The Book of M (14 page)

I'M STILL HERE, ORY. I'M STILL ALIVE. I STILL REMEM
BER.

I'm in Oakton now. I walked all night—by dawn, I'd made it to the Chain Bridge Road exit under the I-66 West.

It's very quiet in this neighborhood, but the townhouses are so lovely. The kind I always wished we might have one day. I imagine that before the world ended, there were kids riding their bicycles up and down the clean, smooth asphalt, and mothers standing in clusters on their front lawns with strollers, checking their ornate wrought-iron mailboxes, planting tulips along the borders of their driveways. It was that kind of place. I mean, I even saw one lone bicycle on a later street, mournfully pedaling itself in slow, lost circles, waiting for its child to come back. It looked so sad, Ory.

Just west of that was a high school. Oakton High School, judging from the part of the sign that was still upright. I know schools aren't the best places to scout alone—too many hallways and rooms, too many places for others to be hiding. But I was exhausted and wanted to get out of the damp dawn. I crossed the overgrown football field and found myself standing in the middle of the campus.

Someone had definitely lived here once. Many someones. There were the remains of their abandoned camp everywhere: discarded scraps of clothing; piles of trash, neatly pushed into corners; scuff marks on the concrete like something heavy had been dragged back and forth, maybe a table or chairs. Some classroom doors were barricaded; some were removed from their hinges to allow sun and moonlight into the small rooms. Windows had rudimentary dressings over them.

That's when I saw the drawings.

It hadn't been a shadowed survivors' camp, I realized as I walked around in the silence. It had been a camp of shadowless. Perhaps they started together, as friends or family, and then all slowly forgot, or perhaps they all gathered together once they lost their shadows and
found comfort and protection in numbers. One of them had been a very gifted artist. A man, I think, because in all the drawings the same person appears, a pale shape with short light hair and two dots of blue for eyes. I think he was drawing himself.

There was no writing in most of the signs, not like the rules you and I made in our shelter. These were signs made of images, carefully rendered in a set of permanent markers or paint. Almost all the colors were there—black, blue, red, green, purple, orange, and brown. The pictures were everywhere, next to every little thing that might be confusing to someone who no longer remembered what it was. There were pictures to describe how to light a fire, how to extinguish it, never to touch it; what a sweater or scarf or jacket was for when it was cold; that people with shadows could be dangerous to those without. I stood in front of the wall where that one had been drawn for a long time, staring at each careful line of that warning. It was painted near the entrance to the school, where they would see it every time they went to the gate to investigate a sound.

Near the back of the campus, the drawings became simpler, less instructive. They seemed not to be depicting how to perform a task or how to avoid a danger, but were more a visual history of who each person in their group had been. There were twelve of them in total. Some were men, some were women. The blue-eyed man was there, next to a stern figure in the center. Their leader. On one side, another woman with long light hair embraced a brown-haired man, both of them looking at each other and smiling. The artist was trying to tell them they were a pair. That they were in love.

The last picture I found was of the same blond-haired, blue-eyed man. It looked like perhaps the first one he'd drawn. It was larger, and there were details about him not present in the others, as though he was still figuring out how to ensure that he could recognize himself, trying to make certain there were enough clues. In the drawing, the blond man was standing face forward, arms at his sides. His expression was peaceful.

Beneath his feet, there was the unmistakable black shape, stretched out at a gentle angle against an imaginary ground. It held the same calm position, arms at its sides, its hair tousled in an identical way. Where their shoes joined together, the blond man had connected them so perfectly there was not even a sliver of the white wall between their two sets of feet.

I moved closer until my face was almost pressed against the dark space on the wall where he'd drawn his penumbral twin. He had given the shadow blue eyes too, two piercing sapphire dots floating in an expressionless black sea.

SIX. THAT WAS THE NUMBER OF PEOPLE NAZ HAD TO KILL ON
their way.

Three shadowless, three shadowed. She remembered their faces sometimes, even the ones she saw only for an instant, if not less. Once in a while, their features were even more vivid to her than those of others she knew far better—Rojan, her mother, her coach. Memory was a strange thing.

