Tomorrow Gajarajan would go and bring Malik’s brave daughter there, to the second great hall, as they had agreed. But there was something else to do first.
The moon was almost full, casting silver light down onto the sanctuary, every corner of it reachable without having to move his body from the altar. Gajarajan draped across the open roof, looking down into the second hall, where a small shape rested on a simple bed. He shifted forward and was inside then, against the floor, silent. The rhythmic, shallow sounds of slumber continued from under the blankets, undisturbed. The shadow rose up against the far wall, where a table sat. He studied the things on top. A change of fresh clothes, instructional objects he’d brought in: a leaf, a dried flower, a spoon—and the patient’s personal effects at the time of admission to the great hall. Some had many, in the earlier days. This one had brought hardly any at all. Just one thing, in fact. The thing from which he’d been able to take the first shadow that had ever fit back onto a shadowless.
THE NIGHT DR. AVANTHIKAR HAD DIED, THE SECOND GREAT hall was empty. It had been that way for weeks—because Gajarajan had failed so many times and was afraid to try again. To torture another shadowless with the hope of recovery, only to have it fail or drive them insane. Or kill them. It was what they’d been arguing about in the first place that drove her to such a risky move, to go outside the gate, into the dark with the deathkites.
Davidia’s guards brought both Dr. Avanthikar and her shadowless rescue in without dying themselves, somehow. The deathkites’ screeches faded as they slammed the doors shut behind them.
“We tried, we tried,” one of the guards was saying, over and over, terrorized by the sight of the doctor as she was—all the blood, the almost surgical openings in the flesh. Everyone loved her as much as Gajarajan did. “We tried,” he stammered.
“Why?” Gajarajan asked her softly as he slid from the side of the gate onto the grass beside where they had set her, so they were both lying down.
She turned her head to look at him. “That’s just always the way, in medicine, I’ve learned,” she said. “The one who discovers something great always did so only because some complete gandoo they worked with refused to let them give up on an idea that seemed useless.” A tremor of pain ran through her. “Look at me. My team and I tried everything, every idea, and Hemu just refused to shut up about that stupid elephant. And then you awakened.”
Gajarajan smiled at her. The outline where his form met the torchlight ached, in a great, sinking pain.
Dr. Avanthikar tried to swallow. He could see her eyes going glassy. “This is the first time you’ve believed less in your power than I have since we began trying to rejoin shadows. Maybe this patient is the one, and I’m the infuriating colleague who refuses to let you quit.”
Gajarajan didn’t tell her that the shadowless man had already succumbed to his wounds. The body flayed by the deathkites until it had unfurled layer by layer, like red rose petals blooming out from a center spine. Dr. Avanthikar wheezed, and he reached out and touched the shadow of her hand where it rested on the grass beneath her shredded palm. Far up on the hill, he felt his body double over and shudder in agony as the lines in her face suddenly softened, released.
“Keep trying,” she said. “Do it for me.”
“I will.”
Gajarajan let the faraway body writhe. It could bear the pain for her. The time it would have to was very short anyway.
THE MAN DR. AVANTHIKAR HAD WANTED TO SAVE HADN’T survived, but Gajarajan had vowed to listen to what she’d said anyway. After she died, everyone who followed the rumors to New Orleans was brought safely inside—no matter what. The first shadowless to come after they’d buried Dr. Avanthikar was the patient who now lay in the bed behind Gajarajan. This one he would not give up on, he’d promised the old doctor’s headstone.
Gajarajan would never know if it was because of Dr. Avanthikar, or if it was just pure dumb luck that this patient turned out to be the first and only one he figured out how to cure, but it didn’t matter. It didn’t matter, because he’d done it. It was possible.
The second great hall creaked softly as the roof settled overhead. Gajarajan shifted forward until he was draped across the table. It was slightly more difficult at night, with only the moonlight and no sun or torches to help with contrast, but he reached across the surface of the wood until he felt what he was looking for. The thing from which he’d taken the cured patient’s shadow.
