The Book of M (24 page)

“You know them, too?” Dr. Zadeh had noticed the same thing.

“I thought that's what all of you were, when you first found me,” Michael said. “They—” He shrugged helplessly. “Now I don't remember. I just remember that they're bad.”

“Ones with shadows who kill ones without,” Letty continued. It seemed like she couldn't speak above a whisper. “They go around, looking for us.”

“Why?” Dr. Zadeh asked, voice stony.

Letty shook her head. “Money or food.” She paused. “They also enjoy it, I think.”

The amnesiac shook his head in disgust. “Who's paying them?” he asked at last.

“Whoever's inside the city hall. Someone's still trying to run things. Trying to clean up New Orleans before too many shadowless—” She stopped abruptly, mouth snapped shut, and stared in terror at them all.
Magic.
Hemu's frightened voice came back to the amnesiac, the pleading expression in the young man's exhausted, terrified eyes.

“It's all right,” Dr. Zadeh said to her. “We know. About the . . . pull.”

Letty's eyes darted to the amnesiac's.

“We do,” he said. “It's real.” The Mandai spice market in Pune flashed in his mind. Or rather the memory of it, because it didn't exist anymore. “We've seen it happen.”

THE FOURTH SHADOWLESS THEY MET BECAUSE OF LETTY.
They also met their first exterminators.

“She was—I don't know. But I know we were together before we forgot why, so she has to be someone important,” Letty said to the amnesiac as they all crept across Lafayette Square. They were deep into the Central Business District just south of the French Quarter, looking for a street they hoped Letty would still find familiar. It was far past their usual search boundaries, but Dr. Zadeh was getting desperate. The shadowless had been disappearing like ghosts. There were so few left now, and those they did see ran well before anyone could get close enough, even Michael. If this shadowless still remembered Letty even a little, they stood a chance of convincing her to come with them.

The neighborhood clearly unnerved Letty, every sound and creak of wood pricking like a needle on a fresh new spot of skin. The amnesiac looked around nervously, her fear making him jumpy. Here he didn't know the angles to hide in, the directions to run that weren't dead ends. They wound their way deeper in.

The shadowless they sought was still alive, hiding between two empty buildings, almost exactly where Letty had said she lost her when she'd started running, so many days ago.

“You're alive,” Letty gasped when she finally saw her.

The shadowless looked up from where she was crouched between a few Dumpsters. The amnesiac saw the flash of recognition in her eyes—she remembered Letty still. “Shh,” she hissed.

The amnesiac and the others didn't move for a second, but Letty darted behind another of the Dumpsters immediately. “Hide,” she said. She mouthed the word
exterminators.

They all threw themselves down behind piles of concrete, burned-out furniture, any shape that would hide them as the footsteps echoed closer, but it was too late. The exterminators had already seen them.

“Look at this,” the one covered in scars said to the other, probably the tallest man the amnesiac had ever seen in person. He took the gun out of his holster. “Newbies. You all know you're in Jackson's neighborhood, right?”

“Jackson's neighborhood?”

The tall one looked at the scarred one with his eyes narrowed. “I've had it with this. People crawling out of the woodwork, muscling in on our area.” He pointed the gun straight at the amnesiac, and Dr. Zadeh and Nurse Marie shrieked, shouting pleading things that interrupted each other and made no sense. “You can't just come in here and take our catch. That isn't how it works.”

“I'm sorry,” the amnesiac said shakily. “We didn't know.”

“Yeah, right,” the tall one sneered. “Explain that, then.” His gun moved to aim casually at Letty and the other shadowless, causing them to cower to the ground, whimpering.

“Family!” the amnesiac cried. “They lost their shadows a week ago. We're all family. We're just looking for food.”

“Food here in this neighborhood also belongs to Jackson,” the scarred one said. “But more importantly, so does your family now.”

“No,” Dr. Zadeh said.

“Once they lose their shadows, they're ours.”

“What about when you lose yours?” Dr. Zadeh asked the scarred exterminator.

The tall one tipped his head at his partner. “Then I'll shoot him immediately and collect my reward for it.”

“Or the other way around,” the scarred one added, grinning.

“Please, we'll leave. We'll never come back,” the amnesiac promised.

“No can do,” the scarred exterminator said. He stepped closer. “See, even if I did believe you that these two were your family, they're still shadowless, and you're still in our hunting neighborhood.” The grin dropped off his face. “But I don't believe you anyway.”

