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The kiss is over before I can get enough, and Valdus steps behind my back, squaring my hips and pulling my shoulders back until they rest against his chest.
“Whenever you want,” he whispers in my ear.
I wonder if he knows that I might never be ready if his breath will keep tickling my skin, his fingers pressing gently at my hips. I clear my throat and lift my trembling arm, cocking the hammer. The pull of the trigger throws my shoulder against Valdus’s chest, and the explosion of a spark on powder makes my ears ring.
“Not bad for your first time.”
My bullet edged in the wall a few feet away from the targets says otherwise.
Valdus only chuckles when I roll my eyes at him. “Try again.”
I shoot the other five bullets at the pyramid of cups—or better said, in their general direction—before Valdus picks up the revolver from my hands. His fingers nimbly unload the shells before charging the next round of bullets, and I shoot them all with the same result.
My fingers ache from the strain when another round finally hits the can at the bottom of the tumbling pyramid.
“Did you see that?” I ask.
Valdus doesn’t answer, and I turn around. Numair stands at the entrance of the hidden room, perspiration sticking his black hair to his face. He heaves between each word, but I can still hear him clear as day. “We have a problem.”
Valdus crosses the room in two large strides, pulling the door behind Numair closed and turning to him with that usual frown of his. “What’s going on?”
“A train stopped for supplies in our charming little town, and a prisoner took advantage of the opportunity to escape the convoy.”
Valdus’s shoulders tense. “We are ready for this kind of situation. Our people know what to do.”
“You don’t understand.” Numair shakes his head. “Whoever he is, he must have made it to Magnar's personal list of enemies. The guards are searching every house, checking tags of every man and woman who wander the streets.”
“Sands,” Valdus mutters.
“Exactly.”
“What?” I ask, looking from Numair to Valdus and back to Numair. “What does it mean?”
“They’ve put the whole town under curfew,” Valdus starts, and Numair finishes for him. “It’s only a matter of time until they make their way here and find you.”
30
Imust have pulled the trigger because the gun fires again, and the bullet buries itself deep into the sand next to my boot. Valdus pries the revolver from my hands.
Strapping the gun back into its holster on his belt, he turns to us. “Numair, take Neylan with you and bring her somewhere safe. The greenhouse, back home, I don’t care.” He pulls a set of tags from his pocket and presses them into my hands. “If anyone asks, your name is Caleb, and you work for the governor. With your short hair, everyone will assume you’re a boy.”
“What about you?”
“I have to move Rev before guards find him and start asking questions we can’t answer.”
Numair pulls me back inside the factory, which wouldn’t stop running even if the desert burned around it. We pass the noisy machinery and guards scouring the place for the escaped prisoner and slip out through the gate with another wave of workers ending their shift. We start toward the town bathed by the setting sun. The street splits in five different directions and most workers disperse through narrow alleys. In mere moments, we’re left without cover. Numair grabs my hand and dashes down a street as the patrol of guards barges into the square, flaunting their swords and guns. I don’t know at what point we start running, but soon, I struggle to keep my breaths steady as we draw closer to the edge of town.
We come to a halt at the corner of a street where another patrol bars the passage to the desert. A father is drying a bare-footed girl’s tears as she clutches a broken toy with her dirty hands. We circle back to a street where a family huddles close to each other, confined to the porch of their house by the guards’ sharp blades. Soon it will be torches and lamps coming to life as silent observers to soldiers ransacking every house on their path.
We try one street after another, but an impervious wall of Magnar’s obedient soldiers has sundered us from the rest of the desert and only sand and shadows can trespass its confines.
“Getting you out of The Broken Sands just isn’t possible,” Numair mutter. “We’ll have to find a place where you can lie low for a while.”
“You there, stop,” comes a grating cry before we can move.
“Sands. Not Togar,” Numair mutters and pulls me deeper into an alley and behind crates piled high enough to shield us from view.
“Who is he?”
