We weren’t winning, but we didn’t have to. We just had to get as many people out as we could. I grabbed a fistful of sand and twisted hard. A stab of violent pain answered in my stomach. And then it was gone. The sand staggered, then dropped. And just like that our cover was gone.
The pain in my side doubled as I tried to grab hold of the sand again. And suddenly, it was blinding. My body was made of pain where it ought to have been flesh and blood. I staggered to my knees, gasping.
‘Amani.’ When I could see again I realised Shazad was kneeling in front of me. The way she said my name made me think it wasn’t the first time. She looked scared. Two other rebels were standing over us, covering her back while she had mine. ‘What’s happening?’
I didn’t know. I couldn’t even talk for the agony. Something my aunt had cut open so carefully inside me felt like it’d ripped in my side.
‘That’s it, you’re getting out of here.’
‘No!’
But Shazad was already helping me to my feet. I tried to pull away, to stand on my own. But she kept her grip.
‘Don’t argue. Last time you got left behind, this happened.’ She meant the Djinn and the Abdals and everything else. ‘Demdji get out first, and that’s an order from your general and your friend. Jin!’ She caught his attention across the chaos of the garden. He was with us in a second. ‘Get her out of here.’
He didn’t need to be told twice and I was in no state to fight an order. His arms were under my knees and shoulders, lifting me off the ground. I remembered the night of Auranzeb.
Are you saying you’re here to rescue me?
This was how to rescue a girl. I might’ve laughed if everything didn’t hurt so much. Shazad covered us as he lifted me towards Izz, who was wearing the shape of a giant Roc, carrying people to safety as fast as he could.
Jin and I were on his back and off the ground with one powerful wingbeat, carrying us high over the rooftops of Izman. Shots punctured the night behind us. They had a clear aim without the cover of the sandstorm. But Izz dodged expertly, moving too quickly to be a target. As we rose I could see Izman spreading out below us like a map, houses dotted with tiny pinpricks of light at the windows among dark streets. And just beyond the rambling walls and roofs was the sea, looking pink with the dawn. We were almost out of range. Even through the blinding pain I could tell. Almost. Just a little higher, just a little further, and we’d be out and gone and Izz could drop me and Jin somewhere safe and go back for the others.
I didn’t hear the gunshot that hit us. But I felt it. In the sudden jerking motion of Izz’s body as iron punctured his skin. In the scream that erupted from him. In a blur of pain, I realised they’d hit his wing. Jin’s arms tightened around me.
For a moment I was back in the harem, looking out over the water with the Sultan at my side, bow drawn as I took aim for the birds. The moment my arrow went through my kill. Watching it plummet to the ground and we were falling, too.
Izz was fighting not to plunge us back into the camp. To carry us further away. To get us out. The Sultan couldn’t capture another Demdji. I could feel the iron biting into him, and the pain hobbling his injured wing.
A last few frantic wingbeats carried us forward, the wind grabbing at us. And then we burst free of the city, of the roofs and streets and the walls that would shatter us when we crashed. We were out over the sea, a sheer drop of a cliff face from the city into the water.
We were falling. Izz’s body flipped, spilling us out as he screamed in agony, frantically beating his wings. Jin’s grip left my waist.
I had just a moment to catch sight of the water below as I slipped from his back, plunging towards it.
I didn’t even feel it when the water swallowed me whole.
Chapter 48
I’d never understood drowning.
I was a desert girl. The sea was made of sand where I was from. And that obeyed me. This. This was an attack.
Water invaded every part of me. Rushing to swallow my body hungrily. Rushing into my nose and my mouth. I was suffocating and the world was narrowed to black. Turned out I was good at drowning for a desert girl.
And then I was surging out of the depths of the water; air hit my face. Something slammed into my lungs. Light burst across my vision. It bloomed then faded to black. And then again. Pain and light wracking through me. Battling for my body.
And then stars. Stars above me. And a mouth was on mine.
