywhere in the house, stacked up on the floor just like their swept-up glitter, and no, she does not want to know about the complex sensory capabilities of every speck of her—she spends her time welding things together and laughing at stupid jokes and trying to feel
very, very whole
—but now she thinks about losing parts, and she fucking has to find some of Cricket.

A voice above her head says, “What are you looking for, empty girl?” The tightropers are civil during the day—they need the fairies; who else is going to justify their war—but there are no rules at night.

“Bite me,” Beckan says.

“So bitchy tonight, Beckan,” the voice growls back, because of course they know it's her. They're just trying on gnome insults—
empty-girl, empty-girl
—for fun.

She does not look up. They can't hurt her.

They won't hurt her.

She's restless tonight. She can only dig through so many dumpsters and so many piles of rubble and dodge so many long, thin ropes hanging above her head before she has to be somewhere else. She's at the laundromat now, close to the west edge of the city, and the walls seem like her best choice.

She thinks she remembers Scrap telling her once that Ferrum used to be a fortress. Or maybe she wants to believe there's something other than racism that made a modestly sized fairy city surround itself with walls too high for anyone to climb. For as long as she's known them, the gates have been unguarded and openable, and before the war, Beckan used to bring her father to the groves outside the city
and keep her distance and avert her eyes from the gnomes tilling soil and scooping animal shit to stand on her tiptoes and pluck peaches from her trees. Now the gates are rusted over and some of the latches have been blown up and broken, so it's hard for a fairy to leave. But the tightropers swing over the walls and the gnome tunnels extend underneath them and out to the farmlands, and sometimes when she is close to the wall she can hear voices on the other side, gnomes or tightropers strategizing or yelling or crying.

Like tonight, for instance, there are voices. Quiet.

She finds a thinner bit of mortar and presses her ear against it. Two voices: one high and one low. A tightroper and a gnome.

Then soft footsteps come up behind her, and she startles so hard her cheek scrapes against the stone. She bleeds thick and dirty.

“Just me,” Scrap whispers.

She nods and tugs him to the wall.

They hear words—
treaty, peace, long enough
.

They hear them over and over.

Treaty, peace, long enough.

Scrap picks her up with one arm and wraps her legs around his waist and spins her in Northwest Park Square and then they're running home, breathless and incredible and
childish
, and Scrap says, “You should tell Josha. You should be the one.”

“This isn't the news he's waiting up for. I'm going to tell him”—she can't say it, can't say
the war's over
because she's afraid the words will fall off her lips and get lost—“and he'll just be sitting there staring at me with that
look
until he figures out that I'm happy because of this and not because we found some of Cricket.”

“You're better with him,” Scrap says. He and Josha hardly talk anymore, ever since Cricket died a few weeks ago. Ever since the world got so quiet.

They slow down, panting, blocks before they reach their house (which is just against the South gate, all the way on the other edge of the city, but Ferrum is small and they like to run). She presses her nose into the back of his neck when she smiles and smells sweat and glitter on his skin. Scrap's glitter is blue and pink while hers is blue and black, but it somehow always surprises her to find a bit of Scrap's glitter that matches hers. She's always been used to looking like Josha, who is so close to her color that it would be hard for her to believe they weren't related if she hadn't spent her whole childhood filled with very unsiblinglike feelings for the boy (feelings that are, for better or worse, very, very over). Her feelings for Scrap aren't nearly as complicated. Not for a while now, anyway. He's the boy with the room next door. He's the boy she leans into when she's happy without any hesitation because she is just happy and he is just nearby. But it's still hard to reconcile, sometimes, looking like Scrap.

They hike up their hill and Beckan walks backward for a few steps, like always. From the peak of their hill, the city is a blur of gray, useless, half-bombed buildings. If there was anyone on the streets, they would be too small for her to see, but when she looks up and focuses very, very hard, she can still find a few tightropers skittering from rope to rope like spiders on a web. The tightropers are bigger than the fairies, really, but from this cabin on the hill, everything looks very small but the sky looks a little nearer.

Then she smiles and says, “Hey, Scrap. We're liberated.”

He wrestles his way out of his jacket. “Liberated!”

“Look at us!”

“Hug again,” he says, and wraps her up.