She killed the first four as she and her sister moved south through Connecticut on their way to New York. Two shadowless, two shadowed. The two shadowless ambushed them as they passed the hideouts, biting and scratching. Crazed—starving. Naz didn't want to kill them, was afraid of killing them, and she and Rojan tried as hard as they could to just get away first, but the shadowless wouldn't give up.

The two shadowed ones were starving for something else. For those, Naz did not hesitate.

JUST PAST HARTFORD, IT STARTED TO GET A LITTLE EASIER.
They moved only at night, avoiding large towns and keeping to the rural areas. Naz couldn't have said what New Haven or Springfield looked like.

The bow kept them alive. Naz was careful and managed to hunt so that Rojan could chase after and retrieve most of the precious arrows she loosed to use again. She shot little things—rats, pigeons—and they ate them raw, afraid a fire might attract attention. They ruined a lot of their spare underwear that way. They didn't die, but almost. Some nights the taste was so revolting, one of them would throw it
all back up as soon as she'd finished eating it, then cry at the waste as the other one held her, at how they both were probably starving to death. When the sisters stopped for evening camp just north of Poughkeepsie, in a particularly wooded area, Naz couldn't take it anymore. Rojan had the shakes, and Naz was almost too weak to pull back the bowstring. She made a tiny fire to cook their dinner for once.

It took about twenty minutes before they were found.

Naz heard it first, to her left. A snapping twig. She threw herself against the trunk of a tree and trained her bow on the undergrowth.

“You see it? I don't see it,” Rojan whispered from against another.

Branches. Darkness. Another sound, dangerously close. Naz tried to aim, but she couldn't make anything out. The glow of the flames blinded her, lighting the night so that whoever was hunting her could easily see into their camp, but she couldn't see beyond it. She kicked the ground, tossing dirt onto the fire to suffocate it.

“Oh, God, no!” someone howled. “No, no, no! Why?
Why?
”

Rojan screamed, and Naz almost lost her grip on the tail of the arrow. A man stumbled hysterically out of the darkness at her and fell to his knees. Naz screamed this time. Her arrow went wild, missing him by three lengths as she scrambled for another, still shrieking, the man still crawling.

She and Rojan had been so careful to avoid attracting attention, certain that there were predators around every corner, but there really must have been no one but the three of them for miles that night, Naz realized later. They made enough noise in that moment to alert an entire city. Rojan yelling, Naz shouting and circling her enemy, aiming the glittering slate tip of her arrow at his head, and the man moaning, hands scrabbling in agony through the dirt.

“Stay down! Stay down!” she shouted at him. “What the fuck is the matter with you? You move an inch and I'll kill you! I will
kill
you!”

“The fire,” he was wailing. Finally Naz focused on him long enough to realize he had a shadow, dimly lit by the moonlight, hunched
beneath him on the ground. “The fire, the fire.” He looked at her like she'd murdered a child. “
Why
did you put out the fire?”

NAZ LET ROJAN LIGHT THE TINY FLAME AGAIN, EVENTUALLY.
The man's last name was Wright. He refused to say his given name. “I don't want to talk about it,” he said. “Please don't make me talk about it.”

They didn't make him talk about it. After an hour of questions, Naz finally felt safe enough to lower her bow. Her arms were so badly cramped she couldn't move her fingers for a good while afterward. Wright didn't know how to make a fire or hunt, but he did have a lot of water, in a huge camping-type rubber bladder he'd found somewhere. Naz and Rojan offered him a third of their roasted squirrel once they cooked it, and he gave them as much of the water as they could drink. The next morning was the first time Naz's piss wasn't uranium yellow in she couldn't say how long.

“I came north through the Bronx,” Wright told the sisters as they picked the tiny bones clean and then sucked on them. “Something happened in Midtown, near the Empire State Building. Something very big. That's when I knew I had to go. I doubt there's anything left now.”

“We were heading for New York,” Naz said. She slipped her bow over her shoulder again and pressed the palms of her hands into her eyes. Vague colors swam against the pressure. It felt nice. Now what? “I don't know where to go instead.”

