“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 man
y 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.
The One Who Gathers
“HE’S NEVER DONE THAT BEFORE, APPARENTLY,” DR. ZADEH said. They were in the car again, on their way to the hospital from the hotel for their third visit. The amnesiac wasn’t sure he’d slept at all last night, but he didn’t feel the least bit tired. “Confided in anyone about his elephant research or pulled the cables off his head like that. Dr. Avanthikar hopes it’s a promising sign. Did he say anything potentially helpful when the alarms were going? The microphones couldn’t pick up anything.”
Magic. “No,” the amnesiac lied.
Dr. Zadeh frowned. “Nothing?” he asked. “What was he talking about?”
“Just how he felt,” the amnesiac said. “He’s afraid of what he can’t remember, but he’s also embarrassed by it. It’s a strange feeling, to be surrounded by people who you know have a better understanding of you than you do.”
“Shame is a powerful emotion.” Dr. Zadeh nodded sympathetically. “It can be a huge obstacle.”
It wasn’t that the amnesiac didn’t trust Dr. Zadeh or Dr. Avanthikar. He just didn’t understand how to explain to them what Hemu had said. Hemu needed their help if he ever hoped to stop his forgetting, but they already had him under virtual arrest, confined to two rooms inside a hospital wing. He was more experiment than patient. What would they do if the amnesiac told them what Hemu had revealed and made him seem even more impossible and confusing?
“NOW THAT YOU’VE ESTABLISHED SOME RAPPORT, LET’S HAVE you ask him specific questions about his past today,” Dr. Avanthikar said as the amnesiac took off his shoes to enter Hemu’s transplanted living room. “Childhood, family, Zero Shadow Day, the moment when he first started to forget.” She clicked a few screens on her computer. “Maybe you’ll be able to better help him pinpoint something relevant than we can, now that you two have quite the bond.”
“I’ll try,” he said.
Dr. Avanthikar put a hand on his shoulder to reassure him. “I know you’re worried about his decline, but we still have plenty of time. Okay?”
“Okay.” He tried to smile. Dr. Avanthikar opened the door.
“My American friend,” Hemu nodded from inside his little wired web as the amnesiac walked in. He apparently didn’t mind having the cables on again, now that he’d managed to pass his secret on. Or perhaps he was only pretending to be calm, waiting for another moment. Or perhaps he’d already forgotten what he’d said. “Any American food?”
“Oh,” the amnesiac blinked. The peanut butter and jelly sandwich. “I’m sorry, Hemu. We were late leaving to get here this morning—it completely slipped my mind.”
Hemu waved it off. “I shouldn’t even have asked. Don’t trouble yourself with it.”
“I promised I would,” he said. “Tomorrow.”
Hemu slid his elephant research notebook carefully onto the low table so he could settle more comfortably on the couch. The amnesiac sat in the chair facing him and waited patiently for the aides to attach the cables to his own forehead again so they would match each other. “So what have they instructed us to speak about today?” Hemu asked. “More Gajarajan?”
“Unfortunately, no,” the amnesiac said. “They’re hoping for more of a . . . focused approach now. They want us to talk about anything about your past.”
Hemu nodded, resigned. They sat for a moment.
“You know what the worst part is,” he started. The amnesiac looked up. “Is forgetting something, but remembering that you’ve forgotten it.” He toyed with the hem of his tunic. “It’s almost better to both forget a thing and also forget you’ve forgotten it. Maybe not better. But kinder.”
The amnesiac sighed. “I’m sorry we have to do this,” he said.
“It’s all right. I know you’re only trying to help. This just always shows me exactly what it is I’ve lost.” He took a breath. “Did you have any family that you didn’t remember you had?”
The amnesiac thought about Charlotte. “Not really,” he said. “No siblings. I apparently never knew my father, and my mother died a few years before the accident.”
Hemu squinted, thinking. “I have a mother,” he said. “I do remember that word, what it means. Just not who she is.”
“Dr. Zadeh told me that my mother’s name was Anne,” the amnesiac said.
“The doctors say they keep telling me what mine is named, too. But I just can’t hold it.”
“It’s not your fault,” the amnesiac said.
“So they all keep saying,” Hemu sighed.
“Do you remember the last time you saw her?” the amnesiac continued. “I mean, I know you don’t, I just meant—maybe we could try to work backward.” He felt absurdly underqualified. Surely his own team had tried this countless times. “I see Dr. Zadeh—my doctor—do that with his other patients, sometimes,” he finished lamely.
