Of course. It’d sounded too much like good luck to be true.

‘So we’d have to go tonight to have a stab at getting her to cut the iron out of me.’

I would need more than Sam’s help for that.

*

‘And you’re coming to me.’ The circles of exhaustion under Hala’s eyes made the skin there look a deeper shade of gold. ‘Me, instead of your darling Shazad or your beloved Jin?’

They don’t know how to crawl inside someone’s head like you do. It was on the tip of my tongue. But she wasn’t wrong. Shazad or Jin and a few well-placed threats could probably get me the same thing. That wasn’t the real reason I was here. We were both Demdji, and we owed each other the truth.

‘They’re human,’ I said. They would fight beside me. We would die for each other. But no matter what, they would never understand this the same way Hala did. To have a part of myself trapped away. That someone had hurt me because of what I was. That I wanted to hurt her back. ‘The story around camp is that your mother sold you in marriage to the man who took your fingers.’

Hala’s face changed at once. ‘Do you know what our mothers get,’ she replied as I watched the motion of her golden fingers through her inky hair, ‘along with us, from our fathers?’

‘A wish,’ I said, remembering my conversation with Shira in the prison.

‘Do you know what your mother wished for?’

‘No,’ I admitted. I supposed I ought to ask my father, if we ever succeeded at getting me back into the palace.

‘Mine wished for gold,’ Hala said. It was such a stupid simple wish. The one that every peasant and tinker and beggar made in stories. I didn’t press her. I just waited. She had this look like she wanted to tell me, her golden lips parted slightly. If I didn’t push, she would.

‘My mother had grown up poor and she wished to be rich,’ she said finally. ‘And maybe she meant it well. Maybe she found out she was going to have a child and wished for wealth to be able to raise me in comfort instead of in the gutter where she’d grown up. That’s the lie I used to tell myself when I was little. But I could never say it out loud.’ Her smile was bitter. ‘And then the money ran out, and what she had left was me, her golden daughter.’

She leaned back, and the light in the opening of the tent made her skin flash. She was one of the only people bothering with a tent. It occurred to me she might be hiding. The golden daughter of a woman who loved gold too much. We’d both been traded in for gold in our own way.

‘I’ll help you.’

*

I found Jin shaving inside the house, in a small room set off from the study. For the long nights when the general didn’t get to his bed, I guessed. A beaten brass basin was half-filled with water underneath a cracked mirror. It was just a little bit too low for him, so that he had to stoop over. His shirt was flung over the door handle. From behind him I could see the way the muscles on his bare shoulders bunched, moving the compass tattooed on the other side of his heart. There was a new tattoo on the opposite shoulder. A series of small black dots across his skin. Like a burst of sand. As he straightened he spotted me in the reflection, leaning in the doorway watching him.

‘That one’s new.’ The room was small enough that I only had to take one step to be close enough to touch it.

‘I got it done while I was with the Xichian army.’ His skin was hot under my hand as my fingers danced across the dots, one at a time. ‘I was thinking about this girl I knew.’ He turned around quickly, catching my hand. He smelled of mint mostly, but there was an undercurrent of desert dust and gunpowder when he kissed me that made me desperately homesick. That made it harder to speak what I had to say next.

‘Jin, I’m going to tell you something,’ I said, pulling away, ‘and I don’t want you to ask me any questions about it. I just want you to trust me. Tonight, there’s something I’ve got to do before we rescue Rahim. And I need Sam and Hala for it, and I don’t want to tell you what it is in case it doesn’t work.’

‘I hate everything about this already.’ Jin wiped a stray streak of water off his jaw with the back of his hand.

‘I had a feeling you might. But I’ve got to tell someone, and Shazad is more likely to try to stop me. And she needs to get to the ambush point. You both do. We can’t chance this falling apart on my account.’

‘One way to be sure of that is for you to just come with us.’ Jin toyed with the ends of my shortened hair, considering me carefully, trying to read me. But for this I was determined not to let anything show.

‘Get to the intersection.’ I stood my ground. ‘Wait for us there. If everything goes right we can still get there in time to intercept Rahim.’

‘Is that a promise?’ I knew when Jin was saying yes without really saying it. I had him on my side.

‘Djinn’s daughters shouldn’t make promises.’ I pushed myself up, reaching for a shadow near his ear where the razor had missed, close enough to him to feel his heartbeat. ‘It usually doesn’t end well.’

Jin turned his head instead, catching me off guard with a kiss, fast and sure. He broke it off quickly, but he didn’t pull away. He just smiled against my mouth. ‘Then this had better not be the end, Bandit.’

Chapter 45

The rooms my aunt kept above the gold merchant’s were cluttered with chests, half-packed, some of them stuffed to overflowing. When Sam walked us through the wall I smacked my shin into one of them, and barely kept in the string of curses that sprang to my tongue.