‘Do you think the princess was sent home?’ a voice asked in the crowd behind me.

‘Maybe it was a bluff,’ another voice considered. But I knew that neither of those could be true. So what was the Sultan waiting for?

I caught movement from the corner of my eye. Not on the stage, but up above us and to the side, on the palace walls. When I glanced up, there was nothing there at first, and for a moment I thought I was seeing things, a trick of the light. But something kept my eyes fixed on that point on the wall, as if I could see through stone by sheer force of will.

And then the Sultan stepped into view, holding a girl around the waist.

He cut an impressive figure in the dawn light, dressed in a scarlet kurti with a bright gold sheema draped around his neck: the colours of blood shed over a dawn sky. He was flanked by his Abdals, the bronze of their artificial skin glinting in the sunlight. The rush of anger and hatred and humiliation was almost too much to take. Like it might send me doubling over.

The young girl was dressed in white nightclothes that whipped and twisted around her legs in the morning air, her dark hair falling around her shoulders in a wild tumble. She would’ve looked leached of all colour, if it wasn’t for the flash of red at her neck. For a moment I feared her throat had already been slashed and she was being brought out here to die slowly. But no, it wasn’t blood, just a bright red cloth. From far away it looked like a sheema thrown loosely around her neck as any desert girl might wear it. But there was another flash of red identical to it, tied around the crenellations of the palace walls. The same walls that Jin and I had jumped from in the chaos of Auranzeb, trusting a rope to get us to safety. But this rope wasn’t securing her.

He wasn’t going to execute her on the stage. He was going to hang her.

My heart started to beat frantically as I cast around, looking for the others. I couldn’t reach her up there. I desperately searched for the twins to give them a sign to forget the plan and fly to the walls of the palace. But we’d split ourselves up, scattering through the crowd that now hid the others from me.

I was on my own. And I was too far away.

I started to move all the same, pushing my way through the mass of gawkers, praying I might be able to get close enough to the twins to call out to them, or to Hala to tell her to draw something up in the Sultan’s mind that would stall him. Or even close enough to fire off a shot, a bullet straight between the Sultan’s eyes. To do something other than watch a girl die. But the crowd fought against me like I was trying to push my way upstream in a raging river. Around me faces started to turn upwards, noticing that something was happening high above us.

The Sultan stepped up to the very edge of the palace walls.

I was close enough to see that the girl was shaking and crying as she stood on the precipice. Close enough to see the Sultan turn her away from him, towards the rising sun. To see him lean over the girl and whisper something in her ear. To see the girl squeeze her eyes shut.

But too far away to do anything.

He pushed her.

It was one swift, violent motion that sent her over the edge of the wall, falling fast. Her scream ripped the air open like a knife through cloth, drawing up every eye that hadn’t noticed her. Some cries from the crowd mingled with hers as the whole of the square watched helplessly as she fell. Nightclothes twisted cruelly around her flailing legs, feet frantically searching for a purchase they wouldn’t find. As she dropped, the long, colourful rope of the noose unfurled like a sheema caught in the desert wind, whipping behind her in a trail of red.

Until there was none of it left to unfurl.

It snapped taut. The noose around her throat pulled tight, bringing her fall to a wrenching stop.

Her scream cut off with sickening suddenness. And I knew it was over.

Her name was Rima. She was from a poor family that lived by the docks. Her father’s door had a sun emblazoned on it in scarlet paint, left over from the Blessed Sultima’s Uprising. That was why she had been taken. Ahmed’s sun had turned from a symbol of defiance into a target.

She was the middle daughter of five. The Sultan could have plucked any one of them from their beds that night. But Rima was closest in age to me.

*

The second girl was named Ghada. We never even got a chance to save her. We never so much as saw her alive. Dawn found her body already hanging from the palace walls next to Rima’s. She’d been killed inside, where we didn’t have a hope of reaching her. The Sultan wasn’t foolish enough to repeat the same trick twice.

On the afternoon after Ghada’s death, her father, who had rioted in the streets against the Sultan, stood in the square before the palace and denounced the rebellion that had condemned his innocent daughter. I didn’t blame him for his words. He had another daughter he needed to save.

*

Naima was the name of the third girl. The third one we failed to save. The third one who died for our crimes.

No matter what we did, what we tried, we were too late. Too slow. We would have to get into the palace to save them before they died. And we didn’t have any way in with Sam gone. Hell, we hadn’t managed to get in back when he was still with us.

‘No living parents.’ Sara was telling me what she had learned about Naima, as she rocked Fadi in her arms. ‘But she has four brothers.’ Curtains were pulled against prying eyes, but early morning light leaked through the lattice of the window to dance anxiously across her face as she moved. There was something else she wasn’t telling me.