Rebel of the Sands (17 page)

D
ark fell in the oasis earlier than I thought it would. I hadn't noticed when we'd been crossing the desert, but now it struck me that Shihabian really must be close. At twilight, the colorful world turned to a softer version of itself. Campfires burned among the trees. Each was surrounded by a little pocket of people, sharing food, laughing. I thought of Dustwalk at dinnertime. Everybody shut up inside their houses, jealously guarding every scrap they had. Here the food was laid out on a big carpet in the middle of the camp, with a stack of mismatched plates.

Shazad and I sat down by one of the small fires. Shazad helped herself to two plates, piling flatbread and fruit on one and handing it to me.

“Where do all these people come from?” I asked Shazad
in between bites. I hadn't realized how hungry I was until I started eating.

Shazad looked around at the hundred or so rebels, as if the question surprised her. “A little bit of everywhere. There were only a dozen of us when we fled Izman after the Sultim trials. But in the last year, the cause has gotten bigger. More people have joined. A few were turned out of their houses or arrested for supporting Ahmed a little too loudly. Some we broke out of prison. Farrouk and Fazia are orphans from Izman.” She gestured to the pair I'd seen tinkering with the bomb that morning, now building some kind of structure out of bread. “We hired them to make an explosive device on a mission a few months back and the Sultan's army identified them, so they're refugees now. Fairly useful to have around, although I worry one day they'll blow this whole place sky-high.”

“What about you?” I asked.

“I'm a girl who could've done just about anything if I'd been born a boy.” Shazad took a bite of her food. “But I was born a girl, so I'm doing this. My mother thinks it's an elaborate stall tactic to avoid getting married.” I'd seen Shazad kill a Skinwalker. Watched her that afternoon run a dozen of the rebels through sword drills with the kind of command that could march a whole army across the desert. If she couldn't carve out a place for herself in Izman, what hope was I going to have?

“She's too modest.” Bahi dropped down next to Shazad by the fire, folding his legs over the pillow. He was balancing a plate on his knees. “Shazad was born to greatness. Her father is General Hamad.”

I gave them both a blank look.

“He's been the Sultan's chief general for two decades,” Bahi bragged for her. “He had a strong daughter and a weak son. Being a man of unconventional strategies, he trained his daughter to follow in his footsteps.”

“My brother's not weak, he's sick,” Shazad said.

“Most people,” Bahi said with a bold smile that was all teeth and no humor, “would have killed their son trying to turn him strong. Like my father tried to do with me.”

Shazad saved me from having to answer. “Bahi's father is a captain in the army. He reports to my father, which is why Bahi and I have known each other since we were six years old.”

“And we've been friends that long because I'm so charming,” Bahi said.

“You're marginally less of an ass than the rest of your brothers,” Shazad conceded. “Captain Reza”—there was scorn in Shazad's tone and Bahi snapped a fake salute—“has six sons, so he thought he could spare a few. Much as he enjoyed gloating to his superior officer that he has six strong sons, where my father had only one.”

“And you,” I said.

“Captain Reza never counted me.”

“His mistake,” Bahi put in.

“Does your father know . . .” I wasn't sure how to put it. “That you're turning against him?” I probably shouldn't have put it like that.

“I'm not against my father.” Shazad smiled fondly. “I'm against the Sultan. My father turned against him a while ago, too. He's the one who told us about the rumors of the
weapon being made down in the Last County. So highly secretive, the Sultan didn't even tell him—but he has other ways of obtaining information.”

That made me sit up. Rumor in Dustwalk was that Ahmed's rebellion was just a band of idealistic fools in the desert. But the rebels had had enough of a hold on Dassama that it'd been worth destroying. And the general was high-ranking in court. If
he
was loyal to Ahmed . . .

“You're saying you've got allies in the Sultan's court?”

