Rebel of the Sands (Rebel of the Sands, #1)(73)

He sighed, tipping his hat backward. “Yeah, yeah. Just trying to get some sleep before going to near certain death.”

“I think thieves in the night are meant to be quieter than this, you know,” Hala muttered from her side of the campfire. “What exactly is your plan to get us all killed, General?”

“Simple. We get them to destroy each other.” We all stared at her, waiting. It seemed to take her a second to realize she was two steps ahead of the rest of us. “The Sultan might be aiming to drive out the Gallan, but he doesn’t want open war. That’s why he’s trying to blame Noorsham’s destruction on us. If the Gallan soldiers see Noorsham, see that he’s the Sultan’s weapon and not ours, then open war is what the Sultan will get. He’ll lose his alliance with the Gallan. And that leaves us with just the Sultan to usurp, not a whole foreign army after us, too. All we have to do is kill Noorsham before he kills them.”

“Or us,” Hala pointed out. “So it’s five of us against two armies and an insane Demdji superweapon.”

I looked around the circle of faces in the dark. At Shihabian two days ago—God, was it only two days?—I’d felt like an imposter. Like a part that didn’t quite fit in this rebellion, no matter how much I wanted to. Jin’s foolish Blue-Eyed Bandit who gave up the city without knowing what she was giving it up for. The Demdji without powers who couldn’t save anyone. But now, standing in this circle, I felt it, the thing that made them all stay and risk their lives. Being a link in the chain.

“Yeah, I guess it is,” I said.

“There’s an old expression,” Shazad said. She might not want to be called General, but it was written all over her. She surveyed her small army: a shape-shifter, a gold-skinned girl, a foreign prince, and a blue-eyed bandit. “About fighting fire with fire. It never made much sense to me. But fighting fire with Demdji who don’t burn so easily, that might work.”





twenty-seven


Noorsham was impossible not to see first. Even from far away, I tracked his progress by the sun glinting off the brass helmet with the barrel of the rifle.

It was only half a day’s walk from the railroad outpost to Fahali. We’d landed on the mountain just after dawn. It was close to noon now, the sun high over the scene. Every once in a while I could just make out Izz’s shadow dashing across the mountain face as he circled slowly. Waiting for his chance.

I tracked the barrel of my gun along from Noorsham, through the soldiers. There were a few dozen of them. And there was Naguib.

My finger tightened on the trigger.

“Not even you can make that shot, Bandit.” Jin’s voice in my ear eased my finger off the trigger. “He’s still out of range.” As soon as my finger was away from the metal of the trigger, the terrifying, dizzying sensation of having an entire desert at my fingertips, ready to rip out of control, rushed back. My powers were still too much of a liability, Shazad had declared in the end. I didn’t know enough about what I was doing to be any kind of help as a Demdji just yet.

I let out a long breath. Just as I did, Noorsham’s head swiveled, swinging up toward us. I could swear he looked straight at our hiding place. Next to me, Shazad sucked in a breath.

He couldn’t see us, I reminded myself.

Hala was making sure of that. She lay on the rock next to me, eyes closed. I could see the strain in her face that holding on to every soldier’s mind at once took. Fixing an illusion there so that all they saw when they looked to the cliffs above Fahali was an empty mountain.

As Noorsham’s head tipped up I saw the flash of skin where the bronze mask didn’t quite meet the armor at his throat. It was a harder shot than a glass bottle in a pistol pit at the other end of the desert. I was just praying it wasn’t a shot I was going to have to take.

The plan was simple. Use Hala’s illusions to draw Noorsham away from his little army and into revealing the Sultan’s treachery to the Gallan. Then kill Noorsham and run, leaving Naguib and General Dumas to face each other.

Simple as saving an entire city of Mirajin and destroying a two-decade-old foreign treaty. Simple as murdering my brother. Killing Noorsham was the hard part. I was glad it belonged to Izz. I only had the gun in case he failed. In case I got a clear shot.

General Dumas had said it himself. He had a long history of killing folks with royal blood. It just wouldn’t be the prince he’d thought.

Without Noorsham, Naguib had nothing to face the Gallan army with, a small rabble of Miraji soldiers against the general’s troops. He would be killed, or captured. And one way or another, from the death of a Miraji prince or the betrayal of the Sultan, there would be war.

I only had the gun in case I got the chance to kill my brother.

No. I stopped that thought. Jin was right. Family and blood weren’t the same. I might not want to see Noorsham die, but this was a war. What I wanted didn’t matter.

My heart pounded between my backbone and the rock I was flattened against as Naguib’s small army advanced toward Fahali.

Next to me, Jin was frowning at something in his hand. Craning over, I realized he was holding the beat-up brass compass. The needle was swinging frantically. The way I’d only seen it do once, when the two were close together for the first time.

“Why’s it doing that?” I whispered. The army was close now, close enough that anything louder might carry down the canyon.