I drove my other fist into his gut hard enough that my knuckles popped. Jin doubled over, coughing. “Thanks for the tip.” I wished victory didn’t feel so much like I’d sprained my hand.
“Any time.” He clutched his stomach where I’d hit him, but it looked like he was laughing. I had the wild urge to hit him again while he was down. Instead I drew my shirt up, pulling the gun out of where it was tied against my hip.
“We should start walking,” Jin said. “We’re probably less than a day out of Massil. We’ll have to follow the rails. We could be there before the sun gets too high if we start now.”
“What makes you think I’m going anywhere with you?” If it weren’t for his having an army on his tail, I’d still be on the way to Izman. Of course, if it weren’t for him I’d also still be in Dustwalk. But I wasn’t going to get into that just now. I shoved my gun back in my belt; no need to hide it here. Better for folks to know I was armed.
“You got a better plan?” Jin waved his arm at the empty desert like he was offering me a feast for fools. “Would you rather strike off across the desert and wind up food for buzzards than walk another day with me?”
He wasn’t wrong. It was open nothingness as far as the eye could see all around us. Except for the rails that ran like an iron scar through the sand. There were only two ways to go if I wanted to stay alive. Forward with him. Back to Juniper City.
I wasn’t going back.
“Don’t flatter yourself.” I riffled my fingers through my hair, pulling it loose from where it was trapped under my sheema as I started to walk. “You’re not near worth dying over.”
• • •
WE WALKED IN silence as night crept its way across the sky. My anger kept me three steps ahead of Jin as we walked. But even that fire started to dim as the night wore on. I told myself over and over again there’d been another way. We could’ve stayed on the train. Found somewhere to hide. Something.
After a few hours of turning it over and over in my head, though, I couldn’t think of anything else that we could’ve done except jump.
It was hard to stay angry at someone who’d saved your life.
We’d been walking near all night when I noticed the other figure.
I thought it was a trick of the hazy gray predawn light. The uncertain times between day and night, where neither God nor the Destroyer of Worlds had true dominion, were the most dangerous. But no, down the rails, someone was walking toward us.
I dropped to the sand on instinct, flattening myself into the landscape. Jin was down next to me in a second without question. “What is it?” He had the sense to keep his voice low as he crawled up next to me on his elbows.
“Someone is coming.” I nodded ahead. All I could make out was a silhouette on foot, coming in our direction. It could just be a lone desert nomad, leaving Massil as we were going in. Or it could be that someone in the third-class carriage had told the soldiers they’d seen a girl dressed as a boy and a foreigner jump off the train.
The same thought clearly occurred to Jin. “Come on.” He started to push himself forward on his elbows to stay close to the sand, moving away from the rails. We’d been walking between them, from one wooden slat to the next, so there’d be no tracks. I crawled behind Jin, kicking any marks from our bodies away with my boot. We crested a sand dune. I rolled over to the other side, flattening myself on my front so we were hidden from the rails.
I loosened my gun just in case. Jin already had a knife in his hand.
We lay in the sand in silence, side by side. I could feel the desert shifting below my stomach with every breath. I listened for the sound of passing footsteps. That was the trouble with sand—it muffled most noises. We’d never hear him climbing up the dune until he was on top of us. We outnumbered him, but surprise made a single man dangerous.
It probably wasn’t a soldier, I realized. Soldiers didn’t tend to travel alone. But that still left a hundred dangerous possibilities. A hungry Skinwalker. A greedy desert bandit. A Djinni.
No. That was ridiculous. It couldn’t be a ghoul—the iron ought to keep them away. And no one had seen a Djinni for decades. They didn’t live among us like they used to anymore.
But they were immortal. And this was the desert. The true open desert. Legend said things were out here that hadn’t been seen by civilizations in decades.
The unknown made me itch to clamber over the dune and take a look. I shifted ever so slightly, inching my way up the dune. Jin hissed a warning under his breath. I pressed the gun to my lips, to silence him. And remind him I was armed, and likely a better shot than whoever was on the rails. He didn’t reach out to stop me as I pulled myself the rest of the way up.
The rails were as empty as a drunk’s liquor bottle on prayer day.
“There’s no one there. They’ve gone past.” Or they’d vanished in a column of smokeless fire like the Djinn in the stories.
“Do you have a death wish?” Jin sounded almost impressed, his voice returning to a normal volume as he sat up.
“If I did, I wouldn’t be very good at it, seeing as I’m still alive,” I said, holstering my pistol.
“God knows how.” Jin scrubbed his hands over his face, tiredly. I was dead tired, too. It hit me all at once. “Didn’t anyone ever tell you the story of Impulsive Atiyah and the Djinni Sakhr when you were a child?”
“You mean the Djinni Ziyah,” I corrected him absently.