Rebel of the Sands (21 page)

I turned as far as I could to grab on to her hand. Her fingers were on the edge of my eyesight, stretching for me.

The door clattered open. All I saw was a golden uniform that looked like my death.

But Shazad was faster than death.

She dove across empty space. I caught the flash of a knife in her hand and then red across gold and white. If the soldier cried out before he went under the rails, it was lost in the drone of the train.

I didn't see him die. All I saw was Shazad landing too hard on her ankle.

Her foot giving out below her.

The wind grabbing her dark hair, tying it around her neck like a noose.

Her eyes catching mine as she fell toward the rails.

F
or the longest moment of my life, there was nothing but air between my fingers.

Then my hand clamped over Shazad's wrist. Relief engulfed me as her other arm swung up and her fingers latched onto my arm, like some greater force was drawing us together.

One of Shazad's feet caught on the narrow ledge, just enough for me to keep hold of her. Her weight battled between my grip and gravity as she tried to pull herself out of the dangerous backward lean that could turn into a fall if either of us loosened our grip.

My fingers shook with the will to not let go. She was shouting something that the wind carried away. “I can't hear you!” I screamed back.

“More of you?” There was another voice on the air, like something spiraling out of a dark dream. I'd forgotten about the open door and the uniforms behind it, my back exposed to them so they could put a knife through it any second. “We're practically invaded.”

I knew this voice. Sharp and northern and threatening to put a bullet straight through Tamid's leg, holding me at gunpoint, speaking to the Gallan general in Fahali.

Commander Naguib's laugh swirled on the wind.

My eyes locked with Shazad's. I couldn't look away, not even a little bit, not without letting her slip. The rails rushed by below her scrabbling feet, her sheema loose and whipping violently in the air. My arm trembled, trying to pull her back to standing.

But Shazad could see everything. She could see behind me straight into the carriage. She just didn't have the gun.

“Someone drag them in,” Naguib ordered lazily.

Shazad's eyes went to the gun on my hip and then over my shoulder. I knew exactly what she wanted me to do. I could pull my gun, swing around, and put a bullet straight into Naguib's head.

Only I couldn't do it without dropping her.

Let me go
. Her lips shaped the words into the air.

She was willing to kill and die for this cause. Because if Commander Naguib didn't die, we were all dead. From somewhere deep inside me I saw Tamid's face. I wasn't that girl anymore, the one who left people.

My hand tightened on her wrist.

Arms grabbed my waist, dragging me backward,
carrying Shazad with me as we were pulled into the safety of the carriage. Well,
safety
wasn't exactly the word.

Hands searched me for weapons. I pressed my forehead into the carpet, panting while they scoured my body. My legs were shaking so badly, I couldn't have stood or fought anyway. It took Shazad's hand on my elbow to help me up.

We were in one of the luxury private carriages. It was filled with neat uniforms and our own battered rebels. I counted about two dozen soldiers.

Two of them were holding Jin. He was on his knees and he looked like he was struggling not to slump onto the floor. But he gave me a weak, rueful smile, which I tried to return.

Hala had a gun to the back of her head, arms tied behind her. At first I didn't see Bahi, and for one stupid second I hoped he had been smart enough to get off the train. Then I recognized him, shirt red at the collar from the blood gushing out of his nose. He barely looked like himself.

And standing by the polished wooden bar like the host of some demented party was Naguib. “Well, this is a sorry little mission.” His attention skimmed over me, then veered back. “And if it isn't the blue-eyed bitch. Not allied with the traitor, you said?”

“Circumstances have changed.” I picked words Shazad would say, nice and sharp and clean, because if I used my own they might get me shot. “Nothing quite like a gun to the head to make you join the other side,
Commander
.”

“I'm sure.” Naguib stepped away from the bar in that unnatural nervous gait. “And I'm sure my
brother
here was very persuasive.” His foot lashed out into Jin's ribs on the last word, doubling him over onto the thick red carpet. I didn't react. I wouldn't give Naguib the satisfaction.

