“Should we draw?” a third called from farther back.
“Dad!” Vienna yelled, near the second carriage. “What do we do with our weapons?”
“I don’t know!” Malik cried.
“No weapons!” Zhang shouted. He stood up facing back, toward the rest of the procession, and crossed his arms and swiped them flat and outward, over and over. “No weapons!”
“I hope you’re right!” Ahmadi said. The end of the bridge was rushing up to meet them. Suddenly Zhang could see movement along the top of the wall. There were platforms on the other side, littered with lookouts, guards, torches. A thunderous clanging started then, and Zhang realized it was a warning bell: We see you. We see you, you are known.
As if it had been a cue, the carriages all slowed together, hooves clattering, everything leaning forward. Please don’t kill us, Zhang prayed as they slowed to a nervous, twitching halt in front of a set of tall, heavy wood-and-iron doors.
Then for a moment, Zhang forgot his fear. They had come to a stop just a few feet away from the wall, Holmes’s nose almost touching the huge metal hinge where it met the gate. He could see it up close for the first time.
What is it? He stared in awe. The wall was made of something he couldn’t describe. It was almost like it was carved from solid, polished crystal, in a melding, swirling hue that shifted between almost diamond clear and dark, dark blue. It was the most magnificent, impenetrable thing he’d ever seen.
Just then, a dim shape soared by at eye height, inside the wall, then vanished. Zhang pointed, mouth hanging open. “Was that—” he stammered.
“Oh my God.” Ahmadi jumped.
“Was that a fish?”
Everyone gasped in awe. It wasn’t a wall of crystal, Zhang realized. It was something even more impossible than that. It was a wall made entirely of water, for miles and miles and miles—so perfectly still the surface of it shone like glass.
“What is this place?” Ahmadi whispered.
“I don’t know,” Zhang replied. “But we’re about to find out.” There were sounds from above now, from people somehow walking on top of the water wall. Every inch of his flesh became keenly aware of the fact that they’d been waiting in front of the gates for a full ten seconds and had yet to be killed. Slowly he looked up.
“State your purpose!” A shout came down from the top.
Zhang flinched. “Refuge!” he called back. “We . . .” It was almost impossible to believe that he’d come here on a hunch he had heard from a strange woman at a deserted apartment complex almost six months ago, and then been begged to believe by a dead friend. Had she and her Broad Street crew made it too, even with so many shadowless in their group? Had they perished on the way? “We heard New Orleans was still standing. We came to join your city.” Was that good enough? “We can contribute! We have—” He was going to say engineers, nurses, guards, lawyers, even though he had no idea what most of the soldiers had done before the Forgetting, but the screeching sound of the sentry door in the bottom corner of the great gate cut him off. The water rippled where the hinges connected, a tiny wave traveling across the surface and disappearing. A cluster of men and women in mismatched armor trotted out, each brandishing a shotgun—and a shadow. Malik tensed, but didn’t move. Zhang stared. If they had enough shadowed survivors to spare that they would send a whole group of them out to greet total strangers, he couldn’t guess how many were inside the city. Hundreds? Thousands?
After them came another shadowed woman in simple navy clothes, holding a clipboard. She was taller than Zhang, almost as tall as Malik, with reddish brown hair and freckles. Her pale skin gleamed in the sun, as if she’d never seen daylight in her life. As she approached with her small guard, Zhang climbed quickly down from the carriage, and Malik and Ahmadi dismounted. The woman’s clothes were well worn, but clean and unwrinkled. No bones jutted anywhere. Just a few feet away, she stopped and dipped her head in greeting, and said, “Hello.”
Zhang tried to find his voice, but ended up only nodding dumbly. A gust off Lake Pontchartrain picked up and kicked sideways through their line, tinkling metal carriage links, ruffling his tattered coat and the papers on her clipboard.
“Do you speak for the group?” the woman finally continued. There was a faint lilt there, a trace of a French accent or something like it.
“Uh, yes,” Zhang finally said. “General—uh, I mean—Zhang. Zhang, from Arlington, Virginia.”
The woman’s eyebrows arched slightly on her forehead as she recorded the information, but she didn’t look up at Zhang until she’d finished. “Please confirm this is correct,” she asked.
“Yes,” he replied.
“You’ve come a long way,” she said as she took the clipboard back. She was smiling now. “I’m glad to welcome you to New Orleans.”