Rebel of the Sands (7 page)

“Let me go.” I tried to tug my arm free, but her grip tightened.

“Where do you think you're going?”

“Away.” I stopped struggling, facing her head-on. “Out of this town and away from you. You don't want me here. You don't want your husband wanting me.” Her fingers dug in. “And I don't want your husband or anyone else having me.” I darted a look over my shoulder, couldn't see anyone through the crowd. But it was a damn small town. Fazim would find me. “Just let me go and I'll leave.” I turned back to Aunt Farrah. The hatred that she usually wore had slipped. I was right and she knew it. In this we were allies. “Please.”

Her fingers loosened.

Too late. Uniform-clad arms clamped around me and I was lifted off my feet with an involuntary cry. I was
half dragged back around the house into the street. The celebrations had quieted, revelry turning to panic as the army penned folks back against houses in a line. Soldiers marched down the street, lanterns held high, checking every man's face.

“Search all the houses and see if he's there.” I recognized the clipped, careful accent of young Commander Naguib. He walked through our town like he owned the whole damn place.

Jin was wanted for treason. As a mercenary, they claimed. They didn't send so many men to bring in traitors for pay. So either they weren't here for Jin or he was a lot more than a mercenary.

The soldier holding me dropped me in front of the young commander, who gave me a once-over before turning to Fazim over his shoulder. “This is her?”

“Yes. She was with the foreigner in Deadshot.” The swinging lamplight made Fazim ugly as he hovered over the commander's shoulder. I'd been afraid before, but this was a new sort of terror. “She was working with him. She's the Blue-Eyed Bandit.”

A soldier snorted from the edge of the lamplight. “From the pistol pit? This girl?”

“He's an idiot.” I found my voice. I was trying to be brave. But it was Fazim's word against mine. They were going to believe a man over a girl any day.

The commander grabbed my chin and held the lantern so close to my head, I figured he was going to burn me. “You have lovely eyes.” It was no use pretending anymore.
I'd been betrayed by my own face. “Now, where is our foreign friend?”

“If I knew that, I wouldn't be here answering stupid questions.” His hand connected with my cheek so hard, I was afraid that he'd snapped my neck, only I was too surprised to die. Pain echoed in my teeth and bones.

“Where is he?” The commander's voice wormed its way through the ringing in my ears. I was only still standing because a soldier was holding me up. I struggled to find the ground again. The commander grabbed my chin. “Tell me.” There was a gun at my temple. “Or I will shoot you in the head.”

My jaw hurt, but I made it work. “Well, that wouldn't be real clever, because then you'd never get to hear what I've got to say.” The click of a bullet slotting into the chamber of a gun was a noise I knew like my own voice. I'd just never heard it so close to my ear.

“That's not going to work on her.” Fazim spoke up. “If you really want to frighten her, you need her cripple.”

Anger rushed in, pushing out my fear. I lunged at him so fast that the grip holding me slipped. I got my hands on his throat, but arms wrenched me off him before I could do much damage. Someone slapped me again. When my vision cleared, Tamid was kneeling on the sand in the circle of lamps. His bad leg was sprawled out crookedly, and a gun rested against the back of his neck.

I hated Fazim, but I hated myself more. Tamid had warned me I'd get in trouble. I just hadn't figured on getting anyone in trouble with me.

“Now,” the commander said in his fine accent. “Would you care to tell us whether or not you were with our friend from the east in Deadshot?”

I swallowed angry words that rose up automatically. Mouthing off wasn't worth Tamid's life. “I wasn't with him.” I spoke through clenched teeth. “We were both there.”

“And where is he now?”

“I don't know.” I thought he would hit me again. But the commander just pursed his mouth like he was disappointed in a bad student. He moved around to Tamid. I was suddenly afraid again.

“What happened to your leg?”

“Leave him alone!”

Tamid and the commander both ignored me. “It was twisted when I was born,” Tamid answered cautiously. We had an audience of about two dozen soldiers and a few hundred Last County folks. All of them were watching us with a mix of horror and fascination.

“Well, then.” The commander circled behind Tamid. “It's hardly much good to you, is it?”

The bullet went straight through his knee. I screamed so loud, I couldn't even hear Tamid's cry as he crumpled to the ground. A single shriek pierced through the sudden uproar. Tamid's mother. Two soldiers were holding her back.

“What do you think, Bandit?” Commander Naguib cried to me over the noise from the crowd. “A man with one leg might as well have none for all the good he is.” He aimed his gun at Tamid's good leg.

“No!” The cry ripped through me.

“Then tell me the truth. And tell me fast. Where is he?”

“I don't know!”

Tamid's mother screamed.