“Shadowless are almost gone, or hiding,” the tall one said. “Other guys have been crowding our territory for months now, taking our kills. We've heard every story there is twice. Including yours. I'm putting a stop to it.”

“Please—” Dr. Zadeh started to say just as something cruised soundlessly through the air overhead. The only way any of them knew it had been there at all was the huge dark square it cast down over them as it passed.

In the same instant, Letty's shadowless friend and the two exterminators dropped into tight crouches, covering their heads. It wasn't just an instinctual flinch to some nearby movement, the amnesiac realized with a chill—it was a deliberate,
practiced
move.

“What was that?” the amnesiac gasped.

“Come on,” the scarred exterminator said to the tall one, already running away.

“The shadowless,” he replied angrily.

But the scarred one was already halfway down the street. “No time. I'm not dying today.”

A gust of wind made everyone jump again, and the shadowless whimpered in terror, sinking even lower to the ground.

“We have to
go,
man,” the scarred one yelled. “Jackson! Come
on
!”

“Your lucky day,” the tall exterminator snarled at them. He pointed a finger straight at Dr. Zadeh's chest. “We catch you leaning in on our business again, it'll be the last time.”

Dr. Zadeh refused to answer. “We hear,” the amnesiac said.

“Don't
forget
now,” he teased, sinister, nodding his chin at their still-there shadows. Then he bolted after his friend, eyes checking the sky.

As soon as the exterminators disappeared around the corner, everyone gasped, suddenly remembering to breathe again. “What was that thing?” Nurse Marie cried, and tried to grab both the amnesiac and Dr. Zadeh, but they had each moved out of her reach at the same moment, to look up. They spun around, trying to see the sky between the buildings, but the roofs were too close together, their view of the sky too narrow. Letty ran to the shadowless she knew, Michael close behind her.

“Was it a plane?” Dr. Zadeh yelled. “Was it a plane?”

Letty's friend was shaking now. She seemed to shrink down onto the asphalt of the alley. “Hey.” The amnesiac crouched, so as to be on her same level. “Do you know what that was?”

The shadowless's eyes stared straight through him, unblinking. “It's coming back.” She trembled.

The amnesiac turned back to look at Dr. Zadeh, who was still staring into the sky. “What is it? What's coming back?” he asked, but she was too terrified to answer.

“If it was a plane—if someone is still flying a plane—” Dr. Zadeh continued excitedly. “We have to get their attention!”

“Wait,” the amnesiac said to Letty. “Keep hold of her.” He ran for a utility ladder welded to the side of a building, to climb up to the roof.

“Be careful!” Nurse Marie cried, watching him ascend with a concerned expression on her face. “Keep away from the edge! You can't judge depth with one eye!” She'd been the first nurse the amnesiac had depended upon when he arrived at the assisted-living facility, when he was barely strong enough for crutches, and she still worried after him as if he was still her charge.

“Almost there!” the amnesiac yelled to her. He hauled himself
onto the flat top of the building. Dusk was falling, smearing everything with an orangy-purple haze. On the horizon, so far it looked to be over the western area of Metairie, a dark thing rippled in the sky. “I can't see—” he started to say. And then he heard the screams.

Nurse Marie was at Dr. Zadeh's side by the time the amnesiac had scrambled back to the edge of the roof to peer down at them, clutching a trembling Michael to her with knuckles that had gone white. Letty cowered with her companion.

“What did you see?” Dr. Zadeh asked softly.

The dark shape passed overhead again. It was the size of a small house, with angles as sharp as blades. There were more screams from the direction in which it had gone.

“Jesus Christ,” Nurse Marie said.

Dr. Zadeh took the new shadowless's face in his hands and made her look at him. “What is it?” he asked firmly, in the voice he had mastered over decades of practice, a tone of absolute authority that could cut through fear or pain, or even sometimes the terrified fog of an Alzheimer's episode, and could compel any patient to answer him. “What. Is. It.”

The shadowless's eyes finally focused on Dr. Zadeh. “Deathkite,” she whispered.

From his vantage point above them, the amnesiac saw the shape lean into the wind to return toward them once more.

“We have to get inside,” he breathed. “Right now.”

