Rebel of the Sands

I glanced from him to his twin. “Who taught you to count?”

The twins beamed at me. “So you’re the new Demdji,” Izz said, standing to inspect me with no mind to how bare he was. “We wanted to meet you.”

“We were wondering if you might be our sister,” Maz said. “On account of your eyes.” He gestured to his hair, an unnatural blue, a few shades off from my eyes. If we’d both inherited it from our Djinn fathers, it might be that we shared one. The realization that I might suddenly have a brother after seventeen years unsettled me.

“I’ve always wanted a sister,” Izz said brightly. “Have you met Imin? She and Hala had the same Djinni father, you know. Their mothers lived on the same street in Izman.” So I was responsible for Hala’s golden-eyed sister risking her life in the Gallan camp. It seemed I couldn’t stop doing things to make her hate me.

“Amani’s not our sister, though.” Maz looked faintly disappointed as he said it. “Or else we wouldn’t be able to say that she’s not our sister.”

“Still!” Izz said, perking up. “You might be able to change your shape like us. That would be just as good.”

“Do you want a drink?” Shazad blessedly pulled me away from the naked twins.

The dancing started soon after. I’d never danced properly at Shihabian before. Not with Tamid’s injured leg. I couldn’t stand to leave him out. But my body loosened soon enough and was weaving through the sparks from the fire, from one partner to the next. As drink flowed more freely and people got sloppier, we spun more wildly. I careened round Shazad dancing with Bahi, and a pair of hands belonging to my next partner grabbed me, spinning me around to face him.

I was chest to chest with Jin. We both stopped, letting the dancing go on around us. I could feel the warmth of his hands through the delicate fabric of the khalat. After weeks of my being a boy around him, everything that made me a girl was in his hands. His eyes traveled over me slowly, resting for just a second on the red sheema tied around my waist. It was the one he’d given to me. All the way back in Sazi. “You look like you were born out of fire.”

“Jin—” I started. I never finished. Midnight dropped like a cloak over the sky like it always did on Shihabian. One moment there were fires and lanterns and stars and moonlight, and then there was just blackness.

No matter that the Buraqi were fewer and the Djinn didn’t live alongside men anymore, no matter how many factories rose up filled with iron and smoke: this was magic that didn’t fade. It lived in the memory of the world itself. The first true dark, when matches wouldn’t strike, tinder wouldn’t catch, and stars hid. Jin’s hands slipped away from me, and I felt even his presence fade. I couldn’t follow him. Not in this kind of dark. All of us stood completely still where we’d stopped. Waiting for the light to come back.

A fire flared to my right. The stars were blinking back to life one by one. Still, no one spoke. The hours up to midnight were for festivities; now was a time for prayers and memories. My eyes darted around for Jin as the crowd shifted me toward the single fire like moths.

The storyteller was a young woman. She stood on a raised stone by the fire, Demdji gathered all around her, facing the rest of the camp.

“The world was created in light,” the storyteller began, the traditional opening. Every story might be different, but it always began with the same words. “And then came the night. The Destroyer of Worlds came from the dark that existed only in the places the sun couldn’t touch.”

I spotted the back of Jin’s head as he escaped the crowd. I followed, weaving my way through the people dropping into prayer, walking until the noise and light and illusions and laughter were far away and the edge of the desert opened.

“Blue-Eyed Bandit.” I jumped at Jin’s voice. I could just make him out now in the returning starlight.

He took a swig from the bottle dangling from his fingers, and for a wild second I thought he might be drinking up the courage to really face me this time.

“Want a drink?” He held out the bottle. “There was this girl once I knew from the Last County who could hold her drink even when I wound up head down on the table.”

He meant at the Drunk Djinni, by the gutted-out mines of Sazi, when I was just the girl with the gun who could hold her drink and he was just a foreigner who couldn’t hold the drugs I slipped in his. Instead of a Demdji and a prince. When I was still so certain of everything and he started lying to me.

“Then again,” Jin said, taking another swig, “that girl didn’t walk away from stories halfway through either.”

In that moment, I did turn to fire. My hand sent the bottle flying to the ground, the sand guzzling the spilled liquor as it rolled. I realized I’d been expecting him to stop me, catch my arm before I could hit him.

“Stories and lies.” I found my voice and swallowed whatever else was snaking up my throat lest it come through as tears. “I’m not so fond of them as I used to be. But you know by now, all your lies to get me here were wasted. Haven’t you heard what they’re saying? That I’m the only Demdji in the world without powers?” He struggled through his drunken haze to focus on me. “Did you ever think about telling me what I was?”

All at once Jin filled my senses, the smell of liquor and heat and the sight of the distant planes of his face, of the tattoos just visible through his shirt.

“You want to talk about this? Now?”