“I don't know where I'm going, either,” he replied. “Can I come with you two?”

Naz said no, and Rojan said all right. In the end, Rojan won the argument. Wright could carry a lot of water in the rubber bladder, enough to split between three people. And he could make their endless night watches into bearable shifts.

The going got much smoother. Naz still didn't trust him, but with more sleep and better hydration, she had to admit they moved much
faster. As they passed Hoboken in New Jersey, the three of them went to the edge of the Hudson River to look across at Manhattan, just to see. They stood on Sinatra Drive, just before the shore, staring out across the dark water. The moon glimmered, its reflection spliced by ripples.

“Is that . . . really?” Naz trailed off as she stared.

“Yeah,” Wright said. “That must have been what everyone was screaming about as it killed them, neighborhood by neighborhood.”

They stared. New York was being destroyed by its own monster. At least three times her original size, the emerald woman rose up between two skyscrapers, the huge torch in her hand blazing with real fire. With a deafening roar, she lifted the tablet in her other arm and brought it down on top of a building, flattening it to the ground. Shock waves skipped across the water as the green hands tore into the wreckage.

“I can't believe you made it out alive,” Rojan said softly.

“I know,” he sighed. They watched it for a little while longer. “To think at one point I thought maybe I could just wait it out if I laid low enough.”

Naz couldn't understand what she was seeing. “It's almost kind of beautiful,” she finally said as the giant woman tossed the hem of her long robe behind her, crushing everything in its path. Glass and metal sprayed like silver confetti as buildings collapsed. Somewhere just south of Central Park, from where the statue had been a few minutes earlier, an explosion rose up in an angry dark cloud. Her crown glinted in the orangy dusk. “Horrible, but beautiful.”

They camped on the shore that night, and ate crayfish they caught along the bank. Wright still wouldn't tell them his name, but he told them a lot of other things. How he watched Boston on TV, how the Forgetting overtook New York, how he should have left with his friends when they said they were going to steal some motorcycles and head south. “Have you ever heard about the One with One Eye?” he asked them as they huddled near the small flame.

“The One with One Eye?” Naz repeated.

“Or maybe it was No Eyes. That's what my buddies were calling—it? him?—anyway. Whoever it is. Or was.” Wright paused. “The One Who Gathers. That one I know I heard them say for sure.” He leaned forward as Naz nodded in sudden recognition. That was the name she and Rojan had seen spray-painted on the side of a building just outside Boston. “My friends said he was in New Orleans,” he added.

So they decided, why not? There was no New York now, or Boston or Tehran, so New Orleans it was. Maybe Wright's friends would still be alive there. Maybe they'd be gathered up with all of them again, by this “gathering one,” whatever the fuck that meant. It wasn't much of a plan, but it was more than they'd had before. Naz caught Rojan's gaze over the top of the fire, and saw that her little sister was grinning smugly at her.
Fuck it,
Naz shrugged, and grinned back. Her sister trusted everyone too quickly, but Naz also always waited too long. They had water now, and a plan. Maybe Wright wasn't so bad after all.

They made it all the way to Wilmington, Pennsylvania, before the next shadowless found them. He was in the back of the grocery store they were trying to raid, circling the aisles. Naz had hoped he was one of the afraid ones when she spotted him. She was going to try to go around and spook him out the front door, but when he saw her, he charged, and she could tell he wasn't going to stop. He was angry—so angry—with no way to express it. No words, no writing, no hand signs. The only thing he could do was destroy something. Maybe it was the same for the monster in New York. She just didn't understand what anything was, and no one could tell her.

Wright was far across the store with Rojan, but after the first moment of shock, Naz was calm. The shadowless didn't seem to recognize the arrow as Naz pulled it quickly to the string and drew it back, and did not dodge. He just kept running straight down the aisle, straight for her. That was good. It made it so she could aim an instantaneous, painless end. Her fifth of the six kills.

