Rebel of the Sands (22 page)

The door banged open. Naguib rushed in, coming to find Noorsham. I moved with the sort of speed that usually belonged to Shazad, reaching across the bar. My hand fastened around the neck of a bottle. I turned, swinging it, narrowly missing Naguib's face. He grabbed my wrist, wrenching it downward. I felt a shot of pain through my whole body and screamed. The bottle shattered against the ground, distracting him long enough for me to pull free.

Someone called my name. Jin was standing in the doorway. A huge hole torn in the train separated the two carriages, but damn him, was he thinking of coming for me?

“Go!” I shouted at him. “I'll be right behind.” He knew better than to argue with me. He jumped as I started to run for the tear in the side of the carriage.

I wasn't far behind him, my arms bracing either side of the gap in the wall.

Noorsham.

I glanced backward. He'd been knocked sideways by the blow. There was a dent in the metal helmet he wore, but he was righting himself. I glimpsed through the gap that we were coming up on a canyon, where the rails crossed over the chasm.

I had to jump. Now. But I couldn't leave Noorsham. I couldn't leave him alive. I couldn't leave him here in Naguib's hands. I had to kill him. Or save him. Our blue eyes locked across the debris littering the carriage.

The noise inside me sounded like Bahi's scream, begging me to cross the carriage and rip off his mask, drag him away. But the valley was almost under us; I might have already waited too long.

If I went back they'd have me trapped and there wouldn't be time to jump.

If I jumped now, I might go over anyway.

I was damned either way.

I flung myself through the rip in the carriage. The wind caught me, tossed me. I hit the ground and my body exploded into a constellation of pain. Momentum carried me through the sand as easily as if it were air; I was in too much agony to fight it. My vision cleared just in time for me to see the canyon gape open to swallow me. My empty fingers scraped through the sand. I fought for purchase that wasn't there to stop my body. There was nothing to cling to but sand.

My legs went over, taking the rest of me with them.

M
y fingers caught on something. I felt a tug of falling in my stomach as I willed my injured hand to hold on. My body swung against the canyon wall and I heard my ribs connect with the sickening noise of bones breaking. I cried out, agony taking me over. For a moment all I could do was hang, eyes shut, breath shallow, telling myself not to look down. Willing my hand to hang on.

Only then I realized I didn't know what I was holding on to.

I was shaking so hard, I could barely move. It seemed like it took forever to open my eyes. I tipped my head back slowly, like any move might throw me off balance and send me hurtling to the bottom of the chasm.

I'd grabbed hold of the sand. Or rather, the sand had
grabbed hold of me. An arm made of sand had clamped around my wrist. It was holding on to my life.

I dropped my head, squeezing my eyes shut. Trying to remember how my lungs ought to work. How fast my heart ought to beat.

I'd seen dozens of things born from the sand and the wind and the spirits in the desert in my sixteen years. I'd heard every story, about immortals and ghouls alike that came from the sand. But this was something new. And it felt wholly foreign and entirely familiar at once.

This wasn't a creature from the sands. This was me.

I took a deep breath. My ribs stretched into an endless ache that wrapped around my whole body. I swung my left arm up, the motion ripping a cry out of me, catching the sand-arm by the wrist, trying to pretend I didn't feel grains of it slipping between my fingers.

Slow as the setting sun, it recoiled into the sand, dragging me up with it. My hand started slipping and a new sand-arm snaked out from the desert, grabbing me. And then another. A dozen hands held me, pulling at my clothes, my arms. Pulling me back to the desert.

And then I was up, lying flat on my stomach. I crawled away from the edge, my body shaking. I didn't know if it was pain or something greater waiting to crash into me. Something my body knew before my mind. I was blank. Watching without grasping it. Around me, a dozen arms of sand disintegrated. I flinched.

Nothing else moved. Not even me. Then I reached toward a heap of sand that had saved my life. I hadn't even
touched it before it began to rise toward my palm, like the snakes in baskets called by charmers.

So this was the kind of Demdji I was.

A gun went off. The sand collapsed as I spun toward the sound. The world poured back in around me all at once. There were bodies in the sand already. I was just in time to see Shazad jab her elbow into a man's throat, whirling to catch him in the gut with a knife. A soldier came at her from the right.

“No!”

I wasn't empty anymore. I was furious. The sand lashed up, exploding between them, sending them both sprawling. I ran for Shazad as it settled.

She was finishing coughing up desert dust when I dropped to my knees next to her. When she saw me she starting hacking all over again. “I thought you were dead! I saw you go over,” she got out between coughs. “I saw you fall.”

To our right a gun went up. Without thinking, I flung out my hand; a wave of sand sent the soldier sprawling. Buried him. His gun skittered to my feet. I didn't pick it up. The rush made me feel dizzy and drunk and scared all at once. It was like I'd just grown another limb I wasn't fully in control of yet.

I clasped Shazad's hand, pulling her up. I was still shaking too hard to find words. When I turned, the sand at my feet turned with me—I knew it without looking. I
felt
it. Like I always had, without knowing that I was. The desert all around me, the sand like a living thing, calling to me, begging me to use it. To be part of it.

