Rebel of the Sands (3 page)

I didn't need to check if Hasan was following my gaze; a blind man could see the mass of broke factory workers and underfed boys and men with already-raw knuckles aching for a release. Even the kid with his split lip lined up as a target was one of the restless. Only he was drunk
on the prince's rebellion instead of two-louzi liquor. Hell, I knew the feeling. I was counting on it to carry me all the way to Izman.

“Living under our sun doesn't exactly give men a cool head. Especially, say, if an Eastern Snake and a Blue-Eyed Bandit were to start talking out there.” I looked at Hasan out of the corner of my eye, praying that he wasn't about to have me shot. “I'll tell you what, though. I can help you out.”

“Can you, now?” Hasan scoffed, but he was still listening.

“Sure. I'll forfeit and take the kid's place. For a thousand fouza.”

The foreigner rounded on me, saying something in a language I didn't know but that sounded like cursing. “Are you crazy, kid?” He switched back to Mirajin. “You want to get shot instead of him?”

“If I'm lucky, he'll miss me.” I felt my chest rising and falling with each shallow breath. The kid was rocking back and forth on the sand that I was sure was filled with glass. He had bare feet, but he didn't whimper.

“Are we shooting or what?” Dahmad bellowed, chucking his empty bottle at the kid, missing him by a foot.

I was still watching Hasan; the sale wasn't made yet.

“If I'm not lucky, you don't have to pay me a thing and your crowd gets blood.”

Hasan's lip curled up nasty-like. “And everybody goes home happy.”

“Except the dead Bandit,” the foreigner said, low enough that I was the only one who heard. He raised his voice. “We'll throw the game.” The foreigner's eyes hadn't left
me, though he was talking to Hasan. I opened my mouth to argue, but something in his gaze made me stop. We were on the same side now. “If the Blue-Eyed Bandit here is so determined to get up there as a target, I'll shoot first. I'll miss the bottle without shooting him in the head. Then you let the Bandit shoot. With me as the target. He'll miss, too.” My shoulders felt tight, like my arms knew I couldn't bear to miss a shot. But he was trusting me. So I nodded ever so slightly. “Your champion wins by default. We all get out of here without a bullet hole in us.”

“And with the money,” I piped up before the foreigner could make us both honorable and poor. “We leave with a thousand from the house winnings. Each.”

“I'll give you a hundred each,” Hasan said.

“Eight,” I retorted.

“Five and you're grateful I don't send someone after you to break your fingers and bring me my money back.”

“Done.” Five hundred wasn't a thousand, but it was better than nothing. And I might still be able to get to Izman on that.

The crowd was beginning to get rowdy. A cry went up from the stands. “Are you yellow-bellied fools going to shoot? The kid's about to piss himself!”

Hasan tore away from us. “Gents! Who really wants to see this rebel brat get shot at? He's too short by half anyway.” Hasan snatched the bottle off the kid's head. “Scram!” The kid stared at him like he was the hangman who'd just cut the noose.
Go
, I urged silently. Then he was stumbling away.

The pressure on my chest eased even as a murmur of discontent rose. Hasan silenced them with a raised hand. “Wouldn't you rather see these three men with a score to settle take aim at
each other
?” The uproar from the stands was deafening, feet stamping so hard the whole building shook, down to the nails. “Step up, Bandit!”

I took one long, shuddering breath. Maybe I ought to have thought this through. Or at least held firmer at a thousand. “Come on, kid,” a voice by my ear said. “You trust me, don't you?”

I eyed the foreigner's cocksure grin. “I don't even know you.”

He reached out and pulled my hat off my head. I was glad I'd thought to shove my hair back under the sheema that was pulled low as my eyebrows, but still I felt bare without the hat. “All the more reason to trust me.”

The walk across the barn seemed too long.

Hasan grinned as he balanced the bottle on top of my head. “Better earn your money and not shake, kid. Or everyone'll see the bottle trembling like a girl on her wedding night.”

My anger rooted me; the bottle didn't move. Not when the foreigner stepped to the line. Not when he slotted his single bullet into the chamber. Not even when he raised the gun and pointed it straight at my head. Except I couldn't breathe. He took careful aim, adjusting the shot. He was taking his time, and my nerves were fraying by the second.

“Just fire, you coward!” The shout burst from my lips the same second the gun went off.

