Grace (3 page)

I stood near the stage, feeling the wind blow through my hair, a strange sensation. I watched and listened as Keran Berj’s latest missives from his God were issued. All doctors had to pray to Keran Berj before they saw patients. All corn that was planted had to be the yellow-seeded kind. No one was allowed to go swimming. The Festival of Service was now The Festival of Glorious Freedom.

Money was to be sent to Keran Berj for a palace made of ice that would sit in the desert, a building that would be put under a dome to show that, with Keran Berj, all things were possible.

I bowed my head when the speech ended with “As God wills,” as I had been taught.

When I looked up, the Minister was coming onstage. He walked slowly, and was sweating. I felt hot myself, inside the layers of white, under the weight of the shawl. My head felt hot and naked.

I moved my hand to my wrist. I glanced up at the sky. I waited to feel the Saints with me.

I felt nothing.

I pressed my hand to my wrist but instead of pushing the wires of the remote together, I pulled the knot that unbound the bomb strapped to my leg. I was supposed to do this to make sure the bomb did not have to explode through me. It slithered down, sliding on my sweat-drenched skin, and landed by my foot.

My skirts belled over it, but I still didn’t push the wires. Instead, I nudged the bomb under a banner hanging in front of me, Keran Berj’s smile, printed bigger than the tallest man, watching my face.

I took a step back. Three little girls walked onstage. There were flowers in their hands. The Minister of Culture smiled. One of the girls waved at someone in the crowd, flowers dancing in her hand with the movement.

People laughed, happy at the sight.

I took another step back.

I knew something was truly wrong with me then. I was where I was supposed to be. I was doing everything I was supposed to do.

Only I wasn’t.

I kept moving, let myself be pushed far back into the crowd, let myself be carried to its very edge by those who wanted to be closer. Who wanted to see the old, tired man onstage.

Who believed in what they were seeing.

Then I pressed the wires together.

T
he blast would have killed me had I stayed with the bomb by the stage. I would have been tossed up into the air as bits of bone and ash so fine I would have fallen like rain, scattered like the words of a prayer.

Instead, I stayed standing. Breathing.

Whole.

I can still see the fire the bomb created. It was so strong, so angry. It hissed and popped and roared as it moved. As it grew.

I walked out of the village, past dazed and weeping women, men, children, and soldiers, slipping into the trees, up into the Hills. I unbraided my hair as I walked, tucking it away under the cap I’d kept in my skirt’s waistband, another thing that was to be found on my dead body, another reminder of who and what I was.

Those who had brought me, who hid and watched from far off, to view my destruction—they had horses. They were gone by the time I reached where they’d been, and they’d left no trail, only a tiny patch of trampled grass. It didn’t matter. I still knew the way.

My walk was long, but eventually I reached the path that led to where we were living until the winter. It was then I saw the stuffed white sack hanging from a tree.

I stopped and watched it swing.

I had only ever seen one once before, when Sean Cuclani was found down off the Hills inside a house with a soldier. Some say Sean was spying for Keran, others that he’d turned away from the People and that the reason his wife never swelled with child was because he wouldn’t touch her.

Either way, the white sack was hung, his things stuffed inside and cursed with all the vengeance the Saints can bring. It was left for him to find. Left for him to see that he had no one. Not the Hills. Not the People. He was nothing. Forgotten. Worse than a ghost, because no one would honor his spirit. No one would ever even say his name again.

Sean took down the sack and hanged himself with the rope. He was left for the earth to take, of course—it wasn’t right to bury him, not even then—but he did the proper thing. The honorable thing.

I took down the sack and didn’t even think about the rope. My dead body, whole with my tongue hanging from my mouth, would mean nothing. Likely as not, no one but the birds would ever see it as the People would be on the move soon enough now that I wasn’t dead—Keran Berj would send his Guards out looking as soon as he got word—and the birds would just pick me clean without ever wondering why I was there.

