“Please, after you,” Gajarajan said, and gestured to the other end of the first hall, his dark arm sweeping across the wall. “I’m coming too, don’t worry.”
As they walked, the shadowless sitting on mats in little clusters looked up at Gajarajan, then Ory. Some seemed to have no idea who he was, or had known and forgotten, but a few must have heard the news. “Congratulations,” they said softly, with a happiness that was almost more like awe. They found each other, after all this, in the end. He could see what it meant to them, what they were watching happen. She remembers again. It worked. It’s possible after all.
At the end of the first great hall was a corridor, and then a door.
“One,” Gajarajan said, meaning the first of the only two doors.
Ory nodded as he looked at it. What would it be like to live in a place where you had to walk this far before you hit a barrier? He had imagined that when you became shadowless, there were hundreds more doors, not fewer.
Gajarajan’s shadowy arm slithered across the face of the wood. “The second door is just inside. It leads into the second great hall.”
“What’s this, then?” Ory asked as the first door started to move, the shadow’s dark, two-dimensional outline impossibly pushing the three-dimensional thing open.
“The visiting room,” Gajarajan said.
In the small space, there were four chairs around a simple wooden table. Max’s tape recorder was in the center of its bare surface.
“Oh, God,” Ory said.
“It’s the same one,” Gajarajan confirmed.
“The same one,” he repeated, entranced. He clenched his fists to stop himself from leaping at it. “Can I hold it?”
“Of course,” Gajarajan said. “It belongs to you and Max.”
For a moment, Ory didn’t move. Then he did. He sat down first, and gently touched the cool plastic. Then he realized it had no shadow beneath it. “Does it—?”
“Unfortunately, no,” Gajarajan said softly. “It doesn’t play. I had to use them—the recordings. To form her shadow into the right shape. Otherwise it would have been just a rectangle, hardly the form of a woman at all.” He paused. “At the time she arrived, I didn’t know what had happened. Who you were, if you were still out there . . . My first obligation was to Max. To restore her memories, as completely as I was able.”
“No, that . . .” Ory nodded. “That was the right thing to do.”
Gajarajan shifted on the wall, edging closer. “It might be best to leave it on the table during the reintroduction,” he added kindly. “As an object you both share.”
Ory nodded again and pulled his hands back into his lap. “Yes, that’s a good idea,” he heard himself say. He looked up at the second door, the one on the other side of the room. It was far, far heavier. It almost seemed as if it wasn’t made of wood, but another material entirely.
“That one can be opened only from this side, the outside,” Gajarajan said when he saw Ory studying it. “A good friend remembered that a long time ago.” He draped himself across the chair next to Ory, sitting without needing to pull it out first. He had left the one directly across empty, Ory noticed. For Max. “I didn’t want it that way, but it’s for the best, for everyone’s protection. Taking and rejoining a shadow can be . . . complicated. If something goes wrong, it would be very bad if a shadow or shadowless could let themselves out.”
“How do you get in and out then?” Ory asked.
Gajarajan pointed up, at the ceiling. “There’s an opening in the roof in the room. I stretch up the outside wall and then reflect down through there.”
Ory nodded numbly. It occurred to him again just how far away from his physical body they were.
“I . . .” Gajarajan paused. His chest was on the back of the chair and his head on the wall behind it. “I just want to apologize for how long it took me to realize that you were the Ory in the recordings.” He lifted his great ears against the surface of the wall, in a gesture of helplessness. “I really had no idea. I’m so sorry.”
“It’s all right,” Ory stammered. It was too late to be angry. “She’s here now.”
“She is,” Gajarajan nodded.
The shadow stood, and Ory braced himself when it vanished. Gajarajan had to check on Max one more time, to make sure she was also ready for him to open the door that was separating them. Ory waited in agonizing silence, trying to decide if it had been fifteen seconds or fifteen hours. She was just feet away from him. He couldn’t stop straining to catch any hint of sound in the silence. He tried to figure out what he would say. Would he introduce himself again, or greet her as he always had? Should he shake her hand? Hug her? Could he kiss her—if she wanted? Would he have the courage? The time passed by in a garbled blur.