فصل 24

twenty-four

The heat vanished. My skin felt fevered. My lungs burned.

I was on all fours, gasping for air, my heart going in time with the rattling of the train below me.

Bahi was dead. He’d died screaming, just like I’d said Commander Naguib would. I’d bent the universe and turned the harm away from Shazad straight onto Bahi. The carriage had gone still now, except for the chandelier above us, slightly singed, swinging frantically from side to side with the motion of the train.

Jin surged forward. One of the soldiers holding him shoved a knee into his spine, forcing him to the ground.

“Restrain him.” Naguib was doing his best to sound bored, but there was a waver in his voice. His hair was stuck to his skin with sweat. Hala let out a small sob without moving. “Might I suggest my esteemed foreign brother is next?”

But Noorsham ignored his commander. “Amani.” All his attention belonged to me. “You’re still alive.”

I didn’t understand him at first, and then I realized my clothes were charred, blackened, and burned away in places. Only I wasn’t. My skin was a Demdji’s. Daughters of immortal things didn’t burn easily. “I grew up in the desert.” My voice shook. “I know heat.”

“No.” He reached down a metal hand, like he might touch my face. I could feel the heat radiating off it. “You’re special, like me.”

And it was true, right down to our accents and blue eyes. I couldn’t tell him it wasn’t. We were both Demdji; we weren’t made for lies.

“I want to be alone with her.” He raised his voice so Naguib could hear him.

“Like hell.” Shazad was unraveled on the carriage floor. But with those two words I knew she still had some fight in her.

“Couldn’t have said it better.” Jin was struggling back to his knees. Naguib’s boot connected with his side again.

“Nobody hurts them.” I shouted as Naguib raised his foot again. He stopped, his boot hovering above his brother’s ribs. He wasn’t a commander with a prisoner then. He was a son who wasn’t allowed to compete for his father’s respect at the Sultim Trials. Who couldn’t command his soldiers’ respect and heard behind his back that his rebel brother was a better man than him. And he was taking it out on Jin. “I’ll come with you. And while I’m gone, nobody hurts them.” I turned back to the pair of blue eyes, set deep in the metal face. Were mine that unsettling to look at? “We got a deal?”

His eyes smiled, but the metal mouth never moved. I wondered if he’d grown up stupidly ignorant of what he was, just like me.

“You’ve got my word: no one will hurt them while you are gone.”

He held out his hand again. It didn’t matter that I was a Djinni’s daughter; his metal glove still made my palm blister when I clasped it.

• • •

THEY SEARCHED ME twice before they left me alone with him, but they did it hastily. I got the feeling even the soldiers were dying to get away from their Demdji weapon. Then we were alone in the next carriage over, a large dining car. It looked almost exactly like the one I’d eaten in on the train out of Juniper City. Every motion of the train made the glasses clink like a manic chorus of bells. Noorsham sat in a bright red chair while I leaned against the door, as far away from him as I could get.

“You didn’t come back,” he said finally. “In Fahali. You didn’t come back for me.” He sounded younger than he had in front of Naguib. And for a moment, the terrifying bronze armor blurred back into the scrawny soldier boy on the floor of the prison.

“I meant to. I wanted to. I tried, but . . .” I was making excuses. A lot of excuses for a broken promise, made when I thought we were both just children of foreign men. Not a defective Demdji and a weapon of destruction. “I know,” I said finally. “I’m sorry.

“How come you were locked up?” I asked.

“I wouldn’t obey my commander’s orders.”

“The prayer house,” I realized. “You wouldn’t burn the prayer house in Dassama.” He inclined his head slowly. “How come?” I remembered his disgust at Bahi. “Don’t believe anyone holy enough to be at prayers could be a rebel?”

“I knew there wouldn’t be any Gallan inside,” he said simply.

“The Gallan.” I shook my head in confusion. “Why would . . .” Dassama hadn’t just been allied to Ahmed; it had been a major base for the Gallan army. The Sultan wasn’t trying to burn out the rebellion on behalf of the Gallan. He wasn’t using it as a testing site because it was rising in support of Ahmed. He was scouring the foreigners out of his desert. “You’re not after us. You’re after them.”

“The Sultan told me that God was angry that we’d let faithless foreign powers into the desert. He said he needed me to return our land to our people. My fire could clean out the foreign armies, the ones that would harm us, control us, and take from us what isn’t theirs.”

Who marched in with their blue uniforms and took women and guns alike from this desert.

I thought of standing in the tent with Ahmed, scared his father was coming for us. How stupid and naive. The Sultan didn’t care about a handful of rebels wanting to make a better world. He was making a new world, too. One he didn’t have to share.

Something flashed outside the window. Blue wings. A huge blue Roc. Izz circling above the train. He must’ve realized something was wrong by now.

Noorsham followed my eyes just as Izz flung himself upwards, darting over the top of the train and out of sight.

“You’re from Sazi,” I said, drawing Noorsham’s attention back to me. I pushed myself away from the door and started pacing, keeping his eyes on me. Just because we told the truth didn’t mean I couldn’t fool him. “I can hear it in your accent. The mines.” The pieces were starting to come together: the way the burnt city reminded me of something I couldn’t put my finger on. Two great disasters separated by the desert. “It wasn’t an accident. It was you.”

“I destroyed the mines on the day I discovered my gift.” He stood up with the same ponderous motions as a Holy Father. “The day I brought light and wrath down on the wicked.”

“And Sazi was wicked, was it?” I traced my finger down the wood of the bar. So long as I was here, my friends stayed alive. So long as I was here, I could buy us some time. I just had to keep him talking. When I glanced out the window, Izz was gone. How long would it take him to figure out we were in trouble?

“You’re from the Last County, too,” he said. “How good were people where you were from?”

He wasn’t wrong. “You’ve killed more people than anybody in the Last County ever did.”

Noorsham spread his hands and the tightly woven chain mail caught the light. “I was chosen for greater things. This is my purpose.”

I recoiled. Greater things. It sounded too close to things I’d said to Tamid about leaving Dustwalk. About there being another life out there. One that wasn’t so small and pointless and short. The things I’d thought in the rebel camp. I could share an accent with someone who killed so gleefully, but I wasn’t willing to share my words. “What’d they do to you, anyhow, the wicked folks of Sazi?”

For a second, even made of metal, he looked human. “Do you remember seven years ago, when the Gallan army came through?” His fingers tapped out a rhythm on the bar as he walked toward me.

“The Gallan army came through more than once,” I said. I didn’t dare move away from him.

“Don’t you pretend you don’t remember.” His accent stumbled, and I heard the Last County thicker than ever. His tongue righted itself again. “This time was different.”

“I remember,” I admitted, even though I didn’t want to. It was a drought year. The restlessness went bone deep, and there were more of the foreigners in their blue uniforms than usual. “My mama and I hid under the house for a whole day. She tried to make me think it was a game. But I was old enough to understand some of why.”

Noorsham nodded. “My sister Rabia was old enough, too,” he said. “And then when the army was gone, folks up on the mountain got together and tossed stones at her and all the other girls for lying with foreign men. Until they were lying dead. And my mama let them.”

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.