“You know”—he straightened his cuffs—“you might as well tell me where my other would-be usurper of a brother is now and spare yourself a lot of misery. After all, I have seven of you, and I only need one of you to talk. In fact, I only need one of you alive at all.” He touched the pistol at his hip.

“You're obviously a very poor gambler,” Shazad said. I reckoned it was her accent that made Naguib finally notice her.

“Shazad Al'Hamad?”

Shazad batted her eyes at him like we really were guests at a party. “You'll forgive me, have we met?”

His expression curdled. “Of course. I wouldn't expect the great general's only daughter to notice one of the Sultan's many sons. Though many of us noticed
you
.”

“I noticed the sons that mattered,” Shazad replied coolly.

I watched the words slice through Naguib the commander, hitting the boy underneath. “Your father will hang for this, you realize. Which is fine with me, since my father has promised that I will be general when he's gone.” Naguib reached for Shazad's face. “All thanks to you. But I think I'll deal with you—”

“If you hurt her you will burn in hell.” Bahi's voice was thick from the blood clotting his nose. “If you don't believe
me, the Demdji will tell you.” I realized he meant me. “She can't tell a lie.” Naguib's gaze went to me, finally seeming to take in my strange eyes.

“It's true.” I spoke without hesitation. Bahi had warned me not to do it. Not to bend the universe by making truths. But now he was asking me to. For Shazad. To keep her alive and safe. “Touch her and you'll die screaming.” The second the words fell out of my mouth, they were true. With Bahi's warning, I'd thought it would feel different. That power would surge out of me as I felt my words rearrange the universe to make Shazad safe. But that was the danger. They were just words. They slipped out easily. Like any other words. “Begging for your life.”

Naguib's fingers stopped just short of Shazad's chin. Wary at whatever game we were playing.

Bahi caught my eye. “Lying is a sin, after all.” Jin snorted.

A laugh burst from my lips, even with the gun to my neck.

“What would you know about sins?” A hollow voice spoke from a corner, cutting off my laughter and sending a slow cold finger down my spine. I squinted into the dark, where all I'd seen was piles of weapons and helmets.

Then one of the old-fashioned suits of armor moved.

The man was made of pure metal. Bronze chain mail hands rippled when his fingers flexed, bronze joints clicked when he walked. Even his face was a smooth mask of copper that caught the sun that blazed through the train windows.

I didn't like the way the soldiers gave him room, as if they were scared of him.

“Sit up straight, preacher boy.” The metal lips didn't move when the man talked, but a hollow voice echoed inside the mask, tainted with an accent that sounded an awful lot like he was from the Last County. Bahi struggled to raise his bloody face until two guards forced him up against the wall, slumped and barely standing.

The bronze man reached out and took Bahi's hands, one of them tattooed, the other blank. The metal man tilted his head like a curious bird. As he did, I saw the sliver of skin at his neck. Not a metal man, then. A man dressed in metal.

“Noorsham,” Naguib said, on the edge of giving an order.

Noorsham.
And then I was standing back in Fahali. In the prayer-house-turned-prison. A boy with a slightly uneven smile chained up to a wall.
I'm special
, he'd told me.

Through the slits in the copper, all I could see was blue. Blue like the desert sky, like the oasis water. Blue like my own eyes.

“You are a traitor.” Noorsham's voice was distant as he turned his burning blue gaze back on Bahi. So far removed from the desperate hopeful tone when he'd helped me. I strained against the soldier who held me. “Traitors should be returned to the arms of God. For judgment.”

He raised one bronze hand and rested it flat against Bahi's forehead like he was blessing him.

Bahi smiled through bloody, swollen lips. “Sorry to
disappoint. I think I've strayed too far to find my way—” And then he was screaming.

Shazad cried out his name.

