Rebel of the Sands (19 page)

“Who's we?” I asked, starting to undress.

“Me and Jin, and you if you want.”

My hands faltered on my buttons, Delila's words fresh in my mind. “I don't think I'm meant to leave camp before I figure out my powers.” I didn't sound that convincing even to myself, and Shazad made a disbelieving noise at the back of her throat.

“However short our lives might turn out to be if this revolution fails, you can't avoid him forever, you know.”

“Want to watch me try anyway?”

•   •   •

THE HOLY TIME
of Shihabian started when the sun vanished, a reminder of the night when the Destroyer of Worlds came and brought darkness with her. Last year Tamid had spun me in place until I was dizzy, and we both laughed until we had to hold each other up, tipsy-turvy from drink and dancing. We celebrated until midnight,
when the whole world would turn black in memory of the first night. And then, when the stars and the moon came back, we prayed until dawn.

But Dustwalk's celebrations had nothing on those at the Rebel camp. Lanterns were strung between the trees so thick, I could barely see the branches for the light. Figs plucked straight from the trees, cakes so sweet my fingers stuck together. The air smelled of oil and incense and smoke and food and the desert and being alive in the desert.

I was fiercely conscious of the way the silk and muslin of my borrowed khalat felt on my skin. The golden cloth draped and clung like nothing I'd ever owned. I'd cinched it at the waist. Shazad's figure was better filled out than mine, but I wasn't going to be mistaken for a boy in this, especially not when she opened the top three clasps at my throat. I'd put up a bit of a fight, but Shazad was a better born fighter than I was, and in the end I had to let her loose on me. I'd figured she'd try and fail to turn me into something as bright and polished as she was. Instead, when she'd held up the mirror, a wild thing stared back.

My hair was twisted and half-bound, coming apart in waves that kissed the edge of my jaw and my neck like I'd been caught in a sandstorm. She'd painted my lips red enough that I imagined I could taste blood. My eyes were so dark around the blue that I feared for anyone caught in their crosshairs.

I looked like something that belonged in a revolution.

The pair of us drifted from one fire to another, people
catching us to talk, sweeping me up in camp chatter as easily as Shazad. I ate honey cakes and washed them down with sweet wine. I spotted Jin across the campfire, playing some game or other with his sister and laughing as he lost.

There was a pair of cats by a fire. One blue, the other gray with a blue tuft on its head. I knelt down to scratch the blue one absently, and instead of a cat I found my hand on the stomach of a very naked, very blue boy.

“Happy Shihabian, General.” The boy saluted Shazad, who barely bothered to look down as she stepped over him. I tried to keep my eyes on his face and off any other part of him.

“Izz,” Shazad replied, nodding to the blue-skinned boy, “meet Amani. Amani, meet the twins. Or one of them. They just got back from doing a supply run for us this morning.”

I flushed and looked away, catching Shazad looking too damn amused. The other cat turned into a boy, too. He was identical to Izz, but his skin was dark. Only his hair was the same pale blue as his brother's skin.

“And this is Maz.” Shazad gestured.

Maz grinned. “The one and only.”

I glanced from him to his twin. “Who taught you to count?”

The twins beamed at me. “So you're the new Demdji,” Izz said, standing to inspect me with no mind to how bare he was. “We wanted to meet you.”

“We were wondering if you might be our sister,” Maz said. “On account of your eyes.” He gestured to his hair,
an unnatural blue, a few shades off from my eyes. If we'd both inherited it from our Djinn fathers, it might be that we shared one. The realization that I might suddenly have a brother after seventeen years unsettled me.

“I've always wanted a sister,” Izz said brightly. “Have you met Imin? She and Hala had the same Djinni father, you know. Their mothers lived on the same street in Izman.” So I was responsible for Hala's golden-eyed sister risking her life in the Gallan camp. It seemed I couldn't stop doing things to make her hate me.

“Amani's not our sister, though.” Maz looked faintly disappointed as he said it. “Or else we wouldn't be able to say that she's not our sister.”

