“Do you hear that?” Ursula asked me. “It’s like engines.”
“What?” I raised my head and squinted. The sun was so bright and everything was so flat. The light reflected right off the ground, like a mirror. At first I couldn’t see a thing.
Then an open-back jeep shot past the front of our hood.
“Everyone down!” Ursula shouted. The RV surged beneath us—her foot jamming the pedal into the floor. I screamed as the tires squealed. From nowhere, suddenly we were surrounded, Ory. They’d been in our blind spot somehow, or were lying in wait and pulled onto the main road from ditches or something.
“They’re everywhere!” I cried to Ursula.
“How many?” she yelled back.
“I don’t know!” I tried to count. “Five cars at least!”
“Seven!” Lucius called. “No, eight!”
“Dhuuxo, get the gun!” Intisaar cried.
A dusty jeep screeched by and something hit my window, shattering the glass all over me. “God damnit!” Ursula shouted as I ducked, covering my face from the shards.
“Faster!” Intisaar wailed.
“Shadowless,” the stranger driving the jeep next to us said to me through the open air of the destroyed window when I looked at him. He put his hand out as if he could reach me from his seat. Even terrified, I was transfixed by the dark image of the shadow of his arm as it hung over the sandy ground between our two vehicles, rippling from the speed. Shots erupted on the other side of the RV, from Dhuuxo, and there was screaming and cursing. She waved Ursula’s gun triumphantly and pointed out her open window. “Two down!”
“Go!” the one who must have been their leader called from his motorcycle, and the bandit beside me revved his jeep closer to the RV, slamming against our right side. Victor and Ysabelle shouted behind me as they tried to keep balanced and fight back, but the jeep slammed us again and they fell backward into the cabin in a tangle of limbs. “I have one!” the bandit beside me cried, and reached out of the open window of his jeep again and into mine.
“No!” I tried to punch him, but his fingers were like iron when he finally snatched my arm just above the wrist. “Ursula!” I cried, and then, “Ory!” Between us, against the bright, sandy ground of the highway shoulder, the shadow of his arm pulled and pulled, pulling nothing.
“Stop him!” Ursula was shouting. She grabbed at the rifle that Dhuuxo had dropped when she tripped, but the RV teetered, and she had to take the wheel again. “No!”
I felt myself start to lift from my seat, to be dragged through the window. Only then did I finally realize what the man was wearing—layers against the sun and heat, every piece from head to toe a pure, ghostly white.
“It’s Transcendence!” I screamed before the bandit cracked me in the head with the butt of his pistol.
I’m okay still, Ory. I’m okay. So far.
I hope the speaker’s picking this up. I have your recorder hidden under my shirt, and I’ve pulled my collar up to hide my face while I whisper. I don’t know if the guards would care, but I can’t risk it. I don’t know what I’d do if they took it away. If I couldn’t talk to you. You’re all that’s keeping me going right now.
Even if the speaker actually is catching this, you’d still probably have no idea what I’m talking about—what’s going on. I wouldn’t blame you. I’m only beginning to understand it myself, too.
When I finally woke up, everything was quiet and dark. Something was hovering in front of me. A face, only the eyes visible, the rest veiled in a layer of white gauze. A voice I didn’t recognize was speaking softly to me, trying to draw me back from unconsciousness. Something touched my head, where it ached from the blow.
“Stop,” I mumbled.
“I need to keep pressure here.”
“She said stop,” I heard Ursula say behind me.
“Ursula,” I said. I felt her hands grasp my shoulders, to say, I’m here.
Things began to come into focus. We were together, thank God. All alive, and not grievously wounded.
“Enough, stop,” I said again, pushing the stranger’s hand away. We weren’t bound, I realized.
The face draped in white, gauzy fabric looked down to check the cloth that had been pressed against my scalp. The small red stain was dry. “That’s very good.” It was a female voice.
“What do you want with us?” Ursula asked.
