The Fire Wish Read online

  “Rational,” I huffed. “You’re the one afraid of some dormant jinni tunnels.”

  She folded up the weaving and stood with her back to me. “Promise me you’ll keep watch for me whenever my head is obstructed by fear, and I will keep it level enough for the both of us when we arrive,” she said, and when she turned I saw that half of her mouth had slid into a smile.

  “I promise,” I said. “But I also promise that if I can find a way for us to get out of here, I’m going to take it.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Fine. It’ll be you against the caliphate, but that wouldn’t surprise me.”

  We laughed, and she sat down on the bench, knocking her bony shoulder into mine.

  11

  Najwa

  The relief on Faisal’s face when I came back told me more than anything he could have said. Had he really been worried while I was gone? It wasn’t as if I’d gone in without any training.

  “How did it go?” he asked. The only people in the room now were Faisal and Delia. The rest of the Eyes of Iblis had gone, and their absence left the room so empty it echoed.

  I shrugged and looked at the Eye of Iblis. The caliph’s throne filled the entire wall, and it appeared larger than the actual one.

  “You left the area,” Delia said. Her voice was tight.

  I winced, and nodded. “When the prince left the room, I felt like I had to follow.”

  “You were supposed to follow your orders.”

  “Delia, she is back, and in one piece. Let’s hear what she has to report.”

  Everything was fine until I told them about the girl from Zab. The air seemed to spark between Delia and Faisal.

  “Are you sure the caliph said Zab?” Delia asked. She was as still as a pillar, and as straight.

  I nodded. “He said that because she was from there, it would inspire the city.” Something I’d said was wrong. The air felt like it was about to combust. “Do you know who she could be?” I asked Faisal.

  He closed the space between us and took me by my elbow. “We will take care of it, Najwa. You’ve done well on this assignment, and I’m sure we will need you to return, so go home and get some rest.”

  He was ushering me out of the room, and I turned to look at Delia, who had gone to the Eye of Iblis. She was tapping at the image of the throne with her fingernail. “But I’m not tired,” I said.

  “All your friends have gone home by now,” he said. Suddenly, we were out in the hall. I followed him into the circular hall that housed the Lamp.

  “There’s something about Zab, isn’t there?” I asked, and he stopped me, right in front of the Lamp. He had his back to it, like it was nothing more than art.

  “We cannot discuss this here, Najwa.”

  My face flushed in shame. “I’m sorry. I just wanted to know.”

  Frowning, he nodded, then took me to the entrance. We were standing beside the desk where the copper disks scaled the wall, but a different person was sitting there now, looking bored.

  “All of us in the Eyes of Iblis have insatiable curiosity. It’s what makes us good. But what makes us work is understanding who should know certain things and who should not. Now go back to your mother. You’ve accomplished more today than ever before. Don’t tell her about the palace,” he said, pausing to smile. We both knew she wouldn’t take that well. “But you can show her the mark. We will see you tomorrow.”

  I nodded, even though I didn’t want to. I wanted the rest of the story. I wanted to know what it was about this girl from Zab that disturbed two seasoned Eyes of Iblis officers. I wanted to know why I wasn’t allowed to know. And I wanted to understand why they’d bring me into the Eyes of Iblis and send me to the palace but not trust me completely. If I was the only one who could get there, wouldn’t knowing everything about the situation help me?

  I didn’t dare open my mouth again. Instead, I waved to Faisal and let him pull the door closed behind me. Mindlessly, I made my way across the Cavern, somehow making it over the bridge, past the stores and the library, and up the path that led home.

  My house wasn’t terribly high up the Cavern’s wall. It was one of the stacked buildings littering the cascade of fallen gypsum that had become the foundation in the geode. Most of the homes were decorated using liberal doses of wishes, but none were as gaudy as mine. It was rounded and squashed like a tortoiseshell, with each square of the shell a different crystal. In the center of the roof was a slice of very thin glass that allowed the light in. I had begged my mother to leave it all one color, or just one shape, but it changed every month or so. Everything did in our house, depending on her mood. Somehow, she couldn’t get anything to match the image she held in her mind.

