I snorted. I couldn’t resist. “Doesn’t she always look like that?”
“Not all the time,” Atish said. There was a slight twitch in the corner of his mouth.
When we arrived at the pier, Atish set down the oars and hopped out, then tied up the boat. He was helping us climb out when we heard a scraping sound, followed by rumbling and creaking. It sounded as if every crystal in the Cavern was pushing past its neighbor. Atish pulled me off the pier and toward the lake wall. I stumbled and he picked me up, making sure I was away from the water. Shirin ran along beside us.
Panic bubbled within me, and I didn’t know what for. Shirin gasped, and she looked up. Worry was etched into her forehead. Above us, the crystal shards were swaying.
It was an earthquake. I had felt them at home, but I’d never been through one while I was inside the earth. I’d never felt so locked in before. This was worse than the wooden barge. This was all stone, and it was going to crash down on me.
“Get under the awning!” Atish shouted. He pointed at the stone building, where Gal was standing in the door, gesturing for us to come to her. Mutely, I ran, a step behind Shirin, climbing up to the top of the wall.
The earth continued to scrape together. I covered my ears and saw that everyone else was doing the same. Everyone was watching the crystals shift and sway like tree branches in a breeze.
The rumbling stopped as suddenly as it had begun, but no one dared speak. I wasn’t sure what would upset the rocks again. What if all it took was one word to send the crystals crashing down? Then the silence shattered with a deafening crack. A shard had split, high above, and dropped. It swooshed for half a second before crashing into the lake. The splash speared up into the air and scattered all the wisps of flame into dizzy sparks.
Atish was crouched beside me when he cursed, “Damn it, Farhad!” As soon as he said it, I remembered: the boys were climbing on the crystals. He hopped out from beneath the awning and spun around to look at the cliff behind us. He pulled at his short-cropped hair and swore.
Then he ran, disappearing behind the building. It took me a second to move, but I did, and found Shirin beside me. We left the safety of the awning and scanned the Cavern’s curved walls for any sign of the boys.
One of them had slipped off the topaz crystal and was hanging from a precipice that jutted out from below. Another boy was lying motionless atop the crystal. It looked like a rock had fallen and shattered around him. And a third boy was crouched on a ledge between the two, eyes wide. He was safe, but he wasn’t moving at all.
I scanned the crowd around us and noticed that all the jinn were taking care of themselves. No one noticed the boys a hundred feet above. No one but Atish, who was already across the jumble of houses and running up the footpath toward them.
Shirin yelped, and I grabbed her hand. “We have to help. Wish them to safety!”
“We can’t transport within the Cavern!” she shouted. “Oh, Atish, run faster!”
Atish leaped into the air and caught one of the lower crystals, then began scaling the cliff, moving from handhold to handhold without looking, as if he’d done this many times. Finally, he reached the third boy, said something to him, and crept over to the precipice. The first boy had not let go, and when I looked closer, his hands seemed to have gone into the crystal.
“He wished his hands into the rock!” Shirin said, sounding relieved.
We watched Atish lay his hands over the boy’s, causing them to glow. He lifted the boy and set him on the ledge beside the other one. Then he continued to climb swiftly, gripping the rock. For one terrible moment, his feet slipped and he hung vertically. I froze, terrified that he’d fall trying to save the boy, but he moved one arm, swung it ahead, and then the other. At last, he pulled himself onto the top of the crystal.
“How …”
Shirin nodded. “I know. Atish is a really good climber. That’s probably why Farhad wanted to climb today.”
Atish fell onto his knees beside the boy and swept the broken rocks aside, causing ashy dust to drift from the edge like snow. It had to be Farhad, judging by the way Atish knelt over him and pulled him into his arms.
If jinn couldn’t transport within the Cavern, how would he get him down?
Atish stood and settled Farhad, who seemed to be waking, onto his own back. Then he went to the edge of the crystal where it met the wall, and pressed his free hand into the rock. The rock rippled like water in strong wind. When he lifted his hand, he stepped off the edge of the crystal.