“No! No! I don't! He was here. He came here. Then he left.”

“When?” The commander came at me full stride, the simmering rage that lived under the cool face rising up again.

“Dusk. A few hours ago.”

“Where did he go?”

“I don't know!” I cried out. The gun smashed across my head. Blood erupted across my vision. I saw a burst of red and light before it cleared and I could see the lanterns swinging above my head again.

“Where is he?” the commander asked.

“I don't know,” I repeated, because the truth was all I had now, as weak as it was.

“I will shoot him again, and this time it might not be in the leg.”

“I'm not lying! He didn't tell me. Why would he tell me?” I was shouting now.

“Which way did he go?”

“I don't know!”

“Lying is a sin, you know.” The gun pressed against my cheek, hot metal in my face.

And then the world exploded into noise and light.

•   •   •

RINGING.

Everything was ringing.

My first thought was that someone had been shot.

Tamid?

I was facedown on the ground. I pushed myself to my elbows.

In the dark all I could see was fire where I knew a cliff of black brick was supposed to be.

The entire weapons factory was ablaze.

Sound rushed back in. Screaming came first. The folks of Dustwalk had flung themselves to the ground in prayer, or just covered their heads; some staggered to their feet, others just stared. Commander Naguib was already shouting instructions, Tamid and I forgotten. Soldiers were leaping onto their horses, riding full tilt toward the blaze.

Tamid
.

He was crumpled on the sand, not moving, but as I called his name he looked up at me. At the same moment I heard his name again. His mother was cowering and weeping in the sand, trying to crawl toward him.

Then I heard the unmistakable scream of a Buraqi. The desert horse was barreling down the street toward us. On its back was Jin, riding straight toward me. Guns swiveled uncertainly in Jin's direction. He fired a shot and a soldier went down.

I turned back to where Tamid was crumpled.

The Buraqi was almost on top of me.

I had seconds to decide. My legs were trapped, my gut tugging me recklessly toward Tamid. To near certain death. My heart tugging me to Jin and escape and the unknown.

Jin leaned over the horse, reaching down. A gunshot went off at my feet.

It wasn't a decision. More than a want.

It was an instinct. A need. Staying alive.

Jin's hand came into reach. I clasped it tight and swung my body as Jin pulled me up behind him. I saw Aunt Farrah's ashen face. I saw Tamid crumpled in the sand. I saw Commander Naguib, reloading his weapon. Defenseless. Young.

It would be a clean shot. And Jin was armed. One shot and the commander would be dead. Jin knew it, too; I felt it in the tension of his shoulders. Instead he pulled the horse around, lowering his gun, and my hands twisted into Jin's shirt a second before the Buraqi burst into the speed of a beast of wind and sand.

“T
ell me you drink.”

I woke to rough cloth against my face and the smell of gunpowder in my nose. I'd dozed off with my head against Jin's back as we rode. His words vibrated through his shoulder blades and into my skull, jangling loosely until I put them together.

“You've seen where I grew up.” My voice sounded scratchy. When I opened my eyes all I could see was the weave of his shirt, but I could already tell we weren't anywhere near Dustwalk. The air tasted different, of cooler mornings and grit instead of heat and dust and gunpowder. “Of course I drink.” My body ached and my chest felt like something was clattering around it. God knew I could use a drink or five right about now.

Sometime while we rode I'd wound my arms around Jin's waist to hang on. I let him go and wiped the sweat of my palms onto my own shirt as Jin slid from the saddle. I tried to line up my thoughts along with my spine as I forced myself straight.

Wherever we were, it looked like most desert towns. Slapped together wooden houses and dusty ground. Only it was rockier than Dustwalk, and the horizon loomed close and high around us in the predawn haze. We must've gone up into the mountains.

I squinted up at a swinging signpost with a picture of a crudely drawn blue man with closed eyes. The lettering announced it as the Drunk Djinni. I knew that story, but I couldn't remember it just now.

The town was dead quiet.

“Where are we?” I asked, only to realize Jin was gone. I twisted atop the Buraqi and spotted him two houses down, hopping over a flaking white fence. A line of laundry was strung between the house and a crooked post, and Jin snatched a piece of crimson cloth straight off it. My eyes traveled past him, up the mountain, beyond the houses. I answered my own question.

Sazi was a full day's ride from Dustwalk. Or a few hours as the Buraqi ran. I'd heard so much about the mining town, but I'd never seen it. They said it was bad here after the mines collapsed a few weeks ago. But I still couldn't have imagined this.