Shazad was easily the most beautiful girl I'd ever met, and when she smiled with all her teeth she looked like the most dangerous one, too. “A few. The stories would have you believe that Ahmed appeared in Izman on the day of the Sultim trials like magic. Same way they'd have you believe that he disappeared from the palace the night of Delila's birth in a poof of Demdji smoke. But campfire stories are never the whole story.” I remembered what Ahmed had told me, as we kept watch over Jin in the sick tent. That his mother and Jin's had plotted their escape. But Jin's mother wasn't even in the popular story. Neither was Jin, for that matter. “Ahmed came back to Izman half a year before the Sultim trials, on a trading ship. He fell in with an intellectual crowd. A lot of very clever, very idealistic boys, including my brother, who sat around and talked about philosophies and how to make Miraji better. Many of them are children of people in the Sultan's court.”

She took a bite of her food. “One night, I found my brother and Ahmed and three of their idiot friends in stocks in the middle of Izman because they'd been preaching that women ought to have the right to refuse a
marriage.” That struck down to the bone. “Fortunately, being General Hamad's daughter gets you a long way when dealing with soldiers. I dressed them down for arresting their general's only son, and they were rushing to unlock the rest of them. They had no idea they'd accidentally arrested the prodigal Prince Ahmed, or I doubt even being the general's daughter would've done much. Ahmed was renting rooms in the Izman slums under a false name then.” I figured there was a reason things like that didn't make it into the stories. No one wanted to imagine their hero prince sleeping in a flea-infested bed. “I dragged my brother home, and Ahmed followed us. When we got there I dressed him down about almost getting my brother killed. And the next thing I knew, we were shouting about Ataullah's philosophy on the role of the ruler in the state, and then I was agreeing to train him for the Sultim trials.”

“I was locked away in the Holy Order at the time,” Bahi said with his mouth full. “Or I would have talked some sense into her.”

“Would you like to tell her what you actually did when you got kicked out, or shall I?” Shazad took a bite of flatbread.

Bahi was suddenly very intent on his food. “I don't recall.”

Shazad didn't miss a beat. “He got very drunk and turned up to serenade me outside my father's house.”

I snorted a laugh. “What song?” I couldn't help but ask.

“I don't remember,” Bahi muttered again.

“‘Rumi and the Princess,' I think?” Shazad caught my eye, the spark of a laugh there.

“No.” Bahi looked up defensively. “It was ‘The Djinni
and the Dev' and it was beautiful.” He puffed out his chest as Shazad's spark exploded into a real laugh. It was contagious, and soon I was laughing, too. Bahi started to call for a drink, saying he'd sing it for us once he had some liquor in him.

Truth be told I already felt drunk.

The night and the colors and the laughter and the sense of power and certainty in what they were doing made my head spin. This revolution was a legend in the making. The kind of tale that sprawled out long before me and far beyond my reach. The sort of epic that was told over and over to explain how the world was never the same after this handful of people lived and fought and won or died trying. And after it happened, the story seemed somehow inevitable. Like the world was waiting to be changed, needing to be saved, and the players in the tale were all plucked out of their lives and moved into places exactly where they needed to be, like pieces on a board, just to make this story come true. But it was wilder and more terrifying and intoxicating, and more uncertain, than I'd ever thought. And I could be part of it. If I wanted to. It was getting way too late to rip myself out of this story now, or to rip it out of me.

“Where the hell have you been, holy boy?” The new voice startled me out of my daydream. I stared at the speaker. I'd thought Delila and Imin were sights to see, but the girl who dropped uninvited next to our fire was made of gold. Everything from the tips of her fingernails to her eyelids looked like she'd been cast out of metal instead of born, except her hair was as black as mine and her eyes were dark. Another Demdji. “Can you deal with
this?” She stretched out her arm toward him; it was caked in blood and burn marks.

Bahi hissed through his teeth as he took it. “What happened?”

“There was a small explosion,” the golden girl said drily.

“The burns aren't that bad,” Bahi said. “It's hard to burn the daughter of a First Being made of pure fire.”

“When did you get back, Hala?” Shazad asked. Hala didn't answer; she just gestured sarcastically to her bloody traveling clothes in a way that seemed to suggest Shazad was stupid for not realizing she was fresh into camp.

