فصل 13

thirteen

The desert was changeless. For six weeks there was only sand and blue skies. The blisters on my feet turned bloody just in time for fresh ones. The restlessness I’d shoved into the bottom of my gut my whole life wasn’t staying down so easy. I was on my way to Izman and I’d never felt more awake in my life.

At night, while the rest of the camp slept, I’d shed my sheema and breathe and sit some of Jin’s watch with him until I was worn out enough to sleep before mine. He taught me words from other languages he’d learned sailing. After the first month I could threaten a man and insult his mother in Xichian, Albish, and Gallan. He showed me how he’d broken Dahmad’s wrist in the wrestling pit, a move he’d learned from a Jarpoorian sailor in an Albish port. I asked him about his broken nose once. He told me a Mirajin girl had hit him, and his brother had set it for him. He did that sometimes, mention his brother, like he was forgetting to guard himself with me. But he talked freely about most everything else. He told me about the places he’d been, the foreign shores he’d sailed to and stories of all the things he’d done, until I was itching to see the Golden Palaces of Amonpour and feel the rock of a ship below my feet. The stories of Izman had belonged to my mother. But the world was a lot bigger than my mother ever told me. And it occurred to me once or twice that I could go anywhere in it.

I knew we were getting close to the end of the desert the first time I saw something other than sand dunes on the horizons.

“It’s called the Dev’s Valley,” Jin told me as the camp settled down. We were on the outskirts of it. “It’s a mess of mountains and canyons all the way down the western Mirajin border. They say it was carved into the land during the war against the Destroyer of Worlds. Before mankind.”

“That’s one hell of a battle.” We were probably a two-day walk away. Two days wasn’t so long. I looked up into the night. The sand rolled out in an endless ripple, turned blue by the starlight, so it was almost hard to tell where it met the sky except for the wild burst of stars overhead. “We’ve been walking for near two months now. The stars have moved.”

“A captain on one of the ships I worked on used to be able to travel by the stars.”

“But you need a broken compass.” As always when I mentioned the compass, I got nothing from him except for the slightest twitch of his lip.

“You want me to take your watch?” I asked. It was a pattern we’d fallen into since the first night.

“You’re unnatural.” Jin ran his hands over his face. “This desert is enough to drain any man.”

“Well, I’m not a man,” I said. “And I was just trying to be nice, so—”

“No, wait.” Jin’s fingers laced with mine too quick to react, pulling me down to sit next to him. It sent a stupid wild jolt through me before he let me go just as fast. “I’m sorry, I’m just sick to death of the sand everywhere.”

“I’m plenty used to it, I suppose.” I stared out across the dunes. They looked like they went on forever, but the horizon felt closer with the mountains. “It gets deep into your soul after a while.”

“It’s in your skin, too.” He reached out a hand, and before I could think, his palm was flat against my cheek, warm and a little bit rough. His thumb traced the length of my cheekbone. A cascade of sand went in its wake, falling away from skin where it was stuck and leaving a strange burning shiver behind.

“Amani.” He didn’t take his hand away from my face. “You’re going to have to be careful when we get to Dassama. The city has been an encampment for Gallan soldiers for years now. It’s got almost as many of them as it does Mirajin people in its walls.”

“When am I not careful?” I tried for lightness, but in truth I was all too aware of his hand on my face.

“You’re never careful,” Jin said wryly, his thumb tracing rough patterns on my cheek, his eyes following it. Like he was memorizing it. “Hell, right now if anyone from the caravan happened to look over, your cover would be blown.” His hand ran along my jawline. I could feel his touch on my face leaving my breathing ragged.

“I’d say you’re the one not being careful just now.” He seemed to catch himself. His hand dropped away quickly. A cold ache spread out behind it. “Besides,” I said, “you’ll be with me. How much trouble can Atiyah possibly get into if she’s got Sahkr?” Atiyah and Ziyah was a great love story. Atiyah and Sahkr was just our joke.

He didn’t laugh. I’d gotten to know what silence meant from Jin. He was hiding something from me. Suddenly, how soon we’d be going our separate ways crept up on me. My aunt Safiyah might be blood, but Jin I knew. And I didn’t want to leave him. He made the world bigger. I wanted to go to the countries he’d been to. And more than anything I wanted him to ask me to go with him. But we were running out of time together.

In the early light of morning, the mountains looked even closer. My stomach twisted in anticipation. The excitement of nearing Dassama, the end of the desert and the first civilization we’d seen in weeks, crept into the caravan as the day wore on. The normal stoic trudging through the sand turned restless. The younger kids dashed up and down the line of camels, already trying to talk anyone who would listen out of a few louzi so that they’d be able to buy themselves treats when we got to Dassama. Men and women were starting to pine loudly for a glass of something cool. Isra was berating Parviz loudly about the provisions. How it’d almost not been enough this time. How we were going to have to resupply as soon as we got into town. Yasmin was keeping her young cousins going with a game she called When I Get to the City.

“When I get to the city, I’m going to pull off my feet and get new ones that aren’t so sore.” Little Fahim drooped dramatically, letting his arms swing like a rag doll’s.

“When I get there,” his sister chimed in, pulling him up by the scruff of his shirt, “I’m going to eat a hundred yazdi cakes.”

