Every time she was here, she felt helpless. Always at the mercy of some Balladairan or another, hanging from their whims. Not tonight. Tonight, she came of her own will. She didn’t want mercy. She wanted them to burn.
There were six more buildings on the southern side of the compound, closest to Touraine and her mixed company of rebels. Two barracks faced each other in the southwest corner, and another two faced each other in the southeast corner. In the middle, the canteen faced the administrative building, and the supply stores sat squat behind the canteen. The remaining Sands were probably under guard in one of the barracks; the rest were garrisoned by the Balladairan soldiers.
The compound was noisy, and despite the order of the tents, she had a feeling that the well-oiled army of Balladaire was gunky with fear and sickness. The figures running circuits from barracks to tents to mess hall seemed manic, not efficient.
On either side of Touraine, the leaders of the rebellion crouched: Djasha, with her golden eyes, frail body, and the force of a god in her veins, and Jaghotai, raw strength and over thirty years of just rage begging for an outlet.
“You sure you don’t want to stay up here?” Touraine asked them. “We’ll need you to get out.”
“I’ll end this with my bare hands or die trying,” growled Jaghotai.
No less than Touraine expected.
Djasha nodded solemnly, her eyes locked on the jail where her wife waited.
They took each other in one last time. The moment seemed to stretch, until Jaghotai held out her forearm. Touraine clasped it.
“We pray for rain,” Touraine said.
“No.” Jaghotai squeezed Touraine’s arm tightly. “Be the rain.”
The rebels descended on the compound like a summer storm.
The attack went wrong from the very beginning.
Jaghotai surged down the wall with a platoon of her best remaining fighters, aiming for the western barracks to surprise the soldiers in their beds. The rifles would be least useful there, in the close quarters. Above them, looping around the wall they had cleared of sentries, some Sands who had joined the rebels waited with Touraine’s treasonous guns to give Jaghotai cover. As the alarm cry went up, Saïd and his group snuck east with Djasha to the jail under cover of chaos.
Touraine led her group up the middle, to the supply stores where the Balladairans kept spare munitions as well as blankets and uniforms. She and her new soldiers crept through the shadows, and all around her, the darkness seemed alive with danger. Which it was. Her lungs swelled with the heady buzz of doing what she was meant to do.
Two of her makeshift soldiers took out the two guards at the supply door. Easily done—they were confused at the alarm and groggy with sleep or illness. The guards hadn’t fully registered that the compound was under attack until it was too late.
Touraine and Noé slipped into the building, leaving a handful of their soldiers outside to guard their backs. Something was wrong. There was no clerk, but that didn’t set her senses off. She sniffed.
“Sir, there’s no powder,” Noé said in a low voice.
“Down!” she hissed. She signaled at the rest of them, but they were slow to react.
In the close quarters, the gunshots sounded like thunder, and smoke clouded the dark room, ruining the little night vision Touraine had. She ducked low and ran. She and Noé scrambled together for the door. She tripped over soft, solid lumps as she wove a snake’s path back to the exit.
She gulped fresh air when she was outside and dived immediately to the side. The rebels she’d left were wide-eyed in the dark, holding their knives and the muskets Touraine had kept from Cantic.
“A trap,” she said raggedly. “Don’t go in. Don’t show them your back.”
She dragged Noé aside. “We need to get to the barracks. The other Sands—”
He nodded, his narrow face solemn in the dark. He turned to go, but before she even let go of his shirt—the hooded shirts the Qazāli wore, not the standard-issue conscript coat—they paused at an all-too-familiar sound.
Balladairan marching drums, keeping a sharp cadence.
“The alarm,” Noé said, maybe in denial. He tried to shrug her off and see to his mission, but Touraine held fast.
She shook her head. “Alarm’s been set off.” It had been for ages, though the attack couldn’t have been on longer than ten, fifteen minutes even. This sounded too far away, from the south. “The Balladairan reinforcements are here.”
Sky-falling fuck.
Noé’s eyes widened.
“Come on,” Touraine said. Noé turned tail and sprinted to the southernmost barracks in the southeastern corner, quiet as a fox in a den of gunfire and death screams, and Touraine bolted for its neighbor. Freeing the Sands was their only hope of getting out of this compound alive.
She sent another rebel after Noé and took a second to assess the rest of their little company. Jaghotai raising a holy devastation through the west of the compound. There was no sign of Djasha and the prisoners.
Touraine took out the only Balladairan in front of her barracks building before he could level his musket and fix his aim. Blood gurgled from his belly and across his eyes as he screamed. Touraine hadn’t quite gotten the hang of using the long knife instead of her baton, and it showed. She got the important parts, though: poke them hard, hit with the sharp side, and be fast.
But when she opened the door to the barracks, there was no one there. Just rows and rows of empty double bunks. At a loss, she stepped in farther, even going so far as to kneel and scan under the beds. The room was dark enough to hide in, but it was quiet as death.
Outside was another case. She listened and watched as