An explosion. An accident. Gunpowder gone wrong was the word in Dustwalk, and I'd figured I knew what they
meant. I'd blown up bottles and tin cans along with all the other kids in the desert. I'd seen them shatter as we ran hollering for cover. Sometimes a kid would get a burned finger that needed to be sawed off, or a scarred chin, but most of the time we just wound up with a mess of metal and glass and sand all melted up together.

The collapsed mines looked a lot worse than a melted hunk of old tin. It reminded me of my father's body when they dragged him out of our house, his skin still smoldering. The mountain itself was disfigured, like the earth had rebelled from within its very soul and closed the mountain's ancient mouth, swallowing the mines whole.

No wonder the army hadn't stayed long in Sazi. There wasn't a whole lot to be done. Hundreds of prayer cloths were tied around rocks and stakes all the way up the mountain, but God had failed here.

“Here.” Jin's hand on my knee pulled me back. He was holding the strip of red cloth up to me. I realized it was a sheema. “Better if no one sees your face.”

“Is that how you got a shirt?” I asked. “You took it off someone's clothesline on your way out of town?”

He nodded ever so slightly. “While you were putting on one hell of a show with the Buraqi. I needed to get out of there before the army came looking. You were too good a distraction to waste.”

I was a distraction.

I riffled around in the bag that was still strapped over my shoulder. The shirt I'd grabbed off the floor of the boys' bedroom was at the top. The one I'd meant to give him
when I stupidly thought he'd need my help. I balled it up and flung it at him. Jin caught it deftly with his free hand.

“Stealing's a sin, you know.” I snatched the sheema from him and started tying it, wincing as my fingers brushed the spot where Naguib's gun had smashed across my cheek. “And that shirt doesn't fit you well.”

Jin paused for a moment before peeling off the shirt he'd been wearing. “Is drinking yourself under the table one, too?” He tugged on the new shirt as I busied myself wrapping my face against the sun that was still rising.

“If I say no,” I said, tucking the fabric into place, “will you be buying?”

•   •   •

MY SECOND DRINK
burned less than the first one on the way down, but it still wasn't close to burning out the aching hollow space in my chest.

“Tamid.” I blurted out the name I'd been biting back since we sat down. “My friend. He got shot through the leg. What do you reckon will happen to him?”

“Not a clue.” It was dark in the Drunk Djinni. Busy, too. Full of men with no mines to go to and nothing to do but drink and tell their stories to painted girls. It wasn't even noon and this whole town was drunk, or well on its way. And I was helping. Jin's hat was tugged low over his face, concealing as much of it as he could manage. “Could be they'll leave him alive. Could be they'll shoot him in the head to finish the job. You never know with your Sultan's
army. But there's nothing you can do about it now—you already left him.” I wanted to tell him that I didn't—that he took me away—but we both knew that wasn't true. “Only way to find out for sure would be to ride back into town and get matching bullets straight through our heads. I hear that's the latest style in Izman.”

“Well, it's the last thing they'd expect,” I joked lamely.

But I knew I wasn't going back. I'd spent near seventeen years planning on leaving. With my mother. And then on my own. And now I'd finally made it out. After all that time scraping and saving, and fighting, dragging the horizon closer by my fingernails one louzi at a time, I was on my way. The warm rush I was feeling wasn't all from the drink.

“So where to now?” My foot started tapping on the ground. I'd spent years in one place, and now that I'd finally started moving, it was hard to stop.

The bar girl came over. Jin stopped her as she started to slosh liquor into his glass. “Leave the bottle.” He slid a coin across the table to her.

She held the coin up to the faint light before tossing it back on the table. “This isn't real money.”

I picked it up. Sure enough, the round piece of metal was about the same size as a louzi, but it was too thin, and printed with a sun instead of the profile of the Sultan.

“My mistake.” Jin kept his head low, so the brim of his hat hid his foreign features, as he gave her a new coin. The girl bit it before sauntering back to the bar.

Jin propped his elbows on the table and filled my glass
back up to the brim. He was favoring the shoulder he hadn't taken a bullet to. I watched the strain across his back, his shirt pulling so I could see the tattoo of the sun rising over his collar. I glanced down to the coin in my palm, the same image staring up at me.

“What's the sun?” I asked.

“That might be a bit of an existential question four drinks in,” Jin said, putting the bottle down, his shirt shifting again to eclipse the tattoo.

“Three drinks. And I meant that one.” I reached across the table and tugged his collar down so I could see the tattoo on his chest. My knuckles grazed his heartbeat. I let go quickly, realizing I was too close to start undressing him.

“It's a symbol for luck,” Jin said. He pulled his collar back up, but I could still see the edge of the ink over his heart.

