‘He’s right,’ another voice called from the other side, another face I couldn’t see. ‘Throw her in jail where she can’t make any trouble.’
A ripple of agreement spread through the crowd. Finally the man with sad eyes jerked his head in a sharp nod.
The crowd parted hastily as Hossam started to pull me through. Only they didn’t move very far. Everyone wanted to get a look at the Blue-Eyed Bandit. They stared and jostled for space as I was pulled past them. I knew exactly what they were seeing. A girl younger than some of their daughters, with a split lip and dark hair stuck to her face by blood and sweat. Legends were never what you expected when you saw them up close. I was no exception. The only thing that made me any different from every other skinny, dark-skinned desert girl was eyes that burned a brighter blue than the midday sky. Like the hottest part of a fire.
‘Are you one of them?’ It was a new voice, rising shrill above the din of the crowd. A woman with a yellow sheema shoved to the front. The cloth was stitched with flowers that almost matched my eyes. There was a desperate urgency in her face that made me nervous. There was something about the way she said them. Like she might mean Demdji.
Even folk who knew about Demdji couldn’t usually pick me out as one. We children of Djinn and mortal women looked more human than most folk reckoned. Hell, I’d even fooled myself for near seventeen years. Mostly I didn’t look unnatural, just half-foreign.
My eyes were what gave me away, but only if you knew what you were looking for. And it seemed like this woman did.
‘Hossam.’ The woman staggered to keep up as he dragged me through the streets. ‘If she’s one of them, she’s worth just as much as my Ranaa. We could trade her instead. We could—’
But Hossam shoved her aside, letting her be swallowed back into the crowd as he dragged me deeper into the city.
The streets of Saramotai were as narrow as they were ancient, forcing the crowd to thin and then dissipate as we moved. Walls pressed close around us in the lengthening shadows, tight enough in some places that my shoulders touched on both sides. We passed between two brightly painted houses with their doors blown in. Gunpowder marks on walls. Boarded-up entryways and windows. There were more and more marks of war the further we walked. A city where the fighting had come from inside, instead of beyond the walls. I supposed that was called a rebellion.
The smell of rotting flesh came before I saw the bodies.
We passed under a narrow arch half covered by a carpet drying in the sun. The tassels brushed my neck as I ducked under. When I looked back up, I saw two dozen bodies swinging by their necks. They were strung together across the great exterior wall like lanterns.
Lanterns who’d had their eyes picked out by vultures.
It was hard to tell if they’d been old or young or pretty or scarred. But they’d all been wealthy. The birds hadn’t gotten to the kurtas stitched with richly dyed thread or the delicate muslin sleeves of their khalats. I almost gagged at the smell. Death and desert heat made quick work of bodies.
The sun was setting behind me. Which meant that when sunrise came the bodies would blaze with light.
A new dawn. A new desert.
Chapter 3
The prison almost smelled worse than the corpses.
Hossam shoved me down the steps that led underground into the jail cells. I had time to glimpse a long line of iron-barred cells facing each other across a narrow hallway before Hossam pushed me inside one. My shoulder hit the ground hard. Damn, that was going to bruise.
I didn’t try to get back up. I lay with my head against the cool stone floor as Hossam locked the jail cell behind me. The clang of iron on iron set my teeth on edge. I still didn’t move as the footsteps faded up the stairs. I waited three full breaths before struggling to my feet using my bound hands and elbows.
There was one small window at the top of my cell that gave just enough light that I wasn’t fumbling around in the dark. Through the iron bars I could see into the cell across from mine. A girl no older than ten was curled up in the corner, shivering in a pale green khalat that had gone grubby, watching me with huge eyes.
I leaned my face into the bars of the cell. The cold iron bit deep into the Demdji part of me.
‘Imin?’ I called down the prison. ‘Mahdi?’ I waited with bated breath as only silence answered. Then all the way at the other end of the prison I saw the edge of a face appear, pressed against the bars, fingers curling around the iron desperately.
‘Amani?’ a voice called back. It sounded cracked with thirst, but an annoyingly nasal, imperious note remained. The one I’d gotten to know over the last few months since Mahdi and a few others from the intellectual set in Izman had made the trek out of the city and to our camp. ‘Is that you? What are you doing here?’
‘It’s me.’ My shoulders sagged in relief. They were still alive. I wasn’t too late. ‘I’m here to rescue you.’
‘Shame about you getting captured, too, then, isn’t it?’
I bit my tongue. It figured I could count on Mahdi to still be rude to me even from the inside of a jail cell. I didn’t think a whole lot of Mahdi or any of the rest of the weedy city boys who’d come to the heart of the Rebellion so late. After we’d already spilled so much blood to claim half the desert. But still, these were the men who’d supported Ahmed when he first came to Izman. The ones he’d traded philosophies with, and first started to fan the spark of rebellion with. Besides, if I let everyone I found annoying die, we’d be mighty thin on allies.
‘Well’ – I put on my sweetest voice – ‘how else was I meant to get through the gates after you bungled your mission so badly that they put the entire city on lockdown?’
I was met with a satisfyingly sullen silence from the other end of the prison. It would be hard for even Mahdi to argue that he hadn’t failed from the wrong side of a prison door. Still, I could gloat later. Now the last of the daylight was starting to retreat, I was going to have to move quickly. I stepped away from the iron bars. Rubbing my fingers together, I tried to work some blood back into my hands.
The sand that had stuck between them when I’d pretended to trip at the gates shifted in anticipation. It was in the folds of my clothes, too – in my hair, against the sweat of my skin. That was the beauty of the desert. It got into everything, right down to your soul.
Jin said that to me once.
I brushed aside that memory as I closed my eyes. I took a deep breath and pulled the sand away from my skin – every grain, every particle answering my call and tugging away from me until it hung in careful suspension in the air.
When I opened my eyes I was surrounded by a haze of sand that glowed golden in the last of the late afternoon sun streaming into the cell.
In the cell across from mine, the little girl in the green khalat straightened a little, leaning out of the gloom to get a closer look.
I sucked in a breath and the sand gathered together into a shape like a whip. I moved my tied hands away from my body as far as I could, shifting the sand with the motion. None of the other Demdji seemed to understand why I needed to move when I used my power. Hala said it made me look like some Izmani market charlatan of the lowest order. But she’d been born with her power at her fingertips. Where I came from, a weapon needed a hand to use it.
The sand slashed between my wrists like a blade, severing the rope. My arms snapped free.
Now I could do some real damage.
I grabbed hold of the sand and slashed my arm downwards in one clean arc, like the blow of a sword. The sand went with it, smashing into the lock of the cell with all the power of a whole desert storm gathered into one blow.
The lock shattered with a satisfying crack. And just like that, I was free.