Rebel of the Sands

by Alwyn Hamilton

  “You don’t have any right to decide that for me.” I shoved him away from me, trying to tear him out of my space, out of my head.

  “But he does?” Jin shouted, the moment breaking. “My brother says you’re a Demdji and you think that will make your life matter, more than being the Blue-Eyed Bandit?”

  I rounded on him, my hair catching in the air as it came loose from its braid. “You can’t judge me for wanting to be more than just another worthless grain in this desert. Not when you were born so much more than this. Not when you were born powerful and important.”

  “Really?” Two of Jin’s quick steps carried him across the sands so fast, it was almost violent. “I was born the same year as ten brothers and a dozen sisters. Being born doesn’t make a single soul important. But you were important when I met you, that girl who dressed as a boy, who taught herself to shoot true, who dreamed and saved and wanted so badly. That girl was someone who had made herself matter. She was someone I liked. What the hell has happened since you came here that she is so worthless to you? What’s happened that only my brother’s approval and some power you never needed before can make you important? That’s why I didn’t want to bring you into this revolution, Amani. Because I didn’t want to watch the Blue-Eyed Bandit get unmade by a prince without a kingdom.”

  I wanted so badly to tell him he was wrong, but my tongue turned to iron just at the thought. But that didn’t mean he was in the right either. “And what are you doing fighting for this country if it’s not for him? This country you don’t understand and you resent for taking your family—”

  “You’re right.” He cut me off. “I never understood this country. I never understood why he chose to leave everything else behind and stay for this. Not until I met you.”

  I felt like he’d pushed me, like I was falling and I needed him to reel those words back in to keep me standing straight.

  “You are this country, Amani.” He spoke more quietly now. “More alive than anything ought to be in this place. All fire and gunpowder, with one finger always on the trigger.”

  We stood close, anger pulsing between us. My heart was beating fast—or maybe that was his. We were breathing each other.

  Just him and me.

  There was more fire in me than I’d felt since I was told I was a Demdji. I opened and closed my hands, wanting to reach for him.

  “Jin.” Bahi’s voice broke the moment. His face was graver than I’d ever seen it. “Ahmed is looking for you. There’s news of Naguib’s weapon.”

  • • •

  “THE WEAPON IS on the move.” Imin was gulping down water. She—he’d practically run from Fahali.

  “You’ve seen it?” Shazad asked.

  Imin shook his head. He was still wearing the shape of the Gallan soldier. Everyone from the inner circle stood around him, hanging on his every word: the prince, Shazad, Jin, Bahi, Hala. And then me. “Just rumors. Some accidental fires in Izman that they’re trying to blame on us. And three ships anchored in port that burned down. But there was a missive this morning. To Fahali. Commander Naguib is coming as a representative of his father to negotiate the terms of the alliance with General Dumas.”

  “Well, that certainly sounds like ‘We’re bringing you a weapon to annihilate the rebellion’ to me,” Hala commented, putting a hand on her sister-brother’s shoulder.

  “Have they found us?”

  “Not yet,” Imin said. “But they were close.”

  “So we move the camp.”

  “And where do we go?” Bahi interjected. “If we go north, we walk into Gallan hands. If we go west, we cross the border into Amonpour—if the mountain clans don’t get us first. East, your father kills us, and south, the desert has the privilege of it. It was different when we first fled Izman, but the rebellion has grown since there were a dozen of us. You can’t move a kingdom so lightly. Even a small one.”

  “He’s right,” Shazad acknowledged.

  Ahmed’s hand gripped the table. His knuckles were pale.

  “So we intercept it,” Jin said. He was tossing his compass from hand to hand. The needle swung frantically, pointing at Ahmed’s. “Are they moving it by train?”

  Imin nodded, blond Gallan curls falling into his face.

  Ahmed didn’t speak immediately. We all hung on to his silence. “They can’t know we’re looking,” he said finally. It was Jin he spoke to, not his general, not the Demdji. His brother. “You make it look like you’re common bandits raiding the trains for the money. Jin, you take—”

  “I’ll go.” The words fell out of my mouth before I could think better of them.

