Rebel of the Sands (Rebel of the Sands #1)(71)

So this was the kind of Demdji I was.

A gun went off. The sand collapsed as I spun toward the sound. The world poured back in around me all at once. There were bodies in the sand already. I was just in time to see Shazad jab her elbow into a man’s throat, whirling to catch him in the gut with a knife. A soldier came at her from the right.

“No!”

I wasn’t empty anymore. I was furious. The sand lashed up, exploding between them, sending them both sprawling. I ran for Shazad as it settled.

She was finishing coughing up desert dust when I dropped to my knees next to her. When she saw me she starting hacking all over again. “I thought you were dead! I saw you go over,” she got out between coughs. “I saw you fall.”

To our right a gun went up. Without thinking, I flung out my hand; a wave of sand sent the soldier sprawling. Buried him. His gun skittered to my feet. I didn’t pick it up. The rush made me feel dizzy and drunk and scared all at once. It was like I’d just grown another limb I wasn’t fully in control of yet.

I clasped Shazad’s hand, pulling her up. I was still shaking too hard to find words. When I turned, the sand at my feet turned with me—I knew it without looking. I felt it. Like I always had, without knowing that I was. The desert all around me, the sand like a living thing, calling to me, begging me to use it. To be part of it.

The fighting had stopped, but I couldn’t.

“Amani.” Shazad’s grip slipped out of mine. The sand was moving underneath me, a swirl like a tiny sandstorm, and then it was getting bigger, rising, rising until it was all around me, pulling at my hair, my clothes, calling me into it, into the desert.

To drown in it.

I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t control it. There was too much of it. I couldn’t breathe.

A new hand closed over mine, and this time it was flesh and bone. Jin appeared through the sand, his sheema wrapped tightly around his face as he pushed his way through blindly. I saw he was holding something metallic a second before his arms went around me and he pulled me into his chest. He was saying something I couldn’t hear over the storm. All I felt was his hand press into my arm. It was a bullet, cool and hard, the iron biting into my bare skin.

The cold of it cut through the heat in me.

The sand dropped away, spiraling down and down and down until it was back under my feet and I could hear Jin’s heartbeat under my forehead, feel the pain of the bullet pressing into my flesh too hard, hear him whispering my name over and over again in my ear until I stopped shaking.





twenty-six


We finally stopped flying a few hours before dawn to let Izz get some rest from carrying the four of us. We were halfway between home and where we’d jumped off the train. It was open empty desert on all sides, though I could see the mountains of the Dev’s Valley on the horizon. We didn’t unpack supplies or even build a fire. Everyone collapsed where they stood. Izz turned into a huge catlike beast I’d never seen before and fell asleep. Shazad leaned against him. Her eyes were red, even though I hadn’t seen her crying.

Jin sat down next to me without a word. There was something in his hands. The red sheema, I realized. The one I’d let go out the window. He took my right arm, gently, without asking. My hand was swollen and tender, but I’d almost stopped noticing the constant throbbing. Sprained. Not broken. The place where my ribs had connected with the canyon wall had faded to a dull ache. I felt Bahi’s absence like a badly stitched wound as Jin’s hands worked, clumsy with exhaustion, binding my hand with my sheema. He tied it off, his fingers skimming over the cloth before he set my hand down gently.

“You all right?” he asked.

“It’ll heal.”

We both knew that wasn’t what he’d been asking, but Jin let it pass anyway.

“Can you shoot left-handed?”

“If I have to,” I said.

Jin held his pistol out to me. “Do you want it?” I stared at the gun in his hands, but I didn’t snatch it up like I would’ve once. Yesterday. “You’ve worked it out, haven’t you?”

“It’s because of the iron.” I took the gun by the leather handle, careful not to touch the metal. I thought of the way he’d pressed a bullet to my skin as the sand was rising. Just one touch and I was stripped powerless because of the thing that had shaped my whole life, with or against my will. It was like the Buraqi and the metal horseshoes: so long as I had iron against my skin, I couldn’t touch my Demdji powers. “It’s the reason I got through my whole life without knowing I was a Demdji. Because I’m from Dustwalk.” The girl who taught herself to shoot a gun. Until she could knock down a row of tin cans like they were nothing and the gun was everything. “Because I’m the girl with the gun.” And Noorsham was the boy from the iron mines. He said he’d been sick. Sick enough to leave the mines and stop inhaling iron dust for a little while, maybe. So that when he went back to work, he did it as a Demdji.

“From the town where even the water tastes like iron.” And when they’d been afraid of Noorsham in Fahali, iron was what they’d chained him with. Jin’s hand was clenching and unclenching around nothing. His knuckles were torn up, and the motion was making the scabs break all over again. That had to be painful.

“Bet you weren’t counting on all this being so damn complicated when you abducted me from that godforsaken place.”