I gasped, but Atish did not fall. He had wished a set of narrow stairs into the wall, and he trudged down them, Farhad heavy on his back. When he reached the other boys, he gestured to them to follow, and they did.
“Come on,” Shirin said, tugging me from where I’d grown rooted. She guided me through the other jinn, who had gone back to their business, not knowing a disaster had just been averted. Finally, we reached the start of the footpath and found Atish.
I had expected him to be struggling now, and exhausted, but he was glowing. He was slick with the sheen of sweat, but stood tall and powerful and looked relieved. He smiled at me before setting a squirming Farhad onto his feet.
“Thank you,” Farhad said. Whatever awe he’d had for Atish before had been doubled. Atish smacked Farhad lightly on the top of his head.
“I told you to be careful,” he said.
The other two boys mumbled their thanks and then ran off, half-carrying Farhad, who kept looking over his shoulder at Atish. We watched them, and then Atish stepped toward me, wiping the sweat off his forehead and making his short hair stand up.
His eyes were burning a hole into mine, and for a moment, I didn’t mind.
Shirin shifted on her feet. “Um, I’m going to go after them. To make sure they’re not hurt.” She ran away, easily catching up with the boys.
“That had me worried,” Atish said. Then he laughed.
I swallowed. I had to be Najwa, but I could not deny my own self. I was in shock from the earthquake and the terror of watching Atish hanging from a rock, far too high above the ground. Still, there was a heat in my face, and I felt it rising. “That was amazing,” I breathed. “You saved the boys. I’ve never seen someone climb like that. So fast.”
“It was just a bit of climbing.” Just a bit of climbing. I’d climbed shallow cliffs before, so I knew what it was like. But I’d never thought what he did was possible.
I cocked my chin at the ceiling. “What about the rest of the crystals? Will there be another earthquake?”
“You know there’s never more than one at a time.”
That didn’t make me feel any better. “What if you’d fallen while trying to help them?”
“I didn’t really think about it. I just reacted. I couldn’t leave them up there.” He grinned until his whole face was beaming. “It’s all part of the Shaitan training. We’re pretty tough.” Then he stepped closer and put his hand on my shoulder. His touch was hot, searing into my skin. But I didn’t move away. Instead, I found myself wanting him to come closer. To touch more of me.
Everything had literally been falling down around me, but I had to appear as though it were all normal. Just an earthquake. Just falling crystals. Just a rescue. Just Atish, with his hand on me.
Still, I wasn’t supposed to be alone with a man. Even down in this land of jinn, I could feel my father’s eyes on me, narrowed with suspicion.
“Najwa,” Atish said. His voice had gotten thick. “I don’t know what is happening to me, or to you, but something changed.” He let go of me and leaned back against a boulder the size of a fattened camel.
“You mean how the Cavern is falling down?” I eyed the boulder, hoping it wouldn’t shift, wouldn’t roll down the hill, carrying me with it.
He smiled at me. “Not the earthquake. I mean how everyone always assumed we would end up together. I never rea
lly thought about it, to be honest. I was just going along with their expectations. But I can’t do that anymore.”
“What do you mean?” I asked. I pressed my fingertips into the coarse stone. This conversation felt too private.
“You’re different. I feel like all these years have gone by and I’ve never really looked at you before.” He looked down at the ground, then back up at me, and his eyes were suddenly bright. “I didn’t notice it until I came down from the cliff. You were standing there, with your hair still wet from the lake, and it was like I’d never seen you before, and … my stomach flipped.”
“I’m sorry—”
“Don’t be sorry,” he murmured. “All this is making me realize what I’ve always taken for granted. You.” He shook his head. “Now that we’re not students anymore, we shouldn’t take anything for granted. There’s a war going on. I’ll be fighting, and you’ll be spying. If we don’t do something about it, we’ll end up pulling apart.”
