It was a long drop.

‘Miss Amani.’ Captain Westcroft acknowledged me, dismissing his soldiers with a quick nod. ‘How can I help you tonight?’ If he was surprised that I’d got out of my room, he didn’t show it.

‘I want to talk to you about Sam.’

‘I see.’ Clasping his hands behind his back, he slowly began to walk along the walls, letting me fall into step behind him.

‘I want to make his release a condition in our alliance.’ Shazad would be able to negotiate this. I wasn’t her, but I could pretend I was for one conversation.

‘I’m afraid that won’t be possible.’ The captain sounded genuinely regretful. The sky was darkening around us quickly as we walked, and torches and lamps started to spring to life throughout the fortress, pushing back against the night.

‘Then it better become possible.’ I tried to say it like Shazad would, like I wasn’t asking – I was ordering. ‘Sam’s not yours to execute; he’s with us now.’

‘He is still a deserter. And he will always be a deserter. An army runs on discipline. In places like these, far from home, desertion and insubordination become greater threats than ever. And if I am going to ask these soldiers to march across a desert for you, they need to be disciplined.’ He stopped walking, turning to face me, looking grave. ‘Your friend needs to be made an example of for three hundred other men.’

Three hundred soldiers.

It was the best chance we’d have at getting Ahmed back. The Albish might even have enough magic among them to get us through Ashra’s Wall, if it was real.

I’d have to be stupid to turn that down. But then, I’d been accused of that plenty in my life. Stupid, ignorant, reckless girl from Dustwalk who wouldn’t know a good deal if it was staring her in the face.

‘Captain,’ someone called in Albish, drawing Westcroft’s attention down to the courtyard below. The soldier standing guard at the gate said something too quick for me to catch.

The captain’s reaction was instant, his face shifting to real worry. ‘Excuse me,’ he said swiftly before moving down the stone stairs that led from the wall towards the gate. I followed him.

I wasn’t even at the bottom step when I saw what had caused the commotion. Through the fortress’s gate, I could see a pale figure stumbling out of the gloom. He was clutching his side, wearing an Albish uniform covered with blood. I could just see in the faint torchlight that his face was twisted in pain.

The Albish soldiers were already rushing forwards, past the gate and into the dark, to help him. The Mirajin soldiers, on the other hand, hung back, rightfully wary. There was something wrong here, something unsettling about this wounded soldier limping home through the night. All of us who’d been born in this desert could feel it. Years in Dustwalk checking over my shoulder, wary of dark corners and of things that lurked in the gloom, had trained my instincts. But I had learned some more tricks since my desert days.

‘It’s not human.’ The words fell too easily off my tongue to be anything but the truth, and I knew. I knew as the soldiers stumbled towards the edge of the light cast by the lamps burning near the gate, grasping him by either arm, holding him up.

Neither of them saw the glint of its teeth as it shifted its head towards the nearest soldier’s throat to rip it out.

It was too late to cry out a warning. Too late to do anything except move.

I was quick. My hand was around the pistol holstered at the captain’s side before he could so much as see me moving. The weapon came alive in my grip. I took aim quickly, as the ghoul’s maw opened, ready to clamp down.

I fired.

The bullet caught the Skinwalker between the eyes.

Its stolen face didn’t even have time to look surprised as it dropped dead.

Instantly, the foreign soldiers’ guns were swinging back towards me, thinking I had killed one of their own. My hands were already up, finger off the trigger, trying to prove I wasn’t a threat. The gun was wrestled off me, and my arms were grabbed.

‘That wasn’t one of your soldiers,’ I said in Mirajin, loud enough for Bilal’s men at the gate to hear me, even as my arms were being wrenched painfully behind my back. ‘It was a Skinwalker.’ I thought maybe understanding dawned across the captain’s face, but the rest of the soldiers looked blank. They didn’t understand that they had brought this upon themselves. Bilal, lingering in his sickbed, wouldn’t have known what they were doing. I wondered if he even would’ve cared.

And suddenly I saw another flicker of movement.

And I remembered, on our climb up the mountain: there had been more than one body buried out there, half-dragged out of the dirt with teeth marks on its skin.

‘And it’s not alone.’

The Mirajin soldiers were quick to react, guns swivelling into the darkness. But the Skinwalkers knew we were wise to them now. They kept to the shadows, darting in and out too quickly to be a useful target even as barrels tried to follow them through the night.

We didn’t have any warning before the next thing sprung. Its mouth clamped over a soldier’s shoulder, ripping through flesh and muscle, all the way to the bone. The man’s scream echoed down the mountain.

But Rahim’s men were well trained. Another soldier was on the Skinwalker in a second, his knife across its throat, sending the monster down to the ground twitching.