Thirteen

"Noor, wake up."

Noor rubbed her eyes groggily and blinked at me. "It's still dark. The sun hasn't even started to rise." She sat up from her little pallet on my grandmother's floor. The few clothes we had were strewn around us on the floor, the room a mess from the night before, when nearly half the village had been here. "Dania, are you okay?"

"I heard something, maybe a shout?" I bit the inside of my lip. "I think we have to leave now."

Noor clambered to her feet. "I'll saddle the mule."

"Do it quickly. I'll gather our bags."

Something about the tension in the air didn't feel right, and my voice came out in urgent puffs. Noor glanced through the window. "I don't see anything, but there could be an ambush. Someone might have gotten word to the emperor's soldiers."

I folded my clothes tightly into my pack. "It would take the emperor's soldiers half a day to ride here. We need to be long gone before that happens." I paused. "Unless someone got word to the city last night."

"What about your grandmother? Don't you want to say goodbye?"

The chipped paint on Nanu's door stood out in the dim light of her compact mud-brick house. I looked at it for a long moment and thought of what I had told myself last night.

The only way to continue this was to contain any emotion, to lock everything up.

I didn't have room for my grandmother, I didn't have room for kindness.

I turned my blood to stone and continued packing. "We don't have time to wake her. Goodbyes aren't necessary."

Noor frowned. "But don't you want to—"

"No. When all this is over, maybe." I wasn't sure if there would be anything left of me when what I had planned was over, and I didn't want to contemplate that future. But I would see Nanu then. Maybe I'd come back to this village and live some hollowed-out existence.

Noor looked as if she wanted to say more but shook her head instead. "Let's go, then."

We left before the sun filtered its first rays of morning. I looked down at Basral, the emperor's city, as we climbed up through the mountains. A cloud of dust rose in the air from the valley, growing ever closer.

"Horses."

Noor looked over her shoulder. A group of black dots on the horizon signified the emperor's riders.

"Someone did alert them."

My heart slammed against my chest, adrenaline and anticipation cutting through my anger.

If I met with Vahid's soldiers now, I'd turn the ground red with their blood.

I fluttered my eyes closed, breathing through my nose. Fighting a few low-level soldiers wouldn't serve me, and it wouldn't give me my revenge. We had to concentrate on making a quick escape, before they could confirm we were ever here.

"They'll be tracking us."

"I wouldn't be too worried about that." Noor nodded toward the other direction, across the desert to where the sky dripped down to the earth in a gray haze.

"A storm," I breathed.

"That will cover our tracks in the interim. But we need to make haste before they catch up to us."

We traveled for days, portioning out the rations we'd taken from Nanu, and harvesting from the forest in the mountains for the rest we needed. Noor proved remarkable at knowing which plants to eat and which were djinn-made, which would burn us from the inside out as she put it. We ate wild red plums, roots boiled in goat's milk to remove the bitterness, and mountain scorpions that had found their way into Noor's bag roasted over the fire. And every day as we moved through the terrain and followed Souma's route, I repeated the same names like a mantra.

Casildo .

Darbaran .

Vahid .

Mazin .

It kept my feet moving, stopped me from falling to my knees and sobbing into the earth every time I thought about my father's death.

Because if I stopped moving, if I stopped plotting, I'd have to face the reality of life without him.

Noor and I traveled mostly in silence, and I could sense she was giving me space. At night she adjusted our course by mapping the stars, muttering to herself and taking us on a zigzag path through the mountains.

I spent the evenings sharpening my knife.

Mazin's pendant hung cold against my chest, and each time it slid under my kurta I took a slow breath.

A reminder.

We camped under the stars for small snatches of time, just in case the soldiers were still tracking us. Because of that, we never rode a direct route and switched back on ourselves multiple times to confuse our trail.

At last, we came to the other side of the mountains, where enormous boulders littered the ground, making it nearly impossible to travel through.

"We're here," Noor said, looking at the rocks as if she could tell each one apart from one another.

"How do you know?"

"Souma gave me the exact location and described this place well. He called it the graveyard of stone ."

I looked around at the vast space, the formations indeed piled high like tombs. "How are you meant to find anything here?"

"There are clues. Souma gave me a map."

I shot her a look. "How did you smuggle a map into Thohfsa's prison?"

"I didn't." She tapped her temple. "It's all in here. Souma made me memorize it."

Now that we'd reached our destination, her face glowed in the morning light and her eyes shone even brighter.

"You're happy we're here," I said slowly, recognizing the lightness of her steps as she moved through the boulders.

"I finally get to see Souma's life savings." She shot me a smile. "The treasure he hid from the world."

"And confirm that he trusted you with it, over everyone?"

Noor met my eyes, her smile fading. "Yes, that's part of it too."

The treasure could be anywhere, and navigating this type of geography would be impossible. We could be overturning rocks looking for this mystical djinn treasure for the rest of our lives.

I chewed on my bottom lip, shielding my eyes from the sun. "What else did Souma say?"