Before I could move, heat rolled across the carriage in a violent, suffocating wave as I watched the hand against Bahi's forehead turn as bright as an ember. Bahi's skin sizzled and blackened as we all cried out.

The hold on my arms broke. I was two steps to Bahi before the heat was too much. I fell to my knees, gasping.

Bahi's skin turned black and then white. I watched helpless as he turned from a boy into ash.

We'd found our weapon.

T
he heat vanished. My skin felt fevered. My lungs burned.

I was on all fours, gasping for air, my heart going in time with the rattling of the train below me.

Bahi was dead. He'd died screaming, just like I'd said Commander Naguib would. I'd bent the universe and turned the harm away from Shazad straight onto Bahi. The carriage had gone still now, except for the chandelier above us, slightly singed, swinging frantically from side to side with the motion of the train.

Jin surged forward. One of the soldiers holding him shoved a knee into his spine, forcing him to the ground.

“Restrain him.” Naguib was doing his best to sound bored, but there was a waver in his voice. His hair was stuck to his
skin with sweat. Hala let out a small sob without moving. “Might I suggest my esteemed foreign brother is next?”

But Noorsham ignored his commander. “Amani.” All his attention belonged to me. “You're still alive.”

I didn't understand him at first, and then I realized my clothes were charred, blackened, and burned away in places. Only I wasn't. My skin was a Demdji's. Daughters of immortal things didn't burn easily. “I grew up in the desert.” My voice shook. “I know heat.”

“No.” He reached down a metal hand, like he might touch my face. I could feel the heat radiating off it. “You're special, like me.”

And it was true, right down to our accents and blue eyes. I couldn't tell him it wasn't. We were both Demdji; we weren't made for lies.

“I want to be alone with her.” He raised his voice so Naguib could hear him.

“Like hell.” Shazad was unraveled on the carriage floor. But with those two words I knew she still had some fight in her.

“Couldn't have said it better.” Jin was struggling back to his knees. Naguib's boot connected with his side again.

“Nobody hurts them.” I shouted as Naguib raised his foot again. He stopped, his boot hovering above his brother's ribs. He wasn't a commander with a prisoner then. He was a son who wasn't allowed to compete for his father's respect at the Sultim Trials. Who couldn't command his soldiers' respect and heard behind his back that his rebel brother was a better man than him. And he was taking it
out on Jin. “I'll come with you. And while I'm gone, nobody hurts them.” I turned back to the pair of blue eyes, set deep in the metal face. Were mine that unsettling to look at? “We got a deal?”

His eyes smiled, but the metal mouth never moved. I wondered if he'd grown up stupidly ignorant of what he was, just like me.

“You've got my word: no one will hurt them while you are gone.”

He held out his hand again. It didn't matter that I was a Djinni's daughter; his metal glove still made my palm blister when I clasped it.

•   •   •

THEY SEARCHED ME
twice before they left me alone with him, but they did it hastily. I got the feeling even the soldiers were dying to get away from their Demdji weapon. Then we were alone in the next carriage over, a large dining car. It looked almost exactly like the one I'd eaten in on the train out of Juniper City. Every motion of the train made the glasses clink like a manic chorus of bells. Noorsham sat in a bright red chair while I leaned against the door, as far away from him as I could get.

“You didn't come back,” he said finally. “In Fahali. You didn't come back for me.” He sounded younger than he had in front of Naguib. And for a moment, the terrifying bronze armor blurred back into the scrawny soldier boy on the floor of the prison.

“I meant to. I wanted to. I tried, but . . .” I was making excuses. A lot of excuses for a broken promise, made when I thought we were both just children of foreign men. Not a defective Demdji and a weapon of destruction. “I know,” I said finally. “I'm sorry.

“How come you were locked up?” I asked.

“I wouldn't obey my commander's orders.”

