“OPEN.” I BANGED my hand against the door. “Unlock. Let me in.” The rock surface of the painted door wouldn’t budge. I didn’t figure the password would be obvious, but I wasn’t going to die for not trying.
“I think I’ll keep you alive for a while.” The Skinwalker was pacing back and forth along the shadow border. “That way, you can watch me eat your flesh with those pretty eyes and I’ll listen to you scream.” The Skinwalker grinned with the dead Gallan soldier’s mouth, only it was full of fangs. It wanted my attention. It was practically on top of me now, the shadows so close I had to pull my elbow against my stomach. The light would burn it. But it could be patient with the light shrinking every second.
I was running out of time.
I sagged against the stone. We were going to die here. We’d escaped Dustwalk, jumped off a train, crossed a desert, and survived Fahali and the Nightmares, and now this was where my story came to an end. In a dusty canyon at the hands of a hungry ghoul.
Stories. The memory flickered tiredly in my mind.
Sakhr.
Jin had gotten the name wrong. The name of the Djinni used to summon help, to open doors into his kingdom. And then he’d gotten it wrong again. He’d said it as he rambled incoherently from the Nightmare venom in the desert.
I leaned in close to the door. I felt stupid, but there was no one to see me except a Skinwalker who wanted to eat me whole, and I didn’t care much what it thought. I pressed my mouth to the painted keyhole and whispered the name. “Sakhr.” And I held my breath.
Nothing happened. The last of my hope fled as I sagged back against the door.
The sun betrayed me in a flash. One second we were in the last of the light, the next the shade touched me. The Skinwalker’s hand came with it. Long talons scraped across my arm, blood blossoming in five long trails across my skin.
Its teeth went for my neck. I remembered what Jin had taught me: I didn’t try to break free. I bore my weight into the monster. Its teeth scraped through flesh and blood, tearing my shoulder open. Agony tore through my whole body as we toppled to the ground together.
I shoved it off me and stumbled back into the painted wall. My blood smeared across the shape of a girl riding a leopard. Of all the unimportant things to notice before dying.
The rattling shriek of stone grating against stone filled my ears. In an open stone archway where the painted door had been stood the most polished-looking girl I’d ever seen. Like she was born pretty, but she’d been scrubbed and groomed until she was as close to perfect as any living thing could get. Her face was all desert planes and dunes, but her dark eyes weren’t soft. Strands of black hair caught in her eyelashes as she stared the scene down. Her eyebrows raised as she saw Jin, unconscious in the sand next to me. Her eyes went to the Skinwalker next. She reached behind her and a pair of scimitars hissed as she drew them across her body. “You have blood on your claws.” The Skinwalker sprang for her.
She didn’t move like Jin, or like any of the soldiers I’d ever seen. She moved like a storm someone had given steel to. She sidestepped the ghoul like it was nothing, her right sword slicing across its arm. The monster snarled and rounded on her just in time to get her left sword straight through its stomach and her right sword through the neck. The eyes in the stolen face went wide. For a second my heart swelled—it looked so human. Then its fanged mouth fell open.
She yanked the blades out, black with ghoul blood. The thing slumped to the ground, dead.
“You must be the one who said the password,” she said.
I opened my mouth to answer.
I had a second to realize I’d lost a lot of blood before everything went dark.
seventeen
I came awake staring at stars.
I squeezed my eyes shut again and then reopened them. The stars were stitched into the tent above me, yellow cloth constellations in the lamplight. I moved to prop myself up and my arm rebelled in pain, making my head spin. I felt like death. Which was a privilege of being alive, at least.
It took a second for my head to steady. My arm was bandaged from wrist to shoulder. The bandages smelled of honey and something I didn’t recognize.
Next to me Jin was lying still under a heavy blanket pulled up to his elbows. His bare chest was slick with sweat. Fresh bandages were wrapped around him, so I couldn’t see the wound anymore. But his chest was rising and falling with shallow breathing, and that was enough to make my own breathing ease. He was alive. We were both alive. The rush of relief that followed was enough to lift me onto my elbows to get a proper look around.
In the corner sat a stranger. A boy about Jin’s age, with a round face, arms crossed over his chest, curly black hair falling into his eyes as his chin flopped forward in sleep.
I sat up slowly, careful not to wake him. The fact that I was bandaged and not bound and gagged seemed like a good sign. But just because they’d fixed me up didn’t mean I ought to trust them—whoever they were.
My shirt had been replaced, but my sheema was still tied around my middle, and between it and my body was the compass. My heart raced in relief as I pulled it out.
My eyes dropped to a small pile of bottles and bandages in the corner, and among them, a knife that looked like it was for medicine. There was dried blood on it. I snatched it up. I needed to find out where I was. And I wasn’t going unarmed.
The sleeping boy was an easy guard to slip. Sunlight hit my face violently through the tent flap, blinding me the second I pushed outside.
Somebody had painted the world while I slept.
I’d thought green was the color of dusty scrub that fought its way up between stones—not this color that boasted its existence, unafraid, to the desert. Behind me the huge dusty gold of the cliff face loomed over the camp, but the sand surrendered quickly enough as it crept away from the walls. We were overlooking an oasis, a burst of color and life, scattered with people. At a glance I guessed it was about the size of Dustwalk, a hundred or so souls. Only comparing this place to Dustwalk was like comparing a Buraqi to a donkey. And at the center of it all rose a gold-and-red tower that was high enough to scratch the blue off the sky.
My legs decided to walk instead of surrendering me to the ground at the last second. I held the compass close to my body with one hand; the other one clutched the knife. I didn’t know how much use it’d be. I was light-headed, either from loss of blood or from the overwhelming strangeness of this place. My legs moved half on their own. In a few steps, the burning sand turned cool as I stepped into the shade of the oasis.
I passed below trees hanging heavy with oranges and pomegranates and some fruits I didn’t even recognize. They sprang up everywhere, around pools so clear and deep, I felt if I got close enough I might see the beating heart of the earth in them.