It was impossible. How could the Red King have known the exact book they had been looking for all this time, without being able to read it?
But he didn’t have time to consider it further. The Red woman’s breath shuddered weakly. Run, Ory, Max urged again. Get out.
Then the whole room collapsed into a deafening roar.
Too late, Max whispered. “No,” he tried to argue, but he knew. The woman is dead.
The Reds’ screams became a war call. Something bright and hot whizzed by Ory’s head and smashed into the bookshelf beside him. Fire. They were setting everything on fire. They were going to burn it all down.
“Imanuel!” Ory yelled as he came careening around the shelves. Everywhere, Reds were running wildly. The woman was still on the floor, unmoving. He couldn’t see Imanuel or the Red King through the chaos. “Imanuel!”
He spotted them through the gathering crowd. He shoved between the vicious, crazed Reds, running for the far end of the room, where the Red King and Imanuel were sliding on the blood-soaked floor, strangling each other, both scrambling for a weapon. Ory was so close he could almost touch them when the Red King’s crimson hand wrapped around a shard of broken glass. He was so close he could see the Red King in all his horrifying glory for the first time. So close he could see his face as the serrated tool sang through the air.
“No!” Imanuel screamed. Everything froze.
Ory didn’t know if it was because Imanuel knew he couldn’t stop the blade or because he suddenly realized that Ory was there, where Imanuel had begged him not to be.
He understood now—why his friend had been so afraid for him to join the Iowa’s missions, and why all of the shadowless were so obsessed with books. Because if it was true that every shadowless got to keep one thing to cling to until the very end—one thing that would eventually be all there was left of them, until everything was gone—and that being together under a powerful leader helped them remember longer what little they still had, then only one thing made sense. Ory did not want to believe it, but he was there, and it was too late. He saw.
The Red King was Paul.
“No!” Imanuel cried again. The jagged shard plunged into him, and the sound snapped off into a horrible gasp. Blood spurted everywhere in a surging river until both he and the Red King looked the same.
Ory ran at them, his voice echoing off the walls as he lunged. “Paul!” he screamed.
The Red King let go of Imanuel’s body and turned. It was impossible to tell if it was simply because of the sound, or if that word was the last word that could catch fire in his mind. Ory wanted to see the answer in his eyes as he descended upon him, but he searched, searched—even as he pulled the D.C. police-issue Glock 13 that Malik had given him out of the belt of his pants and aimed, he searched—and saw nothing. There was only red.
Ory had heard their soldiers tell one another legends that the Red King was unkillable, that he’d forgotten he wasn’t immortal, so he was. But it wasn’t true. He had forgotten his name, that he had written poetry, that he was not the size of a rhinoceros. That Imanuel was a person he once loved, not feared and hated. But he had not yet forgotten that he could die.
“Is it done?” Imanuel asked him as Ory crouched down to him. The gun smoked in his hand, emptied of the same fatal storm that had possessed his lost shotgun. Thunder moaned softly, fading in time with the last shuddering beats of the Red King’s life. All around them, the shocked, disbelieving screams began.
“It’s done,” Ory said.
“I told you not to come,” he repeated faintly. His eyes were glazed.
“I know,” Ory said softly. He put a hand gently under Imanuel’s head.
“I didn’t want . . . ,” Imanuel rasped, “you to know.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Ory said. “You got the book.” The book was Paul. Not that. That had never been.
“Book,” he repeated.
Ory took it from where it lay beside Imanuel, still wrapped in a tattered plastic bag he must have brought from the Iowa to protect it. There was so much blood Ory could barely see. He pressed his hand to Imanuel’s neck to try to stanch the place he thought the enraged, throbbing flood was leaving his body, but it didn’t help. The wounds were too deep. He tried to pick Imanuel up, but Imanuel was too weak to help him lift. They sank back to the floor as the Reds began to crowd around them.
“Go,” Imanuel said, but Ory shook his head. The Reds converged. He couldn’t move. He couldn’t leave Imanuel.
Suddenly Ahmadi was there, slapping his face, trying to bring him out of his shock. Ory looked up to see Malik hoisting up the other side of Imanuel’s limp, pallid body. They’d broken the General’s order, too. They had come.