LATER, AFTER THEY'D GOTTEN LETTY AND HER FRIEND THEY
had named Jo back to the facility, the amnesiac remembered that Hemu had once told him it was customary to fly celebratory kites on Zero Shadow Day. After everyone had had their fun with the moment of shadowlessness and the shadows had returned, the afternoon would turn toward food and games. Little boys loved that part most of all, the kite flying—or rather, the kite fighting. The object of the game was to be the last one still aloft. In their desperation to win, the
boys often rubbed the strings with powdered glass so they could saw through one another's lines as the fabric sheets crossed, and later even cheated by adding hidden blades to the edges of the frames, to cut the bodies of other kites.

At the time, the amnesiac thought he would have liked to have seen a kite fight, if it had been possible. In a way, he'd gotten his wish.
Was it Hemu?
He often wondered, each time over the months that followed that he watched the deathkites circle overhead—wonderful things that had been twisted into something horrible and evil by accident. Was it Hemu, or had it been someone else?

“Nurse Marie?” Vivi's voice came from the dimly glowing hallway. She, the amnesiac, and Dr. Zadeh turned to see the old woman leaning nervously into the room. Candles were in each corner, but since they'd boarded up all the windows for safety against the riots, it always looked no brighter than dusk at all times. In the weak light, Vivi looked even frailer than by day. “You'd better come.”

“What is it, dear?” Nurse Marie asked, rising to her feet. The knee was giving her trouble again, the amnesiac saw. “Everyone's all right?”

“We're all right,” Vivi said. There was a long pause. Beside him, the amnesiac heard Dr. Zadeh sigh, exhausted. Vivi looked down. “It happened again, to Edith.”

THEY WERE SHORT ONLY ONE MORE SHADOWLESS WHEN A
second pair of exterminators found them. Dr. Zadeh was in the middle of handing food they'd brought to the tiny ball of rags shivering against the concrete wall, and Michael and Letty were calling quietly to it. The amnesiac never saw if it was a man or a woman, old or young. The shadowless was about to reach for the food, just one withered hand and two narrowed eyes visible from the folds of dirty fabric, but then in a swirl of layers, it was gone.

“What the—” Dr. Zadeh gasped in frustration.

“‘What the' indeed,” a low voice said from behind them. “I'd ask you the same question about what the fuck you're doing here.”

They all turned at once, hearts stuttering. The amnesiac's skin went cold and clammy. There were two figures there, a man and woman, dressed in old police riot gear. Exterminators.

“Looks like they were after that one that just got away,” the woman replied to her partner. Her eyes landed coldly back on Dr. Zadeh.

“This isn't what it looks like,” he began.

They tried to explain—their experiments, their hope to discover a cure. The amnesiac could see in their eyes that they didn't care. To them, there was no difference between Dr. Zadeh killing a shadowless in their territory or saving one. In either case, it was a body taken away for which they didn't get paid.

Dr. Zadeh shouted for Michael and Letty to run then—as far as they could, as fast as they could. He knew that no matter how it ended up, the two of them would never be allowed to live. They were worth too much to the exterminators. Shots went off as they sprinted, deafening booms. The amnesiac couldn't look, but as he cowered in front of the exterminators and their guns, hands spread protectively in front of his face, he didn't hear either of them fall.

“Please,” Nurse Marie was on her knees, begging for Dr. Zadeh's life. “
Please.
” But there was nothing they could offer that the exterminators wanted.

They killed him.

SMITH TRES, THE SOLDIER WHO WAS STABBED DURING THE
last attempt to trade, didn't develop a fever, but the General wouldn't know if he was out of the woods for at least another week. Naz was just so relieved that he hadn't died on the first night—when he'd been so pale from blood loss his lips were almost blue, teeth chattering, unable to keep warm despite all the blankets she took from her own bed and all the other beds of the soldiers under her command. They'd lost so many people recently. Both to death and to the Forgetting. A few days ago, she even saw a new Red that she'd once known the year before—he'd fought in their army before he lost his shadow and forgot he had. He'd been one of her best scouts, just like Tres was now. Both of them as brave and reckless as she'd ever seen. Both of them almost lost completing missions she'd ordered. Naz didn't know if she'd be able to bear it if another person from her team died.

But even though it seemed like Tres would survive, it still left the problem of who was going to take his place in her formation until he was healed. The army was stretched thin, but she'd been making do already missing her first scout. Now that she was missing two, there was no way around it.