“Or get crushed by a rock,” I said, forcing myself to laugh. I looked up and regretted it right away. His eyes were desperate and wide, and a golden fire flickered in his irises. My chest fluttered and my stomach turned over.
“Say something,” he whispered.
“I …”
“Najwa, we’ve been friends since we were children, and I just now realized that—that I’m in love with you. You have to say something.”
I couldn’t swallow. My throat—my entire body—had gotten too tight.
“What’s wrong?” he asked. He studied my face, which was growing hotter by the second. I looked aside because I couldn’t look at him anymore. He was talking to Najwa, and I wasn’t her.
Part of me wanted, just for a second, to be her. But she should have been here when he made his declarations—not me.
“Nothing’s wrong,” I said. What would Najwa have said? Did she love him? “The war won’t tear us apart. Not if we care about each other.” It was a lie, and the worst part was that I had torn them apart. I had made the wish that changed everything.
He stepped closer, stopping only a few inches away from me, and held his hands over my shoulders. The heat emanating from his palms was like fire—the kind of fire that draws you in, makes you think the air is too cold, so you creep closer until suddenly you’re burning.
I waited, expecting him to set his hands on my shoulders, but he never did. Instead, he reached up to my face and into my hair. Then he leaned his face down, and I had just enough time to suck in a quick breath before he pressed his lips against mine.
How they burned. I melted into him, forgetting who I was, forgetting what he was, and letting everything inside me ignite. Finally, when his lips left mine, I felt a chill—the kind that makes you realize how much you needed that fire that had burned you.
Unable to look him in the eyes, I brushed the skin of his shoulder, where his Shaitan mark glowed beneath the surface. It pulsed with a beat different from his own, and I knew this only because his heart was pounding against mine, as rapid as a rabbit’s.
I was breathing him in. I was wrapping my arms around a jinni. A Shaitan soldier. And I had only just met him.
He moaned, then kissed me again. This time, I pressed back, giving him as much of myself as he’d given me. I wasn’t Najwa, but I wanted this. I wanted him. And so I fell into him, wrapping my fingers around the front of his vest and slipping them over the smooth skin of his chest. His hands had fallen to my back and were holding me up in the air. It was like flying.
“Definitely different.” He said this with his lips brushing against mine. “I like how spontaneous you’ve gotten.” Then he blinked and looked over my shoulder. “Yes?” He pulled away and stood at attention.
I turned and saw a jinni wearing a bronze-colored vest. He looked like a soldier, but he didn’t have the mark of the Shaitan. He nodded at me and snapped his heels together.
“The Master of the Corps requests your attendance.”
“Me?” I asked.
The jinni blinked, but didn’t move. “Yes,” he said. He waved dismissively at Atish. “You must come alone.”
“Sounds like you’ve got an assignment,” Atish said. He smiled, but it was wistful, as if he was the one who should have gotten called. I nodded, still shaken from the kiss he’d just given me, and followed the soldier. I left Atish behind at the boulder, but the heat on my lips came away with me.
21
Najwa
That evening, Rahela and I were invited to have dinner with the wife of the caliph. I hadn’t eaten all day, and although I was hungry and excited about trying human food, I grew worried that I would somehow reveal myself. A misspoken phrase, a cultural misstep, and any one of the women at the table might grow suspicious. Rahela, quiet and stoic, raised one eyebrow when I mentioned this.
“Were you not taught the ways of humans?” she asked. I had told her a little about myself. Not enough to betray the Eyes of Iblis Corps, but just enough to indicate that I did know a few things about humans.
“I was,” I said. I watched as she brushed her hair. It was as straight as the strands in her little loom. “But I don’t know everything. What if they ask me something about Zab? Or the journey?”
“They don’t know anything about the place. I think most of them have been here for years, and many have never been out of the city. But if they ask anything specific, I will speak for you. It’s not like I can’t talk.”
