IN THE MAIN HALLWAY, ALL THE GROUPS HAD CONVERGED, each carrying or dragging boxes. The storm hurled rain against the east wall, startling them all into a crouch for a moment. The amnesiac counted quickly. “Everyone’s here. Okay, let’s go. Basement!”
“Basement! Basement!” They all revised the chant. Marie held a wooden torch she’d made and lit somewhere, to help them through the dark hallways. Boxes began to scrape across the floor, out toward the central atrium garden, where the storm doors to the basement were. Just as the amnesiac turned to follow last, something banged against the front lobby door.
“Shit!” he gasped. He stumbled, recovered, barely keeping the old man on his back. “Are you all right?” he asked softly.
“Yeah,” the old man gasped. “Someone’s out there?”
“Don’t—” Marie hissed across the room. “Don’t open it.”
Shadowed scavengers? More shadowless? The storm, throwing debris? The amnesiac watched the locks rattle, praying they would hold. Outside, the wind was howling, strong enough that he could hear the echoes of it through the concrete walls.
The door banged again. “Please!” someone cried, a woman’s voice. “Please! Is someone there? Help me! The storm—” The wind swallowed whatever she said after that.
“Trappers,” Downtown said. “Or kidlings. Or could be deathkites circling her. We can’t be sure.”
Curly was next to him. “We’re out of time.”
They’re right, he thought. Just go. Keep the others safe. That was his job, what he had promised Dr. Zadeh he would do. To keep them together, to watch over them all, and to help them remember as long as he could. He listened to the woman outside pound her fists on the door and wail. The trees were likely bent sideways by now, everything left in the city leaning as if being devoured by a giant vacuum in the sky. The trappers used all manner of bait—children, women, puppies they’d stolen from a street dog. Kidlings didn’t use bait at all. They were so terrible, they didn’t have to. The amnesiac had watched the old man moan in the bus station for four hours yesterday before he was sure no one had planted him there. He couldn’t give this woman the same test—she’d be ripped away by the raging wind in far less time. But he couldn’t just leave her to die, either.
“I’m sorry!” he finally yelled. “We can’t open the door. Go somewhere else while you still have time!”
“Hello?” she screamed. The door rattled as she hit her fists against it. “Dr. Zadeh, is that you?”
Dr. Zadeh.
They all took a step back. The amnesiac looked at Marie, who now was staring suspiciously at the door. Without the signs on the building any longer, there was only one explanation—whoever knew this had been Dr. Zadeh’s clinic had known him personally.
“What now?” Marie whispered.
“I don’t know,” the amnesiac said. He shrugged the leather bag until the straps slid off his arms and it plopped to the ground, and then carefully laid the old man over Curly’s back—he couldn’t fight holding it all. He motioned for Marie to give him her knife.
“Are we really doing this?” she asked.
“Are you shadowless?” the amnesiac called at the door, gripping the blade as tightly as he could.
“No—I have a shadow! I have a shadow!” The woman outside scraped desperately at the wood as the wind shrieked. “Let me in!”
“Then what’s your name?” he yelled. Not that the amnesiac would remember anyone from more than just a few weeks before the Forgetting, but it was all he could think of. “What’s your name? If you still have your shadow, you should remember your name—”
She shouted her answer frantically. He couldn’t hear the first word through the wind, but the second one he finally caught as she screamed it over and over. “Avanthikar!” she cried. “Avanthikar!”
He didn’t realize what he had done until it was over. He was across the room, at the locks. He opened the door, reached out into the cold, slicing rain, grabbed the ragged thing hunched against the wind, and yanked it inside in one motion. Marie’s torch snarled, angry at being whipped by the wet air. The amnesiac pressed the knife down on his captive before she could recover.
“Prove it,” he said. “I’m sorry, but you have to prove it. I have people I have to protect.”
“You,” she stammered. The shadowless were shouting now, some excited, some terrified. It was too dark to see more than the lines on the stranger’s dirty face, her bony hands, the wisp of her shadow pinned beneath her on the floor.
“Prove it,” the amnesiac said again. “How did he die?” Not Dr. Zadeh, but the other. The other man they both had known and loved.
The woman looked at him for a long moment, trying to understand the words through the knife, the wind, the drowning rain. Then all of her memories caught up, from whatever distance they’d had to travel to reach her again.
“Peanut butter,” she finally said.