“A large vehicle?” Vienna frowned. “No. There’s no fuel anymore.”
“Oh.” Lucius glanced down for a moment, at the grass that tickled the billowing hems of his robe. Zhang waited for something more, or the reason he’d asked, but Lucius said nothing. He simply waited. But for what?
The longer Zhang watched, the stranger the scene in front of him seemed. Lucius was there, as Gajarajan had said he would be, and he was shadowless, and Transcendence clearly worshipped him—but everything felt as if it was tilted one degree off center. As if Zhang was the one who wasn’t remembering something that he should have understood, instead of all the shadowless.
“We came in horse carriages,” Vienna offered, as if that might have been what he meant.
But Lucius only shook his head and waved a hand to dispel the words. “Never mind,” he said. Then, even more quietly: “I can’t remember why I asked.”
“Enough talk,” the first Transcendence disciple, the one who had been appointed to speak, growled to The Eight. He pointed at Vienna. “Join us now, or after we destroy your false prophet and free you.”
From the corner of his eye, Zhang saw the shadow of the elephant shift on the wall beside him. “Remember, don’t fight them,” he whispered. “Not a single one.”
And then he stretched out of the tower in a flash and spread himself across the earth just to the left of The Eight, his shape burned starkly against the grass like black fire—a shadow with no body.
A cry of horror went up from the fluttering, alabaster army as the closest ones saw it. “The blasphemer!” the man in white shrieked. “The monstrous one!” The city echoed with their screams. The disciples around Lucius cowered, howling, and even Lucius looked momentarily stunned at the unnatural, impossible sight. In the tower with Zhang, Malik, and Ahmadi, The One Who Gathers’s body continued to sit placidly, out of sight.
“Destroy them!” one of the disciples cried. White surged toward the gates, toward the city, a deafening avalanche.
Vienna raised her hand straight above her head. The signal. “Now!”
Zhang slid down the ladder and ran, before he could think better of it. Ahmadi and Malik thudded onto the grass after him. “Now!” Zhang cried again, to help relay her call, but he didn’t need to. She had forgotten something—something that made her voice audible everywhere in the city at once. All around them, every New Orleanian not sequestered in the first great hall was pouring onto the deserted streets, running as fast as they could for the open plaza of the city where The Eight waited, moments from being surrounded by Transcendence. Zhang, Ahmadi, and Malik crashed into another waterfall of people exploding out of a joining street, and were sucked into the current. He looked for Ahmadi, but all he could see were arms, the backs of heads, hair whipping in the wind. Don’t fight, he tried to remind himself as he felt the panic rise. They all sprinted straight for the swarming white and crashed into their lines.
“Zhang!” Ahmadi screamed. Zhang turned around frantically, but he couldn’t see her. Not see—tell apart. Because everyone suddenly had the same face.
“What the . . . ,” the person next to him said then, as a shocked silence suddenly fell across both armies.
Vienna had changed all of them—thousands of New Orleanians—so that they all looked just like Transcendence. Everyone was now wearing the exact same pale, swirling robes, veiled to the tops of their noses. Zhang looked at the man standing next to him, and to both his horror and exhilaration, couldn’t tell who he was at all. He had no idea if he was New Orleanian or Transcendence.
He was almost too awestruck to wonder what it had cost Vienna.
“Mix with them!” someone from the New Orleans side cried out then. “Mix with them so we’re too intertwined for them to attack!”
“Retreat!” a Transcendence general yelled back. “Retreat!” People began pushing and yelling, trying to move but afraid to injure anyone in case they were facing an ally instead of an enemy. The crowd surged in multiple directions, but it was too late—all of Transcendence’s army had thrust itself through the city gate in its rage at having seen Gajarajan’s monstrous form. The iron doors clanged shut behind them as they struggled to peel away from the disguised New Orleanians.
He was useful after all, Zhang realized as he looked up at the tower, where Gajarajan was no doubt back inside—and where his body had just finished spinning the wheel to close the gate. Everyone stood frozen at the realization that both groups were now trapped together inside the city.
“Zhang?” someone called in the momentary pause.
“Ahmadi,” Zhang hissed. “Ahmadi!” He squeezed around confused shapes. Everyone was still coming out of shock. “Ahmadi!” But the white-robed figure he bumped into next in the jostling crowd wasn’t her.