Grace (4 page)

I pushed it toward him. The knife pressed harder into my throat as he opened the cloth with his teeth. Even in the dark I could see the glint of the gold as it fell to the floor. We both looked at it lying there; the belt Liam had been dressed in, wrapped around his chill skin, and the tiny smoothed-out pebble of it Da had been given when he’d agreed that his line would end with him, that I was to be an Angel.

“I have to leave,” I said, and he bent to pick up the gold, turning away from me in the dark, the knife gone from my throat as if it had never been there at all.

“And you want me to help you.” He turned the pebble of gold over in his hand, the belt still on the floor, and I saw he knew what it was. What I was.

“Yes,” I said, and he made a sound of disgust, thick in the dark, but kept the gold in one hand still, as if weighing it against me.

“Upstairs,” he said after a minute. “Second door on the left. Leave your clothes in the hall to be burned.”

In the morning, he brought me a dress, plum colored like a fresh bruise, and gave me a piece of bread. “I think I might have a use for you. You listen, you do what I say, and you leave when I tell you to go,” he said. “Understand?”

And then I waited. And waited. I learned the City from a map he gave me to memorize until I could almost see the parks, the shopping district. The palace where Keran Berj lived.

I learned his house with its tiny, cramped rooms, most of which I only glimpsed. I dreamed of being sent away on a ship, wrapped up in a rug. They were one of the few things Keran Berj let go because others wanted them enough to pay prices I’d heard would feed everyone for years.

And then Chris finally told me something.

“You’ll be leaving soon,” he said one night, after letting me inside from the brief, dark stroll he let me have around the fenced-in square that was his yard. Fourteen steps from one end to the other. Ten across. “You’ll go by train. Someone will be with you.”

“But I—” I said, and broke off because I could tell from his voice there was nothing I could say. No one like Chris would take in someone like me without conditions. No one was going to simply save me.

I had myself, though. I used to think that wasn’t enough, but I knew better by then. I was all I had. All I’d ever had. And it would be enough. It had to be.

I would save myself.

I
n the train station, I waited with my papers. Kerr’s were tucked inside the daily paper. The only one, the one with Keran Berj’s picture beaming out in grainy shades of black and white.

Chris had made me leave, finally and unexpectedly, pushing me out the back door when it was barely light and I was still mostly asleep, pausing only long enough to press papers and a few coins into my hands as he said, “Keep your papers in plain sight. You’ll be searched, so don’t hide the others on you. Buy a paper and put them in that. You’re waiting for Kerr. He’s your brother. When he comes, let him do the talking.”

“How will I find him?” I said, only knowing that this Kerr was who Chris—and therefore I—had been waiting for. And that he hadn’t come. I knew nothing else about him, not his real name, not even what he looked like.

“He’ll find you,” Chris said, and then shut the door in my face.

I was searched four times in the train station. The old woman who complained about how her joints ached, her back humped like pain had broken her, was searched six, although it was clear the soldiers only skimmed over her, afraid to touch too much. A man wearing a black hat, which I found was forbidden when one of the solders waved a long sheet of paper in the air and asked why the man hadn’t read the latest Words from God that Keran Berj had received, was searched eight times, and roughly, too.

Searching was like Liam hunting for me in bed, only better because I didn’t end up with Liam puffing over me, closing his eyes to block out my face. I just had a soldier or two wondering out loud what I looked like under my skirts and a hand or two venturing up them. Though my heart hammered with worry over how Kerr hadn’t come, and how I didn’t know how to find him, the first time I was searched was the only time I was scared for myself.

I was scared because the soldiers kept poking and pinching me even though I stood there, patient like the People are, patient like I’d been taught was necessary. I didn’t know why it seemed to drive them on, but then the old woman with the hump of pain on her back raised her hands to her face, shook like she was crying, and then looked at me.

I understood then, and so I pretended to cry, pinching the skin of my right wrist as I twisted from side to side, from one set of arms to another, wailing like I would have done the day I met Liam if I’d thought my voice would have been heard at all.

The old lady was right. The soldiers grinned and backed away, pleased with my tears, and what fear I had vanished. I realized the soldiers truly weren’t like the Guards. They were simply bored men standing around, and what they did was like what the younger Rorys, the ones in training, do when they ride through a village. They’ll walk into houses and steal kisses or bread or both, and only for the fear it causes.

I didn’t fear the soldiers like they wanted because my body had never been my own. It was the People’s, always, and briefly belonged to Liam too. I never thought of it as something other than a vessel—an Angel is a messenger and nothing more—until I looked up at a cloudless blue sky and thought not of the Saints or even the People. I just thought it was a pretty sky, and was glad to see it.

I realized I wanted to keep seeing it.

I had wanted things for myself before, but never like I wanted to keep seeing that sky. I didn’t understand what it meant then.

What my choices would cost.

C
hris’s house was strange. So many rooms, and all for one person. Two, if you counted me, but I knew neither of us did.

The City was strange too. It was orderly; so clean the streets appeared to shine, and all the buildings were a uniform gray, maybe colored by Keran Berj because he liked it, or maybe colored by the factories he’d built. Walking to the train station, I saw it all, and the City was dark and cold and so strangely sad—the slumped buildings that appeared to be homes but could have been anything, the golden statues of Keran Berj on almost every corner, and all the quiet, waiting people standing in orderly lines outside dark buildings.

Everything had its place, everyone had their place, and I could finally see why so many followed Keran Berj. He’d broken everyone, but more importantly, he’d broken the land. Everything around me was his creation.

Keran Berj’s laws were stranger than I thought, though. The statues I knew about, of course, and the palace he lived in, the way he put his picture on everything. Bread. Wine bottles. Candy. But in the train station, as my papers were inspected and I listened to the soldiers argue over how to stamp them, trying to remember if Keran Berj wanted a circle or a square, I realized it was impossible to know all of Keran Berj’s rules. There were too many, and they were always changing.

