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.
The door banged open. Naguib rushed in, coming to find Noorsham. I moved with the sort of speed that usually belonged to Shazad, reaching across the bar. My hand fastened around the neck of a bottle. I turned, swinging it, narrowly missing Naguib’s face. He grabbed my wrist, wrenching it downward. I felt a shot of pain through my whole body and screamed. The bottle shattered against the ground, distracting him long enough for me to pull free.
Someone called my name. Jin was standing in the doorway. A huge hole torn in the train separated the two carriages, but damn him, was he thinking of coming for me?
“Go!” I shouted at him. “I’ll be right behind.” He knew better than to argue with me. He jumped as I started to run for the tear in the side of the carriage.
I wasn’t far behind him, my arms bracing either side of the gap in the wall.
Noorsham.
I glanced backward. He’d been knocked sideways by the blow. There was a dent in the metal helmet he wore, but he was righting himself. I glimpsed through the gap that we were coming up on a canyon, where the rails crossed over the chasm.
I had to jump. Now. But I couldn’t leave Noorsham. I couldn’t leave him alive. I couldn’t leave him here in Naguib’s hands. I had to kill him. Or save him. Our blue eyes locked across the debris littering the carriage.
The noise inside me sounded like Bahi’s scream, begging me to cross the carriage and rip off his mask, drag him away. But the valley was almost under us; I might have already waited too long.
If I went back they’d have me trapped and there wouldn’t be time to jump.
If I jumped now, I might go over anyway.
I was damned either way.
I flung myself through the rip in the carriage. The wind caught me, tossed me. I hit the ground and my body exploded into a constellation of pain. Momentum carried me through the sand as easily as if it were air; I was in too much agony to fight it. My vision cleared just in time for me to see the canyon gape open to swallow me. My empty fingers scraped through the sand. I fought for purchase that wasn’t there to stop my body. There was nothing to cling to but sand.
My legs went over, taking the rest of me with them.
twenty-five
My fingers caught on something. I felt a tug of falling in my stomach as I willed my injured hand to hold on. My body swung against the canyon wall and I heard my ribs connect with the sickening noise of bones breaking. I cried out, agony taking me over. For a moment all I could do was hang, eyes shut, breath shallow, telling myself not to look down. Willing my hand to hang on.
Only then I realized I didn’t know what I was holding on to.
I was shaking so hard, I could barely move. It seemed like it took forever to open my eyes. I tipped my head back slowly, like any move might throw me off balance and send me hurtling to the bottom of the chasm.
I’d grabbed hold of the sand. Or rather, the sand had grabbed hold of me. An arm made of sand had clamped around my wrist. It was holding on to my life.
I dropped my head, squeezing my eyes shut. Trying to remember how my lungs ought to work. How fast my heart ought to beat.
I’d seen dozens of things born from the sand and the wind
and the spirits in the desert in my sixteen years. I’d heard every story, about immortals and ghouls alike that came from the sand. But this was something new. And it felt wholly foreign and entirely familiar at once.
This wasn’t a creature from the sands. This was me.
I took a deep breath. My ribs stretched into an endless ache that wrapped around my whole body. I swung my left arm up, the motion ripping a cry out of me, catching the sand-arm by the wrist, trying to pretend I didn’t feel grains of it slipping between my fingers.
Slow as the setting sun, it recoiled into the sand, dragging me up with it. My hand started slipping and a new sand-arm snaked out from the desert, grabbing me. And then another. A dozen hands held me, pulling at my clothes, my arms. Pulling me back to the desert.
And then I was up, lying flat on my stomach. I crawled away from the edge, my body shaking. I didn’t know if it was pain or something greater waiting to crash into me. Something my body knew before my mind. I was blank. Watching without grasping it. Around me, a dozen arms of sand disintegrated. I flinched.
Nothing else moved. Not even me. Then I reached toward a heap of sand that had saved my life. I hadn’t even touched it before it began to rise toward my palm, like the snakes in baskets called by charmers.
So this was the kind of Demdji I was.
A gun went off. The sand collapsed as I spun toward the sound. The world poured back in around me all at once. There were bodies in the sand already. I was just in time to see Shazad jab her elbow into a man’s throat, whirling to catch him in the gut with a knife. A soldier came at her from the right.
“No!”
I wasn’t empty anymore. I was furious. The sand lashed up, exploding between them, sending them both sprawling. I ran for Shazad as it settled.
She was finishing coughing up desert dust when I dropped to my knees next to her. When she saw me she starting hacking all over again. “I thought you were dead! I saw you go over,” she got out between coughs. “I saw you fall.”
To our right a gun went up. Without thinking, I flung out my hand; a wave of sand sent the soldier sprawling. Buried him. His gun skittered to my feet. I didn’t pick it up. The rush made me feel dizzy and drunk and scared all at once. It was like I’d just grown another limb I wasn’t fully in control of yet.
I clasped Shazad’s hand, pulling her up. I was still shaking too hard to find words. When I turned, the sand at my feet turned with me—I knew it without looking. I felt it. Like I always had, without knowing that I was. The desert all around me, the sand like a living thing, calling to me, begging me to use it. To be part of it.
The fighting had stopped, but I couldn’t.
“Amani.” Shazad’s grip slipped out of mine. The sand was moving underneath me, a swirl like a tiny sandstorm, and then it was getting bigger, rising, rising until it was all around me, pulling at my hair, my clothes, calling me into it, into the desert.
To drown in it.
I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t control it. There was too much of it. I couldn’t breathe.
A new hand closed over mine, and this time it was flesh and bone. Jin appeared through the sand, his sheema wrapped tightly around his face as he pushed his way through blindly. I saw he was holding something metallic a second before his arms went around me and he pulled me into his chest. He was saying something I couldn’t hear over the storm. All I felt was his hand press into my arm. It was a bullet, cool and hard, the iron biting into my bare skin.
