She was a Demdji.

Chapter 4

There’d be time to worry about my new Demdji ally later. For now I had to use the gift she was giving us. The guards’ guns were already rising towards me – a burst of sand knocked them out of their hands. One guard staggered back into Imin. Imin grabbed him, and with one sharp twist I heard a neck crack.

A guard sprung at me, knife drawn. I split the sand in two, using half to knock his hand aside before he could get near, even as I turned the rest solid in my hand, forming it into a curved blade of sand. It cut clean across his throat, drawing blood. Imin grabbed a fallen gun. He might not be as good a shot as I was, but in a space this closely confined it’d be hard to miss. I ducked as Imin fired. More screams came from inside the cells, the sound of gunshots bouncing off the stone walls drowning them out.

And then silence. I straightened. It was over. Imin and I were still alive. The guards weren’t.

Mahdi stepped out of the cell, his lip curling up in faint judgment at the bodies as he took in the carnage. That was the thing about the intellectual types. They wanted to remake the world, but they seemed to think they could do it without any blood. I ignored him as I turned towards the cell holding the little Demdji girl in a green khalat. She was still cradling the tiny sun, staring at me with sombre red eyes. They were unsettlingly bright.

I splintered her lock with a burst of sand. ‘You’re—’ I started as I dragged the door open, but the little girl was already on her feet, shoving past me out of her cell towards the other end of the prison.

‘Samira!’ she called. She got close to the bars, but didn’t touch them. She knew enough to stay away from iron. More than I had when I was her age. I leaned against the stone wall. I was starting to feel the exhaustion creeping in on me now that the fighting was done.

‘Ranaa!’ Another girl pushed her way to the front of the cell, kneeling on the floor so she was eye level with the young Demdji. She looked like she’d been beautiful before prison got to her. Now she just looked tired. Dark eyes sunk into a drawn face. I checked her over quickly for any sign of a Demdji mark but she looked as human as they came. She was probably of an age with me. Not old enough to be the girl’s mother. A sister maybe? She reached through the bars, resting a hand against the little girl’s face. ‘Are you all right?’

The young Demdji, Ranaa, turned to me, her mouth already twisting into an angry pout. ‘Let her out.’ It was an order, not a request. And from someone who was used to giving them, too.

‘No one ever taught you to say please, kid?’ It slipped out, even though this wasn’t the place to start teaching manners. And I probably wasn’t the person to, either.

Ranaa stared me down. That probably worked on most folk. I was used to Demdji and even I found those red eyes unsettling. I remembered some stories saying that Adil the conqueror was so evil his eyes burned red. She was used to getting what she wanted with those eyes. But I wasn’t all that used to doing what I was told. I twirled the sand around my fingers, waiting.

‘Let her out, please,’ she tried, before stomping one bare foot. ‘Now.’

I pushed away from the wall with a sigh. At least I’d tried. ‘Move back.’ I could give orders, too.

The second the lock shattered, Ranaa fell forward, flinging her small arms around the older girl’s neck, still carefully holding the ball of light in one hand as the other one clutched the dirty fabric of her khalat. I could see into the rest of the cell from the glow of the tiny sun in her hand. The cramped space was stuffed with prisoners, so close together they didn’t have room to lie down, a dozen women piled on top of each other. They were already scrambling to their feet, collapsing out of the cell with relief, gasping for freedom, leaving Imin and Mahdi to try to get them in some sort of order.

They were all girls or women. The remaining cells were no different, I realised, glancing around at the cautious, anxious faces pressing out of the gloom against the bars, wary of us but tentatively hoping for rescue. Mahdi and Imin had found a set of keys on one of the dead men and were busying themselves freeing the rest of the captives. I supposed that was easier than shattering the locks. Prisoners spilled from one cell after another, sometimes rushing to embrace someone else, sometimes just staggering out, looking like skittish animals.

‘The men?’ I asked Samira as she disentangled herself from Ranaa, figuring I already knew the answer.

‘They were more dangerous.’ Samira said, ‘At least that’s what Malik said when he—’ She cut herself off, shutting her eyes like she could stop herself from seeing them die at the hand of the man who’d usurped power in her city. ‘And they were less valuable.’

It took me a moment to understand the significant gaze she gave me over Ranaa’s head. Then it sunk in. The women who were staggering out of the cells were young. There were a lot of rumours lately about slavers taking advantage of the war. Kidnapping girls from our half of the desert and selling them to soldiers stationed far from their wives, or to rich men in Izman. And then there was the matter of a Demdji’s value …

‘Ranaa.’ I riffled through my mind. I’d heard that name once already today. The woman wearing the sheema stitched with blue flowers, I realised. The one who’d wanted to know if I was a Demdji. Now I understood why she recognised me. ‘Your mother is worried about you.’

The little girl gave me a disdainful once-over, her face still pressed into Samira’s chest. ‘Then why didn’t she come and get me out?’