A History of Glitter and Blood

by Hannah Moskowitz

  Beckan waits for someone to admit that this is very nearly impossible. That they can’t possibly be expected to try this mission with so little information, for a fairy boy that half of them have only met a handful of times (and for most of those handfuls was not the nicest), on a quest that gives them a very good chance of being caught and tried and killed. If the council likes using Scrap as a good example for what happens when one race attacks another, they’ll adore using the five of them to show what happens when you don’t toe the line.

  But nobody says anything.

  Nobody gives up.

  It isn’t as if being young and stupid has been glamorous or has worked out so well for Beckan. She probably should have left Ferrum with the rest of the fairies. She probably should have given in and turned into a flighty little stereotype, setting cities on fire and running away. Probably her goal should have been to live thousands of years with as much of her body as she could.

  Rig smiles at her and holds out her hand. “Come help,” she says, and Beckan kneels beside them and doesn’t do much more than nod along when they talk, but they love her anyway.

  She would choose this.

  He sits on the floor of his cell, still writing, listening to the beat of Leak’s footsteps as they come closer to him, pass by his cell, fade back away.

  He is much too far underground to hear anything else, but he tells himself that the whole world is sleeping, and that Leak’s footsteps are all in his head, and there are no reasons left to feel anything. There is no reason to be sad or to be scared. He is alone and ready and brave. He lowers his forehead to his knees.

  He is not going to die with dignity, he realizes. He is not ready. He will never be ready.

  He is going to die fighting and kicking and screaming and crying, and whether that’s good or bad, it’s just the reality. It’s just Scrap. He doesn’t know how to give up.

  But he wishes he could almost as much as he wishes he could really die, that he wouldn’t be torn apart and bits of him wouldn’t rot inside gnome stomachs or lie discarded on the floors of the tunnels. It will get so cold.

  And he will miss them, and how much he misses them will rip at every tiny scrap of him, until . . . there is no until. Forever.

  He looks at his arm across the cell from him, and he makes it go up on its remaining fingers and crawl its way across the floor to him. For all these weeks, a bit of him has been with this arm, cold and lonely and scared. And it was so hard, but there were enough things happening, enough real life, for him to push it aside.

  He strokes the arm with his good hand, and he feels it and his heart shudder and calm. A little.

  But no one will take care of the tiny bits of him. No one will find them. There will be too many, and the little scrap fairy will finally just be too small.

  Like Beckan’s father, and Cricket, and everyone they write off and forget, he will blow around and get buried in the dirt and burn into ash in the fire, but he will never go away. He will be stuck in these tunnels forever.

  Please let them find me, he thinks. Please let them keep a piece of me. Don’t let all of me be lost forever.

  “Just a bit of me,” he whispers. “Just enough.”

  He will haunt this city like a ghost.

  The exit Beckan and Rig and Tier took when they fled the city, freshly dug, is still open. “They think they know everything,” Rig says, laughing.

  They enter through there, but they don’t continue down the tunnel Rig and Beckan and Tier took from the city. That’s much too risky. They veer immediately east, and Piccolo and Josha are, as predicted, stunned by how quickly the gnomes dig.

  The others stand back while Beckan blowtorches their way through the wall, and after that they proceed more slowly, always aware that one handful of dirt cleared in the wrong direction could have them in a tunnel with no ceiling for the whole city to see.

  “What was that?” Tier says.

  They freeze.

  There is a sound coming toward them. It sounds like rain, at first, slow, coming down on the roof of their cottage.

  “Someone’s coming,” he says, and they flatten, together, against the wall of the tunnel. Beckan’s ears are full of the sounds of them all breathing, hard and fast, at conflicting rhythms. They are a mess of panic. Her chest hurts.

  “Breathe,” Piccolo whispers, and she takes a deep breath in. She hadn’t realized she wasn’t.

  The footsteps are coming toward them. They stare at the other wall of their tunnel, where it sounds more and more each second like someone is about to break through.

