Grace

by Elizabeth Scott

  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.

  “Water! Fresh, clean well water! Nothing added, and cold too!”

  “Tea! Mint tea, soothing for the body and mind! ”

  “Dumplings! Fresh meat, fresh greens, boiled today! ”

  Windows on the train are pushed down, opened, and I watch the onion-smelling man bargain for a jar of water and a packet of dumplings, arguing furiously with a girl of no more than nine or ten, her pale skin peeling in strips down her face. I can see the angry red of her scalp through her bone-white hair, and touch my own in sympathy.

  I do not buy anything. These people, these window flies, are here because they followed Keran Berj blindly, and when he tossed them aside they were sent here. They were sent and they stay, living on their tiny, arid patches of land and doing nothing. They have no spirit.

  Kerr buys things, though. Always, at every stop, even the first ones we made when the City was still in sight, shining statues of Keran Berj still watching over us. He bought overpriced fried puffs of dough and the little meat patties that people shape with spoons bearing Keran Berj’s name, and fruit juices in cold, dripping cans printed with Keran Berj’s face. He bought from fat, slow men and women, people who had plenty, who clearly knew ways to get around the ration system and would praise Keran Berj with one side of their mouth while the other counted out coins. I wondered how many of them reported to Chris in one way or another.

  Now Kerr is buying water, mint tea, and two packets of dumplings, paying with coins that I still haven’t figured out where he carries and thanking each person as if their desperation doesn’t scream from the gleam in their eyes to their shaking, skinny hands and bodies.

  No one gets on the train here.

  No one gets off, either.

  No one would ever willingly get off here.

  Eventually, the soldiers get off the train and push the people pressing against the windows away. Kerr unwraps the dumplings before the train starts rattling away, eating them in quick, small bites. He eats more neatly than anyone I have ever known, even Mary, who could act so fine you would think she’d gone to the special school Keran Berj built for girls he thought would serve well as tour guides for the few outsiders let in.

  He offers me two, and I eat them because it is stupid to refuse food, even if the rice is not spiced properly and the meat tastes of cow and not the goat that it should be.

  I miss the strangest things. Rice with red pepper cut so fine it looks like flakes. The strips of goat in the stew we ate to mark the arrival of winter. The smell of the Hills when spring was coming and the earth was damp with promise, like a girl is supposed to be on her first night with her pledged.

  The way Da would sometimes talk of my mother when I was young and drink set him that way. How his eyes would go all soft and far away. His obsession for her—his willingness to claim her for himself when he didn’t need to and to talk of her after she’d gone—destroyed him in the eyes of his family. They never acknowledged him again, not even after I became an Angel.

  They never once even looked at me.

  I wanted to understand what he felt for her, but I didn’t. He claimed her and she’d chosen to leave him and this world, slipped away to have me, mouth gritted around a rag so Da wouldn’t hear her scream and come find her.

  After I came and she was gone, bled out bone white, I was his penance. I was the price he paid for what he felt for her, and he did right by putting me to good use. By taking me to the Angel House.

  By making sure death was all that waited for me too.

  CHAPTER 18

  Kerr eats the other packet of dumplings after the train has been laboring acros the desert, after the soldiers have passed through again, not even looking at our papers. They smell of fresh meat, and some of them have crumbs on their shirts.

  Food must have been loaded on for them at the last stop. I’ve heard stories about what they eat. Bread made with flour so fine it makes loaves that don’t go hard the moment they cool. Fried meat patties as large as my palm, and fresh greens even in the winter.

  “Why do you think those people sell their own food?” Kerr asks, and I shrug, take the two dumplings he is holding out to me.

  “To wait in the sun like that, for so few coins . . .” He shakes his head. “If the old man I bought these dumplings from sells fifty a day—and how could he, when only one train passes through and everyone else is selling too—he would make less than what everyone who lives in the City is paid for putting up posters of Keran Berj in their homes.”

  I shrug again. Talk about the window flies is stupid. They paid for following Keran Berj, and if they want to use what food they are rationed to make money, it is their concern, not mine. They are still stuck in his world, thinking of coins and how to get things. They sell their food without understanding where it comes from, without seeing that land must be cherished.

  “They don’t get ration cards out here, you know,” he says, as if he knows what I’ve thought, plucking the dumpling wrapper out of my hand and smoothing it flat across his knee. “They don’t get anything. They’re forced to live out here, in this heat, in this land where almost nothing grows. They struggle to just live.”

  “They chose their path,” I say.

  He looks at me. I cannot read his face, see only a flicker of something in his eyes, and add, “And as Keran Berj wishes, he is to be obeyed,” for good measure. I know the lines of praise as well as anyone on this train. I just don’t believe them.

  I never have, and am sure Kerr once did. I look at him again, so well-fed sleek even now.

  “You feel for them?” I say, knowing my voice is mocking and thinking of the couple in the train station, of how he turned on them. How I am sure he has certainly sent people out here, or worse.