I didn't have time to flinch.

A boo went up from the crowd. And I was still alive to hear it.

I tipped my head and the bottle tumbled unbroken into my hands. I looked, and a bullet was embedded in the wall a hair to the left of my skull. Only then did I start to shake. I wasn't sure if it was from nerves or from excitement. I wrapped my hands around the bottle to hide it either way.

In a blur of boos I walked back to the line. The foreigner passed me halfway across the pit as he walked out to the target. He paused for a second, placing my hat back on my head. “You all right?” he asked.

“Cut it a little fine there.” I tugged my hat back down.

“What's the matter, Bandit?” Like he thought something was too damn funny. “Feeling a little less immortal?”

I shoved the bottle at him. “I wouldn't taunt someone who's about to aim a gun at your head.”

He laughed and kept walking.

And then I was the one standing behind the white painted line and he was the target. I could hit the bottle no problem if I wanted to. What were the chances Dahmad would actually hit the foreigner anywhere fatal? And even if he did, what was the foreigner to me? Not a thousand fouza in prize money.

I fired. The bottle stayed in one piece.

“The game is over!” Hasan cried over the shouts. “Dahmad reclaims his spot as your champion!” Some cheered, likely those holding slips with his number on them.

And slowly a new chant started to go up from the crowd. “Shoot! Shoot! Shoot!”

The champion was weaving unsteadily. “Yeah! I want a shot at the Snake, too.”

The foreigner had pulled the bottle off his head, but now the champion was swaggering over to the line, taking aim and gesturing at him to step back into place.

“They're right!” Hasan crowed. “We can't have a winner if Dahmad doesn't shoot.” He cut his gaze toward me. I understood what he meant clear enough. No winner meant no winnings for the house. And that meant no money for us. “What do you say, Eastern Snake?”

My eyes met the foreigner's and I shook my head. He held my stare for a long moment, all hints of joking gone. Then he stepped back and set the bottle on his head.

The champion stumbled up to the line. He could barely stand. He squinted at the foreigner, as if trying to make out where he was exactly. My father had been this drunk most days when he came home from factory work. He got his hands on a gun one of those times. My mother and I would've both been dead if he'd been able to shoot straight.

Dahmad raised the gun. From where I was standing I could see he was aiming straight at the foreigner's chest.

The foreigner had beaten the champion last time. Dahmad was drunk enough to think revenge was a better idea than winning. And a man was a big enough target for even a drunk to hit.

As the champion's hand squeezed down on the trigger,
Hasan's earlier words crashed down around me. There were no second shots in this game. I flung my body sideways without thinking and crashed into Dahmad.

The shove sent the bullet three feet to the left. The liquor sent Dahmad down into the sand while I staggered to find my footing, clutching my arm.

The crowd went up like a powder keg that had been waiting for the right spark.

They knew they'd been tricked, but no one seemed to know how. Some were screaming that the foreigner and I were in it together; others were shouting that Hasan had scammed them. In an instant they were rushing the bet wranglers.

“Son of a whore!” A pair of hands grabbed me by the front of my shirt. Dahmad was back on his feet and he had me clear off the ground, my toes dragging in the sand. I started to thrash, but he shoved me back against the wall of the pistol pit, knocking the air out of my lungs. And then there was a knife in his hand. Dahmad's face was close to mine, his teeth bared, his breath reeking of spirits hot against my cheek. “I'm going to gut you from navel to nose and leave you here picking your insides up off the ground, boy.”

The foreigner's hand clamped over the champion's wrist, moving too fast for me to see. But I heard the sickening snap. I dropped to the sand in a heap as the champion fell onto his side roaring in pain, the knife clattering away. I saw bone sticking out of his arm. The foreigner swiped the knife from the ground. “Run,” he ordered.

The whole place had gone to hell.

A drunk smashed into a lantern as he careened; it dropped into the stands, shattering in oil and flames.

I turned to make for the entrance, but the brawl was too far gone already. There was no escape that way. The foreigner and I stood, backs against the wall. We were forgotten—the chaos wasn't even about us anymore. The whole barn was filling with smoke. We were going to be choking in seconds.

“I don't suppose you can fly?” he shouted over the noise, pointing his chin straight above us. A window just out of reach, above the stands.

