Grace (2 page)

Maybe he was getting me ready for this, but I don’t think he was.

I think I fit into his plans and so he took me in.

Past that, I think he simply didn’t care.

O
nce, right before Mary was sent on her way, I walked down to the main camp, past all the Rorys resting before their next fight, to see Da. I only did it to show things were different for me. Mary had no family that counted to see her before she left, but I did, didn’t I? She was alone, aside from her beaten down mother, and I wasn’t. I wasn’t like her. She was so eager to please and I was . . .

I was where I had to be.

I found Da asleep on the ground near where he’d set up, stinking of drink like always. I slept out under the stars, knowing better than to go into Da’s tent without permission. Even then, when Da woke and got a glimpse of me, he smacked me hard.

“Angel House turned you out?” he said, and turned away from me, spat on the ground three times.

“No,” I said, and wondered why I’d even come to see him.

“Good. Working for the People’s freedom, you are. Proof you’re good for something.” He waved me away then, and spit three times again as I left.

I nodded even though he couldn’t—didn’t—see. Even though the People’s freedom didn’t seem to think much of me. It turned me into a thing. A weapon.

It felt like a cage, being what I was. I felt like I—Grace—was nothing.

I seemed to be the only one who felt that way, though. Lily and Ann loved saying they were Angels and longed for their pledges and bombs like nothing else. Mary never talked about pledging, but then no one would have her since not one of the Rorys was willing to claim her—and the half of her that flowed with the blood of the People—as his.

She did talk about her bomb, though. She wanted it so badly, and when she finally got it, she spent days oiling it so it would slide down her leg without a sound.

No one would go near her because she wasn’t one of the People. She was alive only because she was an Angel—and she was glad of it. Glad to be an Angel because then she thought she mattered.

I never understood that. She didn’t. I didn’t. No Angel did, not truly.

“Stop staring, sister,” Kerr says, low-voiced, and I look at him. He’s staring out the window, as if the view is going to change. I wonder if he’s ever seen the desert before and bet he hasn’t, not even in pictures.

If he was in the Hills he’d stare so much he’d fall right off them.

“Don’t look at me either,” he says, still whispering. As if the snoring people around us are awake and watching. The heat has slowed everything down, made everything an effort. We’ve only had our papers checked once in the last four stops, so different from the beginning, when the air in the City turned my breath to ghost white puffs and I sat in the train station, waiting.

Then, everyone’s papers were checked constantly, and I waited for Kerr, holding his set and fearing they’d be found. My heart hammered so hard I wondered if it was going to break.

“You look sickly,” I tell Kerr, and he does. He’s so pale I suspect he’d cook in the Hills. Not that he’d ever even make it to them. His throat would be slit by the Rorys before he made it onto the first slopes. The look of him—no earth color at all—gives him away right off.

“I’m—” Kerr says, fiddling with the collar on his shirt, and the door at the far end of the car opens, soldiers streaming in.

“Papers!” they bark, and then say it again, louder, because they’ve been drinking—I can smell it—and because they’re bored.

And, I think, because when the train finally stops and lets everyone on board out to go and do the government work Keran Berj wants them to do, they have to ride all the way back to the City. To him. Not that they would ever let themselves think this. Not when they have the majesty that is Keran Berj watching them.

The heart is a place with worm holes made by feelings you aren’t supposed to have but do. I know that better than anyone.

I get my papers out and put them in my right hand. Chris told me Keran Berj made it illegal to gesture with your left hand in honor of the Minister of Culture, who’d lost his left hand due to infection.

“Or Keran cutting it off, most likely,” Chris said, laughing, and I smiled and swallowed hard around the bits of bread and meat he’d given me to eat, willing them back down my throat.

I never knew if Chris guessed exactly what I’d done, and I surely wasn’t going to ask. It was bad enough to be locked in that room of his house and hear him coming and going, hear people on the street calling him “Christaphor”—his given name, I suspect, or at least the one he’d chosen to use—with respect in their voices, the kind of respect that only comes from fear.

I was afraid of him too.

The soldiers come down the train aisle, plucking up papers and tossing them back. Sometimes they stop and frown and ask questions. Kerr and I have only had to tell our story twice, but now I wonder if we will have to say it again.

We’re on our way to bring our sister home. She wants to come back to Keran Berj, to her children and her husband, but the government across the border—never say its name, never acknowledge that it has any power—says she’s an escapee. As if anyone traveling outside would ever want to leave the glory that is Keran Berj.

Still, she can’t leave unless family comes to claim her, and with her husband off doing his annual soldier training—God watch over him—Kerr was sent instead, and had to bring me because she’s pregnant, heavily so, and everyone knows what Keran Berj says about women and childbirth. “Glorious work, fit only for our sisters.” Even over the border, his reach extends, proclaiming that only women should be present when babies are born.

As if Keran Berj does not take those children and teach them to act according to his will as soon as he can.

A soldier, blond hair and jagged teeth, stops by our seats. He flips through my papers and tosses them back. He goes through Kerr’s more slowly, then slaps them against one thigh and says, “You look familiar. Did you go to the Academy? ”

“I work near it,” Kerr says. “Keran Berj Shoes, over on Berj One Road. You’ve been there, I suppose?”

The soldier nods. “Last year. I waited in line for a whole day, and then the Official for Distribution came and said they ran out.”

“Next time you get selected for a pair, tell the Line Officer that Kerr asked you to ask about his nephew’s birthday,” Kerr says, and the soldier grins. His face is like the moon, wide and waxy-white.

“I hear there’s a drawing coming during the Festival of Health.”

Kerr nods, and the soldier hands him his papers back before moving on. I finger my hair again as I test the floor with one foot.

Still too hot to rest against.

Still no stain on my hands.

