“I can’t maintain this for long,” Djasha murmured as if she could read Touraine’s thoughts. Perhaps, Touraine thought with a start, the other woman could.
While the others climbed up the ladders and onto the ramparts in their dark clothes and veils, Touraine surveyed the place that was not her home and yet held her heart in its fist. To her left, the gate in the west wall facing the medinas. A bare dirt road ran from the gate and split the compound neatly into north and south: the infirmary in the northwest corner, where even now Touraine wretchedly hoped Balladairan soldiers were dying and the Sands were not; the brig in the northeast corner, where Touraine had spent more than enough time and where Djasha would rescue Aranen; between the infirmary and the brig, the administrative building, where she had been court-martialed, where Cantic gave orders and Luca wrote laws and Touraine had tried desperately to find a place in it all. The compound had never seemed so huge from the ground. The height of the wall also gave Touraine the perspective to see how badly she’d failed and how badly Balladaire had failed her.
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, Sa?d 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.