  Everybody looked at me.

  My argument with Jin was still fresh. He was right. I was never going to be good for anything if I just waited for my Demdji powers. I’d been still too long.

  “You’re a risk,” Ahmed said honestly. But it wasn’t a no.

  “I’d take that risk in a heartbeat,” Jin said, looking at his brother. “I don’t need her as a Demdji.”

  Shazad spoke up for me. “Amani is the best shot I’ve ever seen and she can pass for human. She’s been doing it her whole life.”

  “I can do this,” I insisted.

  Ahmed’s eyes locked with mine, and for a moment he didn’t look like anybody’s brother or friend; he looked like a ruler. I straightened, trying to look like a worthy soldier.

  He nodded. “You leave at dawn.”

  twenty-two

  “Do you know why they call this Deadman’s Ridge?” Bahi asked cheerfully. He’d been chattering ever since we landed, flown here on Izz’s back while he was in the shape of a giant Roc, the open desert rushing below us. The blue-skinned Demdji was now curled up among the rocks as a large blue lizard. At least he wasn’t trying to help set up camp as a naked boy.

  “Is it because I’m going to kill you if you don’t stop talking?” Shazad asked, chucking a piece of firewood at him.

  “Sadly, the mapmakers didn’t anticipate you, Shazad.” Bahi slung his arm over her shoulder. We were perched on a mountain. Below us the desert spread out on all sides. Except to the north, where I could just make out what Jin told me was the sea. And directly below us, straight through the mountains, was the railway. “It’s because so many workers died blasting the tunnels,” Bahi explained. “They say their restless ghosts wander the rails.”

  “Another fine achievement of the Sultan’s allegiance with the Gallan,” Jin said, kicking a rock out of the way before laying out his bedroll. Jin called him the Sultan, I’d noticed. Where Ahmed called him their father, Jin never did.

  “And you’re telling us this now?” Hala shoved Bahi. “Right as we’re about to blow out a tunnel?”

  “Just trying to help everyone reflect on the situation.” Bahi’s good spirits were running a little too wild for my taste, given I could barely rein in my nerves.

  The section of the railway that Deadman’s Ridge overlooked ran from Izman, before the tracks sliced their way through the mountains to Fahali on the other side. And from there it was only a day’s journey to Ahmed’s camp.

  We were going to make sure the weapon didn’t make it that far. The train was due in two days’ time. Tomorrow we’d rig the tunnel with explosives that would force the train to a stop, giving us time to board, pretending to be bandits. Hala would climb inside the heads of the passengers so they would see a dozen bandits, not just four of us, distracting the soldiers while we removed the weapon.

  “Aren’t Holy Fathers supposed to reflect in silence?” I asked, shaking out my bedroll.

  Bahi’s mood wasn’t even dented. “I’m too young and good-looking to be a father, anyway.”

  “That’s not what Sara says,” Shazad muttered.

  I wondered if Sara was the reason he’d failed as a Holy Father. He claimed he’d drunk too much before morning prayers once and the previous night’
s dinner wound up on the High Father’s robes, but I’d heard a dozen stories of why Bahi hadn’t finished his training.

  “No one can prove that that baby is mine.” Bahi sagged.

  “He has your smart mouth,” Shazad retorted.

  “He’s an infant,” Bahi said. “Don’t they just wail and scream?”

  “Sounds like your son,” I muttered.

  Jin snorted.

  “Ah, well.” Bahi pulled a bottle of something out of his bag. “Here’s to my son, then.”

  “Why do you have liquor?” Shazad massaged her temples, like she already had a hangover. In answer, he pulled out two more bottles.

  “Medical reasons. It’s in the scripture. Look it up. Ladies first.” He held the bottle out to her. Bahi’s face was pure victory as Shazad’s fingers closed over his. He let his fingers linger just a second before he released them. I was starting to think I was right about him leaving the holy fold for a girl, only not one named Sara. I wondered if Shazad really hadn’t noticed or if she was just pretending for his sake.