The woman in white set the cloth aside and pulled her arms back through the bars. The bars. I realized we were in a cavernous empty hall—from the look of the walls, it had once been the main room of a church, but now all the religious fixtures were gone. Only the stone bricks and windows remained, as well as one new construction, a giant iron cage in the center of the floor, inside which we were all locked. “I’m very sorry for the rough handling. They know better than that,” said the woman, as if Ursula hadn’t asked the question. “They were just so excited to have found so many of you at once.”
“Are we prisoners?” Lucius asked. My head spun.
“No, of course not,” the woman said emphatically.
“Then we’re free to leave,” Ursula said.
The woman shifted. “We hope you won’t want to.”
“So then we’re prisoners.”
“You are honored guests.” She smiled. She gestured to the bars. “I know how this looks, but these are for your protection—those out there with shadows are fearful and violent. We want to protect you from them. We want to help you.”
I checked: the woman had a shadow. “You want to help shadowless?” I asked warily.
“Anything you want,” she offered. “Name it. We will find a way.”
“We want to leave,” Ursula repeated.
Victor stood up, and so did Wes and Lucius. Before they could reach through the bars to the woman, the door behind her opened, and five more strangers dressed in white filed in to stand at intervals around the hall. Guards.
“Honored guests?” Ursula asked sarcastically.
“They all say that at first,” the woman replied, with a smile so kind it sent a chill down my spine. “I promise you’ll see.”
Mahnaz Ahmadi
NAZ WALKED SLOWLY UP TO THE FRONT OF THE IOWA, WHERE Ory and Malik were standing with the General. Above, the sky was just starting to brighten, not into warm peach, but an oppressive wintery navy streaked with gray. It was hailing lightly.
“Some day for our most important mission.” The General sighed when she reached them, gesturing at the threatening sky. He stuck his foot out, a few inches over the ground. “It’s so overcast, we look like a bunch of Reds.”
Naz smiled, despite the grim mood. He was right. The morning had that peculiar kind of stormy light that was bright enough to illuminate the landscape, but so lifeless it sucked the shadows from everything except the deepest, most narrow corners of the world. Everything was there, but two-dimensional.
“You ready?” Ory asked.
“I’m always ready,” the General said automatically, then flinched. He and Ory both smiled, surprised at the sudden memory, but it was bittersweet. It had been Paul’s catchphrase, once.
Naz looked down. She hated seeing moments like this. Sad recollections. She’d heard the trademark saying in the stories Paul sometimes told, when they all used to sit around the fire at the Iowa in better times—usually when he had been trying to goad the much more cautious Ory into doing something mischievous with him as kids. Then history repeated itself when Ory met Max. She’d said it when Ory accidentally proposed far too early, when it had just slipped out at a romantic dinner; when they’d gone skydiving; the first time they’d nervously talked about children, maybe, someday. Paul said at that fateful football game, when he heard Max say it to Ory when he asked her if she wanted to get out of there, and go get dinner somewhere, it was how he knew she was right for him.
Naz thought that if Max had still been here, she probably would have liked her. She seemed a lot like Paul.
“Well, you look it.” Malik fi
nally broke the awkward silence. They all turned to him gratefully. The General was lightly armored, and wearing a leather shoulder bag to carry his tools on the way there—then hopefully Paul’s book on his way back. Over all of it, he’d shrugged the cleanest single piece of fabric Naz had seen in two years—a doctor’s white lab coat.
“Can you believe I still have it, after all this time?” Imanuel asked. He admired the blindingly clean sleeve.
“Honestly, yes.” Ory smiled. “You have a weapon?”
The General shook his head. “I don’t want to aggravate them.” He put a hand on Ory’s shoulder. “I’m coming back.” He looked at Malik and her, too. “I’m coming back.”
