The rooster's cry had barely left its throat when Kinan pried his eyes open the following morning, heavy-lidded and reluctant. He threw back his blanket, rubbed his eyes with his knuckles, and crossed the room to wake Amro.
No response.
He tried again. Then again. Amro lay utterly still, surrendered to sleep in a way that suggested the night hadn't been kind to him. Kinan, out of patience, splashed water on him.
Amro lurched upright.
"Who's there?"
Kinan said nothing and retreated to his own bed.
Amro blinked at the air in front of him, unfocused, then sank back into the pillow — until the quality of the light filtering through the room registered. Daylight. He was on his feet in an instant: washing his face, pulling on his clothes, drinking water, then marching straight back to shake Kinan awake again.
They left for the market at a near-run.
The day passed without incident — ordinary in every respect, except that Kinan handled the selling entirely on his own while Amro sat in the corner of their stall and made up for the sleep he'd missed. By evening, when the light had softened and it was time to go home, Amro noticed something on the way back that made him stop mid-stride.
A group of men dressed entirely in black were detaining a young man — no older than thirty — in the middle of the street.
Something cold moved through Amro. He caught Kinan by the sleeve and redirected them down a different path without a word, pressing one finger to his lips when Kinan shot him a questioning look. They looped around and emerged on the other side of the street that led home. Only then did Amro relax his grip and say:
"Now we can walk in peace."
"Why? What just happened?" Kinan said.
"There's something dangerous nearby. I'm not certain what — but we stay cautious."
Kinan scratched his cheek.
"I genuinely have no idea what you're talking about. I didn't notice anything strange out there."
Amro gave no answer. He blinked slowly, tugged the donkey's rope, and kept walking.
⁂
II.
Back at the house, they sat across from each other at the dinner table — a large wooden bowl between them, two clay cups on either side. The kitchen was modest in the truest sense: one wide table pushed against the right wall, a window with thin, worn curtains that let the night in at the edges, and a few seats fashioned from sections of palm trunk. The only sound was the quiet scrape and click of spoons against teeth.
"Tomorrow I'm going to the barley shop — I'll bring back a few sacks. We'll keep some for ourselves and sell the rest. It should bring in more than the clothes do. Most people in this quarter can't afford fabric, which means they'll move for grain."
Kinan didn't respond. He stared at his bowl with the deliberate blankness of someone who knows exactly what's being implied and has chosen not to acknowledge it.
Amro smiled faintly and folded his arms.
"Which means you'll be staying here with the donkey. When I'm back, we'll talk about the work — and I have something to show you. Something you might actually like."
"What could you possibly have to show me?" Kinan said, mouth half-full. "Look at us. Two traders scraping by, selling old clothes in a street full of people who can barely afford to eat. What exactly does a man like you own that would surprise me?"
Amro's face coloured slightly.
"Ha — don't rush to conclusions. What I have will make you forget yourself entirely."
"Mm." Kinan leaned back. "We'll see what a poor man's surprise looks like."
They finished eating. Kinan was asleep before his head fully met the pillow.
III.
Amro did not sleep.
He lay still, eyes open, fixed on the kitchen window. Thoughts moved through him slowly, the way deep water moves — all of them circling the same thing: the truth he had been carrying, the truth he had not yet told. It gave him insomnia sometimes. It made him rehearse futures he couldn't predict — what would happen if the boy refused to accept it, how the boy would look at him afterward. But the fear that pressed hardest against his chest was simpler and more specific than all of that.
What if I die before I tell him?
What becomes of him then?
The thought made him sweat despite the cool air. He had always known that worrying about the future was a kind of slow suffocation — and yet here he was, drowning in it again.
He rose from the bed, crossed to the window, and drew the curtains aside. He tilted his face up toward the sky, and the expression on it was the expression of a man who has been tired for a very long time.
"I wish whoever is up there would look down at this," he thought. "I am exhausted. All I want is an end to this — but not before I've done what I came here to do. I don't think I could rest in my grave if I died having left it unfinished."
A breath of night air moved across his face. He closed his eyes and let it pass over him.
And then, the way it sometimes does when the body finally softens, memory rose.
⁂
IV.
A young man of medium height — a thin beard following the line of his jaw and joining his moustache — held a wooden sword. That was Amro.
Across from him stood another young man: black hair shot through with strands of white, lean, with the kind of face people tended to look at twice. He, too, held a wooden sword.
They sparred in the centre of a loose ring of young men and children, all watching, calling out. Amro glanced to his right and caught sight of a figure with dark brown hair worn in two braids — smiling at him, nodding in encouragement. He felt something lift in his chest. The chief of the tribe had come to watch him. Him. Had come personally to stand here and —
He turned back to the ring.
