Noorsham saw me watching him. I’d taken a step forwards without realising it. He reached into the bag and held out his closed hands towards me. I didn’t move straightaway, but Noorsham didn’t move on. Didn’t turn back to the woman who had sold out young Mira and was shifting restlessly. Waiting to reclaim her leader’s attention. Finally I extended my hands towards my brother. And he dropped an orange in my palms.
I stared at it, disbelieving, even as Noorsham’s attention shifted back to the disciples in his line. I hadn’t seen a fresh orange for the first sixteen years of my life. Not until I got to the rebel camp, far from this dusty dead-earthed part of the desert where nothing could grow. Fruit around these parts came stewed in cans so that it could survive the long desert journey to us.
It was impossible that I was holding a fresh orange. Except it was real. When I peeled it, the rind caked under my fingernails, and the intoxicating smell of fresh citrus filled the dusty desert air. And there was no mistaking the burst of sweet flavour when I ate it.
It was unsettling. Out of place. The whole thing, this whole camp. It worried me in a way I couldn’t wholly put my finger on.
I turned over restlessly in my bedroll. I hated being alone with my thoughts. They churned through my head like a desert storm, dust scattering every which way, too quick to catch. I needed to talk to Jin. I didn’t care that it was against whatever rules they seemed to have here. I slipped out of my bedroll as quietly as I could, casting around to make sure there were no wakeful eyes watching me sneak away as I wove my way through the rest of the bodies of sleeping women.
I was almost out when a flicker of light above us caught my eye. I stopped, ducking quickly so I was low to the ground. Too low for the light to find me among the rocks and sleeping bodies. And I waited, for whatever night-time patrol this was to pass.
A few moments later, Noorsham appeared above me on the slope. He was moving through the dark by a dim light emanating from his hands, a dulled version of his destructive power. He was walking a few paces above me.
I hesitated. Of all the people to get caught by, Noorsham would be the worst, that was for damn sure. I ought to go back, lie down, close my eyes, pretend to be asleep until dawn and then we could all leave in the morning with no one getting turned to ashes. But I already knew I wasn’t fooling myself, pretending I might do the smart thing for once in my life. I waited a few heartbeats, until he was a safe distance ahead of me, and then I moved to follow him.
He led me past the edge of his makeshift civilisation, to where the ground started to slope upwards above the camp. I moved as gingerly as I could, careful to stay far out of the circle of light cast by his hands, trying to remember where to step on the uneven ground by watching the light ahead of me as we climbed further and further up the mountain slope. Until, finally, we reached the entrance to the mines. Noorsham pressed forwards without hesitating, entering the dark mouth of the mountains, his hands spilling a sea of light across the rough stone walls.
I hesitated where I was crouched just below him on the slope, moving on all fours to avoid sliding rocks that would give me away. If I entered that tunnel, there was nowhere to hide.
But I’d come this far.
I moved up the last few feet to the entrance, following him into the mountain.
Ahead of me, Noorsham moved with the confidence of someone who had taken this route a thousand times before. When the path forked, he took the left tunnel without hesitation. He passed the debris abandoned by miners without so much as glancing down. He did not slow when we wove through places where the mountain had collapsed into hideous charred and melted rock. A result of the moment he had unleashed his power inside this mountain, killing most of the people in it.
We were deep into the old mines when he turned right and walked through what looked like a solid wall. I stopped sharply behind him as he vanished, then quickly rushed forwards, already afraid of losing him. As I got closer I realised it wasn’t solid rock. It was a tiny side passage in the mountain, so much narrower than the tunnels made by man, I likely would’ve mistaken it for a fissure in the rocks if I was walking by. The light of Noorsham’s hands was still just leaking out around my feet. If I waited any longer I would lose it. I would be left alone in the dark.
I plunged after him.
It wasn’t a long tunnel. I’d maybe walked a dozen paces when it ended suddenly. I staggered to an abrupt stop as the narrow tunnel opened into a cave. Noorsham was ahead of me, moving deeper into the cavern. In the light cast by his hands I could see a perfectly formed domed ceiling above us, and smooth even walls.
We were deep into the mountain now. I could feel the weight of it pressing in all around us, as if the stone was trying to reclaim this chamber. Like it knew the cave was out of place, hadn’t been formed by nature. But I could tell it wasn’t made by human hands, either. Not something this size, this perfectly made.
In the center of the cave sat a huge stone chest, large enough to fit a person. I ran my hand along the narrow fissure of the entrance. There was no way something that size came through this gap. As Noorsham approached it, I saw that there was no break between the chest’s sides and the floor of the cave. The chest was carved out of the mountain itself. Like the whole cavern had been hollowed out around it. The light danced across its uneven surface, casting into relief the images that adorned the side. Elegantly twisting vines were chiseled into the stone, hanging heavy with etched figs and dates and grapes and oranges and pomegranates and dozens of other fruits I’d never seen in the desert. Some I didn’t even recognise now. There were scrapes of colour, too, as if the carved fruits had been brightly painted once upon a time.
And then Noorsham’s hands dashed light across the far wall of the cave. And I forgot all about the stone chest.
The sight was gone as quickly as it had come, plunged back into darkness as my brother dropped to his knees, prostrating himself in prayer, pressing his hands into the ground so that the only lights left in the cave were two glowing embers trapped between his palms and the stone ground. I could see his lips moving in silent supplication, his features seeming to melt into the gloom as he raised his head, slowly. Then, as he raised his hands, the wall came into view again, one inch at a time, like the dawn revealing the landscape hidden by the night.
And I knew I hadn’t been hallucinating.
The wall was every colour we never saw in the Last County painted in intricate patterns. It was as bright as the Sultan’s gardens, decorated with scenes of a great battle, of the Destroyer of Worlds emerging from Eremot, of the First Hero being made by the hands of the Djinn, of beasts never seen in the desert or the mountains. The wall looked like a twin to the one that led into our lost sanctuary in the Dev’s Valley.