The Book of M

by Peng Shepherd

  “Do you remember the exact instant you lost your shadow?”

  “I was killing a man,” Ursula said. She hadn’t been. She’d been driving when it happened, steering the RV carefully through northern Virginia.

  “Who in your group lost their shadow first?”

  “I did.” She didn’t. She’d told me that she had been the last, just before I’d stumbled onto their camp.

  But it doesn’t matter. They just ask again, on different days, with different people, as if Ursula had never responded at all.

  “Did it hurt?”

  “Were you afraid of losing your shadow before it happened?”

  “Was there any warning it would happen before the actual moment?”

  The questions are so constant that now after a few days, I can’t remember what Ursula has answered before for any of them. I can barely remember how it actually happened to me now, so long ago, after all these circles.

  “Are they maybe trying to cure us?” Intisaar asked one night as we reclined against the bars. Most of the candles had winked out before midnight, but the questioners wouldn’t return until dawn, so the guards just left the room in semi-darkness, watching us from the dim corners as they patrolled.

  “No.” Ursula shook her head.

  “With the exception of the bars, they really are—kind,” Dhuuxo admitted. “Most shadowed survivors run or kill us on sight. These people talk to us, feed us, and bring us new clothes and blankets whenever we need them. They want us.”

  “And their questions do sound similar to what the news reported the scientists were asking Hemu Joshi, once they quarantined him for treatment,” Victor added. The smoke from the cigarette the woman in white had gifted him drifted in front of his eyes, and he looked down, embarrassed.

  “We already know the scientists didn’t find anything useful, though,” Ursula replied, her voice harsh. Zachary stirred, shivering, and she put her arm around him. She was afraid, I could tell. Afraid that Transcendence’s gentle patience might be working on us. “I know they’re treating us well,” she said, softer this time. “But we are still in a cage.”

  The woman we first met was one of the two who came today. We all sat silently, watching the pair of them or staring off into the empty hall as Ursula invented random lies.

  It was the other one talking this time, a man wrapped in white layers. The woman was simply listening, smiling beatifically at us the entire time, as if we were her children. Ursula decided to ignore a question, just to break the pattern.

  “Were you afraid when it first happened?” the man asked after the pause, continuing without frustration.

  “You’d have to be stupid not to be afraid,” Ursula finally said.

  The man nodded noncommittally. Not agreeing or disagreeing; simply hearing. “Did you feel the pull as soon as your shadow disappeared?”

  “No,” Ursula said.

  The man nodded again. Then the woman did—but a few moments later than he had. I looked more closely at her eyes. She wasn’t watching Ursula.

  “What did it feel like when your shadow disappeared?”

  Dhuuxo and Intisaar were pointedly ignoring the ones in white. Zachary stared blankly at his palms. I studied the woman as surreptitiously as I could. She was looking into the cage, but just past Ursula’s shoulder. Slowly, so that no one would notice, I shifted my eyes. Lucius, Victor, Wes, and Ysabelle were leaning on the bars at the back of the cage. They were all half-dozing from boredom as Ursula answered—except Lucius.

  “Did you feel it when your shadow separated from you?”

  “Not even a little,” Ursula drawled, lying.

  But Lucius nodded. Ever so slightly.

  My eyes flicked back. I saw the woman tip her head again. So minutely it was almost impossible to notice beneath all the layers.

  It all made sense now. They weren’t interested in what Ursula said. They knew she would lie every time. They were interested in how long she would continue to do it. How long we would all let her before one of us would start to wonder if maybe there was another way out of the cage. How long until one of us would start to answer with the truth.

  I wish you were here, Ory. I need to tell Ursula, but I don’t know how. The cage is big enough that I can sit in a corner and whisper to you without Lucius hearing—they all know I talk to you and ignore me anyway—but if I was to go over and say something in Ursula’s ear, he’d see for sure, and know something was wrong. I’ve been waiting for a time when I’m sure he’s asleep, but we all lay around so much, it’s hard to tell. Or what if he isn’t cheating the rest of us, but just trying to help in his own way, because Ursula is no closer to getting us out than the first day? Trying to win their trust so he can turn on them at the right moment? You would know what to do. You’d at least have a guess, and then we could figure it out together.