  “You know I’m not allowed to drink,” Shazad said, taking a deep swig.

  “You’re not allowed to drink?” I couldn’t keep the skepticism out of my voice as she passed the bottle on to me. It was cheap stuff that burned on the way down.

  “The general doesn’t approve,” Bahi interjected. I knew he meant her father, not her.

  Shazad gave a mock salute, but her smile was too earnest to make me believe she didn’t love her father. “He says a drunk soldier is a dead soldier.”

  “Clearly one time the general was wrong,” Bahi said, pulling out a second bottle. “Or else he would’ve had a dead captain a thousand times over in my father.”

  Shazad started to retort something, but Bahi was already roping Izz, Jin, and Hala into some drinking game that seemed to involve flipping over a pair of coins and then slapping palms into rocks before taking a swig.

  We might die here, I realized. They were just used to it. For the past year they’d all been throwing themselves into danger and near death over and over, just for the shot at a better world. I’d done that, too. I’d walked into the pistol pit with nothing but a good shot at death for the chance of finding a better place. But that’d just been for me. They were walking into danger for themselves and everybody else. The whole of Miraji. So that no one else died like they had in Dassama. So that no one had to live like I had in Dustwalk.

  “Ladies!” Bahi called, pulling me out of my own head. “Won’t you join us? So far, I’m winning.”

  “I thought the point was not to drink the most,” Hala retorted.

  “Clearly you and I have different definitions of winning.” Bahi said.

  “We were just giving you a head start.” Shazad bumped my shoulder with hers. “When you wake up and all your blood has turned to liquor, you will look back on that as your first mistake on the way to losing.”

  I laughed in spite of myself. After one bottle was empty, Bahi got up the bravery to re-create his drunken serenading under Shazad’s window. We were drunk on anticipation and good old-fashioned liquor under stars that seemed to belong to us to rearrange at will.

  And I realized that, scared as we were, I’d never been so happy as I was that night.

  • • •

  THE NEXT MORNING something woke me before the sun. I lay very still, trying to figure whether it was just a memory from a dream I was already forgetting.

  The camp was still asleep around me. The fire’d been doused. Shazad was on her side, one hand resting across her blade like she was expecting someone to come for her any second. On the other side of the fire pit, Hala was curled up, buried in her bedroll.

  Izz would be on watch duty in the sky in the shape of a Roc, but Bahi and Jin’s bedrolls were both empty. I got up, joints popping, and started toward the sunrise, pulling myself up onto the ridge that protected the camp. That was where I found them.

  Bahi didn’t have a prayer rug, but he was sprawled on his knees, his head down, his lips pressed to his hands. I stood very still. I could hear the words of morning prayers muttered like a whispered secret. It felt like witnessing something intimate. I stepped back, not wanting to intrude. I caught sight of Jin, crouched a few feet away on a narrow ledge, his back against the mountain, his hands dangling into the open space over the rails. I padded across the dusty stones of the ridge in bare feet.

  “The hangover’s not that bad.” I heard the croak in my own voice as I went to sit next to him.

  “As much as I would like to blame Bahi’s cheap liquor, I can hold my drink.” He ran a hand over his face. “I haven’t slept well since I woke up from the Nightmare bite. When I close my eyes I see the camp burning if we don’t intercept the weapon. My family burning. You burning.”

  I looked up at the last one. He let out a long exhale.

  “You don’t have to stay—you know that, don’t you? You were right at Shihabian. You’re here because I . . . because I got you involved in this. Because I wanted you to stay. But I don’t want you to have to die. You could still go. To Izman. Or wherever you want. Get out of this.” He was apologizing, only I wasn’t mad anymore.

  I stared out over the desert. It seemed endless, but the sun was rising to my left, which meant that somewhere, the way I was looking, was Dustwalk. “I reckon I’m where I’m supposed to be.”