“Still!” Izz said, perking up. “You might be able to change your shape like us. That would be just as good.”

“Do you want a drink?” Shazad blessedly pulled me away from the naked twins.

The dancing started soon after. I'd never danced properly at Shihabian before. Not with Tamid's injured leg. I couldn't stand to leave him out. But my body loosened soon enough and was weaving through the sparks from the fire, from one partner to the next. As drink flowed more freely and people got sloppier, we spun more wildly. I careened round Shazad dancing with Bahi, and a pair of hands belonging to my next partner grabbed me, spinning me around to face him.

I was chest to chest with Jin. We both stopped, letting the dancing go on around us. I could feel the warmth of his hands through the delicate fabric of the khalat. After
weeks of my being a boy around him, everything that made me a girl was in his hands. His eyes traveled over me slowly, resting for just a second on the red sheema tied around my waist. It was the one he'd given to me. All the way back in Sazi. “You look like you were born out of fire.”

“Jin—” I started. I never finished. Midnight dropped like a cloak over the sky like it always did on Shihabian. One moment there were fires and lanterns and stars and moonlight, and then there was just blackness.

No matter that the Buraqi were fewer and the Djinn didn't live alongside men anymore, no matter how many factories rose up filled with iron and smoke: this was magic that didn't fade. It lived in the memory of the world itself. The first true dark, when matches wouldn't strike, tinder wouldn't catch, and stars hid. Jin's hands slipped away from me, and I felt even his presence fade. I couldn't follow him. Not in this kind of dark. All of us stood completely still where we'd stopped. Waiting for the light to come back.

A fire flared to my right. The stars were blinking back to life one by one. Still, no one spoke. The hours up to midnight were for festivities; now was a time for prayers and memories. My eyes darted around for Jin as the crowd shifted me toward the single fire like moths.

The storyteller was a young woman. She stood on a raised stone by the fire, Demdji gathered all around her, facing the rest of the camp.

“The world was created in light,” the storyteller began, the traditional opening. Every story might be different,
but it always began with the same words. “And then came the night. The Destroyer of Worlds came from the dark that existed only in the places the sun couldn't touch.”

I spotted the back of Jin's head as he escaped the crowd. I followed, weaving my way through the people dropping into prayer, walking until the noise and light and illusions and laughter were far away and the edge of the desert opened.

“Blue-Eyed Bandit.” I jumped at Jin's voice. I could just make him out now in the returning starlight.

He took a swig from the bottle dangling from his fingers, and for a wild second I thought he might be drinking up the courage to really face me this time.

“Want a drink?” He held out the bottle. “There was this girl once I knew from the Last County who could hold her drink even when I wound up head down on the table.”

He meant at the Drunk Djinni, by the gutted-out mines of Sazi, when I was just the girl with the gun who could hold her drink and he was just a foreigner who couldn't hold the drugs I slipped in his. Instead of a Demdji and a prince. When I was still so certain of everything and he started lying to me.

“Then again,” Jin said, taking another swig, “that girl didn't walk away from stories halfway through either.”

In that moment, I did turn to fire. My hand sent the bottle flying to the ground, the sand guzzling the spilled liquor as it rolled. I realized I'd been expecting him to stop me, catch my arm before I could hit him.

“Stories and lies.” I found my voice and swallowed
whatever else was snaking up my throat lest it come through as tears. “I'm not so fond of them as I used to be. But you know by now, all your lies to get me here were wasted. Haven't you heard what they're saying? That I'm the only Demdji in the world without powers?” He struggled through his drunken haze to focus on me. “Did you ever think about telling me what I was?”

All at once Jin filled my senses, the smell of liquor and heat and the sight of the distant planes of his face, of the tattoos just visible through his shirt.

“You want to talk about this? Now?”

“Why not?” I spread my arms wide, daring him. “Why don't you tell me what the plan was? If things had been different in Dassama, were you going to truss me up like a prisoner and drag me here? Or did you have different lies all ready?”

