Free Grace by Elizabeth Scott Page B

remember? I asked if my sister could move.”
    “I remember,” the soldier says. “Go on.”
    “Well, you were by our seats. You saw there was nothing in my hands. Nothing in my seat.” He points to the woman sitting next to him. “She got on at the stop, though. She sat down here, and she had a bott—”
    He’s cut off as the woman starts screaming, shaking her head and saying, “No, no, it was there, it was on the train already, he pulled it out and said—”
    The soldier hits her. The woman howls and then falls silent, stunned.
    “She did board then, didn’t she? ” he says to himself, and then looks at the other soldiers, who nod. He turns back to Jerusha. “Did you see her talking to anyone before she boarded?”
    “Just a man, an earth-dark man who . . . ” Jerusha trails off, then says, “Wait. Is she—does she—is she one of them? Those—those People?” He spits the word as if it is too awful to fit in his mouth, too awful to be said, and stares at the woman in horror.
    The soldier pulls the woman up, stares into her crying face. “The Guards contacted us earlier. Told us to look for a woman traveling alone with short, dyed hair. Is that you, do you think? ” He yanks her head forward, pulling her hair, and she screams.
    He holds up a clump of it. It is white like the brightest sunlight on top and a darker, deeper yellow near the root. Not light brown-red, though.
    Not like mine.
    “Dyed hair,” the soldier says, and the woman cries, “For Keran Berj, for his glory, for how he says women should be,” but the soldier shakes her, hard, and says, “We know everything. You asked a soldier to throw the bottle away a little while ago. Off the train, you said, because the trash was full. You think we don’t know what you are? You think you didn’t give yourself away the moment you showed papers saying you’re checking on soil conditions between here and the border? You think that would fool anyone other than some desert rejects?”
    “But I am checking on soil conditions and the tea—he gave it to me!” the woman says, pointing at Jerusha.
    “Except he didn’t have it because I saw him. You were the one who tried to get rid of it.”
    “No, I just asked a soldier to throw it away because the trash is full, and he said he’d throw it off the train. I didn’t ask that. I’m not—my papers are real! I believe in Keran Berj! ”
    “Of course you do,” the soldier says, and then starts to drag her off the train.
    She screams, pleading for someone to look at her papers, to call her office.
    She is still screaming when the Guards appear again, lit by the soldiers’ lamps.
    The lamps are switched off and as darkness falls again there’s the sound of low voices and her sobbing. It goes on for a moment and then there is silence.
    It is so quiet I think the stars will fall from the sky.
    But they don’t. They stay, shining brightly far away, and the silence on the train is complete, endless.
    Eventually, the train begins to move again.
    The woman is not on it.

CHAPTER 32
    I press my face against the window, feel the bitter cold bite into my skin. I should not be glad I am alive—I know what that woman’s fate was—but I am.
    I do not move when someone sits next to me. I know who it is.
    “You knew this would happen,” I say, looking away from the window, looking at him, and Jerusha says, “Yes.”
    “The man who sold me the water—”
    “His hands,” Jerusha says. “They were like mine. No marks from labor, no dirt under his nails. He’s never touched the ground in his life except to kick people into it.”
    “But why did you ...?” I say, and trail off as I see something in the darkness of the train car, something I couldn’t see when I looked at him before because the light only showed me what I knew. It showed me Jerusha, the monster.
    I never thought to look past it.
    “Mary,” I say, surprised, and Jerusha echoes it back, his voice shaking.
    In my mind’s eye, I see