Near the back of the campus, the drawings became simpler, less instructive. They seemed not to be depicting how to perform a task or how to avoid a danger, but were more a visual history of who each person in their group had been. There were twelve of them in total. Some were men, some were women. The blue-eyed man was there, next to a stern figure in the center. Their leader. On one side, another woman with long light hair embraced a brown-haired man, both of them looking at each other and smiling. The artist was trying to tell them they were a pair. That they were in love.
The last picture I found was of the same blond-haired, blue-eyed man. It looked like perhaps the first one he’d drawn. It was larger, and there were details about him not present in the others, as though he was still figuring out how to ensure that he could recognize himself, trying to make certain there were enough clues. In the drawing, the blond man was standing face forward, arms at his sides. His expression was peaceful.
Beneath his feet, there was the unmistakable black shape, stretched out at a gentle angle against an imaginary ground. It held the same calm position, arms at its sides, its hair tousled in an identical way. Where their shoes joined together, the blond man had connected them so perfectly there was not even a sliver of the white wall between their two sets of feet.
I moved closer until my face was almost pressed against the dark space on the wall where he’d drawn his penumbral twin. He had given the shadow blue eyes too, two piercing sapphire dots floating in an expressionless black sea.
Naz Ahmadi
SIX. THAT WAS THE NUMBER OF PEOPLE NAZ HAD TO KILL ON their way.
Three shadowless, three shadowed. She remembered their faces sometimes, even the ones she saw only for an instant, if not less. Once in a while, their features were even more vivid to her than those of others she knew far better—Rojan, her mother, her coach. Memory was a strange thing.
She killed the first four as she and her sister moved south through Connecticut on their way to New York. Two shadowless, two shadowed. The two shadowless ambushed them as they passed the hideouts, biting and scratching. Crazed—starving. Naz didn’t want to kill them, was afraid of killing them, and she and Rojan tried as hard as they could to just get away first, but the shadowless wouldn’t give up.
The two shadowed ones were starving for something else. For those, Naz did not hesitate.
JUST PAST HARTFORD, IT STARTED TO GET A LITTLE EASIER. They moved only at night, avoiding large towns and keeping to the rural areas. Naz couldn’t have said what New Haven or Springfield looked like.
The bow kept them alive. Naz was careful and managed to hunt so that Rojan could chase after and retrieve most of the precious arrows she loosed to use again. She shot little things—rats, pigeons—and they ate them raw, afraid a fire might attract attention. They ruined a lot of their spare underwear that way. They didn’t die, but almost. Some nights the taste was so revolting, one of them would throw it all back up as soon as she’d finished eating it, then cry at the waste as the other one held her, at how they both were probably starving to death. When the sisters stopped for evening camp just north of Poughkeepsie, in a particularly wooded area, Naz couldn’t take it anymore. Rojan had the shakes, and Naz was almost too weak to pull back the bowstring. She made a tiny fire to cook their dinner for once.
It took about twenty minutes before they were found.
Naz heard it first, to her left. A snapping twig. She threw herself against the trunk of a tree and trained her bow on the undergrowth.
“You see it? I don’t see it,” Rojan whispered from against another.
Branches. Darkness. Another sound, dangerously close. Naz tried to aim, but she couldn’t make anything out. The glow of the flames blinded her, lighting the night so that whoever was hunting her could easily see into their camp, but she couldn’t see beyond it. She kicked the ground, tossing dirt onto the fire to suffocate it.
“Oh, God, no!” someone howled. “No, no, no! Why? Why?”
Rojan screamed, and Naz almost lost her grip on the tail of the arrow. A man stumbled hysterically out of the darkness at her and fell to his knees. Naz screamed this time. Her arrow went wild, missing him by three lengths as she scrambled for another, still shrieking, the man still crawling.
She and Rojan had been so careful to avoid attracting attention, certain that there were predators around every corner, but there really must have been no one but the three of them for miles that night, Naz realized later. They made enough noise in that moment to alert an entire city. Rojan yelling, Naz shouting and circling her enemy, aiming the glittering slate tip of her arrow at his head, and the man moaning, hands scrabbling in agony through the dirt.
“Stay down! Stay down!” she shouted at him. “What the fuck is the matter with you? You move an inch and I’ll kill you! I will kill you!”
“The fire,” he was wailing. Finally Naz focused on him long enough to realize he had a shadow, dimly lit by the moonlight, hunched beneath him on the ground. “The fire, the fire.” He looked at her like she’d murdered a child. “Why did you put out the fire?”