Grace

Table of Contents

 

 

 

 

 

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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2010 by Elizabeth Spencer

 

English translation of the poem “Forced March” from
Clouded Sky: Poems by Miklós Radnóti
, published by The Sheep Meadow Press with translations by Steven Polgar, Stephen Berg, and S. J. Marks. Used with permission.

 

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Summary: Sixteen-year-old Grace travels on a decrepit train toward a border that may not exist, recalling events that brought her to choose life over being a suicide bomber, and dreaming of freedom from the extremist religion-based government of Keran Berj.

eISBN : 978-1-101-44336-1

[1. Fantasy. 2. Despotism—Fiction. 3. Insurgency—Fiction.
4. Fugitives from justice—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.S4195Gr 2010 [Fic]—dc22 2009053285

 

Published in the United States by Dutton Books, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
345 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014 *
www.penguin.com/youngreaders

 

—FROM
Forced March
BY MIKLÓ́S RADNÓTI

I
’m afraid my hair is showing. Chris said the dye would work but I’m not sure he much cared if it did; and I don’t think it was true dye, just a mixture of color he’d created, a kind of a paint and nothing more. Plus the train is hot, so hot the floor burns my feet, little red huff hisses of pain searing up into my legs.

I want to get off this train but I can’t. Not now. It is the only choice left to me, and it is actually considered an honor to be here. To be trusted enough to be on this train, to have a ticket for it, is something most can’t even dare to dream of. Keran Berj lets few people out of this land—his land, or so he says—and only those on government business are allowed to go. And then only if the business will result in glory of some kind for Keran Berj.

I’m certainly not supposed to have the honor of being on this train.

I’m not supposed to be here at all.

Chris made my hair glow over a sink, frowning when I tried to move away from the scissors in his hand. The gold I’d given him to help me had bought me no trust and only a tiny bit of his patience.

So now I worry that the bright color is bleeding, raining off my hair and onto my skin. Stupidly, I worry that it is staining my shirt. It is white, with buttons made of tin. One of the sleeves has been sewn in crooked, a large gathered fold lying where my shoulder is.

I’ve never had a shirt made by machines before. Inside the fold is space for three of my fingers, like a hiding place in the open, an error made by the machine that sewed the shirt. I was fascinated by it for a while, slipped my fingers into it when we first got on the train until Kerr, the boy Chris made me wait for, the one who I must pretend is my brother, kicked me in the ankle, hard, and hissed, “Stop acting like a piece of Hill shit,” as he pretended to be checking the lumpy, stained seat waiting for us.

It’s an insult here, in this world. In Keran Berj’s world. To be from the Hills is an insult. I hate that, even as I know I would never go back there.

Can’t go back there.

Once this train was very grand, or so the stories go. Before Keran Berj, who supposedly rules us all, there was someone else, someone who truly did command everyone’s loyalty, a great man who ruled from far away. He is said to have had the strength of a bear and the wisdom of the Saints. He came only once a year to take money and did not crack the dead’s teeth to pull out their fillings and melt them into statues. This man came and rode everywhere—from the mountains to the seas—in a long, beautiful train. Its insides were covered with diamonds, and at night it shone brighter than the stars.

Then the man died. No one else came to rule—we were forgotten—and Keran Berj stepped forward and said he would lead, that everyone would be equals and life would be better.

I wonder if it is a rule that all stories must end with a lie. But then, the only stories I know are the ones the People tell, and they all end with Keran Berj and his false words, so maybe there are some that don’t.

It is so hot. My hair is wet when I push my fingers into it, my feet hurt, and the man in front of us smells like onions, the wild ones that grow on the side of the Hills. The ones you can smell before you see them, the ones that start to grow with the promise of spring. I can hardly believe this train was grand once, but I see hints of it in the markings where things have been pried away, decorations and comforts removed for someone else’s use.

