Mirage (Mirage #1)(67)

“Amani.”

I hummed in response.

“I can’t marry Maram,” he said.

My eyes flew open in shock and I scrambled to sit up. “What?”

“I love you,” he said.

Joy surged through me, overwhelming my shock. “What?” I said again.

He smiled and covered my hands with his. “I love you,” he repeated. I didn’t realize how fiercely I grinned until he leaned forward to kiss me again and I felt the shape of my mouth try to change and fail.

“I want to be yours,” he said against my mouth. “And no one else’s.”

I cradled his face, afraid to believe him. “Really?”

“Yes. Really.” I felt like a different person when I kissed him again, as if my joy and desire had twined around one another and transformed me. I wanted, and not just Idris, but everything. Everything those words promised, everything he wanted to give me. A life outside of what we were trapped in. I didn’t know how, and in that moment it didn’t matter. We had promised ourselves to each other, and there was no one who could unmake that promise.

“Do you love me?” he asked, pressing me into the cushions.

“Yes,” I murmured, echoing his promise from the beginning. “Yes.”





32

The palace was silent in the middle of the night. The noises I’d expected—desert creatures, a large family settling into sleep, were largely absent. There was the whistle of wind, the crackle of fire in the sitting room, and the soft whisper of fabric as I dressed. I drew the gray mantle over my shoulders and the hood over my hair. The data packet was safely hidden in the folds of my qaftan. I covered my face and froze when I caught my reflection in the mirror. I hardly recognized the girl looking out from under the shadow of her hood. A rebel. A spy. The farmer’s daughter from a backwater moon and the body double couldn’t have been more different.

I paused in front of Idris’s door. The giddiness from this afternoon hadn’t passed. I pressed a hand against my ribs as another flutter of joy washed over me. What would he think if he knew where I was going tonight? Would he be angry? Would he understand?

It was, I told myself, a problem for another time.

The halls were just as quiet as the rest of the palace, and the light sconces were turned down to half light. I moved as quietly and quickly as I could, and kept my eyes turned to the ground. Arinaas’s agent dared not breach the walls of the palace, especially when it was believed Maram was in residence. I would have to make my way through to the lowest levels of the palace and out through the tunnels that led to drinking wells. Arinaas’s agent would be waiting at the very end of the westernmost tunnel.

The tunnels were less quiet than the palace proper, filled with the sound of rushing water and the hollow knock-knock as water buckets bumped against one another in the wind.

The moon was full tonight and the sky clear. Its light cut a clear path, illuminating the tunnel’s entrance, and framed the waiting agent. He cut a stark figure, dressed all in black, his turban and face veil covered in a thin layer of desert sand.

“You will return, oh mourner,” he said in Kushaila.

“Set your feet toward the citadel,” I replied.

The tight lines of his shoulders relaxed and he drew down his veil. Dihya, he was young. Too young to have received his daan, too young to have started to grow a beard. Fourteen. Maybe fifteen. But his face was hard and lean—he’d suffered. Suffered enough to take the risk of becoming a rebel before reaching his majority. Suffered enough that no one had stopped him.

“Well,” he said, “your face. Let’s see it.”

The words were fast and harsh—regional. He was from the Eastern Reach.

I stepped out of the shadow of the tunnel and pulled down my veil. His face whitened and his mouth thinned in shock.

“I thought she was joking,” he said hoarsely. “Dihya. You’re the spitting image.”

I didn’t smile when I said, “That’s the point.” My fingers folded over the small data packet and pulled it out of my gown. “This is what you came for. It’s a list of all the Vathek munition depots in the Eastern Reach, as well as base locations and strike units.”

His eyebrows rose in surprise. “And no one knows you’ve taken this?”

“I’m good at being her,” I said. “So, no. No one knows.”

I dropped the data packet into his open palm. It was such a small thing, but meant so much, would do so much, to defend the rebels and civilians here. More than Idris’s presence, more than anything any of us could do in the present moment. The war wouldn’t be won by thwarting a single bombing campaign, but lives would be saved and hope secured. It was a step, and one we desperately needed.

“Siha, yakhoya,” I said as he folded his hands over the packet. Health, brother.

“Baraka, yakhti,” he replied. Blessings, sister.





the ziyaana, andala





33

“So,” Maram said, “was I right?”

I looked up from fiddling with my skirts. I’d returned to the Ziyaana nearly a week ago and Maram had wasted no time summoning me to her chambers.

While I’d been gone, Mathis had at last named her sole Imperial Inheritor of the Ouamalich System and its ancillaries. She seemed happy—she’d gotten what she wanted. But there were moments when I caught her looking less so, as if the responsibility weighed too heavily on her mind, her gaze distant, her fingers twisted in the chain of her mother’s pendant. Perhaps I gave her too much credit, but part of me wondered if the flippancy with which she addressed her ascension to the throne was borne out of something deeper than what she showed the world. If she truly was more her mother’s daughter than her father’s, but couldn’t afford to show it.