  I made it home and was about to pull aside one of her woven creations that hung in the doorway when I heard voices. I froze. It was my mother and Irina, her apprentice. Irina was the last person I wanted to run into.

  She was the same age as me, but she didn’t study at the school. She claimed she was too talented to waste her time there. Apparently, designing clothing was more important than anything else.

  “Well, that’s it for their relationship, then,” Irina said. She couldn’t say anything without scorn.

  My mother giggled. “I’ll be surprised if he comes here tomorrow. He’ll have other duties, I suppose.” My hand shook the curtain, and I cursed it silently. “Najwa?”

  There was nothing to do but go in. Mother and Irina were sitting at the table, each holding a spread of cards in her hand. A bottle stood open between them, half-drunk. Irina’s look was smug. She’d gotten close to my mother, and she knew it irritated me.

  “Who are you talking about?” I asked. I dropped my empty lunch bag on the shelf.

  “Atish, of course,” Irina said. Of course. “He made full Shaitan status today. You should see his mark. It’s practically glowing. And it’s hot to touch too.”

  “Is it?” I asked, trying not to imagine Irina touching Atish anywhere, much less on his mark. Mother was smiling, but without any sort of smirk. Her thick, straight hair fell behind her, glittering with pink diamonds beaded onto the ends. She had finally chosen a color for her hair, and it was nearly the same as my own. I frowned at the copied diamonds.

  “How did your transport test go?” she asked. “I know you passed, since everyone did, but how was it? What sort of flower did you bring back?” Mother was, for once in her life, graciously changing the subject. She had asked me to bring her an earthen flower, and I’d promised. But I was empty-handed, and she could see that.

  “I’m sorry, Mother. I had to turn my flower in. To the Eyes of Iblis.” She blinked, and I knew I’d never hear the end of that. “But it went well. I was in the most beautiful garden I could have imagined.”

  “Well, what sort of flower was it, then?” She glanced at Irina, who was adjusting a shawl made of silk and living glowworms. One of the glowworms had detached itself and was making a run for it.

  “A rose. Mother, why would Atish not come here tomorrow?” If there was one thing I could count on, it was Atish. He was the definition of routine, and part of his routine was walking with me to school.

  “Well, he’s in the Shaitan now,” she began.

  “He’s not going to want to walk you down there now that he’s not in school anymore,” Irina cut in.

  The mark on my hand burned, and I wanted to rub it in her face. But I couldn’t. Whenever Irina was around, I couldn’t find my voice. She treated me as though everything I said was inconsequential, and I usually ended up giving way to her opinions and unwanted advice.

  Still, I had my news, and Faisal had said I could share it. “Mother, the transport test went so well, actually, that afterward Faisal brought me to the Eyes of Iblis building.” I paused, waiting for the information to sink in, but they just blinked. “And, um, they gave me my mark.”

  “They what?” I had
expected Irina to say something like that, but not my mother. She pushed her chair back. “You go to the surface one time, just like everyone else, and he tosses you into the Eyes of Iblis? Just like that?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Najwa, that’s ridiculous,” Irina said. “Where is it?”

  I held out my hand to show them. The new mark glittered, and there it was, the truth of what I’d said. The undeniable shift in who I was. In what I was.

  My mother’s face had paled. “Najwa, I don’t know. I hadn’t heard they were planning on this. How could he do it so suddenly? To someone so young and—and inexperienced?”

  This stung. I had never wanted to tell my mother any secret so badly before. “They gave Atish his mark today. Why not me too?”

  “Because you’re you! And Atish is only going up the ranks in his foolish military organization. But you—you’re going to be up there, mingling with them. I don’t care if it helps us in this idiotic war or not, but having my daughter popping up amongst humans is … it’s …”

  “It’s disgusting,” finished Irina.