Then they're unlocking the front door and racing down the hall to Josha's room. They pound on it together, Scrap's one hand and
Beckan's two, until they finally stop so they can hear him answer, yell at them, tell them they can fuck off or come in. But he says nothing.

“Josha,” Beckan says. “We're coming in.”

Still no answer. Scrap tries the knob. Not locked.

Josha is only a lump in the bed and a bit of black hair sticking out from the top of the comforter.

“Josha, the fucking war's ending. Scrap and I heard.”

She is still excited, but it feels so different now, as if it has solidified and sunk to her feet. It is so hard to be happy in front of Josha now. Hard to be anything but guilty.

“Josha,” Scrap says. “Get up. Did you hear her?”

“Yeah,” Josha says.

Late at night, alone in her room, desperate, she would tell herself that the end of the war would be the thing to fix Josha. Since nothing else has worked.

Since they can't find Cricket.

“Get up,” Scrap says. Harshly. Cruelly. Finally.

“I'll make waffles,” Beckan says. “Do you want waffles? You'll feel better.”

Josha sits up a little and says, “It's the middle of the night.”

“I'm making waffles. I'll waste flour. We can have so much flour now, y'know? We can have anything. Everyone's going to come back and the shops are going to open and so much fucking flour, kid.”

“I'm not hungry,” Josha says, but he does raise his eyes to Beckan and give her the smallest smile she can imagine. “I love when you're happy,” he says.

“We're all happy. You had to do this war too,” she says, even while she's realizing that maybe the problem is that it isn't Josha's war anymore. That Josha's war, somewhere along the line, became something very different.

“You should write a story about Josha and Cricket,” she'd said, months ago to Scrap, while they were laughing their way through scrubbing the kitchen floor and Josha and Cricket were drunk in the living room.

Scrap threw up his hands and said, “I don't write love stories! I write epics and historical accounts and dry nonfiction!” and then grabbed a long, stale stick of bread with one hand and snapped it in half with the other, threw her the larger bit, and announced that they were now sword fighting.

Now Scrap pulls Beckan outside Josha's room, closes the door on him. “He's getting better,” he says. “He is. Talking and everything.”

“Yeah. Definitely. Definitely, he'll be fine.”

Scrap nods.

A pause hangs between them.

Recently Beckan has developed a habit of trying to catch the moments on Scrap's face when one thought chances to another.

When he starts to chew his cheek, she interrupts. “What do we do now?”

“Waffles.”

“After that.”

“I . . .”

She feels triumphant for stumping him.

Lately, she tests Scrap like you'd check a limb after a fall. Looking for a break.

It's a hideous metaphor, considering the missing arm.

“I guess we wait for the cease-fire and go to work?” he says.

It feels wrong to go to work this morning, but at the same time, she doesn't know what else to do, and she has no idea if the cease-fire
has really changed anything. Probably, the gnomes still need them. Who knows if the gnome women are back yet, and if they aren't, Scrap and Beckan should trick as much as they can before they are.

There's no point in a real cease-fire without even a little bit of Cricket, anyway.

And without any of the other fairies home.

And without Josha out of bed.

And without Scrap smiling like he used to.

She heads to the kitchen, but she stops halfway to watch Scrap leaning against the archway to the hall, writing in his notebook. He balances it against his half arm and the wall while he writes.

“Midnight, 5/9/546.” he says. “The end.”

“You'll have to find something else to write now.”

Scrap's expression stays the same, but Beckan is good enough now at scanning his face to know that she has just terrified him.

A part of her likes that, and she doesn't want to know why.

Enough
. She shakes her head, remembers what is important, and goes back to her room and wakes up her father to tell him the news. She smiles with all her might.

An hour later, there's cease-fire.

The thing is that (historically speaking) fairies are very, very bad at keeping histories. The thing is that they tend to give up.

In the morning, Scrap and Beckan take their usual route down to the mines. And shit, okay, a better author would insert a map right here. Remember that for the next draft.

Shit, what the fuck am I even doing? What kind of history book doesn't have a map?

Once upon a time there was a writer who couldn't write a fucking book.

I don't know what comes next. That whole chapter's going to need to get thrown out anyway. You completely forgot halfway through that you'd said it was raining at the beginning.