Grace by Elizabeth Scott Page B

my skin. I don’t pull away, though. I just press my feet into the hot floor instead. The pain is familiar now.
    “That’s how I know you want to live,” he says. “She pulled away from me. You don’t.”
    “You want to live too. You didn’t die for her, you didn’t even do what she would have wanted,” I say, hating him for making me sound as weak as I am. Hearing him say what I want sounds so simple, but so selfish. I have turned my back on a lifetime of training, of beliefs everyone around me found easy to carry. I turned to myself and I . . .
    I am not sorry for it. Not like I should be.
    “Yes, I want to live too,” he says, and I hear something strange in his voice, look over and see that the night sky has lightened enough to show his face is tense and sad. “I wrote down what the Minister said I needed to. I didn’t cry when Keran Berj told me my parents could never come home because the Minister said not to, and moved into his house after I watched them die because he said he would make sure I never had to leave. He said he would always watch over me because I was so special to him.”
    He looks at me. “I learned what special meant to him then. Years of it, of being special, and then I watched him grin at Mary’s body. I told him I was glad he was there when he looked at me. I memorized his poem and recited it to Keran Berj before they hanged her corpse as a warning to the People. I told him I was grateful for everything he’d done to protect me before he fell asleep the night I shot him.”
    “He—the Minister—?”
    “Yes.”
    “But you are so important to Keran Berj. He wouldn’t—”
    “You’re really surprised, aren’t you? ” he says, and there is astonishment in his own voice. “You, who claim to know exactly what he is capable of ? ”
    “But you were a child.”
    “Once,” he says, and his voice is thick with a feeling I know, that I’ve lived with forever. Shame. Shame for having blood in me that made it so I could never truly be one of the People. Shame for being sent to Angel House so Da could prove his worth and be rid of the memory of my mother. Shame that I never believed in what I was taught like I should have. Shame that in spite of all the lessons and prayers that when I thought about forever—about living beyond this world—I didn’t want to die.

CHAPTER 34
    Y ou didn’t kill the Minister for Mary,” I say, thinking of how I took the belt from Liam’s hips. How I didn’t look for Da. How I pushed the bomb down and walked away from it, far away enough to be safe.
    To live.
    “No,” he says. “It was for me. I did it because I stayed with him for years and never . . . I stayed. I did it because I could have turned away when they arrested my parents, when I realized they were truly going to die, and I didn’t. I did it because I watched them hang. Keran Berj would have killed me before their necks even had a chance to snap if I’d only looked away. So I didn’t. I wanted to live. I just—no matter what happens, I keep wanting to live. Just like you killed thirty-four people but not who you were supposed to, and not yourself. You weren’t thinking about them. You think about you. About surviving. I understand that. I understand you.”
    Thirty-four people? I killed thirty-four people? “I didn’t know—I never thought—”
    “About them?” he says, and there is nothing I can say in reply.
    Because I didn’t think about that. In all the thinking I’ve done about that day, about the bomb, I never thought about them. About the people who were there.
    People who died the day I decided I wanted to live.
    Why have I never wondered about them? I’ve thought about how I could have died, should have died, but I never thought about what happened to the crowd when the bomb went off, never thought about the people around me, in front of me. I never—
    I never even looked at them.
    I looked at the fire. I’ve dreamed of the flowers, of blood. Of it all over