“One hundred!” Yasmin faked wide-eyed surprise. “How will you have room after eating a hundred dates and a hundred chickens?” She rattled off the list of foods the little girl had already promised to eat. I tried to stop my own stomach from growling in answer.

“What about you, Alidad?” Yasmin asked, trying to draw me into their game. “What are you going to do when we get to Dassama?”

Truth be told, all I wanted was to wash for so long that the dust from my skin would turn the baths to a miniature version of the Sand Sea. Only I couldn’t do that without throwing away my secret.

But more than Dassama, Izman was preying on my mind as we got closer to the end of the desert.

My mother had talked about going to find her sister in Izman so often that it was like a prayer in our household, when my father wasn’t there. But I didn’t even know if I wanted it anymore. I didn’t know if I’d ever wanted it or if my mother had just been wanting it enough for the two of us to keep us going all those years.

Hell, my aunt Safiya could be as bad as Aunt Farrah, and even if she wasn’t, I wasn’t so sure I wanted to turn myself over to anyone else who could claim a right to my life.

And I’d never see Jin again.

My eyes were latched to Jin’s back up ahead when I realized that the front of the caravan train had come to a stop.

“What’s happening?” Yasmin put her hand on Fahim’s head, keeping him from going any farther.

A mutter ran back through the caravan train as folks raised their heads, straining to see up front, shielding their eyes against the dying sunset. They wanted to see, but a caravan ran on orders. Except for me.

I broke into a run for the front of the caravan, which had reached the top of a dune. Parviz was standing above me, Jin next to him, his sheema pulled down, as I climbed my way up the sand. The camels had dropped to their knees to rest, not understanding why we were stopping.

I broke over the top of the high dune next to them. At first I couldn’t grasp it, either.

Where Dassama ought to have been, we were standing over ruins. Old, half-crumbled walls caught the setting sun, the last light casting shadows across them and stretching out across the sand. Then I realized they weren’t shadows.

My mouth went dry.

“How,” Jin said very carefully as I stepped up beside him, “does sand burn?”

• • •

THE CLOSER WE got, the worse it looked. Where the stone wasn’t blackened, it had crumbled to ash. In places the sand itself was black or burned hard. We didn’t speak as we drifted through what was left of the narrow streets and charred houses. This wasn’t a fire. Fire was something that some folks survived, that you ran from and put out, smothered in sand.

Jin was the first to say what we were both thinking, too low for the rest of the caravan to hear. “No bodies.”

“Bodies burn easier than stone.” I kicked a rock, and what was left of it disintegrated. “No fire would catch like this unless the whole place was soaked in oil.”

“A bomb,” Jin said. It wasn’t a question, but that didn’t mean he was right.

“The pattern for it is wrong,” I said.

Jin looked at me sideways. “How do you know that?”

“Come on, Xichian boy.” I forced lightness. The wind dragging at my sheema tasted like ash and made me want to gag. “You telling me you never set off gunpowder when you were a kid just to blow things up?”

Jin snorted. “We didn’t all grow up near a weapons factory.”

I shrugged. “When a bomb goes off, it’s always got a center. Here the buildings are burned on every side.” Like something had crashed down from above and flooded the city with fire. Familiarity whispered in my ear, though I didn’t know why. I rounded a ruined corner and pulled up short.

“And a bomb doesn’t spare prayer houses, either.”

In the middle of the destruction, a huge domed building was the only thing left whole in the city. Its walls were still a fresh gleaming white, the scorch marks stopping just short of it.

“What did this?” I whispered.

Jin just shook his head. “Something unnatural.”

“We’ve got another problem.” We’d wandered to the center of the town, and I nodded to the crumbled hunk of melted metal and stone in the middle of the square. “I’m thinking that used to be the well.”

The fear that went through the caravan as they saw the same thing I had was unmistakable. No one knew the value of water like desert folks. “How much water do we have left?” Jin asked, raising his voice as he called to Parviz.

“A day’s worth.” Parviz looked grim. “Two, if we ration. It’s a six-day walk to Saramotai.” I recognized the name of the next Oasis town we were due at after stopping to resupply in Dassama.

“It’s only two days to Fahali, though,” Jin said, “if we head west instead of north.”

“That’s off our path,” Parviz replied too quickly.

“Better to die of thirst than take a detour, is it?” Jin’s arms were crossed over his chest. His eyes were on his feet, but also far away. Like he had bigger things on his mind than us all dying of thirst. “Besides, I’m not hearing any other bright ideas.”

Parviz glanced at his brother, a man named Tall Oman. They called him that to set him apart from the three other Omans in the caravan. Something silent passed between the two men. Tall Oman shook his head slightly. I glanced at Jin to see if he’d caught it, too, but he was lost in his own thoughts.

“Is there something we ought to know?” I asked. “About Fahali?”

“It’s a dangerous city,” Parviz said shortly.

“It’s a dangerous desert,” I said. He was hiding something, but I couldn’t tell what. “Isn’t that why you pay us?”

There was a moment of tense silence. Then Parviz nodded, his face pulled tight.

“Fahali, then. And we pray your aim is sharp, young Alidad.”