IN THE OLD WORLD, THERE WOULD HAVE BEEN PHOTOGRAPHS and documents to compare. Persons would have had wallets whose driver’s licenses could be entered into databases and matched instantly, as they had once done for his own body, after the car accident that led to his birth. There was none of that now. All Gajarajan had was a woman who had arrived on foot, alone, who remembered nothing, and a tape recorder with fragmented thoughts locked inside.
Zhang never spoke about his life before the Forgetting, or even before arriving in New Orleans, really. The shadow thought of him only as Zhang, or the General, or the one who brought all the books. In the tape recordings, he was always called by his first name, and there was no mention of the others in his group, or Washington, D.C., or what he’d been doing there. When the shadowless woman had shown up at the gate, she hadn’t been able to speak at all anymore. There was almost nothing left. Gajarajan spent weeks painstakingly analyzing the recordings to draw out what was needed, to make the recorder’s own little square shadow much, much more detailed and complete than he had ever been able to do before—the most human-shaped shadow he’d ever been able to craft from something else—before he tried to take it from the thing and place it on her. It was nearly finished by the time Zhang and his army eventually arrived at the gates.
Perhaps he should have asked Zhang more about himself sooner. But Gajarajan had always been bad with names anyway—he hadn’t even noticed that almost every one of the Iowan soldiers had given only a surname at all until Vienna forgot Zhang’s and called him something else.
“Ory,” he murmured softly. He reflected off the wall back to the roof. The sleeper did not stir. There would be plenty of time to tell them both the good news tomorrow. “I’ve found your wife, Ory,” Gajarajan said to the moon. “Max is here.”
Mahnaz Ahmadi
THAT WAS A SURPRISE. NEITHER ONE OF THEM SAW THAT COMING. Not in a million years.
The day after Vienna and The Eight had saved the city from Transcendence felt like a day out of time. They all wandered around, staring at everything that still existed, still was theirs. Shopkeepers neglected to open shops. Sentries didn’t show up for duty. Zhang failed to unlock the library—but no one wanted to read anyway. They were all too busy just living. Looking at lampposts, sprigs of grass, a smudge along the bottom of a wall from someone’s boot, and marveling they were all still alive.
The only thing that reminded Naz to do anything at all was her stomach. By evening, she and Zhang both were in House 33’s kitchen, chopping potatoes from the community garden while they waited for their turn at the cooking pot outside. The stove was free, but there hadn’t been any thunderstorms for a few days, so the wires that trailed off into the sky weren’t able to catch a current—they were back to the pot and front-yard fire pit for now. But Naz didn’t mind. She hadn’t had even a moment of electricity for two years. Having it for a few hours every few days now was like magic.
Some of their housemates from the other rooms were laughing about something at the kitchen table. Zhang was dicing expertly, even one finger short. His hand had healed so well.
The soup was Max’s recipe. Naz thought maybe it was progress, that he had suggested it. Max apparently hadn’t been the best cook, but Naz was. She was still trying to decide if she was supposed to make it well—would that impress him or seem cruel?—or not so well—would that comfort him, or make him even more depressed?
“I’m starving,” she said just as a knock rattled the front door.
“Think it’s Malik?” Zhang asked as the knife paused. “Maybe he came for dinner?”
She didn’t think it was—Malik hadn’t been up for visiting since Vienna had left for the sanctuary so Gajarajan could begin trying to make her a new shadow, or whatever it was that he did. Then they heard their housemates’ surprised voices.
“Oh! Why—”
“Gajarajan! What an honor!”
Naz looked at Zhang. Surprise was etched across his forehead.
“I didn’t know he went anywhere,” Naz heard one of them say to the other as they came back through the kitchen and disappeared to their rooms. “The human part, I mean.”
“Zhang,” Gajarajan’s voice reached them then. His body smiled as soon as it stepped into the kitchen. Behind it, on the wall, Gajarajan looked at Naz, and the grin lessened slightly. It was almost as if he hadn’t expected her to be there.
“Hi,” she said.
Gajarajan bowed slightly, spread across both the wall and the counter.
They waited, but Gajarajan just kept looking at Zhang, as if unsure of how to proceed. Between the two of them, the shadow’s human body waited patiently, vaguely facing her, but not quite. Naz tried not to stare.
“It’s nothing to be embarrassed about,” Gajarajan finally said to her. “It’s a strange thing to see a blindfolded man walk as if he could see.”
“I’m sorry.” Naz managed to look away, to the shadow, and smile. “Other than when Transcendence came, I don’t think I’ve seen you do it.” She didn’t say that it wasn’t so much the walking as that he never bothered to point the body in the right direction once he set it somewhere—in their kitchen or upon the altar.
“Don’t be. I use it so infrequently, I’ve made it into something strange. There’s just so rarely any need.”