From her horse beside Zhang’s carriage, Vienna clicked her tongue. “Ahmadi isn’t going to like that,” she said. “He better clean the string well.”
They had been talking about Ahmadi as the carriages ambled along. “When did she move to the United States?” Zhang asked. She’d mentioned Tehran a few times, but he’d gotten the sense that it was a thing she looked at only from the periphery, never head on, the way he now did with Max. It was just too painful.
“When she was about my age, I think,” Vienna answered as her horse flicked its head.
Zhang tried to imagine what that would have been like, to move from that far so young. Now it was impossible. Without shadows, Iran seemed like a place that was so unreachable from where they were, it didn’t exist anymore. Maybe it actually didn’t.
“She wanted to go to the Olympics for archery,” Vienna continued. “Apparently the best coach in the world was living in Boston before the Forgetting. When she joined our army, she trained everyone. She’s started teaching us all how to make bows and arrows.”
“You can shoot as well?” Zhang asked.
“Well, guns are easier. But I’m getting better.”
“You’ll have to teach me then,” he said.
“Definitely!” she cried, and then grew suddenly bashful at her outburst. “Are you also from, like, China or something?” She asked.
“No—Arlington,” Zhang replied. He’d almost said we. We came from Arlington. There was no we anymore. No Max. “Well, before that, Portland,” he finally said. “I grew up in Portland, Oregon.”
“With Paul,” Vienna added.
He nodded, smiling.
“I grew up in D.C.,” she continued. “I’ve never left.”
“You’re leaving now,” he offered, but it sounded flat. It wasn’t the same. There was nothing left to see.
But Vienna wasn’t looking at Zhang anymore. Her eyes were trained in the distance. “Our scouts” was all she said. He looked, too.
They knew something was wrong as soon as the scouts crested the horizon. First, there were only two horses and riders, not three. And second, those two horses were running. Not in the easy, loping gait they used to cover miles at a time, but galloping—heads low, ears flat against their gleaming, sweaty necks as the earth churned beneath their hooves.
“Code red!” Malik yelled from behind. It was what they’d used to shout to warn of an impending attack on the Iowa, but it worked for the caravan, too. Chaos erupted. Soldiers on the carriages all steered their horses closer together and whipped them into a rumbling sprint, and the ones riding astride the carriages raced out to meet the two incoming survivors, bows drawn.
Which two? Zhang wanted to yell to Malik, even though it was wrong. Is one of them Ahmadi? He was supposed to care about the books, not the soldiers, and if he was supposed to care about the soldiers, he was supposed to care about them equally. Zhang craned his neck over the back of his carriage, but they were crashing along so swiftly it was impossible to get a good look. Malik was shouting for the first half of the carriages to speed up and the second half to slow down, so that he could work Zhang’s into the center, for protection. His horse screamed as it flew by. Zhang’s driver whipped Holmes in terror until her flanks started to sparkle red. He yelled for Zhang to pick up his shotgun. Their carriage edged up next to the gap in the line to wedge themselves in, and Holmes snarled at the horse of the carriage beside her, who was running wild, unable to feel the reins anymore. She slammed her head into its neck and bit hard until it shrieked and gave way.
“I’m here!” Zhang shouted to Malik. “I’m here! Close the gap!”
Malik’s horse thundered down the line again, from front to back, Malik waving his arm for all of them to bunch tighter. Just then, the two surviving riders reached the carriage line.
“Ahmadi!” Zhang cried. She was there. She was alive. He didn’t even see who was the other. Their small cavalry surrounded them to bring them back into the caravan safely. And on their heels loomed the reason they’d been fleeing so fast.
“Reds!” someone screamed.
The monsters had found them. They’d grown too confident they’d outrun them, and now the shadowless had caught up—hundreds of them. The horizon gleamed crimson. They were on foot, on bicycles, on motorcycles that had been reimagined to run without fuel, some clinging to vicious living gargoyles they’d pulled off the old buildings in D.C. and spent their last precious memories to awaken. All of them probably had just one recollection left, but it was the same one. Kill.
“Fire at will!” Malik yelled.