  “You don’t understand anything,” he says, his voice quiet, and looks out the window. I do too, wondering what it would be like to live with nothing but sand and heat, to not have trees and soil that thrives. It would be hard to love this land.

  Hard to live in it. And with no ration cards, no soil to grow things in . . .

  The next time we stop, I use one of the few coins Chris gave me to buy a piece of bread from a woman who would be about my mother’s age, if she had lived. The woman’s face is narrow, bone-gaunt, and when she passes me the bread, I see the tendons in her arms, as if there is nothing else lying between her skin and bones.

  “Take it back,” I tell her, and her eyes widen. She shakes her head, says, “It is good, I promise you. It is good bread.”

  “No,” I say, pressing it into her hand. “I mean you should eat it.”

  “You gave me your coin,” she says, and when I nod, she frowns, confused, and then disappears into the crowd as if I might come after her and take the coin back. As if I might grab the bread she was willing to give me, the bread I see her cramming into her mouth as if she can’t be bothered to taste it.

  As if she is starving.

  “Now you understand,” Kerr says when the train starts moving again. His voice holds no smugness, though, and when I look over at him, he is fiddling with the collar on his shirt, opening and closing the top button over and over again.

  CHAPTER 19

  When the sun finally starts to set, it’s oddly bright on the train, as if the last moments of daylight are somehow captured by the metal and then pushed through the windows in bright shards.

  Kerr is staring out the window still, as if he c
an see past the light, as if he can see something off in the distance.

  I don’t know how he does it. My eyes water like I’m weeping, and yet he, so soft-looking, so pale and round-cheeked, is fine.

  “You must be used to very strong light,” I say, wiping my eyes.

  “Yes,” he says, and his voice is full of pain.

  The door at the far end of the car opens, and the blond soldier from before comes back. He leans over us, smelling of fresh air, food, and drink—so much better than I smell now, after hours of sweat and the muck on my skirt.

  “Would you like something to eat?” he says.

  “Food? ” Kerr says, and I look at him, at the rounded curves of his face, gentle chin and cheeks that do not stretch tight over the bones. Soft, so soft. I despise how weak he is. I cannot wait to leave him behind.

  “Food,” the soldier says, low-voiced, and Kerr glances out the window one more time and then stands up, smiling. His smile is a polished, gleaming thing, practiced and beautiful, and I try not to stare as he says, “I’ll bring you something back, sister.”

  His smile is brilliant. His voice is warm.

  His eyes are cold. Dead.

  I wait until he’s gone, and then make the sign to ward off evil three times. I have to do it with my hand held under my skirt so no one else will see, and I don’t know if it will work or not. I don’t know if protection works when the Saints have turned their faces away from you.

  But then, I made the sign plenty of times before and it never protected me from anything.

  Kerr comes back when I am half asleep, my eyes still stinging from the setting sun, and I squint at him.

  He sits down, looking away. Looking out the window once more. It is growing dark now. There is nothing to see, but still he looks.

  I rub my eyes and look at him again. Kerr’s mouth and chin are red, a strange sick color, like the inside of a cut, and he smells like Liam did after he came to bed and spoke of Sian.

  Kerr sees me looking at him and turns to face me.

  I am the first to drop my eyes.

  The soldier who’d stopped to talk to us comes through the car a little later with a few others, whistling at something that’s said as he tosses a piece of bread at Kerr.

  “You’re handing out food now?” one of the other soldiers says, and the one who tossed the bread laughs and says, “Payment. Besides, it fell on the floor near the passenger washroom. You want it? ”

  The soldiers laugh and go on their way. Kerr tears the bread in half, wiping it clean, and puts a piece of it in his mouth.

  Then he offers the other half to me. No words, just puts it in one hand and holds it out.

  I look at him. The color on his face has faded. There are bits of grit on his pant legs, ground in around the knees.

  I take the bread and eat it.

  Kerr’s eyes widen, but he doesn’t say anything. After a while, he looks at the floor, tracing the button at the top of his shirt, the one that presses into his throat.

  I watch him for a while and then the heat and the sensation of food in my stomach closes my eyes again.

  “You do what you must in order to survive,” he says when I wake up, gasping, from a dream of blood-dark flowers wrapping around me. The train is still rattling hotly over the tracks, pushing through the dark desert.

  “Yes,” I say, looking at the bright stars and thinking of learning how to die. Of stiff white fabric billowing around as wires rubbed against my leg.

  Of where I am now.

  “I’d kill you to save myself, you know,” he says, so quietly his voice sounds like part of the train’s low, constant throb.

  I yawn. I am here, trapped in an escape, and I’m beyond fearing words now. I have never heard many kind ones anyway.

  He grabs my arm, as if that will somehow make me feel his threat. I push it off and grab his hand in return, bending the pale, soft fingers back a little. I can’t do more than that. Not now. We still have the border to reach. To cross.

  I can’t see his face, but his fingers, captured in my hand, are shaking.