  But no, the footsteps turn, go back, and gradually disappear.

  “We’re close,” Tier says. “Must be whoever is guarding Scrap. It’s got to be.”

  “How do you know?” Beckan says.

  “I . . . I don’t know. I don’t.”

  “It does sound like patrolling,” Rig supplies. “The rhythm of the steps.”

  “We’re right up against their tunnels,” Josha says. “We should veer off. We’re way too close.”

  “Hmm,” Tier says, and then he pushes out the wall separating them from the gnome tunnels. Dirt rains down, and ahead of them are empty granite hallways, dim candles, and silence. Piccolo and Josha quickly click off their flashlights while whisper-cursing at Tier along with the girls.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” Beckan says.

  “We’re not going to find Scrap by circling around. He’s somewhere they can get to. He’s in their tunnels.”

  For a while, as far as they can see, the tunnels are covered.

  Closed.

  Besides the footsteps, safe.

  “Someone else could be coming!” Beckan says.

  “No. We heard the last guy, we would have heard them too.”

  Josha says. “I don’t see Scrap. We’ve got to go.” He backs back into their tunnel.

  Beckan stops him. “Josha.”

  She touches the blue and pink glitter smeared across the granite walls.

  “He was here,” she says.

  And before they can think about it any longer, they take off down the hallway.

  There is glitter all over the walls and the floor, and it’s making Beckan’s head ache. Did they rip him to pieces here? There are no bones and no blood, but how did this much glitter get off him without hurting him?

  The glitter leads them down hallway after hallway, but there is no Scrap. They keep freezing, thinking they heard feet that weren’t theirs, grabbing at each other’s hands and whispering what was that—

  “Maybe he’s not on this level,” Rig says.

  “The elevator,” Beckan says.

  This is the point where Scrap hears feet coming, multiple feet, and he writes THE END in his book over and over and throws it away from him and shakes down to his bones.

  Leak is here, and Scrap says, “Is it time?” He thought they’d let him wait in here for longer, make him sweat (fairy sweat tastes good; Crate told him that once).

  “I think so,” Leak says, and he takes his rifle off his belt.

  “Wait. What are you doing?”

  He points it at Scrap and slips the nose through the bars and Scrap closes his eyes and nods.

  But then the nose is in his hands.

  “Make it look real, kiddo.”

  “What?”

  Leak sighs and gets to his knees so his head is level with Scrap’s and with the butt of the gun. “If they’re breaking you out, then you gotta make it look like I got fought off. I’m not getting in trouble over you. Come on, before I change my mind.”

  Scrap catches his breath and whispers, “Thank you,” and slams the butt of the gun into Leak’s skull.

  The elevator will not take them to any other floors. It has been sealed up, locked in with steel and cement on all sides, packed in so hard on the top that the ceiling is bowing, the metal grate at its front locked and locked again. Leak is unconscious on the floor.

  But they do not need to go to any other floors, be
cause they have found Scrap.

  18

  “Fuck,” Scrap breathes. “Hi. Shit.”

  Beckan is already digging into her tote bag, testing the bars on the grate with her other hand.

  Piccolo scales the side of the elevator to get out of the way. “Let me see your wrists, man,” he tells Scrap.

  Rig looks at Leak. “Is he dead?”

  “Just unconscious. He’s not a bad guy. Guys guys guys.”

  Piccolo says, “Your wrists, Scrap.”

  Scrap holds them up, both metal and real.

  “Good. I know those knots.” He talks Scrap through how to untie them and Scrap tries, very hard, but the ropes are too thick and too tight.

  “Come here,” Tier and Rig say together, and they bite cleanly through the ropes.

  Piccolo gives a weak laugh. “Yeah, should have thought of that.”

  Beckan puts the mask on. “Stand back, guys. Scrap, get to the other end of the elevator.”

  “What can I do?” Josha says. “How can I help?”

