فصل 10

ten

For a sliver of an instant I was flying.

Then rails flashed in the edge of my vision, narrowly missing a chance to get better acquainted with my skull. My ribs and the ground weren’t so shy.

We hit the sand hard. Air burst out of my lungs. We rolled one over the other, Jin’s grip tight around me, the train screaming in my ears, drowning out everything I wanted to shout back. Finally we stopped in a bank of sand.

I shoved Jin off me, an ache spreading from my shoulder to my hips. He cursed, clutching his side, but I was ready to run as fast as the train until I caught up. I was on my feet just in time for night and black smoke to swallow the last of the gleaming metal carriages.

For one crazy second I thought about running behind and grabbing hold. Riding for days hooked onto the back of a train.

But the train was gone. Carrying hundreds of people away to Izman. Without me. And I felt something rupture inside. I wrapped my arms around my ribs to keep it in.

“You all right?” Jin was watching me, clutching his side. “Amani?”

The way he said my name on a long exhale set me off like a spark in a powder keg. I swung my fist, straight for his face.

Jin grabbed my wrist before my knuckles could get flirting distance from his nose. He pulled me into him, knocking me off balance.

“Here’s a tip for you.” He was close to me now, close as he had been when he kissed me, or when I kissed him. “Don’t try to hit a man in the face when he’s looking straight into your eyes. You’ve got traitor eyes, Bandit.”

I drove my other fist into his gut hard enough that my knuckles popped. Jin doubled over, coughing. “Thanks for the tip.” I wished victory didn’t feel so much like I’d sprained my hand.

“Any time.” He clutched his stomach where I’d hit him, but it looked like he was laughing. I had the wild urge to hit him again while he was down. Instead I drew my shirt up, pulling the gun out of where it was tied against my hip.

“We should start walking,” Jin said. “We’re probably less than a day out of Massil. We’ll have to follow the rails. We could be there before the sun gets too high if we start now.”

“What makes you think I’m going anywhere with you?” If it weren’t for his having an army on his tail, I’d still be on the way to Izman. Of course, if it weren’t for him I’d also still be in Dustwalk. But I wasn’t going to get into that just now. I shoved my gun back in my belt; no need to hide it here. Better for folks to know I was armed.

“You got a better plan?” Jin waved his arm at the empty desert like he was offering me a feast for fools. “Would you rather strike off across the desert and wind up food for buzzards than walk another day with me?”

He wasn’t wrong. It was open nothingness as far as the eye could see all around us. Except for the rails that ran like an iron scar through the sand. There were only two ways to go if I wanted to stay alive. Forward with him. Back to Juniper City.

I wasn’t going back.

“Don’t flatter yourself.” I riffled my fingers through my hair, pulling it loose from where it was trapped under my sheema as I started to walk. “You’re not near worth dying over.”

• • •

WE WALKED IN silence as night crept its way across the sky. My anger kept me three steps ahead of Jin as we walked. But even that fire started to dim as the night wore on. I told myself over and over again there’d been another way. We could’ve stayed on the train. Found somewhere to hide. Something.

After a few hours of turning it over and over in my head, though, I couldn’t think of anything else that we could’ve done except jump.

It was hard to stay angry at someone who’d saved your life.

We’d been walking near all night when I noticed the other figure.

I thought it was a trick of the hazy gray predawn light. The uncertain times between day and night, where neither God nor the Destroyer of Worlds had true dominion, were the most dangerous. But no, down the rails, someone was walking toward us.

I dropped to the sand on instinct, flattening myself into the landscape. Jin was down next to me in a second without question. “What is it?” He had the sense to keep his voice low as he crawled up next to me on his elbows.

“Someone is coming.” I nodded ahead. All I could make out was a silhouette on foot, coming in our direction. It could just be a lone desert nomad, leaving Massil as we were going in. Or it could be that someone in the third-class carriage had told the soldiers they’d seen a girl dressed as a boy and a foreigner jump off the train.

The same thought clearly occurred to Jin. “Come on.” He started to push himself forward on his elbows to stay close to the sand, moving away from the rails. We’d been walking between them, from one wooden slat to the next, so there’d be no tracks. I crawled behind Jin, kicking any marks from our bodies away with my boot. We crested a sand dune. I rolled over to the other side, flattening myself on my front so we were hidden from the rails.

I loosened my gun just in case. Jin already had a knife in his hand.

We lay in the sand in silence, side by side. I could feel the desert shifting below my stomach with every breath. I listened for the sound of passing footsteps. That was the trouble with sand—it muffled most noises. We’d never hear him climbing up the dune until he was on top of us. We outnumbered him, but surprise made a single man dangerous.

It probably wasn’t a soldier, I realized. Soldiers didn’t tend to travel alone. But that still left a hundred dangerous possibilities. A hungry Skinwalker. A greedy desert bandit. A Djinni.

No. That was ridiculous. It couldn’t be a ghoul—the iron ought to keep them away. And no one had seen a Djinni for decades. They didn’t live among us like they used to anymore.

But they were immortal. And this was the desert. The true open desert. Legend said things were out here that hadn’t been seen by civilizations in decades.

The unknown made me itch to clamber over the dune and take a look. I shifted ever so slightly, inching my way up the dune. Jin hissed a warning under his breath. I pressed the gun to my lips, to silence him. And remind him I was armed, and likely a better shot than whoever was on the rails. He didn’t reach out to stop me as I pulled myself the rest of the way up.

The rails were as empty as a drunk’s liquor bottle on prayer day.

“There’s no one there. They’ve gone past.” Or they’d vanished in a column of smokeless fire like the Djinn in the stories.

“Do you have a death wish?” Jin sounded almost impressed, his voice returning to a normal volume as he sat up.