I grinned at him even though he couldn't see it. “I can't fly, but I don't weigh so much.”

He understood me perfectly. Linking his fingers together, he created a foothold. I shoved the pistol I was still carrying into my belt. Damned if I'd leave a decent weapon here.

I took a few short steps back and ran. My third step landed my right boot in the foreigner's interlaced fingers and he launched me upward. My arms banged into the ledge with a jolt that was going to leave bruises. His hands were there under me, holding me steady as I dragged myself up the windowsill. The prayer house's roof was an easy drop below, and in a few seconds I was out in the night air. I was dying to make a run for it.

Instead I turned back, bracing my feet against the roof as I pulled him up, until he was out of the window and on the roof beside me.

We jumped down from the old prayer house, rolling as we hit the sand below. A bullet bounced off the wood near my head. “All right, Bandit,” he gasped. “Where to?”

Where to?
he asked me, in the town with the sky smelling of smoke and fiery chaos blooming in the dark.

I had to get back to my uncle's house. I had to lose him. My little cousin Nasima once got slapped silly for bringing home a mouse she found under the schoolhouse. I could only guess what'd happen to me if I brought a stray foreigner anywhere near home. And that wasn't even banking on what the foreigner would do if he found out I was a girl. “Nah, I'll be all right.”

He looked over his shoulder. “Got somewhere to be?”

I was already backing away, eyeing the bar where I'd left Blue, hoping to God the horse was still there. “Thanks for everything.” I forced a grin at him even though he couldn't see it. “But I've got to go see a bar about a horse.”

And before he could say another word, I bolted.

“G
et your useless self up and to the store, or don't expect to eat today.” My blanket came off me with a violent rip. I groaned, squeezing my eyes shut against the sunlight and my aunt's face. “And don't expect to eat tomorrow either.”

I counted her footsteps as she stomped away. Ten steps and she was clear to the kitchen. I cracked an eyelid. How much sleep had I had? A few hours, maybe. I wanted sleep more than I did food. But burnt dawn light was leaking in and calls to prayer were starting.

I rolled from the mat to the wooden floor, pulling my blanket over my head as I dug around for some clothes. Around me, the six cousins I shared the cramped room with were stirring. Little Nasima sat bolt upright before
flopping back down and stuffing the corner of her blanket into her mouth.

You could barely see the floorboards between our mats. Our room looked like a battlefield, clothes strewn everywhere like fallen bodies, schoolwork, mending needles, and the odd book scattered throughout like shrapnel. Only Olia's corner had a clear floor. She'd even tried to hang a horse blanket from the ceiling to separate herself from her sisters. It took some getting used to, this room.

There'd been only two rooms in my father's house. The one he and my mother slept in and the big room where we ate and where I slept for almost sixteen years. That room was gone now, with the rest of the house I grew up in.

It took some searching, but I found my good blue khalat shoved in a ball under my mat. It was wrinkled, so I did my best to smooth out the creases with my hands before tugging it quickly on over the plain brown shalvar I wore on the bottom.

Shira sighed into her pillow. “Can you stop crashing around like a dying goat? Some of us are trying to sleep.” In her corner, Olia pulled her blanket back over her head.

I found a boot and dropped it from as high as I could so it hit the floor with a loud thud. Shira flinched. She was the only one of my female cousins I shared blood with. The others belonged to my uncle's other wives. Aunt Farrah had given her husband three boys, then Shira.

She simpered at me through heavy-lidded eyes. “You look terrible, cousin. Didn't sleep well?” My fingers faltered on the sash I was knotting around my waist. Shira
smirked pointedly. “Looks like you must've been tossing and turning, too.” I resisted the impulse to tug my sleeve down over my bruised elbow. Of course Shira knew I'd snuck out. She slept two feet away.

Not that she could've guessed where I'd gone. But that wouldn't stop her from telling if she thought it'd get her something, even if it was just the satisfaction of seeing me get a beating.

“How could I sleep?” I went back to tying my sash with sluggish fingers. “Did you know that you snore?”

Olia snorted under her covers. “See, I told you,” she shot at her half sister. Sometimes I almost liked my next youngest cousin. We used to get along just fine back before I lived under my uncle's roof and hating me became one of Aunt Farrah's household rules.

