I could feel time slipping away with every moment we weren’t up in the mountains, hunting for Eremot.
Juniper City was struggling to govern itself without the Rebellion or the Sultan. Neighbourhoods were carving themselves up. Men with guns were charging innocent folks for protection from men with knives. The Sultan’s army that came through didn’t care; they were just there to transport prisoners. Neither did the other soldiers who came through, foreign and Mirajin, heading into the mountains never to come back, according to the whispers on the streets.
Jin broke a man’s hand when he tried to rob us at the inn we stayed at overnight. That put an end to any sign of trouble for us, though we still took turns keeping watch through the night. As if we were back in the desert and not safely behind walls.
In the morning, we were woken by a group of men preaching loudly in the streets that it was the end of times. That death was coming for us from the mountains. That any who ventured out beyond the city and did not go with pure hearts would find death.
I didn’t know if our hearts were pure, but we were going to have to head out of the city one way or another. We had to find what was left of the Rebellion and we had to find it quickly. Every passing day was another day Ahmed or Delila or Shazad or Rahim might be dead.
Except we had a stop to make first. I’d made a promise, after all.
*
It was less than a day to Dustwalk from Juniper City as the shape-shifter travelled. Less than a day between the place Tamid and I were born and the city that had seemed impossibly far away my whole life. I wasn’t sorry to get out of Juniper City, to finally be on the move, but I reckoned I could live another hundred years and never see Dustwalk again and be happier for it. Only we’d promised to take Tamid back home if we could. And Demdji kept their promises. Besides, I could feel Ahmed’s compass heavy in my pocket, reminding me we didn’t have any clear direction anyway.
I knew when we were getting close to Dustwalk. The landscape didn’t change. It was all barren desert flatland outside of Juniper City. But it was something I couldn’t quite explain. A shift in the air, like it was wrapping itself around me, pulling me back. The accusatory glare of the sun on my neck, like I’d done something wrong by leaving. And then, suddenly, there it was in the distance, etched against the perfectly blue desert sky like a shadow against the day: the godforsaken place that had raised me.
I leaned down on Maz’s feathered neck and shouted over the wind for him to take us down. I didn’t need to get any nearer.
‘You ought to be able to walk from here,’ I said to Tamid as he slid from Izz’s back. ‘Less chance of getting shot if you don’t arrive from the sky on the back of a giant bird.’
Tamid stared up at me from the ground, where he was trying to steady himself on his bad leg. ‘You’re not coming with me?’
‘You’re the one who wants to go back, not me.’
Tamid dropped his head, nodded. ‘So I guess this is goodbye then.’
‘I guess so.’ I didn’t move to get off Maz’s back. We still had plenty of ground to cover and we needed to use all the daylight we had.
Tamid looked like he was about to say something else, but Jin spoke first. ‘Something’s wrong.’ I twisted around on Maz’s back to where Jin was sitting behind me. His eyes were fixed straight ahead on Dustwalk.
I squinted against the bright desert light at the town. It looked exactly like I’d left it. Even from this far away I could spy the wooden roof of the prayer house sticking up a little bit higher than the others around it. A few doors down would be my uncle’s house. A few doors the other way was Tamid’s: the only home in the whole town with two storeys. I used to think Tamid’s family was the richest I would ever know. Then I’d lived in a palace for a while.
I realised what Jin meant. There were no signs of life. Even on a hot day there ought to be a dash of movement, a face watching us through a window on the edge of town – something.
It looked deserted.
I cursed under my breath as I slid off Maz’s back. I could feel time running away from us. But while I might not want to set foot back in Dustwalk as long as I lived, I couldn’t exactly leave Tamid alone here. He’d starve to death or get killed by a ghoul or a wild animal before he could get back to civilisation. We had to see what was going on in Dustwalk.
‘Looks like we’re coming with you after all.’
It was slow-going as we moved across the shifting sands, back towards the place that had made me – part of me, at least: the dangerous, angry, restless, selfish part. The one I’d been trying to discard piece by piece. Tamid pulled ahead in spite of his bad leg, anxious to get home. I found myself falling further and further behind. Jin noticed. He slowed down, waiting for me until I fell into step beside him.
‘You know the story of Ihaf the Wanderer?’ I asked. We were getting closer, no matter how slow I walked, and my breath was feeling shorter. ‘Ihaf was a farmer who left his home and defeated the ghoul that had been terrorising his people. He was feasted in Izman for a hundred days for what he had done. And then, at the end of it all—’
‘He returned home and went back to tilling his fields and a peaceful life,’ Jin filled in, tugging his sheema a little so that it covered him from the glare of the sun. ‘My mother used to tell us that story.’
‘So did mine.’ My eyes found the place where my mother’s house used to be. Before it burned. I wondered if on some night, across desert and sea, Jin and I were hearing the same story under the same stars from our mothers. ‘I always hated that ending. How could you go home again after all that? After slaying monsters and saving princesses and dining in the homes of immortal beings …’
Jin kept his gaze straight ahead as he answered. ‘Back when all this started, I used to think there was nothing I wouldn’t do to go home again.’