A tape recorder.
IN THE OLD WORLD, THERE WOULD HAVE BEEN PHOTOGRAPHS and documents to compare. Persons would have had wallets whose driver’s licenses could be entered into databases and matched instantly, as they had once done for his own body, after the car accident that led to his birth. There was none of that now. All Gajarajan had was a woman who had arrived on foot, alone, who remembered nothing, and a tape recorder with fragmented thoughts locked inside.
Zhang never spoke about his life before the Forgetting, or even before arriving in New Orleans, really. The shadow thought of him only as Zhang, or the General, or the one who brought all the books. In the tape recordings, he was always called by his first name, and there was no mention of the others in his group, or Washington, D.C., or what he’d been doing there. When the shadowless woman had shown up at the gate, she hadn’t been able to speak at all anymore. There was almost nothing left. Gajarajan spent weeks painstakingly analyzing the recordings to draw out what was needed, to make the recorder’s own little square shadow much, much more detailed and complete than he had ever been able to do before—the most human-shaped shadow he’d ever been able to craft from something else—before he tried to take it from the thing and place it on her. It was nearly finished by the time Zhang and his army eventually arrived at the gates.
Perhaps he should have asked Zhang more about himself sooner. But Gajarajan had always been bad with names anyway—he hadn’t even noticed that almost every one of the Iowan soldiers had given only a surname at all until Vienna forgot Zhang’s and called him something else.
“Ory,” he murmured softly. He reflected off the wall back to the roof. The sleeper did not stir. There would be plenty of time to tell them both the good news tomorrow. “I’ve found your wife, Ory,” Gajarajan said to the moon. “Max is here.”
Mahnaz Ahmadi
THAT WAS A SURPRISE. NEITHER ONE OF THEM SAW THAT COMING. Not in a million years.
The day after Vienna and The Eight had saved the city from Transcendence felt like a day out of time. They all wandered around, staring at everything that still existed, still was theirs. Shopkeepers neglected to open shops. Sentries didn’t show up for duty. Zhang failed to unlock the library—but no one wanted to read anyway. They were all too busy just living. Looking at lampposts, sprigs of grass, a smudge along the bottom of a wall from someone’s boot, and marveling they were all still alive.
The only thing that reminded Naz to do anything at all was her stomach. By evening, she and Zhang both were in House 33’s kitchen, chopping potatoes from the community garden while they waited for their turn at the cooking pot outside. The stove was free, but there hadn’t been any thunderstorms for a few days, so the wires that trailed off into the sky weren’t able to catch a current—they were back to the pot and front-yard fire pit for now. But Naz didn’t mind. She hadn’t had even a moment of electricity for two years. Having it for a few hours every few days now was like magic.
Some of their housemates from the other rooms were laughing about something at the kitchen table. Zhang was dicing expertly, even one finger short. His hand had healed so well.
The soup was Max’s recipe. Naz thought maybe it was progress, that he had suggested it. Max apparently hadn’t been the best cook, but Naz was. She was still trying to decide if she was supposed to make it well—would that impress him or seem cruel?—or not so well—would that comfort him, or make him even more depressed?
“I’m starving,” she said just as a knock rattled the front door.
“Think it’s Malik
?” Zhang asked as the knife paused. “Maybe he came for dinner?”
She didn’t think it was—Malik hadn’t been up for visiting since Vienna had left for the sanctuary so Gajarajan could begin trying to make her a new shadow, or whatever it was that he did. Then they heard their housemates’ surprised voices.
“Oh! Why—”
“Gajarajan! What an honor!”
Naz looked at Zhang. Surprise was etched across his forehead.
“I didn’t know he went anywhere,” Naz heard one of them say to the other as they came back through the kitchen and disappeared to their rooms. “The human part, I mean.”
“Zhang,” Gajarajan’s voice reached them then. His body smiled as soon as it stepped into the kitchen. Behind it, on the wall, Gajarajan looked at Naz, and the grin lessened slightly. It was almost as if he hadn’t expected her to be there.
