Grace by Elizabeth Scott Read Free Book Online

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
    E arly 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