فصل 17

seventeen

I came awake staring at stars.

I squeezed my eyes shut again and then reopened them. The stars were stitched into the tent above me, yellow cloth constellations in the lamplight. I moved to prop myself up and my arm rebelled in pain, making my head spin. I felt like death. Which was a privilege of being alive, at least.

It took a second for my head to steady. My arm was bandaged from wrist to shoulder. The bandages smelled of honey and something I didn’t recognize.

Next to me Jin was lying still under a heavy blanket pulled up to his elbows. His bare chest was slick with sweat. Fresh bandages were wrapped around him, so I couldn’t see the wound anymore. But his chest was rising and falling with shallow breathing, and that was enough to make my own breathing ease. He was alive. We were both alive. The rush of relief that followed was enough to lift me onto my elbows to get a proper look around.

In the corner sat a stranger. A boy about Jin’s age, with a round face, arms crossed over his chest, curly black hair falling into his eyes as his chin flopped forward in sleep.

I sat up slowly, careful not to wake him. The fact that I was bandaged and not bound and gagged seemed like a good sign. But just because they’d fixed me up didn’t mean I ought to trust them—whoever they were.

My shirt had been replaced, but my sheema was still tied around my middle, and between it and my body was the compass. My heart raced in relief as I pulled it out.

My eyes dropped to a small pile of bottles and bandages in the corner, and among them, a knife that looked like it was for medicine. There was dried blood on it. I snatched it up. I needed to find out where I was. And I wasn’t going unarmed.

The sleeping boy was an easy guard to slip. Sunlight hit my face violently through the tent flap, blinding me the second I pushed outside.

Somebody had painted the world while I slept.

I’d thought green was the color of dusty scrub that fought its way up between stones—not this color that boasted its existence, unafraid, to the desert. Behind me the huge dusty gold of the cliff face loomed over the camp, but the sand surrendered quickly enough as it crept away from the walls. We were overlooking an oasis, a burst of color and life, scattered with people. At a glance I guessed it was about the size of Dustwalk, a hundred or so souls. Only comparing this place to Dustwalk was like comparing a Buraqi to a donkey. And at the center of it all rose a gold-and-red tower that was high enough to scratch the blue off the sky.

My legs decided to walk instead of surrendering me to the ground at the last second. I held the compass close to my body with one hand; the other one clutched the knife. I didn’t know how much use it’d be. I was light-headed, either from loss of blood or from the overwhelming strangeness of this place. My legs moved half on their own. In a few steps, the burning sand turned cool as I stepped into the shade of the oasis.

I passed below trees hanging heavy with oranges and pomegranates and some fruits I didn’t even recognize. They sprang up everywhere, around pools so clear and deep, I felt if I got close enough I might see the beating heart of the earth in them.

The compass needle pointed straight through the oasis. Tents of every color were scattered among the trees, propped against trunks for support or hanging from tree branches.

And the people. Everybody I saw was dressed in colors that looked like they’d been born back when the world was new. A few folks were gathered around a pool, washing clothes and chattering; they didn’t look up when I passed. The girl who had killed the Skinwalker was leading a half dozen men and women with wooden blades through what looked like army drills. I almost stepped on two boys, younger than me by the looks of it, who were tinkering with something that looked like a bomb. They both looked up at me.

“You’re going to want to go the long way around,” one of them said.

“We’d rather only blow our own hands off.” As the other one spoke, I realized it wasn’t a boy at all. She was a girl, hair cropped close to her skull, and so skinny she’d have to stand up twice to cast a shadow, but a girl all the same. Neither of them seemed to have even a bit of worry about me being a stranger. Maybe having a magic door just saved you a whole lot of suspicion. I took the long, long way around to be safe, even if I wasn’t sure where I was headed.

I stepped out of the trees and into a large clearing of sand. Facing me was the biggest tent by far. It was twice the height of a man and it looked like it could hold half the camp—more like a pavilion than a place to sleep. The canvas was red, with a huge blue sun stitched into the canopy.

Identical to Jin’s tattoo.

As I moved closer, I saw that a lone figure stood in the tent. He should’ve looked small under the high canopy, but somehow he seemed to fill the space as easily as the sunlight. He was bent over a table, so all I could see was the crown of his head. His hands were planted on either side of a huge map. Other papers were held down by stones and empty cups and weapons.

And one beat-up brass compass.

The sun caught the knife in my hand, sending a flash of light across the tent. The boy looked up, startled, his eyes going straight to me.

He didn’t look at me like I really looked—a strange girl hovering in the opening of the pavilion, dusty, bruised, bloody, hair caked with sand. And a tongue suddenly unable to talk. He looked at me like I had every right and reason to be standing there.

“You’re hurt.” His brow furrowed with concern. For a second I didn’t understand, and then I realized I was bleeding through the bandages.

Then his eyes swung to the knife in my other hand. I did the only thing I could think of. I held up the compass like a peace offering. “I’ve got this.”

“Ah.” Understanding dawned on his face. “You’re the one Shazad brought in with my brother.”

