The Book of M

by Peng Shepherd

  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.

  URSULA CLIMBED DOWN FROM THE DRIVER’S SEAT AND CLOSED the door softly behind her. It was far too early in the day to stop, and we hadn’t scouted the area to make sure we were alone, but it was a worse idea to keep going. Now that I’ve forgotten how to read, we have to figure something out fast—before we get lost.

  “Dhuuxo, Intisaar, you’re on watch. Ys and Lucius, take Wes and Victor and see if there’s any firewood nearby. Everyone stays within sight of the RV at all times,” she said. Her grip on her hunting rifle was more fierce than usual, as if she was drawing strength from it. Ory, it was the first time I’ve ever seen the look of weightlessness in her that I see in the other shadowless in our caravan. Zachary touched her shoulder. Maybe he saw it, too. “You’re with us,” Ursula said to him.

  Zachary collected his tools from the RV. He could tell we wanted him to draw something—some kind of a sign we could understand without having to read. On the grass, he laid out his paints and brushes so we could see the colors.

  “If we just stay on the huge road we’ve been following so far,” I tried to explain to him, using words and gestures, “we’ll end up in New Orleans.” I had no idea how he could do it, but that’s what I wanted his picture—whatever wordless map he could make us—to mean. That we had to keep going south, and we had to stay on the widest, biggest road. And then at the end, there would be a huge city.

  At least we hoped there would be. Large enough or loud enough to catch our attention as we passed, since we wouldn’t understand the road signs. Otherwise, what would be the point of stopping anyway, then? If there really wasn’t anything in New Orleans, it wouldn’t matter if we missed it—any other place would be just as good.

  Zachary nodded slowly. He, Ursula, and I took a few steps back from the RV, to take in the big black strokes of paint covering its side while he tried to figure out something to do. It was one thing to draw each of us, like Zachary often did. But how was he going not only to draw a city but also to convey that we were supposed to head for it and in which direction it was?

  Zachary suddenly walked toward the RV, one eye closed, as if measuring something against its surface.

  “Ursula,” I said, “he knows what to do.”

  Ursula looked up from her thoughts to see Zachary touching the aluminum siding gently, examining it. When he pulled his hand away, I saw that there was a streak of color where his fingers had been, even though he had yet to touch his paints.

  “Did you see—” I started to ask her.

  “Yes,” she said softly. “It’s been happening for a long time.”

  Wes is taller, but Victor is bigger. We hoisted Zachary onto his shoulders. Ysabelle stood next to them, holding up his art supplies with her hands so he could reach them.

  “You okay to hold him?” Ursula asked.

  “Yep,” Victor said. The lion tattoo on his bicep bulged. “He barely weighs anything at all.”

  It took Zachary the rest of the afternoon to sketch his plan onto the RV. Tomorrow he’ll paint it. As soon as he finished, he laid down in the center of the floor of the cabin, exhausted, and fell deep into unconsciousness the instant his eyes closed.

  I was the opposite. I don’t think I slept at all once it got dark, even though it wasn’t my turn to keep watch. I couldn’t even lay inside the RV. Lucius gave me a surprised, amused look when I climbed out around two A.M. and went over to the place where he was standing watch for his shift, but he didn’t say anything. He stared into the dark, distant trees, scanning for movement, and I looked at the RV. Please let this work, I thought. It was too dark to see what Zachary’s faint marks outlined once the sun went down, but I sat next to Lucius’s spare coat on the grass and stared at the dim shape of the RV anyway until the sky began to brighten again.

  In the morning, I tried to puzzle out what Zachary had drawn, but the pencil lines were thin, and the indentations in the aluminum siding distorted everything. Maybe not even everything had been drawn yet. They might just have been guiding lines for his paintbrush.

  From around the back of the RV, Ursula, Dhuuxo, and Zachary walked slowly, carrying the cans of paint they’d brought when they left Arlington. I watched them as they approached, feeling strange—almost like I’ve known them as long as I’ve known you, Ory. How long have we been on the road now? How long has it been since I left you? It feels like just yesterday that I walked away from the shelter, but I know that can’t be true. I know I’ve already forgotten some things—the reading proves that. How many days between now and the last time I saw you have I also lost?

  “Rough night?” Ursula asked when she saw my expression.

  “Can’t remember,” I joked.

  Dhuuxo laughed, and even Ursula tried to smile, but then her face was serious again. “This will work,” she said. She set the paint down and wiped her hands. “It has to.”

  I nodded, trying to believe her.

  After Zachary mixed his paints and handed Ysabelle the right brushes to hold up to him, he turned around from atop Victor’s shoulders and looked at Ursula. His hand hovered in the air, waiting.

  “All right, everyone,” she said. “Let’s let him work in peace.”

  We all crept around the other side of the RV to wait. Lucius napped in the shade, catching up after his shift as lookout. He still had the rope tether on his ankle—the one that whoever is watching wears so if he forgets and begins to wander off, the tether will hopefully show him that he wants to stay, not go. I settled with my back against a tree, relaxing into the cool, rough bark, and Dhuuxo and Intisaar sat cross-legged in the grass farther away, talking softly to each other. I thought I saw another rose in Dhuuxo’s hands at one point, but when I looked again, nothing was there. Ursula patrolled slowly, surveying the distance for movement.

  I heard the scrape of something soft squeezing through leaves and leaned around the trunk of my tree to look. A small, sk
inny wolf cocked its head and peered at me. Its yellow eyes glinted, almost glowing.

  We stared each other down for several seconds, perfectly still. “There are too many of us to attack me,” I finally warned.

  “I know,” it said simply.

  All right then. I settled back against the tree.

  We both watched the RV. In the small space between the ground and the bottom of the vehicle, I could see Victor’s and Ysabelle’s feet standing on the other side. Deeper into the trees, there was another stirring—probably the rest of the wolf’s pack, waiting for it to satisfy its curiosity and continue on with them.

  “Are you building a den?” it asked.

  “Sort of,” I said. “But when we’re finished building it, we’ll move it.”

  “A moving den,” the wolf mused. “That’s very interesting.”

  “Is your den here, too?” I asked.

  “No, no. But this is a fine spot. Far fewer humans around than where it is now, especially if you move yours away.”

  The last part caught my attention. I scooted into a crouch from my place against the tree. Where was Ursula? “You’ve seen other humans recently?”

  “That way, where the warm breeze crosses the third colder breeze,” it answered, using its ears to indicate the rough direction. They swiveled, pointing independently while its head stayed still.

  I didn’t know what the breezes meant, but I imagined it couldn’t be more than a few miles. Within walking distance for the wolf. “Those humans, were they wearing white?” I asked.