“I didn’t mean to, but I tried to remember them and then I . . .” Ysabelle sobbed, voice muffled by her hands. Victor held her. He was trying as hard as he could—trying to do his job as husband to comfort a woman whom he didn’t remember he loved. “But I had them, I know I did. I know. A mother and a father. But now I don’t know what they look like. I forgot their names.”
“What if we fake an emergency?” Victor asked, smoothing her pale hair. His voice was angrier than I’ve ever heard it. Angry that we were trapped, angry that his wife was panicking and that there was nothing he could do about it—angry that the only reason he knew she was his wife in the first place was because Ursula had reminded him. “Would they open the cage if one of us might be dying?”
“They always have the rest of us if someone does,” Lucius said.
“We have to get out of here. We have to get away. We’re going to run out of time,” Ysabelle said.
Ursula paced along the cage, tiger-like. The guards were at attention, ready to try to stop something impossible from happening. I touched the bar beside my head tentatively as I watched them track her movement, considering. But no. It felt more solid than it had ever felt. I still remembered too well that bars do not bend. And these especially. They seemed even more impossible to escape than simply steel.
“Can you do it?” Zachary asked me softly over Ysabelle’s whimpering.
I shook my head. “Can you?”
He shook his head, too. “Even all together . . . Not enough yet.”
“Yet?”
He watched Ursula glare at each guard with his strange, distant eyes. “Someone giving in to the pull, for power. Little, little every day.”
Did he know about Lucius, too? Or was it someone else? “Zachary,” I whispered. “Do you know who it is?”
He shook his head again.
I sat down against the bars. I know you’d tell me not to try, Ory, even if I was strong enough. That whatever I’d lose wouldn’t be worth it.
The only thing I wouldn’t trade would be you. If I escaped but didn’t remember you, that would be the same thing as dying in here anyway.
Now we know, Ory. Now we know what Transcendence really wants us for. It’s not to cure us at all. You wouldn’t—I barely believe myself.
I heard the sounds before I fully woke. Humming. Soft, mumbling chants. I opened my eyes.
The guards were still there, alabaster pillars around the room. But now, all around the cage, the floor had changed into a rippling, shifting sea of white. It took me a long moment to realize I was looking at bodies. Hundreds of bodies. Every one of them prostrate in front of us, foreheads to the floor, arms reaching. Every one of them with a shadow.
“Ursula,” I hissed. I grabbed her shoulder. “Wake up!”
“Holy mother,” Lucius murmured, drawing into a crouch. “Look at them all.”
“What are they doing?” Ursula asked, disgust and terror in her voice. “Are they . . . are they . . .”
“They’re praying,” Lucius said, in a tone very different from hers. It was almost like wonder. “They’re praying to us.”
It didn’t take long for him to change after that.
When the woman in white came to us in the evening, after the hundreds of others had finished their chanting and departed one by one, we all huddled as far from her as possible. She offered us a packet of crackers one by one, so fresh they even still might have had some flavor. All eight of us refused to take any. Only Lucius went forward and ate one.
“You understand,” she said to him.
He chewed thoughtfully. “You want to become like us,” he said.
The woman in white nodded. “Yes,” she said, almost mesmerized. “We want to become like you. We want to transcend.”
“All of you are insane,” Ursula growled. “Absolutely insane.”
“We’re not insane,” the woman replied. “Everyone else is. Your power isn’t something to be afraid of. It’s something to be embraced. It’s the future, not the end.”
“You don’t understand,” I said. She couldn’t. She would never be able to. She still had her shadow.
The woman looked at Lucius again. He took another cracker. “Your friends have to stay here,” she said. “They will not be mistreated. But they cannot come with you unless they join us.”
“All right,” he said.
“Lucius,” Ursula whispered, horrified.
“The guns are loaded,” the woman warned. There were more guards filing into the room now, barrels trained on us. Ten, twenty. The woman unlocked the door.
“Lucius,” Ursula said again as he stepped free. “Lucius.”
“Just stop,” he said. He glanced back at us. “You made your choice. No one forced you to refuse their offer to join. I made mine.”
“So you’re just giving up?”
“Ursula, we were never going to make it.”
I thought she was going to yell, but Ursula just shook her head. When she spoke again, her voice was much quieter. “Whatever you think it’s going to be like—being their treasured, magical idol—it won’t be,” she said.
The woman in white closed the cage door behind Lucius and locked it again. Lucius put his hands on the bars, this time from the outside. “I know,” he said softly. He looked down. “But it’ll be a better life than this cage, for a while. And when it changes, I won’t remember to regret it anyway.”
Orlando Zhang
“I THINK THAT DOES IT.” AHMADI STEPPED BACK AND STUDIED Ory. “How do you feel?”