The amnesiac felt Buddy’s knee press against his own as Buddy settled to listen, sitting close so that he could hover over the book as well. The amnesiac put his finger down on the page, on the hand-drawn image of Chhaya that Hemu had pasted there. He knew it was in the right place. “Sanjna—” he began. The pain washed over him, a paralyzing wave. “Sanjna wanted to run away and hide from her husband, Surya, god of the sun, for even though she loved him, his brightness was too great for her to bear. It seared her eyes and burned her skin, and she could not even look upon him without being blinded.” He tried to swallow the agony. It was so overwhelming, he thought he might throw up again.
“Before she escaped, Sanjna took off her shadow and made it into a likeness of herself, and named it Chhaya, which means shadow,” Dr. Avanthikar said suddenly. The amnesiac felt her hand on his shoulder and leaned gratefully into it. His finger pointed at Hemu’s scrawled text, sliding from word to word by memory, and she picked up where he had left off. “She commanded Chhaya to stay by Surya’s side, always in her place, and fled. Even though Chhaya was born that very moment and had not lived the childhood and youth that Sanjna had, she still remembered everything from Sanjna’s life—the names of all their servants, where all the belongings were in the palace, Surya’s favorite dishes—because that is the place where memories are stored. In shadows.” She leaned closer. “She remembered so much, even the great Surya was fooled.”
“What happened?” Buddy asked, the same way he did every time.
“For years, Surya believed Chhaya was really Sanjna. He even made a son with her—the god Shani. Perhaps if he had never found out that Sanjna had deceived him, he would have spent the rest of eternity with Chhaya, never knowing Sanjna had fled. But one night, when Surya dimmed the lanterns and pulled Chhaya into the bedchamber, he removed Chhaya’s shoes, and suddenly she began to float—because a shadow is weightless. Without her shoes, she had nothing to anchor her to the ground. Then Surya knew that she was a shadow, and not the real Sanjna.”
The amnesiac suddenly heard a soft clink of glass on glass—the vials from their first-aid kit. The pain erupted again in anticipation until he felt as though he was spinning in place. The binder creaked beneath his hands as he clutched it.
“What’s happening?” Buddy asked. The sound grew mercifully closer.
“Any of these?” Downtown interrupted softly. “I can read the labels but—” She gulped, unsettled. “I don’t know what they mean anymore.”
Fabric rustled as Buddy hugged her. The story was forgotten, as quickly as it was remembered. For once, the amnesiac didn’t care at all.
“This one is fine,” Dr. Avanthikar said to Downtown. “The pain is going to get worse before it gets better.” He realized she was now speaking to him—a gentle, commanding tone. The same one she’d used with Hemu. “So I’m going to put you to sleep for a few hours now.”
The amnesiac tried to nod. His skin prickled as it waited for a needle. Every cell in his body begged for the chemical numbness, the empty sleep that would take him away from the agony. “Please—” he managed.
“Don’t worry,” she said. She pressed the book more firmly into his grip. “I’ll keep watch over them all.”
Orlando Zhang
IT STARTED RAINING AGAIN, AND IT RAINED FOR FOUR DAYS straight, until Ory thought they were all going to go insane from the constant wet. Then it stopped as suddenly as it had begun. The ground dried up so fiercely the mud started to crack. Heat wafted off the roads in sweltering, rippling waves, burning every inch of skin that wasn’t covered. Ory kept waiting to see something on the horizon he thought was real and turned out to be a mirage, but nothing that ever materialized out of that shimmering mirror was a hallucination. Just a memory, badly mangled.
There was no time to think in the day, but at night, there was plenty of time. It was so hot he couldn’t sleep—he would lay shirtless on the grass, sweat beading over his upper lip, listening to everyone else snore. It reminded him of Elk Cliffs. It reminded him of Max.
He wished he could tell her about that last day in D.C. About the Red King—who he really was, and that Ory had freed him. He wished he could tell her that Imanuel had also died. He thought she’d want to know, wherever she was. If she remembered Paul and Imanuel at all anymore.
Even in the heat, Ahmadi and Malik still went out to scout each morning, with double the water and long sleeves and hoods to shade from the sun. On the worst day, before they came back, the army had stopped for the evening an hour early, the men and horses too tired to continue. Ory was in the third carriage, making sure the corners of the tarp were still tightly folded around the books. Holmes began to whinny before the soldiers could see them, and then Ahmadi and Malik appeared on the horizon, shoulders hunched and clothes crisped with streaks of salt.
“Still all clear ahead?” Ory asked.
“So far,” Malik said once they’d dismounted. “The whole country is empty. Just fields. Miles and miles of fields.”
“And a funny sign,” Ahmadi added between gulps of water from her canteen.
“A funny sign?” Ory asked.
“Someone had defaced it. Maybe the world’s last graffiti,” she said.
“‘Fuck shadows,’” he guessed.
Ahmadi laughed. “No, it was just a number. Just a blank sheet of metal with a number on it.”
“What number?”