The Book of M (16 page)

The amnesiac trembled as Hemu stared back at him. The look on his face was desperate. The amnesiac didn't understand at all, but he knew that what Hemu was trying to tell him was something far more important than anything else he'd shared. It was maybe the most important thing in the world now.

“There's a
feeling
,” Hemu whispered. “A pull. I went toward it because I didn't know what was happening at first. Every time, it felt better and better. Once I realized what I was giving up in exchange—my memories—it was too late. Now it's just too strong. I can't stop it.” He swallowed hard. “I don't know if I want to.”

“But what is forgetting yourself giving you?” the amnesiac asked.

Hemu peeled off the sensors in one swift motion. Above, an alarm in the ceiling began to beep, drowning out their voices even further. “
Magic.
”

IF YOU COULD ASK ME NOW, YOU'D WANT TO KNOW
WHEN I
decided. That I was going to run away. That's fair, I suppose.

It was the night before I did it that I became sure.

At first I was terrified of your leaving me alone for the day. I don't know what it's going to be like once I start forgetting the big things, but it can't be good. And you didn't want to leave either. You just wanted to lie in bed with your arms wrapped around me and my hair up your nose as you spooned me. That's what we did for the first four days after it happened—just laid there. Like if we did nothing, just stayed frozen in the moment, then time really wouldn't pass, and I wouldn't forget. I'd just hang suspended forever in the first few hours after I lost my shadow.

Of course, that's not how it works. Maybe it slowed it down some, dulled the temptation to forget for a while, but it wouldn't have worked forever. Time always leaves you behind.

If I'd deteriorated any faster, I think we would have just stayed there until there was nothing left of me. But by the fourth day, when we realized that I was still pretty together, you couldn't argue anymore with me that at some point you were going to
have
to go look for food, to keep us alive. That's when we decided you'd go as soon as it was light enough to see, to scavenge ruthlessly to collect a last Hail Mary stash, one that would allow us to then live out our last few . . . days? weeks? together. You could be there for me then, when it really started to happen, you said.

After you fell asleep, into that deep, heavy unconsciousness you can put yourself into when you know you have to go scavenge the next day, I peeled back a little corner of the cardboard over the window in our bedroom—I know, I know, but I was careful not to crease it—and I watched the moon for a long time.

You don't know this, Ory, but since it happened, I've barely slept.
Maybe that's a side effect. I stay in the bed with you, limbs tangled, but while you're snoring softly, my eyes are open. I lift my hands over my head and just stare at them. Or rather, at where they should be, but I can't see them, because it's too dark. The blackness is so heavy, and it's so hard to see the outline of my fingers, that for those few hours every night, it almost feels like I still have a shadow. I never would have realized that not having one feels different from having one, but it does. And the only time I can relieve that feeling is then, when it's really dark and I can't see any of myself, let alone the subtle shape I should cast beneath me.

I sat there at the window watching the moon shift silently across the sky until I heard you stir. I crawled back in beside you, jammed my nose into your neck. Even after six days without bathing, you still smelled kind of sweet, like faint vanilla that was sharpening.

You clutched at me aimlessly, still half-unconscious, and squeezed me to you with a sleep-heavy leg that you wrapped over me. “But I have a confession about that last play,” you murmured, dreamlost, face searching for my shoulder to bury itself. You don't know this, Ory, but you talk in your sleep when you're upset. We sometimes have entire conversations you don't remember at all. Your own tiny version of shadowlessness. “I have a confession to make.”

“I know,” I whispered, trying to calm you.

I knew where your memories were leading you. You were talking about the football game where we met.

The sky was piercing gray that day. We were huddled together on the bleachers, shivering in our windbreakers as tiny colored dots dashed back and forth across a field far below us. You leaned closer, looking like a boy, nervous and brash at the same time. A whistle shrieked. My friends had vanished into the crowd like fog burning off a lake in late morning, Marion herding them away—and yours had pulled back just far enough to watch you make a fool of yourself. I didn't know them then, but Paul and Imanuel were in that group, watching us. Plastic armor crashed.

