I leaned in, struggling to hold myself together inside my own skin when I felt like I might shatter out of it if I touched him again. But I would break apart entirely if I didn’t. I pressed a kiss against his mouth softly and felt him smile against me. ‘I’m yours,’ I offered back. I traced my mouth along the line of his jaw. ‘All that I am I give to you.’ I dipped my head, my mouth exploring his collarbone and the lean, muscled line of his shoulder. ‘All that I have is yours.’ I felt his hand curl into a fist against my bare back. Like he was grasping for something to hang on to, to anchor himself. But all he could find was skin. Finally I leaned my mouth against the tattoo over his heart. ‘Until the day we die.’
Whatever thin barriers were left between us disappeared. I was keenly aware of everything as it happened, though later, it only came back in flashes. Like I was drunk on him. On us together. I remembered some advice I once heard a mother give her daughter on her wedding day back in Dustwalk: to lie back, close her eyes, bear it and wait until it was over. But I didn’t want to close my eyes. I wanted to see everything.
Together we shed pieces of clothing until we were nothing but skin. His hands questioned when they were not sure. As he shifted over me, I caught sight of the ink that went across his hipbone, the tattoo I had only seen an edge of before, above the line of his belt.
It was a star, I realised. A small circle bursting with light on all sides like it was breaking apart. I drew the line of it with my finger. I heard Jin make a sound like I’d never heard before as he pulled my attention back up with his mouth on mine. He kissed me deeply until I heard myself saying his name over and over in my shallow breaths, like a plea, or a prayer. He whispered my name back to me against my lips like a secret that belonged to him. My breath came in small, ragged gasps, and I sank my fingers into his back. We were burning together as one single flame, bright enough that we could defy the night.
Until finally the last of the space between our bodies vanished.
I came apart in his hands, and he in mine. Both of us shattering into sand and dust and sparks, until we were both just infinite stars tangled together in the night.
Chapter 37
The Demdji and the Prince
Once there was a boy from the sea who fell in love with a girl from the desert.
The boy knew she was dangerous when he met her, with a gun in her hand and no care for her own life in a dusty desert town at the end of the world. She was all fire and gunpowder, and her finger was always on a trigger.
He guessed he was in trouble when those same fingers danced across the stories inked into his skin without seeming to understand how much power she had in her. Or how much power she could have over him. He knew it for sure when he woke up with a headache, missing the girl, and found that he was glad she had given him an excuse to go after her.
He knew it when she drove him across the desert for fear that losing her would tear him in half. He knew it when he did lose her, and he would have torn the whole world apart looking for her.
But he wondered if a boy from the sea and a girl from the desert could ever survive together. He feared that she might burn him alive or that he might drown her. Until finally he stopped fighting it and set himself on fire for her.
Chapter 38
Something was wrong.
I woke suddenly, completely certain of that.
Only my waking mind wasn’t as sure as my sleeping mind had been. And for just a few seconds, it didn’t seem like anything could be amiss. I was lying in the circle of Jin’s arms, fitted against him like we were two pieces meant to fit together. There was a heavy blanket between me and the morning air that I remembered Jin pulling over us last night. My head rested on the tattoo over his heart, listening to its steady beat, as he drew lazy patterns with his fingers across the bare skin of my back underneath the blanket.
And then I remembered that today was the day we were all going into battle.
Jin felt me wake up. ‘What’s wrong?’ he mumbled tiredly into my hair. I lifted my head enough so I could see him. His lids were heavy with sleep, his hair dishevelled, but his eyes were as sharp and ready as ever, watching me. I wondered how long he’d been awake.
‘I’m not sure,’ I said. But even now I couldn’t shake it. It was there, an unsettled feeling in the pit of my stomach. Like there was some danger coming that I couldn’t see yet. I sat up abruptly and smacked my head against the lamp, the same one from last night.
I cursed, rubbing my head, as Jin laughed from where he was still sprawled lazily on the ground. ‘You’ve got a new enemy. The Sultan and his army will have to wait until you’ve defeated that lamp.’
I stuck my tongue out as I pulled the blanket off him, wrapping it around myself like I’d just stepped out of the baths in Izman, before venturing outside the tent. Dawn was only just putting on its face, the faint pink of the sky igniting Izman to the east of us. But even in the half-light, I could see there was something else between us and the city.
I squinted, trying to get a better view of the shifting, blurred thing on the horizon. It almost looked like—
It hit me all at once. That feeling of wrongness wasn’t just fear – it was coming from my Demdji side.
I pushed my way hurriedly back into Jin’s tent. He looked up from where he was pulling clothes on. ‘It’s a sandstorm,’ I said, suddenly breathless. I started searching for my own clothes. ‘The Sultan, he knows we’re here.’ I found my trousers, putting them on quickly under the blanket. ‘He’s using the Abdals to – he’s doing this to keep me here.’ I grabbed my shirt out of the pile, hands shaking. I could already anticipate the pain of trying to hold back a sandstorm long enough to make it a fair fight. I knew I couldn’t hold it back and get into the city. I yanked my shirt on.
Jin drew me to him. ‘Calm down.’ His steadiness made me still. ‘We have armies and other Demdji. You’re not alone in this fight. However –’ he hooked his hands under the hem of the shirt I had just put on – ‘I am going to need my shirt back, because I don’t think I’m going to fit in yours.’ I just had time to realise he was right – I’d taken his shirt without noticing, and I was drowning in it – before he stole a quick kiss from me and pulled the shirt back over my head, tossing me mine instead.
It was a lot harder to believe you might lose a war when you could still laugh on the morning of the last battle.
I stepped out of Jin’s tent just as the storm reached us. I took in a breath as sand rushed closer, encircling the camp, pushing towards the tents. I raised my arms, hands steady as the storm got close enough that I could feel the sands lashing at my skin.
I pushed back with everything I had in me.
The storm stopped its invasion all at once. Sand strained against me at the edges of the camp. The desert that usually obeyed me was fighting back. I couldn’t get it to disperse, couldn’t wave a hand and scatter the storm back into the dunes where it had come from. Instead, the sandstorm whipped around the camp in a cyclone, like a wild animal prowling on the outskirts of a cage, nipping occasionally at the edges of tents, making them tremble in the air.