The Book of M (28 page)

“Can you do it?” Zachary asked me softly over Ysabelle's whimpering.

I shook my head. “Can you?”

He shook his head, too. “Even all together . . . Not enough yet.”

“Yet?”

He watched Ursula glare at each guard with his strange, distant eyes. “Someone giving in to the pull, for power. Little, little every day.”

Did he know about Lucius, too? Or was it someone else? “Zachary,” I whispered. “Do you know who it is?”

He shook his head again.

I sat down against the bars. I know you'd tell me not to try, Ory, even if I was strong enough. That whatever I'd lose wouldn't be worth it.

The only thing I wouldn't trade would be you. If I escaped but didn't remember you, that would be the same thing as dying in here anyway.

Now we know, Ory. Now we know what Transcendence really wants us for. It's not to cure us at all. You wouldn't—I barely believe myself.

I heard the sounds before I fully woke. Humming. Soft, mumbling chants. I opened my eyes.

The guards were still there, alabaster pillars around the room. But now, all around the cage, the floor had changed into a rippling, shifting sea of white. It took me a long moment to realize I was looking at bodies. Hundreds of bodies. Every one of them prostrate in front of us, foreheads to the floor, arms reaching. Every one of them with a shadow.

“Ursula,” I hissed. I grabbed her shoulder. “Wake up!”

“Holy mother,” Lucius murmured, drawing into a crouch. “Look at them all.”

“What are they
doing
?” Ursula asked, disgust and terror in her voice. “Are they . . . are they . . .”

“They're praying,” Lucius said, in a tone very different from hers. It was almost like wonder. “They're praying to
us.
”

It didn't take long for him to change after that.

When the woman in white came to us in the evening, after the hundreds of others had finished their chanting and departed one by one, we all huddled as far from her as possible. She offered us a packet of crackers one by one, so fresh they even still might have had some flavor. All eight of us refused to take any. Only Lucius went forward and ate one.

“You understand,” she said to him.

He chewed thoughtfully. “You want to become like us,” he said.

The woman in white nodded. “Yes,” she said, almost mesmerized. “We want to become like you. We want to
transcend.
”

“All of you are insane,” Ursula growled. “Absolutely insane.”

“We're not insane,” the woman replied. “Everyone else is. Your power isn't something to be afraid of. It's something to be embraced. It's the future, not the end.”

“You don't understand,” I said. She couldn't. She would never be able to. She still had her shadow.

The woman looked at Lucius again. He took another cracker. “Your friends have to stay here,” she said. “They will not be mistreated. But they cannot come with you unless they join us.”

“All right,” he said.

“Lucius,” Ursula whispered, horrified.

“The guns are loaded,” the woman warned. There were more guards filing into the room now, barrels trained on us. Ten, twenty. The woman unlocked the door.

“Lucius,” Ursula said again as he stepped free. “
Lucius.
”

“Just stop,” he said. He glanced back at us. “You made your choice. No one forced you to refuse their offer to join. I made mine.”

“So you're just
giving up
?”

“Ursula, we were never going to make it.”

I thought she was going to yell, but Ursula just shook her head. When she spoke again, her voice was much quieter. “Whatever you think it's going to be like—being their treasured, magical idol—it won't be,” she said.

The woman in white closed the cage door behind Lucius and locked it again. Lucius put his hands on the bars, this time from the outside. “I know,” he said softly. He looked down. “But it'll be a better life than this cage, for a while. And when it changes, I won't remember to regret it anyway.”

“I THINK THAT DOES IT.” AHMADI STEPPED BACK AND STUDIED
Ory. “How do you feel?”

“Like I'm covered in ants,” he said.

The paint itched horribly. They had layered it through his hair, across half his face, and all down his arms, chest, and back, covering him in crimson stripes and swirls. Ahmadi had also torn up his jeans and dragged his shoes through the mud several times to make them look like salvaged things.

“He looks good,” Malik said, hope rising in his voice. He checked behind them, but they were the only ones on the front sidewalk of the Iowa. The soldiers were all still inside packing. “This could work.”

Ory looked down at the red lines slathered across his chest. They were excellent fakes, the right width and pattern. And the lifeless, low-hanging clouds had costumed the most important part of all. In such light—with nothing casting shadows—he looked just like a Red. Just like Max.

A shudder of fear seized him, and Ory squatted down. He cupped his hands together just over the ground, trying to make a pocket of space between his palms and the street small enough that even without the sun, there was a contrast, and he could see.

Yes.

His shadow was still there.

When he stood up, neither Ahmadi or Malik laughed. They understood. Ahmadi grabbed the back of Ory's neck firmly in comfort—the only place that wasn't covered in lines of paint. It was the closest thing she could give him to a hug without smudging his disguise.

“Still there,” he said. His chest ached. He wanted to grab her back and hold tight, but he couldn't. Because of the red paint—and because of Max.

“You make sure the General comes back,” Naz said desperately. “Make sure
both
of you do.”