It’s a strange road that’s led me here. A bad one, some would say. Evil, even. But I’m not sorry I’m here.

I’m not sorry I’m alive.

I
was supposed to die before I turned seventeen. I was supposed to drift up into the sky, into the arms of the Saints.

I was an Angel, and I was supposed to honor the People. I was supposed to show that we won’t be bent to Keran Berj’s will, that we have resources beyond the Rorys.

Keran Berj has his soldiers to make up his army, the one that enforces his rules, and his Guard, to strike when he needs death to be a sure thing; but he does not have what the People do.

The Rorys fight, and that is all they do. It is their life. They fight to keep the Hills ours, and are named, of course, for Rory. The first one, the one who walked down from the Hills when Keran Berj was young and promising so much it was obvious—at least to the People—that he was a liar.

Rory knew that Keran Berj wanted to control everything. He saw that Keran Berj had no respect for the land, for the Saints, for anything or anyone but himself and his God, and so he walked down from the Hills and went to the City.

He found Keran Berj walking through the City, back before he had so much power he only had to show pictures of his face to be obeyed, and Rory shot him.

He missed, and Keran Berj turned his newly formed Guard on him.

Rory was hung after they were through with him.

Just before he swung, Rory cried out, “You aren’t forever, Keran Berj, but the land is. I die for it gladly.”

There were still newspapers then, not just the one that Keran Berj controls now, and those words were printed. What Rory said reached back to the People, and they understood what needed to be done. They understood that Keran Berj would not be stopped by anyone but them.

They saw he would want the Hills.

And so the Rorys were born, and now that is what every boy is trained to be. What every man does until he has sons of his own who can go out and fight.

The People are the Hills. The Hills are the People. The Rorys fight to keep what should be as it is, and to remind Keran Berj that he is not forever.

Only the land is.

But there are more than the Rorys. The People have Angels too. They are reminders, in form and action, that Keran Berj will understand, that he cannot—will not—control the People. That we choose as we will.

Keran Berj has posters of Angels in the soldiers’ and guards’ training camps, we were told as we were training, pictures of red-earth women with bared teeth and wings dripping blood growing out of their backs.

No wonder so few of us are ever even noticed before we do what we are meant to do. If we could arrive on wings and draw blood without blowing it out of people, I think Keran Berj might step aside. His God speaks to him, or so he says, but his God doesn’t grant miracles like that.

Of course, the Saints don’t either. I know. I had no wings that could help me fly away. To get away from the bomb that was made for me. That was my life.

Sometimes, I don’t think there is anything beyond what is here, what is now. I think that maybe beyond this world—this train, this desert we are passing through, this heat swelling all around—there is nothing.

I
was supposed to kill the Minister of Culture. I was supposed to stand in the front row of those gathered to listen to him speak and press my left hand to my right wrist in a way that would push the wires bound under my sleeve together.

I was supposed to do that and then watch the world burn.

I wouldn’t see it for long. An Angel’s death is quick and painless. Beautiful, like going to sleep on a warm spring night.

Of course, there were no Angels to ask about it. None of them ever came back. They went to the Saints, to beyond. All I heard were stories.

And then there were the burns Ann, Mary, Lily, and I got as we were learning to make bombs, to use them. The way we sometimes singed our hair and how Lily once managed to lose one of her toes—

Those moments were not without pain.

To this day, I can still see Lily’s face, gray with agony, and the way her toe lay there on the ground, pulsing blood like it was still part of her. Like it was still living.

It’s nothing, we were told. You belong to the Saints. You are their instrument. You will make us proud.

Lily’s toe was swept away because it didn’t matter. She learned to walk well enough without it. She would be able to do what she was made for.

She would still be able to die.

I
was given to Liam two months before I was sent to the Minister of Culture. Angels are lucky because they do not have to wait until they are twenty to be pledged, as other girls do. They do not have to scurry behind the Rorys carrying weapons and supplies. They do not have to learn to live life on the move.

I lived in the sturdy, stone Angel House. I learned how to talk like someone who lived for Keran Berj. I learned every rule he decreed, and kept track of the ones he still believed in, as well as the former ones he’d deemed evil. I learned his life story, like all those who follow him do, and what prayers he’d written to have sung to his God. I learned how I would destroy part of his world. And when I was sixteen and four months, I was pledged.

The best Angels die pregnant. There is no sure way to tell before they go, of course, because Angels are only pledged long enough for there to be the chance of a baby and nothing more, but there is always hope sent along. If there is a speck in the body, the marker of another life, then two of the People have died, and it proves that the People value the land and its call above all else.

Keran Berj says this is inhuman, but then Keran Berj hanged his own son for “evil thoughts.”

I did not worry that I was carrying a child. Liam came to me only a handful of times, and when he did, he always spoke of Sian and how he was waiting for her.

He always said her name.

I knew how it would be as soon as I saw him; Da’s hand on his shoulder, as if to make sure he stayed, and Liam’s weary, displeased face as I lifted my face to see him.

It never occurred to him that I didn’t want him either. He never questioned the tea I drank every morning, one made of things that shouldn’t be named. One that women with many children used when they were desperate to bear no more.

Liam never asked me anything.

I
couldn’t do it, though.

That was the thing, in the end.

I couldn’t die.

I went into the village. I was pale enough, from my bad blood and being sheltered in the Angel House, and dressed properly, my hair painted with lemon water to hide the red that lurked inside its too-light-for-the-People shade and put up, braided and wrapped around my head like the Rorys had seen girls in the village wearing when they were scouting it. I looked like a child of Keran Berj’s followers, I looked like every other girl there. Pale faced, light-haired, dressed in swirling white and a shawl with Keran Berj’s face printed on it draped over my shoulders and dipping across my back, so that his profile was everywhere you looked.