I took my good shoes, the sturdy, handmade ones I wore every day, from inside the sack, and then went to find Liam, rope in hand. I don’t know what I thought I was going to do.

It doesn’t matter anyway. Liam was dead when I got there, laid out in his mother’s tent, waiting for respects to come. There was a cloth over his belly, to show he’d stabbed himself in shame over me.

If I was dead, he’d be alive. He’d be celebrating. He’d probably even get Sian, finally.

I took the belt lying around his hips, heavy gold shaped in a pattern of running horses. His Ma saw me and didn’t even spit three times before she started screaming curses.

I ran then, and didn’t look back. I didn’t stop to see if Da was alive, or if what I’d done had made him do the proper thing and stab himself too.

I’m his daughter, and I’m sure he’s still alive.

Strangest thing about all of it is that I think of the village. A place not even in the Hills, and I wonder if the Organizer for Events was killed for having an Angel come. I wonder if Keran Berj sent his cameras to take pictures of the fire’s after-math. I wonder what happened to the flowers that had been so bright onstage. I’d seen them as I left, their color washed away. I wondered if Keran Berj would find them and put them on a poster, would use them as a sign of the People’s evil.

I knew the People would use them if they found them too, take the image to heart and leave blood-drenched flowers behind on soil Keran Berj destroyed by overfarming, show that he killed the land, that he cared for nothing but his own will.

I hope the flowers wilted into nothing before anyone found them. They were true flowers once, but then they were picked from the earth and pressed into hands.

They were dead long before I reached them.

S
ometimes when I dream, I am lying on that stage, unable to move.

I am lying on the stage, and I watch blood come toward me. I feel it come into me, feel it become me until it is all I am, until it is all I breathe, until I am swallowed by it.

The worst part isn’t that I can’t stop it. The worst part is that I already know blood won’t change anything.

O
nce Lily told me she’d heard that long ago, back before anyone ruled, back when the People weren’t the only ones living in the Hills, others used to worship in the Angel House. She said they prayed to their gods where we practiced making bombs.

“Other gods? Not the Saints?” I said, and she nodded, pointing at the ceiling, and said that was surely why they were no longer in the Hills.

I’d wondered about that over the years, though. We’d been told the building had been made by the Saints, but as I grew to know the place, and the carvings high on the walls, I decided—

I decided that was wrong.

The carvings were like nothing any Saint ever called for. They were strange, tiny stone faces like monsters out of a dream, and they perched high up on the wall with stone angel wings carved into their backs. Fierce, like they were guarding something. As if they were watching us. As if they couldn’t leave.

I felt sorry for them, trapped and forgotten, and the more I looked at them, the more I was sure that once, long ago, other people had stood where we did. That they’d been the ones who’d built the Angel House. That they’d worshipped their own terrifying angels.

I told Ann what I thought after we both got burned across our thighs while practicing bomb-wearing, and she repeated what I said, leaving me to suffer through extra prayers to cleanse my heart and an empty plate during meals.

Mary told on me when she caught me in the kitchen trying to take a piece of bread on the fifth day of my cleansing, when I was so dizzy with exhaustion and hunger I could hardly stand.

“Why did you do that?” I said when she came into the study room as I was scrubbing the floor—it was decided I needed to cleanse myself and the house—and pointed at her skin, then mine. We weren’t so different, she and I. We both had blood that wasn’t from the People running through us. I thought that should mean something.

She was the only person I knew like me.

“Because of that,” she said, echoing my pointing back. “Everything you do gets me judged, just as everything I do gets you judged. Someday you’ll be glad I listened and obeyed when you wouldn’t. When one of us has our beautiful, final day, and I hope I’m picked to go first, you’ll see that our skin doesn’t matter. You’ll see that what we do matters. Who we are here matters.”

I went back to scrubbing, but she didn’t go away. She sat down and studied, moving her feet when I had to scrub the dirt out of the stones under them.

