A History of Glitter and Blood (7 page)

“Riiiiig.”

Tier nods. “Yes.”

“No, that's horrible.”

“It's impossible. This. This is impossible.”

“You'll see her and it'll all come back. You'll know exactly what to say as soon as she walks through the door. Any minute now.”

“I will?”

“It'll be just like in the book.”

“Which one?”

“With the girl who couldn't speak while he was gone. Thought she would die with no voice. And then he came back.”

“Don't fall for that, Beckan, okay? You cannot just use the things those books tell you. Don't ever stop talking because of a boy. A boy who makes you talk less is not the kind of boy you want anything to do with.”

“Lectures from a boy with a prostitute.”

“Yeah.”

“You learned that from a book too, didn't you?”

“I live in a hole. Where else do I learn anything.”

“The girl in the book, she didn't do it on purpose.”

“That is my point exactly. That is my point times a hundred.”

“You should say something about her boobs.”

He ignores her, which she recognizes as probably his best option. “She grew up down the hall. My father betrothed us when we were groundgrubbers. Children,” he clarifies.

“I figured that out from context.” Scrap taught her that. Context.

“We read the same books and played the same games, Rig and I. We were the same creature. And now . . .” He sighs. “The problem is, the only honest thing I could say to her is, ‘Hi, how was your war?' ”

“Yeah, don't say that.”

“There you have the problem.”

“It's just one thing. This war is the only thing you haven't had in common. One thing.”

“I don't know how to get past this.”

“Because you've never had to get past anything before. You'll deal. She was up there, you were down here, bit by bit you'll tell your stories to each other and you'll forget the rest.”

“I don't know what it was like up there.” He sits next to her. “What she knew about the war. If she could hear anything. Or see us. If they hurt her.”

“You'll know soon.”

“She won't understand,” he says, softly. “What it was like to be on the ground for this.”

You were underground
, she doesn't say.
You barely ever come up. You felt the explosions and you lived with the cave-ins and maybe you were hungry, but you never had to see anything
.

You didn't see carnage and rotting organs
.

You just waited for someone to feed them to you
.

He says, “The problem is, with regards to the war, I understand you and you understand me, and everything else in the world points toward Rig.”

“I don't want you,” she says. Her voice doesn't sound like hers. “I point toward Rig, too.”

“Except—”

“We had different wars too,” she says. Hard. “No one did it like me and Scrap and Josha and Cricket.”

Tier studies himself in the mirror, then frowns, pulls his sleeve over his hand, and scrubs at the glass. “When your fairies come back, the war will be common fairy experience. Scrap can let them read that war he wrote, and then the elders will take the stories and insert their own little anecdotes. Lie about it so it seems real. Run away and find new fairy cities and tell them their valiant war stories.”

“Don't.”

“Don't what?”

“Act like all fairies run away, like it's some given. Because I'm pretty sure there's a fairy girl sitting on your bed right now.”

“Yeah.”

“Why do you always bring him up?” she says.

“Who?”

“Scrap.”

Tier doesn't say anything.

“The jealous thing?” she says. “Do you pay extra for that, or what?”

“Noted.” He bites off the word.

And she looks down. “Rig will be here any minute.” She stands up. “Grab my face again and then I'll go.”

He grabs her face again, and they keep working until the gnomes announce the women coming back, and then she slips out, arms around herself, and does not look for the one face she would recognize. She reminds herself, over and over again, that Rig will not recognize her, but she can't quite believe it.

Josha's favorite memory isn't very old at all. Four months ago, in the dead of winter, bombs rolling in the mines like thunder, they sat in the kitchen with flashlights and cups of hot water and laughed themselves through card games. Cricket found a bit of bug-infested flour under the sink, and they drowned the bugs and filled napkins with wet flour and threw them at each other. They made Beckan scream with half-dead bugs in her face, and Josha picked up Scrap and threw him in the bathtub with a bucketful of white, pasty water. They all ended up coated and disgusting with sore stomachs from laughing, and they stood on chairs in the kitchen and pounced to squish the bugs flat. Then Cricket stopped them all and crawled across the floor with a cup and a jack of spades, and he gathered up all the live bugs and put them in a jar by the window. They lit up. They were fireflies.

“Beckan.”

It's the tightroper boy. He hangs upside down from an ankle, his head only inches above hers.

“Why are you walking alone this late?” he says.

She shakes her head.

He says, “Shit, you're brave. Do you know that?”

She hadn't stopped shaking her head, but she does, now, very slowly.

He gives his ankle a few tugs and clatters to the ground with a noise like a xylophone. When he straightens up, he is half as wide as Beckan but several inches taller, and she can't stop looking at his hair, black and thin and free, like something spilled on him.

“Hi, Beckan. I'm Piccolo.”

“How do you know my name?” she says, which is stupid, because there are three fairies and they are celebrities. He doesn't answer, which she takes as a compliment.

She tilts her head up and tries to find where he was hanging, but she's so quickly disoriented by the hundreds of threads, all nearly translucent and thinner than her fingers.

Piccolo looks up with her.

“You've never been up there?” he says.

“I don't know how. How do you balance?”

He picks a foot up and shows it to her. Where she has five toes, he has two, dividing his foot in half with a narrow slit. “We slide,” he says.

“But me.”

“You hold on. And you can slide, with practice.”

She takes a step back. “Thank you. I'm all right.” She does not want to hold on to anyone.