"That there was a spot where four stone tombs stood in a row. Near that was a cave invisible to the eye."

I tied the mule to a dilapidated date tree and made my way to Noor. My feet stuttered to a stop when a black snake slithered across my path and into the sparse bushes. I let out a garbled scream, lost my balance, and fell in the dirt.

"Why did he pick such an unusual place to hide it?" I said, wincing and dusting the pebbles off my knees. My fresh kurta I'd taken from my grandmother's was torn and I examined the light fabric as I sat back against a large boulder.

"For the same reason you are frustrated now—it is hidden well. No one will accidentally come upon this place, in fact you would probably go around to avoid it. Look around you—there isn't much life here. There isn't anything at all."

She was right. The collection of rocks stretched across the horizon like an eerie stone army. You'd have to know exactly what you were looking for to find anything here.

I got up and kept walking, combing through the rocks, my eyes focusing on anything that resembled a tomb. Noor followed behind me, kicking at the stones with her feet. Something in the distance caught the corner of my eye and I stopped so quickly Noor ran smack into the back of me.

"What the—"

At the outcropping of the hillside were four towering rock tombs, so seamlessly placed that you wouldn't notice until you stood in the exact right place. I took a step toward them, my breath caught in my chest. Noor followed behind, just as silent. The closer we got the more obvious it became that they were intentional—larger boulders on the bottom, with the smaller rocks piled higher until one blackened stone rested on top.

"It must be near here," she breathed.

I scanned the outcropping of rocks. There was no way a cave was hidden along here. We were surrounded by boulders of all shapes and sizes that opened onto a large, desolate expanse.

"Are you sure he said ‘cave'?"

"Yes," snapped Noor, seeming to come to the same realization I had.

Souma's directions didn't make sense.

Noor let out an exasperated breath. "Sorry, I just don't believe he would lie to me. There has to be more to this."

I moved closer to the four rock piles, examining them. A thought occurred to me.

"Noor, he said ‘tombs'?"

"Yes, why?"

Something lightened in my chest. I looked at her. "The cave is underground. Think about it— a tomb ."

She waited a beat before scrambling over to me, a giddy laugh erupting from her. "There must be an underground cave near here."

I got on my hands and knees, sweeping my hands over the ground around the rock piles, the rush of anticipation making my fingers shake. My fingertips hooked on something—a seam in the rock below.

Rocks don't have seams.

I exhaled a whoosh of breath.

"Here," I called out to her.

Noor rushed over to me. "What is it?"

I studied the crack in the rock, too neat and symmetrical to be anything but intentional. "An entrance of some kind, I think."

We worked together, sweeping the dirt and pebbles aside, our hands caking with dust.

Finally, we cleared a space about the size of a large man. A smooth stone surface was revealed under all the dust and rocks, with a circular armhole.

"It's a door."

Noor thrust her hand into the armhole and heaved, but the stone didn't move.

"Let's try both of us."

We both gripped the latch of the stone door and coordinated our efforts. The entrance wrenched free, releasing a cloud of dust into the air, enveloping us both.

I coughed, crawling away from the opening, trying to catch my breath.

"Dania, are you okay?"

"Fine, I just need a minute." I inhaled a breath of fresh air before rubbing the dirt from my eyes and turning back to the cavity in the earth.

Like a sinkhole about to swallow us up, the ground opened into a dark cave beneath the dirt.

"Please don't tell me you want us to go in there." I looked over the edge into the waiting dark.

"Don't be silly," she breathed. "I am not nearly as athletically inclined as you are. I want you to go in there."

I shot her a glare, pushed through the sick feeling of fear in my stomach, and approached the opening. If the djinn magic was in there, I would have to be the one to retrieve it.

"Souma wouldn't have laid any traps," Noor whispered from behind me. "If he had, he would have told me."

"So why aren't you going in there?" I shot back.

"Because if there is anything to fight, you are the best one for the job."

"What would there be to fight?" I said, my brows rising to my hairline.

"Something unseen."

For the first time, I realized what we were doing and what the repercussions were. We were going after a djinn treasure, a power so rare the emperor himself made a deal with a creature from another world just to use it.

And we were about to take it for ourselves.

I touched the hilt of Baba's folding dagger under my kurta.

"When this is over, I'm teaching you how to handle yourself in a fight," I called over to Noor.

"Why do that when I've got you?"

I snorted a laugh, dispelling some of the panic pressing against my chest. I swung my legs over the edge of the entrance, trying to see the bottom. I couldn't jump down when I didn't know how far it went.

"Do we have a rope?"

"No. But your grandmother gave me one of her dupattas—I could tie that around your waist and lower you down?"

"That might work."

Noor pulled out a dark red dupatta from her bag, the shawl embroidered with a soft yellow thread in a northern floral design my grandmother often wore. I tied it carefully around my waist, and Noor held the other end.

"Don't drop it."

"I can't promise anything." She flashed a quick smile at me as I bared my teeth.

Then I clambered down into the dark.