The Book of M (37 page)

NAZ LEFT THE CAMP AT DAWN, LONG BEFORE MOST OF THE
others were awake. She had orders from Malik to set out early with Original Smith and Dos to scout the road ahead of the army. She was to push all the way to Chattanooga, to see if the I-24 was still intact enough to allow them to cross through the ruins of the city rather than having to work five wooden-wheeled carriages through the uneven mountains.

“I want a loose triangle, twenty feet between each of us, on the ready at all times,” she ordered as she secured her fiberglass bow across the back of her saddle. The black, liquid surface shimmered in the morning light.

“Yes, ma'am.” The two Smiths saluted.

“Watch for mud,” Malik said as he handed her a piece of jerky wrapped in a thin cloth. “Runoff from the mountains could make everything soft.”

“I'll bring the horses back,” Naz smiled down to him.

“Yourself too,” he warned.

They set off at a canter, but soon they were trotting, then simply walking, picking their way through the firmest ground as the road narrowed, then fell off into nothing. At one point, her horse's hoof tipped something small and curved, and it rolled to the top of the grass and lay still—half a skull. Naz studied it as they passed, wondering why it looked so strange. It wasn't until she was almost past it that she realized it was because it had been child-sized. Its human no more than five. After that, she stopped looking so closely at the bones.

Dos checked the compass while Naz and Original Smith scanned
the horizon with their bows. They had a few guns, but these were worth more at the caravan than with the scouts. Ory—Zhang, now—had argued with her several times to take at least one when she went out on forward duty, and wouldn't give up no matter how adamantly she refused. Other times, he seemed not to care at all. They would go days without speaking, but then suddenly every single thing she said to him would make the muscles in his jaw tighten as if he could barely manage the strain of being with them all. Other days she'd come back in from a ride covered in dust and want nothing more than to eat all the food in the camp and joke with Vienna by the fire, and he'd be beside her, practically teary-eyed with relief that she'd survived, begging her again to take a gun next time, any gun, to do it for him, please, that he could not lose another. Then the gears would abruptly shift again, and three days would go by before she realized she hadn't seen him since.

“Something at eleven o'clock,” Dos whispered, her bow snapping up.

“Dinner,” Original Smith said. “It's a deer.”

The deer glanced up from grazing and froze, perfectly still as it stared at them. But Dos didn't let fly the arrow.

“Whoa,” Naz finally said.

It was indeed a deer, but the head was wrong. From the roots of its bony antlers sprouted two small, unfurled sparrow wings, a feathered crown.

“Don't shoot it,” she murmured.

“It's the same kind of thing as that weird rabbit-pig-frog animal,” Original Smith said as he lowered his own bow, even though it wasn't. Those little creatures were funny, stupid; the deer, on the other hand, was not. The deer was terrifying, because it was almost beautiful.

“Fuck it, whatever it is.” Dos spat, and crossed herself. “There better not be another disappearing-reappearing lake nearby.”

“Enough.” Naz broke her stare at the strange creature, and swatted Dos's thin arm with the tail of an arrow to draw her attention back to the path. It was newly made, the wood a lighter color. Each night
when they broke for camp, she'd been teaching the soldiers how to make them. They needed all they could get. “Forget the deer. Let's keep it moving.” She lowered her voice. “I don't like it here. Something's off.”

The deer started when the horses began to walk again, wings disappearing, folding tight against its head as it dashed into the underbrush. Naz saw Original Smith and Dos look at each other as the disturbed foliage where it had run grew still again. She could see they felt it, too.

THE ON-RAMP TO THE FREEWAY WAS DESTROYED, SO THEY
stood in the parking lot of a ruined donut shop, staring out across the wreckage of the city. Tiny pieces of ash billowed in the air in front of them, even at such a distance.

“Anyone know what we're looking at?” Naz asked.

“Downtown?” Dos offered. She shivered, even though it was much warmer there than it was in D.C. “The downtown is west of the I-24, right?”

“I've never been to Chattanooga,” Original Smith murmured.

“It doesn't matter anyway,” Naz said.

It didn't. It really didn't. Chattanooga was on fire. As far as they could see, north to south, a raging blaze curdled the skyline, yellow and red flames spewing black clouds that spread for miles.

“How long do you think it's been like that?” Original Smith asked.

