Rebel of the Sands

by Alwyn Hamilton

  “It’s rude to stare.” A black bug crawled out of the sand, over my boot, and up my body. “And it’s rude to leave someone for dead to save your own skin.” I swatted at it, but it just exploded into ten black bugs, and then each of them into ten more until I was crawling with them, my hands slapping at my skin until it was red and painful.

  “Hala, whatever you’re doing, stop it,” Shazad ordered. I’d been wrong. Her voice wasn’t sharp; it was clean, like a good cut. The bugs vanished.

  Shazad had said something about a Demdji who could crawl into folks’ minds. I guessed I’d just met her. I already hated her.

  “Where I come from, people take care of their own.” Hala picked at her nails as if she hadn’t just twisted my mind around.

  “She was,” Jin said behind me.

  twenty

  Jin was awake, leaning heavily on Ahmed’s shoulder, standing on the outskirts of the light from the fire. He looked drained and tired, but he was alive. And he was looking at me. I reacted to him instinctively, my body pulling me forward like it was on a string tied to him. Like the swing of the compass needle twinned with another.

  But before I could stand, there was a squeal from the other side of camp. Delila rushed forward and flung herself into Jin’s arms, babbling in a foreign language I guessed was Xichian. She started crying into his shirt. Soon all the camp was on its feet, people crowding around him. Asking questions, welcoming him back.

  “Easy there,” Bahi called. “I’ve only just got him back on his feet.” Eventually folks started to trickle back to their campfires and their food, leaving Jin and Ahmed facing our small circle. Jin turned to Shazad.

  “General,” Jin said. His voice was thick with disuse, but the way he said it sounded so painfully familiar. Bandit, I heard him saying in the desert.

  “Don’t call me that.” Shazad embraced him with one arm, more careful of the bandages than Delila had been. “What happened to ‘I’ll just go and take a look around. I’ll be back in no time’?”

  The laugh made its way round the small circle that was left around Jin as I sat on the outside. I hunted through my feelings for something to say here, in this place I didn’t belong, to Jin, who’d just become a stranger all over again. These people had stood side by side planning a revolution since the days I was shooting tin cans off the fence behind my uncle’s house.

  “Better late than dead,” Hala said. She didn’t embrace him. But as the firelight danced over her golden skin, making it look molten, I saw that some of the hardness was gone from her now.

  “Yes, and you have me to thank for that,” Bahi added with his mouth full. Even on his feet, he was still shoveling food into his mouth while talking. “Not that anyone has thanked me yet.”

  “I thought Holy Fathers were meant to do their work for the grace of God, not the thanks of mortals.” Jin was careful not to catch my eye as he addressed Bahi.

  “Well, it’s a good thing I failed my training, then, isn’t it?” Bahi gestured dramatically with the food in his hand, flicking crumbs onto Delila.

  “You were bound to keep someone alive eventually,” Shazad said. “And Amani’s the one who dragged you here.” I wanted to hug Shazad and curse at the same time. Finally, Jin didn’t have any choice but to meet my eyes at the mention of my name.

  Two months in the desert hung between us. All the things he’d told me and the ones he hadn’t. The secrets and lies. The understanding that I hadn’t left him this time. That in two months I’d gone from the girl who’d drugged him and left him facedown on a table just to make a break for it to the one who’d dragged him through enemy soldiers and killer ghouls to save him.

  “Well.” Hala draped herself carelessly over Delila’s shoulders. “At least one of us was successful in bringing home a Demdji.” The new word was still so strange, it took me a moment to realize Hala was gesturing to . . . me. The circle went silent.

  “Demdji?” I was confused.

  Ahmed’s expression faltered. He said something to Jin in Xichian. Jin answered back with a shake of his head without looking at me.

  “Just because I don’t speak your language doesn’t give you the right to talk about me in it.” My voice rose higher than I meant it to. I was shouting in the presence of the prince. Two princes.

  “Amani,” Ahmed said gently. “Maybe you’d like to sit.”

