AHMADI HAD BEEN RIGHT. IT WAS LIKE COMING HOME. SOMETHING that was familiar, something that he knew and understood. Something that remembered him back.
That night Zhang rolled over and was surprised to feel the soft warmth of another body near his own on the mattress. He opened his eyes and looked in the dark at the silhouette of Ahmadi’s back above the blanket. Her back was different from Max’s. Different color, different slope of the rib cage, different gentle outline of muscles. There were scars on the top of her right arm—a wide band of burns and darkened lines that circled her shoulder. For the first time in a long time, Zhang felt something like hope or happiness as he realized that later there was a chance she would tell him about them. There was a chance they would share even more things and then remember them.
He closed his eyes again, but in the darkness, without his being able to see the pale glow of her skin and the narrowness of her shoulders, it was impossible to know it was Ahmadi there, not someone else. Her warmth radiating softly beside him felt the same.
Did you get to wherever you were trying to go before you forgot everything, Max? he wondered. Did you find whatever you were looking for?
He hadn’t managed to rescue her after all in the end, but as he lay there now, with Ahmadi—knowing that the night hadn’t been the last of its kind with her, but maybe the first, if he wanted it—it felt like an answer, just in a different form than he’d wanted. It must have happened after all. Max must have forgotten him, or at least some of him. Enough of him. Because if he had become a person who could leave Washington, D.C., for New Orleans, who could give up searching—who could possibly someday have feelings for someone else—it could only mean one thing. She was gone.
Zhang wrapped his arm around Ahmadi and put his face against the back of her neck. He nuzzled her softly. To try to make it more real. She murmured, still half-dreaming, then dropped back into deeper sleep again.
“Blue,” he whispered. It was the last time he’d say it, but not the last time he’d remember.
That was the cruelest part. Not that Max had left, but that she had forgotten. It wasn’t her fault, but it was still cruel all the same. Zhang didn’t want Max to forget him, but she had anyway. Now he wanted to forget her, and couldn’t.
MALIK LET VIENNA COME BACK THE NEXT DAY AND THE DAY after, gradually relaxing as he saw how good it was for her. Ahmadi switched some shifts at the wall to join in. It made Zhang happy to have them all there together, completing their little family—but he couldn’t relax. Whenever Vienna was in the library, he was afraid to sit down, to look away for even a second. He felt terrible for not trusting her, but he had been close to only one other shadowless, and she had disappeared once she began to forget. Just up and vanished, and never came back. He couldn’t let himself believe that Vienna wasn’t going to do the same. Every time she went to the tailor’s side to watch them work, or walked outside to stretch her legs, or said she needed a snack from the communal garden, Zhang would make an excuse to follow her. “I just need some air,” he would lie unconvincingly, scrambling for the door an instant after Vienna went through it.
When all the shelves had been fixed and the books organized on them, they painted signs for each genre, built tables and chairs, and hung up a partition to divide the tailor from the library. It took almost a week of constant work, but Zhang didn’t mind. Vienna and he would’ve worked all the way through the nights if Malik and Ahmadi hadn’t shown up each time and blown out all the lanterns just like when he’d been counting the books on the road.
The day the library was finished, they held a small ceremony. Everyone that had come from D.C. gathered to see the books as they were meant to be—not hidden in carriages, but proudly displayed on shelves. They took turns reading from Paul’s poetry as huge swaths of fabric billowed on the tailor’s side just above the dividing wall, the helpers swinging them up to shake out the dust. The verses were punctuated with the soft, gliding sound of shears as they cut. But every gentle intrusion only made Zhang smile. It wasn’t usual, but it was more than Imanuel ever could have hoped for.
Transcendence was still coming, and they knew they’d have to face them, but for the first time in a long time, they all felt like they were finally home. Home. Zhang hadn’t expected to truly ever feel that again.
THE DAY AFTER, VIENNA FORGOT WHO AHMADI WAS.