“If I did, I wouldn’t be very good at it, seeing as I’m still alive,” I said, holstering my pistol.

“God knows how.” Jin scrubbed his hands over his face, tiredly. I was dead tired, too. It hit me all at once. “Didn’t anyone ever tell you the story of Impulsive Atiyah and the Djinni Sakhr when you were a child?”

“You mean the Djinni Ziyah,” I corrected him absently.

“What?”

“It’s Atiyah and Ziyah, it rhymes. Who’s ever heard of Sakhr?” I argued. Everybody knew the story of Atiyah, the impulsive girl who was always getting herself into trouble and her Djinni lover Ziyah, who feared so much for her life that he gave her his name. His true name. Which she could speak and he would be summoned to her rescue. That she could use to bind him to her will. The name that she could whisper to the lock of any door and it would open into his secret kingdom.

“You think the point of the story is the Djinni’s name?”

“No, but I reckon you ought to get it right. She died because she said his name wrong in the story, not because she was impulsive, and why are we arguing about this?” I snapped. We both went silent.

“Is your aunt in Izman really worth your life?” he asked finally.

“I don’t know, I’ve never met her.”

Jin stopped, hands caught midway through his hair. He’d shoved his shirt up to his elbows and I saw the tension in the muscles in his forearms as he scrutinized me. “You’re going to Izman to find someone you’ve never met?”

“I’m going to Izman because it’s got to be a better life than out here.”

“No, it doesn’t,” Jin said. “Cities are worse, if anything. It’s not like Dustwalk, where everybody knows your name and kills you for a good reason. They’ll kill you for no reason at all. And that’d be a crying shame. You’re too remarkable to waste as a corpse in a gutter.” He got to his feet and offered me a hand. I ignored it. I ignored what he’d said about me being remarkable, too.

“You sound like my father,” I said, standing up without his help.

“Your father?” He dropped his hand.

“He used to say the city was for thieves and whores and politicians.” I mocked my father’s slurred tones with a wave of an imaginary drink. “I was better off staying where my family was going to keep me safe. Do you want to know how safe my father kept me?”

“What happened to him?” Jin asked. There was a tense note in his voice that I couldn’t read.

“My mother killed him.” He opened his mouth. “And don’t bother to say you’re sorry. He was an ass and he wasn’t my real father anyway.” I thought back to the blue-eyed soldier who’d been working for Commander Naguib and wondered how many half-Gallan children there were in the desert. No others that I knew of, but I hadn’t exactly traveled far. Until now.

“I was going to say that it sounds like he deserved it.” Jin said. “And your mother?” His voice said he already knew.

“What normally happens to murderers?” Sometimes in my nightmares I still saw her swinging from a rope. I squared my shoulders. Let him tell me she deserved it, like everybody else had.

“That I am sorry for,” he said. “A mother is a hard thing to lose.” I got the feeling he might know something about dead mothers.

“I’ve got nothing to go back to,” I admitted. “My aunt Safiyah in Izman is all I’ve got. So why not Izman?”

He didn’t answer me right away. There was some kind of war behind his eyes. “Fine,” he said on a long resigned exhale. “Here’s what we do.” He dropped to his knees and started sketching a lopsided triangle in the sand that I gathered was meant to be Miraji. “We walk to Massil. Here.” He jabbed at a point at the bottom of the triangle. “Trains are the only way to get through the mountains this time of year. And I don’t suppose you have enough money left to wait around for the next one.” He looked to me for confirmation as he drew a jagged line across Massil, cutting us off from Izman.

“First class tickets are expensive,” I admitted.

“But,” he went on, “there’ll be caravans preparing for the journey across the Sand Sea. Toward the port cities on the northwest coast.”

“That’s where your compass was pointing,” I prodded. His hat tipped over his face hid any answer from me.

“And they’ll be hiring.”

“Hiring what?” I asked.

“Muscle.” He shrugged. “Guns. Your desert’s not all that safe, you know. The crossing is nothing but sand from Massil to Dassama.” He pointed at another dot he’d made in the top left of the triangle. North and west. “It’s a month of walking.”

“It’s also the wrong direction from Izman.” I scuffed the top right corner with my toe, give or take where I knew the capital was.

He gave me an exasperated look that told me to shut up and let him finish. “From Dassama it’s another ten days of walking across the plains; the caravans do some trading on the way, so it can take longer. Then you get to the sea. It’s two days’ sailing to Izman. You can buy your way across with wages from the caravan. What do you say, Bandit?”

“You sure didn’t miss your calling as a mapmaker.” I looked at the muddled lines in the sand on which he’d sketched out our path. It seemed easy drawn out like that. But I knew better than to underestimate the desert. “It’s a lot harder than a train.” It came out as an accusation.

“Yes, but with fewer soldiers who want to kill you.” Jin stood up, brushing the sand off his hands onto his clothes. It was such a foreign thing to do. The gesture of somebody who wasn’t used to sand getting into everything. Who was still trying to fight it.

“They want you,” I reminded him. “I’m just trying to get to Izman in one piece.” I had to admit, it was the best plan I had. He seemed to know Miraji better than I did. And I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want to carry on with him. And lying was a sin.

But something was nagging at me all the same. “I suppose you want me to think it’s a coincidence that the best way across the desert is the way your compass is pointing.”

“I want a lot of things, Bandit. To get out of this goddamn country of yours, a cold bath, a decent meal . . .” Jin trailed off, and for just a moment I could’ve sworn his eyes drifted to me. “But what we need is to start walking if we want to be in Massil before we die of thirst. So what do you say, Bandit.” He stuck his hand out. “Stick together?”

My hand fit well in his.