“Though maybe that wasn't you last night,” I jabbed at Shira. “Hard for a pile of blankets to snore.”

Shira's bed had been as empty as mine when I'd clambered back through the window after using some of our precious water to scrub the smell of smoke and gunpowder from myself. Judging by the sickly sweet smell of oils on her, she'd been out to see Fazim. He'd probably told her he was going to the pistol pit and coming back rich.

I tried not to smile at the memory of him getting pitched from the competition. I wasn't even sure Fazim had made it out alive.

We were at a stalemate. I wouldn't tell so long as she didn't. After a moment, Shira flopped back onto her bed and started pulling a comb through her hair, ignoring me.

I was running my fingers through my own mess of black hair as I made my way into the kitchen. The boy cousins were already starting to mill around on their way to work, shouting to one another over the prayer bells. No one who worked in the factory had time for prayers except on the holy days. I snaked around my cousin Jiraz, whose uniform was half on, half knotted around his waist as he scratched at a healing burn across his chest. He'd gotten it from one of the machines a few months ago when it belched fire at him unexpectedly. He was lucky he'd lost only a month of work instead of his life.

I grabbed the tin of coffee off the top shelf. It was mighty light. There was sawdust mixed in to thin it out, too. My stomach tightened. Things always got bad when food was low. Actually, things were always bad. They just got worse.

“Farrah.” Uncle Asid walked into the kitchen, rubbing his hand across his face. Nida, his youngest wife, trailed behind, eyes on the ground, hands over her pregnant belly. I turned my attention away just in time to pretend I didn't notice my uncle's eyes drag along me. “Is there coffee yet?”

Desperate restlessness filled me. I wasn't staying here. No matter how light the coin purse I wore tied against my middle felt after last night.

“Give me that.” Aunt Farrah snatched the tin with one hand, the other smacking me sharply across the back of the head. I winced. “I told you to go open the store, you hear me?”

“I couldn't
not
hear you.” I stepped out of her reach, not that it'd save me from a beating later. I was glad to get the
hell out of this house and out of my uncle's sights, but I couldn't stop my smart mouth. “Any louder and the whole town could hear you screeching.” I let the door clatter shut behind me as I dashed down the steps and into the street, Aunt Farrah's threats of a switch to my back fading with every step.

My uncle's shop and his house were at opposite ends of Dustwalk, which was a whole two hundred and fifty paces to walk. Dustwalk's single street was as crowded as it ever got, what with the men trudging to the factory and women and old folks rushing to the prayer house before the sun burned away the last of the cooler night air. The familiarity weighed on me. Lately I'd been thinking someone just ought to kill this town out of mercy. No steel was coming down from the mountains. It'd been years since the last Buraqi was spotted. There were a few regular horses left to sell, but they weren't worth a whole lot.

There was only one thing I'd ever liked about Dustwalk, and that was all the space outside of it. Beyond the flat-faced, dead-eyed wooden houses, you could run for hours and still find nothing but scrub and sand. I resented it now, how far it was from everywhere else. But when I was younger it'd been enough just to get away. Far enough that I couldn't hear my father slurring that my mother was nothing but a used-up foreigner's whore who couldn't give him a son. Far enough that no one could see me, a girl with a stolen gun, shooting until my fingers were sore and my aim was good enough that I could've knocked a shot glass out of a drunk's shaky fingers.

The furthest away I could ever get was when my mother used to tell me bedtime stories of Izman. Only when my father couldn't hear. The city of a thousand golden domes, with towers that'd scratch the blue off the sky, and as many stories as there were people. Where a girl could belong to herself and the whole city was so rich with possibilities that you almost tripped over adventures in the street. She read me the stories of Princess Hawa, who sang the dawn into the sky early when Izman was attacked by Nightmares in the night. Of the nameless merchant's daughter who tricked the Sultan out of his jewels when her father lost his fortune. And she read me the letters from her sister Safiyah.

Safiyah was the only person I'd ever heard of who'd gotten out of Dustwalk. She ran away the night before she was meant to be married and made it all the way to Izman. Letters came from her in the capital to my mother with a caravan every once in a blue moon. They talked about the wonders of the city, a bigger world and a better life. Those were the times my mother would talk most about Izman. How we were going to leave and go and join Safiyah someday.

