“You have no idea how long we can hang on,” Ursula said.
“But I do.” She looked down almost hesitantly, as if she didn’t want to say what followed. “I’ve been instructed to stop feeding you.”
“What?” Victor roared. The lion tattoo on his arm looked just as angry as he was. “You’re just going to starve us to death? What kind of people are you?”
“You won’t starve. We won’t let that happen,” the woman said. “You’ll join us before you do.”
Ursula glared at her in silence. Transcendence were not shadowless, but they’d captured enough of us to know how the pull worked. How much faster fear or suffering made the forgetting come. It was a foolproof plan: first be kind, offer food and protection from the outside world in the hopes that we might join them voluntarily—but if that fails, just wait until we forget they were the ones who put us in this cage in the first place. Then they would be our rescuers, not our captors.
The woman in white finally met our eyes again. “Whether now or later, we’ll welcome you all the same.”
Victor threw the remains of his cigarette carton after her as she turned to leave, disgusted. The rest of us watched the guards remove the belt from the bars without protest. It wasn’t worth the risk of injury or of accidentally forgetting something in the struggle. It was useless anyway.
“Give me until dawn,” Ursula said at last, once things had calmed down.
“To what?” Ysabelle asked. “We can’t break the cage. We’ve tried so many times already, and it’s never even creaked once.” She ran her hands through her pale hair. “I don’t know if I have until dawn,” she whispered. “I don’t know if I can hang on that long anymore. And even if we do get out, what if that woman is right? What if there is no New Orleans after all, and we’ve been heading for nothing all this time?”
“Stop,” Ursula said. “There is a New Orleans. And we are going there.”
“Really?” I snapped, before I could stop myself.
It was the first time I’d gone against her. It broke something in the rest of us. We began to fight, everyone yelling at everyone else.
Ursula turned to me in the chaos. Both of us looked on the verge of crying. “It’s going to be all right,” she said gently over the roar.
But it’s not going to be all right, is it, Ory? Because if there isn’t a New Orleans, or if we get there and it’s not what we hope it is, then it would really be over. Everything I’ve done, the hope I’ve finally started to feel, all of it would be for nothing. I won’t ever—there’s no chance I—shit, Ory. Shit. I’m crying. I don’t want you to hear me like this.
I thought it was for the best, my love. Leaving home. You would know that by now if you could listen. I didn’t want you to see me this way. I didn’t want you to have to live with whatever was left. And if the worst thing happened, if I forgot you, I didn’t want to be the reason that you died or disappeared—or turned into something that wasn’t you. I couldn’t be the reason. You would’ve done the same thing for me, and you know it.
When the arguing and crying had finally died away, Ursula came and sat by me in the corner of the cage.
“Ory. His name is Ory,” I whispered.
“I know,” she said. She nodded her chin toward where the recorder was hidden in my shirt.
“I’m afraid to forget him,” I admitted, ashamed.
“You won’t,” Ursula insisted.
“How can you know that?”
“Because I am going to get us out of here,” she said firmly. “And I’m going to get you to New Orleans before it’s too late. I don’t know how, but I will. I promise.”
“But the woman is telling the truth, isn’t she?” I asked. “That the cage can’t be bent.”
“Yes,” Ursula finally said. “But it doesn’t matter. We’ve been going about it all wrong.”
“What do you mean?”
She squeezed her hands around one of the bars, almost tenderly this time. “Maybe we don’t need to open it to escape.”
I could see her sifting through what was left of her mind. Looking to see if she had the strength to do what she wanted—what she might give up if she succeeded. What we all might. Because even though Ursula was going to try and bear the brunt of whatever memories we might lose when she let the pull free to revolt against our captors, it was still going to take something from all of us. We wouldn’t be listeners when she did it, but a chorus, because whatever she wanted to do, it would cost too much for her alone to pay the price. We would have to harmonize, because to sing all of it alone would destroy her.
Ursula looked at me again, eyes determined. “Just give me until dawn,” she said.