I wasn’t dying. This was one of Hala’s illusions. Except it wasn’t. Jin hovered above me. I saw the lines of his face, etched in the predawn light as the pain slammed into my lungs again. Burning. Burning.
I was a Djinni’s daughter. Burning was what I did.
And then the stars vanished and I was staring at the ground and the sight of bile and water spilling out across sand. Expelled from my lungs as I vomited half the sea out. Even after it was all gone I was on my hands and knees retching violently.
I felt a gentle hand on my back. ‘Remind me to teach you how to swim sometime.’ The joke sounded strained. But I laughed anyway. It turned into more coughing as I knelt doubled over, shaking, trying to put myself back together.
The shadow of Izman, set high on the cliff above, loomed over us. It was an awfully long fall. I saw the pain written across Jin’s face, his hair sticking to his brow. I pushed a piece away. My heart was slowing. The chaos of the fight. Of surviving. Some of the pain in my side had subsided.
It was quiet and calm here on the shore as the sun rose. Just for a moment. But the stars were glaring down accusation at me. And I had to let the rest of the world back in eventually.
‘Izz?’ I asked. I didn’t see a giant blue Roc anywhere. He’d been hit by a bullet. He wouldn’t be able to shift again with that in him.
‘I’m not sure.’ Jin shook his head. ‘We got lucky; we fell and hit the water. Izz didn’t fall with us. By the time I’d surfaced with you, I’d lost sight of him.’ The water lapped innocently at our bodies, but out there it was a churning mass that’d swallow you whole.
‘And the others?’
Jin shook his head. ‘I don’t know. Sam got some out. I saw others fall. I lost track of Ahmed and my sister in the fighting and then you dropped.’ He sat back. He was shaking. ‘So this is what you didn’t want me to know about.’
I reached for the sand in my mind, but I could feel the stabbing sensation where my old wound was and I stopped. I might have the iron out of my skin, but it wasn’t so easy to shift back. I sank my fingers into the waterlogged sand under myself and forced my heartbeat to slow. ‘Ahmed is alive.’ It fell off my tongue easily. The truth. ‘Shazad is alive.’ The names tumbled off my tongue one after the other. Delila, Imin, Hala, Izz, Maz, Sam, Rahim. Our people were still alive.
‘Anyone who made it out will head for the Hidden House.’ Jin pushed his soaked hair back off his face as he stood up, reaching down for me. ‘We need to get back there; it’ll be safe—’
‘Maybe not for long.’ I took Jin’s hand, letting him help me to my feet. I was still unsteady from how I’d stopped breathing for a bit. ‘It just takes one person to talk.’
It was painfully slow going to get back up the cliffs to the city. As the sun worked across the sky, we waded where the water was shallow enough. Jin swam some of it with me hanging on to his shoulders until finally we found a place where the ground up to the city sloped enough to climb. The sun was high over us by then and still we did not move quickly. Jin caught me when I stumbled, but a few times we still had to stop to rest. For me to catch my breath as the pain in my side throbbed. We finally found flat ground just outside the city walls. We were far from alone. A crush of people were fighting their way in through the gates.
Someone shoved by me, jostling me back into Jin, who steadied me.
‘Hey.’ Jin caught a man by the shoulder. The man turned, clearly spoiling for a fight. He backed down when he caught sight of Jin, who had the look of knowing how to kill a man and being half-des
perate, too. ‘What’s going on?’
‘The Rebel Prince,’ the man said. My heart jumped at the mention of Ahmed. ‘The Rebel Prince has been captured. He’s going to be executed on the palace steps.’
‘When?’ I shoved forward; I couldn’t keep it in any more. The man’s eyes swept me disdainfully, from my dishevelled hair to my clothes dried stiff with seawater against my body. He might not want to mouth off to Jin, but I wasn’t half so intimidating as my foreign prince.
‘Answer her,’ Jin pressed.
‘Sundown,’ the man said, shaking Jin’s hand off, already pushing towards the crowd. ‘He’s lifting the curfew for one night for it. And if you don’t let me go I’m going to miss it.’