She stopped talking about it on the hottest desert day anyone remembered in a long time. Or maybe just one of those days that folks remembered so well after because of what happened. I was as far into the desert as I could get without losing sight of the house. The sun was glaring so hard off the six empty glass bottles I had lined up that it was making me squint, even with my sheema
pulled up to my nose and my hat low over my eyes as I took aim. I remembered swatting at a fly on my neck as I heard three gunshots. I stopped. But I didn't wonder much. This was the Last County. Then the smoke started to come up.

That was when I ran back into town.

My father's house was on fire. Later, I'd find out my mother shot my father in the stomach three times and then dropped a match to the house. But all I remembered understanding then was relief when they dragged my father's body out of the house. He wasn't even my real father. I remembered my mother trying to run to me before they dragged her off. And my throat going raw from screaming when they put the noose around her neck.

Dreaming about the places my mother talked about stopped being enough when the trapdoor dropped open below her feet.

•   •   •

I WAS JUST
about halfway across town when I noticed the crowd forming in the big gap next to the prayer house, where the house I grew up in used to be. I spotted Tamid's too-neatly parted dark hair through the crowd. I shoved through bodies until I was next to him. People tended to stand clear of Tamid. Like they thought they might catch a limp from him. It left that much more room for me.

“What are we staring at?” I moved to take the place of the wooden crutch under his left arm. It worked fine
and all, but the stupid boy kept getting taller, and every time somebody bothered to build him a new crutch, he'd go and grow again. He flashed me a smile that I returned with a stuck-out tongue.

“What's it look like?” He passed the crutch back to Hayfa. She was the only servant in town, on account of Tamid's family being the only one that could afford both to buy food and to pay someone to cook it. He rested his weight against me. Tamid was pale as sin for desert folk. But at least his tall, skinny frame looked less hunched today.

At first, in the glare of sunrise, all I saw was the familiar blackened brick of the Sultan's weapons factory on the edge of town. The only reason the hellholes around here were allowed to exist was to serve the factory. Then I caught the glint of the sun on polished metal.

The Sultan's army was coming.

They marched in lines of three abreast, down from the hills. Their gold sheemas covered them from the sun, and their sabers hung from one hip, guns from the other, white zouave tucked neatly into their boots, and gold shirts cinched at their hips. Their march was slow but inevitable. It was always inevitable.

At least there were no blue uniforms dotted among the white and gold. Blue uniforms meant the Gallan army. The Sultan's army might not make life easy, but they were still Mirajin, and we were their people.

The Gallan were foreigners. Occupiers. They were dangerous.

Politics and history weren't exactly what folks talked
about in our end of the world, but the way I heard it, our most exalted Sultan Oman had figured two decades back that he was better suited to rule Miraji than his father. So he made an alliance with the Gallan army. The foreigners killed his father and anybody else who refused to bow to him as Sultan. And in return he let the Gallan army set up camp in Miraji and take the guns we made, to go off and win their wars on far-off shores.

“Aren't they back from Sazi a bit soon?” I squinted into the dawn, trying to count them. Seemed like there weren't as many as usual.

“You didn't hear? The pistol pit in Deadshot burned to the ground last night.” I stiffened, hoping Tamid didn't notice. “There was some riot. My father heard this morning; something to do with the Rebel Prince. He says the army's coming down from the mountains to sort it out.”

“To hang drunks and gamblers, you mean.” The Sultan's army had passed through on their way to Sazi only a few days ago. They'd gone to see the mines, probably to find out if they were worth salvaging. It was unsettling to have them back so soon. Normally the Mirajin Fifteenth Command came through every three months to collect the weapons the factory churned out and take them for the Gallan.

“Deadshot was always a bed of sin; they had it coming. I was meditating this morning on the golden city of Habadden.” Tamid's voice took on a righteous tone. He had a tendency to read the Holy Books until the spines were worn, and I swore he'd started preaching at me more
than the Holy Father did lately. “Their people were so corrupted by wealth, they turned their backs on God. So God sent the warrior Djinn to cleanse it with their smokeless fire.”

Sure, then there were the less holy stories of Djinn seducing women, stealing them from fathers and husbands, and carrying them off to hidden towers.

Those were the good old days. Nobody had seen a Djinni in decades. Now all it took to burn down a den of sin was a girl, a foreigner, and a whole mess of drunks.