Rebel of the Sands (Rebel of the Sands, #1)(32)

Massil, the last bastion of civilization before the Sand Sea crossing.

The crowd roared as Jin landed a punch on his opponent’s face with a crunch and sent him down to the ground again.

No more civilized than anywhere else, best I could see.

“You ought to see him in a real tight spot,” I said to Parviz. “I’ve seen him break a man’s hand like that.” I clicked my fingers, thinking of the noise Dahmad’s wrist made when it cracked. Just then Jin’s opponent dove at him again. Jin sidestepped him, his leg lashing out, catching the man’s knee and flipping him over to land flat in the sand. Parviz had a trader’s face, even better than a gambler’s. But I reckoned he was impressed.

“He’d have to be able to fight if he’s always got to be rescuing scrawny little brothers,” a voice chimed in from a few bodies over. I knew before I made the mistake of raising my head that the comment was meant for me. A boy with crooked front teeth had been trying to get a rise out of me all night. I reckoned he wanted me to take a swing at him so he could beat me up and impress some caravan leader without having to step into the ring and fight someone his own size. Jin might be able to hit him hard enough to straighten out his teeth, but I wasn’t fixing to get my arm broke.

Parviz turned to me and eyed me up against Jin. “He’s your brother?”

“We had different mothers.” Our charade was rickety as an old henhouse, but it was the only thing we had that was likely to get us hired and across the desert without being picked apart by buzzards two days out. “We’ll work for half of what the others are asking for,” I said instead of answering the question. We’d been turned down twice already tonight, maybe on account of Jin’s foreignness or my size. But the Camel’s Knees clan had a reputation for being cheapskates.

“I’ve been trading since I was high as a camel’s knee.” Parviz chuckled at his own joke. “I can count well enough to know that with two of you it works out the same fee as a single man, and then there’s an extra mouth to feed. I don’t need dead weight, Alidad.” He called me by the fake name I’d given. “Even if you don’t hardly weigh nothing.”

Parviz turned away, and already my heckler was stepping out to meet him. “You’ve a fine eye for business, my friend. Now I could take any of these fellows any time of the day.” He gestured in a wide arc with a glass of dark liquor dangling from his fingers.

My gun was in my hand in a flash, ready to execute some half-formed plan.

I squeezed the trigger.

The glass in the heckler’s hand shattered before the bullet sank into the wall behind him.

The pit fell silent. The heckler stared dumbly at his handful of glass, blood, and liquor. Someone in the crowd burst out laughing, and then the roar of conversation went up again.

“You son of a bitch!” The heckler had a piece of glass sticking out from his thumb. “You shot me!”

“No, I shot your glass. Don’t worry, the liquor’ll wash the blood off.” I holstered my pistol, hoping I wasn’t about to get shot back. “Like I was about to say before getting interrupted, it’s a modern age. I don’t need a lot of muscle to pull a trigger.”

Parviz’s eyes swept the heckler, then me. Traders knew the worth of things. And they knew when they were getting a bargain, too. “We’re leaving from the West Gate at dawn. Don’t be late.”

Jin was at my side, pulling his shirt on over his head, as Parviz disappeared. “Did you just shoot someone?”

“I got us hired, if that’s what you’re asking.” I scratched the back of my head and tried to look sheepish. I was sure I wasn’t successful judging by the look Jin was giving me. “And I only shot his glass.”

Jin hooked one arm around my shoulder, leaning on me. “I knew I liked you, Bandit.”

And then came that grin. I might have traitor eyes, but Jin had the sort of smile that would turn over whole empires to the enemy—that made me feel like suddenly I understood him exactly, even though I knew nothing about him. The kind that made me feel like if I was on the right side of it, we could do anything together. I had the next six weeks to find out if that was true.





twelve


We left at dawn with the Camel’s Knees as promised. I thought I knew the desert, but as I watched the sun rise in a perfect clear sky over an unbroken stretch of gold, I knew this was something else. The Sand Sea was huge and restless. The Camel’s Knees treated it like something between a beast to be broken and a tyrant to cower in front of. I felt at home instantly.

The landscape shifted from one moment to the next, the moving sands dragging me irresistibly down a dune one moment and trapping me in place the next. Some of the dunes seemed infinite—no matter how long we walked we never seemed to crest them. The wind sliced its path through the land, scattering sand like shrapnel into my eyes and my mouth, in spite of my sheema. In the middle of the day the whole desert shifted and a huge wooden structure appeared out of the sand, red and blue paint flaking off of it with the wind.

“What’s that?” I asked Jin, shielding my eyes from the sun.

“It’s a shipwreck,” Jin told me. And just as quickly as it had appeared, the sand swallowed it up again.

When we pitched camp on the first evening, my skin was raw, my whole body ached from walking, and I was happy.