“When am I not careful?” I tried for lightness, but in truth I was all too aware of his hand on my face.

“You’re never careful,” Jin said wryly, his thumb tracing rough patterns on my cheek, his eyes following it. Like he was memorizing it. “Hell, right now if anyone from the caravan happened to look over, your cover would be blown.” His hand ran along my jawline. I could feel his touch on my face leaving my breathing ragged.

“I’d say you’re the one not being careful just now.” He seemed to catch himself. His hand dropped away quickly. A cold ache spread out behind it. “Besides,” I said, “you’ll be with me. How much trouble can Atiyah possibly get into if she’s got Sahkr?” Atiyah and Ziyah was a great love story. Atiyah and Sahkr was just our joke.

He didn’t laugh. I’d gotten to know what silence meant from Jin. He was hiding something from me. Suddenly, how soon we’d be going our separate ways crept up on me. My aunt Safiyah might be blood, but Jin I knew. And I didn’t want to leave him. He made the world bigger. I wanted to go to the countries he’d been to. And more than anything I wanted him to ask me to go with him. But we were running out of time together.

In the early light of morning, the mountains looked even closer. My stomach twisted in anticipation. The excitement of nearing Dassama, the end of the desert and the first civilization we’d seen in weeks, crept into the caravan as the day wore on. The normal stoic trudging through the sand turned restless. The younger kids dashed up and down the line of camels, already trying to talk anyone who would listen out of a few louzi so that they’d be able to buy themselves treats when we got to Dassama. Men and women were starting to pine loudly for a glass of something cool. Isra was berating Parviz loudly about the provisions. How it’d almost not been enough this time. How we were going to have to resupply as soon as we got into town. Yasmin was keeping her young cousins going with a game she called When I Get to the City.

“When I get to the city, I’m going to pull off my feet and get new ones that aren’t so sore.” Little Fahim drooped dramatically, letting his arms swing like a rag doll’s.

“When I get there,” his sister chimed in, pulling him up by the scruff of his shirt, “I’m going to eat a hundred yazdi cakes.”

“One hundred!” Yasmin faked wide-eyed surprise. “How will you have room after eating a hundred dates and a hundred chickens?” She rattled off the list of foods the little girl had already promised to eat. I tried to stop my own stomach from growling in answer.

“What about you, Alidad?” Yasmin asked, trying to draw me into their game. “What are you going to do when we get to Dassama?”

Truth be told, all I wanted was to wash for so long that the dust from my skin would turn the baths to a miniature version of the Sand Sea. Only I couldn’t do that without throwing away my secret.

But more than Dassama, Izman was preying on my mind as we got closer to the end of the desert.

My mother had talked about going to find her sister in Izman so often that it was like a prayer in our household, when my father wasn’t there. But I didn’t even know if I wanted it anymore. I didn’t know if I’d ever wanted it or if my mother had just been wanting it enough for the two of us to keep us going all those years.

Hell, my aunt Safiya could be as bad as Aunt Farrah, and even if she wasn’t, I wasn’t so sure I wanted to turn myself over to anyone else who could claim a right to my life.

And I’d never see Jin again.

My eyes were latched to Jin’s back up ahead when I realized that the front of the caravan train had come to a stop.

“What’s happening?” Yasmin put her hand on Fahim’s head, keeping him from going any farther.

A mutter ran back through the caravan train as folks raised their heads, straining to see up front, shielding their eyes against the dying sunset. They wanted to see, but a caravan ran on orders. Except for me.

I broke into a run for the front of the caravan, which had reached the top of a dune. Parviz was standing above me, Jin next to him, his sheema pulled down, as I climbed my way up the sand. The camels had dropped to their knees to rest, not understanding why we were stopping.

I broke over the top of the high dune next to them. At first I couldn’t grasp it, either.

Where Dassama ought to have been, we were standing over ruins. Old, half-crumbled walls caught the setting sun, the last light casting shadows across them and stretching out across the sand. Then I realized they weren’t shadows.

My mouth went dry.

“How,” Jin said very carefully as I stepped up beside him, “does sand burn?”

•   •   •

THE CLOSER WE got, the worse it looked. Where the stone wasn’t blackened, it had crumbled to ash. In places the sand itself was black or burned hard. We didn’t speak as we drifted through what was left of the narrow streets and charred houses. This wasn’t a fire. Fire was something that some folks survived, that you ran from and put out, smothered in sand.

Jin was the first to say what we were both thinking, too low for the rest of the caravan to hear. “No bodies.”

“Bodies burn easier than stone.” I kicked a rock, and what was left of it disintegrated. “No fire would catch like this unless the whole place was soaked in oil.”

“A bomb,” Jin said. It wasn’t a question, but that didn’t mean he was right.

“The pattern for it is wrong,” I said.