  “Josha,” Scrap says, and he pushes his hand, hard, against the grate, and Josha is immediately there, his hand pushing back so hard that their palms touch through the cage.

  “It’s okay,” Josha whispers. “It’s okay.”

  On the other side of the elevator, Beckan melts the cage like it’s nothing. “Wait,” she tells Scrap, “let it cool,” but of course he doesn’t, he’s out of there like he was thrown, and he’s touching all of them at once and their hands are all over him, Ican’tbelieveitareyouokaydidtheyhurtyou?

  “We’re going,” Tier says. “Now.”

  They start to take off, but Beckan stops them. “Scrap,” she says. “Do you want your arm?”

  He looks at it, lying there in the cage. “No.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “It doesn’t matter. I don’t need it.” He is hard and sure. “It’s not important.” His metal hand is still in that fist.

  Josha says, “But what about—” and above their heads there is a rush of movement, and they don’t know if it is for them, and they don’t know if the vibrating is in their heads or in the tunnels, but Rig orders them to run and they are running, through tunnels they have made and tunnels they have not, and they’re stopping so short they’re falling when they see tunnels that are open to the ground above. They are grabbing on to each other and they hit one of their new, fragile tunnels, and dirt collapses on top of them and they gasp and choke and duck as a rock falls. And when they look up and count there is one missing. And they do not know how long he has been gone and they do not know where they lost him.

  “No no no,” Beckan whispers. It is so dark. “No.”

  “Josha!” It’s ripped through Scrap’s throat, ugly and raw, painful. “JOSHA!”

  Tier says, “Scrap, hey, we’ll find him, we have to be quiet—”

  “JOSHA!”

  Scrap is small and scared no more. Scrap is big, angry, throwing himself against the tunnel walls, looking for a weaker part, looking for anything, anything, that will give and fold and show him where he left the last one of his pack he’d ever thought he needed to worry about.

  You drove him so crazy, you stole Cricket, you disobeyed and you rolled your eyes and you made Beckan smile more than he could sometimes and you are his family and you are the one he never thought he needed to think about, you are the one who made him turn cold and hard—

  Beckan is quiet, crying, whispering, “Josha Josha Josha okay okay.”

  “Josha!” Scrap yells.

  And then there’s a rush of air from fifty feet away, and the waterfall rumble of dirt, and coughing, and their fucking fairy. Beckan sprints to him and wraps herself around him, and he wheezes and hugs her and says, “Hey, I’m fine. Fuck, you guys took off. . . .”

  Scrap hits him and pulls him down roughly into his neck. “You okay?”

  “Mmmhmm. You?”

  “The fuck was that, huh?”

  “You forgot this.” Josha untucks something from underneath his arm.

  Scrap’s notebook.

  Scrap stares at it, swallows, lets Beckan take it and stuff it into her bag. Then he tugs on Josha’s sleeve, just once, and pries back the fingers on his metal hand.

  Inside is one speck of glitter.

  “It was on my arm,” he says, and holds it into the light.

  It’s green. Bright yellow-green, like an insect.

  They all look at Josha.

  Josha swallows and doesn’t speak for a while. When he does, his voice sounds so much more normal than they expect. “It’s his.”

  “It has to be,” Scrap says.

  Josha nods.

  It just has to be.

  Piccolo opens the locket around Josha’s neck, and Scrap, after just a second of hesitation, gives him the piece of glitter. Piccolo presses it into the inside of the locket, snaps it closed, and then holds it against Josha’s chest.

  Josha can only feel so happy. He is exhausted, used up. He can only feel so many things anymore.

  And looking down at that locket, he feels a few possibilities come back. Like relief. Like love.

  Desperately, he can hear Cricket say. Right, kid?

  “Desperately,” Josha whispers.

  Right at the exit, as Tier starts to hoist them up, Beckan says, “Just a second.”

  Piccolo groans. “Seriously, we’re almost out of here.”

  “You guys go ahead,” she says, but of course they don’t.

  She takes Scrap’s wrist and pulls back, just a little, only a few feet from the others.