“What's going on?” Wright cried as he careened around the corner of the aisle. Rojan was just behind him. “I heard the shot, I—oh, Jesus.”

“I'm okay,” Naz said. Rojan hugged her. All she could think about as she squeezed her back was that if it had been Rojan who found the shadowless and not Naz—Rojan could barely keep a backpack on, let alone fight someone to the death.
Thank God Wright was with her,
she realized.

“All right, no more of this spreading out to search stores and houses faster,” he pronounced at the same moment. “Anytime we go somewhere new, we need to stick together. Together is safer.”

For once, Naz agreed.

She killed her final sixth person in an open field under a moonless night one day south of Baltimore. It was Wright.

IT HAD BEEN NAZ'S TURN TO SLEEP. WRIGHT WAS UP TO TAKE
over watch, and Rojan was already dreaming beside her. For once, Naz set the bow down beside her instead of looping it over one shoulder. It was giving her such a neck ache, to rest like that all the time. Her whole back was sore.

She woke because someone was calling her name softly. Then someone else said, “Shut up.”

Naz opened her eyes.

“Fuck,” Wright growled. “You made it worse.”

She was still groggy. She reached down to the dirt beside her, fingers searching for that familiar shape, even though she could already see that her bow was in Wright's unsteady grip, arrow notched straight at Rojan. Finally her brain caught up.

“You know what we have,” Rojan was saying. “Food we share with you, and clothes that are too small for you to use anyway.”

“Bullshit,” Wright spat. He gestured at Rojan and Naz's bag. “I've seen the gold. I know it's in there, under all the clothes.”

“It's costume jewelry,” Rojan replied. “From our mother. It's just sentimental.”

“Then why not just give it to me?”

“Because our mother's dead,” Naz said. Wright swiveled to point the arrow at her, and she flinched.

Wright laughed. “Not so tough now, are you?”

“You don't know how to use it,” Naz answered. “Things could get really bad.”

“I think they already are,” he said. He pointed with his chin at the bag. “Give it to me. Now.”

“No,” Rojan said, but Naz slowly walked over nearer to her. She bent down to pick up the duffel. “It's our mother's,” Rojan said softly.

“My mother's dead, too.” Wright shrugged.

“Lower the bow,” Naz said. Wright shook his head. “Lower the bow and I'll toss the bag to you.”

Finally he did, and Naz tossed the bag over. He reached down with one hand and grabbed the strap, eyes still on them. The bow and arrow were in one hand. Rojan was sunken, like a hollow thing, but the tension was rolling off Naz in waves. She was wound tight like a coil, ready to lunge at the first opening. She knew it wasn't worth the fight, but she couldn't help it. The strap of their bag dropped over Wright's head. She had let her guard down, and he had betrayed them. He had pointed an arrow at Rojan. She couldn't let it go. Even if she got shot, she couldn't let it go.

His free hand started to go back toward the bow, to aim at them again so he could make a getaway.

“Naz, don't—” Rojan started to say, but it was too late.

“
Motherfucker!
” Naz howled as she threw herself at him.

They all shouted in the scuffle. Naz went straight for his eyes, to claw them out. Rojan ducked, covering her head. Wright was caught between trying to beat Naz off him and reaching back down to notch the arrow, but Naz knew he couldn't fire at such close range and hit her.

That was true. Naz was too close to be shot.

But Rojan wasn't.

“Fuck,” Wright murmured. His hands went slack. “Fuck . . .”

Naz sank down next to her sister. The shot had gone wild, un-aimed, just a spasm of Wright's fingers as he'd lost grip on the tip of the arrow after pulling the string too tight during the fight, but it had somehow still found Rojan. Out of the top of one of her thighs, a long, slim shaft was sticking straight out, like a flagpole.

“Oh no,” Rojan squeaked. The ground everywhere was red with thick syrup. Naz could see her going into shock. Her face was as white as the moon, bathed in a sweaty sheen.

“Pressure.” Naz's hands trembled as she ripped off her belt and tried to wrap it around Rojan's leg. “We have to, pressure, to stop the bleeding. Have to stop it.”