“I have no idea,” Naz said. They watched it for a little while longer. “Maybe since the first day.”

She couldn't imagine what could cause a fire that size, or cause it to burn so long. Whatever it was, there was nothing to do. There was no Chattanooga anymore.

“What do we do now?” Dos asked. “We can't take the freeway through that. Can the carriages manage on terrain until we can find a smaller road around?”

“One thing at a time,” Naz said.

Somehow it was hard to look away. “Pretty,” Original Smith finally said. Somewhere just north of the last standing skyscrapers, an explosion sent a glittering wave of molten glass through the square maze of streets. “Is that a weird thing to say?”

Naz shook her head slowly, transfixed. She understood what he meant. “I wonder if it'll ever burn out,” she said.

Just then a spear—painted red and adorned with crimson strips of fabric—punched itself through the front of Dos's throat.

WHEN HE WOKE, THE PAIN WAS NOT BETTER. IT WAS SO TERRIBLE
, at first the amnesiac couldn't even cry out. When he finally could, he bit his tongue instead, and tried to sense the state of things without his sight. Dr. Avanthikar and the shadowless were on the other side of the basement, where they could talk without disturbing him too much. He sat up as gently as possible. The pain whittled itself from acid into a spear in his skull. He squeezed the Gajarajan book in his hands to keep from moaning until the spear dissolved into acid again.

“—the pre-storm,” Marie was saying softly. “The hurricane is likely just beginning to touch down now.”

“It's too late,” Downtown added. “Even if the facility upstairs has finished collapsing, we can't cross the city. We'll be swept away in the floods.”

“Damnit,” Curly growled. A hand smacked plastic, three sharp bursts. “Fucking—fucking
things
.”

“Flashlights,” Downtown said, filling in the word he'd lost.

The amnesiac wondered if his shadow was blind the way he was now. Or could it always see, even though he no longer could, and never would again? He wondered if he'd know it now if his shadow ever left—would he feel it immediately, or would he wander around for some unknowable amount of time without it before someone else noticed and told him?

The amnesiac imagined it as it would be on the wall behind him, in the same posture, listening to the same conversation in companionable silence. Dr. Avanthikar was arguing with Marie now, debating the statistical probability of leaving and dying versus staying and dying. Downtown was calling for a vote. The amnesiac took a deep breath,
imagined his shadow doing the same. Its charcoal outline expanding and contracting. That is, if Curly had gotten the flashlight back on again—if there was any light to see it by, or if it was still pitch-dark. There was no way for him to know at all.

Whatever the hurricane morphed into would probably destroy New Orleans and kill them, but there was something else, too. He could feel it. Something else was growing—or coming. The Gajarajan book in his hands was comfortingly heavy. He slowly turned the pages, sliding his fingers in and easing each leaf over. Just like Surya and Chhaya's story, he knew what article, what picture, what scribbled notes from his old friend were beneath his palm every time he set it down. Pieces of
Peter Pan
; clippings about Hemu Joshi from
The Maharashtra Times
; mathematics; astronomy; entries from Hemu's own fractured, desperate diary; more excerpts from the Rigveda; and most of all, by far
—
photographs of the great elephant himself at Guruvayur temple, and stories of its incredible, inexplicable feats of memory
.
Hundreds of these pages, read over and over until they were memorized, compared to a handful of notecards about the amnesiac's former life that he'd lost long ago and never cared about anyway. He knew Gajarajan more intimately than he would ever know his old self. It almost felt like he was more elephant than man.

Eventually, the amnesiac realized he was barely listening to the others. He was being drawn in by something else, a subtle feeling he'd not noticed that he actually
had
noticed at first, and then all of a sudden did. It was like waking up from a dream about the ocean and realizing you were floating in water.

Something was happening.

“Dr. Avanthikar,” he murmured, but she didn't hear him. She kept talking. “Dr. Avanthikar,” he repeated, still sitting, facing whichever way he'd been positioned when he was helped to the floor. “Doctor.”

“No, you need rest, not—” she started, but when she finally turned to face him, everything dropped. Her voice, the anger, whatever the rest of them had been arguing about.