AT THE LIBRARY, IT WAS CHAOS. FRANTIC REDS WERE POURING
out of the front doors, their arms full of books, waiting desperately for Iowan troops to arrive—and panicking as to why they yet hadn't. The big man was there as usual, but so was another Red whom Ory had never seen before, a woman who looked to be in her fifties or sixties, with streaks of red braided throughout her wild, silvered hair. She'd wrapped herself in a crimson sheet not unlike a toga. One small limp breast hung carelessly out as she snatched at the other Reds. Then a pristine white shape appeared from behind the Iowa's deserted barricade line. Imanuel.

There was a momentary lull as the Reds recalibrated. Everything paused. Books froze midair. Then the woman turned to screech at him. Somehow, almost impossibly, the Reds seemed to still remember him as the Iowa's leader. They swarmed forward, dumping books at his feet, as many as he wanted, practically burying him. Imanuel scooped up copy after copy, trying to quickly choose which to stuff into the precious extra space in his medical bag. He pointed toward the building, miming his question, asking to be taken deeper into the Red King's library, to choose the book he wanted. He picked up a book, pointed at it, and pointed again toward the building as the Reds screamed.

Ory watched from his perch atop the roof of a destroyed public bathroom.

The Reds were dragging out bigger and bigger books now, misunderstanding that size didn't determine worth the way it did with food, weapons, armies. Across the distance, Ory could see Imanuel searching the growing pile to see if they'd accidentally thrown to
him the one he wanted most of all.
Push them as far as you can,
Ory thought.
Bring as many back as possible.
The older woman and the big man were growing more agitated. Then an angry bellow erupted from within the darkened building, causing everyone to duck on instinct.

The Red King was finished guessing.

Everything went still as he emerged, glittering silvery-maroon in the weak hail as he came right into the center of the street. Ory was too far to make out any of his features, but even from that distance, the Red King was terrifying.

Ory didn't know what he had looked like before he lost his shadow, but what the Red King had become now was a living mountain. He had thought the big Red was huge, but now, compared to his master, he was miniscule. The Red King was the size of two men, over ten feet tall, wearing a scarlet cloak of a hundred layers and haphazard armor made from whole, bent steel doors. A human skull could fit inside each scarred, crimson hand. Red dripped off him from everywhere, leaving trails behind him.

Imanuel raised his arms. Ory couldn't tell if he was trying to smile or grimacing in terror. The Red King roared again, held out his palms. They were also covered in red, but a wetter red, red that came from inside a body. The pregnant woman was in real danger.

Imanuel took a step forward hesitantly. The Red King grabbed him with one hand and dragged him in like a rag doll.

Do it, Ory,
Max said in Ory's mind, the same way he always imagined it before he had to kick open an abandoned Arlington door or go into a deserted shop, to give him courage. He clung to it fiercely now, the memory of the sound of her voice.
Go!

He ran with everything he had, as fast and quietly as he could. The Reds were all still fixated on their leader as they escorted him and Imanuel in, some excited, some entranced. Ory skirted the outside of the crowd, hoping he looked like just another eager warrior. Past the rubble, into the courtyard, up the stairs—through the darkness of the doors.

He was in.

Hide, Ory,
Max's voice urged again. He ducked behind the first set of shelves he saw, and waited for his eyes to adjust to the light. Overhead, a few books glided between the rafters of the library in slow circles, mournful birds separated from their flock, pages fluttering like wings. The Red King and Imanuel entered, flanked by crimson warriors. Across the main lobby, the pregnant woman was still there where Ory had seen her last, still swollen with child, still in pain. But now there was much more blood. Much more. She was pale with fatigue, the skin of her trembling lips almost gray.

The longer Ory watched her from behind the bookcase, the more he didn't know how much Imanuel could do for her without a hospital. In fact, it seemed like it would be almost nothing. Even if she still had the strength to push, too much could go wrong. Ory couldn't understand how Imanuel thought he was going to save her—or get the book.

He isn't, Ory.

He refused to believe Max's voice. He refused to believe that Imanuel had come only to see Paul's book one last time, and never hoped to make it out anyway. Surely his life was worth more than this. One pointless, unwinnable quest.

So is staying here to look for me,
her voice said, but the Red woman's wailing drowned it out.

The procession began to lumber past Ory's hiding place then. First the Red King swept farther inward, dragging layers and layers of red cloaks, velvet curtains and afghan rugs stacked on top of one another beneath his armor. It looked so heavy Ory couldn't believe he could still stand under their weight. Then the rest of the Reds came, panicked, hopeful, ushering a trembling Imanuel deeper inside.

The woman cried again as they reached her, and Ory scooted back for more cover, deeper into the tangled maze of wood and books.

“Baby,” he heard Imanuel say, to see if even though they could no longer speak, perhaps they understood.

The word seemed to do nothing. The Red King roared.

Find the book,
Max told Ory. He turned around and peered into the nightmarish forest of shelves.
Find the book for Imanuel and then save him, while there's still time. Before the woman dies.

He crept deeper into the library. The stacks twisted, some dead-ending, some spiraling back on themselves, some too tightly packed to squeeze through. He tried to work his way toward signs still hanging on the walls, hoping for directions to different sections and genres, but every time he heard a Red, he had to divert behind another overturned bookcase or sideways shelf to hide, getting more and more lost.

