Grace by Elizabeth Scott Read Free Book Online Page A

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 believe 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.
    I look like I am used to hearing orders and obeying them.
    The thing is, I am.

CHAPTER 21
    I was told what to do—what I was—so many times. I had been told what would happen to me so many times. I was raised knowing the Angels were reminders that the People would never give way. I was raised knowing my life was to be used in hopes of changing the world.
    I was to keep nothing in my heart but devotion. No love, no hate, no room for anything else but what I was to do. How I was to serve.
    So when the soldier gestures for me to follow him, I do.
    I have no other choice.
    I only had one once,