After that, the General grew afraid that Paul would run away and get lost, so they started locking him in rooms on the upper levels. They had to move him to a different one every day, because he destroyed them trying to get out.
Naz knew that the shadowless forgot, and it was terrifying, but it was the first time she really saw up close what happened when a person lost his shadow. Paul had started to become something else. She’d never believed what had happened was anything other than fantastical, inexplicable, because there was simply no other way to make it make sense—but those last days with the man she once knew proved it beyond a doubt for her. In his fear, Paul did things no human could do. He scorched walls, turned stone bricks into ice ones, weakened hallways until they were so thin they fluttered like they were made of paper in a strong wind. Other corridors branched off into insane, infinite mazes.
“That’s Paul,” the General would joke deliriously every morning, after they’d managed to get him out of one room and locked into the next. “Stubborn to the end!”
Naz tried to laugh out of sympathy, but nothing ever came out. It had been anything but funny, trying to move Paul each morning. Trying to put him in a new room without him hurting someone or escaping. But none of them could muster the courage to beg the General to order him put out of his misery before it was too late. Paul was going to kill them all, and they didn’t know how to stop it.
In the end, they didn’t have to.
Naz didn’t know how the General got Paul out of his room that night, or down the stairs and through the front door without any of them hearing. Maybe Paul still remembered him, just enough. Malik and Naz found the General in his room the next morning, his clothes and hands covered in crusted streaks of blood.
They didn’t ask him how he’d done it. It was too much.
It was Malik who finally spoke to the General, days later. He asked him for Paul’s book—the copy from the wedding he and Paul had brought with them when they left Elk Cliffs. The army wanted to add it to the collection, with his permission. As a kind of memorial to Paul.
“I couldn’t save it” was all he’d said, in almost a whisper, his eyes locked in a thousand-yard stare.
Naz never found out what that meant.
She thought of the book often after that, almost every day—but once Ory came, she realized she’d just been thinking of the concept of the book, not the actual words inside. The way it had looked when she’d seen it around the Iowa, during better times. The slim spine, the soft cream pages, the deep navy cover with a golden sun emblazoned across it. It was sort of the way she’d always felt about Ory and Max—just concepts—except suddenly Ory was right there with them. Ory, but not Max. The General, but not Paul.
A few weeks after the General had saved them from his husband, they all stopped grieving long enough to remember that there might be another copy of Paul’s book in the library they had recently begun to loot. But by the time they’d pulled themselves together to go again, the Reds were there.
And that was why Naz had kept her distance from Ory. She was afraid that if he knew the story, he might blame her for Max’s disappearance. Naz knew it wasn’t fair, but she believed it was her fault anyway. If only she had gone to the mountain sooner, both he and Max would be at the Iowa now—the same way that if only she had gone back to the library sooner, they might have the book they now were all so desperately hoping to save.
URSULA CLIMBED DOWN FROM THE DRIVER’S SEAT AND CLOSED the door softly behind her. It was far too early in the day to stop, and we hadn’t scouted the area to make sure we were alone, but it was a worse idea to keep going. Now that I’ve forgotten how to read, we have to figure something out fast—before we get lost.
“Dhuuxo, Intisaar, you’re on watch. Ys and Lucius, take Wes and Victor and see if there’s any firewood nearby. Everyone stays within sight of the RV at all times,” she said. Her grip on her hunting rifle was more fierce than usual, as if she was drawing strength from it. Ory, it was the first time I’ve ever seen the look of weightlessness in her that I see in the other shadowless in our caravan. Zachary touched her shoulder. Maybe he saw it, too. “You’re with us,” Ursula said to him.
Zachary collected his tools from the RV. He could tell we wanted him to draw something—some kind of a sign we could understand without having to read. On the grass, he laid out his paints and brushes so we could see the colors.