“I don't know,” the amnesiac said at last. He didn't know. There was a feeling, but without his eyes, every sensation was nonsense. But Dr. Avanthikar was still frozen in place, still completely silent. The other shadowless weren't speaking anymore either. In the whole room, almost no one breathed.

If it had been only that he had become shadowless, they would have moved by now. They would have come over to console him. They were long used to seeing shadows disappear. But something was different. The seconds crawled by. They remained paralyzed by their sight. “What should I do?” the amnesiac finally asked.

“Nothing,” Dr. Avanthikar said. He heard her take a small step forward. No one else moved. The amnesiac did nothing. He waited. The air in the room felt almost solid. “It's okay,” Dr. Avanthikar said softly.

“What?”

But she wasn't speaking to him, he realized. “It's okay,” she said again.

“Yes,” he agreed, trying to sound convincing. The wall behind him where his shadow was smoothly stretched felt as though it had expanded to contain everything in the world. “It's okay.” The amnesiac tried to hold as still as he could.

“Did you see that?” Dr. Avanthikar gasped. She was beyond realizing he couldn't have. Something had gripped her, gripped them all—terror or wonder. “Did you see?” she whispered. She couldn't say anything else. They all waited, bound in place, staring.

And then it came again. The sensation that he had turned his head to look around when he had not moved at all.

“
Did you see?
” Dr. Avanthikar whispered again, close to madness.

A voice that did not come from the amnesiac's mouth, but sounded very much the same, said, “I know how we can stop the hurricane.”

THE NOON SUN WAS SWELTERING, AND THERE WASN'T A
cloud in the sky. On horseback, Malik reached up to take his newly made bow off his shoulder and hook it on the saddle instead, but when his bare fingers touched the hammered metal tips that kept the string in place, he cursed and let go on instinct. The bow slid off his shoulders and smacked the dirt.

“Damnit!” he growled. “It's hotter than hell!”

From her horse beside Zhang's carriage, Vienna clicked her tongue. “Ahmadi isn't going to like that,” she said. “He better clean the string well.”

They had been talking about Ahmadi as the carriages ambled along. “When did she move to the United States?” Zhang asked. She'd mentioned Tehran a few times, but he'd gotten the sense that it was a thing she looked at only from the periphery, never head on, the way he now did with Max. It was just too painful.

“When she was about my age, I think,” Vienna answered as her horse flicked its head.

Zhang tried to imagine what that would have been like, to move from that far so young. Now it was impossible. Without shadows, Iran seemed like a place that was so unreachable from where they were, it didn't exist anymore. Maybe it actually didn't.

“She wanted to go to the Olympics for archery,” Vienna continued. “Apparently the best coach in the world was living in Boston before the Forgetting. When she joined our army, she trained everyone. She's started teaching us all how to make bows and arrows.”

“You can shoot as well?” Zhang asked.

“Well, guns are easier. But I'm getting better.”

“You'll have to teach me then,” he said.

“Definitely!” she cried, and then grew suddenly bashful at her outburst. “Are you also from, like, China or something?” She asked.

“No—Arlington,” Zhang replied. He'd almost said
we. We came from Arlington.
There was no
we
anymore. No Max. “Well, before that, Portland,” he finally said. “I grew up in Portland, Oregon.”

“With Paul,” Vienna added.

He nodded, smiling.

“I grew up in D.C.,” she continued. “I've never left.”

“You're leaving now,” he offered, but it sounded flat. It wasn't the same. There was nothing left to see.

But Vienna wasn't looking at Zhang anymore. Her eyes were trained in the distance. “Our scouts” was all she said. He looked, too.

They knew something was wrong as soon as the scouts crested the horizon. First, there were only two horses and riders, not three. And second, those two horses were running. Not in the easy, loping gait they used to cover miles at a time, but galloping—heads low, ears flat against their gleaming, sweaty necks as the earth churned beneath their hooves.

“Code red!” Malik yelled from behind. It was what they'd used to shout to warn of an impending attack on the Iowa, but it worked for the caravan, too. Chaos erupted. Soldiers on the carriages all steered their horses closer together and whipped them into a rumbling sprint, and the ones riding astride the carriages raced out to meet the two incoming survivors, bows drawn.