Naz looked down sharply as her eyes grew hot. He was hugging each of them now, Malik and Ory clapping him roughly on the back and blinking just like she was. Her body moved against her will when it was her turn, arms outstretched, as if a hug would do anything at all. You don’t understand, she wanted to tell him. You can’t go alone. I made a promise to Paul before he died. I said I would bring Ory and Max back, and I said I’d protect you. I can’t fail a second time. But before she could say it, he started walking toward the front lines.
Leaving. He was leaving. Naz could feel the panic crushing her. He was leaving, and there was nothing she could do. “Malik,” she gasped.
“I know,” Malik said. She felt his arm around her shoulder, holding her up.
The General turned back once and waved, and then he was gone, turned onto another street. Everything was suddenly completely silent.
She turned to Malik at last. He and Ory looked as panicked as she felt, rooted to the asphalt, eyes wide as they stared into the empty street.
“What do we do?” Ory asked numbly. None of them moved for a few moments, until at last Vienna walked up.
“Dad,” she said softly, “they’re all waiting for you.”
Malik finally snapped back to attention and turned to face the troops. “All right!” he cried. “We don’t know how much time we have, so let’s work fast, soldiers. When the General gets back, the whole Red horde might be right on his ass—so we had better be ready to move. Is that clear?”
“Yes, sir!” they cried in unison.
“My group, upstairs on packing duty. Double-check everything—we do not leave a single book! Ahmadi’s group, the basement.” He clapped once. “Let’s go!”
NAZ STILL THOUGHT OF THE BASEMENT AS A GARAGE, EVEN though it wasn’t a garage anymore—the luxury cars were all long gone. Parked in their places now was a row of carriages, each from a different era. And along the opposite wall, the soldiers had built low walls out of scrap to transform the parking spots into stalls—stables, to be exact.
“This?” Ory panted.
“No, the bridles.” Naz gestured impatiently. “The thin brown straps with the metal bit in the middle.”
She saw him pause between dragging heaps of riding tack over to her and Vienna to stare at the row of horses snorting and stamping in their stalls. She knew what he wanted to ask them—where were they getting enough grass, how had he never seen them being exercised, where had they even found them—but she could also tell he was thinking the same way she did: that would just waste time, and time was something they didn’t have much of. There was only one question that really mattered anyway. “Why aren’t we using cars?”
She smiled at being proven right.
“Would if we could,” Vienna answered as she slid the reins over one horse’s head and hefted a harness after it with a grunt. “Once the Reds figured out that petroleum makes a fire burn even faster, they went after it like—” she considered.
“Like flies after horse shit,” Naz finished for her. She reached for another bridle, and Ory jumped to grab a harness that he guessed should go after. She grunted in approval and started on the next horse in her row, hands moving efficiently, buckling straps and fitting bands across the giant, muscled creatures. He was picking it up quickly.
“You’d be lucky if you could find enough fuel in all of D.C. now to power a motorcycle for two miles,” Vienna added. She was taking the General’s decision to walk into the Red’s territory alone better than they were—still young enough to believe a person when he promised he would come back no matter what. She trusted almost as quickly as Rojan used to. “Carriages were the best we could do. We stole them from the Smithsonian before the Red King torched them.”
“Concentrate,” Naz finally admonished them, but gently. She and Vienna moved to the next horse in sync. Ory tried to scoot as quickly as he could around the stall to follow, but he accidentally bumped a huge brown bay on the nose with his shoulder. It was some kind of draft breed, with legs as thick as tree trunks. An irritated whinny screeched off the concrete ceiling.
“That’s Holmes,” Vienna said when Ory had finished cowering. She tipped her chin at the stall after, where a light gray horse of the same size with silvered hooves stood. “And Watson.”
“Because they’re clever stallions?” Ory muttered, still grimacing from the sound.
“They’re both female,” Vienna said. “I just named them that because they like to be near each other.”
They worked in silence for a few minutes after that, which is what Naz thought she had wanted. But the longer she tightened bridles and hoisted harnesses, the more agitated she became. She had actually let the General walk in there alone. She had let him talk her out of the promise she’d made with herself about Rojan, about Paul, about Ory and Max—to protect them at all costs. She had sworn each time, and now she was about to fail again.
