NAZ PEEKED INTO THE QUIET BARRACKS ROOM. ORY WAS already inside, waiting for her. She ushered Malik in and closed the door behind them.
“I don’t say this lightly,” she started, warming up to her argument. “I know the General ordered us all to wait here, but it’s wrong. We just can’t—”
“Done,” Ory interrupted.
Naz blinked, surprised.
“You don’t have to convince me,” he continued. “He did tell me to stay, but he also told me to ‘actually obey Ahmadi this time.’ So just order me to do it—as long as it’s a direct order, I have no choice, right?”
Naz tried, but she couldn’t keep the smile from her lips. Maybe Max and Paul had taught him a thing or two after all.
“Well, okay then,” she finally said, relieved. “Ory, I order you to recon the situation, help the General get Paul’s book, and get back here as fast as you can.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Ory saluted.
“Aren’t you going to ask me if I’m in?” Malik asked.
“I found you in the stairwell on your way to the stables,” Naz said. “You were already coming to get me to say the same thing.”
Malik shrugged and nodded.
“The only problem is, how am I going to get close enough to actually do this without being noticed?” Ory broke in. “Imanuel’s the only non-Red there, so a second one will stick out like a sore thumb.”
Malik crossed his arms. “I had an idea on my way to find Ahmadi,” he said. “You won’t like it, but I think it’s our best shot.”
DO YOU REMEMBER WHEN YOU AND I WERE UP AT THAT CABIN in the Poconos, that long weekend a few years ago, Ory? We were comfortably drunk on mugs of hot buttered rum, and there was a fire in the fireplace. Infomercials rolled by on the television in the corner. We were playing What If. “What if someone gave you a little box with a button on top, and every time you pressed the button, the box would give you a million dollars, but someone you’d crossed paths with—from the clerk at a convenience store in a town you once drove through to an old high school classmate to your own mother—would instantly die. The box would choose the person completely at random. Would you press the button? Would you press it more than once?”
We both toasted each other and drank down our mugs, smug at how easily we could give up the imaginary money. What was money compared to a human life? Especially one you couldn’t choose. I was so sure I’d never press that button, Ory. Fuck a million dollars. It wasn’t worth the cost. But what if you were losing who you were minute by minute? What if chancing something that big was the only thing that would free you from this metal cage? What if it was the only thing that would get you to New Orleans? What if—
Someone’s coming. I have to hide the recorder now.
I don’t know what it is about this place, Ory. It’s hard to hold on. Maybe it’s being trapped in such an empty, unchanging room, or the questions. The endless questions.
The ones in white come to us singly or in pairs. Sometimes it’s the woman from the first day, sometimes it’s another woman, sometimes it’s men. The guards deal with our waste bucket at regular intervals, but it’s these others who bring us food, so much food, divided into small pieces so it can fit through the bars. I don’t think I’ve been this well fed since the Forgetting began. Then while we eat to our heart’s content, they ask.
“What did it feel like when you lost your shadow?”
“What were you doing at the moment it disappeared?”
“What were your feelings about Hemu Joshi and the first shadowless when the incidences in India first happened?”
It’s not an interrogation, it’s not like that. No matter what we do—ignore them, scream—they never shout back or hurt us or withhold meals. They just keep asking, with eternal patience. Eventually we decided that only Ursula should answer, so she began to speak for us all—but the answers she gives are always lies. That’s the only power we have left.
“Do you remember the exact instant you lost your shadow?”
“I was killing a man,” Ursula said. She hadn’t been. She’d been driving when it happened, steering the RV carefully through northern Virginia.
“Who in your group lost their shadow first?”
“I did.” She didn’t. She’d told me that she had been the last, just before I’d stumbled onto their camp.
But it doesn’t matter. They just ask again, on different days, with different people, as if Ursula had never responded at all.
“Did it hurt?”
“Were you afraid of losing your shadow before it happened?”
“Was there any warning it would happen before the actual moment?”
The questions are so constant that now after a few days, I can’t remember what Ursula has answered before for any of them. I can barely remember how it actually happened to me now, so long ago, after all these circles.
“Are they maybe trying to cure us?” Intisaar asked one night as we reclined against the bars. Most of the candles had winked out before midnight, but the questioners wouldn’t return until dawn, so the guards just left the room in semi-darkness, watching us from the dim corners as they patrolled.