The Book of M. Peng Shepherd
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settled back against the wall and cradled the phone between her ear and shoulder. She still didn’t know if she fully believed her sister, but she also knew that if Rojan was still lying, arguing about it further wouldn’t convince her. All it would do was wake their mother up when one of them started shouting.
“Can you see the stars?” Rojan asked in the silence.
“From the roof,” Naz said.
“Go up there.”
THE DAY AFTER, NAZ WOKE UP TO LIGHT RAIN PATTERING against the windows. I should try to collect that for drinking, she thought groggily as she rolled over on the carpet to unplug her phone from the wall. But the charge was barely full.
Naz called, and her mother picked up crying. She and Rojan already knew from the news that the power had gone out in Boston overnight. “How much battery do you have left?” Was all she said.
“Seven percent,” Naz answered.
NAZ LEFT THE EARPIECE IN FOR WEEKS, EVEN THOUGH IT WAS useless. She knew even then that it seemed a little crazy, but she kept talking to them as if they were there. She needed to. “Whew, that was heavy!” she’d say when she finished lugging down water from containers she’d found around the building and put open-faced on the roof. Or “Remember when we found out I’d been accepted to train here?” or “Did you hear that?” when an errant sound had terrified her in the middle of the night. It turned out to be a rat in the ventilation system, not a human.
Naz asked Rojan which office she should move to when the music studio grew boring and small, then babbled about the pros and cons. She described what other floors looked like.
She asked her mother if they’d both known what would happen, would she still have cut Naz off to try to stop her from dating? If the shadowlessness had never come, would she have held out until she died, or given up and reached out? She asked if she might try to be better to Rojan than she had been to Naz, if Rojan wanted something else someday, too. Slowly, slowly, Naz stopped talking.
AS SOON AS IT WAS LIGHT ENOUGH TO SEE, ORY SPRINTED. Out of the shelter, down the mountain, all the way to the first ruin of road. That’s where he stopped, jerked to a halt at the edge of that asphalt path.
He had no idea which way Max had gone.
The sun was out, burning so bright everything was white instead of yellow. It made the blow to the back of his head from the night before throb painfully. East, toward downtown Arlington, and then past the river to D.C., was slightly more traversable. West, toward Fairfax County and all the western cities like Falls Church and Oakton and Centreville, was overgrown and wild. Ory gritted through the headache, studying the ground for tracks, but there weren’t any. There was too much grass and rock and not enough dust to see any footprints Max might have left.
How much of her memory had she lost, exactly? Even if it had been a devastating amount, there had to be some figment of it left that would have made her choose one path over the other. A spray of birds shot across the sky from one tree to another, screeching, then disappeared into the leaves. But what if whatever remained wasn’t a part he knew?
The birds chattered again, and then fell silent. Every second that went by was a day. How far could a person who didn’t know where they were going get? No explanation, no clues, no map. She had vanished without a single trace, as silently and mysteriously as had her shadow.
Where did the shadows go? Ory wondered. He didn’t even care about the why anymore. Only the where. The why was inexplicable. Ory didn’t believe in magic, but he knew in his heart that what had happened was nothing that could be understood by humans. It was no natural disaster, no disease, no biological weapon. The best name he’d ever heard for it was curse. Because in the end it didn’t matter who you were. No one escaped—either because they were someone who lost their shadow, or because they were someone who loved someone who lost their shadow.
Ory gritted his teeth. It was impossible to hope now, but he had to believe that the person he was chasing was still Max. Otherwise what would be the point of trying to find her? And if he was chasing Max, then there was only one direction she would have chosen. She’d try to go home. Not the shelter, but their real home. The apartment where they’d lived in D.C., before the Forgetting. Before they’d gotten in the car that weekend so long ago to drive into Virginia for Paul and Imanuel’s wedding. Before everything.
Ory held his breath and ran east, straight into the low-hanging morning light, as if he could outrun his terror. If he could just make it far enough, the rising sun would turn into a bridge, and then he’d be in D.C. And Max would have to be there. She’d have to be.
THAT’S WHAT HE TOLD HIMSELF UNTIL HE COULDN’T RUN anymore.
Odricks Corner had turned into a willow forest, curtains of leaves everywhere. For some reason, the sidewalks had been refashioned into spirals. Ory rested only long enough for the sweat to dry across his forehead. He went on with the gun out then.
Since Paul and Imanuel’s wedding, neither he nor Max had returned to their apartment. She had wanted fiercely to go back, but it was too dangerous. Before the news went down, they’d seen the scenes from Boston, San Francisco, D.C.—fires, looting, roving gangs. There was plenty of food at Elk Cliffs Resort from the wedding, and the slope of the mountain provided natural protection.
Over the years, as more and more of the other guests disappeared, or left to try to make it to their own homes, Ory became convinced that only their mountain was safe. Who knew what was lurking there in the east, in the great silent black hole that had been their capital. For a moment, he remembered the strange group he’d met on Broad Street, what their leader, Ursula, had said. Bad things. Bad things are happening in D.C.
THERE WAS A RUSTLING IN THE HEDGES ALONGSIDE OLD Cedar Road. Ory didn’t like it there, in that part of Arlington. Houses lined both sides of the street, set far back, with low-hanging trees. No one was inside, but the shades behind the windows blinked languidly on their own from time to time, like drowsy eyelids. On the side of one garage, someone had scrawled in charcoal The Dreamless One and The One Who Gathers.
There was more movement, a nervous shuffling. Ory looked and saw no dark shape there under the trembling leaves. He raised the gun and ran.
HE CROSSED UNDER THE I-495 IN LATE EVENING. WOULD MAX have made it as far east as McLean in one day? Perhaps, but no farther. Ory had scoured the ground for signs of her as he went—a dropped supply he might recognize from their stash, a tear of familiar clothing, even a footprint—but had found nothing. Nothing from anyone at all, even. There was a shoe that had been in the gutter so long it was fossilized in mud. A ways after, there had been a bone, but it was old. So old he did not have to look away as he passed it.
In the night, Ory heard something inhumanly heavy cross the interstate, walking over the top of the overpass instead of below. He huddled closer to the dank concrete wall as it passed. Even with the moon, it was so pitch-black, he could not have seen if there was a shadow or not. He didn’t try to look. He held the wall and prayed the sound above would move on.
IN THE MORNING, HE CLIMBED ONTO THE OVERPASS TO SEE what might have been there. But there were only wildflowers and a single car tire.
THE MORNING AFTER THE BOSTON EMERGENCY BROADCAST, I opened my eyes to the worst hangover I’ve ever had. Dim flashes of the night before returned. Marion, my best friend from high school who’d become almost as close to Imanuel as she and I were to each other, calling for calm. Jay “Rhino” White, someone’s plus one—although we never quite figured out whose—declaring himself captain of an investigative scouting team he’d just created. Paul saying, “Fuck this, I’m getting the champagne,” and going to get it. All of it. “If this is the last day on earth, we can’t waste a drop.” Do you remember that? I