Zhang had no idea how Gajarajan knew it. Vienna nodded gently, as if from far away.
They watched the white waves begin to split from one endless alabaster surface into hundreds, thousands of small fluttering shapes, men and women covered from head to toe in their strange white robes. Maybe they were all hoping they would forget because they couldn’t even see who they each were anymore.
“False prophet!” someone finally called from deep within Transcendence’s lines. “Show yourself!”
Zhang nearly cried out when their gate trembled in response. Ahmadi clutched his arm with fingernails like razor blades as Malik forced himself to obey Gajarajan’s nod to crank the wheel to open the huge doors. “Why are we doing this?” Zhang hissed. “Why open it for them?” But the shadow beside them said nothing. Zhang clutched the railing of the tower’s low wall until his knuckles turned white.
Transcendence seemed equally surprised that they were opening the city to them. The first row lowered their weapons uncertainly. From inside, The Eight stared them down.
At last, one white shape pushed through the many to the front. “Transcended ones, we greet you.” The man bowed, and his shadow copied. “If you join us now, we can offer you protection during the battle, and then mercy afterward. You will be accepted into Transcendence as honored guests.”
“We wish to speak to Lucius,” Vienna said.
The man in white paused. He was close enough that Zhang could just make out his eyes from the tower as they narrowed suspiciously. “Your own leader doesn’t show himself. What makes you think you have the right to demand to speak to ours?”
“The One Who Gathers has a shadow,” Vienna said coldly. She gestured to the towering, shimmering height of the living storm bound to stillness on either side of the gate. Something one still bound to his dark twin could never make. “Who do you think is really in charge here?”
The man in white finally bowed again. It was impossible to tell, but Zhang thought he might have been smiling beneath all the veils and layers. “Our leader asked to meet you before we even arrived. I am happy to have found you worthy of his audience.”
Zhang braced as their crowd parted around another shifting section of itself. A group emerged, tightly clustered. At least ten disciples surrounded their great shadowless messiah, a tall and almost handsome man of indeterminate age. The front two on either side held on to him as they walked by linking their arms with his at the elbows, like human chains. Trying to keep him from utterly destroying the city until they’re ready, Zhang thought grimly. He was also draped in the same robes, but more layers of them, and longer, and was the only one with his head completely uncovered.
Lucius.
It was the look on the shadowless’s face that caught Zhang: it was nothing like how the ones in Gajarajan’s sanctuary seemed. Their gazes were absent, but not angry, not afraid—as if their memories had simply gone off somewhere else for a time and might return. It was even different from what he’d seen on the faces of the Red King and the Reds. That had been greed and rage, twisted out of control without memory. Lucius was something far worse—he was nothing at all. Emptiness that could never be filled. His eyes were not simply dimmed or distant—they were dead.
The escort of disciples came to a stop in front of the first man that had been speaking for them all. Lucius stared at The Eight for several seconds, studying them in silence. From above, Zhang studied him back intensely. There was something almost familiar about him—almost like a face he’d met in another time, another world—but he could not place him. The disciples clung to him, practically melding onto his body. Their shadows twisted behind them into a grotesque mass.
“You lead the people of New Orleans?” Lucius finally asked. The voice was disarmingly quiet and smooth. “A city of shadowed people?”
“We have many shadowless as well,” Vienna said. “New Orleans welcomes all who want to remember instead of forget.”
“Once a man transcends, he cannot return,” Lucius replied.
Vienna grinned. “You’re wrong.”
The disciples around Lucius pulled tighter, and Zhang flinched—but nothing happened. Lucius only nodded. “You haven’t been shadowless for very long,” he finally said. “You’ll see.”
“I have seen,” Vienna replied. “When I heard the rumors, I didn’t believe most of them either. But then I arrived in New Orleans and—”
“You came to New Orleans?” Lucius asked. “You didn’t already live here?”
“From Washington, D.C.,” Vienna answered.
Lucius’s eyes narrowed as he searched the incomplete archives of his mind for information that was attached to any of those words. “On your way, you didn’t see a very large thing to ride in—a large vehicle—did you?”