Rebel of the Sands (Rebel of the Sands, #1)(30)

The same thought clearly occurred to Jin. “Come on.” He started to push himself forward on his elbows to stay close to the sand, moving away from the rails. We’d been walking between them, from one wooden slat to the next, so there’d be no tracks. I crawled behind Jin, kicking any marks from our bodies away with my boot. We crested a sand dune. I rolled over to the other side, flattening myself on my front so we were hidden from the rails.

I loosened my gun just in case. Jin already had a knife in his hand.

We lay in the sand in silence, side by side. I could feel the desert shifting below my stomach with every breath. I listened for the sound of passing footsteps. That was the trouble with sand—it muffled most noises. We’d never hear him climbing up the dune until he was on top of us. We outnumbered him, but surprise made a single man dangerous.

It probably wasn’t a soldier, I realized. Soldiers didn’t tend to travel alone. But that still left a hundred dangerous possibilities. A hungry Skinwalker. A greedy desert bandit. A Djinni.

No. That was ridiculous. It couldn’t be a ghoul—the iron ought to keep them away. And no one had seen a Djinni for decades. They didn’t live among us like they used to anymore.

But they were immortal. And this was the desert. The true open desert. Legend said things were out here that hadn’t been seen by civilizations in decades.

The unknown made me itch to clamber over the dune and take a look. I shifted ever so slightly, inching my way up the dune. Jin hissed a warning under his breath. I pressed the gun to my lips, to silence him. And remind him I was armed, and likely a better shot than whoever was on the rails. He didn’t reach out to stop me as I pulled myself the rest of the way up.

The rails were as empty as a drunk’s liquor bottle on prayer day.

“There’s no one there. They’ve gone past.” Or they’d vanished in a column of smokeless fire like the Djinn in the stories.

“Do you have a death wish?” Jin sounded almost impressed, his voice returning to a normal volume as he sat up.

“If I did, I wouldn’t be very good at it, seeing as I’m still alive,” I said, holstering my pistol.

“God knows how.” Jin scrubbed his hands over his face, tiredly. I was dead tired, too. It hit me all at once. “Didn’t anyone ever tell you the story of Impulsive Atiyah and the Djinni Sakhr when you were a child?”

“You mean the Djinni Ziyah,” I corrected him absently.

“What?”

“It’s Atiyah and Ziyah, it rhymes. Who’s ever heard of Sakhr?” I argued. Everybody knew the story of Atiyah, the impulsive girl who was always getting herself into trouble and her Djinni lover Ziyah, who feared so much for her life that he gave her his name. His true name. Which she could speak and he would be summoned to her rescue. That she could use to bind him to her will. The name that she could whisper to the lock of any door and it would open into his secret kingdom.

“You think the point of the story is the Djinni’s name?”

“No, but I reckon you ought to get it right. She died because she said his name wrong in the story, not because she was impulsive, and why are we arguing about this?” I snapped. We both went silent.

“Is your aunt in Izman really worth your life?” he asked finally.

“I don’t know, I’ve never met her.”

Jin stopped, hands caught midway through his hair. He’d shoved his shirt up to his elbows and I saw the tension in the muscles in his forearms as he scrutinized me. “You’re going to Izman to find someone you’ve never met?”

“I’m going to Izman because it’s got to be a better life than out here.”

“No, it doesn’t,” Jin said. “Cities are worse, if anything. It’s not like Dustwalk, where everybody knows your name and kills you for a good reason. They’ll kill you for no reason at all. And that’d be a crying shame. You’re too remarkable to waste as a corpse in a gutter.” He got to his feet and offered me a hand. I ignored it. I ignored what he’d said about me being remarkable, too.

“You sound like my father,” I said, standing up without his help.

“Your father?” He dropped his hand.

“He used to say the city was for thieves and whores and politicians.” I mocked my father’s slurred tones with a wave of an imaginary drink. “I was better off staying where my family was going to keep me safe. Do you want to know how safe my father kept me?”

“What happened to him?” Jin asked. There was a tense note in his voice that I couldn’t read.

“My mother killed him.” He opened his mouth. “And don’t bother to say you’re sorry. He was an ass and he wasn’t my real father anyway.” I thought back to the blue-eyed soldier who’d been working for Commander Naguib and wondered how many half-Gallan children there were in the desert. No others that I knew of, but I hadn’t exactly traveled far. Until now.

“I was going to say that it sounds like he deserved it.” Jin said. “And your mother?” His voice said he already knew.

“What normally happens to murderers?” Sometimes in my nightmares I still saw her swinging from a rope. I squared my shoulders. Let him tell me she deserved it, like everybody else had.

“That I am sorry for,” he said. “A mother is a hard thing to lose.” I got the feeling he might know something about dead mothers.