THEIR HOTEL, WHICH THEY DIDN’T CALL A HOTEL ANYMORE, because it wasn’t really so much a hotel as it was a “shelter,” was built on a high peak in the center of Great Falls National Park, overlooking Arlington and the other suburbs of northern Virginia. It meant Ory had to hike down every time he went to the city. But it also meant anyone from the city would have to hike up to it. He passed the wooden post where he’d long ago removed the sign that used to point the way. ELK CLIFFS RESORT—300 M, it once had read.
When the last radio signals went quiet, Ory had made some renovations to the shelter, so it wasn’t obvious from the outside that anyone lived there. He taped up all but one of the windows with cardboard to hide his and Max’s movements, and then did the same to some of the other deserted guest rooms in the building, so their own would not stand out to anyone from the outside, if anyone ever came so close. He dragged broken furniture into the front yard, bent fence posts, burned fire marks into the exterior walls. Any food they did find, he kept on the ground floor, in the abandoned ballroom where they’d once watched the sparkling color and whirl of Paul and Imanuel’s wedding, eternal years ago. They would lose it all if someone found them, but maybe that would be all they would lose, he reasoned. He killed a rat he caught in the basement, smeared its blood over the wood floor in the entryway, and let it stain—one word from the oldest language that was always understood.
It worked, for a time. For two years, they survived that way. Some days Ory even felt safe. But that all had ended last week, when Max lost her shadow.
When they’d finally stopped crying, they made one last change. They came up with a set of rules about things that could be dangerous for Max to do, once she forgot more. “If,” Ory had insisted, not once, but Max just shook her head. “Once,” she repeated. She’d gone to get the last of their scrap paper because Ory had refused to move.
Max didn’t need them yet, but it was better to begin practicing earlier rather than later, she’d said. So they’d already know what to do once—if—the time came. After they’d finished writing, she carefully folded and tore the paper into strips and had Ory tape each rule near the place where she’d need it—the front door, the guest kitchenette, and so on. That way, in case she forgot that they had made rules in the first place, she’d still see them before doing something she didn’t want to do.
They knew it wasn’t perfect, but it was the best they could come up with. They didn’t know what else to do.
MAX AND ORY’S RULES
1—Max doesn’t leave the shelter without Ory.
2—Max can use the small knives to prepare food unsupervised, but not the fire.
3—Max can never answer the door.
Max still knew him, knew his voice, but Ory always carried a key when he left, and had hidden another in the courtyard, inside a false rock he’d scavenged from a deserted housing goods store. He didn’t want to ever get into the habit of knocking and asking her to let him in, no matter how tired or injured he was or how much he was carrying. Because even though it was fine now, later it wouldn’t be. Because later, she might remember that he lived with her, but not that no one else did. That everyone else had left the mountain and the hotel a long time ago. Later, if he was out looking for food and Max was alone, it would be too dangerous to ask her to remember that she let one person in every evening when he came home—Ory—but not another.
4—Max can’t touch the gun.
Just in case.
That one made him sick to think about. He didn’t want to write it down. It felt like betraying her somehow—as if his believing that she’d forget who he was would somehow cause it to happen.
Max made him write it anyway. Just in case.
ALL OF THAT MATTERED LESS NOW. THE WINDOWS, THE blood, Ory never asking her to let him inside instead of using a key. But in the early days, it might have saved their lives. The streets were in constant flux then, changed one way from a bad memory and then changed again from another. Ory’d had to check every direction through a pair of binoculars before he could move a step, for fear of being ambushed by shadowed men or mauled by terrified shadowless. But now there were no shadowed ones left, because they’d turned into shadowless, and almost no shadowless either, because they couldn’t remember that they should stay. Now everything was always still. Nothing moved, nothing made noise, nothing changed. There was no one left to change it. Shops became lonely graveyards, houses became monuments.