“Go on, leave me behind,” Ory wheezed from the dirt. “Save yourself.”

Malik's daughter, Vienna, grunted, and threw his arm over her shoulder to try to lift him.

“
Save yourself!
” he wailed as dramatically as he could.

“Vienna!” Naz snapped as the girl began to laugh. “This is not a game!”

“Ahmadi, come on,” Ory said, sitting up and dusting off his pants.

“You won't think it's a game when a Red bashes your head in because you joked your way through Malik's boot camp curriculum,” Naz said to him. “And you . . .”—she looked hard at Vienna—“you won't think it's a game when I don't clear you for missions.”

“No, I'm sorry!” Vienna cried. She snapped to attention and saluted. Naz pinched her lips tight to keep the sadness from showing in her face. It was so hard to tell anyone's true age anymore—the starvation, the scars, the strain of carrying memories alone that should have been shared among others. Sometimes she didn't remember that Vienna couldn't be more than sixteen, maybe seventeen. In some ways she seemed years older, almost the same age as Rojan. Sometimes she seemed so much like Rojan it hurt. “I'm ready to go again, ma'am!”

Naz looked away.
Vienna was not her sister,
she told herself yet again. Her sister had almost made it, but the fever from the arrow wound infection took her in the end.
Vienna was not her sister.
It never worked. “And how about you?” she asked Ory. “Finished screwing around?”

“You know,” Ory said as he squared off against Vienna once more, “if I didn't know any better, I'd think you didn't like me very much.”

“I think you're too sensitive,” she said. “Again!”

She watched them train expressionlessly, drilling even harder. When she at last let them go, Ory gave her a wide berth and didn't speak to her for the rest of the evening. He clearly didn't believe her when she'd brushed off his remark that she didn't like him.

But it was true. It wasn't that Naz didn't like him. It was in fact the opposite. She
did
like him, because he was someone who was as close to the General and Paul as she was—but especially Paul. After all the stories Naz had heard him tell about his lost best friend Ory, and now having Ory here, looking and acting exactly like she'd imagined from Paul's descriptions, telling the same stories about Paul from his own perspective, it made her feel like she too had known Ory for a long time. Like he'd also been her friend, and she'd also left him behind on that mountain.

WHEN ORY HAD FIRST WALKED THROUGH THE
FRONT DOOR
with Malik, the General told him that he and Paul had tried to go back and find him and his wife, Max. That was true. But what the General never told Ory was that once they'd established the army and had the forces to spare, they had planned to go back for them
again,
a second time.

The General hadn't mentioned that second attempt because he didn't like to talk about anything that touched the memory of Paul's last days in any way. Any reminder was too painful to him. Naz was glad Ory didn't know, though. It made things simpler. Because she was the person who was supposed to have led the rescue team to travel to that deserted mountain, to find this Orlando Zhang and Maxine Webber and bring them safely to the Iowa.

THEY'D TRAINED FOR WEEKS TO PREPARE. IT WAS TO BE A
small team, just a handful of soldiers and Naz, so that they could move quickly and quietly. Paul and the General had reported that when they'd attempted to cross back themselves, the bridge had been swarmed with shadowless and too dangerous to cross—but it
was
still standing, and they had greater numbers now. They could make it this time.

Paul had ordered Malik to put his best people on the job, but Malik insisted he would only accept volunteers. When Naz saw the desperation in Paul's face as he waited for someone, anyone, to raise a hand, it made her think of the first time she'd met him. She knew how easily he could have left her and Rojan there to die after the shadowless attack instead of helping them. They were total strangers, and he already had so many mouths to feed at the Iowa. For all he knew, they could have been feigning the seriousness of their injuries. The smarter, safer thing would have been to refuse to take them in. If it had been Naz who had found Paul instead of the other way around, she would have run without even so much as an apology.

But Paul didn't. He had looked at Naz and her sister and known
right away—even though they were so bundled in rags one could barely see their same dark eyes, their same sharp noses. When Malik disagreed about bringing them back to the Iowa, Paul had said, “Look at them, Malik. Just look. They're
family.
” And he saved Rojan—for what little time she'd had left.

Now it was all reversed—everyone gathered was staring at Paul this time, rather than at Naz, and
he
was the one who was trying and failing to save the life of someone he loved.