“We were too late,” she said. “She'd already been arrested. I thought she'd have longer. Shape-shifters are usually better at hiding. Imin lasted for two weeks, remember? But apparently this one is stupid. Rumor is they're holding her for trial in Fahali. I've just come for backup. I say we leave tonight, slip in, and scramble their minds before they can hang her.”

“You mean the girl with the red hair.” I interrupted, before I could think not to. For the first time Hala seemed to notice me. “That's who you were looking for in Fahali. A Demdji.” The word still tasted strange. “She had red hair and a face that changed.”

“You! You saw her!” Hala's golden face glowed eagerly in the firelight as she leaned forward, and I knew we were talking about the same person.

The next words that fell out of my mouth stopped her short. “The Gallan shot her in the head.”

The cheery mood that'd been around the campfire a
moment before was extinguished. “So how come you're still alive?” Hala's golden face hardened.

Something in her voice said she expected me to grovel. To stumble over myself to explain how I dared to have survived when the person she'd been out to save hadn't. “Because they didn't shoot me in the head,” I answered.

Her sneer reminded me of an ivory and gold comb Tamid's mother used to have. She waved a hand, like she was urging me to go on. I noticed she had only eight fingers. Two were missing on her left hand that I could've sworn were there before. She noticed me noticing, and a second later her hand was whole again.

“It's rude to stare.” A black bug crawled out of the sand, over my boot, and up my body. “And it's rude to leave someone for dead to save your own skin.” I swatted at it, but it just exploded into ten black bugs, and then each of them into ten more until I was crawling with them, my hands slapping at my skin until it was red and painful.

“Hala, whatever you're doing, stop it,” Shazad ordered. I'd been wrong. Her voice wasn't sharp; it was clean, like a good cut. The bugs vanished.

Shazad had said something about a Demdji who could crawl into folks' minds. I guessed I'd just met her. I already hated her.

“Where I come from, people take care of their own.” Hala picked at her nails as if she hadn't just twisted my mind around.

“She was,” Jin said behind me.

J
in was awake, leaning heavily on Ahmed's shoulder, standing on the outskirts of the light from the fire. He looked drained and tired, but he was alive. And he was looking at me. I reacted to him instinctively, my body pulling me forward like it was on a string tied to him. Like the swing of the compass needle twinned with another.

But before I could stand, there was a squeal from the other side of camp. Delila rushed forward and flung herself into Jin's arms, babbling in a foreign language I guessed was Xichian. She started crying into his shirt. Soon all the camp was on its feet, people crowding around him. Asking questions, welcoming him back.

“Easy there,” Bahi called. “I've only just got him back on
his feet.” Eventually folks started to trickle back to their campfires and their food, leaving Jin and Ahmed facing our small circle. Jin turned to Shazad.

“General,” Jin said. His voice was thick with disuse, but the way he said it sounded so painfully familiar.
Bandit
, I heard him saying in the desert.

“Don't call me that.” Shazad embraced him with one arm, more careful of the bandages than Delila had been. “What happened to ‘I'll just go and take a look around. I'll be back in no time'?”

The laugh made its way round the small circle that was left around Jin as I sat on the outside. I hunted through my feelings for something to say here, in this place I didn't belong, to Jin, who'd just become a stranger all over again. These people had stood side by side planning a revolution since the days I was shooting tin cans off the fence behind my uncle's house.

“Better late than dead,” Hala said. She didn't embrace him. But as the firelight danced over her golden skin, making it look molten, I saw that some of the hardness was gone from her now.

“Yes, and you have me to thank for that,” Bahi added with his mouth full. Even on his feet, he was still shoveling food into his mouth while talking. “Not that anyone has thanked me yet.”

“I thought Holy Fathers were meant to do their work for the grace of God, not the thanks of mortals.” Jin was careful not to catch my eye as he addressed Bahi.

“Well, it's a good thing I failed my training, then, isn't
it?” Bahi gestured dramatically with the food in his hand, flicking crumbs onto Delila.

