Rebel of the Sands (11 page)

T
he desert was changeless. For six weeks there was only sand and blue skies. The blisters on my feet turned bloody just in time for fresh ones. The restlessness I'd shoved into the bottom of my gut my whole life wasn't staying down so easy. I was on my way to Izman and I'd never felt more awake in my life.

At night, while the rest of the camp slept, I'd shed my sheema and breathe and sit some of Jin's watch with him until I was worn out enough to sleep before mine. He taught me words from other languages he'd learned sailing. After the first month I could threaten a man and insult his mother in Xichian, Albish, and Gallan. He showed me how he'd broken Dahmad's wrist in the wrestling pit, a move he'd learned from a Jarpoorian sailor in an Albish
port. I asked him about his broken nose once. He told me a Mirajin girl had hit him, and his brother had set it for him. He did that sometimes, mention his brother, like he was forgetting to guard himself with me. But he talked freely about most everything else. He told me about the places he'd been, the foreign shores he'd sailed to and stories of all the things he'd done, until I was itching to see the Golden Palaces of Amonpour and feel the rock of a ship below my feet. The stories of Izman had belonged to my mother. But the world was a lot bigger than my mother ever told me. And it occurred to me once or twice that I could go anywhere in it.

I knew we were getting close to the end of the desert the first time I saw something other than sand dunes on the horizons.

“It's called the Dev's Valley,” Jin told me as the camp settled down. We were on the outskirts of it. “It's a mess of mountains and canyons all the way down the western Mirajin border. They say it was carved into the land during the war against the Destroyer of Worlds. Before mankind.”

“That's one hell of a battle.” We were probably a two-day walk away. Two days wasn't so long. I looked up into the night. The sand rolled out in an endless ripple, turned blue by the starlight, so it was almost hard to tell where it met the sky except for the wild burst of stars overhead. “We've been walking for near two months now. The stars have moved.”

“A captain on one of the ships I worked on used to be able to travel by the stars.”

“But you need a broken compass.” As always when I mentioned the compass, I got nothing from him except for the slightest twitch of his lip.

“You want me to take your watch?” I asked. It was a pattern we'd fallen into since the first night.

“You're unnatural.” Jin ran his hands over his face. “This desert is enough to drain any man.”

“Well, I'm not a man,” I said. “And I was just trying to be nice, so—”

“No, wait.” Jin's fingers laced with mine too quick to react, pulling me down to sit next to him. It sent a stupid wild jolt through me before he let me go just as fast. “I'm sorry, I'm just sick to death of the sand everywhere.”

“I'm plenty used to it, I suppose.” I stared out across the dunes. They looked like they went on forever, but the horizon felt closer with the mountains. “It gets deep into your soul after a while.”

“It's in your skin, too.” He reached out a hand, and before I could think, his palm was flat against my cheek, warm and a little bit rough. His thumb traced the length of my cheekbone. A cascade of sand went in its wake, falling away from skin where it was stuck and leaving a strange burning shiver behind.

“Amani.” He didn't take his hand away from my face. “You're going to have to be careful when we get to Dassama. The city has been an encampment for Gallan soldiers for years now. It's got almost as many of them as it does Mirajin people in its walls.”

“When am I not careful?” I tried for lightness, but in
truth I was all too aware of his hand on my face.

“You're never careful,” Jin said wryly, his thumb tracing rough patterns on my cheek, his eyes following it. Like he was memorizing it. “Hell, right now if anyone from the caravan happened to look over, your cover would be blown.” His hand ran along my jawline. I could feel his touch on my face leaving my breathing ragged.

“I'd say you're the one not being careful just now.” He seemed to catch himself. His hand dropped away quickly. A cold ache spread out behind it. “Besides,” I said, “you'll be with me. How much trouble can Atiyah possibly get into if she's got Sahkr?” Atiyah and Ziyah was a great love story. Atiyah and Sahkr was just our joke.

He didn't laugh. I'd gotten to know what silence meant from Jin. He was hiding something from me. Suddenly, how soon we'd be going our separate ways crept up on me. My aunt Safiyah might be blood, but Jin I knew. And I didn't want to leave him. He made the world bigger. I wanted to go to the countries he'd been to. And more than anything I wanted him to ask me to go with him. But we were running out of time together.