The fighting had stopped, but I couldn't.

“Amani.” Shazad's grip slipped out of mine. The sand was moving underneath me, a swirl like a tiny sandstorm, and then it was getting bigger, rising, rising until it was all around me, pulling at my hair, my clothes, calling me into it, into the desert.

To drown in it.

I couldn't breathe. I couldn't control it. There was too much of it. I couldn't breathe.

A new hand closed over mine, and this time it was flesh and bone. Jin appeared through the sand, his sheema wrapped tightly around his face as he pushed his way through blindly. I saw he was holding something metallic a second before his arms went around me and he pulled me into his chest. He was saying something I couldn't hear over the storm. All I felt was his hand press into my arm. It was a bullet, cool and hard, the iron biting into my bare skin.

The cold of it cut through the heat in me.

The sand dropped away, spiraling down and down and down until it was back under my feet and I could hear Jin's heartbeat under my forehead, feel the pain of the bullet pressing into my flesh too hard, hear him whispering my name over and over again in my ear until I stopped shaking.

W
e finally stopped flying a few hours before dawn to let Izz get some rest from carrying the four of us. We were halfway between home and where we'd jumped off the train. It was open empty desert on all sides, though I could see the mountains of the Dev's Valley on the horizon. We didn't unpack supplies or even build a fire. Everyone collapsed where they stood. Izz turned into a huge catlike beast I'd never seen before and fell asleep. Shazad leaned against him. Her eyes were red, even though I hadn't seen her crying.

Jin sat down next to me without a word. There was something in his hands. The red sheema, I realized. The one I'd let go out the window. He took my right arm, gently, without asking. My hand was swollen and tender, but I'd almost stopped noticing the constant throbbing.
Sprained. Not broken. The place where my ribs had connected with the canyon wall had faded to a dull ache. I felt Bahi's absence like a badly stitched wound as Jin's hands worked, clumsy with exhaustion, binding my hand with my sheema. He tied it off, his fingers skimming over the cloth before he set my hand down gently.

“You all right?” he asked.

“It'll heal.”

We both knew that wasn't what he'd been asking, but Jin let it pass anyway.

“Can you shoot left-handed?”

“If I have to,” I said.

Jin held his pistol out to me. “Do you want it?” I stared at the gun in his hands, but I didn't snatch it up like I would've once. Yesterday. “You've worked it out, haven't you?”

“It's because of the iron.” I took the gun by the leather handle, careful not to touch the metal. I thought of the way he'd pressed a bullet to my skin as the sand was rising. Just one touch and I was stripped powerless because of the thing that had shaped my whole life, with or against my will. It was like the Buraqi and the metal horseshoes: so long as I had iron against my skin, I couldn't touch my Demdji powers. “It's the reason I got through my whole life without knowing I was a Demdji. Because I'm from Dustwalk.”
The girl who taught herself to shoot a gun. Until she could knock down a row of tin cans like they were nothing and the gun was everything
. “Because I'm the girl with the gun.” And Noorsham was the boy from the iron mines. He said he'd been sick. Sick enough to leave the mines and
stop inhaling iron dust for a little while, maybe. So that when he went back to work, he did it as a Demdji.

“From the town where even the water tastes like iron.” And when they'd been afraid of Noorsham in Fahali, iron was what they'd chained him with. Jin's hand was clenching and unclenching around nothing. His knuckles were torn up, and the motion was making the scabs break all over again. That had to be painful.

“Bet you weren't counting on all this being so damn complicated when you abducted me from that godforsaken place.”

“I didn't
abduct
you!” At least he'd stopped punishing his knuckles raw. He realized I was baiting him a moment too late. His shoulders eased. The cautious angry fragility wasn't something either of us could keep up long.

“You abducted me a little bit.” It was like we were back with the Camel's Knees, except there was no more pretending about what I was.

I wasn't going to craft illusions out of the air or twist people's minds or change my shape. Those were the powers of Djinn in the stories where they tricked men and one another. Then there were the other stories. Massil and the sand that filled the sea in a fit of Djinni anger. The golden city of Habadden burned by the Djinn for its corruption. Just like Noorsham did. I wondered if I could bury the sea in sand, too.

“Noorsham's eyes are the same color as mine,” I blurted out. I couldn't be the only one who'd put it all together. “He's about my age. He was born spitting distance from where I
was.” I couldn't be the only one thinking it. “Dustwalk to Sazi, that's only a few hours as the Buraqi rides. How far do you reckon that is as the Djinni walks? He's my brother, isn't he?”

“Amani. No matter what he is, he's not your family. Family and blood aren't the same thing.”

“If that's true, how come you didn't shoot Naguib in Dustwalk?” The truth showed on his face, just long enough for me to read it. “I don't want my brother to have to die either, Jin.” We understood each other. His brother and mine were both just the Sultan's weapons.