  Ursula has started pacing, checking the bars again. Lucius is lying down on the other side of the cage, but his eyes just opened when she passed him, awake. No good now. Not yet.

  We all woke up to Ysabelle crying this morning. “I forgot,” she was saying, over and over. “I forgot what they looked like.”

  “Ys.” Victor scooted closer. “What is it?”

  “My parents,” she said, and covered her face.

  I felt a chill. It’s getting worse, Ory. The stress, the fear. We’re going to lose bigger and bigger things now, the more desperate we get. This whole time, we’ve had the memory of New Orleans holding us together, one thing to cling to. But now that we’re trapped here, unable to keep moving toward it—we can’t let ourselves unravel.

  “I didn’t mean to, but I tried to remember them and then I . . .” Ysabelle sobbed, voice muffled by her hands. Victor held her. He was trying as hard as he could—trying to do his job as husband to comfort a woman whom he didn’t remember he loved. “But I had them, I know I did. I know. A mother and a father. But now I don’t know what they look like. I forgot their names.”

  “What if we fake an emergency?” Victor asked, smoothing her pale hair. His voice was angrier than I’ve ever heard it. Angry that we were trapped, angry that his wife was panicking and that there was nothing he could do about it—angry that the only reason he knew she was his wife in the first place was because Ursula had reminded him. “Would they open the cage if one of us might be dying?”

  “They always have the rest of us if someone does,” Lucius said.

  “We have to get out of here. We have to get away. We’re going to run out of time,” Ysabelle said.

  Ursula paced along the cage, tiger-like. The guards were at attention, ready to try to stop something impossible from happening. I touched the bar beside my head tentatively as I watched them track her movement, considering. But no. It felt more solid than it had ever felt. I still remembered too well that bars do not bend. And these especially. They seemed even more impossible to escape than simply steel.

  “Can you do it?” Zachary asked me softly over Ysabelle’s whimpering.

  I shook my head. “Can you?”

  He shook his head, too. “Even all together . . . Not enough yet.”

  “Yet?”

  He watched Ursula glare at each guard with his strange, distant eyes. “Someone giving in to the pull, for power. Little, little every day.”

  Did he know about Lucius, too? Or was it someone else? “Zachary,” I whispered. “Do you know who it is?”

  He shook his head again.

  I sat down against the bars. I know you’d tell me not to try, Ory, even if I was strong enough. That whatever I’d lose wouldn’t be worth it.

  The only thing I wouldn’t trade would be you. If I escaped but didn’t remember you, that would be the same thing as dying in here anyway.

  Now we know, Ory. Now we know what Transcendence really wants us for. It’s not to cure us at all. You wouldn’t—I barely believe myself.

  I heard the sounds before I fully woke. Humming. Soft, mumbling chants. I opened my eyes.

  The gua
rds were still there, alabaster pillars around the room. But now, all around the cage, the floor had changed into a rippling, shifting sea of white. It took me a long moment to realize I was looking at bodies. Hundreds of bodies. Every one of them prostrate in front of us, foreheads to the floor, arms reaching. Every one of them with a shadow.

  “Ursula,” I hissed. I grabbed her shoulder. “Wake up!”

  “Holy mother,” Lucius murmured, drawing into a crouch. “Look at them all.”

  “What are they doing?” Ursula asked, disgust and terror in her voice. “Are they . . . are they . . .”

  “They’re praying,” Lucius said, in a tone very different from hers. It was almost like wonder. “They’re praying to us.”

  It didn’t take long for him to change after that.

  When the woman in white came to us in the evening, after the hundreds of others had finished their chanting and departed one by one, we all huddled as far from her as possible. She offered us a packet of crackers one by one, so fresh they even still might have had some flavor. All eight of us refused to take any. Only Lucius went forward and ate one.

