The watch, already dead.

I needed to warn the others. The world was fading. I was slipping away. I was going to die. Jin. I needed to give him a chance to escape. To save the others.

I opened my mouth to scream a warning. The darkness swallowed it with me.

Chapter 12

I woke up being violently sick. Vomit splattered next to me across the wooden floor, by a bucket. I grabbed it before the second heave came.

Everything left in my stomach came up.

I squeezed my eyes shut and tightened my arms around the metal bucket. I ignored the cloying smell of vomit climbing up from the bottom. My head was still spinning, my stomach still churning. I didn’t move straight away, even after I was sure there was nothing left to choke up but my own liver.

I seemed to still be alive. Which was unexpected. I’d feel good about it when I stopped retching my insides up. And which meant I’d been drugged, not poisoned. The army ought to have killed me. They ought to have killed all of us.

Maybe they’d kept me alive because I was a Demdji, and I was valuable. Or because I was a girl and I looked helpless. But they didn’t have any reason to take the rest of the camp alive. They’d have no reason not to take one look at Jin, who always looked like he could be trouble, asleep, and put a bullet through him to keep him out of the way.

There was one way I could know for sure. I couldn’t speak anything that wasn’t the truth. If I couldn’t say it out loud, then he was gone.

I swallowed the bile in my throat.

‘Jin is alive.’

The truth slipped out like a prayer into the dark, so huge and so certain I felt like I finally understood how Princess Hawa had been able to call the dawn. The words felt as important as the rising sun, easing the panic in my chest.

Jin was alive. Probably a captive in this place like I was.

I started listing names quickly. Shazad, Ahmed, Delila, Hala, Imin – they were alive, one after the other. Not once did my tongue stumble. They were all fine. Well, trying to say they were fine out loud might be pushing my luck, seeing as we’d all just lost our home. But alive. And so was I. And I wasn’t about to let that change.

I was going to live long enough to get back to them.

The room was moving, I realised then. Was I on a train? The floor shifted below me and my stomach heaved again. No, this was different. There was no steady, juddering feeling. This was more like being rocked in a cradle by a drunken giant.

As my head cleared I took stock of things. I gingerly set the bucket down again and eased myself up. I could sit up. That wasn’t nothing to start with. And thanks to the light coming through a small window above me, I could see.

I was on a bed in a cramped room with damp wooden walls and a damp floor. The light had the feel of late afternoon. Burned sky after a long day in the desert. It’d been night when I was taken, so that meant I’d been asleep nearly a whole day. At least a whole day.

I shifted, trying to stand up, but my right hand pulled me up short. I was tied to the frame of the bed.

No. Not tied. Chained.

Iron was biting into my skin. I could feel it the moment I reached for my power. I shoved up the sleeve on my arm to get a look at it. The iron was clamped like an angry hand on a child’s wrist. Only not completely. A sliver of light leaked between my skin and the iron.

I could work with that.

Without thinking, I reached for my sheema. My fingers scraped across bare neck instead. It felt like being punched in the stomach.

It was gone. I remembered now. Jin had tied it like a sling. I’d been struggling as the drug filled my nose and mouth, and the sheema slipped off me. Gone in the sand.

It was stupid. It was just a thing. Just a stupid strip of red cloth against the desert sun. Except it was a stupid thing Jin had given me. Snatched off a clothesline in Sazi, the day we’d escaped Dustwalk. I’d never stopped wearing it since then. Even when I was angry at him. It was mine. And now it was gone.

But there were other ways out of this.

I worried at the stitching on my shirt until the side of it gave way. Tearing off a strip of cloth, I started to stuff it between my skin and the iron manacle. It wasn’t exactly easy work – the manacle was tight and the cloth was awkward and thick. But I kept going all the same, working the piece of cloth in one bit at a time.

There. I felt it the moment the iron stopped touching my skin. My power rushed back in.

I was tired and thirsty, and my mouth tasted of vomit and some unknown drug that was still lingering in my lungs, but I could do this. I reached for the desert outside with everything I had. I felt it surge in answer, only to have it slip away. I pulled again, but nothing came. It felt like reaching for something just a little too far away.

I fought down the panic. There were still other ways. Like there’d been in Saramotai. I took a deep breath and closed my eyes. I could feel it now as I calmed myself. Even against the strange lurching of the room and my dizzy head. The sand that clung to my skin.

I raised my free hand in one quick violent motion, tearing the sand from every part of me that I could find, scraping skin off with it. I slashed the sand down towards my arm in one sharp motion.

The chain on the manacle splintered like wood under an axe. And I was free.

I bolted for the door, fighting the haze that was clinging to my mind like a lingering desert exhaustion. The floor tilted below me, pitching me out into a long dark hallway. At one end light leaked through from whatever was above. The floor heaved again below me.

Something connected in my mind, pieces from stories. Some I’d heard around campfires, and some Jin had told me.