“I actually don't know anything . . . about football.” You trailed off into a soft snore. “I'm only here because my friend Paul made me . . .”

I shifted, fixing your pillow gently.

“You ready to get out of here?” you asked, the same way you had the first time. Later you told me it was the most daring, stupid way you'd ever invited a girl to dinner—that you were convinced you had to seem nonchalant to impress me, but were terrified you'd just blown it as soon as the words were out.

“Shh,” I hummed into your ear, but you didn't quiet. I knew you wouldn't until I repeated what I'd said—whenever you had this dream, you never did until I answered. “I'm always ready,” I finally said.

You settled, smiling faintly. I stroked your hair until I thought you'd drifted back down.

“It's so strange,” you mumbled suddenly. Your voice was so clear that I looked at you in surprise in the darkness, but you were still asleep, eyes still closed. Your fingers dawdled clumsily at the collar of your shirt, where the single silver chain necklace you always wear disappeared beneath the cotton collar. “My ring is gone.”

“What ring?” I asked.

“My wedding ring,” you answered.

Deep inside me, something horrible bloomed. A drowning, drowning dread.

“I don't know how I could have lost it . . .” Your eyelids fluttered. “Don't know.”

“Maybe you took it off and put it somewhere,” I whispered. I tried to hide the horror in my voice.

“I never take it off.” You smiled faintly at me from the other side of sleep. “You know that.”

“Of course I know,” I said. But I didn't. I didn't at all.

“Don't understand,” you repeated again. “The only way is if it broke, but the chain is still here.” Your next dream started to pull you deeper again. “The chain is still here.” The words became less and
less clear. “Do you . . . Do you think . . .” You trailed off as your leg twitched. Then you were gone, whisked away from your worry somewhere deeper, somewhere more peaceful. “Maybe . . .”

Once you began to snore, I lifted your left hand carefully off the covers in the darkness and gently felt my way down your palm toward your third finger.
Please be there,
I prayed.
Please be there.

But it wasn't. There was no weathered silver band. Because of course you had—it made perfect sense now. Of course you had moved it from your hand to a neck chain so it wouldn't get in the way during your scavenging or attract attention if you happened to run into anyone looking for something to steal. So you didn't lose it.

Only now you had, because without it there on your finger to see every day, I had forgotten you still had your wedding band, that you hadn't misplaced it somewhere in the early days or while searching the downtown. I had forgotten you had moved it to the chain on your neck who knows how long ago, and so I had forgotten you had it at all.

I put your hand back down on the covers as softly as I could. Your bare, ringless hand. “Fifty-two,” I whispered to your sleeping form.

That's when I knew I had to leave. Before it was too late.

I understood then how the Forgetting works. Why sometimes we shadowless simply don't remember anymore and why other times something changes: there's a difference between when the mind forgets and the heart does. The memory means more, the more it's worth to you—and to who you are. The heart has a harder time letting go. But what happens when you refuse to let go of a delicate thing as it's being pulled away from you? It stretches. Then it tears.

Do you know what means the most to me of all, Ory? Out of everything that's left in this world? Don't you see now why I had to leave you? That I had to do it? That I had no choice?

Do you know what could happen when I forget
you
?

ORY SAT THERE FOR A WHILE ON THE LAST REMAINING
section of curb on the street.

Of course it was more possible that Max wouldn't be there than that she would. He'd just refused to think about it, because he knew if he did, the logic to give up would have been overwhelming. He could only believe that she'd headed for their home, and then follow her. What else was he supposed to do? Just let her go? Just leave her to forget, even though it was his fault, even though she'd still be in the shelter with him if he hadn't gone to Broad Street? He was just supposed to go on living and let her die? Ory tossed the pebble in his hand and watched it skitter over the asphalt.

Their apartment was gone. The entire block had collapsed in on itself, into a pile of steel bars and sand. Ory watched the air a few feet up from the ground, where the front door should have been. Where he was supposed to have walked through and found Max.

