“Draw?”
“Zachary makes all of our signs for us,” Ursula said. “To help us remember important things.” She held up one hand and pursed the fingers, rubbing them together, to indicate the perpetual stains on his own. “It’s ink,” she added. Then she pulled a paper out of the cubby in the dashboard and handed it to me. It was a picture of eight of them that were left, in excruciating detail, all without shadows. “He did that the day before we found you.”
I turned around to stare at him, overcome. His pale blond hair, blue eyes. He was the one who had filled Oakton High School with drawings, Ory! The self-portrait with a shadow, the pair of lovers who must have been Ysabelle and Victor—a woman with long blond hair and a man with a lion tattoo emblazoned on his bicep. The two dark figures in identical poses that I now understood hadn’t been badly faded renderings of shadows, but Dhuuxo and Intisaar. He was trying to record their memories in the only way he still could.
Our eyes met, and his gaze trailed down the string dangling from my neck. To the tape recorder suspended in the air. I looked down and touched it, to stop its slow spin. When I looked back up, he nodded to me, as if even though he didn’t know how it worked, he understood what it was for. That it was the same thing as his drawings.
Ursula drove. I kept us on the path. The cabin jangled softly as we went over a pothole, but I kept my finger gently pressed against the waxy paper. I could tell it made her happy. She doesn’t remember you can work a map just by looking at it, and thinks it needs to be touched. So I touch it. It’s the least I can do for her while she drives us all.
When we stopped for Victor to have a smoke and the others to have a bathroom break in the weeds by the side of the road, Zachary returned to the front cabin and climbed silently into Ursula’s vacant seat. He looked at the map in my hands and then out the window, where Ursula was standing in the shade of an underpass, waiting for everyone to board the RV again. He took the top paper from a stack in his pocket and sketched thoughtfully for a few minutes. When he was finished, he handed it to me and smiled. It was a perfect rendering of the weathered I-85 sign above Ursula’s head. Zachary didn’t remember anymore what the sign was or maybe even what a freeway is, but knew that it had something to do with my map and it was important. I stared at his picture of the little blue shield with a red border for a long time after he went back to his seat. At the little white shapes in the center of the sign. I wish I could show it to you, Ory. The difference between a written letter and a drawn one is small, but fascinating.
“He’s good, isn’t he?” Ursula finally said once we were moving again.
“He is.” She couldn’t see the subtle difference either. I lined it up with the edge of the map and folded the corner down, to clip the two papers together. “Can I ask you something?”
“Sure,” she said.
“Why are we going to New Orleans? I mean, why there?”
Ursula drew in a long breath. I waited for her to speak, but she just kept her eyes on the road, grimly watching the horizon.
Eventually I looked down at the map spread across my thighs again and busied myself with glancing over its veiny roads and pale green national parks. “You don’t remember, do you?” I finally asked.
“I do,” she said. “It’s just a little hard to explain. Have you ever heard of The One Who Gathers?”
“The what?” I asked.
“Before we started driving, we all lived together,” Ursula said, tipping her head toward the rest of our passengers. “We found a good spot. We had to clear it out first, but the danger was worth it. We had good walls, good weapons, plenty of eyes to keep watch, plenty of hands to bring back whatever we found. Eventually we had so much that we started trading some of it to people who passed by—whatever they could tell us about anything, anything at all, we’d give them a little bit of food. Word got around. People started bringing us information. After a while, we noticed that the same names kept coming up.”
“The One Who Does Not Dream,” I said. I remembered you telling me you sometimes saw strange things written on walls when you scavenged, Ory—carved into the plaster or wood. “The Friend.”
“The Friend, I’ve heard The Friend, too.” Ursula glanced at the fuel gauge. “The one I heard the most, from survivors from as far as Montana, was The One Who Gathers.”
“So all of this is in New Orleans?” I asked.
“Something like that,” she said.