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.”