“She's not here,” he said softly to himself. Either she'd come and then gone when she saw that their home was destroyed, or she never came. Ory picked up a handful of the gray powder and let it slide through his fingers. “Where are you, Max?” He sighed. The sand hissed. “Where?”

His shoulder ached where the sharpened pebble had cut him. The streets had begun to look more menacing in the late-afternoon light—he needed somewhere safe to camp within sight of the property. He pressed down harder to stanch the cut and grimaced.

“I see you've met the four sisters,” a voice said.

The shotgun was already aimed. “The what?” Ory asked.

A tall, thin man emerged from the half doorway of an abandoned business farther down the street. A shadow followed him. “The four sisters,” he repeated, and gestured to the gash on Ory's shoulder. “New around here, aren't you?”

Ory slowly nodded. There was no point to try to hide it. It was obvious the man knew the answer anyway.

“Famous for their hospitality.” He smiled. His eyes lingered on Ory's pockets. “You're lucky you still have your stuff.”

“It wasn't like that,” Ory said. “I approached them. I just wanted to ask if they'd seen my wife. She might've passed through here.”

The man's eyes narrowed. “Lost shadowless?” he asked.

“About a week now. She would've—this is the building where we used to live.”

“What's she look like?”

“You think you saw her?”

“What's she look like?” he repeated.

Ory scrambled for his wallet photo. “She's about five-five, dark skin, brown afro, green eyes. Her name is Max, she has a scar over her right eyebrow—” It was too much to hope for. Did the man know the faces of most of the women hiding around here?

“I very well might,” the man said as if he'd read Ory's mind. “I'm a finder, you see.” When he realized Ory hadn't heard the term before, he shrugged and stuck his hand out. “Give it here.”

Ory passed him the photo. “Her name is Max,” he said again.

The man took one look and then nodded. “Oh, I
have
seen a woman like that,” he said.

Ory snatched the photo back and stared into Max's face. “Are you sure?”

“I'm sure.”

“When?”

“Maybe one, two days ago.” He pondered. “She was alone.”

“Did you talk to her? Was she all right?”

“I don't talk to shadowless,” he said. “Professional policy.”

Ory felt dizzy. “Which way did she go? Can you show me?” He held the photo out again, his hand trembling. “Are you sure it was her?”

The man looked a second time and nodded. “It was her,” he said. “Max.” The name came slowly, as if he was trying it out.

“I'm begging you.” Ory felt himself drop to his knees before he even realized he was doing it. “Show me where she went.”

BY THE TIME THEY REACHED WASHINGTON, D.C., ROJAN WAS
feverish, the color of sweating white cheese. The wound in her thigh stank like rotten meat. The most horrible part about it was that Naz was so hungry sometimes it almost smelled good to her. They hadn't eaten in weeks, and were starving; Naz's sports bra had become so loose under her shirt it was almost more like a short tank top, and Rojan's trousers would have fallen right off if she hadn't been lying down on the makeshift pallet Naz had cobbled together so she could drag her to the city, where they hoped to find better shelter than the woods. But they found when they made it to D.C. that there was no food there either. The shops had all been picked clean long ago. There were just dead bodies, empty buildings, and shadowless. Rojan's wound festered further, blooming like some horrible raw steak flower across her leg.

That was what they were doing the morning they saw their first shadowed survivors since Wright. Starving and dying.

She and Rojan were crouched in the hovel they'd made their home, listening to the sounds. All the streets downtown were close together—and there was so much activity. Screams echoed throughout the nights. Strange rain during the day that somehow soaked only every other street, and to Naz's terror and bafflement, followed movement, as if tracking her. Footsteps for which she could never pinpoint the origin. By this point, she'd lost count of how many she'd killed. It was far greater than six. But now Naz was always afraid that the next time they ran into someone—shadowed or shadowless—she'd be too weak to fight them off, even with the bow. That the next time it happened, it would be the end.