  “Yes,” Mother said, nodding at Irina. “You should be here, where it’s safe. Where you won’t be tainted.”

  Her outburst caught me off guard. I had backed up against the shelves. “Why didn’t you say something?”

  “I did say something, but Faisal wouldn’t have anything of it! You know my brother. He’s impossible. And he was always telling me you were meant for his precious Corps.” There were tears in her eyes.

  Irina draped an arm over my mother’s shoulders. “Maybe you should go out for a bit. Let her calm down.” She said this with the smile of a snake.

  “Fine!” I turned and ran out, practically ripping the flimsy curtain that was our door. I hated them. Both of them.

  I ran up the trail that wound behind our house. I was going to go as high as I could. There, the gypsum shards bit into each other like the tip of a monster’s mouth. I couldn’t press on from here—I was at the top, where the ceiling met the wall. As a young child, I could fit between the points almost till the top and bottom melted into one another. I would hide there for hours, soaking in silence.

  But now the last few feet were impossible to reach. I stared at the narrow space, squeezing my nails into my palms, and thought of the shock on my mother’s face. How had she not known I would end up in the Eyes of Iblis? I was training for it. It had been only a matter of time, and yes, that time had come early, but it shouldn’t have shocked her.

  Something had changed in me today, though. Maybe that was what scared her. Maybe she could see the garden in me, and the sky. Maybe she could smell the flowers. She had been up there once. Just once, on the day of her own transport test.

  I turned and looked at the houses that poured down the Cavern’s wall. They stood between the bits of jagged rock, and the lake still curved like a deadly fingernail around the city, flickering here and there. It was all the same as always. None of it was fresh.

  The look on Prince Kamal’s face when he lifted his selenite ball sprang into my mind. He wasn’t sitting in one place, trying to manage. He was doing something, even if his father didn’t think it was worth his time. Even if everything in his life pointed to a mysterious girl from Zab.

  In fact, it wasn’t just his life that was being affected by her. She was interfering with mine too. Some human girl, making her way to Baghdad, was going to change things.

  And all I ever did was watch.

  But that was going to change.

  I sucked in a huge breath through my nose, and thought of this girl while I held my breath. I focused my mind on what I knew of her, which was very little. It would be enough. I was ready.

  “Shatamana,” I whispered.

  Then it happened. Tiny grains of sand swirled around my skirts and scratched my cheeks, moving with the air that left my lungs. A wind of limestone bits and musk twisted around and around. The lake rushed past me, a marbled vision of fire and water.

  Then I dissolved into smoke the color of my hair and flew up through the Cavern, a burst of flame pushing through the layers of rock and sand.

  12

  Zayele

  “Princess,” the guard said. He was knocking on the door. I sat up just as Rahela stood from her spot on the floor. The guard’s beard filled the whole window.

  “You’ve come to let us out? That’s really too kind,” I said, while I checked to make sure I was properly covered.

  “No, Princess. The vizier wanted us to tell you to prepare yourself. We will be arriving in Baghdad before the day is over.”

  It was good I was still sitting down. Somehow, I managed to nod.

  “Thank you,” Rahela told the guard. She spoke to him about breakfast and needing extra water for me to bathe in, but my focus faded.

  Today was the hideous day I’d be let out of my little cabin and brought into the legendary Palace of Baghdad.

  After the guard left, Rahela washed my hair and braided it in layers.

  “Let’s leave my hair like this. It doesn’t matter what I look like,” I said.

  She ignored my complaints and tugged out the knots. “It doesn’t matter to them, but it matters to me. I can’t walk in looking better than a princess,” she said. Then she grinned. “Unless you want me to marry the prince and have you be the constant companion.”

  “Would you?” I asked, jerking my hair from her fingers.

  She rapped my head lightly with the brush. “Of course not, silly. Besides, Hashim knows what you look like.”

  “I think I’m going to throw up,” I said, resigning myself to her overly elaborate hair design.

