That was the worst of all. The houses were how they learned the horrible danger of their experiment. If a rejoining failed midway—if the new, stolen shadow didn’t take or he tried to strip it back off by force—the shadowless died.
“Maybe it can’t be done after all,” he said softly as they stood over their latest failure. The shadow hadn’t wanted to admit it, but it was becoming harder and harder to believe. The dark outline of a salvaged car engine lay draped over the floor between him and the doctor, lifeless. It had begun to fade even as he tore it from the machine, evaporating. For the first time, he could feel himself lose hope.
“Don’t give up,” Dr. Avanthikar pleaded. “No matter what.”
“I don’t even understand what caused it in the first place. The shadowlessness.”
She tried to put her hand on his shoulder as best she could. In the end, she simply placed her palm flat against the wall, over the top of his outline. “It doesn’t matter,” she said.
“Yes, it does,” he argued.
“No, it doesn’t.”
He could feel the warmth of her skin as it seeped into the stone where he lay.
“Look at me,” Dr. Avanthikar said. He slowly obeyed. “It doesn’t matter why it happened anymore. It only matters what we do from here.”
He looked down again, trying to believe her.
“You have to do this, Gajarajan.” She called him by a name, and for the first time, it felt right. “You’re the only one who can.”
GAJARAJAN HAD TOLD DR. AVANTHIKAR THAT DIFFICULT DAY that he would find a way to do it, somehow, even though he had no idea how. He kept trying, and failing. It wasn’t until almost two years later—just before Zhang’s army arrived at the wall—that he finally made good on that promise. He only wished that she had still been alive to see it.
They had been fighting again, after damaging another shadow so badly as they tried to strip it from its solid chandelier form that it vanished the instant it came free. Gajarajan was prowling back and forth against the wall, and Dr. Avanthikar was facing away from him, looking over the rest of the sleeping city, to keep herself from falling into the argument once more.
“Look,” she said suddenly. He turned from his flat surface to see her pointing across town, toward the gate. “Is that someone out there?” she asked.
He looked closer and nodded. She was right. Another shadowless had found his way to them, the first one in weeks, and was now wandering aimlessly back and forth on the narrow bridge over the water, as if lost.
“He needs help to make it the rest of the way here,” she said.
“Too far gone,” Gajarajan replied. “Besides, it’s past dusk. The deathkites are out.” Since they’d created the wall, the deathkites knew better than to fly over the city. They could feel the same magic in that thing as was in themselves. But outside its bounds, the night was still their territory.
“Gajarajan,” Dr. Avanthikar said, “they come because you’ve called them. You can’t leave them out there when they finally do. Everyone who wishes to remember again deserves the same,” she said.
“I wish that were true, but the risk is too great.” He sighed. He and their eight remaining shadowless patients from the former facility were still learning how to work together. They were not ready for the deathkites yet, if they could help it. “We could lose many trying to save one.”
But Dr. Avanthikar never listened to him. She’d stopped listening to him ever since they began trying to fix the shadowless. Gajarajan couldn’t remember the last time they’d spoken without arguing. Each failure made them more and more raw. “What about you, then? What about Marie and Downtown and Curly and Buddy? Should I have left you upstairs to die during the hurricane instead, because there were more of them to protect downstairs?”
“Yes,” he said, but she was gone, marching stubbornly down to the front gate, to demand a guard contingent follow her for a rescue operation.
“Let me out,” Dr. Avanthikar ordered the night sentries clustered around Davidia at the entrance. “It’s an emergency.”
“Stop her,” the shadow said to the captain, from the wall beside her post, and she flinched in surprise at his instant appearance. His legs lay in two long dark lines across all the roofs of New Orleans.
Dr. Avanthikar ignored him. “This is a rescue!”
“Don’t listen,” he said. “It’s not safe.”
The guards didn’t open the gate, but before they could grab her, Dr. Avanthikar threw herself straight into the great bound wall of storm water just beside it instead.
It enveloped her at once, sucking her in like a riptide—but the wall had been made by their shadowless, for their own protection. It released her gently on the other side into a puddle on the grass. She began to run toward the bridge.