Grace Read Online Free PDF Page B

and watched the man with the tick-tock shoes march to the station doors.
    “Nari, Leji,” he called, and two Guards came inside.
    They walked over to the tick-tock man and listened as he spoke. Then they went down to the tracks and looked one way, then the other. They came back and as the frightened silence started to ease they made the old woman with the bent back stand up. One of the Guards hit her across the mouth, said, “Traitor.” She swayed, and a child fell out of her coat, the lump on her back revealed as a small boy with bright blue eyes but hair and skin of the People.
    The Rorys used to always spit when they saw me because my own eyes are blue.
    The Guards did not spit. They simply took the boy and the woman outside. They did not come back.
    There was no sign the child or woman had ever been in the station. People moved into their seats as if they’d never existed.
    I wanted to go, but I couldn’t. My only option was to stay where I was and so I did. I sat, and I waited for the train to come.
    Eventually, it did.
    And so did Kerr.

CHAPTER 16
    I heard the train first. There were no tracks where I lived, for even the man with the train, the one who had it before Keran Berj—even he recognized our land for what it was and let it be. Keran Berj had once tried to push rails into the first low swells of the Hills, but the land swallowed the spikes he tried to plant and the Rorys killed all his workers.
    But I had seen trains. Though Keran Berj could not reach the Hills, he reached up near them, and I’d glimpsed them off in the distance when I was little and still with Da. And then, when I was training to be an Angel, we all had to walk down from the Hills and see one passing by so that if we were asked about it, we could describe it, for it was one of Keran Berj’s many sources of pride.
    I had thought it a strange blot on the rolling brown grain of the plains below the Hills, and Ann and Lily and Mary and I had all talked about how noisy it was. But in the station it was so much louder than the far-off hum I’d heard. It sounded like the thunder from a hundred storms, and made the ground pulse, a strange, low throbbing that I couldn’t hear, but could feel beneath my feet.
    “Sister, I’m here,” someone said as I stared. And then he hissed, “Where are my papers?” as arms pretended to hug me.
    That was Kerr, finally arrived.
    “Brother,” I said, broken from the train’s spell, and when I handed him the newspaper, his fingers slipped inside and pulled out the identification card and passes so fast I didn’t even see it.
    He elbowed me when I tried to look at his face and turned away, glanced at a couple waiting together and said, “Has someone told those two that Keran Berj frowns on public displays of affection? ”
    The soldiers, who had been watching us, blinked at him, at the loud sureness of his voice, and then turned toward the couple, who guiltily unclasped their hands and cringed.
    “Don’t stare at them,” Kerr said to me. His voice was cold, ice cruel.
    “I’m not yours to order,” I said, and kept watching them.
    He said nothing in reply and I thought for a moment that I’d surprised him, but when I glanced over at him he was looking at the newspaper, carefully folding it so that only the bright, glowing face of Keran Berj showed.
    Now that I finally saw him, I realized he was my age or a year or two older, and clearly carried not one drop of the People’s blood. He was pale all over, hair and skin, and so far everything he’d done—the way he’d spoken to me, the way he’d eagerly and loudly, openly, turned on someone else—made me wonder why he would even need someone like Chris.
    I wondered, but not enough to turn away. Not enough to try and fade into the crowd, to try and fade into the City, into some sort of shadow life.
    I wanted more than that. I’d wanted it enough to find and endure Chris. To be here in the station. In the City.
    So when the train opened its