We’re on our way to bring our sister home. She wants to come back to Keran Berj, to her children and her husband, but the government across the border—never say its name, never acknowledge that it has any power—says she’s an escapee. As if anyone traveling outside would ever want to leave the glory that is Keran Berj.
Still, she can’t leave unless family comes to claim her, and with her husband off doing his annual soldier training—God watch over him—Kerr was sent instead, and had to bring me because she’s pregnant, heavily so, and everyone knows what Keran Berj says about women and childbirth. “Glorious work, fit only for our sisters.” Even over the border, his reach extends, proclaiming that only women should be present when babies are born.
As if Keran Berj does not take those children and teach them to act according to his will as soon as he can.
A soldier, blond hair and jagged teeth, stops by our seats. He flips through my papers and tosses them back. He goes through Kerr’s more slowly, then slaps them against one thigh and says, “You look familiar. Did you go to the Academy? ”
“I work near it,” Kerr says. “Keran Berj Shoes, over on Berj One Road. You’ve been there, I suppose?”
The soldier nods. “Last year. I waited in line for a whole day, and then the Official for Distribution came and said they ran out.”
“Next time you get selected for a pair, tell the Line Officer that Kerr asked you to ask about his nephew’s birthday,” Kerr says, and the soldier grins. His face is like the moon, wide and waxy-white.
“I hear there’s a drawing coming during the Festival of Health.”
Kerr nods, and the soldier hands him his papers back before moving on. I finger my hair again as I test the floor with one foot.
Still too hot to rest against.
Still no stain on my hands.
It’s a strange road that’s led me here. A bad one, some would say. Evil, even. But I’m not sorry I’m here.
I’m not sorry I’m alive.
CHAPTER 5
I was supposed to die before I turned seventeen. I was supposed to drift up into the sky, into the arms of the Saints.
I was an Angel, and I was supposed to honor the People. I was supposed to show that we won’t be bent to Keran Berj’s will, that we have resources beyond the Rorys.
Keran Berj has his soldiers to make up his army, the one that enforces his rules, and his Guard, to strike when he needs death to be a sure thing; but he does not have what the People do.
The Rorys fight, and that is all they do. It is their life. They fight to keep the Hills ours, and are named, of course, for Rory. The first one, the one who walked down from the Hills when Keran Berj was young and promising so much it was obvious—at least to the People—that he was a liar.
Rory knew that Keran Berj wanted to control everything. He saw that Keran Berj had no respect for the land, for the Saints, for anything or anyone but himself and his God, and so he walked down from the Hills and went to the City.
He found Keran Berj walking through the City, back before he had so much power he only had to show pictures of his face to be obeyed, and Rory shot him.
He missed, and Keran Berj turned his newly formed Guard on him.
Rory was hung after they were through with him.
Just before he swung, Rory cried out, “You aren’t forever, Keran Berj, but the land is. I die for it gladly.”
There were still newspapers then, not just the one that Keran Berj controls now, and those words were printed. What Rory said reached back to the People, and they understood what needed to be done. They understood that Keran Berj would not be stopped by anyone but them.
They saw he would want the Hills.
And so the Rorys were born, and now that is what every boy is trained to be. What every man does until he has sons of his own who can go out and fight.
The People are the Hills. The Hills are the People. The Rorys fight to keep what should be as it is, and to remind Keran Berj that he is not forever.
Only the land is.
But there are more than the Rorys. The People have Angels too. They are reminders, in form and action, that Keran Berj will understand, that he cannot—will not—control the People. That we choose as we will.
Keran Berj has posters of Angels in the soldiers’ and guards’ training camps, we were told as we were training, pictures of red-earth women with bared teeth and wings dripping blood growing out of their backs.
No wonder so few of us are ever even noticed before we do what we are meant to do. If we could arrive on wings and draw blood without blowing it out of people, I think Keran Berj might step aside. His God speaks to him, or so he says, but his God doesn’t grant miracles like that.
Of course, the Saints don’t either. I know. I had no wings that could help me fly away. To get away from the bomb that was made for me. That was my life.
Sometimes, I don’t think there is anything beyond what is here, what is now. I think that maybe beyond this world—this train, this desert we are passing through, this heat swelling all around—there is nothing.
CHAPTER 6
I was supposed to kill the Minister of Culture. I was supposed to stand in the front row of those gathered to listen to him speak and press my left hand to my right wrist in a way that would push the wires bound under my sleeve together.
I was supposed to do that and then watch the world burn.
I wouldn’t see it for long. An Angel’s death is quick and painless. Beautiful, like going to sleep on a warm spring night.
Of course, there were no Angels to ask about it. None of them ever came back. They went to the Saints, to beyond. All I heard were stories.
And then there were the burns Ann, Mary, Lily, and I got as we were learning to make bombs, to use them. The way we sometimes singed our hair and how Lily once managed to lose one of her toes—
Those moments were not without pain.
To this day, I can still see Lily’s face, gray with agony, and the way her toe lay there on the ground, pulsing blood like it was still part of her. Like it was still living.
It’s nothing, we were told. You belong to the Saints. You are their instrument. You will make us proud.
Lily’s toe was swept away because it didn’t matter. She learned to walk well enough without it. She would be able to do what she was made for.
She would still be able to die.
CHAPTER 7
I was given to Liam two months before I was sent to the Minister of Culture. Angels are lucky because they do not have to wait until they are twenty to be pledged, as other girls do. They do not have to scurry behind the Rorys carrying weapons and supplies. They do not have to learn to live life on the move.
I lived in the sturdy, stone Angel House. I learned how to talk like someone who lived for Keran Berj. I learned every rule he decreed, and kept track of the ones he still believed in, as well as the former ones he’d deemed evil. I learned his life story, like all those who follow him do, and what prayers he’d written to have sung to his God. I learned how I would destroy part of his world. And when I was sixteen and four months, I was pledged.
The best Angels die pregnant. There is no sure way to tell before they go, of course, because Angels are only pledged long enough for there to be the chance of a baby and nothing more, but there is always hope sent along. If there is a speck in the body, the marker of another life, then two of the People have died, and it proves that the People value the land and its call above all else.
Keran Berj says this is inhuman, but then Keran Berj hanged his own son for “evil thoughts.”
I did not worry that I was carrying a child. Liam came to me only a handful of times, and when he did, he always spoke of Sian and how he was waiting for her.
He always said her name.
I knew how it would be as soon as I saw him; Da’s hand on his shoulder, as if to make sure he stayed, and Liam’s weary, displeased face as I lifted my face to see him.
It never occurred to him th
at I didn’t want him either. He never questioned the tea I drank every morning, one made of things that shouldn’t be named. One that women with many children used when they were desperate to bear no more.
Liam never asked me anything.
CHAPTER 8
I couldn’t do it, though.
That was the thing, in the end.
I couldn’t die.
I went into the village. I was pale enough, from my bad blood and being sheltered in the Angel House, and dressed properly, my hair painted with lemon water to hide the red that lurked inside its too-light-for-the-People shade and put up, braided and wrapped around my head like the Rorys had seen girls in the village wearing when they were scouting it. I looked like a child of Keran Berj’s followers, I looked like every other girl there. Pale faced, light-haired, dressed in swirling white and a shawl with Keran Berj’s face printed on it draped over my shoulders and dipping across my back, so that his profile was everywhere you looked.
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.
CHAPTER 9
The 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.
CHAPTER 10
Sometimes 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.
CHAPTER 11
Once 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.
“Ot
her 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.”