“I do remember cameras,” Hemu said. “A lot of cameras. It was so bright. Every time one would finish its blinding flash, another one would be starting. All I could see was white.” He peeled back his lips and made the sound of a hundred shutters clicking: chh chh chh chh chh chh chh. “The police were trying to help me into a van, to get me away from them. I wanted to close my eyes and just let them push me toward the back doors and into a seat.”
“Oh, this is when they took you from the spice market and brought you here,” the amnesiac said.
“The what?” Hemu asked, looking at the amnesiac mid-thought, face puzzled.
“The spice market.”
“What market?”
“The—what was it called—the Mandai,” the amnesiac tried. “The spice market. Where you were when you lost your shadow.”
Hemu’s dark eyes grew distant, as if he was gazing somewhere far away. He was trying to recall it, the amnesiac realized.
“I don’t remember,” Hemu finally said.
A few minutes later, there was a metal clang on the other side of the door, from inside of the observation room. A chair falling as someone stood up out of it too quickly, maybe. The amnesiac glanced over, but the door didn’t open.
Then someone cried out “Mandai!” The wall muffled it somewhat, but the word was clear enough. “Mandai! Mandai!”
They both stared at the door. Suddenly everyone was screaming. “What’s going on?” Hemu asked fearfully.
“I don’t know,” the amnesiac said. He ripped the cables off his head. “Stay here,” he called over the alarms he’d triggered, and ran across the room. He shoved the door to the observation office open. Dr. Zadeh dashed forward to stop who he thought would be Hemu, but then realized it was only the amnesiac. The shadowless was still sitting where he’d been left, staring confusedly at them. Inside, the aides were shouting and pointing at a TV playing the news. Dr. Avanthikar had her silver head in her hands. There was an aerial shot of a completely empty street on the screen. No shops or buildings lining the sides, not even paint on the asphalt to denote traffic lines. A crowd had begun to swarm at its edges. “What’s going on?” the amnesiac cried to her over the alarms.
The reporter’s voice-over was in Hindi, but it was unmistakable that he was yelling, frantic. Dr. Avanthikar didn’t look up from her hands. “The spice market is gone,” she said. “It . . . it vanished into thin air.”
THE NEXT MORNING, AN AIDE OPENED THE DOOR TO HEMU’S re-created living room for the last t
ime. Both doctors nodded at the amnesiac as he stood there. Just a few minutes, it meant. That was all the time they had. After whatever had happened to Mandai, the rest of the night had been filled with uniforms, badges, interrogations. Interrogations of Dr. Avanthikar. Interrogations of Dr. Zadeh. Interrogations of the amnesiac, over and over. None of them could explain it. Hemu was the only one the officers didn’t question. They were afraid to cause whatever had happened to happen again. They watched him through the observation window for hours in silence before they let the rest of them go home.
Dr. Zadeh and the amnesiac had woken at dawn to the hotel room phone ringing. They had no idea which official was on the line, but the message he relayed from the prime minister was unambiguous: the joint Indian-American experiment was over. They had less than twelve hours to get on a plane voluntarily before law enforcement would come and forcibly deport them. As soon as Dr. Zadeh put down the receiver, it rang again. This time it was Dr. Avanthikar. More officials were coming at noon for further assessment of her research, she told him. If they could get to the hospital before that, they could say goodbye and escape clean.
“Hemu,” the amnesiac said.
“Hello,” Hemu replied. He tucked his legs up beneath him on the couch.
They looked at each other for a few moments. The amnesiac wondered if he still remembered what had happened yesterday evening—not exactly what, but that it had been terrible, and it was his fault somehow, or if Hemu was simply waiting for him to speak. If he even remembered the amnesiac at all.
“I’m leaving today,” he finally said. “I have to go back home.”
“Oh.” Hemu looked down. “That’s too bad. I like—I liked talking with you. Especially about Gajarajan.”
The amnesiac felt an immense relief. “You remember,” he said.
Hemu shrugged. “For now. Soon I might not remember you even came.”
The amnesiac walked over to where Hemu was seated. “For now is good enough for me,” he said.
Hemu looked up at him and smiled. He saw it then. How tired Hemu was. How tired he must have been for a long time.
The Book of M Page 16