Jin put his hands on my face. “We don't have to do anything. He's after the Gallan. You don't have to stop him.” I was so used to Jin's unwavering certainty. The hitch in his voice, the tentativeness of his hand on my face, this was unfamiliar ground. “We could retreat. Live to fight another day.”

“We'd just be living to die another day.” I leaned my forehead into his. “Noorsham—we have to stop him. If the Sultan has a weapon like that, it's only a matter of time before he cuts his way through the foreigners and comes for us, too. We might never get another chance.” I wasn't even sure what I meant by “stop him.” Kill him? Rescue him? Save him? “They're headed to the Gallan camp,” I said, and the moment I did, I knew I was right. “They're going to kill them. We can get there first.”

“I'm not that inclined to save any Gallan soldiers,” Hala interrupted. “I've been a Demdji in an occupied country longer than you have. They all deserve to burn, if you ask me. We should take care of our own.”

“And Fahali?” I looked around the group of tired,
ragged rebels. “What about all the people there? They're headed back there to burn out the Gallan. A lot of desert folks will burn with them.”

No one answered me.

“We need to sleep.” Jin ran his hands over his face. I felt that exhaustion, too. It was soul deep. “Nobody makes smart decisions in the dark. We sleep and tomorrow we head back to camp. Tell Ahmed about the weapon. And then we decide.”

•   •   •

TOMORROW WOULD BE
too late. I knew that down in my gut as I lay between the desert and the stars, dead tired and too alive with thought to sleep.

Nobody made smart decisions in the dark, Jin said. A stupid decision in the dark was how I'd wound up dressed as a boy in Deadshot. I'd make it all over again if I had to. It hadn't even been a decision, really. And neither was this.

I was up before I knew for sure what I was thinking of doing. In the light of the embers I started to pack supplies. Enough for a day's walk across the desert.

“Running away like a thief in the night?” My gun leapt into my hand. Shazad was still leaning against the blue furred beast that was Izz, but her eyes were open now, watching me. I didn't know how long she'd been awake.

“You planning on stopping me?” We both knew she could and that I wasn't going to shoot. Still, I didn't drop my gun right away, even clumsy as it was in my left hand.
“He's my brother, Shazad. It's my responsibility. And I can warn them. Even if I can't do anything else, I can—”

“I don't want to stop you.” Shazad pushed herself to sitting. “I'm just offended you didn't ask me to come with you.”

“Is that the smart thing to do, General?” But I could feel the fire taking light in me again. The one that'd been trampled by fear and Bahi's loss. And I could see it in Shazad.

“No,” Shazad admitted. She reached for her weapons and started buckling the scimitars over her shoulders. “The smart thing would be to let the Sultan wear himself out fighting his allies and hope that they catch on and kill him, leaving an empty throne for Ahmed.” She tightened the buckle on her second sword. “But Naguib recognized me. So I don't have time to wait around for that. If we don't stop him, he'll send news to the Sultan—and my father, my mother, and my brother will all burn like Bahi. Then he will come for the rest of us. Besides”—she reached a hand for me and I clasped it, pulling her to her feet—“it's the right thing to do.”

I might be tangled with Jin. But with Shazad it was simpler. We were tied together.

She turned to Jin now, sprawled by the fire, his hat pulled over his eyes. “I can tell you're awake. Are you coming with us?”

He sighed, tipping his hat backward. “Yeah, yeah. Just trying to get some sleep before going to near certain death.”

“I think thieves in the night are meant to be quieter than this, you know,” Hala muttered from her side of the campfire. “What exactly is your plan to get us all killed, General?”

“Simple. We get them to destroy each other.” We all
stared at her, waiting. It seemed to take her a second to realize she was two steps ahead of the rest of us. “The Sultan might be aiming to drive out the Gallan, but he doesn't want open war. That's why he's trying to blame Noorsham's destruction on us. If the Gallan soldiers
see
Noorsham, see that he's the Sultan's weapon and not ours, then open war is what the Sultan will get. He'll lose his alliance with the Gallan. And that leaves us with just the Sultan to usurp, not a whole foreign army after us, too. All we have to do is kill Noorsham before he kills them.”

“Or us,” Hala pointed out. “So it's five of us against two armies and an insane Demdji superweapon.”

I looked around the circle of faces in the dark. At Shihabian two days ago—God, was it only two days?—I'd felt like an imposter. Like a part that didn't quite fit in this rebellion, no matter how much I wanted to. Jin's foolish Blue-Eyed Bandit who gave up the city without knowing what she was giving it up for. The Demdji without powers who couldn't save anyone. But now, standing in this circle, I felt it, the thing that made them all stay and risk their lives. Being a link in the chain.

“Yeah, I guess it is,” I said.

“There's an old expression,” Shazad said. She might not want to be called General, but it was written all over her. She surveyed her small army: a shape-shifter, a gold-skinned girl, a foreign prince, and a blue-eyed bandit. “About fighting fire with fire. It never made much sense to me. But fighting fire with Demdji who don't burn so easily, that might work.”