It was not a surprise. Ory knew already that a man who had never even met his wife had the same or better chance of finding her than he did—because she wasn’t really his wife anymore. Not entirely. He kept running. He tried not to hate the finder for saying it.
“Right here, yesterday afternoon or the day before,” the finder said as he disappeared around the far corner of the outdoor mall.
“Wait!” Ory cried, and lurched forward to catch up to him. When he came around the corner, the finder was gone.
Ory stood there for a few seconds, unsure of what to do. “Max?” He called. There were overturned Dumpsters, heaps of concrete. “Hello?” A long empty plaza. And then finally he understood. “I have only the shotgun. No food,” he said.
Things shifted around the corners. The finder appeared again, walking slowly out from another corner of the silent campus, still breathing hard from the run.
“How many of you?” Ory asked. He could see from the shadows of the buildings that he was surrounded. Finder, he thought ruefully. He wondered how many before him had also fallen for it. He wanted to be angry or embarrassed, but there wasn’t any point anymore. “Five? Six?”
“Enough,” the finder said.
Ory laid down the gun and took the shells out of his pockets. “I don’t have any food,” he said again.
Another joined the first, holding a baseball bat. And another. And another. The sky was a dead gray color. “We’ll just make sure.”
Part III
THIS TENT IS NICE. IT’S WARM AND DRY, AND EACH PANEL IS A different color, so the light from the sunrise through the trees turns the inside into a beautiful, rippling kaleidoscope.
I want to stay forever. Which is probably only another few weeks or so.
There are nine of us now, in total. There were twelve before, but four forgot too much, and then I joined. When I found them, they all talked it over, debating whether it was worth the risk. In the end, they decided since they’d packed the resources for twelve survivors, they could spare the extra they now had.
That makes it sound easy. It really wasn’t, Ory. It wasn’t at all. At first I thought they were going to kill me.
It was late at night. I was moving through the woods just off the road, as quietly as I could in case there were any wild animals or shadowless nearby, looking for a safe place that I could stop and sleep for a few hours. Something I could put my back against so I had to watch only three sides instead of four. That’s when I saw it. A soft orange glow deep in the trees. A campfire.
I know, Ory. I shouldn’t have gone. But I was so curious. To be brave enough to have a fire probably meant it was a group, not a single person. And a group that still remembered to stay together as a group probably meant shadows. I haven’t seen one for so long—I just wanted to see one again.
I had been right. It was a group. But not like I’d been naively hoping it might be. It was no happy camp of fellow travelers, willing to share food by the fire and reminisce about the good old days. It was more like, either you’re a threat or on your way, and we’ll be the ones to decide that. They saw a shadowless woman wandering alone at night, nothing more. But when I started answering their questions, I don’t think they expected me to sound so . . . whole. Then things took a sharp turn when I told them that today is day sixteen without a shadow for me, and I can still remember my name.
“It’s Max,” I said softly, hands up to show I meant no harm. The woman holding the hunting rifle narrowed her eyes.
“Last name?”
“Webber. Maxine Webber,” I answered.
A pair of young women who looked like twins edged up behind the one with the gun. They were beautiful, tall and willowy, with high cheekbones and thin noses beneath their dark skin. One trained her deer-sized eyes on me, and the other whispered something to their leader. The older woman’s hair had been buzzed almost to the skin, and I could see the younger’s lips move even though they were just an inch from her ear. The gun didn’t waver.
“Sixteen days, you say,” the twin on the left finally said, with a vaguely Arabic accent. I nodded. She looked at the woman holding the gun with an interested expression. The other five studied me from where they still sat, in a loose circle around the meager campfire they’d built. A man with hair so blond it seemed translucent in the dusk put a hand over his mouth, as if thinking. His fingers were stained by something, maybe mud or mashed grass, each one darkened to the second knuckle. The man beside him exhaled smoke, and tossed his cigarette into the flames. None of them had shadows—not a single one. Can you picture that, Ory? Nine of us standing there in the woods, and not a single shape of a hand flickered in the light of the fire, not a single profile warped across foliage or bark. Only the silhouettes of trees danced across the ground, rows and rows of gnarled black lines. There was no sign nine humans were there at all.
The woman in charge glanced at the first twin out of the corner of her eye, to avoid turning her head—and her aim—from me. The twin nodded back. She wanted her to ask me something, I realized.