“I know.” He nodded tiredly. “It drives me mad. But I agreed when I let her walk in.” He leaned forward and stared hard into the wall where Gajarajan was darkly cast. “But I can’t keep sitting here in New Orleans waiting indefinitely. I need to do something. Anything.”
What Malik had proposed to him seemed like a death wish, but if anyone could succeed at this task, it would be him and his soldiers. He had come to Gajarajan the day after Vienna entered the sanctuary, shouting the elephant’s name as if possessed, until the shadow flashed up onto the curved wall of the altar to receive him. The body was perched ready to stop him in case he lunged; Gajarajan had thought he’d come to try and take his daughter back by force now that the reality of her absence had finally sunk in. But it wasn’t that at all. He’d come to ask for the exact opposite: to be allowed to leave the city. He wanted to take a small team and search the strange new wilderness for more people—shadowed or shadowless—and help them reach New Orleans, too.
Gajarajan slid to the left along the wall, closer to Malik. “I’m worried about the danger,” the shadow finally said. “About sending you and your volunteers back out there again. To where the shadowless are succumbing to the pull, and there’s no one to stop them.”
“I know. But we can do it.” Malik brushed away a fly as the soldiers training took a break, panting from exertion. For a brief moment, his face darkened. Gajarajan imagined he was remembering the ghost of the first Iowan General again. Of the terrifying shadowless he’d called the Red King, and of the monsters in white who came out of the wilderness after their carriages with fire. “We’ve survived much worse.”
“Are you afraid at all that something might happen to you out there? Something that might prevent you from returning to Vienna?” Gajarajan asked.
“Yes,” he admitted. “But I think it would be worse if I stayed.”
The shadow studied Malik’s face. There would be no deterring the man, he could see. The strain was there beneath the fierce expression. The knowledge that the only thing he could do to help his daughter was not to do anything at all for her. Something had to fill that hole before it consumed him. But more than that, he was also right: there were shadowless out there in need of help, who might not find the city or hear the stories on their own.
Gajarajan nodded. “All right. But for this to be worth anything, you need to be able to show those you find indisputable proof of this place and my power. Otherwise, you’re no more convincing than the rumors.”
“If I can get you that indisputable proof, you agree that we can go?” Malik asked.
“If you can, then—” Gajarajan started.
“I will,” he interrupted, certain. “In D.C., I listened to the legends about you for more than a year before I made it here. Hoping, but not fully believing, since I had nothing to go on but gossip. Because it wasn’t just my life on the line if that gossip was wrong—it was Vienna’s, too. I was desperate for one of those someones speaking the rumors to not just talk but to show me—something I could see with my own eyes and touch with my own hands, to prove you were real. If anyone here can find something like that, it’ll be me.”
“What would that sort of something be, though?” Gajarajan asked.
“I’m not sure yet,” Malik said. “But I’ll know it when I see it.”
Mahnaz Ahmadi
NAZ MOVED OUT OF HOUSE 33.
After her shift at the wall, she went upstairs and piled everything into a bedsheet like it was a folding rucksack. There wasn’t that much anyway. Just her bow, some clothes, and the remains of what family trinkets she and Rojan had started out with in their duffel bag.
There was a room left on the top floor of House 47, the most recently finished house—and the farthest open spot away from House 33—so she went there. Zhang said he didn’t want her to go, but she couldn’t stay. Not after she knew that the shadowless who had been successfully rehabilitated was his Max, and that she’d be ready to rejoin the world in a day. What was Naz supposed to do? Just sit at the communal kitchen table while Zhang brought her through the door and they talked upstairs? While he—moved her into his room right beside hers? It was better this way. She needed time to think.