“Bahi!” A new voice made everyone’s head turn. The girl who rushed in was younger than I was. Her hair was a dark purple, spreading in soft waves framing a round face earnest with panic. “Something’s happening to my brother. Jin’s babbling in his sleep.”
There was that word again. Brother.
She looked even less like Jin than the Rebel Prince.
“That’s normal,” Bahi said. “The Nightmare venom’ll be burning out of his system.”
“You’re sure?” The purple-haired girl’s voice was thin with tears.
“Delila.” The prince reached out for her comfortingly. For his sister, I realized.
“You’re the Djinni’s daughter,” I blurted. My head was spinning, trying to remember what was real and what was only something I’d heard around campfires. “From the story.”
Delila was momentarily distracted from her worry. She brushed her violent purple hair back behind her shoulders, like she could hide it.
“Expecting fangs and scales?” Prince Ahmed smiled like it was a joke, but there was a tinge of wariness there, too.
“Wings and horns, actually,” I half joked. That was what they’d said the prince’s monster sister looked like in Dustwalk. The younger girl’s eyes dashed to the ground, embarrassed. The air shifted around her head, like heat in the desert. The tinges of purple disappeared and her hair was as pure black as her brother’s. She fiddled with it self-consciously. I was suddenly sorry for having said anything at all.
“I’ll go check on him anyway.” Bahi scratched his neck, looking awkward in the tension. As he did, I saw blue ink etched into his palm in a perfect circle thick with lacing symbols.
My heart sank.
“You’re a Holy Man.” Back in Dustwalk, we stitched up our own gunshot wounds and missing fingers. You had to be missing a pair of limbs or a bucket of blood before it warranted the Holy Father’s intervention. We only called him when everything but prayer was hopeless—to heal in part, but also to bargain at the doors of death. The presence of a Holy Man was never a good sign. It was a last resort.
The thought must’ve shown on my face. “Don’t worry.” Bahi held up his other hand. It was blank. The matching tattoo that ought to have been there was missing. “I’m not a very good one.”
He put his marked hand on Delila’s shoulder, leading her out as he leaned in conspiratorially, speaking in her ear. He said something that made her laugh through her worry. I wished I knew what. I could use some words that would unknot the worry in my gut. If I’d dragged Jin halfway across the desert to die, I was going to kill him.
“What happened to him?” Prince Ahmed’s accent was neater than mine, but softer than Commander Naguib’s. Naguib. He was the Sultan’s son, too. He was Jin’s brother just as much as Prince Ahmed was.
Jin had pointed his gun at Naguib’s face and hadn’t pulled the trigger. It was a sin to kill your own blood.
“Is there anyone else related to Jin I ought to know about before answering that?” If ever there was a time to watch my smart mouth. It wasn’t even them I was angry at.
But Shazad snorted a laugh. An unpolished, undignified laugh that didn’t match the rest of her, and that didn’t seem to be at me either. “Not that we’re aware of. But you can never be sure with the Sultan and his women.”
But Ahmed caught the edge in my words. “You didn’t know he was my brother.” It wasn’t a question.
“I didn't even know he was part of the rebellion.” Humiliation burned inside me. Ahmed and Shazad were both looking at me, waiting for me to say something that might explain why anyone would drag someone she didn’t even know through the desert. I wasn’t sure how to explain how the two of us got so tangled up.
“Jin blew up a factory.” That seemed like the right place to start, only it wasn’t, really. “That was after we burned down a building,” I added. “But that was sort of an accident.” Shazad’s face lit up with a smile. Like she’d just decided something about me and liked it. Then it all came tumbling out.
Shazad’s smile faded as I got to Dassama, but she didn’t interrupt as I rushed through the past few days. Fahali. Our escape. The Nightmares.
“We need to plan.” By the time I finished, Shazad was tapping the map that was spread out in front of the prince, pinpointing Fahali. “The Gallan and the Sultan are getting closer. And now they’re looking for us—with a weapon that can wipe out whole cities.” She turned to me. “What kind of range do you think this thing has?”
“Not enough to blast the whole canyon.” I looked at the jagged line of ink across the paper that showed the hugeness of the Dev’s Valley. Shazad’s finger rested on Fahali. There was a tiny x scratched at the other edge of her finger, marking the rebel camp. Less than a finger’s width apart didn’t seem far enough to be safe to me. “Enough that they don’t need to be precise. Or get through your magic door.” I hesitated. “And the thing is, there wasn’t a single bit of shrapnel in Dassama.”
“What does that mean?” Ahmed asked, looking down at the map. Surveying the country he’d already won once and was fighting for all over again.
“No shrapnel means it’s not a single-use bomb,” Shazad said, catching on quicker than the prince. “This is something new. Something they can use over and over again.”
“Which means they don’t have to know exactly where we are, because they don’t need to get us on the first try.” A look of perfect understanding passed between Ahmed and Shazad and right over me.
“We need Imin,” Ahmed said.
The girl who followed Shazad back into the tent moments later seemed completely unremarkable. She looked so average that it was hard to pick out anything to notice about her at all. Except that she had yellow eyes.
“We need a spy,” Ahmed said to the girl, Imin. “We need you to infiltrate the Gallan army in Fahali and send word if they get too close to us.”
“Fine.” The girl shrugged sullenly. Even as she did her face started shifting. Her lips narrowed, her skin paled, her shoulders widened, and her chest flatted. In a few blinks she was someone else entirely. A man with a whole new face. A Gallan face.
The only things that didn’t change were her—his—pale yellow eyes and her clothes. I thought of the red haired girl in Fahali, right before she got shot.
“I don’t like it.” Shazad surveyed their spy. “Your eyes . . .” Imin rolled them expressively at Shazad. “We ought to send Delila.”
“No.” Ahmed shook his head. “An illusion is too risky. Sending a Demdji into a Gallan camp is like sending a lamb into the lion’s den as it is. Illusions slip; shape-shifting doesn’t.”
“At least Delila can hide her mark,” Shazad muttered.
“It has to be Imin.” Ahmed’s tone didn’t leave room to argue.
Finally Shazad conceded with a nod. “There’s a dead ghoul in the canyon in Gallan uniform. Help yourself. You’re to report back by Shihabian.” She turned to go, nodding at me to follow. “And try not to get killed.”
eighteen