Grace by Elizabeth Scott

the last picture I saw of him again now. How he was turned so the camera didn’t catch him. Turned so he didn’t have to see the body swinging from Keran Berj’s monument to himself. Turned so he didn’t have to see Mary die.
    “She should be here,” he says.
    I don’t know what to say. I’ve seen the mark around his neck. I’ve seen what she tried to do.
    I know she wouldn’t want to be here.
    “I found out who she was. What she was,” he says, and his voice is so thick with something I cannot name that my skin prickles. “And if I knew, Keran would find out. There’s no way to keep a secret from him, not ever.” He shakes his head. “But I thought I could—I thought maybe I could save her. I thought . . . I thought she’d want to get away. Be . . . be free.”
    I think of everything I was taught, and I know exactly what she would have said to him when he spoke of being free.
    “We—the People—fight for freedom, to live as we will. All else must be set aside for that.”
    “That’s exactly what she said,” he says, and I recognize what’s in his voice now. Bitterness. “And when I said, ‘Freedom depends on setting aside everything in its name,’ she smiled at me for real for the first time—the only time—and said, ‘Yes, now you see.’”
    I stare at him, a chill creeping up my spine. Those words are so similar. The People and Keran Berj and . . . no. I push the thought away. It’s not how it sounds.
    It can’t be.
    I can’t have been taught what Jerusha was.
    I can’t.
    I swallow. “It’s different for us. We mean it.”
    He looks at me. “And so does Keran Berj every time he says it, which is at the end of almost every speech. So how is it different? ”
    I look at my hands. I am tired of thinking. Of trying to find the right thing to say when everything I know has a mirror image that I am terrified to see, but do.
    “I don’t know,” I finally say. “I just . . . All I know is that I don’t want death anymore.”
    And there it is. I don’t want death. I want life. The opposite of everything I know. That I was taught to believe. To do.
    “Mary did,” he says, and I look at him.
    “She asked you to—?”
    “No,” he says. “After I found out who she was, I told her she had to go, that she wasn’t safe, but she wouldn’t . . .” He stops speaking, and I know he is touching the closed collar of his shirt. Thinking about what lies underneath.
    “She cut me along my scar,” he says after a moment. “I stood there, blood everywhere, my blood in her hair, on her face, and thought ‘If this is what she wants,’ but then—” He sighs. “I didn’t want to die. I called for help. I told her I lov—I said things to her. And she laughed at me. Said I was nothing. Said that when I died she was going after Keran Berj.”
    “So you handed her over to him.”
    “No,” he says. “I still wanted to save her. I still thought I could. So I hit her with a sculpture of Keran Berj, put my Guard sash in her mouth to keep her quiet—I was in training for them, was going to be the Chief Guard one day—and shoved her into my wardrobe. I was going to let her out. I was going to make her leave the City. I didn’t think—” I hear him swallow.
    “She was found,” I say. “And Keran Berj killed her.”
    “Not him,” he says, voice cracking. “I was in the hospital for a week because of the cut. Not that long, but I hadn’t told anyone about her being in the house, said I didn’t know who’d tried to kill me, that they’d gotten away, and she—she was there in the wardrobe without water. A person can’t live—”
    “I know,” I say, because I do. The Rorys sometimes leave soldiers tied to the ground with their water bottles just out of reach, a message to those that find them.
    “Not everyone knows that,” he says. “I asked a girl at a dinner party about it right before . . . right before I left. I said, ‘Do you know how long a person can live without