“All right,” Paul said. There was something strange in the tone. As if it had been a surrender at the end of an argument, not a casual comment. You looked at each other for a long time before he squatted back down.
You led me into the trees, over to the small stream. The water smelled almost sweet. I took one shoe off and nudged a few pebbles from the edge of the bank into the softly gurgling water. You copied me.
“Blue,” you said at last. Your voice was tight.
I stopped and looked at you, as you took my hand and looped your fingers tightly through mine.
I knew why you were crying then. You were crying because Paul and Imanuel had finally decided. They were going to make a break for it. They were going to leave Elk Cliffs. They wanted us to come with them, and you didn’t want us to.
“Ory,” I said, “we can make it if we’re careful. We can—”
“We’re staying here.” Your voice cracked.
I looked down. “Let’s at least talk about it,” I began. I could feel the panic setting in. I had to convince you. We had to go with them. If we stayed here, we’d be the only ones left eventually. Then we’d never go anywhere again. We’d die or lose our shadows here. “Maybe more guests might join us, so we could make a bigger group, or a safer—”
“We’re staying here,” you repeated.
The words were so final, I didn’t know what else I could say. Ideas raced through my mind, one after another, none good enough. “I already told them we were going with them, weeks ago,” I finally stammered, throat tight. “I told them you were in.”
But you didn’t say anything to that. You just shook your head as the tears began to slide down your cheeks, and then looked down the mountain, over the trees below, into the setting sun.
I didn’t understand at first. Why we had come so far just to talk. We all argued in front of each other now—no one cared about privacy anymore. The glow from the sun filled up your eyes, lighting the tears on fire.
Then I did.
You’d already spoken to Paul and Imanuel, long before I ever had. They’d tried to convince you to let us leave the mountain with them and travel together, to find either my family or Imanuel’s. And you’d refused. You’d refused, to save our lives from whatever was out there, even though it meant never seeing them again. You’d told them not to let on if I asked to join—to lie to me. That when the day came to leave, to not say goodbye to us, so it would be too late to do anything by the time I realized.
There was no chance to convince you to let us go with them now because they were already gone.
Orlando Zhang
THE NOON SUN WAS BEARING DOWN, COOL BUT BRIGHT enough to make Ory sweat. There was still no sign of Max.
He wiped his brow and scooted farther off to the side of the road, to walk under the shade of the trees. McLean had become some kind of subtropical wilderness, but warped. Along the roads, single human limbs, twisted into strange shapes and in various states of decomposition; entire neighborhoods charred to blackness; weird, chilling shrines of everyday objects haphazardly placed in strange corners, people’s last attempts to try to collect and remember themselves; tunnels, dug a few feet into the grass or asphalt, all empty.
The shrines were both the best and most worrisome sign. There were far more of them here than in the suburbs of Arlington he normally patrolled—more shrines meant more people to ask about Max. But the kind of people that made shrines were shadowless people.
The little altar just ahead of him on the shattered sidewalk looked freshly built. A stack of salvaged objects that made no sense together, their only connection being that they’d been found in the same place, because they’d belonged to the same owner. An owner who didn’t know why they were important anymore, only that they were, because they held answers to a past he or she could no longer remember. There was a tattered teddy bear, a faded paperback book, what looked like a pair of boxers, a hammer, a box of condoms, and a pile of dead AA batteries.
Ory touched the cover of the paperback. It was dusty, the pages curled from having endured rain and dried countless times. He didn’t see them often anymore, books. Maybe people had used them for kindling. Every time he did, it made him think of Paul—his own beautiful covers decaying on bookstore shelves now. His poems that no one was ever going to read again. He hoped that however Paul and Imanuel had met their end after they left the mountain, it had been kind and quick.
The moldy spine almost fell apart as Ory edged the cover open. BOOKSTOP USED BOOKS. No name.
He heard the shadowless before he saw it. A shifting of leaves in the green ahead. Ory backed away from the sound slowly, turned to run. But instead of an empty road, there was a man standing there. A broken-off table leg in his hand.