“It's on your foreign coin.” He raised his eyebrows at the accusation in my tone. But I figured he knew what I meant. The sun was printed on what I figured was a Xichian coin, which meant it was a national symbol. Jin might have been born here, but he'd told me he was raised in Xicha. It seemed awfully patriotic for a mercenary to have his country's sun tattooed over his heart.

“Why did you come back for me?” I leaned toward him, trying to unravel him. “You could've made a clean getaway.”

There was a tug at his mouth as he leaned in to whisper conspiratorially, “I needed a fast horse.” He was so close I could smell the alcohol on him. So close he
might've kissed me. He seemed to realize that at the same moment I did and pulled away. “Besides, I owe you. When you caught the Buraqi, it drew every person in the Last County away from that goddamn factory just long enough for me to get in and send it up. I've been trying to do that for weeks now. I was getting mighty low on money.”

So that was why he'd been in the pistol pit that night.

“And all of it just to blow up some factory in the dead end to nowhere?”

“The biggest weapons factory in the country. And by extension, the world.”

“The world?” I'd never known that. It didn't seem possible.

“It's not hard when you can't build something half the size of it anywhere else without it getting torn down by First Beings.”

My head was feeling light from the alcohol, and in the dark of the bar I was struggling to put his words together. “What do you mean, torn down?”

Jin paused, drink halfway to his mouth. “Come on, desert girl. How long had it been since you'd seen a First Being before the Buraqi came into town? Magic and metal don't mix well. We're killing it. But it's fighting back.” The Buraqi's screams lit up my memories. “Most other countries can make anything on a small scale, including weapons. But a few tried to build factories just like yours hundreds of years ago. The living earth itself rebelled. There's a valley in Xicha that's called Fool's Grave. It used to be a town. They'd built a cannery there. Legend
says they were open about a month before the First Beings who lived in the earth had enough and tore apart the ground under the town and flooded the ruins. The same thing happened everywhere. So after a while folks stopped building factories. Except in Miraji. Your First Beings are the only ones who seem to put up with it.”

“And what makes us so special?”

Jin shrugged. “Maybe it's because the desert's magic already comes out of fire and smoke instead of growing, living things. Or because the earth here is already dead. But the fact is, your country is at the crossroads between the East, where guns were born, and the West, where they're waging a war of empires. And it's the only one in the world that can build weapons on a massive scale. This desert is valuable. Why do you think the Gallan are here?”

“So we're just one giant weapons factory to them?” The notion was unsettling.

Jin poured himself another drink. “And there are a lot of countries who aren't very pleased by your Sultan providing the Gallan with weapons to invade them if they got it into their heads to try.”

“So which one of those countries are you blowing up factories for?” I prodded the sun on his chest. The Xichian symbol.

Jin raised his glass in a mock toast. “Maybe I'm just a pacifist.”

I clinked my glass to his. “You have an awful lot of guns for a pacifist.”

The words were met by a wry turn of his mouth. “And
you're too smart for someone who doesn't know nearly enough about her own country.”

We drank. As my empty glass hit the table, something crashed in the corner of the room. I jumped. A chair had knocked to the ground. Its owner, a man in a dirty green sheema, was on his feet, facing another man who was lounging back, both feet propped up, a game of cards spread out on the table. A pretty girl was between them, molding herself up against the standing man, whispering in his ear until he folded back into his chair. The sitar player started up again in his corner, and someone laughed high and clear, breaking the tension.

The thought hit me all of a sudden. “Did you blow up the mines, too?”

If Xicha wanted to cut off our weapons, then it made sense to cut off the supply of metal, too. Factories could be rebuilt. Collapsed mines were harder. “Here?” He actually looked surprised. “No. I heard it was an accident.”

“Why should I believe you? Is Jin even your real name?”

“Well, around here they call me the Eastern Snake. But you know that”—he looked up at me from under the brim of his hat—“Blue-Eyed Bandit.” The shock made me pull back. Jin's face split into a grin at my surprise.

“You knew who I was?” I asked, sounding a little breathless. “In Dustwalk?”

“Your eyes aren't exactly inconspicuous,” Jin said.

“You knew who I was and you wouldn't take me with you?” The frightened, humiliated feeling of returning to the empty store rushed back in. “Why?”

“Because you shouldn't go to Izman.” He settled back in his chair. “No matter how well you can take care of yourself with a gun out here, the city'll tear you apart.”

“I wouldn't be alone,” I said. “My mother's sister lives in Izman. That's where I'm headed.”

“Do you even know how to get there?”

I shrugged. “How are you getting there?”

“I'm not,” he said simply, catching me by surprise. I reached back, trying to remember if he'd ever said he was. It just seemed like he must've been.