“Hi,” she said.
Gajarajan bowed slightly, spread across both the wall and the counter.
They waited, but Gajarajan just kept looking at Zhang, as if unsure of how to proceed. Between the two of them, the shadow’s human body waited patiently, vaguely facing her, but not quite. Naz tried not to stare.
“It’s nothing to be embarrassed about,” Gajarajan finally said to her. “It’s a strange thing to see a blindfolded man walk as if he could see.”
“I’m sorry.” Naz managed to look away, to the shadow, and smile. “Other than when Transcendence came, I don’t think I’ve seen you do it.” She didn’t say that it wasn’t so much the walking as that he never bothered to point the body in the right direction once he set it somewhere—in their kitchen or upon the altar.
“Don’t be. I use it so infrequently, I’ve made it into something strange. There’s just so rarely any need.”
“Is everything all right?” Zhang asked then.
On the wall, the shadow nodded—the man did not. “Yes, everything is all right. It’s better than all right.”
Zhang relaxed a little. “Would you like some soup? It’ll be finished soon.”
“No, thank you. The body has already eaten.” Gajarajan shook his head. “I’m actually here because, well—I’ve discovered something very unexpected.”
Zhang set the knife down beside the cutting board and turned back to the shadow. Naz watched, waiting for one of them to say something. The starchy water slicked from the potatoes began to collect at the blade’s serrated edge as it rested on the counter.
“If it would be possible to meet in your room, that would be best,” Gajarajan continued.
Naz put her hand on Zhang’s shoulder.
“I think it might be best if Zhang and I met alone at first, Ahmadi. It’s a . . . sensitive subject.”
That made Zhang edge closer to her, in a way that made her heart thrill. “All three of us go,” he said firmly.
THE MEETING LASTED ONLY A FEW MINUTES. IT SEEMED AT the time as if it had gone on forever, but the sliced potatoes were still sweating when Naz finally went back downstairs, even though neither one of them wanted dinner anymore.
Gajarajan still needed a few days, to make sure everything was perfect, he’d said. On Ceresday—New Orleans’s eighth weekday, thanks to Wifejanenokids’s old mistake—Zhang could come by anytime. He would be waiting.
Afterward, Naz and Zhang sat outside on the porch, bowls of soup untouched beside them, staring out at the empty street. Everyone else was inside their houses, eating. The rest of their own housemates hovered momentarily in the kitchen one at a time, then escaped back to their rooms, sensing the danger.
“What time will you go, on Ceresday?” Naz finally asked. “I think you should do it in the morning. Just go first thing.”
“Ahmadi,” Zhang pleaded. He looked more tired than she’d ever seen him in his life. “I know we have to talk about it, but not yet. Just not yet.”
Naz nodded and turned back to what was left of the sunset. They sat that way in the quiet for a few more hours, just feeling how it felt to be the two of them together, side by side. She tried not to think about how it very well could be the last time.
They didn’t fight until they got up to the room, well after midnight.
The One Who Gathers
IN THE COURTYARD OF THE SANCTUARY, SWORDS CLANGED. The volunteers leapt backward into their ready stances again.
“Watch your blind spots,” Malik instructed. “Faster!”
“You trained them well,” Gajarajan said against the wall beside him as the volunteers sprang for each other once more, some striking, the others parrying. Farther away, he could feel the sensations in his body’s flesh—the twitch of long-unused muscles, microscopic imitations in response to the sparring matches the shadow’s eyes were seeing.
“They’re tough,” Malik said. “They had to be. There was no room for mistakes in D.C.—or on the road here.”
“And you want to go back out there.”
Malik studied the volunteers grimly as they continued to train, arms crossed. “You agreed my idea was a good one.”
Gajarajan nodded. He thought of Dr. Zadeh. “It is. I just meant—I was taught once by a wise man that sometimes people do drastic things in the face of difficult circumstances. A sort of coping mechanism. I worry this mission may be such a thing.”