“You were bound to keep someone alive eventually,” Shazad said. “And Amani's the one who dragged you here.” I wanted to hug Shazad and curse at the same time. Finally, Jin didn't have any choice but to meet my eyes at the mention of my name.

Two months in the desert hung between us. All the things he'd told me and the ones he hadn't. The secrets and lies. The understanding that I hadn't left him this time. That in two months I'd gone from the girl who'd drugged him and left him facedown on a table just to make a break for it to the one who'd dragged him through enemy soldiers and killer ghouls to save him.

“Well.” Hala draped herself carelessly over Delila's shoulders. “At least one of us was successful in bringing home a Demdji.” The new word was still so strange, it took me a moment to realize Hala was gesturing to . . . me. The circle went silent.

“Demdji?” I was confused.

Ahmed's expression faltered. He said something to Jin in Xichian. Jin answered back with a shake of his head without looking at me.

“Just because I don't speak your language doesn't give you the right to talk about me in it.” My voice rose higher than I meant it to. I was shouting in the presence of the prince. Two princes.

“Amani,” Ahmed said gently. “Maybe you'd like to sit.”

The plate that Shazad had given me had toppled off my
knees and to the ground. I'd stood up without realizing it, without knowing what I meant to do, but sure as hell that I needed both legs planted to do it.

“Maybe I wouldn't.” I caught Jin's mouth twitching up at the corner and my anger rose. “Lying,” I said, looking only at him, “is a sin.”

Jin finally spoke to me. “I was going to hell long before I met you.” There was something like regret in his voice.

“You don't know that I'm—”

Jin cut me off. “Don't fool yourself, Blue-Eyed Bandit.” His voice was flat, a stranger's, resigned. “I knew you were a Demdji before I knew you weren't a boy. All I had to see was your eyes.”

Traitor's eyes.

Delila's hair. Imin's eyes. Hala's skin.

The Djinni's mark
.

“I realized you didn't know when you told me about your mother's husband. You called him your father. Demdji who know what they are don't do that.” I looked at the two Demdji next to him. Delila was chewing her lip, looking uneasy, while on her shoulder Hala looked like she might be about to clap her hands at my discomfort.

“Plenty of Gallan soldiers have eyes like mine,” I argued.

“Northerners have eyes like pale water. Yours are different. Yours are the color of fire when it burns too hot. And it's more than that.” Now that Jin had stopped ignoring me, all his attention was mine. “You know the stories better than I do: Djinn can't tell lies. Neither can their children. I'd bet my life no lie has ever crossed your tongue.”

My laugh was short and violent. Shazad took a step toward me, but I pulled back. “You calling me honest?”

“No, you're a great deceiver. But you're no liar.”

I remembered something Jin had said in the shop in Dustwalk.
You're a good liar. For someone who doesn't lie
.

“At the shop, I hid you from Naguib—”

“You didn't lie to him.” The world narrowed to Jin and me and the memory of that day. “Not
once
. You told him it was a quiet day. You said there weren't many foreigners in Dustwalk. Misleading truths, but still truths. You tricked him. Just like you did with the caravan. Just like you did when you told me I could call you Oman.” I thought about how easily Jin had trusted my word. Of how easily he'd given up on finding the weapon in Fahali when I'd said. “Djinn are powerful, deceitful things.”

“So what's your excuse?” I lashed out, but Jin didn't even flinch.

“I can keep going if you want.”

“Jin.” Ahmed's warning sounded far off.

“The sand and the sun don't drain you the way they do us mere mortals. You belong to them.” I remembered one of our last nights in the desert.
You're unnatural
, he'd said to me. “You pick up languages
like that
.” He snapped his fingers, and I realized he'd spoken the last two words in Xichian. All the nights in the desert when he'd fed me stories of far-off places and scraps of their language. Testing me.

“Stop it.” I could barely speak the words. What was it Shazad had said about the Demdji? That they—we—were
useful. Was that why Jin had saved me in the first place? Dragged me across the desert, not as an ally, not because we needed each other to stay alive, but because he knew his brother could use me?