Jin and I traded a glance before our gazes went to the horizon, across the sea.
The sky was already darkening.
Chapter 49
The Rebel Prince
When men and women on long desert roads sat around campfires, where only the stars could see them, they told the tale of the Rebel Prince as best they knew it. And they told the truth as best they could. But not all of it. Never all of it.
When they told of his days in the harem, they never told of his brother the Foreign Prince, born under the same stars. They told of the night his half-Djinni sister was born, but they never knew of the young woman who risked her own life to take three children away to safety as the Rebel Prince’s mother died. And when they told of the Sultim trials, they left out the general’s beautiful daughter who trained him and fought beside him until he was ready to face the challenge.
In years to come in the desert, when the caravans warded against the fear of the night with stories of great men, they would tell of the day that the people of Izman gathered at dusk in the thousands to get their first glimpse of the Rebel Prince since the Sultim trials, as he stood on an executioner’s stage. Waiting for the axe to fall.
The stories would never tell that the Rebel Prince was not the only captive of the Sultan on that day. They would never know that he could have escaped capture had he not made so many of his people escape before him. They would never tell that he had laid down his weapons and surrendered himself to his father in order to save those others who were left behind.
The storytellers never knew that the man who stood on that stage did it by his own choice. That he could have escaped his fate if he were a less good man. A less brave man.
On that day, a hundred thousand men and women would come to watch and each would tell the story of what they saw there. The tales would cross the sands in the months that followed, repeated across the desert and on foreign shores. The same stories would be told again among caravans in the centuries that followed, when the time came to teach their children of all the great heroes who had come before them in the desert.
But there would only ever be six people who would know the story of what truly happened that day. The people of the caravans would never know what came to pass in the prison cells below the palace between dawn and dusk. Before the moment that all of Izman saw on the stage.
Six people, who had all fought side by side and were imprisoned side by side for it. They sat in the dark, awaiting their fates like thousands who had sat there before them. They passed whispers inside their cell, swearing that the Rebellion would not die there with them. Though by dawn, two of them would be dead.
Six people who would never tell the story of what took place on the day that would be known forever as the day the Rebel Prince died.
Chapter 50
When the legendary Princess Hawa died at Saramotai time lost all sense. The sun rose to watch her fall. It stopped in the sky in the dead of night. And the stars stared down alongside to witness the birth of grief in a new world. The entire world held its breath as Attallah dropped dead because his heart was torn in two.
Time didn’t stop now. It was already running out. There was no time to plan. No time to race for reinforcements or even a gun. I didn’t know what to do. Or even what I was running towards. I just knew that I was running, pressing through the mob in the streets, racing towards the palace.
No time to get help. No time to plan a rescue. That was what the Sultan was counting on.
He was going to execute Ahmed and we barely even had time to get there, let alone plan how to get him out. We were going to have to make a plan on the fly. Like we always did.
We were good at that.
I saw a man with a gun as we shoved by. ‘Jin.’ I grabbed his arm. He stopped, looking where I was pointing. I didn’t need to say anything further. Jin grabbed the man, wrenching his arms behind his back, holding him as I grabbed the gun. And then we were moving again, rushing away from the man’s shouted accusations.
The crowd started to get too thick before we were even within sight of the palace. I pushed. The streets were choked with people and I couldn’t move any more.
I couldn’t even see the square. I shoved forward, but soon I was trapped in the mass of bodies. I squirmed through until I was shoved up against a wall. I looked up.
I couldn’t climb that. Not alone. But I could get up there with help. Jin knew what I was thinking before I’d even finished thinking it.
‘You’ll be alone,’ he said. Someone jostled him, pressing us closer together, until we were flush against the wall. Alone, with a gun, powerless and bleeding from a half dozen places.
‘I know.’ I ran my tongue along my lips. They were caked with salt.
Jin lifted me up. I grabbed the ledge above, dragging myself up painfully. And painfully slow, fighting through the stabbing in my side.