In the early light of morning, the mountains looked even closer. My stomach twisted in anticipation. The excitement of nearing Dassama, the end of the desert and the first civilization we'd seen in weeks, crept into the caravan as the day wore on. The normal stoic trudging through the sand turned restless. The younger kids dashed up and down the line of camels, already trying to talk anyone who would listen out of a few louzi so that they'd be
able to buy themselves treats when we got to Dassama. Men and women were starting to pine loudly for a glass of something cool. Isra was berating Parviz loudly about the provisions. How it'd almost not been enough this time. How we were going to have to resupply as soon as we got into town. Yasmin was keeping her young cousins going with a game she called When I Get to the City.

“When I get to the city, I'm going to pull off my feet and get new ones that aren't so sore.” Little Fahim drooped dramatically, letting his arms swing like a rag doll's.

“When I get there,” his sister chimed in, pulling him up by the scruff of his shirt, “I'm going to eat a hundred yazdi cakes.”

“One hundred!” Yasmin faked wide-eyed surprise. “How will you have room after eating a hundred dates and a hundred chickens?” She rattled off the list of foods the little girl had already promised to eat. I tried to stop my own stomach from growling in answer.

“What about you, Alidad?” Yasmin asked, trying to draw me into their game. “What are you going to do when we get to Dassama?”

Truth be told, all I wanted was to wash for so long that the dust from my skin would turn the baths to a miniature version of the Sand Sea. Only I couldn't do that without throwing away my secret.

But more than Dassama, Izman was preying on my mind as we got closer to the end of the desert.

My mother had talked about going to find her sister in Izman so often that it was like a prayer in our household,
when my father wasn't there. But I didn't even know if I wanted it anymore. I didn't know if I'd ever wanted it or if my mother had just been wanting it enough for the two of us to keep us going all those years.

Hell, my aunt Safiya could be as bad as Aunt Farrah, and even if she wasn't, I wasn't so sure I wanted to turn myself over to anyone else who could claim a right to my life.

And I'd never see Jin again.

My eyes were latched to Jin's back up ahead when I realized that the front of the caravan train had come to a stop.

“What's happening?” Yasmin put her hand on Fahim's head, keeping him from going any farther.

A mutter ran back through the caravan train as folks raised their heads, straining to see up front, shielding their eyes against the dying sunset. They wanted to see, but a caravan ran on orders. Except for me.

I broke into a run for the front of the caravan, which had reached the top of a dune. Parviz was standing above me, Jin next to him, his sheema pulled down, as I climbed my way up the sand. The camels had dropped to their knees to rest, not understanding why we were stopping.

I broke over the top of the high dune next to them. At first I couldn't grasp it, either.

Where Dassama ought to have been, we were standing over ruins. Old, half-crumbled walls caught the setting sun, the last light casting shadows across them
and stretching out across the sand. Then I realized they weren't shadows.

My mouth went dry.

“How,” Jin said very carefully as I stepped up beside him, “does sand burn?”

•   •   •

THE CLOSER WE
got, the worse it looked. Where the stone wasn't blackened, it had crumbled to ash. In places the sand itself was black or burned hard. We didn't speak as we drifted through what was left of the narrow streets and charred houses. This wasn't a fire. Fire was something that some folks survived, that you ran from and put out, smothered in sand.

Jin was the first to say what we were both thinking, too low for the rest of the caravan to hear. “No bodies.”

“Bodies burn easier than stone.” I kicked a rock, and what was left of it disintegrated. “No fire would catch like this unless the whole place was soaked in oil.”

“A bomb,” Jin said. It wasn't a question, but that didn't mean he was right.

“The pattern for it is wrong,” I said.

Jin looked at me sideways. “How do you know that?”

“Come on, Xichian boy.” I forced lightness. The wind dragging at my sheema tasted like ash and made me want to gag. “You telling me you never set off gunpowder when you were a kid just to blow things up?”

Jin snorted. “We didn't all grow up near a weapons factory.”

I shrugged. “When a bomb goes off, it's always got a center. Here the buildings are burned on every side.” Like something had crashed down from above and flooded the city with fire. Familiarity whispered in my ear, though I didn't know why. I rounded a ruined corner and pulled up short.

“And a bomb doesn't spare prayer houses, either.”

