The night before the mission left, I met you one last time. Malik is an experienced, strong captain—if anyone can get us out and back, it will be him. But there’s no guarantee that we’ll return, and this really could be the last chance you’ll have to learn what happened to your wife—truly the last. If I die, there will be no other version of her left, no matter how pale a substitute. You knew it, too.
I shared as many memories—of mine, of Max’s—as I could with you. Not the things you experienced with her, because you already know those, but all the things that happened in the tape that you never got to hear. The RV, the others who traveled with us, the dangers we overcame. What we lost and gained. What magic we did. Everything you asked, I answered, with as much detail as if each memory had been the key to a riddle whose answer would mean life or death. Each was, I suppose, for both of us—just in different ways. For you, it was death. For me, it was life.
I’m not sure if you were there when we rode off, two full carriages, seven mares, and six volunteers, amid the resounding cheers. There were so many gathered, and the horses moved so fast, it was hard to see. The crowd whooped so loudly that the new Eight—the six that had defended us against Transcendence, now with Ramirez and Played-violin to replace Vienna and Survivedthestorm—rushed out of the first great hall to make sure something terrible wasn’t happening. From the driver’s bench of the first carriage, I watched the city slowly vanish into the distance as the bridge grew longer and longer behind us. Away from everything I loved. It was strange to think that when I first arrived, I hadn’t known who I was. But now, as we left, it could not have been more opposite. I felt it so deeply that I couldn’t believe I had ever been anyone else but myself. The wind stung my eyes as they teared.
“You going to be all right?” Malik asked me gently.
I nodded. “I will,” I said. “I’m just remembering.”
We rode in silence after that, until sundown. According to the gate records over the last eight months, New Orleans received thirteen survivors—twelve shadowless and one shadowed—from Baton Rouge. The greatest number of people all from the same place, aside from your group from Washington, D.C. There was a good chance there were probably more there. As the horses surged, carrying us on, I looked at Malik for a long time and tried to pretend he was you. To pretend the man I loved had been placed inside this other new one. I studied the dark, weathered skin, the tired eyes and thin lips. The unfamiliar lines across his hard face. I tried to imagine you speaking not with your own voice but with Malik’s rough, gravelly murmur. Would I still love you like I love you now? Or would I fail to see you just as you’d failed to see me?
Beneath my feet, my new shadow shuddered as the carriage rumbled over the worn road, keeping perfect time with me. Where all the recordings I now have are contained. The ones about the shelter, about Paul and Imanuel’s wedding, about things before even that—and about the caravan, about friends who are no longer here, and about the long, mysterious road south. All the memories I had finally shared with you the night before, and the one single one I hadn’t.
I told you everything you had wanted to know when we’d met. But there was one thing I didn’t say to you and will never say, because I can’t. It’s not something that can be said—only something that can come as an answer. And you would never ask me the question. But even if I never say it, it’s still real, because a thing does not have to be said to be real. It just has to be remembered.
I will remember it. For myself, for you, and for Max.
Fifty-two.