She was right about our skin meaning nothing, but not the way she wanted it to. All that time she spent studying to be an Angel, all the belief she had in what we were taught and in the Saints, and the People will remember me far longer than they ever will her. I’ll be held up as a sign of what bad blood—blood from Keran Berj’s world—does.

I’ll be used as proof of how nothing in or from Keran Berj’s world is worth keeping. There will be no more children like Mary or me, and not just because no one from Keran Berj’s world has come up into the Hills for years. The People will never risk another Angel like me.

Mary lived for the People when they didn’t want her, but in the end, what she did will be forgotten. It had already started to slip away—willed away, maybe—before I left.

I remember, though.

J
erusha was Mary’s calling.

Jerusha, Keran Berj’s devoted disciple. A monster he’d created.

It was a surprise, her being sent to him. Her mother was like mine, one of those who’d come to the Hills thinking they could study how the People lived, a group devoted to peace when there was none to be found. But her mother didn’t end up like mine. She lived, and was used hard by the Rorys.

The only reason Mary was even taken by the Angels is that she looked so much like someone from out of the Hills, from Keran Berj’s world, that everyone agreed it was the proper thing, especially since she’d managed to live with no kin and survive.

And she believed. Inside Angel House, Mary heard all the stories and prayers she never had before, and grew to believe in the Saints and the People so much that she’d make her knees bloody kneeling and praying. It was the devotion—and how she looked, so pale, so much like them—that got her sent out first. That got her sent to Jerusha.

Ann thought Mary was planning on running away. Lily and I agreed Ann was just jealous that she wasn’t called first. She thought it was her right, since she was the oldest, and she followed Mary around as soon as she was called, questioning her. She even dug through the bag Mary packed right in front of her, and, at the last prayer, chanted loudly about trust.

Mary ignored her until after the final words of that prayer, but when it was done and we were walking her outside, starting the final farewells, she grabbed Ann’s arm and said, “I’ve got more cause to hate Keran Berj than you ever will. He said it was a good idea for my mother to come here, sent her and all her peace-loving friends into the Hills to—” She paused, and spat on the ground three times. “He’s why I’m here. And that’s why his beloved Jerusha will die.”

“But freedom isn’t about that,” Ann said. “It’s not about revenge. Your mother is nothing. Freedom is—”

“I know what freedom is,” Mary said, and smiled like a Saint herself. “I go because I live for it. I live to serve the People as they see fit, and I will do what they and the Saints have called me to.”

“Oh,” Ann said, and looped Mary’s arm through hers, leading the way to Mary’s last meal before she was taken off the Hills. I stared after them until Lily came back and touched my arm.

“The bread will get cold if we have to wait for you,” she said, and I nodded, still thinking about what I’d heard.

Wondering why Mary’s freedom sounded so awful.

Why the thought of it made me want to scream.

Then she was gone, and it was ages—a winter so bitter it drove all of us, even the Angels, into the highest part of the Hills, and the start of a cold, wet spring—before we found out what happened to her.

A
fter the bomb, after I lived, after I saw Liam dead and took his belt, I went to Chris.

I’d waited till it was darkest night to go to him, scuttling around the City like a beetle and squinting at the signs Keran Berj had placed on everything. When I found him, he pulled me aside so fast I don’t think anyone ever saw me, and he didn’t speak until we were inside his house.

“So,” he said, clapping me on the shoulder like the Rorys do when greeting someone after battle.

He knew our ways, it was true. But then he knew everyone’s ways. And his voice was not warm with greeting.

He lit a match, and the glow of it was so bright after the dark I’d been stuck in for days that it hurt my eyes. I saw his mouth scowl down before the match burned out, and then I was shoved up against the wall, a knife nicking into my throat.

“What do you want?” he said, and I struggled around the fear that was turning my insides to liquid and dug out the cloth I’d been keeping tied tight to me.