  “You understand,” she said to him.

  He chewed thoughtfully. “You want to become like us,” he said.

  The woman in white nodded. “Yes,” she said, almost mesmerized. “We want to become like you. We want to transcend.”

  “All of you are insane,” Ursula growled. “Absolutely insane.”

  “We’re not insane,” the woman replied. “Everyone else is. Your power isn’t something to be afraid of. It’s something to be embraced. It’s the future, not the end.”

  “You don’t understand,” I said. She couldn’t. She would never be able to. She still had her shadow.

  The woman looked at Lucius again. He took another cracker. “Your friends have to stay here,” she said. “They will not be mistreated. But they cannot come with you unless they join us.”

  “All right,” he said.

  “Lucius,” Ursula whispered, horrified.

  “The guns are loaded,” the woman warned. There were more guards filing into the room now, barrels trained on us. Ten, twenty. The woman unlocked the door.

  “Lucius,” Ursula said again as he stepped free. “Lucius.”

  “Just stop,” he said. He glanced back at us. “You made your choice. No one forced you to refuse their offer to join. I made mine.”

  “So you’re just giving up?”

  “Ursula, we were never going to make it.”

  I thought she was going to yell, but Ursula just shook her head. When she spoke again, her voice was much quieter. “Whatever you think it’s going to be like—being their treasured, magical idol—it won’t be,” she said.

  The woman in white closed the cage door behind Lucius and locked it again. Lucius put his hands on the bars, this time from the outside. “I know,” he said softly. He looked down. “But it’ll be a better life than this cage, for a while. And when it changes, I won’t remember to regret it anyway.”

  Orlando Zhang

  “I THINK THAT DOES IT.” AHMADI STEPPED BACK AND STUDIED Ory. “How do you feel?”

  “Like I’m covered in ants,” he said.

  The paint itched horribly. They had layered it through his hair, across half his face, and all down his arms, chest, and back, covering him in crimson stripes and swirls. Ahmadi had also torn up his jeans and dragged his shoes through the mud several times to make them look like salvaged things.

  “He looks good,” Malik said, hope rising in his voice. He checked behind them, but they were the only ones on the front sidewalk of the Iowa. The soldiers were all still inside packing. “This could work.”

  Ory looked down at the red lines slathered across his chest. They were excellent fakes, the right width and pattern. And the lifeless, low-hanging clouds had costumed the most important part of all. In such light—with nothing casting shadows—he looked just like a Red. Just like Max.

  A shudder of fear seized him, and Ory squatted down. He cupped his hands together just over the ground, trying to make a pocket of space between his palms and the street small enough that even without the sun, there was a contrast, and he could see.

  Yes.

  His shadow was still there.

  When he stood up, neither Ahmadi or Malik laughed. They understood. Ahmadi grabbed the back of Ory’s neck firmly in comfort—the only place that wasn’t covered in lines of paint. It was the closest thing she could give him to a hug without smudging his disguise.

  “Still there,” he said. His chest ached. He wanted to grab her back and hold tight, but he couldn’t. Because of the red paint—and because of Max.

  “You make sure the General comes back,” Naz said desperately. “Make sure both of you do.”

  AT THE LIBRARY, IT WAS CHAOS. FRANTIC REDS WERE POURING out of the front doors, their arms full of books, waiting desperately for Iowan troops to arrive—and panicking as to why they yet hadn’t. The big man was there as usual, but so was another Red whom Ory had never seen before, a woman who looked to be in her fifties or sixties, with streaks of red braided throughout her wild, silvered hair. She’d wrapped herself in a crimson sheet not unlike a toga. One small limp breast hung carelessly out as she snatched at the other Reds. Then a pristine white shape appeared from behind the Iowa’s deserted barricade line. Imanuel.

