Rebel of the Sands (Rebel of the Sands, #1)(22)

Sometime while we rode I’d wound my arms around Jin’s waist to hang on. I let him go and wiped the sweat of my palms onto my own shirt as Jin slid from the saddle. I tried to line up my thoughts along with my spine as I forced myself straight.

Wherever we were, it looked like most desert towns. Slapped together wooden houses and dusty ground. Only it was rockier than Dustwalk, and the horizon loomed close and high around us in the predawn haze. We must’ve gone up into the mountains.

I squinted up at a swinging signpost with a picture of a crudely drawn blue man with closed eyes. The lettering announced it as the Drunk Djinni. I knew that story, but I couldn’t remember it just now.

The town was dead quiet.

“Where are we?” I asked, only to realize Jin was gone. I twisted atop the Buraqi and spotted him two houses down, hopping over a flaking white fence. A line of laundry was strung between the house and a crooked post, and Jin snatched a piece of crimson cloth straight off it. My eyes traveled past him, up the mountain, beyond the houses. I answered my own question.

Sazi was a full day’s ride from Dustwalk. Or a few hours as the Buraqi ran. I’d heard so much about the mining town, but I’d never seen it. They said it was bad here after the mines collapsed a few weeks ago. But I still couldn’t have imagined this.

An explosion. An accident. Gunpowder gone wrong was the word in Dustwalk, and I’d figured I knew what they meant. I’d blown up bottles and tin cans along with all the other kids in the desert. I’d seen them shatter as we ran hollering for cover. Sometimes a kid would get a burned finger that needed to be sawed off, or a scarred chin, but most of the time we just wound up with a mess of metal and glass and sand all melted up together.

The collapsed mines looked a lot worse than a melted hunk of old tin. It reminded me of my father’s body when they dragged him out of our house, his skin still smoldering. The mountain itself was disfigured, like the earth had rebelled from within its very soul and closed the mountain’s ancient mouth, swallowing the mines whole.

No wonder the army hadn’t stayed long in Sazi. There wasn’t a whole lot to be done. Hundreds of prayer cloths were tied around rocks and stakes all the way up the mountain, but God had failed here.

“Here.” Jin’s hand on my knee pulled me back. He was holding the strip of red cloth up to me. I realized it was a sheema. “Better if no one sees your face.”

“Is that how you got a shirt?” I asked. “You took it off someone’s clothesline on your way out of town?”

He nodded ever so slightly. “While you were putting on one hell of a show with the Buraqi. I needed to get out of there before the army came looking. You were too good a distraction to waste.”

I was a distraction.

I riffled around in the bag that was still strapped over my shoulder. The shirt I’d grabbed off the floor of the boys’ bedroom was at the top. The one I’d meant to give him when I stupidly thought he’d need my help. I balled it up and flung it at him. Jin caught it deftly with his free hand.

“Stealing’s a sin, you know.” I snatched the sheema from him and started tying it, wincing as my fingers brushed the spot where Naguib’s gun had smashed across my cheek. “And that shirt doesn’t fit you well.”

Jin paused for a moment before peeling off the shirt he’d been wearing. “Is drinking yourself under the table one, too?” He tugged on the new shirt as I busied myself wrapping my face against the sun that was still rising.

“If I say no,” I said, tucking the fabric into place, “will you be buying?”

? ? ?

MY SECOND DRINK burned less than the first one on the way down, but it still wasn’t close to burning out the aching hollow space in my chest.

“Tamid.” I blurted out the name I’d been biting back since we sat down. “My friend. He got shot through the leg. What do you reckon will happen to him?”

“Not a clue.” It was dark in the Drunk Djinni. Busy, too. Full of men with no mines to go to and nothing to do but drink and tell their stories to painted girls. It wasn’t even noon and this whole town was drunk, or well on its way. And I was helping. Jin’s hat was tugged low over his face, concealing as much of it as he could manage. “Could be they’ll leave him alive. Could be they’ll shoot him in the head to finish the job. You never know with your Sultan’s army. But there’s nothing you can do about it now—you already left him.” I wanted to tell him that I didn’t—that he took me away—but we both knew that wasn’t true. “Only way to find out for sure would be to ride back into town and get matching bullets straight through our heads. I hear that’s the latest style in Izman.”

“Well, it’s the last thing they’d expect,” I joked lamely.

But I knew I wasn’t going back. I’d spent near seventeen years planning on leaving. With my mother. And then on my own. And now I’d finally made it out. After all that time scraping and saving, and fighting, dragging the horizon closer by my fingernails one louzi at a time, I was on my way. The warm rush I was feeling wasn’t all from the drink.

“So where to now?” My foot started tapping on the ground. I’d spent years in one place, and now that I’d finally started moving, it was hard to stop.

The bar girl came over. Jin stopped her as she started to slosh liquor into his glass. “Leave the bottle.” He slid a coin across the table to her.