‘I’m fine.’ Delila squirmed as her brother checked her over for injury. ‘Really, Ahmed, I’m fine.’
Shazad gave me a significant look that she hid behind the guise of scratching her nose. After half a year I could read Shazad like an open book. This one meant we were about to be in trouble.
So we hadn’t exactly had permission to take Delila with us. But we’d known we’d need help if we were going to get past Saramotai’s impenetrable walls. We’d also known that if we asked Ahmed if we could take Delila on a mission he’d say no. So we just hadn’t asked him. It wasn’t technically disobedience if we’d never been forbidden from doing it. Even though we both knew that excuse would fly just about as well as either of us could.
Personally I’d been hoping Ahmed might not notice that Delila was gone at all. He was busy running a whole rebellion, and we were gone only a handful of days. But then, unlike me, most people seemed to be able to keep track of their siblings.
‘She did good, Ahmed,’ I offered. ‘A lot of folk would be dead if it weren’t for her.’ A lot more folk. But I didn’t say that aloud. I knew Shazad heard it in my silence all the same. Delila just beamed at her feet as Ahmed finally tore his eyes off his sister to survey the state we were in and the rabble behind us. Some were riding, others were on foot if they were strong enough. Mahdi was among those who had declared he needed a horse after his ordeal. Imin had shifted to a girl’s shape, riding double with Navid, whose arms were wrapped around her protectively.
‘I see you managed to bring back Imin and Mahdi, and then some.’ There was a wry hint under his indulgent smile.
Some of the ex-prisoners had stayed in Saramotai, but plenty of others had decided to leave with us. Women who had nothing to stay for. Whose husbands and sons had been among the bodies hanging from the walls. The woman who’d called me Zahia was one of them. The Holy Father in Saramotai had seen to her as best he could. Enough to tell me that she wouldn’t die on the journey to camp. Mahdi argued about bringing her, but Shazad didn’t question me when I said it seemed wrong to leave her helpless in the city that had tried to kill her. I could tell Shazad knew there was something I wasn’t telling her. The woman had been weaving in and out of consciousness since we’d left the city, riding mostly tied with a sheema to another woman in front of her so she didn’t slip off.
It wasn’t exactly uncommon for strays to come back from missions. I ought to know – half a year ago, I was one. Jin had been meant to come back with news of the Sultan’s so-called weapon. Instead he came back with me. And in the six months that’d passed since then, I’d long stopped being the rebel camp’s newest arrival.
We’d been joined by rebel sympathisers like Navid, ignited to action after the battle at Fahali. Orphans picked up in Malal, clinging to the hem of Jin’s shirt the whole way back to camp. A defecting soldier who’d been guided our way by Shazad’s father, General Hamad. Sometimes Shazad would slip and refer to them as troops. Ahmed called them refugees. After a few weeks everyone was just a rebel.
‘We need to debrief.’ The words came with a significant look directed specifically at me and Shazad. Ahmed wasn’t about to dig into us in front of everyone. But that didn’t mean we were off the hook.
Shazad was already talking as we pushed through the gateway that led to camp, telling Ahmed what hasdhappened in Saramotai. She danced around arranging to get me captured and skipped to how she and Delila, invisible under Delila’s illusion, had slipped in behind me the moment I’d pretended to trip in the doorway, waiting for nightfall to let the others in behind us. The less she could remind Ahmed we’d put his sister in danger, the better. The way she told it, you’d barely know there’d been a fight. We’d left Samira in charge of the city, Shazad told him.
‘We need to send her reinforcements,’ she said as we felt our way through the inside of the cliff towards camp. ‘We left everyone we could to help.’ ‘Everyone we could’ meant the half a dozen other men who had come with us to Saramotai. Navid would’ve made seven whole people but he wouldn’t be separated from Imin again. It wasn’t exactly an army that could hold a stronghold but it was what we had. ‘It’s not enough to hold the peace. We should send fifty well-trained soldiers, before somebody else develops any ambition and steps into Malik’s shoes. And we need to reinforce the city against the Sultan. Ahmed’ – Shazad lowered her voice, casting her eyes behind us to where the newly recruited rabble was feeling their way nervously through the dark tunnel – ‘your father’s troops were in our half of the desert.’
Ahmed didn’t answer her right away, but as we neared the end of the tunnel I could see he understood the significance even better than I did. A whole lot of the power we held relied on appearances. Truth be told, we wouldn’t be able to match the Sultan’s army on a battlefield if they tried to take the desert back from us by force. Keeping our half of the desert relied on the Sultan believing our numbers were greater than they were. And that deception relied on his men never straying into our half of the desert to find out the truth.
As we stepped through the other side of the cliff face, I blinked against the sudden brightness. The summer light made the rebel camp look like one of Delila’s illusions – too beautiful and alive in this desert full of dust and death. A world apart.
The camp was twice the size it had been when I’d first seen it. I couldn’t keep myself from glancing over my shoulder at the women of Saramotai following us. I’d gotten into the habit of watching the new refugees’ faces when they first set eyes on the camp. I wasn’t disappointed this time. One by one, they stepped out of the tunnel and got their first look at my home. For just a moment, grief and fear and exhaustion parted, giving way to wonder as they took in the oasis rolled out below them. Watching them, it felt for a second like I was seeing it with fresh eyes, too.