Ursula’s expression faltered for an instant as she realized I had named a thing that should have been there but couldn’t remember why it wasn’t. There were too many white-masked disciples streaming after us for her to consider it for more than a few seconds, though, or we’d die. “Don’t worry about that now!” she shouted from the front seat. “Just keep them away from us!”
I clambered to the other side, to help Dhuuxo and Intisaar hold off our pursuers. There was a knife in my hand, a knife with a dark green handle that hadn’t been there before, I realized with dim horror, but there was nothing left to do now but thrust it out the window, slash, and scream. Zachary was on the floor by our feet, his hands scrambling madly to pluck shapes out of thin air and then grasp them as solid things. He had heard me. He was trying to remember his brushes, so he could paint for us again. The soft stains on his fingers were darkening as they spread, creeping until the skin of his arms had turned into an inky swirl almost up to his elbows.
“Don’t do this!” a familiar voice cried. The woman in white was there, shouting at us from the back of one of the strafing motorcycles. She didn’t have a weapon, but her driver did. “There is nothing for you there! We can give you everything—power, respect, love, an army—”
Zachary lurched to the opposite windows, between Victor and Wes, covered to the chest in color now as if he’d been tarred. I didn’t even know in what direction we were driving—or if Ursula did either. Please let him remember what the painting looks like, I pleaded. Just one more time. But the RV was moving too fast, and there were too many of them chasing us. I could feel it—he was running out of time somehow. There was no way for him to paint anything by reaching out the window as we sped, but if we could escape, by the time we were safe enough to stop, he wouldn’t remember what the mural looked like.
“Ursula!” I yelled, but she yelled at the same moment as well, ducking as a thrown rock crashed against her window, fracturing the glass.
“No fear,” Zachary said to me in a voice that was somehow not strained at all, despite the chaos. “No fear. I paint.”
I looked at him, and he nodded calmly. It was hard to tell—there was just so much dark, gleaming varnish on him now, covering almost every inch of his body—but I thought I saw his navy-blue-stained lips smile at me. I paint, he said again, without moving them at all. I believed him, Ory.
“Left side!” Intisaar cried as an ATV screeched wildly past us, dangerously close to the front cabin. I looked away from Zachary and thrust my arm through the window to slice at anything within reach.
“No more cages!” the woman in white continued desperately, just behind us. Her motorcycle swerved around a pothole at deadly speed.
“Someone kill her, whoever she is,” Ursula said. The RV shifted gears into a charging sprint.
“We were wrong! No more cages! Anything you want! We—” Her cries turned into a surprised choke as the soldier steering for them suddenly jerked like a doll. I thought I heard a storm calling from somewhere nearby. The man’s head dropped back, then slowly tilted to the side at an angle that made it clear he was no longer driving the motorcycle—no one with their head at such an angle could drive a motorcycle.
“Got them!” Dhuuxo snarled triumphantly. A pistol was smoking in her grip, but then she didn’t have it any longer as quickly as she had gotten it. She stared in surprise at her empty hands.
The motorcycle stayed balanced beside us for just a moment. Straight—then listing, listing, slowly toward the road’s shoulder—and then it disappeared in an explosion of sand, white flags of fabric, fire. “Angela!” someone screamed, a long, horrible howl. “Angela, no!”
The word broke a kind of spell over me. She’d had no face, but now she had a name. Angela. Angela. I could imagine her as more than just someone who locked other humans into cages until they broke. As something other than a piece of Transcendence. Angela who worked in banking, Angela who went for five-mile runs around her neighborhood, when it had still existed, Angela whose husband died in the first month. Who had misinterpreted shadowlessness as some kind of religion—who had somehow fooled herself into believing that because the Forgetting was uncontrollable, inevitable, that also made it right. Angela—just another woman who didn’t understand anything that had happened either. None of us did.
“Do not let them get away, no matter what!” another voice cried at last from somewhere near the taillights. The rest of Transcendence rallied around it, shouting. “They’re coming back with us—dead or alive!”
“More speed, Ursula!” I shouted to her. The RV groaned frightfully, somehow lurching forward even faster. Another thing forgotten. “Or they’re going to kill us!”
“Just keep fighting!” she called back. The motorcycles edged ever closer. Behind, gun muzzles gleamed from the off-road jeeps. There were far, far too many of them. If they managed to stop our vehicle, we’d never survive.
“Faster!” I screamed again as a white hand swiped for our rearview mirror. The RV roared.
Ursula drove so far and so fast to lose the horde, we didn’t realize until we finally, finally stopped that Zachary was gone.
Orlando Zhang