“You are,” Gajarajan said. “I hope to be able to help you remember soon.”
I smiled again as I looked at her. Vienna. I don’t know how many other shadowless you know, Ory, but here was at least one then. At least you were friends with one other like me. I hoped that would help make it less strange, if you did think it was strange. “I look forward to seeing you again, Vienna,” I said.
Vienna shook my hand. My shadow shook hands with nothing. “Me too. Remind me—if it works, if I meet you again, remind me how we met so I can know.”
I memorized her face. It was easy, burned into my brain in an instant. Gajarajan had taught me techniques to boost memory, once my new shadow took. Letter games, patterns, rhymes. He learned them himself a long time ago from a wise old man he called Dr. Zadeh. His own teacher, he’d said. Now that I can make memories again, Gajarajan thinks that I actually remember new things better than someone who never lost their shadow in the first place.
“It’s time for me to take Max outside now, to meet her husband,” Gajarajan said then to Vienna. My heart began to thunder. “I’ll be back soon, and we’ll talk more about how we’ll find you a new shadow.” His ears ruffled, and I had the impression he’d winked at her. “It shouldn’t hurt,” he added, answering her previous question. “I promise. I’m getting better at this. I learned a lot from Max.”
“It’ll be over before you know it,” I added to reassure her, although it was a lie.
Most of the rejoining was just fragments to me. Moments out of place and time that played like damaged film, stuttering and without sound. But enough to know that it had not been easy for Gajarajan. Not easy at all. It had been harder to join the tape recorder’s shadow to me than any other shadow he’d ever tried on another shadowless before, including even the alligator’s. He’d had to fight it onto me, as if it hadn’t wanted to be joined to something new. Later, Gajarajan told me he’d never had something resist that hard before. But the shadows he tried before had been made of birds and mice and trees and rocks—never something that was partly made from a human. And never something that contained so many memories.
It didn’t matter. It had worked. I remembered. And I hoped it would be smooth for Vienna, but even if it went as roughly for her as it had for me, she would say the same as I would—that it was still worth it in the end. To remember who I was. I gladly would have suffered far worse to have my name back once more. To have you again.
“In the meantime, why don’t you think about anything you might still have with you that has great meaning to you?” Gajarajan said to her. “It’s all right if you don’t remember. But if you do have anything, that might be a good place to start.”
Vienna worked something out of her collar and held it up. A locket on a tarnished chain. “Maybe this?” she asked. Inside were two badly weathered faces, a woman with short hair and a gentle smile and a man with a serious face. They both looked just like her. “My mother and father.” She pointed to the photographs. “When we lost her, he gave it to me. I don’t remember her name. But I remember that this was hers.”
Gajarajan drew closer, flickering from the wall to the floor so he could glide right up to her to see. “That might do very well,” he mused. “Let’s look closer at it when I return.” He was back on the wall, beside me, trunk curving into a smooth arc. Waiting for me.
Breathe, Max, I thought. I made my way across the hall, hand trailing along the familiar walls that had once felt like the extent of the entire world to me. Before I had remembered there were other things out there.
Then we were in front of the door that could be opened only from the other side. Gajarajan hovered, facing me at the same height. Through the dark shape of his ears and head, I could make out the marks that had been written or carved or burned on its surface since he had began trying to replace our shadows more than two years ago. There were signs of fear and rage, grooves from claws or teeth, places where fire or some other corrosive thing had touched, but there were also beautiful things, too. Simple shapes, words, drawings of houses or people or flowers, as memories had come back to the others, bit by bit. I wondered what it must have been like to forget everything twice, once the shadows could no longer be made to cooperate. Or remember, but the wrong things. That you once could fly rather than that you once were someone’s wife.
I suddenly felt afraid. I jammed my hand into my pocket, but the tape recorder wasn’t there.
“Ory has it, Max,” Gajarajan said. “He’ll give it back to you.”
“I know,” I replied. I remembered. I was only nervous.
“We don’t have to open the door until you’re ready.”
I nodded. “Is he also nervous?”