In the middle of the destruction, a huge domed building was the only thing left whole in the city. Its walls were still a fresh gleaming white, the scorch marks stopping just short of it.

“What did this?” I whispered.

Jin just shook his head. “Something unnatural.”

“We've got another problem.” We'd wandered to the center of the town, and I nodded to the crumbled hunk of melted metal and stone in the middle of the square. “I'm thinking that used to be the well.”

The fear that went through the caravan as they saw the same thing I had was unmistakable. No one knew the value of water like desert folks. “How much water do we have left?” Jin asked, raising his voice as he called to Parviz.

“A day's worth.” Parviz looked grim. “Two, if we ration. It's a six-day walk to Saramotai.” I recognized the name of the next Oasis town we were due at after stopping to resupply in Dassama.

“It's only two days to Fahali, though,” Jin said, “if we head west instead of north.”

“That's off our path,” Parviz replied too quickly.

“Better to die of thirst than take a detour, is it?” Jin's arms were crossed over his chest. His eyes were on his
feet, but also far away. Like he had bigger things on his mind than us all dying of thirst. “Besides, I'm not hearing any other bright ideas.”

Parviz glanced at his brother, a man named Tall Oman. They called him that to set him apart from the three other Omans in the caravan. Something silent passed between the two men. Tall Oman shook his head slightly. I glanced at Jin to see if he'd caught it, too, but he was lost in his own thoughts.

“Is there something we ought to know?” I asked. “About Fahali?”

“It's a dangerous city,” Parviz said shortly.

“It's a dangerous desert,” I said. He was hiding something, but I couldn't tell what. “Isn't that why you pay us?”

There was a moment of tense silence. Then Parviz nodded, his face pulled tight.

“Fahali, then. And we pray your aim is sharp, young Alidad.”

I
could see the mountains from Fahali, like ragged teeth in the afternoon haze. Amonpour was across those mountains, on the other side of the Dev's Valley. And the border meant soldiers. We were stopped at the gates by the city guard, bored-looking Mirajin men in pale yellow, who flipped through our saddlebags lazily, chatting to Parviz as they did. Most of the caravan sank down to sit in the sand, leaning just inside the city walls while the bags were searched.

We'd walked with barely any rest since Dassama, only stopping in the darkest hours of the night when continuing might as well mean death by ghoul instead of by thirst. I remembered what Jin had said our first night in the desert: the desert didn't let weakness live.

And we were still alive. We were Mirajin and we survived. Even as my legs gave out below me, I'd never been prouder to be a desert girl, among the Camel's Knees.

A coin danced across Yasmin's knuckles absently, catching the sunlight. Worry danced across her face quicker than the sunlight off the coin and vanished just as fast. Her palm tightened around the half-louzi piece. Parviz's eyes veered away once too often as the guard rummaged through his belongings, his back too stiff. My hand drifted to my gun without really being sure what I was afraid of.

I looked around for Jin. I spotted him a good twenty paces away, pulling his hat low as he headed away from the caravan. My tiredness and my stiff legs forgotten, I pulled myself to my feet and dashed to catch up to him.

“Hey!” I shoved him in the shoulder, closing the distance a moment before he would've disappeared around a corner. In one movement, his hand was on my wrist, halfway to reaching for his gun before he realized it was me. He was jumpier than a barefoot beggar on hot sand.

“You ought to know better than to sneak up on a man like that, Bandit.” He dropped my arm, trying for lightness. I didn't rise to the bait.

“And you ought to know better than to think you can sneak away from me.” We were far enough from the Camel's Knees to not be overheard, but I kept my voice low all the same. “You're hiding something.”

Jin laughed, though not like it was actually funny. Like he didn't even know where to start. When he pushed his hand through his hair his sheema fell back. I was seeing
him unobstructed, in the light of day, for the first time in weeks. “There are a lot of things you don't know, Amani.”

That was probably true. Jin didn't tell me much. There were just the moments when the walls he kept around himself cracked and I saw a hint of something through them, when he slipped and mentioned a brother, or a dead mother, but he closed those up fast enough.

“So what don't I know about Dassama?” The memory of the scorched sand hung between us uneasily, ending any attempt at a joke he might've tried to make. We'd both seen a whole city gone up in flames. And he'd barely said a handful of words to me since then. Like he was avoiding me.

