Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Epigraph
GRACE
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
JERUSHA
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
GRACE
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
CHAPTER 38
CHAPTER 39
CHAPTER 40
Acknowledgements
DUTTON BOOKS
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2010 by Elizabeth Spencer
English translation of the poem “Forced March” from Clouded Sky: Poems by Miklós Radnóti, published by The Sheep Meadow Press with translations by Steven Polgar, Stephen Berg, and S. J. Marks. Used with permission.
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Summary: Sixteen-year-old Grace travels on a decrepit train toward a border that may not exist, recalling events that brought her to choose life over being a suicide bomber, and dreaming of freedom from the extremist religion-based government of Keran Berj.
eISBN : 978-1-101-44336-1
[1. Fantasy. 2. Despotism—Fiction. 3. Insurgency—Fiction.
4. Fugitives from justice—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.S4195Gr 2010 [Fic]—dc22 2009053285
Published in the United States by Dutton Books, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
345 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014 * www.penguin.com/youngreaders
http://us.penguingroup.com
You’re crazy. You fall down, stand up and walk again,
your ankles and your knees move
but you start again as if you had wings.
The ditch calls you, but it’s no use you’re afraid to stay,
and if someone asks you why, maybe you turn around and say
that a woman and a sane death a better death wait for you.
—FROM Forced March BY MIKLÓ́S RADNÓTI
GRACE
CHAPTER 1
I’m afraid my hair is showing. Chris said the dye would work but I’m not sure he much cared if it did; and I don’t think it was true dye, just a mixture of color he’d created, a kind of a paint and nothing more. Plus the train is hot, so hot the floor burns my feet, little red huff hisses of pain searing up into my legs.
I want to get off this train but I can’t. Not now. It is the only choice left to me, and it is actually considered an honor to be here. To be trusted enough to be on this train, to have a ticket for it, is something most can’t even dare to dream of. Keran Berj lets few people out of this land—his land, or so he says—and only those on government business are allowed to go. And then only if the business will result in glory of some kind for Keran Berj.
I’m certainly not supposed to have the honor of being on this train.
I’m not supposed to be here at all.
Chris made my hair glow over a sink, frowning when I tried to move away from the scissors in his hand. The gold I’d given him to help me had bought me no trust and only a tiny bit of his patience.
So now I worry that the bright color is bleeding, raining off my hair and onto my skin. Stupidly, I worry that it is staining my shirt. It is white, with buttons made of tin. One of the sleeves has been sewn in crooked, a large gathered fold lying where my shoulder is.
I’ve never had a shirt made by machines before. Inside the fold is space for three of my fingers, like a hiding place in the open, an error made by the machine that sewed the shirt. I was fascinated by it for a while, slipped my fingers into it when we first got on the train until Kerr, the boy Chris made me wait for, the one who I must pretend is my brother, kicked me in the ankle, hard, and hissed, “Stop acting like a piece of Hill shit,” as he pretended to be checking the lumpy, stained seat waiting for us.
It’s an insult here, in this world. In Keran Berj’s world. To be from the Hills is an insult. I hate that, even as I know I would never go back there.
Can’t go back there.
Once this train was very grand, or so the stories go. Before Keran Berj, who supposedly rules us all, there was someone else, someone who truly did command everyone’s loyalty, a great man who ruled from far away. He is said to have had the strength of a bear and the wisdom of the Saints. He came only once a year to take money and did not crack the dead’s teeth to pull out their fillings and melt them into statues. This man came and rode everywhere—from the mountains to the seas—in a long, beautiful train. Its insides were covered with diamonds, and at night it shone brighter than the stars.
Then the man died. No one else came to rule—we were forgotten—and Keran Berj stepped forward and said he would lead, that everyone would be equals and life would be better.
I wonder if it is a rule that all stories must end with a lie. But then, the only stories I know are the ones the People tell, and they all end with Keran Berj and his false words, so maybe there are some that don’t.
It is so hot. My hair is wet when I push my fingers into it, my feet hurt, and the man in front of us smells like onions, the wild ones that grow on the side of the Hills. The ones you can smell before you see them, the ones that start to grow with the promise of spring. I can hardly believe this train was grand once, but I see hints of it in the markings where things have been pried away, decorations and comforts removed for someone else
’s use.