“I'm not going to hurt you.”

“Yes. I know, maybe you won't.” She shakes her head. “But my friends are waiting for me.”

“Scrap's still underground.”

“Oh.”

“You really want to walk home alone?”

“Is that an offer?”

He shakes his head. “I can't. I can't wander off, I'm ridiculously controlled, it's this whole thing.” He chews on the inside of his cheek. “It's bullshit. Anyway. But I'll wait here with you if you want.”

And all of a sudden, she trusts him. There's something about a boy who isn't allowed to wander off. There's something about a boy in a sky who has limits.

“You can wait with me,” she says.

He nods. She shifts so she is next to him, and they stand together in the darkness. His way of breathing is louder than hers. She can't believe how tall he is.

“You know,” she says, and he jumps. “You know,” she says again, “We could see better from up there, maybe?”

“We could.”

“So.” It's Josha's speech pattern, the unaccompanied
so
, but it seems in place here. She feels like Josha would be better at this than she is. It's hard to be herself around new creatures. She always forgets how she is.

His face breaks into a smile, and then hers, and she looks up at the stars and at Piccolo spitting a new thread into his hand, and something inside her pounds like a drum.

He yanks a length of thread out of his throat, bites it off, and whips one end up to the sky. It sticks.

He offers his hand. She takes it so quickly that it isn't until her fingers are in his that she realizes she cannot remember the last time she did anything with this little thought.

She thinks about Tier, probably holding hands with Rig. The different secret handshakes Cricket had with Scrap and Josha. About how Scrap will sometimes grab her knuckles when they're walking home at night and something moves and they are afraid.

“Just hold on to me,” Piccolo says. He moves Beckan's hands to his shoulders, slips the thread between his fingers, and zips up the line with Beckan on his back. The thread glides through his hands. Air whistles down Beckan's throat—this is so fast. Has she ever gone this fast?

She watches the building beside her, the ruined mess of a skyscraper, as row after row of windows pass and disappear beneath them. It is so much higher than when she used to go up to the roof of her apartment building, before everything, to get a good view of the sunset while she melted scrap metal into sculptures. She'd dance around while her metal cooled and feel free, as if that was something otherwise hard to feel.

“It's so blue up here,” she says.

“Hmm?”

“I thought it would be black.”

“Nah,” he says. “Not this time of night.”

“Nah?”

He laughs. “Yeah. Nah. Like no.”

“I've never heard that before.”

“You guys all talk really pretty.”

“Thank you.”

Piccolo says, “Hold on here,” and they surface through a hole in the massive net. The threads feel like water on Beckan's skin, and they only cling for a fraction of a second before they let go.

“Is my glitter going to get all over . . . ?”

“You're fine. I don't mind. You're safe now. Here, sit.”

She blinks the last threads out of her eyes. Around them, the net spins into a floor, with edges that curl up like the edges of a bowl. Everything under her gives and bounces and scares her. The air feels thicker here, and she smells smoke.

“Where is everyone?” she says.

“By the fire. See?”

She follows his finger across the sky, buildings and buildings away, where a low-slung hammock hosts the fire she could barely see from the ground. She can see a few tightropers laughing, but she can't hear it.

“There really aren't many of us here, you know?” he says. “Just army. And we lost a lot of guys.”

“You're in the army?”

“No, my dad's a general. I'm a messboy.”

“What's a messboy?”

“I clean up after them and stuff. Spills and things, after meals, latrine.”

“That sounds . . .”

“Oh, it's shit. My dad volunteered me.” He flashes her a smile and flops down on the web. “We don't get along. You can walk here. It's packed together. Thick.”

She takes a few careful steps. Her feet feel so wide.

“Here.” He stands up and ties a thread around her wrist. “Lifeline. It won't snap if you fall. You'll hang.”

“Like you were.”

“Mmmhmm.”

His fingers are cool on her wrist. Her glitter gets all over his skin, but he doesn't brush it off.

He doesn't seem to mind.

He's good at messes, though.

“My dad's here,” she says, to share something with him. She roots around her bag but doesn't find the jar. “Oh. I left him at home.”

“Your dad . . . is really small?”

“He's in a jar. There's not a lot of him.”

“Oh. I'm sorry.”

She shakes her head. “He's alive.”

“Aren't you guys always alive?”

“He communicates. Blinks. That's how we know.”

“So if he couldn't blink at you, then he'd be dead?”

She doesn't like this conversation, but she knows he can't tell. “If I couldn't talk to him, he'd be dead.”

“That sounds arbitrary.”

“We're an arbitrary species.” She knows how to be glib about this the same way she knows to ignore the feeling of her glitter falling to the ground.

“Do you like it up here?”

“I can't see anything.”

He points toward the edge of the web. “Lead the way.”

She does, on her hands and knees to feel a bit more secure. She sits at the edge of the web and holds a thread slung above her head for support. She checks the line tied to her wrist again and again.

“Stop worrying,” she whispers. He looks up. She says, “Tell me to stop worrying.”

He laughs. “No way.”

And she looks up and down and out at the world.

Nothing is gray from here. The city sparkles with blues, and she sees pockets of light from streetlamps and a few buildings still lit throughout the city.

“Are all of those your shops?” she says.

“And headquarters and stuff. There's an office just for planning rebuilding. Selling paintbrushes and stuff.”