I wondered if that’s what he wanted.

My scalp ached from the dye, which Chris had done the day before he’d sent me off in the dark, and I collected a circle, a square, and then a circle inside a square on my papers.

Kerr still did not come, but a man whose shoes made a sharp tick-tock noise as he walked did. He walked around the station twice, his shoes loud in the sudden, frightened silence, looking for something. The soldiers all stood stiff and unmoving while he did.

I wondered what Angel would be sent to meet the tick-tock man, and looked at the newspaper that held Kerr’s papers. Next to the large, smiling picture of Keran Berj that I’d seen everywhere, on everything, there was a picture of a body—dressed in black and covered with medals—being lowered into the ground, Keran Berj standing beside it. Below the picture was a poem Keran Berj had written.

It was called “Memory.” It was written in honor of the recently dead Minister of Defense. The word “freedom” was used in every line. I rubbed my right wrist and watched the man with the tick-tock shoes march to the station doors.

“Nari, Leji,” he called, and two Guards came inside.

They walked over to the tick-tock man and listened as he spoke. Then they went down to the tracks and looked one way, then the other. They came back and as the frightened silence started to ease they made the old woman with the bent back stand up. One of the Guards hit her across the mouth, said, “Traitor.” She swayed, and a child fell out of her coat, the lump on her back revealed as a small boy with bright blue eyes but hair and skin of the People.

The Rorys used to always spit when they saw me because my own eyes are blue.

The Guards did not spit. They simply took the boy and the woman outside. They did not come back.

There was no sign the child or woman had ever been in the station. People moved into their seats as if they’d never existed.

I wanted to go, but I couldn’t. My only option was to stay where I was and so I did. I sat, and I waited for the train to come.

Eventually, it did.

And so did Kerr.

I
heard the train first. There were no tracks where I lived, for even the man with the train, the one who had it before Keran Berj—even he recognized our land for what it was and let it be. Keran Berj had once tried to push rails into the first low swells of the Hills, but the land swallowed the spikes he tried to plant and the Rorys killed all his workers.

But I had seen trains. Though Keran Berj could not reach the Hills, he reached up near them, and I’d glimpsed them off in the distance when I was little and still with Da. And then, when I was training to be an Angel, we all had to walk down from the Hills and see one passing by so that if we were asked about it, we could describe it, for it was one of Keran Berj’s many sources of pride.

I had thought it a strange blot on the rolling brown grain of the plains below the Hills, and Ann and Lily and Mary and I had all talked about how noisy it was. But in the station it was so much louder than the far-off hum I’d heard. It sounded like the thunder from a hundred storms, and made the ground pulse, a strange, low throbbing that I couldn’t hear, but could feel beneath my feet.

“Sister, I’m here,” someone said as I stared. And then he hissed, “Where are my papers?” as arms pretended to hug me.

That was Kerr, finally arrived.

“Brother,” I said, broken from the train’s spell, and when I handed him the newspaper, his fingers slipped inside and pulled out the identification card and passes so fast I didn’t even see it.

He elbowed me when I tried to look at his face and turned away, glanced at a couple waiting together and said, “Has someone told those two that Keran Berj frowns on public displays of affection? ”

The soldiers, who had been watching us, blinked at him, at the loud sureness of his voice, and then turned toward the couple, who guiltily unclasped their hands and cringed.

“Don’t stare at them,” Kerr said to me. His voice was cold, ice cruel.

“I’m not yours to order,” I said, and kept watching them.

He said nothing in reply and I thought for a moment that I’d surprised him, but when I glanced over at him he was looking at the newspaper, carefully folding it so that only the bright, glowing face of Keran Berj showed.

Now that I finally saw him, I realized he was my age or a year or two older, and clearly carried not one drop of the People’s blood. He was pale all over, hair and skin, and so far everything he’d done—the way he’d spoken to me, the way he’d eagerly and loudly, openly, turned on someone else—made me wonder why he would even need someone like Chris.

I wondered, but not enough to turn away. Not enough to try and fade into the crowd, to try and fade into the City, into some sort of shadow life.

I wanted more than that. I’d wanted it enough to find and endure Chris. To be here in the station. In the City.

So when the train opened its doors, I followed Kerr, and sat down beside him.

W
e were supposed to arrive at the border yesterday, but everyone—especially the People—knows that while Keran Berj may boast of the power of his land, the might of his army, and the efficiency of his train, he doesn’t control all the land; his army is nothing without his Guards and the certain death they bring, and the train runs more on the whims of its tracks than on Keran Berj’s will.

Well into the second day of a trip that was supposed to be done in one, the washroom has rapidly become something no one wants to brave unless they must. The men go with the soldiers to the back car and “water the ground,” and the women take deep breaths and wade in to something fouler than even the worst animal pen.

All the other women seem less bothered by the filth and smell of the washroom than I am, as if a soldier leering is far worse than squatting over a hole so clogged with waste that it is seeping onto the floor. Perhaps all of them are used to obeying Keran Berj’s ever-changing rules, to waiting in lines, to giving up everything he asks for his new statues or roads or whatever he wishes. Perhaps they truly only think of him.

I don’t.

The train begins the slow grinding noises that means it is stopping, and out the window I see shadows of buildings, tiny against the dust-colored ground. We are deep into the desert now, land no one wants to live in, but it is home to those Keran Berj wants isolated. Punished. Those who broke his laws are sent here, out into this hot, barren emptiness. Death comes for them but slowly, slowly.

I suspect Keran Berj likes that.

As the train lurches to a halt, people from the shimmer-haze of buildings stream out, red-faced from the sun as they shout through the windows.