When Naz first heard the footsteps, she thought that day had come.

She dropped to the ground inside their shelter, pressing her stomach against the dusty wood floor. Rojan opened one eye weakly to look at her. As quietly as Naz could, she slid an arrow out of her quiver and nocked it. She poked her head over the half wall of their shelter to steal a glance, and almost choked. Not one or two, but an entire
horde
of shadowless was prowling outside.

“Shadowless?” Rojan whispered. Her voice was like dry leaves scraping together.

“Yeah,” Naz nodded.

“How many?”

Naz looked down. Too many. Far too many. They were scrambling back and forth around the street, as if searching the perimeter of the sisters' ruins.
Can they smell us?
Naz wondered. Dust from the crumbled buildings billowed down the street, hazy in the air, swirling as bodies without shadows dashed through it, creating currents. Two of them were barely more than toddlers, she realized with a shudder. Huge heads teetering on tiny little bodies, arms and faces hairless with youth.

“It's okay,” Rojan said.
It's okay if you run.

“I'm not leaving you,” Naz whispered fiercely. A shadowless darted closer, snarling.

“Please.” Rojan closed her eyes again. “I want you to.”

Naz looked back out at the street. She knew she should go. If she had been the one dying on the ground, she'd want Rojan to save herself, too. Naz would want Rojan to save herself so badly that she'd probably try to kill herself to free her sister. She had no doubt that if Rojan was strong enough to crawl around to find something sharp, she probably would do just that.

Instead, Naz raised her bow and let loose the first arrow.

“Naz,” Rojan moaned. But it was too late. The street exploded into chaos as Naz grabbed another arrow from the quiver on her back.

She had no idea why she did it, because there was no point. She'd never kill them all. Maybe it was because she knew she'd never leave Rojan, but Rojan was going to leave her, because Rojan was going to die first. The only thing Naz had wanted to do her entire life, from the moment she became a big sister, was protect Rojan—and she had failed. There was nothing she could do to save them. Maybe she was just trying to speed it up, then, so it finally could be over. A shadowless went sailing, body jerked straight as the arrow punched into him, then fell. He didn't get up.

“How do you like that,” Naz snarled. The rest of the shadowless had recovered from the initial shock, and all turned toward the sound. Their eyes locked on her. She reached back into her quiver as they began to move in, nocked another arrow, let it fly, too. Another. Another. It felt good to be doing it. The shadowless fell, but more replaced them. She kept shooting. Those familiar motions, the memory of the bow as strong in the muscles themselves as in her mind. Taking something back, before the end.

“Make a circle!” A man's voice broke her aim suddenly. Naz faltered, jolted back into the moment. The shadowless spun around, hissing. Bodies ran back and forth. There was more shouting now, and then sounds of death. Someone else was fighting the shadowless for her, she realized. Many someones. An entire group had shown up and was beating her predators into retreat. “Face out! Back to back!”

Slowly it grew quiet and still again. The dust settled back onto the broken streets. Naz stood there, dazed, holding her bow, as she stared. Across the street, six people stood amid the shadowless corpses, panting. At the front, two men wielded pipes like baseball bats—one tall and dark-skinned, and the other pale, with a barrel chest and thinning brown hair. Both with shadows. No,
all
with shadows, she realized. All of them. Every. Single. Survivor.

When the pale, balding man turned toward Naz, everything came rushing back.
What have I done? What the fuck have I done?
She
ducked back down behind the wall as quickly as she could, but it was too late.
They know right where we are now.

“Are you all right?” he called.

“Careful,” his friend said.

“Malik, come on. She was in trouble.”

But the other couldn't be swayed. “We don't know her.”

And I don't know you either,
Naz agreed.

“You can come out,” the first finally continued, facing her direction again. “Are you injured?”

The one called Malik sighed in disgust, giving up.
So the pale, balding one is the leader of their group,
Naz observed. She knew who to aim at now, if need be.