“Amani—” He reached for me, his hand dropping away just in time to hide a gesture that didn't seem to belong to a brother in view of the caravan. I glanced behind me. They were still being searched at the gate. Colorful scarves unraveled in one of the guards' arms, making Isra scold him as she snatched them back off the ground.

“You don't have to carry on through the desert from here if you don't want to.” My full attention came back to Jin. That wasn't what I'd been expecting. He was watching me close, gauging my reaction.

“How do you reckon?” I asked warily.

“There's a train. It runs from an outpost a few hours' walk outside Fahali. It goes straight to Izman. You could be drinking arak in the shade of the palace walls in fewer days than I have fingers, if you wanted.”

A train. Like the one he'd pulled me off all those weeks
ago on the other side of the desert. A straight shot to the capital, after sixteen years of aiming for it, and he was offering it to me. And I'd never see Jin again. That was what he was really offering me: a way out of this. To turn my back on Dassama and what he knew and walk away to the life I'd always wanted. Or always figured I did.

“And if that's not what I want?” I had traitor eyes and there was no way he could mistake my meaning.

He took a deep breath. I couldn't tell whether it was relief or resignation. When he inhaled I could see the Xichian sun over his heart rise just above the horizon of his shirt collar. “I told you in Sazi that the Sultan was building weapons for the Gallan. But it wasn't just guns.”

“What do you mean?” The factory outside of Dustwalk had made nothing but guns my whole life. Jin's jaw worked, like he was testing the words. I'd watched him cross paths with death and dodge it with a wry tilt of the hat a half dozen times now. This was something different. This was something more than just him in trouble.

“There were rumors of another weapon,” he said finally. “Something they were making far down in the south. A bomb that could level whole cities like the hand of God itself. Whole countries even.”

Whole countries like his. He'd told me other things about the Gallan: That they were building an empire at the borders of countries around them as their magic faded. A weapon like the one that had destroyed Dassama would let them swallow other countries whole.

“We thought it might just be something being spread to scare folks,” Jin went on. “But in the end better safe than
dead.” He let out a long exhale, but my own breathing was feeling shallow. “So I was sent down to the end of civilization to see what I could find. And lo and behold there's a monster of a weapons factory. I figured even if there was no great leveler of civilizations, this was something. Something that might be able to cripple the Gallan for a little while, stem their supply of guns to their armies overseas. When I blew it up I thought any great weapon that could slaughter cities would go up with it. Judging by the burnt Oasis, Naguib got it out first. If the Sultan's made a weapon like this for the Gallan, they won't need a single bullet to bring the whole world to its knees.”

I thought I understood fear. I'd grown up in Dustwalk. But that was a restless fear, the kind that made me want to run. This was the kind that crawled up from the bottom of your gut and told you there was no running. The kind that made you go still from it.

“And Dassama was—”

“A testing ground,” he filled in grimly. “Commander Naguib must've taken the weapon up to Izman to hand it over. But they would've needed a testing site. Some place where the Gallan would be able to see it for themselves.” And the Sultan had given them one of his own cities, with his own people, so they could test a bomb that would cripple the rest of the world. “Dassama was a large Gallan base, but rumor had it they were losing control of the city to the rebellion.” I remembered the night we'd met in Deadshot.
A new dawn, a new desert.
The rebellion. The Sultan was allied with the Gallan. Holding his power depended on them. I'd never figured that the Rebel Prince
might mean getting rid of the Gallan as well as the Sultan. I supposed the Gallan had.

“And you think the weapon is here?” I said. “In Fahali?”

“This is the only city within spitting distance of Dassama,” Jin said. “Rumor has it the Gallan have doubled their numbers here in past months, searching for the Rebel Prince.” He smiled, like at a private joke.

It'd be petty to yell at him about this. About not telling me. About turning around and walking away from the caravan without a word. “You're going to get us both killed if you go off looking for it on your own, you know. And if I was going to die on account of you, I'd rather have done it weeks ago before I had to do all this walking.” So maybe I was a little petty.

“Amani, you are not a part of this if I—” Jin stopped abruptly. My eyes followed his behind me. I saw a flash of blue uniforms. It was all I needed to see.