  He is watching her.

  She says, “I can’t believe you kept your hand curled around one piece of glitter this whole time.”

  He doesn’t look away. She feels him, his wrist in her hand, his face close to hers, so warm. He is so warm.

  “I can’t believe you said no to the gnomes,” she says.

  So warm.

  “I can’t believe you left your book behind.”

  “I . . . was thinking about getting out.”

  “You chose getting out.” She’s smiling. “You chose being real.”

  He rests his forehead against hers. “Giving me too much credit, Becks.”

  “Never.”

  He is smiling too.

  “You never hardened up, did you?” she says.

  “No.”

  “You fucking idiot,” she says, and then she pushes him against the wall and kisses the breath right out of him.

  At this point, I need to pause and say how fucking ridiculous it is that I managed to write an entire book without needing to stop and write what I am about to write.

  Which is that Beckan is the most incredible anything I have ever met.

  And I can’t believe I was writing this fucking book when I could have been kissing this girl, touching this girl, grabbing this girl when she’s trying to brush the sheep and throwing her down and tickling this girl, or feeling this girl slide into bed next to me when we’d agreed to try to take it slow, to rest, we have plenty of time, and do things to me that this whore has never dreamed of.

  There isn’t anyone in the world who can make me laugh this much or make me this fucking angry, and every time I look at this girl, no matter what she’s doing, I think I could do nothing but watch her do that—wash her hair, sweep the floor, work in her garden, laugh—for the rest of my life, for forever, and never need a thing more.

  There is no until.

  And we’re in bed together, and she is lying on top of me, her arms over my neck, her hands in my hair, and she is sweet and dark like wine . . . shit, how do you write about this stuff? There aren’t words. There is blood and glitter and the feel of her cheek cupped in my hand while she kisses my temple, and her hands on my shoulders when she leads me back to bed when I’ve been sleepwalking. I don’t do the dishes when I sleepwalk anymore. I dream I’m dancing with her.

  And then she leads me back to bed and kisses me from my stomach to my neck, and I dance do
wn to my last speck of glitter. Back in those tunnels, my arm dances.

  This girl. This girl, this girl. And I wake up with a cold, sticky mouth, breathing hard, terrified that something could happen to her, and then I think of Josha and Cricket and all these things that I’ve done and fuck, if this girl could fix everything, if the amount of life in this girl could somehow bring all of me back, but I can still hear the bombs in that city, I can still feel Crate’s throat under my thumb and that cold cell where my arm is curled up and sometimes I cannot make it dance, sometimes it is just too scared, and I can still hear my cousin’s voice shouting my name when I run too far ahead and he is worried about me.

  So they settle in. Piccolo balances on tree branches. Rig hunts rabbits. Tier tends the sheep. Josha cooks. Beckan starts a garden. Scrap writes.

  Beckan and Scrap continue to be unable to keep their hands off each other.

  The others laugh because it seems like they are everywhere, that no matter where they go, Beckan and Scrap are there, occasionally wearing some clothing, usually not, always kissing so hard it looks like it must hurt, pushing each other into things, grabbing at each other’s ears and hair.

  They kiss under the kitchen table while the others are eating. They lie on the stairs and the others have to nudge them with their feet as they go by. They roll in the grass and lie forehead to forehead, nose to nose, and whether or not they can kiss like that is so much less important than that they be touching each other with as much of themselves as possible. Beckan misses Scrap’s arm just because it is a part of him that she does not get to hold. “It’s fine,” he tells her, whenever she asks. “It’s keeping watch of the city.”

  “Arms don’t have eyes.”

  “It’s keeping hold.”

  If I still had that writing book, here I would put an excerpt about the importance of endings! The excerpt would talk about symbolic and narrative symmetry and the importance of crafting an ending that reaches emotional satisfaction for all of its characters! And it would not, absolutely would not, leave room for a sequel. Because stories need to have endings, just like lives! Oh, wait!