Grace Read Online Free PDF Page A

would end with him, that I was to be an Angel.
    “I have to leave,” I said, and he bent to pick up the gold, turning away from me in the dark, the knife gone from my throat as if it had never been there at all.
    “And you want me to help you.” He turned the pebble of gold over in his hand, the belt still on the floor, and I saw he knew what it was. What I was.
    “Yes,” I said, and he made a sound of disgust, thick in the dark, but kept the gold in one hand still, as if weighing it against me.
    “Upstairs,” he said after a minute. “Second door on the left. Leave your clothes in the hall to be burned.”
    In the morning, he brought me a dress, plum colored like a fresh bruise, and gave me a piece of bread. “I think I might have a use for you. You listen, you do what I say, and you leave when I tell you to go,” he said. “Understand?”
    And then I waited. And waited. I learned the City from a map he gave me to memorize until I could almost see the parks, the shopping district. The palace where Keran Berj lived.
    I learned his house with its tiny, cramped rooms, most of which I only glimpsed. I dreamed of being sent away on a ship, wrapped up in a rug. They were one of the few things Keran Berj let go because others wanted them enough to pay prices I’d heard would feed everyone for years.
    And then Chris finally told me something.
    “You’ll be leaving soon,” he said one night, after letting me inside from the brief, dark stroll he let me have around the fenced-in square that was his yard. Fourteen steps from one end to the other. Ten across. “You’ll go by train. Someone will be with you.”
    “But I—” I said, and broke off because I could tell from his voice there was nothing I could say. No one like Chris would take in someone like me without conditions. No one was going to simply save me.
    I had myself, though. I used to think that wasn’t enough, but I knew better by then. I was all I had. All I’d ever had. And it would be enough. It had to be.
    I would save myself.

CHAPTER 14
    I n the train station, I waited with my papers. Kerr’s were tucked inside the daily paper. The only one, the one with Keran Berj’s picture beaming out in grainy shades of black and white.
    Chris had made me leave, finally and unexpectedly, pushing me out the back door when it was barely light and I was still mostly asleep, pausing only long enough to press papers and a few coins into my hands as he said, “Keep your papers in plain sight. You’ll be searched, so don’t hide the others on you. Buy a paper and put them in that. You’re waiting for Kerr. He’s your brother. When he comes, let him do the talking.”
    “How will I find him?” I said, only knowing that this Kerr was who Chris—and therefore I—had been waiting for. And that he hadn’t come. I knew nothing else about him, not his real name, not even what he looked like.
    “He’ll find you,” Chris said, and then shut the door in my face.
    I was searched four times in the train station. The old woman who complained about how her joints ached, her back humped like pain had broken her, was searched six, although it was clear the soldiers only skimmed over her, afraid to touch too much. A man wearing a black hat, which I found was forbidden when one of the solders waved a long sheet of paper in the air and asked why the man hadn’t read the latest Words from God that Keran Berj had received, was searched eight times, and roughly, too.
    Searching was like Liam hunting for me in bed, only better because I didn’t end up with Liam puffing over me, closing his eyes to block out my face. I just had a soldier or two wondering out loud what I looked like under my skirts and a hand or two venturing up them. Though my heart hammered with worry over how Kerr hadn’t come, and how I didn’t know how to find him, the first time I was searched was the only time I was scared for myself.
    I was scared because the soldiers kept poking and pinching me