A History of Glitter and Blood by Hannah Moskowitz Page B

now’s not the time you want to risk poking around making the gnomes mad.”
    â€œYes.” She feels horrible. “And it wasn’t working anyway.”
    â€œIt’s horrible,” he says, quietly. “This war. It was horrible for all of us.”
    â€œI 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.
    â€œIsn’t it?” she says, softly.
    â€œIs this your first war, Beckan?” he says.
    â€œYes.”
    â€œIt’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.”
    â€œWhat does ending the occupation even mean? You just go away?”
    â€œYep.”
    â€œBut . . .”
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.
    â€œYou guys aren’t going to let the fairies come back,” she says.
    â€œNo.”
    â€œI knew that liberation stuff was . . .”
    â€œYeah. Tightropers are conquerers, not liberators. No one expected any fairies to stick around, and we thought the gnomes would be easy to take out.”
    â€œSo why are you different?”
    â€œI 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.”
    â€œThere go your dreams of being a warlord.”
    â€œRight?”
    â€œHow do I know . . .”
    â€œHow do you know if you can trust me,” he fills in.
    â€œYes.”
    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?”
    â€œMmm. Fair enough.”
    â€œWe’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 . . .”
    â€œIt doesn’t work that way.”
    â€œBullshit.”
    â€œThere aren’t that many generations of us. We live forever.”
    â€œWhat’s your other half?”
    She doesn’t say anything.
    â€œWell, what was your father’s?” he says.
    â€œI don’t know. It isn’t something we talk about.”
    â€œBut he wasn’t full fairy. He couldn’t be. No one is.”
    â€œIt doesn’t work like that.”
    â€œSo you have to be less than half. And unless he’s the, what, proto-fairy, he would have to be too.”
    â€œIt doesn’t
work
like that. It’s different for us. It’s any amount of fairy blood.”
    â€œNo, Beckan.” He’s gentle. “That’s not different. That’s just racism.”
    â€œI’ll live forever and you won’t,” she says. “That’s not me being an asshole. That’s genetics.”
    â€œGenetics is an asshole.”
    â€œFair enough.”
    â€œSo you don’t know anyone’s other half?”
    â€œWell, 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