Sayyida’s eyes were wide and unseeing, fixed on something far away that none of the rest of us could make out. Hala was inside her mind.
Mahdi dropped to his knees on her other side, across from Hala. ‘Sayyida!’ He gathered her up in his arms. ‘Sayyida, can you hear me?’
‘I’d appreciate it if you didn’t do that.’ Hala’s familiar clipped voice sounded strained. She still didn’t open her eyes. ‘It’s a little insulting to try to shake me out of her head like I’m a bad dream, seeing as I’ve been holding an illusion for the better part of a week to try to help.’ A week? That would explain why Hala looked like she was cracking. It was hard for any of us but the shape-shifters to use our powers for more than a few hours at a time. Let alone a week.
‘She was easy enough to find, waiting for me in a cell.’ Hala slumped on the ground. She was shaking visibly. Barely hanging on. ‘Getting in her head was the only way I could carry her all the way here quietly.’ She looked desperately at Ahmed. ‘Did you bring something to knock her out?’
Ahmed nodded, pulling a small bottle of something clear from his pocket.
‘What happened to her?’ Mahdi shifted so he was cradling Sayyida. I’d always figured Mahdi for a coward, but I realised now I’d never actually seen him look scared before. Not even on the wrong side of a prison door. And this fear wasn’t for himself. It was possible he did belong in this rebellion after all.
Hala glanced to Ahmed for permission. He hesitated for a second before nodding. The only sign Hala gave that she was letting go of her power was the small sigh that slid out between her lips before she sat back on her heels. But the change in Sayyida was like watching night fall at high noon. Her blank peace turned to screaming, her head arching back as she writhed out of Mahdi’s grip. She was thrashing blindly, like a trapped animal, clawing at Mahdi’s clothes, at the ground, at anything.
Shazad took the bottle from Ahmed’s hand and the sheema from her neck and poured the contents of the bottle into the cloth. Just the smell of it made my head spin a little. She latched one arm around Sayyida’s body, trapping the screaming girl’s arms against her sides, and pressed the soaked cloth against Sayyida’s nose and mouth. Shazad pushed slightly on the girl’s middle, forcing her to take a gasping, panicked breath, inhaling the full force of the fumes.
Mahdi hadn’t moved. He just stared with hollow eyes as Sayyida’s struggling got weaker until unconsciousness claimed her, making her go limp in Shazad’s grip.
‘Mahdi.’ Ahmed broke the silence finally. ‘Take Sayyida to the Holy Father’s tent. She can rest there.’
Mahdi nodded, grateful for the escape. He wasn’t a strong man; a scholar, not a fighter. His arms shook with the effort as he gathered her up. But none of us was about to insult him by offering him help.
‘Rest isn’t going to help her,’ I said as the tent flap closed behind him. ‘She’s dying.’ The truth came easily. Us Demdji couldn’t tell a lie. Whatever they had done to her, it was killing her.
‘I know,’ Ahmed said. ‘But trust me, it does very little good to tell someone that the one they love is dying.’ He looked straight at me when he said that. I wondered what had passed between him and Jin when I was at death’s door.
‘What did they do to her?’ Shazad’s voice was tight. ‘Did she tell them anything about us?’ Of everyone in this camp, Shazad had more at stake than any of us. She belonged to a family at the heart of Izman, and if it ever got out that Shazad was on the Rebel Prince’s side, there were a lot of people close to her the Sultan could easily reach for.
‘Oh, forgive me, I didn’t ask after the particulars of her torture while I was rescuing her all by myself, while also trying not to hand my Demdji self straight over to the Sultan,’ Hala sniped. ‘Maybe you’d like me to go back and trade myself in for some useless information?’ Hala was normally short-tempered, just not with Shazad. Folk didn’t exactly do well when they got smart with Shazad. Hala must be worse off than I’d realised.
‘If the Sultan knew about you, we’d already have heard,’ Ahmed said.
‘We need a new spy in the palace.’ Shazad drummed her fingers across the hilt of the sword at her side. ‘Maybe it’s time for me to return from my holy pilgrimage.’ As far as anyone in Izman knew, Shazad Al-Hamad, General Hamad’s devastatingly beautiful daughter, had come down with a bad bout of holiness. She’d retreated to the sacred site of Azhar, where the First Mortal was said to have been made, to pray in silence and meditate. ‘It’s nearly Auranzeb. It would be a good reason to go back.’
‘You get invited to Auranzeb?’ My ears perked up. Auranzeb was held every year on the anniversary of the Sultan’s coup for the Mirajin throne. A commemoration of the bloody night when he struck a bargain with the Gallan army and slaughtered his own father and half his brothers.
Even down in Dustwalk, we’d heard stories about the celebrations. Of fountains full of water flecked with gold, dancers who leapt through fire as entertainment, and food made of sugar that was sculpted so fine the folk who made it went blind.
‘General’s daughter privileges.’ Shazad sounded bored already.
‘No.’ Ahmed cut across us quickly. ‘I can’t spare you. I might not be as good a strategist as you, but even I know you don’t send your best general into the fray as a spy if you can help it.’
‘And I’m so very dispensable?’ Hala asked from where she was still slumped on the ground, a tinge of sarcasm in her voice. Ahmed ignored her. It was impossible to respond to every sarcastic thing Hala said and still have time to do anything else with your day. I reached out a hand, offering to help her up. She ignored me, stretching to steal a half-peeled orange from the table instead.
‘We have to do something.’ Shazad smoothed her hands compulsively over the map that was rolled out on the table. It used to be a single clean, crisp sheet of paper showing Miraji. Now it was a dozen different pieces showing far corners of the country. Cities with the names of rebels stationed there scrawled and crossed out; other pieces of paper overlapping one another as the desert shifted in our hands. There was a fresh note next to Saramotai. ‘We can’t just hide out in this desert forever, Ahmed.’ I recognised the beginning of the same argument that Shazad and Ahmed had been having for months now. Shazad kept saying we needed to take the Rebellion to the capital if we wanted a shot at winning. Ahmed would say it was too risky, and Shazad would say nobody ever won a war on the defensive.
Ahmed rubbed two fingers across a spot at his hairline as he started his reply. There was a small scar there, almost invisible now. I’d noticed he rubbed it like it still hurt, though, every time he sent one of us off to do something that might be our death. Like that scar was where he kept his conscience. I didn’t know how he’d gotten it. It was from the life Jin and Ahmed had before they came to Miraji.
Jin had told me the stories behind some of his scars once. On one of those dark nights in the desert between camp and a mission. Right after he’d earned a wound that would make a new scar right below the tattoo of the sun on his chest. We were a long way from any Holy Father to patch us up. Which left me. In the dark of his tent my hand had travelled across his bare skin, finding new bumps and marks while he told me where they’d come from. A drunk sailor’s knife in a bar brawl in an Albish port. A broken bone on deck in a storm. Until my fingers found the one on his left shoulder, near the tattoo of the compass that was on the other side of his heart from the sun.
‘That one,’ he’d said, so close to me that his breath stirred the hair that had escaped from the hasty knot on my head, ‘was from this bullet I caught in the shoulder when a pain-in-the-ass girl who was pretending to be a boy ditched me in the middle of a riot.’