  There was a momentary lull as the Reds recalibrated. Everything paused. Books froze midair. Then the woman turned to screech at him. Somehow, almost impossibly, the Reds seemed to still remember him as the Iowa’s leader. They swarmed forward, dumping books at his feet, as many as he wanted, practically burying him. Imanuel scooped up copy after copy, trying to quickly choose which to stuff into the precious extra space in his medical bag. He pointed toward the building, miming his question, asking to be taken deeper into the Red King’s library, to choose the book he wanted. He picked up a book, pointed at it, and pointed again toward the building as the Reds screamed.

  Ory watched from his perch atop the roof of a destroyed public bathroom.

  The Reds were dragging out bigger and bigger books now, misunderstanding that size didn’t determine worth the way it did with food, weapons, armies. Across the distance, Ory could see Imanuel searching the growing pile to see if they’d accidentally thrown to him the one he wanted most of all. Push them as far as you can, Ory thought. Bring as many back as possible. The older woman and the big man were growing more agitated. Then an angry bellow erupted from within the darkened building, causing everyone to duck on instinct.

  The Red King was finished guessing.

  Everything went still as he emerged, glittering silvery-maroon in the weak hail as he came right into the center of the street. Ory was too far to make out any of his features, but even from that distance, the Red King was terrifying.

  Ory didn’t know what he had looked like before he lost his shadow, but what the Red King had become now was a living mountain. He had thought the big Red was huge, but now, compared to his master, he was miniscule. The Red King was the size of two men, over ten feet tall, wearing a scarlet cloak of a hundred layers and haphazard armor made from whole, bent steel doors. A human skull could fit inside each scarred, crimson hand. Red dripped off him from everywhere, leaving trails behind him.

  Imanuel raised his arms. Ory couldn’t tell if he was trying to smile or grimacing in terror. The Red King roared again, held out his palms. They were also covered in red, but a wetter red, red that came from inside a body. The pregnant woman was in real danger.

  Imanuel took a step forward hesitantly. The Red King grabbed him with one hand and dragged him in like a rag doll.

  Do it, Ory, Max said in Ory’s mind, the same way he always imagined it before he had to kick open an abandoned Arlington door or go into a deserted shop, to give him courage. He clung to it fiercely now, the memory of the sound of her voice. Go!

  He ran with everything he had, as fast and quietly as he could. The Reds were all still fixated on their leader
as they escorted him and Imanuel in, some excited, some entranced. Ory skirted the outside of the crowd, hoping he looked like just another eager warrior. Past the rubble, into the courtyard, up the stairs—through the darkness of the doors.

  He was in.

  Hide, Ory, Max’s voice urged again. He ducked behind the first set of shelves he saw, and waited for his eyes to adjust to the light. Overhead, a few books glided between the rafters of the library in slow circles, mournful birds separated from their flock, pages fluttering like wings. The Red King and Imanuel entered, flanked by crimson warriors. Across the main lobby, the pregnant woman was still there where Ory had seen her last, still swollen with child, still in pain. But now there was much more blood. Much more. She was pale with fatigue, the skin of her trembling lips almost gray.

  The longer Ory watched her from behind the bookcase, the more he didn’t know how much Imanuel could do for her without a hospital. In fact, it seemed like it would be almost nothing. Even if she still had the strength to push, too much could go wrong. Ory couldn’t understand how Imanuel thought he was going to save her—or get the book.

  He isn’t, Ory.

  He refused to believe Max’s voice. He refused to believe that Imanuel had come only to see Paul’s book one last time, and never hoped to make it out anyway. Surely his life was worth more than this. One pointless, unwinnable quest.

  So is staying here to look for me, her voice said, but the Red woman’s wailing drowned it out.

  The procession began to lumber past Ory’s hiding place then. First the Red King swept farther inward, dragging layers and layers of red cloaks, velvet curtains and afghan rugs stacked on top of one another beneath his armor. It looked so heavy Ory couldn’t believe he could still stand under their weight. Then the rest of the Reds came, panicked, hopeful, ushering a trembling Imanuel deeper inside.