Rebel of the Sands
• • •
TOMORROW WOULD BE too late. I knew that down in my gut as I lay between the desert and the stars, dead tired and too alive with thought to sleep.
Nobody made smart decisions in the dark, Jin said. A stupid decision in the dark was how I’d wound up dressed as a boy in Deadshot. I’d make it all over again if I had to. It hadn’t even been a decision, really. And neither was this.
I was up before I knew for sure what I was thinking of doing. In the light of the embers I started to pack supplies. Enough for a day’s walk across the desert.
“Running away like a thief in the night?” My gun leapt into my hand. Shazad was still leaning against the blue furred beast that was Izz, but her eyes were open now, watching me. I didn’t know how long she’d been awake.
“You planning on stopping me?” We both knew she could and that I wasn’t going to shoot. Still, I didn’t drop my gun right away, even clumsy as it was in my left hand. “He’s my brother, Shazad. It’s my responsibility. And I can warn them. Even if I can’t do anything else, I can—”
“I don’t want to stop you.” Shazad pushed herself to sitting. “I’m just offended you didn’t ask me to come with you.”
“Is that the smart thing to do, General?” But I could feel the fire taking light in me again. The one that’d been trampled by fear and Bahi’s loss. And I could see it in Shazad.
“No,” Shazad admitted. She reached for her weapons and started buckling the scimitars over her shoulders. “The smart thing would be to let the Sultan wear himself out fighting his allies and hope that they catch on and kill him, leaving an empty throne for Ahmed.” She tightened the buckle on her second sword. “But Naguib recognized me. So I don’t have time to wait around for that. If we don’t stop him, he’ll send news to the Sultan—and my father, my mother, and my brother will all burn like Bahi. Then he will come for the rest of us. Besides”—she reached a hand for me and I clasped it, pulling her to her feet—“it’s the right thing to do.”
I might be tangled with Jin. But with Shazad it was simpler. We were tied together.
She turned to Jin now, sprawled by the fire, his hat pulled over his eyes. “I can tell you’re awake. Are you coming with us?”
He sighed, tipping his hat backward. “Yeah, yeah. Just trying to get some sleep before going to near certain death.”
“I think thieves in the night are meant to be quieter than this, you know,” Hala muttered from her side of the campfire. “What exactly is your plan to get us all killed, General?”
“Simple. We get them to destroy each other.” We all stared at her, waiting. It seemed to take her a second to realize she was two steps ahead of the rest of us. “The Sultan might be aiming to drive out the Gallan, but he doesn’t want open war. That’s why he’s trying to blame Noorsham’s destruction on us. If the Gallan soldiers see Noorsham, see that he’s the Sultan’s weapon and not ours, then open war is what the Sultan will get. He’ll lose his alliance with the Gallan. And that leaves us with just the Sultan to usurp, not a whole foreign army after us, too. All we have to do is kill Noorsham before he kills them.”
“Or us,” Hala pointed out. “So it’s five of us against two armies and an insane Demdji superweapon.”
I looked around the circle of faces in the dark. At Shihabian two days ago—God, was it only two days?—I’d felt like an imposter. Like a part that didn’t quite fit in this rebellion, no matter how much I wanted to. Jin’s foolish Blue-Eyed Bandit who gave up the city without knowing what she was giving it up for. The Demdji without powers who couldn’t save anyone. But now, standing in this circle, I felt it, the thing that made them all stay and risk their lives. Being a link in the chain.
“Yeah, I guess it is,” I said.
“There’s an old expression,” Shazad said. She might not want to be called General, but it was written all over her. She surveyed her small army: a shape-shifter, a gold-skinned girl, a foreign prince, and a blue-eyed bandit. “About fighting fire with fire. It never made much sense to me. But fighting fire with Demdji who don’t burn so easily, that might work.”
twenty-seven
Noorsham was impossible not to see first. Even from far away, I tracked his progress by the sun glinting off the brass helmet with the barrel of the rifle.
It was only half a day’s walk from the railroad outpost to Fahali. We’d landed on the mountain just after dawn. It was close to noon now, the sun high over the scene. Every once in a while I could just make out Izz’s shadow dashing across the mountain face as he circled slowly. Waiting for his chance.
I tracked the barrel of my gun along from Noorsham, through the soldiers. There were a few dozen of them. And there was Naguib.
My finger tightened on the trigger.
“Not even you can make that shot, Bandit.” Jin’s voice in my ear eased my finger off the trigger. “He’s still out of range.” As soon as my finger was away from the metal of the trigger, the terrifying, dizzying sensation of having an entire desert at my fingertips, ready to rip out of control, rushed back. My powers were still too much of a liability, Shazad had declared in the end. I didn’t know enough about what I was doing to be any kind of help as a Demdji just yet.
I let out a long breath. Just as I did, Noorsham’s head swiveled, swinging up toward us. I could swear he looked straight at our hiding place. Next to me, Shazad sucked in a breath.