  The plate that Shazad had given me had toppled off my knees and to the ground. I’d stood up without realizing it, without knowing what I meant to do, but sure as hell that I needed both legs planted to do it.

  “Maybe I wouldn’t.” I caught Jin’s mouth twitching up at the corner and my anger rose. “Lying,” I said, looking only at him, “is a sin.”

  Jin finally spoke to me. “I was going to hell long before I met you.” There was something like regret in his voice.

  “You don’t know that I’m—”

  Jin cut me off. “Don’t fool yourself, Blue-Eyed Bandit.” His voice was flat, a stranger’s, resigned. “I knew you were a Demdji before I knew you weren’t a boy. All I had to see was your eyes.”

  Traitor’s eyes.

  Delila’s hair. Imin’s eyes. Hala’s skin.

  The Djinni’s mark.

  “I realized you didn’t know when you told me about your mother’s husband. You called him your father. Demdji who know what they are don’t do that.” I looked at the two Demdji next to him. Delila was chewing her lip, looking uneasy, while on her shoulder Hala looked like she might be about to clap her hands at my discomfort.

  “Plenty of Gallan soldiers have eyes like mine,” I argued.

  “Northerners have eyes like pale water. Yours are different. Yours are the color of fire when it burns too hot. And it’s more than that.” Now that Jin had stopped ignoring me, all his attention was mine. “You know the stories better than I do: Djinn can’t tell lies. Neither can their children. I’d bet my life no lie has ever crossed your tongue.”

  My laugh was short and violent. Shazad took a step toward me, but I pulled back. “You calling me honest?”

  “No, you’re a great deceiver. But you’re no liar.”

  I remembered something Jin had said in the shop in Dustwalk. You’re a good liar. For someone who doesn’t lie.

  “At the shop, I hid you from Naguib—”

  “You didn’t lie to him.” The world narrowed to Jin and me and the memory of that day. “Not once. You told him it was a quiet day. You said there weren’t many foreigners in Dustwalk. Misleading truths, but still truths. You tricked him. Just like you did with the caravan. Just like you did when you told me I could call you Oman.” I thought about how easily Jin had trusted my word. Of how easily he’d given up on finding the weapon in Fahali when I’d said. “Djinn are powerful, deceitful things.”

  “So what’s your excuse?” I lashed out, but Jin didn’t even flinch.

  “I can keep going if you want.”

  “Jin.” Ahmed’s warning sounded far off.

  “The sand and the sun don’t drain you the way they do us mere mortals. You belong to them.” I remembered one of our last nights in the desert. You’re unnatural, he’d said to me. “You pick up languages like that.” He snapped his fingers, and I realized he’d spoken the last two words in Xichian. All the nights in the desert when he’d fed me stories of far-off places and scraps of their language. Testing me.

  “Stop it.” I could barely speak the words. What was it Shazad had said about the Demdji? That they—we—were useful. Was that why Jin had saved me in the first place? Dragged me across the desert, not as an ally, not because we needed each other to stay alive, but because he knew his brother could use me?

  I stepped closer, the circle around him parting for me nervously. Until I was close enough that I could’ve kissed him again. That kiss was a trick, too. Mine. I was a creature of deceit, but I wasn’t the liar here. “Why
should I believe anything you say?”

  “Go on, then.” His mouth twitched up. “Prove me wrong; tell me a lie. Tell me your name is Oman, straight out this time. Tell me you’re a boy named Alidad. Tell me you are not a Demdji.”

  “Why should I?” I could feel my tongue fighting against the words he dared me to say.

  “Because you can’t.” Victory was marked all over him as he watched me struggle.

  My hand lashed out. His face cracked sideways and my palm stung. And before anyone could say anything more to me, I ran.

  • • •

  “SO ARE YOU planning on stealing all our guns, or do you think maybe you only need one per hand?” I whirled around. Ahmed was watching me from the mouth of the small cave in the canyon wall. I could just make him out.