Which two?
Zhang wanted to yell to Malik, even though it was wrong.
Is one of them Ahmadi?
He was supposed to care about the books, not the soldiers, and if he was supposed to care about the soldiers, he was supposed to care about them equally. Zhang craned his neck over the back of his carriage, but they were crashing along so swiftly it was impossible to get a good look. Malik was shouting for the first half of the carriages to speed up and the second half to slow down, so that he could work Zhang's into the center, for protection.
His horse screamed as it flew by. Zhang's driver whipped Holmes in terror until her flanks started to sparkle red. He yelled for Zhang to pick up his shotgun. Their carriage edged up next to the gap in the line to wedge themselves in, and Holmes snarled at the horse of the carriage beside her, who was running wild, unable to feel the reins anymore. She slammed her head into its neck and bit hard until it shrieked and gave way.

“I'm here!” Zhang shouted to Malik. “I'm here! Close the gap!”

Malik's horse thundered down the line again, from front to back, Malik waving his arm for all of them to bunch tighter. Just then, the two surviving riders reached the carriage line.

“Ahmadi!” Zhang cried. She was there. She was alive. He didn't even see who was the other. Their small cavalry surrounded them to bring them back into the caravan safely. And on their heels loomed the reason they'd been fleeing so fast.

“
Reds!
” someone screamed.

The monsters had found them. They'd grown too confident they'd outrun them, and now the shadowless had caught up—hundreds of them. The horizon gleamed crimson. They were on foot, on bicycles, on motorcycles that had been reimagined to run without fuel, some clinging to vicious living gargoyles they'd pulled off the old buildings in D.C. and spent their last precious memories to awaken. All of them probably had just one recollection left, but it was the same one. Kill.

“Fire at will!” Malik yelled.

Ahmadi was like a surgeon with her tools. She drew arrow after arrow without moving anything except for her right arm, even at a gallop, lining them up for each next unlucky Red without her eye ever leaving the center aim of that long, glittering arc. The fiberglass bent gracefully, and almost as soon as she'd notched an arrow, it would whiz out in a deadly, hissing blur. Another Red would huff like the wind had been knocked out of him. And then fall.

Horses trampled limbs, bodies were torn up as they rolled under motorcycles. Shots rang out. Behind him, Zhang heard one of their
soldiers wail, and then something hit the ground and was left in their dusty wake. He struggled to aim the gun his driver had given him. Ahmadi rode by, a stream of blood coming down one side of her face, still firing. She had Malik's quiver strapped over her other shoulder now, and Malik had an axe. He raised it up, sharp edge glinting. His arm was a braid of veins and sweat. Zhang looked away as the screams erupted.

“General!” Zhang's driver grabbed his arm. “What is
that
?”

Zhang turned to look ahead, where the land sloped upward on the left in a long hill. Something covered the whole crest, row after row, fluttering in hundreds of pieces. Everything was white.

“Are those people?” Zhang asked him.

“They
are
!” he cried. They both leaned forward, straining to see across the distance. They were looking for the same thing. If they were people—were they shadowed or shadowless?

“Shadows!” Zhang yelled, to alert the others. His heart swelled. “They have shadows!” He waved desperately from the top of his carriage as they thundered closer and closer. The wind sent ripples through their strange ivory robes. “Faster!” he shouted to his driver. The Reds pursued, relentless, uncaring, but Zhang's soldiers began to cheer. There was a whole army of shadowed people, standing there as if they'd heard the Iowan army's cries and were waiting for their carriages to sweep past, to cut the Reds off and save them. Zhang just had to reach them.

But then they started to move. Long before the Iowans' first carriage was anywhere near their lines. They poured down the hillside slowly, sweeping out in front like a large white fan, simple weapons pointed outward. It was a strange position—far more difficult for the carriages to navigate through. At first Zhang didn't understand. Then he did.

“Ambush!” he screamed. A cry of horror went up all around him as everyone else realized at the same time that the strangers weren't there to help them at all. They were there to do exactly the opposite.

“What do we do?” Zhang's driver asked hysterically.

“Don't stop!” he yelled as loud as he could, so the rest could hear over the screams of the Reds. “Keep your head down and push through!”

Zhang and his driver both ducked as low as possible behind the wooden windbreak in front of their seat as the horses charged. They were close enough now to see the ones in white clearly—men and women wrapped in layers and layers of billowing, pristine fabric. Their front line dug itself in and prepared to receive Zhang's army like a wall of death.