Keran Berj’s use. No one will mention this, though. The train is—and will always be—called glorious in spite of its sad state, because not only do you never know who is watching, you never know who is listening. Even those trusted enough to have tickets for this train, this trip, watch what they do. What they say. The train is special, and so is everyone on it, but no one is above Keran Berj.

No one.

At least, according to him.

“Are you asleep, sister?” Kerr asks, and puts his hand on my elbow, stilling my fingers as they twist through my damp hair.

“No,” I say, and lower my hand, place it in my lap on top of my fake papers. There is no stain on my fingers. The dye holds. When I am safely across the border, the first thing I will do is leave Kerr behind.

I would kill him, but I already know I am too weak for that.

T
he People don’t do that,” I’d said when Chris told me to take my hair down, and he’d looked at me as if I were stupid, as if he was thinking about tossing me out onto the street right then.

He didn’t do that, though. He just frowned at me—like he was weighing his options, weighing my worth—and then yanked my braids down. I’d looped them up so they lay on the back of my neck, and it was still strange to feel air rushing over them after so many years of a sun-crisp cap cradling my skin.

The People believe a woman’s hair should be covered, undone only in private. There are exceptions, of course. I was one once.

Chris burned the braids after he cut them off. I stared into the bowl of the sink, at cracked white showing rust underneath. My head burned from the dye he’d concocted. My eyes watered from it. My braids made a peculiar crackling noise as they burned, and smelled terrible too, like a bad dream I couldn’t—or wouldn’t—remember.

“If it was last year, I’d sell them,” Chris said. “Keran Berj wanted women to have shoulder-length hair then. Now it’s supposed to be short—new rule—but until recently people were cutting open graves in the hopes of finding hair to add to their own. Imagine walking around with hair smelling of death swinging in your face. But still, better than you swinging from a rope, right?”

I closed my eyes and tried not to think about how much my scalp hurt. Tried not to think about graves and hanging.

But then, death has always followed me.

“You didn’t think to cut your hair before you came here?” he asked as water, so cold there were tiny bits of ice in it, poured out of the tap and over my skull.

“No,” I said, and watched the color that was supposed to sink into my hair race in rivers toward the drain. “Will this color hold?”

“It’s dye, isn’t it?” he said, and yanked a hunk of hair on the back of my neck, pulling me up like the Rorys do to the boys when they first fall off their horses. In the sliver of mirror he’d nailed to the wall, my face was red dark from the blood pulsing into it as I’d knelt over the sink, a color I used to wish I was, but my hair barely touched my ears and shone bright like the sun.

T
he heat makes me sleepy, but I don’t want to sleep. The few times I have, I’ve drifted off into strange, unpleasant dreams. Awake, I can keep them away and keep an eye on the train. On Kerr.

I close my eyes anyway because I’m tired, endlessly tired, and the heat makes it worse, and when I look over at Kerr, I don’t see him.

Instead, I see Liam.

Liam is now sitting next to me, grim-faced like always and smacking the heel of one hand against his other palm, a coil of wires—blue, red, yellow, and green—around his wrists.

I wake up with a start just as Liam pushes them together, and the dream clouds my mind as the train groans like Liam’s Ma did when her joints were aching and she wanted me to rub them, a long, slow screech that made my teeth ache with wanting to scream.

But if I didn’t scream while kneading Liam’s Ma’s feet, Liam frowning disappointed at me and treating our being pledged as if it was a chore he had to grit his teeth and get through, I won’t scream now.

Instead I look at the doors.

They are at either end of the train car, a way out that’s useless. The ground we cover now is turning to desert, to bleak, endless bright sand.

The doors are heavy, tarnished metal, and slide open if you press a palm against them. I’ve never seen anything so fancy. No one opens them except the soldiers. If you want food, you go to the door and wait for a soldier to come through, then follow behind. You have to do the same thing for the washroom, and I think of how Chris used to only let me out twice a day, of how I’d race to the washroom with hate burning a hole in my heart each time.