Jin grabbed my hand as I moved to run, pulling me sideways instead, into a narrow side alley. The cool of the shade folded over me, and we both flattened ourselves in the shadows as the Gallan soldiers descended on the Camel's Knees.

“All caravans must submit to inspection.” The Gallan soldier spoke Mirajin with a thick accent that came from the back of his throat and made it sound like he was gargling water while talking.

“We've already searched them.” One of the Mirajin guards stepped forward. “They have nothing. We were about to release them, sir.”

“We are to search again. Orders of General Dumas.” The Gallan soldier waved his men forward even as the caravan drew back.

The city guard had moved through the caravan's bags like a lazy desert heat, but the Gallan soldiers tore through like a storm, only with more ill will. I stared as bags were ripped off of camels' sides, what was left of our supplies emptied into the street. Yasmin was forced to raise her hands above her head while the Gallan soldiers searched her slowly.

Then there was a shout. A young Gallan held up what was left of one of the saddlebags. He'd sliced into it with a knife, peeling the layers of leather apart, and he was holding what looked like a thin silk bag. He tipped it sideways and something fell out, scattering in the afternoon wind. It looked like fine blue thread, almost like hair. Jin swore.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Medicines.” Jin said. “Only ones made from magic, not science.” That couldn't be right. There were plenty of desperate charlatans across the desert who sold red water and claimed it was cure all Djinni blood, but nobody believed in that. But then, they didn't hide it in the linings of their saddlebags, either. “Magic'll cost anyone his head,” Jin said grimly. “Figures that Parviz wanted to avoid the city.”

I watched as Parviz was dragged forward and shoved to his knees in front of the soldier who'd spoken Mirajin. My hand flew to my gun at the same moment that the Gallan soldier pulled out his. My anger was sudden. They didn't
belong in our desert. They didn't belong in my bloodline, either. I was a desert girl. I hated that half of me came from these foreigners.

I could shoot him.

The thought slid into my mind as neatly as a bullet slotted into a gun. It might not save Parviz, but I could try. Before I could move, Yasmin burst forward, shoving her way past the Mirajin guard. She flung herself between her father and the soldier, straight into the line of my shot. The soldier's gun didn't drop; it just stayed trained on Yasmin now instead of Parviz. His finger went to the trigger. Mine was already there.

“Stop.” The Mirajin guard stepped forward. “You will not shoot him here.”

“It is law that he be executed,” the Gallan soldier said. “General Dumas's orders.” He said the name again, as if it carried the weight of God's own command.

“It's law for smugglers to stand trial before execution,” the Mirajin guard countered. “Prince Naguib's orders.”

I felt Jin stiffen behind me at the name the same time as I did. Naguib was here. Commander Naguib, who had held a gun to my head and shot Tamid through the knee. Of all the people to save them. The pistol was reholstered.

I sagged back against the cool wall as the caravan was rounded up to be imprisoned. Jin and I stayed still in the mouth of the alley. When we couldn't hear footsteps anymore, his body relaxed against mine.

“You know, I never believed in fate until I met you,” he said, tipping his head back against the wall with a deep
sigh. “Then I started thinking coincidence didn't have near so cruel a sense of humor.”

“You're a real charmer, anyone ever tell you that?”

“They have, actually, but usually they say it without rolling their eyes.”

We leaned back in silence. A line of laundry drifted lazily above us in the afternoon heat as I took stock of the situation. We were stuck in a city with the Gallan, their great destroyer of cities, and Naguib, and now the caravan was gone. “We need to get out of here,” I said.

“And what about everyone else, Bandit?” Every time he called me that it made something inside me pull toward him that I couldn't quite shake. “Planning to leave them all behind?”

I wasn't planning on leaving you behind.
“I'm not planning anything,” I said instead. “I haven't thought that far ahead.” But now that I did think about it, Jin was right. I knew what most of the Camel's Knees would do if they were me. This was the desert. You took care of yourself and your own. The rest got left in the sand to die. Like Tamid.

“There's a train straight to Izman tomorrow,” Jin said. “That's about as far ahead as you need to think.”

“So come with me.” The words were out too quick. “You're not going to find the bomb here without getting yourself killed. You've got to know that. And if we stay much longer, both of us are going to wind up dead.”

Something between us seemed to still. I watched the slow rise and fall of his shoulders as he took a deep breath. Then a second one. A third. “All right.”