My legs shift to smoke. My eyes turn to fire. I rise, hands held out, fingers crackling with lightning. It sizzles up my arms, singeing my false skin. I am no human. I am jinni, the most powerful of all Nardukha’s children, exalted above all the hosts of Ambadya.
“Tremble, mortal,” I intone in a thousand and one voices. “I am the Slave of the Lamp.”
“No!” The boy’s hair whips around his face as the wind of my breath swirls around him. “Your name is Zahra!”
Above the alomb, clouds roll and multiply, flashing with lightning. A hot, sticky wind howls through the columns, and in the wind are the jinn, and the jinn are laughing.
“Zahra!” The boy holds up a hand, trying to block the sand that stings his eyes. “I know you can hear me! Stop this! You’re stronger than this!”
I shift my eyes to my master, who stands glorious and shining as a god. He smiles at me, and I bask in his approval.
Kill him.
“I love you,” whispers the boy, his words reaching me improbably through the howling wind and the crackling fire. “I love you. Do you hear me? I love you. No matter what.”
Kill him.
I stretch my hands toward him, preparing to launch the lightning that sizzles across my fingers, biting me like a thousand and one angry snakes.
KILL HIM.
I draw a breath, and my palms burn white, blindingly white, as the lightning bunches and readies.
Then something glints on my hand, drawing my eye, just for a moment.
A ring.
The ring I forged for the thief to give to the princess, which he gave to me instead, and with it, his heart. The symbols I myself pressed into the gold seem to shine at me: love, undying, infinite, unity. Symbols of power, symbols of truth. They burn into my ears, sear themselves into my soul.
Time slows.
The clouds overhead roll backward.
My thoughts stumble and reverse.
Kill him.
Kill him?
But I love him.
The moment is but a heartbeat. There is no time. With the next breath Nardukha’s command will overwhelm my heart. I will kill him. I don’t have a choice. I never had a choice.
No.
I do have a choice.
What was it Aladdin said to me, so long ago? You can’t choose what happens to you, but you can choose who you become because of it. I can’t stop Nardukha from killing us both, but I can choose to not be the monster he wants.
Zhian still stands by the Eye, holding my lamp with one finger curled through the handle, dangling at his side.
Not trusting myself to think it through, not daring to take another precious fraction of a second, I shoot the lightning from my hands—toward Zhian. The jinn prince dodges, but not fast enough. The searing energy strikes him in the chest, doing little harm but throwing him off balance. He may hold the lamp, but he is jinn and cannot command me, so its power doesn’t protect him from my attack. Before he can recover, I am upon him, driving toward him in a funnel of smoke. My arms wrap around him, and I propel us both forward, toward the great Eye of Jaal and the fiery tunnel within. As we cross the threshold, Zhian cries out and lets go of the lamp, but too late.
Time rushes forward.
The clouds overhead coil and burst with lightning.
Zhian is sucked away into the tunnel and lost to sight, screaming in fury. I begin to pour into my lamp as it hurtles toward the hungry flames. Nardukha reacts, reaching—but not fast enough.
The lamp falls
falls
falls
falls into Ambadyan fire, the only force in this world or the next capable of destroying it.
I have time only to smile, my face momentarily forming through the smoke, and to whisper to Aladdin before the bronze walls close in on me and start to melt in the flames.
“I love you.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
FORMLESS, I DRIFT.
Where do jinn go when they die? Humans are said to be destined for the godlands, where they will either dwell in ease or toil for the gods, depending on their deeds in life.
But jinn are cursed, and many believe they have no souls at all. When they die, they simply cease.
But I am still here—wherever here is.
Slowly I come to, my consciousness reluctant to wake. I am smoke, airy and thin, spread wide across a dark sky.
With much effort, I am able to assemble myself, finding that I am all in one piece. Instinctively I reach for my lamp, but I cannot sense it. Then I remember—it is gone. I saw it melt in the fires of Ambadya, felt the searing flames on my own skin.
My fate is tied to the lamp.
But I’m not dead.
The thought sends a jolt through me, and I take stock of my surroundings. The sky above is dark, but there are no stars, no moon, and no clouds to obscure it. Below I see only sand, sweeping toward every black horizon.
I sink and take my human form, turning a full circle. And then I see it: the only thing to be seen for leagues about.
A door, half sunk in sand.
A door I know at once.