Shazad started to retort something, but Bahi was already roping Izz, Jin, and Hala into some drinking game that seemed to involve flipping over a pair of coins and then slapping palms into rocks before taking a swig.
We might die here, I realized. They were just used to it. For the past year they’d all been throwing themselves into danger and near death over and over, just for the shot at a better world. I’d done that, too. I’d walked into the pistol pit with nothing but a good shot at death for the chance of finding a better place. But that’d just been for me. They were walking into danger for themselves and everybody else. The whole of Miraji. So that no one else died like they had in Dassama. So that no one had to live like I had in Dustwalk.
“Ladies!” Bahi called, pulling me out of my own head. “Won’t you join us? So far, I’m winning.”
“I thought the point was not to drink the most,” Hala retorted.
“Clearly you and I have different definitions of winning.” Bahi said.
“We were just giving you a head start.” Shazad bumped my shoulder with hers. “When you wake up and all your blood has turned to liquor, you will look back on that as your first mistake on the way to losing.”
I laughed in spite of myself. After one bottle was empty, Bahi got up the bravery to re-create his drunken serenading under Shazad’s window. We were drunk on anticipation and good old-fashioned liquor under stars that seemed to belong to us to rearrange at will.
And I realized that, scared as we were, I’d never been so happy as I was that night.
? ? ?
THE NEXT MORNING something woke me before the sun. I lay very still, trying to figure whether it was just a memory from a dream I was already forgetting.
The camp was still asleep around me. The fire’d been doused. Shazad was on her side, one hand resting across her blade like she was expecting someone to come for her any second. On the other side of the fire pit, Hala was curled up, buried in her bedroll.
Izz would be on watch duty in the sky in the shape of a Roc, but Bahi and Jin’s bedrolls were both empty. I got up, joints popping, and started toward the sunrise, pulling myself up onto the ridge that protected the camp. That was where I found them.
Bahi didn’t have a prayer rug, but he was sprawled on his knees, his head down, his lips pressed to his hands. I stood very still. I could hear the words of morning prayers muttered like a whispered secret. It felt like witnessing something intimate. I stepped back, not wanting to intrude. I caught sight of Jin, crouched a few feet away on a narrow ledge, his back against the mountain, his hands dangling into the open space over the rails. I padded across the dusty stones of the ridge in bare feet.
“The hangover’s not that bad.” I heard the croak in my own voice as I went to sit next to him.
“As much as I would like to blame Bahi’s cheap liquor, I can hold my drink.” He ran a hand over his face. “I haven’t slept well since I woke up from the Nightmare bite. When I close my eyes I see the camp burning if we don’t intercept the weapon. My family burning. You burning.”
I looked up at the last one. He let out a long exhale.
“You don’t have to stay—you know that, don’t you? You were right at Shihabian. You’re here because I . . . because I got you involved in this. Because I wanted you to stay. But I don’t want you to have to die. You could still go. To Izman. Or wherever you want. Get out of this.” He was apologizing, only I wasn’t mad anymore.
I stared out over the desert. It seemed endless, but the sun was rising to my left, which meant that somewhere, the way I was looking, was Dustwalk. “I reckon I’m where I’m supposed to be.”
“You know, I sort of miss the girl who was ready to leave everyone else to save her own skin,” Jin said. “She seemed less likely to die doing something stupid and heroic.”
“I’m going to go ahead and take that as a compliment.” I laughed, but then I stopped. The way I was staring, across the rails, I saw the glint of sunlight off something. “Is that—”
The sky came awake with a scream before I could finish.
We both looked up to see Izz circling the camp and then spiraling down, changing from bird to boy a few feet above the ground as he dropped into a crouch. I was on my feet, turning back toward camp, panic already racing in my chest. But Jin’s hands were on my waist. He turned me around quick as a whip. His mouth came down hard and desperate over mine.
His hands burned across the bare skin at the bottom of my spine. His touch sparked along the edge of my clothes. I didn’t know if being kissed by him set me alight or if it just turned the fire already in me loose.
He broke away before we were consumed, hands on my face. “Still feeling immortal, Bandit?”
We ran back to the camp. Shazad was already awake and armed. Izz had a wild look in his eyes. “There’s a train coming.”
Shazad shook her head like she was trying to clear out her mind. “There’s no train scheduled before ours,” she said, confirming what we were all thinking. I read it in Shazad’s face the same moment I thought it.
“They put it on another train.” I might as well spit it out. “The weapon is on this one.”
? ? ?
THERE WAS NO time to rig the tunnels, no time to stop the train so we could get on board. That’s what they were counting on. No one talked as we perched on the ridge overlooking the tunnel, waiting for it to come through. At first all I could hear was everyone breathing into the silence, and then breaths mixing with the rattle of rails, and then nothing but the mountain rumbling below our feet as the train raced through the tunnel.
Waiting.
Waiting.
The train burst through in a blast of black smoke.
“Go!”
We half ran, half slid down the mountain and plunged into coal smoke. The black cloud invaded my lungs and my nose, blinded my eyes, so I went sprawling. I was back up and jumping before I had time to feel the sting of the skin stripped from my elbow.
One moment it was stone below my feet, the next it was air. The whole world was suspended.
My feet hit the roof of the train unsteadily and I slid, panic wrapping me up as I fell toward the edge. A hand was around mine, grabbing me. Jin hauled me back up. There was no room to thank him over the deafening noise of the train. I tightened my fingers around his for a moment.
Then we split, his hand tearing out of mine. Shazad and I bolted for the front of the train, Jin, Bahi, and Hala for the back. I didn’t look down, not at the rails rushing below us, not at anything, until we were as close to the front as we could get without climbing into the engine.
I eased myself down first, toward the door that would take us inside, clinging to the outside of the train as it tried to shake me off with every rattling movement, the air howling around my ears.
Shazad landed next to me with the grace of a cat. I checked the pistol on my belt as her hand closed over the handle of her blade.
Terror and excitement battled for my attention. Everything I was feeling was mirrored straight back at me from her eyes. We turned as one.