The cold of it cut through the heat in me.
The sand dropped away, spiraling down and down and down until it was back under my feet and I could hear Jin’s heartbeat under my forehead, feel the pain of the bullet pressing into my flesh too hard, hear him whispering my name over and over again in my ear until I stopped shaking.
twenty-six
We finally stopped flying a few hours before dawn to let Izz get some rest from carrying the four of us. We were halfway between home and where we’d jumped off the train. It was open empty desert on all sides, though I could see the mountains of the Dev’s Valley on the horizon. We didn’t unpack supplies or even build a fire. Everyone collapsed where they stood. Izz turned into a huge catlike beast I’d never seen before and fell asleep. Shazad leaned against him. Her eyes were red, even though I hadn’t seen her crying.
Jin sat down next to me without a word. There was something in his hands. The red sheema, I realized. The one I’d let go out the window. He took my right arm, gently, without asking. My hand was swollen and tender, but I’d almost stopped noticing the constant throbbing. Sprained. Not broken. The place where my ribs had connected with the canyon wall had faded to a dull ache. I felt Bahi’s absence like a badly stitched wound as Jin’s hands worked, clumsy with exhaustion, binding my hand with my sheema. He tied it off, his fingers skimming over the cloth before he set my hand down gently.
“You all right?” he asked.
“It’ll heal.”
We both knew that wasn’t what he’d been asking, but Jin let it pass anyway.
“Can you shoot left-handed?”
“If I have to,” I said.
Jin held his pistol out to me. “Do you want it?” I stared at the gun in his hands, but I didn’t snatch it up like I would’ve once. Yesterday. “You’ve worked it out, haven’t you?”
“It’s because of the iron.” I took the gun by the leather handle, careful not to touch the metal. I thought of the way he’d pressed a bullet to my skin as the sand was rising. Just one touch and I was stripped powerless because of the thing that had shaped my whole life, with or against my will. It was like the Buraqi and the metal horseshoes: so long as I had iron against my skin, I couldn’t touch my Demdji powers. “It’s the reason I got through my whole life without knowing I was a Demdji. Because I’m from Dustwalk.” The girl who taught herself to shoot a gun. Until she could knock down a row of tin cans like they were nothing and the gun was everything. “Because I’m the girl with the gun.” And Noorsham was the boy from the iron mines. He said he’d been sick. Sick enough to leave the mines and stop inhaling iron dust for a little while, maybe. So that when he went back to work, he did it as a Demdji.
“From the town where even the water tastes like iron.” And when they’d been afraid of Noorsham in Fahali, iron was what they’d chained him with. Jin’s hand was clenching and unclenching around nothing. His knuckles were torn up, and the motion was making the scabs break all over again. That had to be painful.
“Bet you weren’t counting on all this being so damn complicated when you abducted me from that godforsaken place.”
“I didn’t abduct you!” At least he’d stopped punishing his knuckles raw. He realized I was baiting him a moment too late. His shoulders eased. The cautious angry fragility wasn’t something either of us could keep up long.
“You abducted me a little bit.” It was like we were back with the Camel’s Knees, except there was no more pretending about what I was.
I wasn’t going to craft illusions out of the air or twist people’s minds or change my shape. Those were the powers of Djinn in the stories where they tricked men and one another. Then there were the other stories. Massil and the sand that filled the sea in a fit of Djinni anger. The golden city of Habadden burned by the Djinn for its corruption. Just like Noorsham did. I wondered if I could bury the sea in sand, too.
“Noorsham’s eyes are the same color as mine,” I blurted out. I couldn’t be the only one who’d put it all together. “He’s about my age. He was born spitting distance from where I was.” I couldn’t be the only one thinking it. “Dustwalk to Sazi, that’s only a few hours as the Buraqi rides. How far do you reckon that is as the Djinni walks? He’s my brother, isn’t he?”
“Amani. No matter what he is, he’s not your family. Family and blood aren’t the same thing.”
“If that’s true, how come you didn’t shoot Naguib in Dust
walk?” The truth showed on his face, just long enough for me to read it. “I don’t want my brother to have to die either, Jin.” We understood each other. His brother and mine were both just the Sultan’s weapons.
Jin put his hands on my face. “We don’t have to do anything. He’s after the Gallan. You don’t have to stop him.” I was so used to Jin’s unwavering certainty. The hitch in his voice, the tentativeness of his hand on my face, this was unfamiliar ground. “We could retreat. Live to fight another day.”
“We’d just be living to die another day.” I leaned my forehead into his. “Noorsham—we have to stop him. If the Sultan has a weapon like that, it’s only a matter of time before he cuts his way through the foreigners and comes for us, too. We might never get another chance.” I wasn’t even sure what I meant by “stop him.” Kill him? Rescue him? Save him? “They’re headed to the Gallan camp,” I said, and the moment I did, I knew I was right. “They’re going to kill them. We can get there first.”
“I’m not that inclined to save any Gallan soldiers,” Hala interrupted. “I’ve been a Demdji in an occupied country longer than you have. They all deserve to burn, if you ask me. We should take care of our own.”
“And Fahali?” I looked around the group of tired, ragged rebels. “What about all the people there? They’re headed back there to burn out the Gallan. A lot of desert folks will burn with them.”
No one answered me.
“We need to sleep.” Jin ran his hands over his face. I felt that exhaustion, too. It was soul deep. “Nobody makes smart decisions in the dark. We sleep and tomorrow we head back to camp. Tell Ahmed about the weapon. And then we decide.”
• • •
TOMORROW WOULD BE too late. I knew that down in my gut as I lay between the desert and the stars, dead tired and too alive with thought to sleep.
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