“Of course it is,” Malik said.
Gajarajan said nothing—waited for Malik to continue if he liked. He respected that. That Malik was a man who didn’t shy away from understanding his grief, even if it made the pain sharper than if he left it as a dark, vague thing. It was a sign of true strength.
Malik looked down. “I just—I don’t know what else to do with myself for the next few months. Not being able to see her. And maybe—never again.”
“Vienna—” Gajarajan began, but Malik waved his hand as if to dispel what the shadow was about to say next.
“I understand there are rules,” he said. “That what you do in the sanctuary is dangerous.”
“Those rules are as much for your and the rest of the city’s safety as hers,” Gajarajan replied.
“I know.” He nodded tiredly. “It drives me mad. But I agreed when I let her walk in.” He leaned forward and stared hard into the wall where Gajarajan was darkly cast. “But I can’t keep sitting here in New Orleans waiting indefinitely. I need to do something. Anything.”
What Malik had proposed to him seemed like a death wish, but if anyone could succeed at this task, it would be him and his soldiers. He had come to Gajarajan the day after Vienna entered the sanctuary, shouting the elephant’s name as if possessed, until the shadow flashed up onto the curved wall of the altar to receive him. The body was perched ready to stop him in case he lunged; Gajarajan had thought he’d come to try and take his daughter back by force now that the reality of her absence had finally sunk in. But it wasn’t that at all. He’d come to ask for the exact opposite: to be allowed to leave the city. He wanted to take a small team and search the strange new wilderness for more people—shadowed or shadowless—and help them reach New Orleans, too.
Gajarajan slid to the left along the wall, closer to Malik. “I’m worried about the danger,” the shadow finally said. “About sending you and your volunteers back out there again. To where the shadowless are succumbing to the pull, and there’s no one to stop them.”
“I know. But we can do it.” Malik brushed away a fly as the soldiers training took a break, panting from exertion. For a brief moment, his face darkened. Gajarajan imagined he was remembering the ghost of the first Iowan General again. Of the terrifying shadowless he’d called the Red King, and of the monsters in white who came out of the wilderness after their carriages with fire. “We’ve survived much worse.”
“Are you afraid at all that something might happen to you out there? Something that might prevent you from returning to Vienna?” Gajarajan asked.
“Yes,” he admitted. “But I think it would be worse if I stayed.”
The shadow studied Malik’s face. There would be no deterring the man, he
could see. The strain was there beneath the fierce expression. The knowledge that the only thing he could do to help his daughter was not to do anything at all for her. Something had to fill that hole before it consumed him. But more than that, he was also right: there were shadowless out there in need of help, who might not find the city or hear the stories on their own.
Gajarajan nodded. “All right. But for this to be worth anything, you need to be able to show those you find indisputable proof of this place and my power. Otherwise, you’re no more convincing than the rumors.”
“If I can get you that indisputable proof, you agree that we can go?” Malik asked.
“If you can, then—” Gajarajan started.
“I will,” he interrupted, certain. “In D.C., I listened to the legends about you for more than a year before I made it here. Hoping, but not fully believing, since I had nothing to go on but gossip. Because it wasn’t just my life on the line if that gossip was wrong—it was Vienna’s, too. I was desperate for one of those someones speaking the rumors to not just talk but to show me—something I could see with my own eyes and touch with my own hands, to prove you were real. If anyone here can find something like that, it’ll be me.”
“What would that sort of something be, though?” Gajarajan asked.
“I’m not sure yet,” Malik said. “But I’ll know it when I see it.”
Mahnaz Ahmadi
NAZ MOVED OUT OF HOUSE 33.
After her shift at the wall, she went upstairs and piled everything into a bedsheet like it was a folding rucksack. There wasn’t that much anyway. Just her bow, some clothes, and the remains of what family trinkets she and Rojan had started out with in their duffel bag.
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