These city walls were not built for scaling. A statement of the perfectly obvious, I know. But they really, really weren’t. The stones were placed precisely in such a way to keep anyone from doing exactly what we are. My arms are sore and my legs are stretched to their limits. Getting from one brick to the next would be difficult even in the daylight, much less with three quarters of a moon as the only source of light. There are campfires not too far in the distance, but those provide little comfort to me—they belong to the very people I don’t want to notice me or my sister.

So, when my boot slipped earlier on one of the stones … well, now you know why I’m hanging by one arm, scrambling for purchase against the walls.

The scrape of boots against rock, of course, causes Zeena to look up and hiss. I already bit back a curse when I missed the brick, and there’s no other way to find my foothold again without a little bit of noise.

But it doesn’t matter; Zeena is not reasonable. She cannot possibly resist the urge to silence me, as though I might have missed the stakes in this dangerous game. As though I think we are currently racing down the spine of a palm tree to see who could bring Baba back a fresh date first.

As though her hissing were any less noisy than my one—extremely small—slip-up.

I can hear her warning in my mind: Silence and invisibility are our one advantage. Thank you for that sage advice, Zeena. Truly thoughtful and supportive and exactly what I needed this very moment. Could not do this without you, my shining and guiding light. Please, hush me again so that we might draw further notice to our climbing out of a city during a siege in the middle of the night.

My foot, mercifully, finds the next stone. I ignore the burning ache in my limbs as they beg for relief, pleading with me to relax for just one tiny moment. That feeling is a lie. Giving in to it would get us caught or killed. Akko fell—is falling—and its walls are not ones that I would dare scale in any other situation.

The Faranji came by the sea; we had to get out the hard way. To be a captive soldier is always a risk, but we did not have the safety of being men. If we were discovered, we would be too far from home for our name or our tribe to mean anything to these strange invaders. The men we fought alongside with for months had told us in no uncertain terms: The Faranji were barbarians. We would not be afforded the honor of being soldiers by them.