says, âShit, youâre brave. Do you know that?â
She hadnât 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 canât stop looking at his hair, black and thin and free, like something spilled on him.
âHi, Beckan. Iâm Piccolo.â
âHow do you know my name?â she says, which is stupid, because there are three fairies and they are celebrities. He doesnât answer, which she takes as a compliment.
She tilts her head up and tries to find where he was hanging, but sheâs so quickly disoriented by the hundreds of threads, all nearly translucent and thinner than her fingers.
Piccolo looks up with her.
âYouâve never been up there?â he says.
âI donât know how. How do you balance?â
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. âWe slide,â he says.
âBut me.â
âYou hold on. And you can slide, with practice.â
She takes a step back. âThank you. Iâm all right.â She does not want to hold on to anyone.
âIâm not going to hurt you.â
âYes. I know, maybe you wonât.â She shakes her head. âBut my friends are waiting for me.â
âScrapâs still underground.â
âOh.â
âYou really want to walk home alone?â
âIs that an offer?â
He shakes his head. âI canât. I canât wander off, Iâm ridiculously controlled, itâs this whole thing.â He chews on the inside of his cheek. âItâs bullshit. Anyway. But Iâll wait here with you if you want.â
And all of a sudden, she trusts him. Thereâs something about a boy who isnât allowed to wander off. Thereâs something about a boy in a sky who has limits.
âYou can wait with me,â 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 canât believe how tall he is.
âYou know,â she says, and he jumps. âYou know,â she says again, âWe could see better from up there, maybe?â
âWe could.â
âSo.â Itâs Joshaâs speech pattern, the unaccompanied
so
, but it seems in place here. She feels like Josha would be better at this than she is. Itâs 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 isnât 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 theyâre walking home at night and something moves and they are afraid.
âJust hold on to me,â Piccolo says. He moves Beckanâs 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 Beckanâs throatâthis 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. Sheâd
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