Rebel of the Sands

“I don’t remember,” Bahi muttered again.

“‘Rumi and the Princess,’ I think?” Shazad caught my eye, the spark of a laugh there.

“No.” Bahi looked up defensively. “It was ‘The Djinni and the Dev’ and it was beautiful.” He puffed out his chest as Shazad’s spark exploded into a real laugh. It was contagious, and soon I was laughing, too. Bahi started to call for a drink, saying he’d sing it for us once he had some liquor in him.

Truth be told I already felt drunk.

The night and the colors and the laughter and the sense of power and certainty in what they were doing made my head spin. This revolution was a legend in the making. The kind of tale that sprawled out long before me and far beyond my reach. The sort of epic that was told over and over to explain how the world was never the same after this handful of people lived and fought and won or died trying. And after it happened, the story seemed somehow inevitable. Like the world was waiting to be changed, needing to be saved, and the players in the tale were all plucked out of their lives and moved into places exactly where they needed to be, like pieces on a board, just to make this story come true. But it was wilder and more terrifying and intoxicating, and more uncertain, than I’d ever thought. And I could be part of it. If I wanted to. It was getting way too late to rip myself out of this story now, or to rip it out of me.

“Where the hell have you been, holy boy?” The new voice startled me out of my daydream. I stared at the speaker. I’d thought Delila and Imin were sights to see, but the girl who dropped uninvited next to our fire was made of gold. Everything from the tips of her fingernails to her eyelids looked like she’d been cast out of metal instead of born, except her hair was as black as mine and her eyes were dark. Another Demdji. “Can you deal with this?” She stretched out her arm toward him; it was caked in blood and burn marks.

Bahi hissed through his teeth as he took it. “What happened?”

“There was a small explosion,” the golden girl said drily.

“The burns aren’t that bad,” Bahi said. “It’s hard to burn the daughter of a First Being made of pure fire.”

“When did you get back, Hala?” Shazad asked. Hala didn’t answer; she just gestured sarcastically to her bloody traveling clothes in a way that seemed to suggest Shazad was stupid for not realizing she was fresh into camp.

“We were too late,” she said. “She’d already been arrested. I thought she’d have longer. Shape-shifters are usually better at hiding. Imin lasted for two weeks, remember? But apparently this one is stupid. Rumor is they’re holding her for trial in Fahali. I’ve just come for backup. I say we leave tonight, slip in, and scramble their minds before they can hang her.”

“You mean the girl with the red hair.” I interrupted, before I could think not to. For the first time Hala seemed to notice me. “That’s who you were looking for in Fahali. A Demdji.” The word still tasted strange. “She had red hair and a face that changed.”

“You! You saw her!” Hala’s golden face glowed eagerly in the firelight as she leaned forward, and I knew we were talking about the same person.

The next words that fell out of my mouth stopped her short. “The Gallan shot her in the head.”

The cheery mood that’d been around the campfire a moment before was extinguished. “So how come you’re still alive?” Hala’s golden face hardened.

Something in her voice said she expected me to grovel. To stumble over myself to explain how I dared to have survived when the person she’d been out to save hadn’t. “Because they didn’t shoot me in the head,” I answered.

Her sneer reminded me of an ivory and gold comb Tamid’s mother used to have. She waved a hand, like she was urging me to go on. I noticed she had only eight fingers. Two were missing on her left hand that I could’ve sworn were there before. She noticed me noticing, and a second later her hand was whole again.

“It’s rude to stare.” A black bug crawled out of the sand, over my boot, and up my body. “And it’s rude to leave someone for dead to save your own skin.” I swatted at it, but it just exploded into ten black bugs, and then each of them into ten more until I was crawling with them, my hands slapping at my skin until it was red and painful.

“Hala, whatever you’re doing, stop it,” Shazad ordered. I’d been wrong. Her voice wasn’t sharp; it was clean, like a good cut. The bugs vanished.

Shazad had said something about a Demdji who could crawl into folks’ minds. I guessed I’d just met her. I already hated her.

“Where I come from, people take care of their own.” Hala picked at her nails as if she hadn’t just twisted my mind around.

“She was,” Jin said behind me.

twenty

Jin was awake, leaning heavily on Ahmed’s shoulder, standing on the outskirts of the light from the fire. He looked drained and tired, but he was alive. And he was looking at me. I reacted to him instinctively, my body pulling me forward like it was on a string tied to him. Like the swing of the compass needle twinned with another.

But before I could stand, there was a squeal from the other side of camp. Delila rushed forward and flung herself into Jin’s arms, babbling in a foreign language I guessed was Xichian. She started crying into his shirt. Soon all the camp was on its feet, people crowding around him. Asking questions, welcoming him back.