There was a moment when no one knew what he meant. It was probably the last moment that anyone ever didn’t know. Now nothing ever meant anything else.
“The shadows?” Ory finally asked. But it seemed impossible. The rumors had begun that said perhaps it was something contagious, the new century’s black plague, or Ebola, but it seemed like hysteria, still easy to dismiss. There was just no real information—no one was sending any signals out of the afflicted countries, by phone or email or post or television or radio—and besides satellite images and high-altitude military flyovers, which showed nothing but stillness and the occasional flicker of a terrified shape wandering through streets or jungle, there was nothing else to go on.
“It happened in Boston?” Max asked.
“Not in Boston.” Imanuel shook his head. “To Boston. Almost everyone there.”
BY MIDNIGHT, WORD HAD SPREAD THROUGHOUT THE WEDDING party. The courtyard was deserted, champagne glasses abandoned half-full where they were, and everyone was crowded back into the ballroom. Some were on their cell phones, and the caterers had turned on the TV bolted to the wall in the corner of the room.
“Don’t,” Max said. She put her hand over Ory’s to stop him from opening the browser on his own phone, cradled now in his palm. They’d left their apartment in D.C. late that morning, and hadn’t packed a charger in the rush to make it to the wedding on time. “Save the power, just in case.” It wouldn’t matter—cellular signal would go down in another day or two before they’d run out of battery—but they didn’t know that then. Ory nodded gratefully at her good thinking and edged the device back into his pocket.
On television, helicopter footage cut between downtown Boston and one of the larger highways out of the city beneath a reporter’s voice-over. The National Guard had circled the metropolis and blocked all routes in and out, putting the entire population under indefinite quarantine. There was a mini screen in the bottom right corner running at the same time as the live feed; it was a rerun of the president’s speech that had apparently aired half an hour before, when the news about Boston first broke. He was in the middle of assuring the public that the nation’s top scientists were working around the clock to figure out the cause of the epidemic—the world was still calling it “the epidemic” then, as if it was some kind of simple biological quirk, some twisted proteins or mutated virus that could be solved by the right vaccine—and advised everyone not to travel except in emergency circumstances. “Stay safe, stay inside, limit travel, and limit contact with others whenever possible,” his grainy image repeated. “We are doing everything we can to find a way to neutralize the spread. I promise you, as soon as we discover a cure, we’ll be sending FEMA and Red Cross agents door to door through every neighborhood to distribute it.” His voice was calm, but the message was clear. Do not go to the hospital. Do not go to the grocery store. Do not leave your house. Wait.
Now, it was clear the Forgetting was not contagious. At least it didn’t seem like it was. The number of times that Ory had been curiously examined or attacked by a shadowless while out scavenging, the number of random survivors he’d tried to help in the early days who later succumbed, and he was still here, still whole. If it had been contagious, he’d have lost his shadow years ago. He still had no idea what it actually was. And he’d given up trying to figure it out. But back then, as they all huddled in the ballroom, terrified, watching nervous soldiers try to say—then yell, then desperately mime—instructions to stop and turn back around at the confused, terrified shadowless man approaching them, no one knew if it was or wasn’t something that could be passed by breath or touch. Everything else in the world had always worked that way. At the time, there was no reason to think this was any different. They couldn’t be blamed for what happened then.
The president’s little speech box disappeared, and the split screen suddenly dropped the view of downtown to focus on only the highway feed as the commotion started. A shadowless man had wandered away from the city and was now stumbling toward the line of soldiers, crying, but not saying any words or seeming to hear the ones being shouted at him. He looked to be in his fifties—still strong, but balding, and beginning to grow a middle-aged paunch. He wore brown corduroys, a button-down shirt, and a navy blue sweater over it, pristine in the harsh blaze of the emergency floodlights. He looks like a university professor, Ory thought dazedly. A university professor with no shadow.
The soldiers were screaming now, some waving, some holding an open hand straight out in the universal gesture to stop, to fucking stop, stop or we have to shoot, we have to shoot to kill. The man didn’t seem to recognize or remember any of it at all.