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serve well as tour guides for the few outsiders let in.
    He offers me two, and I eat them because it is stupid to refuse food, even if the rice is not spiced properly and the meat tastes of cow and not the goat that it should be.
    I miss the strangest things. Rice with red pepper cut so fine it looks like flakes. The strips of goat in the stew we ate to mark the arrival of winter. The smell of the Hills when spring was coming and the earth was damp with promise, like a girl is supposed to be on her first night with her pledged.
    The way Da would sometimes talk of my mother when I was young and drink set him that way. How his eyes would go all soft and far away. His obsession for her—his willingness to claim her for himself when he didn’t need to and to talk of her after she’d gone—destroyed him in the eyes of his family. They never acknowledged him again, not even after I became an Angel.
    They never once even looked at me.
    I wanted to understand what he felt for her, but I didn’t. He claimed her and she’d chosen to leave him and this world, slipped away to have me, mouth gritted around a rag so Da wouldn’t hear her scream and come find her.
    After I came and she was gone, bled out bone white, I was his penance. I was the price he paid for what he felt for her, and he did right by putting me to good use. By taking me to the Angel House.
    By making sure death was all that waited for me too.

CHAPTER 18
    K err eats the other packet of dumplings after the train has been laboring acros the desert, after the soldiers have passed through again, not even looking at our papers. They smell of fresh meat, and some of them have crumbs on their shirts.
    Food must have been loaded on for them at the last stop. I’ve heard stories about what they eat. Bread made with flour so fine it makes loaves that don’t go hard the moment they cool. Fried meat patties as large as my palm, and fresh greens even in the winter.
    “Why do you think those people sell their own food?” Kerr asks, and I shrug, take the two dumplings he is holding out to me.
    “To wait in the sun like that, for so few coins . . .” He shakes his head. “If the old man I bought these dumplings from sells fifty a day—and how could he, when only one train passes through and everyone else is selling too—he would make less than what everyone who lives in the City is paid for putting up posters of Keran Berj in their homes.”
    I shrug again. Talk about the window flies is stupid. They paid for following Keran Berj, and if they want to use what food they are rationed to make money, it is their concern, not mine. They are still stuck in his world, thinking of coins and how to get things. They sell their food without understanding where it comes from, without seeing that land must be cherished.
    “They don’t get ration cards out here, you know,” he says, as if he knows what I’ve thought, plucking the dumpling wrapper out of my hand and smoothing it flat across his knee. “They don’t get anything. They’re forced to live out here, in this heat, in this land where almost nothing grows. They struggle to just live.”
    “They chose their path,” I say.
    He looks at me. I cannot read his face, see only a flicker of something in his eyes, and add, “And as Keran Berj wishes, he is to be obeyed,” for good measure. I know the lines of praise as well as anyone on this train. I just don’t believe them.
    I never have, and am sure Kerr once did. I look at him again, so well-fed sleek even now.
    “You feel for them?” I say, knowing my voice is mocking and thinking of the couple in the train station, of how he turned on them. How I am sure he has certainly sent people out here, or worse.
    “You don’t understand anything,” he says, his voice quiet, and looks out the window. I do too, wondering what it would be like to live with nothing but sand and heat, to not have trees and soil that thrives. It would be hard to love this land.
    Hard to live in