The space had gone dark.
Not dim — dark. The kind of dark that has weight. He felt the air close around him. His body began to tremble for no reason he could name. Then, from the black, a massive shadow appeared — the outline of a figure with no clear face — reaching down, taking hold of him, and setting him back on the ground as though he weighed nothing.
Amro caught his breath. He rubbed his eyes.
He opened them.
Kinan stood before him. His face was blank — emptied of everything — and his eyes were black from edge to edge, entirely. His lips moved in words that were barely audible. Amro stepped toward him, and with each step the words became clearer —
"Why did you hide this from me, Amro? Did you really need to let me long for something, and then let me die of grief over a lie I built my whole life on? Do you hate me that much?"
Amro's eyes flew open. He stumbled backward two steps as the floor beneath him dissolved — the fighting ground becoming a vast desert that sent threads of sand up around his ankles and pulled him slowly, steadily, downward —
Everything went black.
He opened his eyes.
V.
He breathed.
A dream. Another nightmare — but worse than the one before, because this one had mixed everything together without mercy: beautiful moments from his past, strange and unsettling images he couldn't place, and then, surfacing through all of it, the fear he carried daily about the secret he was keeping from Kinan. All of it compressed into a single dream — one of the worst he'd ever had.
He felt something crack inside him. That familiar fracture — the one that appeared sometimes and had no name. He had always assumed it was the weight of the pressure he lived under, and he had always answered it with patience and endurance, waiting for a death that would bring him relief. But his fears wouldn't even let him ask for death.
He got up from the bed a second time. This time he dressed fully, wrapped his face in cloth, and went out to walk.
He walked until he reached the shore.
He looked around. To his right, tucked between the rocks, sat a small cave. He went to it, unwound the covering from his face, crouched down, and pushed his hand into the sand. He closed his fingers around a fistful and felt its resistance.
"Shore sand," he thought. "Dense. Not easy to move."
And then — in a moment that was quiet and matter-of-fact — he raised his hand.
The sand rose with it.
A thin stream of it lifted into the air, coiling and shifting. It was heavier than he'd expected, the compacted sand of the beach resisting him in a way desert sand never had — but it moved. He drew it sideways, let it spiral, sent it forward in a clean line, brought it back. The threads moved like something alive, like something that had been waiting.
Amro was a sand-user. Or, as those who wielded the elements called it — a bearer of the Sand Gift.
He had always been careful. He had no interest in the people of this region knowing what he carried. There were consequences to being known.
VI.
This place had once been full of element-users — and then a single event had made every last one of them hide.
The city around him was no ordinary city. It was the capital of what had once been one of the greatest kingdoms in the known world: Sadara, and its jewel was Zahrat al-Sahel — Flower of the Coast. At its height, the kingdom had stretched across the entire desert, pressed against the borders of Kwasta to the north and Shakti to the east, and held dominion over the full breadth of the Great West — and all of it accomplished in a remarkably short span of time, built on the back of an army that weaponised two elements in perfect coordination: wind and sand. Together they had bent kingdoms to their will, and every realm nearby had learned to fear the name.
Then it fell — just as fast as it had risen.
A single tribe had managed to unite enough rebels, topple the ruling dynasty, and seize the territories Sadara had spent generations building. The new rulers relocated the capital to a settlement along a great green river, and there they thrived. But they imposed brutal conditions on the old Sadara lands — and among those conditions was this: no one in these territories was permitted to use their element. Any person known to carry one would be seized and brought to the new capital, to serve under the new kings.
That was why Amro kept his gift hidden. And that was almost certainly why the young man he'd seen earlier — the one dragged away by the men in black — had been taken.
He moved the sand slowly now, without urgency. Threads of it shifted through the air like lazy serpents, circled him, then shot forward with sudden speed, clean as blades, before settling back to stillness.
He watched his own hands afterward and felt something like grief.
"I've grown weak," he said quietly. "There was a time when I could move entire masses of it. Now I can barely manage a few threads."
His ears caught something — a rustling from the right side of the cave. He turned sharply, both hands closing into fists, threads of sand forming behind him in readiness.
"Who's there? Leave now. Don't cause me trouble."
Silence.
He moved forward carefully, the sand trailing behind him — then lunged.
"Got you."
He released his stance almost immediately.
A cat, crouched in the grass, batting at a mouse.
Amro exhaled — long and slow — and returned to his place by the cave entrance. He sat down and turned his gaze to the water, watching the waves come in and pull back, come in and pull back, as though the sea, too, was thinking something over and hadn't yet decided.