The Book of M (46 page)

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.

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.”

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.

There was a room left on the top floor of House 47, the most recently finished house—and the farthest open spot away from House 33—so she went there. Zhang said he didn't want her to go, but she couldn't stay. Not after she knew that the shadowless who had been successfully rehabilitated was
his
Max, and that she'd be ready to rejoin the world in a day. What was Naz supposed to do? Just sit at the communal kitchen table while Zhang brought her through the door and they talked upstairs? While he—moved her into his room right beside hers? It was better this way. She needed time to think.

In her braver moments, she wanted to be happy for him. To find anyone again after what had happened was nothing short of a miracle. What would she give if Rojan could come back? But this was different. Zhang had added to Naz's life, but she had taken Max's place in his.

House 47 was full of a group of university students from Memphis who had walked to New Orleans because some of them used to have parents who lived in Metairie. They all knew one another pretty well and let Naz keep to herself. That was good. She signed on for a few extra shifts on the wall, and decided to spend some time with Malik before he left, which he was convinced would be soon, despite the fact that nothing he'd brought to Gajarajan had been anywhere near the “indisputable proof” he needed to be able to go. She almost went to
him after she put her clothes in House 47 and signed up for his crazy mission, too, but she stopped herself on the walk over. It would have been for the wrong reasons. She would have been doing it to punish Zhang, to force his hand in choosing.

In truth, she knew she probably should have done it. She should have forced it. Max was his wife. If Naz was on the road for five, six months, it would make everything a lot easier. She'd come back, and it would be over. Maybe then she'd go out again, and just keep going out every time another mission was ready. But it turned out she didn't have the guts. Or maybe she had too much hope. Impossible hope. But she also was watching the impossible happen right in front of her.

It should have been the most romantic story in the world: wife loses her memory and disappears, husband traverses the country, braving wilderness and war to find her, against million-to-one odds. Naz was sure that Zhang prayed every night that Max wasn't dead, that he'd really be with her once more, never actually believing any of it was possible. Otherwise, none of this between he and Naz would have happened. He was the one who leaned forward to kiss her that night in her room, not she. He thought he finally had to forget Max, because she was never coming back.

Except here she was. And she remembered.