Jin looked at me sideways. “How do you know that?”

“Come on, Xichian boy.” I forced lightness. The wind dragging at my sheema tasted like ash and made me want to gag. “You telling me you never set off gunpowder when you were a kid just to blow things up?”

Jin snorted. “We didn’t all grow up near a weapons factory.”

I shrugged. “When a bomb goes off, it’s always got a center. Here the buildings are burned on every side.” Like something had crashed down from above and flooded the city with fire. Familiarity whispered in my ear, though I didn’t know why. I rounded a ruined corner and pulled up short.

“And a bomb doesn’t spare prayer houses, either.”

In the middle of the destruction, a huge domed building was the only thing left whole in the city. Its walls were still a fresh gleaming white, the scorch marks stopping just short of it.

“What did this?” I whispered.

Jin just shook his head. “Something unnatural.”

“We’ve got another problem.” We’d wandered to the center of the town, and I nodded to the crumbled hunk of melted metal and stone in the middle of the square. “I’m thinking that used to be the well.”

The fear that went through the caravan as they saw the same thing I had was unmistakable. No one knew the value of water like desert folks. “How much water do we have left?” Jin asked, raising his voice as he called to Parviz.

“A day’s worth.” Parviz looked grim. “Two, if we ration. It’s a six-day walk to Saramotai.” I recognized the name of the next Oasis town we were due at after stopping to resupply in Dassama.

“It’s only two days to Fahali, though,” Jin said, “if we head west instead of north.”

“That’s off our path,” Parviz replied too quickly.

“Better to die of thirst than take a detour, is it?” Jin’s arms were crossed over his chest. His eyes were on his feet, but also far away. Like he had bigger things on his mind than us all dying of thirst. “Besides, I’m not hearing any other bright ideas.”

Parviz glanced at his brother, a man named Tall Oman. They called him that to set him apart from the three other Omans in the caravan. Something silent passed between the two men. Tall Oman shook his head slightly. I glanced at Jin to see if he’d caught it, too, but he was lost in his own thoughts.

“Is there something we ought to know?” I asked. “About Fahali?”

“It’s a dangerous city,” Parviz said shortly.

“It’s a dangerous desert,” I said. He was hiding something, but I couldn’t tell what. “Isn’t that why you pay us?”

There was a moment of tense silence. Then Parviz nodded, his face pulled tight.

“Fahali, then. And we pray your aim is sharp, young Alidad.”

fourteen

I could see the mountains from Fahali, like ragged teeth in the afternoon haze. Amonpour was across those mountains, on the other side of the Dev’s Valley. And the border meant soldiers. We were stopped at the gates by the city guard, bored-looking Mirajin men in pale yellow, who flipped through our saddlebags lazily, chatting to Parviz as they did. Most of the caravan sank down to sit in the sand, leaning just inside the city walls while the bags were searched.

We’d walked with barely any rest since Dassama, only stopping in the darkest hours of the night when continuing might as well mean death by ghoul instead of by thirst. I remembered what Jin had said our first night in the desert: the desert didn’t let weakness live.

And we were still alive. We were Mirajin and we survived. Even as my legs gave out below me, I’d never been prouder to be a desert girl, among the Camel’s Knees.

A coin danced across Yasmin’s knuckles absently, catching the sunlight. Worry danced across her face quicker than the sunlight off the coin and vanished just as fast. Her palm tightened around the half-louzi piece. Parviz’s eyes veered away once too often as the guard rummaged through his belongings, his back too stiff. My hand drifted to my gun without really being sure what I was afraid of.

I looked around for Jin. I spotted him a good twenty paces away, pulling his hat low as he headed away from the caravan. My tiredness and my stiff legs forgotten, I pulled myself to my feet and dashed to catch up to him.

“Hey!” I shoved him in the shoulder, closing the distance a moment before he would’ve disappeared around a corner. In one movement, his hand was on my wrist, halfway to reaching for his gun before he realized it was me. He was jumpier than a barefoot beggar on hot sand.

“You ought to know better than to sneak up on a man like that, Bandit.” He dropped my arm, trying for lightness. I didn’t rise to the bait.

“And you ought to know better than to think you can sneak away from me.” We were far enough from the Camel’s Knees to not be overheard, but I kept my voice low all the same. “You’re hiding something.”

Jin laughed, though not like it was actually funny. Like he didn’t even know where to start. When he pushed his hand through his hair his sheema fell back. I was seeing him unobstructed, in the light of day, for the first time in weeks. “There are a lot of things you don’t know, Amani.”

That was probably true. Jin didn’t tell me much. There were just the moments when the walls he kept around himself cracked and I saw a hint of something through them, when he slipped and mentioned a brother, or a dead mother, but he closed those up fast enough.