I was damned either way.

I flung myself through the rip in the carriage. The wind caught me, tossed me. I hit the ground and my body exploded into a constellation of pain. Momentum carried me through the sand as easily as if it were air; I was in too much agony to fight it. My vision cleared just in time for me to see the canyon gape open to swallow me. My empty fingers scraped through the sand. I fought for purchase that wasn’t there to stop my body. There was nothing to cling to but sand.

My legs went over, taking the rest of me with them.

twenty-five

My fingers caught on something. I felt a tug of falling in my stomach as I willed my injured hand to hold on. My body swung against the canyon wall and I heard my ribs connect with the sickening noise of bones breaking. I cried out, agony taking me over. For a moment all I could do was hang, eyes shut, breath shallow, telling myself not to look down. Willing my hand to hang on.

Only then I realized I didn’t know what I was holding on to.

I was shaking so hard, I could barely move. It seemed like it took forever to open my eyes. I tipped my head back slowly, like any move might throw me off balance and send me hurtling to the bottom of the chasm.

I’d grabbed hold of the sand. Or rather, the sand had grabbed hold of me. An arm made of sand had clamped around my wrist. It was holding on to my life.

I dropped my head, squeezing my eyes shut. Trying to remember how my lungs ought to work. How fast my heart ought to beat.

I’d seen dozens of things born from the sand and the wind and the spirits in the desert in my sixteen years. I’d heard every story, about immortals and ghouls alike that came from the sand. But this was something new. And it felt wholly foreign and entirely familiar at once.

This wasn’t a creature from the sands. This was me.

I took a deep breath. My ribs stretched into an endless ache that wrapped around my whole body. I swung my left arm up, the motion ripping a cry out of me, catching the sand-arm by the wrist, trying to pretend I didn’t feel grains of it slipping between my fingers.

Slow as the setting sun, it recoiled into the sand, dragging me up with it. My hand started slipping and a new sand-arm snaked out from the desert, grabbing me. And then another. A dozen hands held me, pulling at my clothes, my arms. Pulling me back to the desert.

And then I was up, lying flat on my stomach. I crawled away from the edge, my body shaking. I didn’t know if it was pain or something greater waiting to crash into me. Something my body knew before my mind. I was blank. Watching without grasping it. Around me, a dozen arms of sand disintegrated. I flinched.

Nothing else moved. Not even me. Then I reached toward a heap of sand that had saved my life. I hadn’t even touched it before it began to rise toward my palm, like the snakes in baskets called by charmers.

So this was the kind of Demdji I was.

A gun went off. The sand collapsed as I spun toward the sound. The world poured back in around me all at once. There were bodies in the sand already. I was just in time to see Shazad jab her elbow into a man’s throat, whirling to catch him in the gut with a knife. A soldier came at her from the right.

“No!”

I wasn’t empty anymore. I was furious. The sand lashed up, exploding between them, sending them both sprawling. I ran for Shazad as it settled.

She was finishing coughing up desert dust when I dropped to my knees next to her. When she saw me she starting hacking all over again. “I thought you were dead! I saw you go over,” she got out between coughs. “I saw you fall.”

To our right a gun went up. Without thinking, I flung out my hand; a wave of sand sent the soldier sprawling. Buried him. His gun skittered to my feet. I didn’t pick it up. The rush made me feel dizzy and drunk and scared all at once. It was like I’d just grown another limb I wasn’t fully in control of yet.

I clasped Shazad’s hand, pulling her up. I was still shaking too hard to find words. When I turned, the sand at my feet turned with me—I knew it without looking. I felt it. Like I always had, without knowing that I was. The desert all around me, the sand like a living thing, calling to me, begging me to use it. To be part of it.

The fighting had stopped, but I couldn’t.

“Amani.” Shazad’s grip slipped out of mine. The sand was moving underneath me, a swirl like a tiny sandstorm, and then it was getting bigger, rising, rising until it was all around me, pulling at my hair, my clothes, calling me into it, into the desert.

To drown in it.

I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t control it. There was too much of it. I couldn’t breathe.

A new hand closed over mine, and this time it was flesh and bone. Jin appeared through the sand, his sheema wrapped tightly around his face as he pushed his way through blindly. I saw he was holding something metallic a second before his arms went around me and he pulled me into his chest. He was saying something I couldn’t hear over the storm. All I felt was his hand press into my arm. It was a bullet, cool and hard, the iron biting into my bare skin.

The cold of it cut through the heat in me.

The sand dropped away, spiraling down and down and down until it was back under my feet and I could hear Jin’s heartbeat under my forehead, feel the pain of the bullet pressing into my flesh too hard, hear him whispering my name over and over again in my ear until I stopped shaking.

twenty-six

We finally stopped flying a few hours before dawn to let Izz get some rest from carrying the four of us. We were halfway between home and where we’d jumped off the train. It was open empty desert on all sides, though I could see the mountains of the Dev’s Valley on the horizon. We didn’t unpack supplies or even build a fire. Everyone collapsed where they stood. Izz turned into a huge catlike beast I’d never seen before and fell asleep. Shazad leaned against him. Her eyes were red, even though I hadn’t seen her crying.