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.
Chapter 19
‘I’m raising my hands,’ I said automatically. As I did, my brain started scrambling for solutions to having a gun pointed at my back. I couldn’t count on Jin or Sam to come looking for me quicker than a bullet could reach my spine.
‘Do it,’ a woman’s voice said. ‘And turn around so I can see you.’
The figure behind me shifted, and I caught the glint of metal in the glass of the window. A reflection. It wasn’t much, but enough that I could tell where she was. I shifted a little bit, taking stock of the sand clinging to my boots.
‘Turn around, I said,’ the voice harped behind me, thick with Last County accent. ‘If you can’t move faster, I can put a jump in your step.’
I could move fast.
I grabbed for the desert at the same moment that I dropped to one knee in a violent twist of my body. I whipped my hand up, slamming the sand into the barrel of the gun, knocking it clean from her grasp. The shotgun clattered to the ground, skittering out of reach and into a corner.
I was already back on my feet, releasing the sand, the sudden wrenching pain fading as I did, pistol out of its holster …
Pointed straight at my aunt Farrah’s chest.
Farrah froze where she was, staring at me, the shock as evident on her face as it must have been on mine, both of us looking for words.
She found her tongue before I did. ‘I’d have thought you’d at least have the decency to be dead by now.’ Well, that was a bold opener considering I had a gun aimed at her. But then again, this was Dustwalk. We’d all had a gun aimed at us at one point or another. You got used to it. ‘So, I guess you’ve come crawling back after it didn’t work out with whoever that man was that you rode off with? Wish I could say I’m surprised. How long did it take him to realise he couldn’t beat the disrespect out of you? I tried for a year, and it didn’t make a lick of difference.’
It seemed like a lifetime ago that I’d last had to bear my aunt’s insults and beatings. I’d spent the last year forgetting about Dustwalk and the girl I used to be here. But suddenly, standing across from her, it felt like it was just yesterday. I waited for her words to open fresh wounds, to make me feel small and angry and powerless against her, no matter that I was holding a gun.
But none of that came. Her words felt hollow, like she was shouting at me from the bottom of a deep pit and I was the only one of us who could see she was trapped in it.
‘Aunt Farrah.’ I lowered the gun, reholstering it. I could take her without a weapon if I needed to. ‘What happened here?’ The house felt huge and empty around me. ‘Where is everyone?’
‘Gone.’ Aunt Farrah spat the word, like it might be my fault. ‘Everybody had to pick up and leave. What was there to stay for after the factory was destroyed?’ I remembered something Shira had told me, back in the harem, about how hard things had got in Dustwalk without the factory. So maybe it was my fault – or Jin’s, if we were being really specific.
‘So, what are you still doing here?’ I asked.
‘Well –’ a sly smile spread over her face as she smoothed a hand over her khalat – ‘not that it’s any of your business, but I’m waiting for a letter from my daughter.’ Her tone was smug and self-satisfied, but her words just filled me with dread. She was talking about Shira, my cousin. Distantly, I remembered Shira telling me that I could trust Sam because she trusted Sam with her family. That he’d arranged to get letters and money down to Dustwalk for her. But there wouldn’t be any more letters coming. ‘She’s the Sultima now, you know,’ Aunt Farrah said.