“Was it a plane?” Dr. Zadeh yelled. “Was it a plane?”
Letty’s friend was shaking now. She seemed to shrink down onto the asphalt of the alley. “Hey.” The amnesiac crouched, so as to be on her same level. “Do you know what that was?”
The shadowless’s eyes stared straight through him, unblinking. “It’s coming back.” She trembled.
The amnesiac turned back to look at Dr. Zadeh, who was still staring into the sky. “What is it? What’s coming back?” he asked, but she was too terrified to answer.
“If it was a plane—if someone is still flying a plane—” Dr. Zadeh continued excitedly. “We have to get their attention!”
“Wait,” the amnesiac said to Letty. “Keep hold of her.” He ran for a utility ladder welded to the side of a building, to climb up to the roof.
“Be careful!” Nurse Marie cried, watching him ascend with a concerned expression on her face. “Keep away from the edge! You can’t judge depth with one eye!” She’d been the first nurse the amnesiac had depended upon when he arrived at the assisted-living facility, when he was barely strong enough for crutches, and she still worried after him as if he was still her charge.
“Almost there!” the amnesiac yelled to her. He hauled himself onto the flat top of the building. Dusk was falling, smearing everything with an orangy-purple haze. On the horizon, so far it looked to be over the western area of Metairie, a dark thing rippled in the sky. “I can’t see—” he started to say. And then he heard the screams.
Nurse Marie was at Dr. Zadeh’s side by the time the amnesiac had scrambled back to the edge of the roof to peer down at them, clutching a trembling Michael to her with knuckles that had gone white. Letty cowered with her companion.
“What did you see?” Dr. Zadeh asked softly.
The dark shape passed overhead again. It was the size of a small house, with angles as sharp as blades. There were more screams from the direction in which it had gone.
“Jesus Christ,” Nurse Marie said.
Dr. Zadeh took the new shadowless’s face in his hands and made her look at him. “What is it?” he asked firmly, in the voice he had mastered over decades of practice, a tone of absolute authority that could cut through fear or pain, or even sometimes the terrified fog of an Alzheimer’s episode, and could compel any patient to answer him. “What. Is. It.”
The shadowless’s eyes finally focused on Dr. Zadeh. “Deathkite,” she whispered.
From his vantage point above them, the amnesiac saw the shape lean into the wind to return toward them once more.
“We have to get inside,” he breathed. “Right now.”
LATER, AFTER THEY’D GOTTEN LETTY AND HER FRIEND THEY had named Jo back to the facility, the amnesiac remembered that Hemu had once told him it was customary to fly celebratory kites on Zero Shadow Day. After everyone had had their fun with the moment of shadowlessness and the shadows had returned, the afternoon would turn toward food and games. Little boys loved that part most of all, the kite flying—or rather, the kite fighting. The object of the game was to be the last one still aloft. In their desperation to win, the boys often rubbed the strings with powdered glass so they could saw through one another’s lines as the fabric sheets crossed, and later even cheated by adding hidden blades to the edges of the frames, to cut the bodies of other kites.
At the time, the amnesiac thought he would have liked to have seen a kite fight, if it had been possible. In a way, he’d gotten his wish. Was it Hemu? He often wondered, each time over the months that followed that he watched the deathkites circle overhead—wonderful things that had been twisted into something horrible and evil by accident. Was it Hemu, or had it been someone else?
“Nurse Marie?” Vivi’s voice came from the dimly glowing hallway. She, the amnesiac, and Dr. Zadeh turned to see the old woman leaning nervously into the room. Candles were in each corner, but since they’d boarded up all the windows for safety against the riots, it always looked no brighter than dusk at all times. In the weak light, Vivi looked even frailer than by day. “You’d better come.”
“What is it, dear?” Nurse Marie asked, rising to her feet. The knee was giving her trouble again, the amnesiac saw. “Everyone’s all right?”
“We’re all right,” Vivi said. There was a long pause. Beside him, the amnesiac heard Dr. Zadeh sigh, exhausted. Vivi looked down. “It happened again, to Edith.”
THEY WERE SHORT ONLY ONE MORE SHADOWLESS WHEN A second pair of exterminators found them. Dr. Zadeh was in the middle of handing food they’d brought to the tiny ball of rags shivering against the concrete wall, and Michael and Letty were calling quietly to it. The amnesiac never saw if it was a man or a woman, old or young. The shadowless was about to reach for the food, just one withered hand and two narrowed eyes visible from the folds of dirty fabric, but then in a swirl of layers, it was gone.