  I’d decided to leave. I’d decided that before my hand had even stopped stinging from hitting Jin. But I wasn’t going unarmed. I wedged the fourth pistol between the sheema I’d tied around my middle like a sash, since I didn’t have a belt, and my hip bone. “Maybe your armory ought to be better guarded if you don’t want folks helping themselves.”

  “Not a consideration we’ve really needed to have before you,” Ahmed said.

  “Well, you ought to think of that next time your brother brings ignorant strays home.” I pushed by him and started walking. Ahmed followed me.

  “Am I a prisoner?” I turned to face him when we’d walked a few steps.

  “No.” Ahmed clasped his hands behind his back. “Though Jin did say we’d better send someone after you so that when you collapsed from sheer stubborn exhaustion, we could bring you back before you died.”

  “He has so much faith in me.” I didn’t try to keep the bitterness from my voice as I fiddled with the pistol at my waist.

  “He does,” Ahmed said. “He thought you’d have made it much farther than this by now, for one thing.”

  I flicked the hammer of the pistol restlessly. He wasn’t wrong. I was exhausted. And wounded. And hungry. And miles from anywhere else I could go. Even farther from anywhere I wanted to be. But before Jin woke up, before the word Demdji spun out of Hala’s mouth and landed on me, I’d wanted to stay.

  “Why?” My voice cracked a little, and I cleared my throat.

  “Well,” Ahmed said, “from what I understand, you walked a long way here. Jin figured you’d at least make it past the point of no return . . .”

  I caught myself before I laughed. I could almost pretend he was just another boy from the Last County, except with a better accent. “Why didn’t he tell me?”

  “You’d have to ask Jin for his own reasons for not telling you. But if you want honesty from me . . .” Ahmed sighed. He looked older than eighteen. “The Demdji are an asset, Amani. Don’t get me wrong; every man and woman in this rebellion is. But Imin is the best spy I have. And Hala has saved more people than maybe even Shazad has. My sister is the reason I didn’t die at the end of the Sultim trials. The twins can take animal form and can cover distances in a matter of days that would take a normal man weeks. In a war, you take what best serves your cause.”

  I wished it were Jin trying to convince me. He’d be so much easier to argue with. But Ahmed’s logic couldn’t be bickered against so easily. And that just left me as the problem.

  “I can’t . . .” I faltered on the words. “I can’t do what your other Demdji can. I reckon I would’ve noticed by now if my face changed or I could make illusions walk through the air. I thought I might stay and . . . do what Shazad does.” Though now I said it out loud, it seemed stupid, too. Shazad might be wholly human, but I’d seen her kill a Skinwalker without breaking a sweat. Without a gun, I was just a girl. Not a Demdji. “I didn’t figure I’d stay to make bugs crawl out of people’s skin or turn myself into another person.”

  “If you choose to go, you can,” Ahmed said. “It’s dangerous in Miraji for a Demdji, but you seem to have handled yourself just fine so far.” I thought of the girl the Gallan general had shot through the head in Fahali. She had been like me. I remembered Jin warning me to be careful. Warning me against Izman. “But if you decide to stay, there are a half dozen other Demdji who could help you figure out what your power is, whatever it is that you can do that can help this rebellion. If you still want to.”

  If I wanted to.

  If I wanted to be part of this story. This riddle.

  Truth be told, it was more than a want.

  twenty-one

  There were three pomegranates hanging from the branch. And then there were two and then four. I glanced over at Delila, who smiled sweetly. “See, it’s not that hard.”

  It’d been a week since Jin woke up and Ahmed promised they could help me unearth my powers. A week of meditating with Bahi and of Delila instructing me that the way she cast illusions was that she just did. Somehow she thought a demonstration would help.

  “This is useless.” It didn’t help. “We don’t even know that my gift is with illusions.”

  “It is the most common Demdji gift,” Bahi offered philosophically from the sidelines.

  “Just try,” Delila said.

  “Yes,” Hala put in, looking on. “Make one disappear and you’ll be on par with the street performers in Izman.”

