Empire of Bones by N. D. Wilson Page B

around the great glass towers of Midtown Manhattan. But only because her reflection looked pitiful. She was too small for the heavy mailbag on her shoulder, too short and too thin for her blue-gray shorts and her official uniform shirt. The shoes had seemed comfortable at first, but now every step on the uneven concrete sent needles up into her feet.
    Her uncle had said this would be hard when he’d hired her. He’d said she wouldn’t last the week. And yes, he had been willing to bet. If she did last, he would owe her a week of restaurant dinners. If she quit, she would owe him a week of cooking with her grandmother’s recipes. Butter. Lard. And no more fat-free sour cream.
    Mercy Rios, eighteen (and a half), temporary letter carrier. Mailman. Mailgirl . She puffed a strand of loose hair out of her face and stole a glance at her reflection ina pane of black bank glass. Broken little beast of burden in borrowed clothes .
    Pausing before she reached the next street and putting one foot up onto a bench, Mercy adjusted the bag strap. It was her third day, and there was no longer any unbruised patch of shoulder willing to carry the weight. Not on either shoulder. But the pain wasn’t what bothered her. She knew pain well. And physical pain could be pushed away and eventually forgotten. In the gym, she had been a fearless little gymnast, crashing on the balance beam and scrambling back up through the blood and tears, flying off the bars, tumbling onto her head. There had been pain every day, but she had never held herself back. She had never attempted only what she knew she could do. It was the unknown, the dangerous darkness of the harder, higher thing, that she had always chased.
    In her last meet, two years ago, she had defied her coach. Her team’s victory had already been assured when she’d chalked her hands and walked to the uneven bars. Her coach had crouched down, and with his nicotine breath and yellow smile, he’d told her which of the more difficult elements to drop. He’d told her to play it safe. And Mercy had nodded. She’d smiled.
    She’d meant to. But once her blood was flowing, once she was flying and swinging faster and harder and higherthan any girl was meant to, something else took over. She didn’t drop her double back flip. She tripled it.
    Mercy knew what it was like to hear a bone snap, to see and feel it jutting out of her thigh. That pain was long gone. But the pain of her coach’s anger, the pain of being thrown away, of being pushed out and told not to come back … that was the kind of pain that could last a lifetime.
    Hitching her bag, Mercy straightened up and stared down the sidewalk toward the next intersection. People parted around her, leaving her behind.
    This next street, this next part of her route, was why she wanted to quit. It was why other carriers had already quit or pulled rank to be reassigned or had simply disappeared. It was why her uncle had been willing to give her a chance.
    Mercy Rios never quit. Not even when she wanted to scream and sob and run away.
    The small temporary letter carrier marched forward. Her eyes were on the corner, where the street’s mouth waited. In the crosswalk, the rushing crowd seemed to accelerate, hurrying to get past. She knew they could feel it. Probably the same way she did. As she approached, the light turned red. The pedestrians should have stopped. They should have piled up on the curb and waited for cross traffic. But they kept rushing forward. There was no cross traffic. Not one car leaving,and not one of the hundreds of cabs and town cars and buses turning in.
    Mercy approached the corner, holding her breath. As she did, the cross street became harder and harder to see. It wasn’t invisible, it was just … pushing her eyes away, forcing her to look elsewhere, at pedestrians and cabs and bicycles. She felt like she was trying to push the wrong sides of two magnets together. The more she tried to focus her eyes—and her