It was rare for Jin to talk about Xicha. He hadn’t told me much. That their small home overlooked the sea and always smelled of salt. That Jin and Ahmed shared a room, and Delila shared another with Jin’s mother. That the floor was always stained with dark dye from trying to hide Delila’s purple hair. They had a rotted roof that leaked so badly that when Jin was just six years old, he and Ahmed stole some wood from the docks and clambered on to the rafters to patch it up. There was a scar on his palm where he’d sliced it open with a rusty nail. I knew that place had been home for as long as he and Ahmed had been sailing, heading from dock to dock. It had been home until Ahmed had abandoned it for the desert, and Jin’s mother had died, and Jin had collected Delila to bring her to the country of their birth. To a place where they would have to make a home.
I thought of the Dev’s Valley, the colourful tent I had shared with Shazad for half a year. Of nights full of stars and warmth. I would give just about anything to go back to that home, too. Except it had been taken from us. And then it had been taken again when the Sultan ambushed us that night in Izman.
This wasn’t home. Neither of us had one of those any more.
The closer we got, the more obvious it was that Dustwalk was quiet as a dead man. I waited for the twitch of curtains that would mean we were being watched on approach, or the sound of a voice. I felt an itch start on the back of my neck, a restlessness. There was danger here.
Jin and I caught up to the others, drawing our guns at the same time on the outskirts of town. When I glanced back to my right Sam had done the same, and the twins had shifted into large dogs with sharp teeth. I lifted my finger away from the iron for a moment, moving it far enough from my skin that I was sure I could feel the sand at my fingertips, too. That my power hadn’t abandoned me.
And then we moved into the town as one.
The streets were empty as a drunk’s glass. The door to the house that had belonged to Amjad Al-Hiyamat was swinging in the wind, breaking the silence as it bashed into the house. Sand had built up in it, keeping it from shutting properly. I pushed it open with my foot, peering around the darkness inside. It was empty – but not wholly. A low table still sat in the middle, and in the room off to the side, I could see a large bed. But everything else was gone: clothes, food, cookware. Anything someone could carry, like they’d fled. But not in a hurry.
I emerged from the dark back into the desert sun just as Jin stepped out of the prayer house across the way. ‘No signs of a struggle,’ he said. ‘Or looting.’
‘No bodies either,’ I said. ‘Folks just picked up and left, by the look of things.’
Tamid pushed by us, walking as quickly as his bad leg would allow. He didn’t answer when I called out after him. I followed close behind as he rushed to his house, dread already sinking into my stomach.
Walking into Tamid’s house was like walking into a half-formed dream. It was exactly like I remembered it but completely different. The blue of the dining-room wall, the creak in the floorboard that always caused Tamid’s mother to give me a nasty look when I came over, like I was the one making her house complain – these were familiar. But the house had been stripped, just like Amjad’s. Only the things that were too big to carry were left.
‘Mother!’ Tamid bellowed at the top of his lungs, standing at the foot of the stairs. His one good foot was on the bottom step. Stairs were hard for him. It was a lot of effort to make just to be disappointed at the top.
‘They’re not up there.’ I said what we already both knew.
Tamid didn’t look over his shoulder as he spoke to me. He kept his eyes fixed at the top of the stairs, like he could summon them. ‘Where are they then?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said.
‘Are they dead?’
Yes. I tried it first, because it seemed likely. Blessedly, the word wouldn’t come. ‘No,’ I said with a relieved sigh. ‘No, they’re not dead.’
I headed back out into the street, leaving Tamid to have some time in the house where he was raised. It was unsettling, being outside in this quiet. I pulled my sheema away from my face as I wandered down the long row that made up Dustwalk’s main street. The sun hit my head unforgivingly, like the eye of an angry parent, wanting to know why I was getting home so late.
I passed by the store. I wondered if Jin’s blood was still on the floorboards where I’d sewn him up.
I fell in love with you when I was bleeding under a counter at the dead end of the desert and you saved my life, Jin had said when he thought I was asleep back in Iliaz. Back when we were both who we used to be.
We’d started here, he and I.
My aunt’s house was the last one on the row. It was exactly two hundred and fifty paces from the shop. I knew because I’d counted it on hundreds of trips between the two. Something about it seemed different from the others. The door was closed, for one. I told myself I was imagining things. It only seemed different because I knew it so well. But still I pushed inside carefully, heart pounding a frantic rhythm as the hinges creaked open for me, pouring sunlight into the dark of the house beyond.
It was as empty as Tamid’s.
Where this place had always been a riot of people, of wives and children, there was nothing here now. I wasn’t sure whether I felt relieved or disappointed. I walked through the house, floorboards creaking below my feet as I went to the room I’d slept in once upon a time. Light flooded in here, through the single window. One that was big enough for me to crawl in and out of in the dead of night.
It was bare as a bone. But there, in the clear light of day, I realised why it seemed different. It was empty, but it didn’t look abandoned. The floor was swept clean, unlike the other houses, which were clogged up with dust and sand. The window was washed, too. Someone had been keeping this place tidy. They’d been here recently, by the look of things. Very recently.
That was when I heard a shotgun being cocked behind me.