“Gather those arrows up for her, so she can use them again,” another shouted, now that it was clear they weren't about to be commanded to attack Naz, too.
At least not yet.
Naz watched them for signs of a ruse. The younger ones began to move toward the arrows and bodies shakily, still stunned from battle. “Careful when you pull them out.”

“Hon?” one of the women added across the rubble. “That was brave of you. To fight them.”

Naz didn't move. People said nice things all the time, then killed you for your boots. Wright had done it. These strangers had saved her, but that still meant nothing. She didn't know a thing about them.

“Really brave,” the leader added. “You don't have to worry about us, though. We're friendly. We're not here to attack you.”

“Prove it,” Naz finally shouted over the wall.

“Prove it? Uh.” He turned and glanced awkwardly at the small group behind him. A teenaged girl reached into her backpack. She looked just like the one named Malik, Naz saw as she watched her. Same nose, same eyes. Both tall. Naz swallowed hard and did not let herself think about it. “Oh,” the leader said as the girl moved toward him, and then he turned back around. Naz's fingers strained on the bowstring as she peeked over. He was holding something. “Here.”

It was a piece of jerky meat.

Where on this godforsaken earth had an idiot like that found meat and then managed to preserve it? There was nothing left here, anywhere, nothing at all.

Naz watched the man look around for a moment, likely for lurking shadowless who'd sniffed out the meal, and then set the tough meat down on a flat piece of rubble. “Here. A gesture of peace,” he called.

That was very convincing. People tried to take your food, not give it to you. “Back up,” Naz growled.

He put his arms up and walked a few steps back obligingly, and then with a flick of his hand, scooted the rest of the group even farther.

Naz didn't move. Not yet. “What was all that?” she asked Malik.

“Just shadowless,” he answered. “That's how they are here. In the downtown, they're starting to roam together.”

“That's different,” Naz said.

“It is different,” he agreed, troubled.

“How did you learn to do that?” the girl called to Naz. She wiped a wet trail on her forehead. For a moment, Naz thought it was blood, but then she realized it was just smeared with dirt.

“I was an archer,” Naz answered at last. “I was training for—for the Olympics.” It was such a strange thing to say in this new world.

She saw the words slowly register on all of their faces. “An archer,” the girl said to her father, as if in wonder. Their shadows talked to each other as well, silent mimes. Naz watched all their dark shapes face one another and fidget on the asphalt. It was mesmerizing. “That's impossible luck.”

The man in charge had moved closer while Naz was talking, close enough that he could peer into the shelter. He could see Rojan lying there, pale and near death. Naz watched his eyes study them, taking the situation in. “We could really use your help. Come back with us. Meet the General,” he said gently.

“No,” Malik growled softly, warning, but the leader ignored him. Naz could see the look in the pale man's eyes. It was the same look her coach had when he first met her, young and terrified, clutching her passport in the Boston airport. Naz knew if Malik had been the one in charge, the group would be gone already, and she and Rojan would be alone once more. He was a man who trusted no one, just like Naz—but the other was a man who trusted everyone, just like Rojan. He was looking at her like family.

“Join us,” he said again, taking another step forward. “Both of you.”

“Watch it,” Naz said as she pulled the bowstring tighter against her cheek, arrow aiming this time at Malik. She looked at the girl. The other man was the leader, but this was better insurance.

It seemed less and less like a trap the more they talked, but Naz was hard to convince. There were so many of them and just one of her. But she and Rojan were also starving to death.

In the end, it took fifteen minutes for the man to lure her out from her hovel, and even then, she walked the whole way to the jerky meat offering with the bow still drawn on Malik, arms burning with acid to let the arrow fly. Later, when she thought back on that day, she couldn't imagine what his daughter, Vienna, must have been feeling in those long moments, her father trapped at the mercy of Naz's exhausted, terrified fingertips. Naz would never forgive herself for it, for aiming death so long at Malik like that as she came forward—even though later Malik said it was what convinced him she would make a great lieutenant in their army.