Naz put her hand up firmly. She was the first volunteer.

But they never went. The night before the mission was to leave, Malik had to cancel the rescue—because Paul's shadow disappeared.

“I CAN'T JUSTIFY LETTING YOU GO NOW,” MALIK TOLD HER
the morning after it happened. They were outside the General and Paul's room, where Malik had been standing guard since the previous evening. Inside, the sobs had grown hoarse with exhaustion. Naz could hear Paul's voice, calm and muffled through the door, but the General was inconsolable. “I'm afraid to leave them, in case Paul—” He sighed. “I need someone to lead the library trips in my place until the General comes around again.”

But the General didn't come around. As Paul deteriorated, the grief overwhelmed him. Malik tried to manage him and Naz tried to manage the army. Just before he'd lost his shadow, Paul had been particularly taken with the New Orleans rumors, and then with the idea that books could be what The One Who Gathers was seeking. Malik ordered Naz to continue collecting as many as they could, as fast as they could—at that time, the Reds didn't exist yet. They would come later, but at that point, the library was completely abandoned. Just books and cobwebs. Once or twice, they ran into a shadowless or two inside, but they weren't organized. Just wanderers who had happened upon a dry, warm place. Sort of like the Iowans. With Naz in charge, they managed a few good runs before things got much worse with Paul.

The last thing he said to her was about Ory. “Find him,” he begged. Naz promised tearfully that she'd do it, even though she knew that she never would now. The next day, Paul no longer remembered how to speak.

After that, the General grew afraid that Paul would run away and get lost, so they started locking him in rooms on the upper levels. They had to move him to a different one every day, because he destroyed them trying to get out.

Naz knew that the shadowless forgot, and it was terrifying, but it was the first time she really saw up close what happened when a person lost his shadow. Paul had started to become something else. She'd never believed what had happened was anything other than fantastical, inexplicable, because there was simply no other way to make it make sense—but those last days with the man she once knew proved it beyond a doubt for her. In his fear, Paul did things no human could do. He scorched walls, turned stone bricks into ice ones, weakened hallways until they were so thin they fluttered like they were made of paper in a strong wind. Other corridors branched off into insane, infinite mazes.

“That's Paul,” the General would joke deliriously every morning, after they'd managed to get him out of one room and locked into the next. “Stubborn to the end!”

Naz tried to laugh out of sympathy, but nothing ever came out. It had been anything but funny, trying to move Paul each morning. Trying to put him in a new room without him hurting someone or escaping. But none of them could muster the courage to beg the General to order him put out of his misery before it was too late. Paul was going to kill them all, and they didn't know how to stop it.

In the end, they didn't have to.

Naz didn't know how the General got Paul out of his room that night, or down the stairs and through the front door without any of them hearing. Maybe Paul still remembered him, just enough. Malik
and Naz found the General in his room the next morning, his clothes and hands covered in crusted streaks of blood.

They didn't ask him how he'd done it. It was too much.

It was Malik who finally spoke to the General, days later. He asked him for Paul's book—the copy from the wedding he and Paul had brought with them when they left Elk Cliffs. The army wanted to add it to the collection, with his permission. As a kind of memorial to Paul.

“I couldn't save it” was all he'd said, in almost a whisper, his eyes locked in a thousand-yard stare.

Naz never found out what that meant.

She thought of the book often after that, almost every day—but once Ory came, she realized she'd just been thinking of the concept of the book, not the actual words inside. The way it had looked when she'd seen it around the Iowa, during better times. The slim spine, the soft cream pages, the deep navy cover with a golden sun emblazoned across it. It was sort of the way she'd always felt about Ory and Max—just concepts—except suddenly Ory was right there with them. Ory, but not Max. The General, but not Paul.

A few weeks after the General had saved them from his husband, they all stopped grieving long enough to remember that there might be another copy of Paul's book in the library they had recently begun to loot. But by the time they'd pulled themselves together to go again, the Reds were there.

And that was why Naz had kept her distance from Ory. She was afraid that if he knew the story, he might blame her for Max's disappearance. Naz knew it wasn't fair, but she believed it was her fault anyway. If only she had gone to the mountain sooner, both he and Max would be at the Iowa now—the same way that if only she had gone back to the library sooner, they might have the book they now were all so desperately hoping to save.