“I didn't make you come here.” Jin's eyes bored into mine, but I wasn't backing down. He said I had traitor eyes. Let him see the betrayal there. Let him drown in it. “I didn't trick you and I didn't ask you to.”

“What else was I meant to do? Leave you to die?”

“You might've.”

“I wouldn't have.”

“The truth is I had no idea what I was doing when it came to you, Amani. I tried to leave you in Dustwalk because I didn't want to drag you into my brother's war. I came back for you because I didn't want to see you die at the hands of my other brother. But either way, I was bound to wind up doing one or the other. Just depended
on which one.” His hand came up like he was going to reach for me but dropped to his side instead. “I was glad in Sazi when I saw you'd gone because it meant you'd escaped on your own path, and I was glad when you took the compass because it gave me a reason to go after you. And yes, I lied to keep you out of Izman because I was afraid someone would know what you were and you'd get snapped up and sold to the Sultan. And I steered you toward Dassama figuring there was a chance I might be able to deliver you to the sea and get you out of this country before it killed you.” His face was so close now. I remembered what he said once, crossing the desert, that the sea was the color of my eyes.

“You don't have any right to decide that for me.” I shoved him away from me, trying to tear him out of my space, out of my head.

“But
he
does?” Jin shouted, the moment breaking. “My brother says you're a Demdji and you think that will make your life matter, more than being the Blue-Eyed Bandit?”

I rounded on him, my hair catching in the air as it came loose from its braid. “You can't judge me for wanting to be more than just another worthless grain in this desert. Not when you were born so much more than this. Not when
you
were born powerful and important.”

“Really?” Two of Jin's quick steps carried him across the sands so fast, it was almost violent. “I was born the same year as ten brothers and a dozen sisters. Being born doesn't make a single soul important. But you were important when I met you, that girl who dressed as a boy,
who taught herself to shoot true, who dreamed and saved and wanted so badly. That girl was someone who had made herself matter. She was someone I liked. What the hell has happened since you came here that
she
is so worthless to you? What's happened that only my brother's approval and some power you never needed before can make you important? That's why I didn't want to bring you into this revolution, Amani. Because I didn't want to watch the Blue-Eyed Bandit get unmade by a prince without a kingdom.”

I wanted so badly to tell him he was wrong, but my tongue turned to iron just at the thought. But that didn't mean he was in the right either. “And what are you doing fighting for this country if it's not for him? This country you don't understand and you resent for taking your family—”

“You're right.” He cut me off. “I never understood this country. I never understood why he chose to leave everything else behind and stay for this. Not until I met you.”

I felt like he'd pushed me, like I was falling and I needed him to reel those words back in to keep me standing straight.

“You
are
this country, Amani.” He spoke more quietly now. “More alive than anything ought to be in this place. All fire and gunpowder, with one finger always on the trigger.”

We stood close, anger pulsing between us. My heart was beating fast—or maybe that was his. We were breathing each other.

Just him and me.

There was more fire in me than I'd felt since I was told I was a Demdji. I opened and closed my hands, wanting to reach for him.

“Jin.” Bahi's voice broke the moment. His face was graver than I'd ever seen it. “Ahmed is looking for you. There's news of Naguib's weapon.”

•   •   •

“THE WEAPON IS
on the move.” Imin was gulping down water. She—he'd practically run from Fahali.

“You've seen it?” Shazad asked.

Imin shook his head. He was still wearing the shape of the Gallan soldier. Everyone from the inner circle stood around him, hanging on his every word: the prince, Shazad, Jin, Bahi, Hala. And then me. “Just rumors. Some accidental fires in Izman that they're trying to blame on us. And three ships anchored in port that burned down. But there was a missive this morning. To Fahali. Commander Naguib is coming as a representative of his father to negotiate the terms of the alliance with General Dumas.”

“Well, that certainly sounds like ‘We're bringing you a weapon to annihilate the rebellion' to me,” Hala commented, putting a hand on her sister-brother's shoulder.