We picked our way through the mess carefully; silks and muslins spilling out of a trunk brushed against my leg like clinging cloth fingers. A rope of pearls was wound carelessly on top of another chest. So this was what selling someone out to the Sultan bought you.

And in the middle of it all, sprawled across a bed, slept my aunt.

‘Ready?’ Hala whispered. I nodded because I wasn’t sure I’d be able to answer truthfully. Hala didn’t deign to wave her hands over my aunt’s body like the street performers did. There was no sign that she was doing anything at all except a slight crease of concentration on her forehead.

My aunt came awake with a violent gasp as Hala seized control of her mind.

For a second, she looked around, wild-eyed. Then she saw me and her gaze focused in recognition.

‘Zahia,’ she gasped out. I watched her fight it for a moment, the line between reality and dream. Between the knowledge that her sister was dead and what she was seeing standing in front of her. It took only a few blinks before the illusion won.

‘Safiyah.’ I sat on the edge of her bed. ‘I need your help.’ I rested my hand next to hers on the cover. I couldn’t quite bring myself to clasp it in pleading.

But Safiyah did it for me. She laced her fingers with mine and pulled my hand to her lips. ‘Of course.’ There were tears in her eyes now. ‘For you, I would flood the desert.’ She paused expectantly, looking at me. And I realised it was one half of a saying. Something that’d passed between Safiyah and my mother. Some secret bond between sisters.

Only it wasn’t secret. I knew it. My mother had said it to me before. But there was no way I could say it to Safiyah.

I thought of Shazad. My sister in arms. We had recognised something in each other the first time we met and we were tied. By more than blood.

I would probably want to destroy anyone who stole her life, too. The way I had my mother’s.

‘For my sister …’ I willed the words off my tongue. ‘I would set the sea on fire.’

The rest was like walking my aunt through a dream world. She led me into her kitchen. It was a small room crowded with hanging spices as well as jars and jars of things that belonged in an apothecary. She cleared the kitchen table, talking the whole while, snippets of conversations meant for my mother which I barely understood. It was eighteen years of all the pent-up things she’d wanted to talk to her sister about while there’d been a desert between them. All the secret private jokes between sisters in a life before this one. The language of two women I’d never really known.

‘You need to strip,’ she told me. As one, Hala and I turned to look at Sam meaningfully.

He held up his hands like we had him at gunpoint. ‘I’ll, um … keep watch,’ he said, backing through the wall.

I stripped and lay down on my aunt’s table. She plucked a tiny knife out of the pile and started cleaning it. I’d been stabbed and shot and beaten and plenty of other things in my life. But I still didn’t love the look of this knife. With a roll of her eyes Hala slipped her hand into mine as my aunt stepped forward, swiping a piece of fabric, wet with something that made my skin tingle, across the spot where the first shard of metal was embedded.

The tiny knife pressed into my arm. I felt the needle of pain shoot through me. I tensed instinctively, squeezing my eyes shut. But the feeling of my skin breaking never came. And then the hard table below me was gone. I moved my fingers and found soft sand beneath my skin.

I opened my eyes. I was staring up at stars. Desert stars, the way they blazed in the open nothingness against the dark, the last burning light of the desert.

This was an illusion. I knew that because I knew Hala. And I knew I was lying on a kitchen table with a knife cutting metal out of my arm and being stitched back up by my aunt.

But knowing the stars above me weren’t real didn’t matter – same as realising you were in dream didn’t help you wake up. I didn’t fight it, this unexpected kindness of Hala stealing away the pain from my mind. Instead I stretched my fingers out across the sand, revelling in the feeling of it against my skin, even if it was all in my head.

The illusion Hala had woven in my mind shattered. The desert and the stars were gone and the kitchen was back. Pain across my body woke up. I hissed and quickly Hala grabbed my mind again and the pain faded as she pulled it out of my head.

I must’ve been under the illusion for a good long while beacuse there were twelve tiny pieces of iron lying in a glass dish next to the table. There was a tiny symbol printed into each of them. The Sultan’s seal. I got angry all over again. That was so like him. He could’ve just shoved iron under my skin from a scrap pile, but these pieces had been specially made.

‘The last one …’ I felt my aunt’s fingers exploring my skin; I felt the slight pressure on my stomach, just above my hip, a hand’s breadth away from my navel. Her dreamlike expression looked worried now. ‘It was so near your stomach, Zahia,’ she said to me. ‘There were scars here already, like an old healed wound.’ She frowned, like she was struggling to remember what had hurt her sister. But I knew what it was. That was where Rahim had shot me. Where the wound had healed over a long, torturous month. ‘The scar tissue makes it almost impossible to remove it all without making it worse,’ Safiyah was saying now. ‘I’m worried I’ve made it worse.’

I pushed myself up, ignoring the returning pain of the smattering of twelve tiny wounds across my skin. This might be the city. But it was still desert land. There was desert dust everywhere. I pulled on it. A stabbing pain tore through my side as I did, right where my old scar was, blinding for a moment. But sure enough, I felt the ground shift, a thousand tiny grains of sand rushing towards my fingers.