“The prayer house,” I realized. “You wouldn't burn the prayer house in Dassama.” He inclined his head slowly. “How come?” I remembered his disgust at Bahi. “Don't believe anyone holy enough to be at prayers could be a rebel?”

“I knew there wouldn't be any Gallan inside,” he said simply.

“The Gallan.” I shook my head in confusion. “Why would . . .” Dassama hadn't just been allied to Ahmed; it had been a major base for the Gallan army. The Sultan wasn't trying to burn out the rebellion on behalf of the Gallan. He wasn't using it as a testing site because it was rising in support of Ahmed. He was scouring the foreigners out of his desert. “You're not after us. You're after them.”

“The Sultan told me that God was angry that we'd let faithless foreign powers into the desert. He said he needed me to return our land to our people. My fire could clean out the foreign armies, the ones that would harm us, control us, and take from us what isn't theirs.”

Who marched in with their blue uniforms and took women and guns alike from this desert.

I thought of standing in the tent with Ahmed, scared
his father was coming for us. How stupid and naive. The Sultan didn't care about a handful of rebels wanting to make a better world. He was making a new world, too. One he didn't have to share.

Something flashed outside the window. Blue wings. A huge blue Roc. Izz circling above the train. He must've realized something was wrong by now.

Noorsham followed my eyes just as Izz flung himself upwards, darting over the top of the train and out of sight.

“You're from Sazi,” I said, drawing Noorsham's attention back to me. I pushed myself away from the door and started pacing, keeping his eyes on me. Just because we told the truth didn't mean I couldn't fool him. “I can hear it in your accent. The mines.” The pieces were starting to come together: the way the burnt city reminded me of something I couldn't put my finger on. Two great disasters separated by the desert. “It wasn't an accident. It was you.”

“I destroyed the mines on the day I discovered my gift.” He stood up with the same ponderous motions as a Holy Father. “The day I brought light and wrath down on the wicked.”

“And Sazi was wicked, was it?” I traced my finger down the wood of the bar. So long as I was here, my friends stayed alive. So long as I was here, I could buy us some time. I just had to keep him talking. When I glanced out the window, Izz was gone. How long would it take him to figure out we were in trouble?

“You're from the Last County, too,” he said. “How good were people where you were from?”

He wasn't wrong. “You've killed more people than anybody in the Last County ever did.”

Noorsham spread his hands and the tightly woven chain mail caught the light. “I was chosen for greater things. This is my purpose.”

I recoiled.
Greater things
. It sounded too close to things I'd said to Tamid about leaving Dustwalk. About there being another life out there. One that wasn't so small and pointless and short. The things I'd thought in the rebel camp. I could share an accent with someone who killed so gleefully, but I wasn't willing to share my words. “What'd they do to you, anyhow, the wicked folks of Sazi?”

For a second, even made of metal, he looked human. “Do you remember seven years ago, when the Gallan army came through?” His fingers tapped out a rhythm on the bar as he walked toward me.

“The Gallan army came through more than once,” I said. I didn't dare move away from him.

“Don't you pretend you don't remember.” His accent stumbled, and I heard the Last County thicker than ever. His tongue righted itself again. “This time was different.”

“I remember,” I admitted, even though I didn't want to. It was a drought year. The restlessness went bone deep, and there were more of the foreigners in their blue uniforms than usual. “My mama and I hid under the house for a whole day. She tried to make me think it was a game. But I was old enough to understand some of why.”

Noorsham nodded. “My sister Rabia was old enough, too,” he said. “And then when the army was gone, folks up
on the mountain got together and tossed stones at her and all the other girls for lying with foreign men. Until they were lying dead. And my mama let them.”

I had nothing to say to that.

“For years I waited for God to punish them. I prayed. I'd never figured the punishment would come from me.” His words reminded me of the Holy Father's voice blistering through the masses on prayer days. I even used to hear the wild religious fervor on Tamid's tongue sometimes.

