With those words, he was gone. Blinking out of existence. Already forgetting us as he vanished back to the desert. Another Djinni blinked out after him. And then my father after him, without so much as casting a glance back our way. And then another. One by one, they vanished from the vaults that had held them for so long against us.

Until we were alone.

Blood was pooling around me, warm on my fingers. My hands crawled away from it across the stone floor, feeling blindly. Something solid wrapped itself around my fingers.

Jin had caught my hand. I clung to his.

I lifted my body from the ground, screaming in pain, dragging myself the last few feet between us. I pressed my hand against my wound as I moved, until the side of my body was against his, our knotted hands trapped between us.

I shifted so I could see his face.

So this was how this story would end. The Resurrected Prince Ahmed would win the war. When he took the palace, he would descend into the vaults again. And there he would find us twined together in blood on the stone floor.

They would burn us. And maybe they’d even remember us. But it would be some distant, false, nameless version of us. The Blue-Eyed Bandit and the Foreign Prince. Not Amani and Jin.

The stories might tell that we loved each other. But the stories would never remember what that felt like. They would never know that when we lay together in his tent the night before we died, he traced the small scar along my collarbone. That when he kissed me, he smiled against my mouth. Or what it sounded like when he said my name. We contained our own stories. A thousand tiny parts of the story would die with us.

The world was starting to fade away into unconsciousness. No – into death. I wanted to tell him I was sorry. But I was and I wasn’t. I wanted to tell him I didn’t want him to die, that I loved him. But he knew that.

‘What do you think happens?’ I said instead. ‘When we die?’ Jin didn’t believe in gods. He didn’t believe in heavens or hells or worlds after. Just in this world. Just in now.

Jin traced my face, like he was trying to remember it. ‘I think they burn us and we become dust and ash.’ He ran a finger across the edge of my lips. ‘And I think that the dust that was me will spend until the end of time trying to get as close as possible to the dust that was you out in that vast desert.’

Something that was neither a sob nor a laugh came out of me, and Jin’s fingers clamped around mine.

I only had time to press back before the darkness came.

Chapter 44

The Young Demdji

Once, at the dawn of a long-ago war, the First War, the immortal Djinn created life. And alongside it there was death. They gave their creations bodies that could be hurt and destroyed and scattered like sand and then lit them with a single spark of Djinni fire that would one day extinguish.

But among them, there were those who had a greater spark of fire than had been granted to most mortals. They were called Demdji. Many said it was because they had more fire that they burned so much brighter and quicker than most.

That they all died so young.

Princess Hawa took her last breath on a wall overlooking a battlefield.

Ashra the Blessed took her last breath facing the Destroyer of Worlds when no one else would.

Imin of a Thousand Faces’ last breath came wearing the one face that death was truly seeking.

Hala the Golden breathed in freedom one last time so that she would not have to take a thousand more breaths as a prisoner.

And the Blue-Eyed Bandit took her dying breath in the vaults below a city at war, clutching hands with the man she loved as the world faded away around them.

And then, after her last breath, she took another one.

Chapter 45

The dark cleared like a sudden burst of fire, and for a moment all I could see was light.

I was dead. Death wasn’t darkness and dust and nothingness, like Jin thought. It was blinding light.

Then I realised I could see the outline of a shape through the light, and it was making my eyes water. My lungs were burning for air, and I could feel blood and hard stone under my hand. I sucked in a panicked breath. A breath that felt like the first one in a long time. I bolted upright, rasping, coughing, sputtering.

The light wasn’t death, I realised. It was the sun, shining through the well into the palace vaults. And I wasn’t dust in the desert. I was exactly where I had died. My hands were still sticky with my own blood, my face stained with tears. This was a whole lot more ordinary than death. I was alive.

And then my eyes focused on the single thing that had changed. The room wasn’t empty any more. My father was there.

Bahadur was crouched across from me, watching me with those unreadable blue eyes that matched mine perfectly. Like we were one person. Like I really belonged to him. He waited patiently as I found my footing back in the world of the living. Like I’d seen other parents watch their children take their first steps.

‘I’m not dead,’ I said, and I felt the words slip out like only the truth could.

‘No,’ Bahadur agreed. ‘Not any more.’

There was a sort of quiet then, as he let me settle into that notion. As he let me take another breath, realising that for a few moments, at least, my lungs had stayed still. That my frantic heartbeat had slowed to a stop. And for a moment I’d been gone.

We’d both been gone.

‘Jin.’ My eyes slid sideways frantically, looking for him. His figure was still slumped in a puddle of blood. Not moving. Not sitting up. I scrambled over to him, fumbling to push up his shirt, sticky with blood.