Rebel of the Sands
I didn’t like the way the soldiers gave him room, as if they were scared of him.
“Sit up straight, preacher boy.” The metal lips didn’t move when the man talked, but a hollow voice echoed inside the mask, tainted with an accent that sounded an awful lot like he was from the Last County. Bahi struggled to raise his bloody face until two guards forced him up against the wall, slumped and barely standing.
The bronze man reached out and took Bahi’s hands, one of them tattooed, the other blank. The metal man tilted his head like a curious bird. As he did, I saw the sliver of skin at his neck. Not a metal man, then. A man dressed in metal.
“Noorsham,” Naguib said, on the edge of giving an order.
Noorsham. And then I was standing back in Fahali. In the prayer-house-turned-prison. A boy with a slightly uneven smile chained up to a wall. I’m special, he’d told me.
Through the slits in the copper, all I could see was blue. Blue like the desert sky, like the oasis water. Blue like my own eyes.
“You are a traitor.” Noorsham’s voice was distant as he turned his burning blue gaze back on Bahi. So far removed from the desperate hopeful tone when he’d helped me. I strained against the soldier who held me. “Traitors should be returned to the arms of God. For judgment.”
He raised one bronze hand and rested it flat against Bahi’s forehead like he was blessing him.
Bahi smiled through bloody, swollen lips. “Sorry to disappoint. I think I’ve strayed too far to find my way—” And then he was screaming.
Shazad cried out his name.
Before I could move, heat rolled across the carriage in a violent, suffocating wave as I watched the hand against Bahi’s forehead turn as bright as an ember. Bahi’s skin sizzled and blackened as we all cried out.
The hold on my arms broke. I was two steps to Bahi before the heat was too much. I fell to my knees, gasping.
Bahi’s skin turned black and then white. I watched helpless as he turned from a boy into ash.
We’d found our weapon.
twenty-four
The heat vanished. My skin felt fevered. My lungs burned.
I was on all fours, gasping for air, my heart going in time with the rattling of the train below me.
Bahi was dead. He’d died screaming, just like I’d said Commander Naguib would. I’d bent the universe and turned the harm away from Shazad straight onto Bahi. The carriage had gone still now, except for the chandelier above us, slightly singed, swinging frantically from side to side with the motion of the train.
Jin surged forward. One of the soldiers holding him shoved a knee into his spine, forcing him to the ground.
“Restrain him.” Naguib was doing his best to sound bored, but there was a waver in his voice. His hair was stuck to his skin with sweat. Hala let out a small sob without moving. “Might I suggest my esteemed foreign brother is next?”
But Noorsham ignored his commander. “Amani.” All his attention belonged to me. “You’re still alive.”
I didn’t understand him at first, and then I realized my clothes were charred, blackened, and burned away in places. Only I wasn’t. My skin was a Demdji’s. Daughters of immortal things didn’t burn easily. “I grew up in the desert.” My voice shook. “I know heat.”
“No.” He reached down a metal hand, like he might touch my face. I could feel the heat radiating off it. “You’re special, like me.”
And it was true, right down to our accents and blue eyes. I couldn’t tell him it wasn’t. We were both Demdji; we weren’t made for lies.
“I want to be alone with her.” He raised his voice so Naguib could hear him.
“Like hell.” Shazad was unraveled on the carriage floor. But with those two words I knew she still had some fight in her.
“Couldn’t have said it better.” Jin was struggling back to his knees. Naguib’s boot connected with his side again.
“Nobody hurts them.” I shouted as Naguib raised his foot again. He stopped, his boot hovering above his brother’s ribs. He wasn’t a commander with a prisoner then. He was a son who wasn’t allowed to compete for his father’s respect at the Sultim Trials. Who couldn’t command his soldiers’ respect and heard behind his back that his rebel brother was a better man than him. And he was taking it out on Jin. “I’ll come with you. And while I’m gone, nobody hurts them.” I turned back to the pair of blue eyes, set deep in the metal face. Were mine that unsettling to look at? “We got a deal?”
His eyes smiled, but the metal mouth never moved. I wondered if he’d grown up stupidly ignorant of what he was, just like me.
“You’ve got my word: no one will hurt them while you are gone.”
He held out his hand again. It didn’t matter that I was a Djinni’s daughter; his metal glove still made my palm blister when I clasped it.
• • •
THEY SEARCHED ME twice before they left me alone with him, but they did it hastily. I got the feeling even the soldiers were dying to get away from their Demdji weapon. Then we were alone in the next carriage over, a large dining car. It looked almost exactly like the one I’d eaten in on the train out of Juniper City. Every motion of the train made the glasses clink like a manic chorus of bells. Noorsham sat in a bright red chair while I leaned against the door, as far away from him as I could get.
“You didn’t come back,” he said finally. “In Fahali. You didn’t come back for me.” He sounded younger than he had in front of Naguib. And for a moment, the terrifying bronze armor blurred back into the scrawny soldier boy on the floor of the prison.