When we left for dinner, I was only slightly relieved by her offer to help. I still had a feeling, lodged somewhere in the back of my mind, that someone would notice. Someone would be watching.
Dinner was served on a series of low tables in the harem’s courtyard. The sun had set, but cut-brass lamps hung on poles and cast the courtyard in a golden light. The other women were already there, leaning against bolsters and talking.
The caliph’s wife sat in the center, between two women of apparently high rank, and when she saw us approach, she nodded. “Zayele,” she said, “and Rahela. Welcome.” She had calmed down since we last saw her. Her face was no longer red, and her voice was steady and strong.
“Yes, welcome,” said the woman to her left, and she gestured to a space at an adjoining table.
I sat on a leather cushion beside Rahela, careful not to bump my knees against the table, which was covered with little bowls filled with food. Two other women sat at our table, and they smiled at us.
“Thank you,” Rahela said. “It has been a long journey, and we are glad to be here finally.”
“How far is it from your little village?” one of the women asked. She sat across from me. She had a long nose, wide-set eyes, and a painted mouth that seemed more used to scowling than smiling.
I glanced at Rahela. We had gone over this. “It’s, um, three days.”
“It’s that close?” she replied, surprised. “I’d expected it to be further away, considering how different you look from us.” She somehow made the word “different” sound sour, and when she winked at the woman beside her, I knew what sort of person she was. I stared at my plate, which was still empty, and reached for a triangular piece of bread. I didn’t know what else to do.
“I was thinking the same thing,” Rahela said. Her voice had a hint of danger, and the woman shrugged.
I dipped the bread into a yellowy paste and tried it. It tasted of garlic, and something tangy, and I had to have more.
“Zayele, we are all so sorry your wedding has been postponed,” another woman said. She was the one sitting to the right of the caliph’s wife. “I’m sure the caliph will be well soon enough. And then you can send word back to your mother. I remember when I first came here. Don’t we all?” She looked around the courtyard and was answered with several nods.
“Yes,” said the caliph’s wife. “Please feel at home here. And enjoy the food, although it may be different from what you’re used to.�
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I suppressed a smile. She had no idea how different it was.
The meal continued, mostly in silence. No one seemed to want to discuss anything but the caliph’s fall, but each time it was brought up, the caliph’s wife looked stricken. It was obvious she cared for him, and I began to wonder about him. Was he like I’d heard in my classes with Faisal? Strong, proud, and shrewd?
Following dinner, when I had filled my stomach with more food than I could remember ever eating, I wandered into the garden. It hadn’t taken much to convince Rahela to let me go alone, and for the first time since I’d been caught by Zayele, I was alone. More or less. The lamplight didn’t reach into every corner, but I was a jinni and comfortable with shadows. I found a gravel path that wound around a clump of bushes and ended at a squat pomegranate tree. I knew the fruit was red, but in the darkness, the pomegranates hung like black orbs, weighing down the branches.
I crouched beneath the tree and looked at the rest of the harem’s garden. Most of the women had retreated to their rooms, but a few milled around by the stream crossing the garden. No one, thankfully, was paying attention to me anymore. Alone and unwatched now, I felt the weight of everything press in on me. I was imprisoned in this human life. I was in the very place where none of my friends could save me. And I had foolishly let Rahela cover up my mark with henna, and now it probably didn’t work.
I tried to choke back a sob, but it broke through, and I wept. I cried for my disobedience, I cried for the friends I might never see again, and I cried for myself and what would probably happen. Most of all, I cried because even though I was trapped, part of me thrilled to finally be here—tasting their food and wearing their gowns—and because of that, I felt wretched and guilty. I was trapped in a lie, and a horrible part of me wanted it that way.
I looked at the pomegranates hanging above me and their backdrop of stars. The night had gone suddenly to ink, and just like the diamonds in the Command of Iblis, the stars shone. But they were so far away, so remote, that they didn’t seem quite real.
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