  I wonder what it’s like to have violence be new and terrifying as I fall back asleep.

  Even in my dreams, I can’t picture it.

  CHAPTER 20

  Early morning, my eyes gritty from dark dreams, and the train has stopped again.

  I tense, wondering if something has happened.

  If the Guards have somehow found out about me.

  Come for me.

  But there are no Guards to see, only the train crew. They are standing around the tracks, pointing at something and then arguing with each other.

  My legs hurt from trying to keep my feet off the floor. I give in, relax. The pain is almost worth it. I cross one foot over the other, pressing down layers of skirt that have popped up around me like small hills.

  The skirt I’m wearing was yellow-green, like leaves as they are about to turn. Chris gave it to me when he woke me up and pushed me out the door, but it’s turned darker now, damp with sweat and grime. The bottom, which has brushed against the washroom floor, is something I will never touch again. I will peel the skirt away from me once I am over the border and find something clean to wear. Something that isn’t from Keran Berj’s world.

  Or mine.

  I want something new.

  I look at the bottom of the shoe that isn’t resting on the train floor. It’s started to melt. I check the other one and it is melting too, the image of the sun that has been stamped onto the bottom swirling into a collapsed circle.

  Beside me, Kerr sleeps, mouth open and closed eyes still turned toward the window.

  After a while the soldiers get off the train and squint into the distance, looking one way, then another, until they all set off to the right. The deeper into the desert we go, the faster this takes—everything is easier to see because there is nothing but sun and sand, nowhere to hide—and within minutes they are all in line for the water pump. They stand, waiting, with flasks that they will fill before returning to the train. A few talk in a knotted cluster as they wait, nodding and smoking their thin pipes stamped with Keran Berj’s smiling face.

  Everyone on the train watches them. All of us stare out the windows, thinking of all that water. Sometimes a soldier will fill his flask too full, and drops will spill onto the ground.

  There is such stillness then, such silence, as we all long to catch those drops. To feel cold water on our skin. In our mouths.

  The pumps do not have Keran Berj’s face or his smile or his sun on them. They are solid-looking, worn with age, from a time before all of this, and I think of what the man who made them would do to Keran Berj.

  That man could find water in the desert and built this winding metal path across the land. He would crush Keran Berj like a bug, grind him between his fingers until there was nothing left but dust.

  I smile, and Kerr wakes with a start, gasping. When he sees my face, whatever he was dreaming of falls away and he follows my eyes, sees what I’m looking at and then elbows me once, hard. I ignore him, but when he does it again I follow his eyes, which are not looking out the window, but at the door.

  The soldiers are coming back, invigorated with fresh air and water, and I put my papers on my right knee and wait while they scratch themselves and then decide to look at our papers yet again.

  They spend a lot of time talking to some people at the front of the car, two women traveling with a small, gloriously dressed child who must be important because he is given water from the soldiers’ flasks.

  I want the train to start moving again and shift in my seat. As I do, I feel sweat drip down the back of my neck. I think of the dye yet again and lift one hand, tuck the short length of one side of my hair behind my ear, and check my fingers.

  I think they are lighter than they were before. My stomach knots.

  I have light hair, but I am not sure if it is still light enough, not light like it should be if I want to walk across the border and have the Guards bel
ieve I will come back.

  And now the soldiers are coming this way; I see their feet, I see them, and they will see me, my hair, and—

  “Sister,” Kerr says, tapping my head playfully before his hand rests on my knee, digging into the bone, a warning. “Someone is speaking to you.”

  I look up and see a soldier, bitter-eyed with a sneer of a mouth, staring at me, eyes roaming across me.

  I smile at him. Smiles are easy. I smiled when Da’s family would walk by me and pretend I wasn’t there, even when it was known that I’d been called. I smiled after Da handed me over at Angel House and the one who led me inside said, “I can’t believe we’re taking another one with bad blood. Saints bless me, but I don’t want to spend forever by your side.” I smiled when I’d walk through camp and people would greet me but never ask me to visit, would turn their faces away, duty done. I smiled when Liam dug his fingertips into my sides to hold me beneath him.

  I smiled when I wrapped a bomb around my leg and was told to go, that I was lucky because it was truly a glorious day to die.

  “You look thirsty,” the soldier says. “Are you?”

  I nod, because I have heard his unpleasantness, his mockery, his disdain taunting voice a thousand times over, in Mary saying “You don’t try hard enough” when I would frown and she would stare, blank-faced, at the Rorys spitting three times whenever she and I walked by. In Liam saying “I’m so tired of pretending you’re Sian. I pray every day that the Saints will take you soon.” In Ann and Lily noticing how pale I’d gotten before I left, how they smiled and said, “Shut away for a few days, and now you look just like one of them.”

  “I could give you some water, if you want.” The words are kind. His voice isn’t.

  I look at my hand. There is nothing on it. My hair is fine. I don’t look like I’m from the Hills. I look like one of Keran Berj’s kind, his obedient sheep slaves.