Naz put down the bridle. Damn the General’s orders. She was not going to lose yet another person that she loved.
“Think you can finish the horses up alone?” she asked Vienna. “I need Ory for another job.”
“I still have—” Vienna started, but when she caught the expression on Naz’s face, she fell silent and saluted.
Naz nodded gratefully. “Head back upstairs,” she said to Ory, and started jogging. “I need to find Malik, and then I’ll meet you there.”
NAZ PEEKED INTO THE QUIET BARRACKS ROOM. ORY WAS already inside, waiting for her. She ushered Malik in and closed the door behind them.
“I don’t say this lightly,” she started, warming up to her argument. “I know the General ordered us all to wait here, but it’s wrong. We just can’t—”
“Done,” Ory interrupted.
Naz blinked, surprised.
“You don’t have to convince me,” he continued. “He did tell me to stay, but he also told me to ‘actually obey Ahmadi this time.’ So just order me to do it—as long as it’s a direct order, I have no choice, right?”
Naz tried, but she couldn’t keep the smile from her lips. Maybe Max and Paul had taught him a thing or two after all.
“Well, okay then,” she finally said, relieved. “Ory, I order you to recon the situation, help the General get Paul’s book, and get back here as fast as you can.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Ory saluted.
“Aren’t you going to ask me if I’m in?” Malik asked.
“I found you in the stairwell on your way to the stables,” Naz said. “You were already coming to get me to say the same thing.”
Malik shrugged and nodded.
“The only problem is, how am I going to get close enough to actually do this without being noticed?” Ory broke in. “Imanuel’s the only non-Red there, so a second one will stick out like a sore thumb.”
Malik crossed his arms. “I had an idea on my way to find Ahmadi,” he said. “You won’t like it, but I think it’s our best shot.”
DO YOU REMEMBER WHEN YOU AND I WERE UP AT THAT CABIN in the Poconos, that long weekend a few years ago, Ory? We were comfortably drunk on mugs of hot buttered rum, and there was a fire in the fireplace. Infomercials rolled by on the television in the corner. We were playing What If. “What if someone gave you a little box with a button on top, and every time you pressed the button, the box would give you a million do
llars, but someone you’d crossed paths with—from the clerk at a convenience store in a town you once drove through to an old high school classmate to your own mother—would instantly die. The box would choose the person completely at random. Would you press the button? Would you press it more than once?”
We both toasted each other and drank down our mugs, smug at how easily we could give up the imaginary money. What was money compared to a human life? Especially one you couldn’t choose. I was so sure I’d never press that button, Ory. Fuck a million dollars. It wasn’t worth the cost. But what if you were losing who you were minute by minute? What if chancing something that big was the only thing that would free you from this metal cage? What if it was the only thing that would get you to New Orleans? What if—
Someone’s coming. I have to hide the recorder now.
I don’t know what it is about this place, Ory. It’s hard to hold on. Maybe it’s being trapped in such an empty, unchanging room, or the questions. The endless questions.
The ones in white come to us singly or in pairs. Sometimes it’s the woman from the first day, sometimes it’s another woman, sometimes it’s men. The guards deal with our waste bucket at regular intervals, but it’s these others who bring us food, so much food, divided into small pieces so it can fit through the bars. I don’t think I’ve been this well fed since the Forgetting began. Then while we eat to our heart’s content, they ask.
“What did it feel like when you lost your shadow?”
“What were you doing at the moment it disappeared?”
“What were your feelings about Hemu Joshi and the first shadowless when the incidences in India first happened?”
It’s not an interrogation, it’s not like that. No matter what we do—ignore them, scream—they never shout back or hurt us or withhold meals. They just keep asking, with eternal patience. Eventually we decided that only Ursula should answer, so she began to speak for us all—but the answers she gives are always lies. That’s the only power we have left.
The Book of M Page 26