My feet hit the ledge and I started to run, ignoring the shooting pain in my body. A jump carried me easily over the narrow gap onto the next roof. I landed hard, scraping my knee. I was back up, leaving a streak of new blood behind. I jumped to the next roof, startling some birds into flight. I kept going. Shoving forward, onwards and onwards, until there was nowhere to go. And I was standing on a roof overlooking the square in front of the palace.
Ahmed stood alone, chained by his wrists to the stage set above the heaving mass of people. His eyes were cast down. I knew what he was seeing. The images of pain and death. The writhing monsters.
The last thing Shira had seen.
The last thing Ahmed would see.
Unless I saved him.
A man was reading out what I could only guess was a list of my Rebel Prince’s supposed crimes. I couldn’t hear him over the din of the crowd. Above him I spotted the balcony from which I’d watched Shira die. They had shielded it with iron instead of carved wood after the riots. Through the gaps in the lattice I thought I could just make out the Sultan, surveying the scene, come to watch another son die.
As the list reached its end, Ahmed finally looked up, out over the sea of Mirajin citizens. Facing his people.
‘The Sultan,’ the man cried, ‘in his great wisdom and mercy, has agreed to grant leniency to any other rebels. They will keep their heads but be condemned to a life of penance serving this country, which they betrayed.’ Leniency my ass. The Sultan had told me himself he needed to win back the love of his people. I remembered him chastising Kadir for Shira’s execution. The people didn’t love you for killing an innocent. ‘But, for his crimes against his own blood, Prince Ahmed has been condemned to die.’ But Ahmed, he’d told the people, had killed Kadir, his own brother. They had to see Ahmed die.
I aimed my gun at the balcony, squinting. That was a small target from this far. Even for me. And I didn’t know if I had a shot to waste.
Over the roofs of Miraji behind me, the sun was setting.
I flattened myself on my stomach and aimed the gun. God, I hoped it was a good gun. I didn’t have a plan beyond shooting the executioner. But that had to be enough, for now at least. I had to save Ahmed and then I could worry about whatever came next.
The executioner stepped onto the stage and my heart stuttered. They hadn’t sent a man to kill Ahmed. The Sultan had sent an Abdal.
Even I
couldn’t make that shot.
I had the executioner in my crosshairs and I was helpless. I aimed the gun all the same. I fired. One clean shot, through the knee. A scream went up from the crowd at the sound of gunfire. But the executioner didn’t so much as stagger. I fired again and again and again, aiming desperately for the tiny target of its foot. Until the gun in my hand was empty.
Until the Abdal had reached Ahmed.
It forced him to his knees in front of the wooden block they’d laid there. Ahmed didn’t fight. He knelt down with dignity, his eyes going down to the gruesome scenes below as he laid his head on the executioner’s block.
I reached out for the desert. I could feel it scattered through the streets, sand invading the city. I started to gather it to me but the pain stabbed through my side, sending me down with a cry, scattering the sand back to street dust.
The mechanical man took one step backwards. Swinging the axe upwards. And I was helpless. I was helpless without my Demdji powers, without any bullets. Unable to stop it. Unable to do anything.
‘Ahmed!’ His name ripped out of me. Through the crowd. Over the din of people calling out, pressing forward, calling for his head, for his freedom.
I was too far away for him to hear me. Too far away to reach him. But somehow from the block his head tilted up just as the axe swung high. He looked straight at me. His eyes met mine.
The low rays of the sun struck the iron of the axe, turning it into a blazing light as it reached its pinnacle.
But the sun didn’t stop. Time didn’t stop. The world didn’t show any sympathy for my grief.
The axe fell. It turned from sunlight to iron. To blood.
Chapter 51
I didn’t cry until I was safe.
I wasn’t even sure how we got back to the Hidden House. All I knew was a hand leading me through streets that had turned to chaos as soon as the axe fell. Through a world that had stopped making sense. Jin. He could’ve been leading me to the executioner’s block and I wouldn’t have known until I was looking up at the crowd with the axe hanging above me.
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