Hurry,
Max's voice whispered to him.
Find the book before it's too late.

Ory glanced back, and through two half-empty shelves glimpsed Imanuel, his lab coat already stained with blood, his tools emptied out all around him, trying desperately to hold the woman still so he could try something, anything. She wailed, delirious, clawing at her bare belly. Blood was smeared on the floor all around her.

Then there it was—the sign near the back, on the wall—
POETRY.

Ory scrambled faster, heart racing, as the Red woman's scream shattered the room again—but this time it was different. There was death in the scream.
Turn back!
Max whispered suddenly.
There's no time.
He ignored her, and threw himself against the shelf, nose pressed against hundreds of musty spines, searching for the
W
names.
Paul Jeremiah West. Paul Jeremiah West. Paul Jeremiah West.

Ory,
Max begged in his head.

He found the
W
s all near the bottom.
Wallace, Walter, Webb, Wepford, White—

“No,” he breathed. The seconds were racing by. He checked again, but there was nothing. Nothing in the space between
Wepford
and
White.

It wasn't there.

Ory leaned closer. On the spines of the books on either side of
where Paul's should have been, there were old stains, the streaks long dried, as if someone had come to this exact place and sorted through, looking for something in particular. Someone covered in red.

“Yes!” Imanuel shouted then, from far across the library.

Ory jerked back toward the sound and peered through the fractured shelves. The Red King had pulled something small and rectangular out of the jagged angles of his armor, and held it toward Imanuel as a last, desperate offering to stop the woman's pain and save her life. A book.

No,
Ory thought.

The cover came into view as the Red King reached down to hand it over.

No.

But it was. Paul's poetry.

Ory stared, transfixed, as Imanuel reached for it and the Red King roared back at him.

It was impossible. How could the Red King have known the exact book they had been looking for all this time, without being able to read it?

But he didn't have time to consider it further. The Red woman's breath shuddered weakly.
Run, Ory,
Max urged again.
Get out.

Then the whole room collapsed into a deafening roar.

Too late,
Max whispered. “No,” he tried to argue, but he knew.
The woman is dead.

The Reds' screams became a war call. Something bright and hot whizzed by Ory's head and smashed into the bookshelf beside him.
Fire
. They were setting everything on fire. They were going to burn it all down.

“Imanuel!” Ory yelled as he came careening around the shelves. Everywhere, Reds were running wildly. The woman was still on the floor, unmoving. He couldn't see Imanuel or the Red King through the chaos. “Imanuel!”

He spotted them through the gathering crowd. He shoved between the vicious, crazed Reds, running for the far end of the room, where the
Red King and Imanuel were sliding on the blood-soaked floor, strangling each other, both scrambling for a weapon. Ory was so close he could almost touch them when the Red King's crimson hand wrapped around a shard of broken glass. He was so close he could see the Red King in all his horrifying glory for the first time. So close he could see his face as the serrated tool sang through the air.

“No!” Imanuel screamed. Everything froze.

Ory didn't know if it was because Imanuel knew he couldn't stop the blade or because he suddenly realized that Ory was there, where Imanuel had begged him not to be.

He understood now—why his friend had been so afraid for him to join the Iowa's missions, and why all of the shadowless were so obsessed with books. Because if it was true that every shadowless got to keep one thing to cling to until the very end—one thing that would eventually be all there was left of them, until everything was gone—and that being together under a powerful leader helped them remember longer what little they still had, then only one thing made sense. Ory did not want to believe it, but he was there, and it was too late. He saw.

The Red King was Paul.

“No!” Imanuel cried again. The jagged shard plunged into him, and the sound snapped off into a horrible gasp. Blood spurted everywhere in a surging river until both he and the Red King looked the same.

Ory ran at them, his voice echoing off the walls as he lunged. “
Paul!
” he screamed.

The Red King let go of Imanuel's body and turned. It was impossible to tell if it was simply because of the sound, or if that word was the last word that could catch fire in his mind. Ory wanted to see the answer in his eyes as he descended upon him, but he searched, searched—even as he pulled the D.C. police-issue Glock 13 that Malik had given him out of the belt of his pants and aimed, he searched—and saw nothing. There was only red.

Ory had heard their soldiers tell one another legends that the Red King was unkillable, that he'd forgotten he wasn't immortal, so he was. But it wasn't true. He had forgotten his name, that he had written poetry, that he was not the size of a rhinoceros. That Imanuel was a person he once loved, not feared and hated. But he had not yet forgotten that he could die.

“Is it done?” Imanuel asked him as Ory crouched down to him. The gun smoked in his hand, emptied of the same fatal storm that had possessed his lost shotgun. Thunder moaned softly, fading in time with the last shuddering beats of the Red King's life. All around them, the shocked, disbelieving screams began.

“It's done,” Ory said.

“I told you not to come,” he repeated faintly. His eyes were glazed.

“I know,” Ory said softly. He put a hand gently under Imanuel's head.

“I didn't want . . . ,” Imanuel rasped, “you to know.”