  At the end of an hour, I had the hair of a princess about to be wed. Then she took out her narrow henna box and painted the soles of my feet and then my palms. She drew diamonds and curlicued flowers across the lines, dipping her brush into the henna pot over and over. The brush tickled and tugged my skin, leaving behind a layer of black goo.

  I groaned, pretending not to notice that what she’d done was beautiful. “So I have a few hours left. Then we’ll be out of this cage and in another.”

  Rahela sighed. “The palace won’t be a cage. And at any rate, it won’t be as small as this place.” She stole a glance at the door. We’d leave this cabin and never see it again. “There.” She wiped the brush on a bit of cloth and closed the henna pot.

  I flapped my hands in the air. As long as the henna was wet, I couldn’t touch anything. She reached for my feet and scraped away the dried henna there, revealing swirling flowers coiling around my toes, triangles and pearls on the bottoms of my feet, and bell-shaped flowers curling up my ankle. All of it was red.

  It would fade, but by then I’d be a married woman with weeks of experience. I shivered. I didn’t want to think about it. I went to my usual spot by the window. Outside, the sun was straight above, so that the guard had no shadow and the water was blinding.

  “I’m sure it’s dry now,” Rahela said behind me. I nodded and turned toward her, but just as I did, something happened. The hairs on my arms rose and a sudden rush of cold swept across me, followed by a wave of heat. I turned back to the window.

  A girl was looking through it. I gasped, and in a blink, she was gone.

  On instinct, I reached through the window and grabbed at the air. Something caught in my fingers. Hair. She hadn’t gone. I yanked at it and heard a muffled cry.

  She was a jinni. A jinni was right here. In my hands. Everything I’d been told about jinn rushed through my mind—invisibility, bejeweled hair, wishes—and when she tried to pull away, I thrust my other hand through the window and touched what had to be her face.

  “Got you!”

  The jinni gasped, and I felt her shudder. She fell apart and came in through the window like a wave of sand. Then, as quickly as she’d turned to sand, she came together again and
fell into me, knocking us both onto the floor. Then her hands pushed at me and she backed up. I reached forward before she could flee, and grabbed her wrist.

  She wore a pale gown embroidered in silver stripes, and her hair shimmered with jewels. Her eyes were wide and dark as a gazelle’s. And just as nervous. But the strangest thing—even stranger than finding a jinni at my window—was that her face was like my own.

  “Zayele!” Rahela shrieked. She backed up in the corner of the cabin, and her nostrils flared.

  “She’s a jinni,” I said.

  The jinni froze. “Let me go,” she whispered.

  “Why do you look like me?” I asked, squeezing her wrist. I was not going to let go.

  “Please, let me go.”

  There had to be a reason a jinni showed up here, right before I reached Baghdad. It couldn’t be coincidence. “Grant me a wish.”

  She tried to pull away, shaking her head. “Please, don’t ask that—”

  “But those are the rules, aren’t they? I know we’re at war, but before all that, jinn granted wishes. All we had to do was catch one.”

  “Don’t, Zayele. Let her go.”

  “I need this wish, Rahela,” I said. I gritted my teeth. I had almost given up on escape, but the perfect solution had appeared at my window: if a human caught a jinni, the jinni had to grant that human a wish. It was a rule of nature to keep the jinn from growing too powerful. “You,” I said to the jinni girl, “you owe me a wish. Then I won’t kill you or call the guards. Is that a deal?”

  She balled up her fists. I could feel the tendons in her wrist moving, and was surprised at how human she felt. “Why can’t I wish myself home?” she asked with a strain in her voice. I wasn’t sure what she meant, but it didn’t matter. I needed this wish.

  She looked so much like me. With a change of clothes and a bit of henna, no one would notice. A tingling idea began to form, and I felt the corners of my mouth lifting. I knew what I would wish for. I smiled, and a powerful surge pulsed beneath my fingers.