He said something else, but I only heard one thing.

Brother.

The word bounced around my head, looking for another meaning than the one I knew.

Then he said something else, but one word stuck itself in my head and didn’t let anything else through.

Brother.

My head scrambled looking for another explanation, but there was only one person he could mean.

Jin was his brother.

“Who are you?” I asked, even though I already half guessed.

An uncertain smile flicked over his face, like he wasn’t sure if I was joking. His smile looked nothing like Jin’s. “I’m Ahmed.”

He didn’t say his full name. He didn’t say he was Prince Ahmed Al’Oman Bin Izman. The Rebel Prince and rightful heir of Miraji. Prince. Stepped out of campfire stories. Who inspired cries to revolution across the desert.

I had no idea what I’d expected of the Rebel Prince, but it wasn’t that he would look just like every other desert boy I’d ever known. He was young. Black hair, skin dark from the sun, a strong square jaw, clean-shaven. Standing in a pavilion crowned in the sun with the commanding air of a Sultan twice his age. His sun. Not the sun of some foreign country tattooed on Jin’s heart. The sun of the rebellion. Of his brother’s rebellion.

A new dawn. A new desert.

Which meant Jin was a prince, too.

He’d told me about breaking his nose and his brother setting it. About how he’d been born in Izman but was from Xicha.

He’d never told me he was a prince.

I’d kissed a prince.

I felt the barrel of a gun press into the side of my neck, interrupting the spiral of my thoughts. “Drop the knife,” a girl’s voice said. “You owe me that much for saving your life.”

The instinct to fight reared its head, but my body was too tired to obey it. I uncurled my fingers so the knife planted straight at my feet. The gun moved away from my neck as the girl—the same one who’d killed the Skinwalker—walked around to face me, still aiming the gun at me. I remembered Ahmed had called her Shazad. She raised her voice. “Bahi, I found her.”

“Oh, thank God and every First Being.” A third figure dashed into the tent. It was the curly-haired boy who’d been dozing when I woke up. “I swear I only fell asleep for a second.” He wagged a finger at me like a scolding mother. “It’s not very polite to sneak away from someone after he’s saved your life.”

“Not the first time I’ve done that,” I admitted. My mind was still racing, but having a gun pointed at you had a way of making a girl focus.

“Not the first time a girl has snuck out on you while you were sleeping, either,” Shazad muttered at Bahi, low enough that I was the only one who heard. I hadn’t noticed when she’d been slaying the Skinwalker, but her accent was as northern and sharp as Commander Naguib’s, and it made me want to pick the knife back up.

“Are you going to shoot me or not?” My own accent scraped bumpily against hers as I stared down the barrel of the gun. “Seems like a waste of your saving my life.”

Shazad raised an eyebrow at me appraisingly, then lowered the weapon.

“Wow,” the curly-haired boy, Bahi, said to me. “I’ve never seen her give up so easily. She must like you.”

Shazad ignored him, “She knew the password,” she said simply. “Jin must trust her.”

Sakhr, I remembered.

“The door didn’t open, though,” I argued.

“It only opens from the inside,” Shazad said. “Any mortal who knows the true name of the Djinni who built this place can speak his name to request entry. It alerts us on the inside. We found the story of this place in an old book, along with the Djinni’s true name. Lucky for us, it turned out to be true when we had to flee Izman.”

True names had power. Shazad said, “So who let you lot in?”

“There are other ways in, if you’re able to fly.” Or willing to climb. I looked at the tops of the cliffs that surrounded us. If you knew the path, you could probably make your way in over the top of the canyon. How long until the Gallan from Fahali found their way in?

“Forgive us—” Ahmed paused expectantly.

“Amani,” I supplied.

“Amani.” He stepped around the table. “You’re tired. Would you like to sit and eat something and—”

“Bahi!” A new voice made everyone’s head turn. The girl who rushed in was younger than I was. Her hair was a dark purple, spreading in soft waves framing a round face earnest with panic. “Something’s happening to my brother. Jin’s babbling in his sleep.”

There was that word again. Brother.

She looked even less like Jin than the Rebel Prince.

“That’s normal,” Bahi said. “The Nightmare venom’ll be burning out of his system.”

“You’re sure?” The purple-haired girl’s voice was thin with tears.

“Delila.” The prince reached out for her comfortingly. For his sister, I realized.

“You’re the Djinni’s daughter,” I blurted. My head was spinning, trying to remember what was real and what was only something I’d heard around campfires. “From the story.”

Delila was momentarily distracted from her worry. She brushed her violent purple hair back behind her shoulders, like she could hide it.

“Expecting fangs and scales?” Prince Ahmed smiled like it was a joke, but there was a tinge of wariness there, too.

“Wings and horns, actually,” I half joked. That was what they’d said the prince’s monster sister looked like in Dustwalk. The younger girl’s eyes dashed to the ground, embarrassed. The air shifted around her head, like heat in the desert. The tinges of purple disappeared and her hair was as pure black as her brother’s. She fiddled with it self-consciously. I was suddenly sorry for having said anything at all.

