“The water.” Rojan grinned.
It was how she’d avoided the roadblocks and reached Naz in the first place, it turned out. After watching the man she’d shared a ride with turned away by police in riot gear carrying huge machine guns, Rojan had decided she didn’t want to press her luck and started hunting for an unguarded street—but she couldn’t find one. Sooner or later, she always ran into another roadblock or a roving patrol, blue and red lights dazzling the night. By accident she found herself crouching behind a small overturned boat in a trash heap to hide from a passing cluster of police, and that’s when she got the idea.
“I dragged it up onto the bank where I came out and tried to hide it in the bushes,” she said. “I can show you where from the roof.”
Once they were ready, they went up for the last time. Rojan walked to the far side of the roof and pointed. From Dorchester Street, it was just a few turns from the shore of Old Harbor, where she was sure the boat was hidden. They waited until 1:30 A.M. exactly and then ran down the road as silently as they could in the pitch-blackness. Sure enough, the little metal boat was there, stuffed into the shrubs. As they dragged it the last few yards to the shore, Naz stepped into the icy water by accident with one foot and gasped in agony.
“Naz!” Rojan whispered, panicked.
“Fuck, that’s cold!” Naz hissed.
“Don’t do that! I thought something was wrong!”
“Something is wrong!” she snapped, but she shut up. Her sister was right, she could be freezing later. Rojan climbed into the boat and set her backpack and the duffel bag down, then put out a hand. Naz slipped the bow over her shoulder and grabbed Rojan’s palm.
They rolled up their sleeves and paddled with their hands until their fingers were numb, because there were no oars. They drifted south, south, south. At some point in the darkness, they bumped into something floating. Naz’s first thought was that it was a body, but thank God it wasn’t—it was just a piece of wood.
When they finally found a shore that seemed far enough away, they crawled out of their own dinghy and crept between the carcasses of other half-sunk boats to the asphalt.
“Heritage Drive.” Rojan read the street sign overhead softly. She looked at Naz expectantly, waiting to hear if they’d gone far enough, if they were clear of Boston proper and the roadblocks.
“I think we’re okay,” Naz muttered, dumbfounded. Somehow they’d paddled all the way to Quincy. How far was that? She tried to estimate. Five, six miles? “Let’s go slow.” She pulled the bow off her back and kept it ready. The streets were even more unnervingly still than from where they’d come.
On the back wall of the next building, glowing under the flickering light of a roof security lamp, someone had graffitied a phrase in spray-paint.
“The One Who Gathers?” Rojan read softly. The name sent a chill through Naz as her sister said it. Rojan reached out and touched the bottom drip of paint—it was long dry. “What on earth do you think it means?”
Naz shook her head slowly. “I have no idea,” she said.
The One Who Gathers
LATER, HE CAME TO HAVE MANY NAMES. THE ONE WITH A Middle but No Beginning. The Stillmind. Patient RA. Last, most important of all—The One Who Gathers. But in the beginning, he had no name at all.
Once he had recovered enough to walk on his own, he was discharged from the hospital and moved to an assisted-living facility, to begin therapy with a specialist named Dr. Zadeh. This was years ago, some three months before that ominous May day when Hemu Joshi became the first man to lose his shadow. It was still early spring where he lived, in New Orleans—the sun rose late and set early in the gently crisp air there. Dr. Zadeh had come to him in the ICU on the first day, once the surgeons told him that his new patient was awake.
Things were a blur then. Emptiness and fear. He couldn’t lift his head or speak. The nurses were so harried that none of them realized he might want to know what was going on, let alone stopped to tell him. But then Dr. Zadeh strode in with his starched lab coat, pen in hand, clipboard bursting with papers that must contain answers, and looked directly at him. Not at his vitals monitor, or his Frankenstein’s monster scalp incision, but at him. The man felt a chill when he did it. Until that moment, the man hadn’t been entirely sure he was alive at all.
“I’m Dr. Zadeh,” the doctor said. He spoke slowly and clearly. “You are in Ochsner Baptist Medical Center, in New Orleans. You were involved in a car crash and suffered injuries. Some of them were very serious. You were in a coma for a week, but you’re out of the woods now. Blink once if you understand.”
Yyyyyh, he tried. His mind could not will his tongue.