I stepped closer, the circle around him parting for me nervously. Until I was close enough that I could've kissed him again. That kiss was a trick, too. Mine. I was a creature of deceit, but I wasn't the liar here. “Why should I believe anything you say?”

“Go on, then.” His mouth twitched up. “Prove me wrong; tell me a lie. Tell me your name is Oman, straight out this time. Tell me you're a boy named Alidad. Tell me you are not a Demdji.”

“Why should I?” I could feel my tongue fighting against the words he dared me to say.

“Because you can't.” Victory was marked all over him as he watched me struggle.

My hand lashed out. His face cracked sideways and my palm stung. And before anyone could say anything more to me, I ran.

•   •   •

“SO ARE YOU
planning on stealing all our guns, or do you think maybe you only need one per hand?” I whirled around. Ahmed was watching me from the mouth of the small cave in the canyon wall. I could just make him out.

I'd decided to leave. I'd decided that before my hand had even stopped stinging from hitting Jin. But I wasn't
going unarmed. I wedged the fourth pistol between the sheema I'd tied around my middle like a sash, since I didn't have a belt, and my hip bone. “Maybe your armory ought to be better guarded if you don't want folks helping themselves.”

“Not a consideration we've really needed to have before you,” Ahmed said.

“Well, you ought to think of that next time your brother brings ignorant strays home.” I pushed by him and started walking. Ahmed followed me.

“Am I a prisoner?” I turned to face him when we'd walked a few steps.

“No.” Ahmed clasped his hands behind his back. “Though Jin did say we'd better send someone after you so that when you collapsed from sheer stubborn exhaustion, we could bring you back before you died.”

“He has so much faith in me.” I didn't try to keep the bitterness from my voice as I fiddled with the pistol at my waist.

“He does,” Ahmed said. “He thought you'd have made it much farther than this by now, for one thing.”

I flicked the hammer of the pistol restlessly. He wasn't wrong. I was exhausted. And wounded. And hungry. And miles from anywhere else I could go. Even farther from anywhere I wanted to be. But before Jin woke up, before the word
Demdji
spun out of Hala's mouth and landed on me, I'd wanted to stay.

“Why?” My voice cracked a little, and I cleared my throat.

“Well,” Ahmed said, “from what I understand, you walked a long way here. Jin figured you'd at least make it past the point of no return . . .”

I caught myself before I laughed. I could almost pretend he was just another boy from the Last County, except with a better accent. “Why didn't he tell me?”

“You'd have to ask Jin for his own reasons for not telling you. But if you want honesty from me . . .” Ahmed sighed. He looked older than eighteen. “The Demdji are an asset, Amani. Don't get me wrong; every man and woman in this rebellion is. But Imin is the best spy I have. And Hala has saved more people than maybe even Shazad has. My sister is the reason I didn't die at the end of the Sultim trials. The twins can take animal form and can cover distances in a matter of days that would take a normal man weeks. In a war, you take what best serves your cause.”

I wished it were Jin trying to convince me. He'd be so much easier to argue with. But Ahmed's logic couldn't be bickered against so easily. And that just left me as the problem.

“I can't . . .” I faltered on the words. “I can't do what your other Demdji can. I reckon I would've noticed by now if my face changed or I could make illusions walk through the air. I thought I might stay and . . . do what Shazad does.” Though now I said it out loud, it seemed stupid, too. Shazad might be wholly human, but I'd seen her kill a Skinwalker without breaking a sweat. Without a gun, I was just a girl. Not a Demdji. “I didn't figure I'd
stay to make bugs crawl out of people's skin or turn myself into another person.”

“If you choose to go, you can,” Ahmed said. “It's dangerous in Miraji for a Demdji, but you seem to have handled yourself just fine so far.” I thought of the girl the Gallan general had shot through the head in Fahali. She had been like me. I remembered Jin warning me to be careful. Warning me against Izman. “But if you decide to stay, there are a half dozen other Demdji who could help you figure out what your power is, whatever it is that you
can
do that can help this rebellion. If you still want to.”

If I wanted to.

If I wanted to be part of this story. This riddle.

Truth be told, it was more than a want.