Keran Berj’s use. No one will mention this, though. The train is—and will always be—called glorious in spite of its sad state, because not only do you never know who is watching, you never know who is listening. Even those trusted enough to have tickets for this train, this trip, watch what they do. What they say. The train is special, and so is everyone on it, but no one is above Keran Berj.
No one.
At least, according to him.
“Are you asleep, sister?” Kerr asks, and puts his hand on my elbow, stilling my fingers as they twist through my damp hair.
“No,” I say, and lower my hand, place it in my lap on top of my fake papers. There is no stain on my fingers. The dye holds. When I am safely across the border, the first thing I will do is leave Kerr behind.
I would kill him, but I already know I am too weak for that.
CHAPTER 2
The People don’t do that,” I’d said when Chris told me to take my hair down, and he’d looked at me as if I were stupid, as if he was thinking about tossing me out onto the street right then.
He didn’t do that, though. He just frowned at me—like he was weighing his options, weighing my worth—and then yanked my braids down. I’d looped them up so they lay on the back of my neck, and it was still strange to feel air rushing over them after so many years of a sun-crisp cap cradling my skin.
The People believe a woman’s hair should be covered, undone only in private. There are exceptions, of course. I was one once.
Chris burned the braids after he cut them off. I stared into the bowl of the sink, at cracked white showing rust underneath. My head burned from the dye he’d concocted. My eyes watered from it. My braids made a peculiar crackling noise as they burned, and smelled terrible too, like a bad dream I couldn’t—or wouldn’t—remember.
“If it was last year, I’d sell them,” Chris said. “Keran Berj wanted women to have shoulder-length hair then. Now it’s supposed to be short—new rule—but until recently people were cutting open graves in the hopes of finding hair to add to their own. Imagine walking around with hair smelling of death swinging in your face. But still, better than you swinging from a rope, right?”
I closed my eyes and tried not to think about how much my scalp hurt. Tried not to think about graves and hanging.
But then, death has always followed me.
“You didn’t think to cut your hair before you came here?” he asked as water, so cold there were tiny bits of ice in it, poured out of the tap and over my skull.
“No,” I said, and watched the color that was supposed to sink into my hair race in rivers toward the drain. “Will this color hold?”
“It’s dye, isn’t it?” he said, and yanked a hunk of hair on the back of my neck, pulling me up like the Rorys do to the boys when they first fall off their horses. In the sliver of mirror he’d nailed to the wall, my face was red dark from the blood pulsing into it as I’d knelt over the sink, a color I used to wish I was, but my hair barely touched my ears and shone bright like the sun.
CHAPTER 3
The heat makes me sleepy, but I don’t want to sleep. The few times I have, I’ve drifted off into strange, unpleasant dreams. Awake, I can keep them away and keep an eye on the train. On Kerr.
I close my eyes anyway because I’m tired, endlessly tired, and the heat makes it worse, and when I look over at Kerr, I don’t see him.
Instead, I see Liam.
Liam is now sitting next to me, grim-faced like always and smacking the heel of one hand against his other palm, a coil of wires—blue, red, yellow, and green—around his wrists.
I wake up with a start just as Liam pushes them together, and the dream clouds my mind as the train groans like Liam’s Ma did when her joints were aching and she wanted me to rub them, a long, slow screech that made my teeth ache with wanting to scream.
But if I didn’t scream while kneading Liam’s Ma’s feet, Liam frowning disappointed at me and treating our being pledged as if it was a chore he had to grit his teeth and get through, I won’t scream now.
Instead I look at the doors.
They are at either end of the train car, a way out that’s useless. The ground we cover now is turning to desert, to bleak, endless bright sand.
The doors are heavy, tarnished metal, and slide open if you press a palm against them. I’ve never seen anything so fancy. No one opens them except the soldiers. If you want food, you go to the door and wait for a soldier to come through, then follow behind. You have to do the same thing for the washroom, and I think of how Chris used to only let me out twice a day, of how I’d race to the washroom with hate burning a hole in my heart each time.
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.
CHAPTER 4
Once, 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.
&
nbsp; “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.