In front, Holmes screamed like a falcon diving for a kill. “Don't stop!” Zhang ordered one more time when the first carriage was almost there. Then his own thrashed wildly as they hit too, and he heard the sound of humans howling as bones broke beneath hooves and wheels. Iowan guns boomed, lightning flashing against the bright day.

“But they have shadows!” Zhang's driver said breathlessly as they turned to make sure the rest of their line had made it through. “I don't understand—they have shadows!”

All around, the ones in white behind their front line started closing on the carriages as they crashed through the crowd. The Reds flew into a fury, attacking whatever was closest, Iowan and strange people in white. Still the robed ones came, unstoppable, like some kind of unfeeling, nightmarish hive mind.

Vienna pulled Zhang from the stupor of his terror. “Fire!” she was screaming at him from her horse. “General—the ones in white—they lit one on fire!” She pointed backward as her mare pushed to match Holmes's sprint. Zhang jerked around, clutching the top of his carriage. The ones in white were howling now, shrieking almost triumphantly.

He saw. Flames licked off the roof of the last carriage in their galloping procession. Dark smoke began to fill the air. What had these strange newcomers done?
Why?
Around them, the Reds wavered, half
resolved to just kill everyone, Iowan or white ghost, the other half mesmerized by the familiar roar of the flames and the ones who had created it. “Malik, the books!” Zhang yelled at him as he rode by again. His entire right half was covered in glistening red syrup from other bodies. The axe shone. He almost looked like the Red King.

Ahmadi was there suddenly as well, eyes wild with terror. “The carriage is on fire!” she cried.

“We can't stop!” Malik said as his horse strained to keep pace with Zhang. “If we stop, we'll lose them all!”

Zhang turned around again. The soldier driving the burning cart was yelling frantically at the rest of them, calling for rescue. Zhang started waving him forward, then kicked a white-robed warrior climbing up his seat ladder. A flying knife barely missed his forehead as the man fell to his death. “How many?” Zhang shouted to Malik.

“With these—whoever the fuck they are, ten to one, at least,” he said.

“Can we win?”

Malik swung his axe, flinging a sheet of blood into the wind. “The Red King and these white ghosts should have sent twice as many,” he said. He raised the blade. “For Imanuel!” he roared.

“Imanuel!” the cry returned, from all around the field.

The rally spurred Zhang. He was shit in a fight, but that didn't matter. Malik protected the soldiers, the General protected the books. “You handle the battle, I'll handle the fire!”

“No, leave it!” Malik yelled, but the engulfed carriage had almost reached Zhang's own, close enough that maybe he could do the stupidest thing of his life. “Zhang!” he cried.

“Malik, go! Just keep them away!” Zhang shouted. Malik finally nodded and raised his axe again. Zhang ducked back into his carriage and rummaged around. There was some water, but not enough. Not enough to stop a blaze like that.

“I don't know how much longer I have!” the soldier driving the burning carriage shouted as he lurched into the empty space where
Malik had just been. His horse was soaked, as though it had plunged through rain, sweat streaming off it. It didn't understand why it couldn't outrun the flames. The whites of its eyes glinted in terror.

“Stay!” Zhang yelled. “I'm coming over! As long as we can last!”

“What?” the soldier cried, face pale with shock. But he didn't jump—he kept the reins and gritted his teeth.

“Keep as close as you can,” Zhang said to his own driver, and then turned to the one commanding the carriage on fire. “You watch the horse,” he shouted to him, and pointed at the half-wild beast galloping in front of them. “When we're out of time, you jump down onto its back, unhook the yoke, and ride off!”

“What about you?” the soldier cried.

“I—” Zhang looked at his driver, struggling to keep their own wagon within reachable distance as they flew at breakneck speed. Behind, the Reds cried out all at once, a shrill and keening scream that purged everything in Zhang's mind for an instant. It was the sound of what their color meant, if a color could speak—a dedication to a singular, absolute goal. The horses reeled, hysterical. “I'll jump back to the first carriage!”

The soldier stared at Zhang for a stunned moment, but then nodded. “Yes, sir!” he finally yelled back, and saluted with the hand not on the reins. He stuck it out to help try to grab at Zhang once he was in midair.

“On three!” Zhang cried.