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even though I stood there, patient like the People are, patient like I’d been taught was necessary. I didn’t know why it seemed to drive them on, but then the old woman with the hump of pain on her back raised her hands to her face, shook like she was crying, and then looked at me.
    I understood then, and so I pretended to cry, pinching the skin of my right wrist as I twisted from side to side, from one set of arms to another, wailing like I would have done the day I met Liam if I’d thought my voice would have been heard at all.
    The old lady was right. The soldiers grinned and backed away, pleased with my tears, and what fear I had vanished. I realized the soldiers truly weren’t like the Guards. They were simply bored men standing around, and what they did was like what the younger Rorys, the ones in training, do when they ride through a village. They’ll walk into houses and steal kisses or bread or both, and only for the fear it causes.
    I didn’t fear the soldiers like they wanted because my body had never been my own. It was the People’s, always, and briefly belonged to Liam too. I never thought of it as something other than a vessel—an Angel is a messenger and nothing more—until I looked up at a cloudless blue sky and thought not of the Saints or even the People. I just thought it was a pretty sky, and was glad to see it.
    I realized I wanted to keep seeing it.
    I had wanted things for myself before, but never like I wanted to keep seeing that sky. I didn’t understand what it meant then.
    What my choices would cost.

CHAPTER 15
    C hris’s house was strange. So many rooms, and all for one person. Two, if you counted me, but I knew neither of us did.
    The City was strange too. It was orderly; so clean the streets appeared to shine, and all the buildings were a uniform gray, maybe colored by Keran Berj because he liked it, or maybe colored by the factories he’d built. Walking to the train station, I saw it all, and the City was dark and cold and so strangely sad—the slumped buildings that appeared to be homes but could have been anything, the golden statues of Keran Berj on almost every corner, and all the quiet, waiting people standing in orderly lines outside dark buildings.
    Everything had its place, everyone had their place, and I could finally see why so many followed Keran Berj. He’d broken everyone, but more importantly, he’d broken the land. Everything around me was his creation.
    Keran Berj’s laws were stranger than I thought, though. The statues I knew about, of course, and the palace he lived in, the way he put his picture on everything. Bread. Wine bottles. Candy. But in the train station, as my papers were inspected and I listened to the soldiers argue over how to stamp them, trying to remember if Keran Berj wanted a circle or a square, I realized it was impossible to know all of Keran Berj’s rules. There were too many, and they were always changing.
    I wondered if that’s what he wanted.
    My scalp ached from the dye, which Chris had done the day before he’d sent me off in the dark, and I collected a circle, a square, and then a circle inside a square on my papers.
    Kerr still did not come, but a man whose shoes made a sharp tick-tock noise as he walked did. He walked around the station twice, his shoes loud in the sudden, frightened silence, looking for something. The soldiers all stood stiff and unmoving while he did.
    I wondered what Angel would be sent to meet the tick-tock man, and looked at the newspaper that held Kerr’s papers. Next to the large, smiling picture of Keran Berj that I’d seen everywhere, on everything, there was a picture of a body—dressed in black and covered with medals—being lowered into the ground, Keran Berj standing beside it. Below the picture was a poem Keran Berj had written.
    It was called “Memory.” It was written in honor of the recently dead Minister of Defense. The word “freedom” was used in every line. I rubbed my right wrist