  “You know, I sort of miss the girl who was ready to leave everyone else to save her own skin,” Jin said. “She seemed less likely to die doing something stupid and heroic.”

  “I’m going to go ahead and take that as a compliment.” I laughed, but then I stopped. The way I was staring, across the rails, I saw the glint of sunlight off something. “Is that—”

  The sky came awake with a scream before I could finish.

  We both looked up to see Izz circling the camp and then spiraling down, changing from bird to boy a few feet above the ground as he dropped into a crouch. I was on my feet, turning back toward camp, panic already racing in my chest. But Jin’s hands were on my waist. He turned me around quick as a whip. His mouth came down hard and desperate over mine.

  His hands burned across the bare skin at the bottom of my spine. His touch sparked along the edge of my clothes. I didn’t know if being kissed by him set me alight or if it just turned the fire already in me loose.

  He broke away before we were consumed, hands on my face. “Still feeling immortal, Bandit?”

  We ran back to the camp. Shazad was already awake and armed. Izz had a wild look in his eyes. “There’s a train coming.”

  Shazad shook her head like she was trying to clear out her mind. “There’s no train scheduled before ours,” she said, confirming what we were all thinking. I read it in Shazad’s face the same moment I thought it.

  “They put it on another train.” I might as well spit it out. “The weapon is on this one.”

  • • •

  THERE WAS NO time to rig the tunnels, no time to stop the train so we could get on board. That’s what they were counting on. No one talked as we perched on the ridge overlooking the tunnel, waiting for it to come through. At first all I could hear was everyone breathing into the silence, and then breaths mixing with the rattle of rails, and then nothing but the mountain rumbling below our feet as the train raced through the tunnel.

  Waiting.

  Waiting.

  The train burst through in a blast of black smoke.

  “Go!”

  We half ran, half slid down the mountain and plunged into coal smoke. The black cloud invaded my lungs and my nose, blinded my eyes, so I went sprawling. I was back up and jumping before I had time to feel the sting of the skin stripped from my elbow.

  One moment it was stone below my feet, the next it was air. The whole world was suspended.

  My feet hit the roof of the train unsteadily and I slid, panic w
rapping me up as I fell toward the edge. A hand was around mine, grabbing me. Jin hauled me back up. There was no room to thank him over the deafening noise of the train. I tightened my fingers around his for a moment.

  Then we split, his hand tearing out of mine. Shazad and I bolted for the front of the train, Jin, Bahi, and Hala for the back. I didn’t look down, not at the rails rushing below us, not at anything, until we were as close to the front as we could get without climbing into the engine.

  I eased myself down first, toward the door that would take us inside, clinging to the outside of the train as it tried to shake me off with every rattling movement, the air howling around my ears.

  Shazad landed next to me with the grace of a cat. I checked the pistol on my belt as her hand closed over the handle of her blade.

  Terror and excitement battled for my attention. Everything I was feeling was mirrored straight back at me from her eyes. We turned as one.

  The door of the carriage burst open under our feet.

  Rows of empty seats stared back at us. Dusty glass hurricane lights juddered quietly from the motion of the train. Shazad and I lowered our weapons. One of the windows was shattered, a table overturned.

  Wordlessly, we moved forward, my finger on my trigger. My other hand rested on the spare gun on my other side.

  We moved through the train together, one empty carriage at a time. Halfway, Shazad gave voice to the fear that had started to grow in my mind. “The others should’ve made it this far by now.”

  I flexed my grip around my gun and wished for something to shoot at.

  When we wrenched open the next door, a gap an arm’s-length wide stretched before the next carriage. Standing on one side of it, I thought it seemed as wide as the Dev’s Valley.

  I couldn’t look down. I wouldn’t look down. Not with the rails rushing by in a blur below. But we had to keep going. We needed to find the weapon before it found us.

  “Step back,” I told Shazad, storing my gun away. “I’ll go first.” She didn’t have time to argue; I grabbed the door frame, swung myself backward, and flung my body forward.