“I'd been out of the mines for a while. I was too sick to work. I tried to go, but my mama wouldn't let me and I didn't have any fight in me. When I came back all the other men were looking at me sideways. They kept asking after Suha, my other sister. By lunchtime one of them got drunk enough to tell me. While I'd been sick, we'd run low on money. And my mama had been afraid of starving to death, so she sold Suha as a whore to the men in the mine. The same ones who'd killed Rabia for lying with foreigners. And as I found out, I felt it all rush out of me, a light sent from a higher power, destroying them and leaving me whole.”

Like hell.

Noorsham stopped pacing, a foot away from me. The unchangeable features of his bronze mask were calm. But one single bronze fist was clenched tightly in anger. I felt the anger with him. For the folks in Dustwalk who had hanged my mother. Who had hanged Dalala. Who would've let someone like Fazim or my uncle have me.

“After that, Prince Naguib found me. I had been
huddled on the mountain, awaiting my next order from God, and he came. And he took me to our exalted Sultan, who explained to me that my fire was a gift. That it would kill the sinful and spare the worthy.”

“Fire doesn't know good from evil any more than a bullet does.” I couldn't stop myself.

He tilted his head, like a puzzled bird. “You're still alive,” he said.

“That ought to be proof enough.” I leaned back against the bar, hiding my shaking hands as I gripped the edge. “And I reckon you know it, too. Why else did they have you all chained up in Fahali? How come they've got you all trussed up in your armor now? I reckon you know as well as I do, being from the Last County, we put bronze in with the iron to make Buraqi obedient.” The Gallan army that was hunting for the rebel camp was stationed in Dassama. They had meant to burn that, too. Only Noorsham wouldn't. So they had taken him back to Izman and they had made him bronze armor. “Seems like he thinks you need to be made to obey, too. You want to know what I think? Naguib's afraid of you.” And I couldn't blame him. “He's just using you. You're a common weapon.”

Noorsham's fingers twitched. “You sound real sure of yourself.”

“Because I'm right.” I grasped for something to say, some truth I could give him. There was no point telling him he was a Demdji, not a weapon of God. Or that he was fighting for the wrong side. He could say the same to me. He believed in the Sultan; I believed in the Rebel Prince.
Jin had told me once there was no arguing against belief. It was a foreign language to logic. And Djinni's daughter or not, I reckoned he could still burn me alive if he decided I was on the other side.

I needed to get out of here. I shoved myself off from the bar and paced to the window. I could still see Izz, flying high above. The window came open with a tug, letting cool air in.

“What are you doing?”

“I'm hot.” I said, pulling my sheema free from my neck. I released my red sheema, stolen off a clothesline in Sazi, letting it whip out into the sand like a bloody flag. I prayed Izz would see it and understand.

“Is this a trick?” He sounded so young again.

“You don't have to let them use you.” My voice took on a desperate note as I turned back to face him. “Prince Ahmed, if he were Sultan, he could expel the Gallan, too. Without killing so many people. He has people like us on his side, too. Only he doesn't use us to raze cities. We're not weapons; we're soldiers.”

“I'm not a weapon,” Noorsham said.

Maybe Jin was right. Maybe there was no arguing with belief. I looked out the window again. Izz was lower now, keeping pace with the train. “So how come,” I asked, steadying myself against the bar, “you can't take the armor off?” His fingers flew to the clasp on the side of the mask that was welded shut just as Izz, in the shape of a giant Roc, flung himself at the train.

The train rocked sideways so hard, I thought we might
tip straight off the rails. I crashed into the bar, knocking the air straight out of me. I heard metal tear, and from the corner of my eye I saw a piece of the carriage wall ripped away in Izz's razor talons.

I bolted to the narrow opening, desert sprawled on all sides.

Then a shape in bright desert clothes launched herself into the sand. Shazad landed in a practiced roll, on her feet before she vanished from my sight, two soldiers following her out. A golden girl grappling with a soldier hit the sand next.