  I stared at the tree. I wasn’t sure what I was reaching for. Hala said it came from her mind. Delila seemed to think she pulled her power out of her chest. I couldn’t find anything in either one. The whicker of horses nearby unraveled whatever attention I’d had. I glanced over my shoulder. It was the party Ahmed had sent out three days before. A raid on a mountain outpost to bring back more guns.

  I’d asked to go with them. I knew guns. Ahmed had said no. That it wasn’t worth it sending out a Demdji before she had her powers in check. Just like he had the time before that. I was starting to wonder what the point of staying was if I wasn’t any use at all.

  As I watched their saddlebags, clinking heavy with guns, the frustration that had been rising in me whipped itself into a frenzy. I couldn’t manage to change my shape or my face, or climb into anyone’s head, or conjure images out of the air. Folks in camp had started taking bets on how long it would take me to figure out my powers. Or maybe I didn’t have any, the whispers had started to suggest.

  As I stared, one of the three pomegranates split open, spilling angry black ooze. I knew it was Hala’s work. My gun sprang into my hand on instinct. I aimed with easy certainty and pulled the trigger. The pomegranate exploded in a violent burst of seeds and red juices, Hala’s illusion disappearing with it.

  “There,” I said, holstering the gun. “Now there are two.”

  A laugh made me turn my head. I realized Jin had been watching. He was passing by us, carrying a stack of firewood toward the center of camp on one shoulder. He’d recovered quickly from the Nightmare bite. I’d seen him training at hand-to-hand combat with Shazad yesterday. She still beat him. Badly. But he held his own for a while.

  Fresh humiliation burned my neck as Jin saluted me and I turned away. We’d been doing a dance all week where Jin pretended nothing was wrong between us, and I pretended he didn’t exist.

  Like he thought it didn’t matter that he’d tricked me to get me here. That he’d pulled me off that train to keep me from going to Izman, not to keep me safe. That he’d convinced me the best way to get there was the caravan, preying on my ignorance about my own country. That I’d gone along with it because I was stupid enough to think we really were a team.

  I brushed the thought off. It was petty of me to hate him. This was a war. He’d done what he needed to do. Even if I turned out not to be all that helpful.

  “Do you know that you cast illusions while you sleep?” I asked Delila. It came out sharper than I meant it to. “I’m not going to become some all-powerful Demdji overnight just by focusing.”

  “We should take a break in any case,” Bahi interjected before
Delila could reply. “It’s only a few hours until dark, and tonight is Shihabian.”

  Hala glanced at the sky. The sun was getting low. Something that wasn’t a sneer flickered over her face for once. Delila saw it, too. She dropped a hand on Hala’s shoulder.

  “Imin is on her way back,” Delila said. My mind fell back to my first day in camp, when Imin had been sent out shaped like a Gallan soldier. She was meant to be back by Shihabian.

  “How do you know that?” I asked Delila. The more time I spent in camp, the more worried I’d gotten about the Gallan in Fahali. The oasis was like nowhere I’d ever been, and if everyone here from all over Miraji was to be believed, it was like nowhere else that existed. All it would take to destroy it would be the Gallan and their weapon.

  Delila looked faintly embarrassed. “It’s something I picked up when I was little. When my brothers started taking work on ships and sailing away, leaving me behind, I never knew when they were coming back. So every morning I opened my mouth to make sure I could say that they were still alive, they were safe, they were coming home. Then I’d try to say that today would be the day that they’d dock. And if I couldn’t say it, then it wasn’t the truth and it wouldn’t happen. Imin is on her way back.” She said it with the confidence of a prophecy.

  We couldn’t speak anything if it wasn’t the truth; what if it could work the other way? I’d done it once before, I realized, with the Gallan soldier. Told him that he wouldn’t find us in the canyon. And he hadn’t. But the Skinwalker had. “What would happen if I just declared that tomorrow my powers will show up? Or if I said—”

  Delila’s eyes went wide and Bahi’s hand was over my mouth whip-quick. The one with the tattoo on it. It smelled of oils and smoke, like the inside of a prayer house. For once he looked serious. “Demdji shouldn’t make truths of things that aren’t. You can never predict how they’re going to turn out.”