“I’ll go check on him anyway.” Bahi scratched his neck, looking awkward in the tension. As he did, I saw blue ink etched into his palm in a perfect circle thick with lacing symbols.

My heart sank.

“You’re a Holy Man.” Back in Dustwalk, we stitched up our own gunshot wounds and missing fingers. You had to be missing a pair of limbs or a bucket of blood before it warranted the Holy Father’s intervention. We only called him when everything but prayer was hopeless—to heal in part, but also to bargain at the doors of death. The presence of a Holy Man was never a good sign. It was a last resort.

The thought must’ve shown on my face. “Don’t worry.” Bahi held up his other hand. It was blank. The matching tattoo that ought to have been there was missing. “I’m not a very good one.”

He put his marked hand on Delila’s shoulder, leading her out as he leaned in conspiratorially, speaking in her ear. He said something that made her laugh through her worry. I wished I knew what. I could use some words that would unknot the worry in my gut. If I’d dragged Jin halfway across the desert to die, I was going to kill him.

“What happened to him?” Prince Ahmed’s accent was neater than mine, but softer than Commander Naguib’s. Naguib. He was the Sultan’s son, too. He was Jin’s brother just as much as Prince Ahmed was.

Jin had pointed his gun at Naguib’s face and hadn’t pulled the trigger. It was a sin to kill your own blood.

“Is there anyone else related to Jin I ought to know about before answering that?” If ever there was a time to watch my smart mouth. It wasn’t even them I was angry at.

But Shazad snorted a laugh. An unpolished, undignified laugh that didn’t match the rest of her, and that didn’t seem to be at me either. “Not that we’re aware of. But you can never be sure with the Sultan and his women.”

But Ahmed caught the edge in my words. “You didn’t know he was my brother.” It wasn’t a question.

“I didn’t even know he was part of the rebellion.” Humiliation burned inside me. Ahmed and Shazad were both looking at me, waiting for me to say something that might explain why anyone would drag someone she didn’t even know through the desert. I wasn’t sure how to explain how the two of us got so tangled up.

“Jin blew up a factory.” That seemed like the right place to start, only it wasn’t, really. “That was after we burned down a building,” I added. “But that was sort of an accident.” Shazad’s face lit up with a smile. Like she’d just decided something about me and liked it. Then it all came tumbling out.

Shazad’s smile faded as I got to Dassama, but she didn’t interrupt as I rushed through the past few days. Fahali. Our escape. The Nightmares.

“We need to plan.” By the time I finished, Shazad was tapping the map that was spread out in front of the prince, pinpointing Fahali. “The Gallan and the Sultan are getting closer. And now they’re looking for us—with a weapon that can wipe out whole cities.” She turned to me. “What kind of range do you think this thing has?”

“Not enough to blast the whole canyon.” I looked at the jagged line of ink across the paper that showed the hugeness of the Dev’s Valley. Shazad’s finger rested on Fahali. There was a tiny x scratched at the other edge of her finger, marking the rebel camp. Less than a finger’s width apart didn’t seem far enough to be safe to me. “Enough that they don’t need to be precise. Or get through your magic door.” I hesitated. “And the thing is, there wasn’t a single bit of shrapnel in Dassama.”

“What does that mean?” Ahmed asked, looking down at the map. Surveying the country he’d already won once and was fighting for all over again.

“No shrapnel means it’s not a single-use bomb,” Shazad said, catching on quicker than the prince. “This is something new. Something they can use over and over again.”

“Which means they don’t have to know exactly where we are, because they don’t need to get us on the first try.” A look of perfect understanding passed between Ahmed and Shazad and right over me.

“We need Imin,” Ahmed said.

The girl who followed Shazad back into the tent moments later seemed completely unremarkable. She looked so average that it was hard to pick out anything to notice about her at all. Except that she had yellow eyes.

“We need a spy,” Ahmed said to the girl, Imin. “We need you to infiltrate the Gallan army in Fahali and send word if they get too close to us.”

“Fine.” The girl shrugged sullenly. Even as she did her face started shifting. Her lips narrowed, her skin paled, her shoulders widened, and her chest flatted. In a few blinks she was someone else entirely. A man with a whole new face. A Gallan face.

The only things that didn’t change were her—his—pale yellow eyes and her clothes. I thought of the red haired girl in Fahali, right before she got shot.

“I don’t like it.” Shazad surveyed their spy. “Your eyes . . .” Imin rolled them expressively at Shazad. “We ought to send Delila.”

“No.” Ahmed shook his head. “An illusion is too risky. Sending a Demdji into a Gallan camp is like sending a lamb into the lion’s den as it is. Illusions slip; shape-shifting doesn’t.”

“At least Delila can hide her mark,” Shazad muttered.

“It has to be Imin.” Ahmed’s tone didn’t leave room to argue.

Finally Shazad conceded with a nod. “There’s a dead ghoul in the canyon in Gallan uniform. Help yourself. You’re to report back by Shihabian.” She turned to go, nodding at me to follow. “And try not to get killed.”