Then suddenly Gajarajan was back, in one instant darkly reflected against the far wall, ears ruffled with excitement. Max was ready. Ory trembled. It was really happening. He was already crying.
He watched the elephant reach for the second door that only opened from this side. Across the front, Ory realized there were letters burned into it, in all capitals. SHADOWS INSIDE, it said. A stamp in the shape of an elephant’s face—wide ears, twin tusks, long, drooping trunk—was seared after.
“Are you ready to meet Max again?” Gajarajan asked.
“BREATHE, MAX,” GAJARAJAN SAID. THAT WAS ALSO THE FIRST thing I understood once I began to remember English again, as soon as I recognized my name. I tried to breathe, and nodded at him as he hovered beside me on the wall. He had come in through the roof to make sure I was ready first, and then would go back the other way around to open the door that could be opened only from the other side. To unite me with you again, Ory.
“I’m breathing,” I said. Gajarajan draped his trunk over my shoulder to reassure me and seemed to smile.
The sanctuary is a good place. I like it here. I’ve learned about how it is outside in the city, gardens and horses and bicycles and people, and I want to see it. But I also want to be able to come back here, to the second hall. Once you leave, you can never come back here, though. You can lose your shadow only once. That’s what Gajarajan says.
He started telling me about you as soon as I’d remembered enough words to have a true conversation. He played me the tape. My tape. The recorder was so old and beaten up that the sound came out faint and tinny, so I had to strain to hear it. Gajarajan and I would wait until it was night, after all the other shadowless in the first great hall had gone to sleep and the city was quiet again, and listen. It was so damaged it almost didn’t sound like me, but just enough. I could make out a woman speaking, a soft high voice, and understand most of her words.
“All my memories were in here?” I had asked in the beginning.
“Yes,” he nodded. “You made this before you forgot everything. When we found you, you were carrying it in one hand, holding tight. You kept your memories.”
That’s what all the other shadowless like to say, he told me. That I “kept my memories” even though I lost my shadow. You, the shelter in Arlington, leaving home, the caravan, the terrible kidnapping by Transcendence, the last lucid moments of my journey south. How badly I wanted to make it here, to see if all the rumors were true. It’s a strange thing to think about—my memories. That I still had them even though I didn’t know I had them.
I shouldn’t complain. Most shadowless come here with absolutely nothing, or lose what little they do have left soon after. And so few of us arrive bringing with us something that means more than the shade from an empty bottle, a piece of trash. To find a shadow that will match a person is much more difficult than it seems. Another thing from nature might be too strong or different, and a useless object might be too weak. And even if it does match approximately, nothing comes with it. No recollection. That was the only trouble with the books you brought, Gajarajan told me. The shape and size were just about right, but the memories are of invented characters, not real humans. They aren’t like my recorder. The shadowless would be made into new people—not old ones.
That’s why my shadow was the one that finally worked. Gajarajan has been able to separate many shadows, and even reattach some of them to the shadowless, but they never stuck, or not all the way. They didn’t fit. So far I’m the only patient whose shadow has.
And then, just yesterday, he told me that you had come to New Orleans, too. Against all odds, you didn’t disappear when I forgot you, and you found me again. Maybe it was because of this tape recorder after all. Because you were inside the whole time.
“Gajarajan really made that for you?” the young shadowless girl beside me asked. She was staring at my shadow as it lay flat across the floor behind me, the same way she had been since Gajarajan brought her here early this morning. At its long arms, its slender waist, the floating cloud of tightly wound curls springing in all directions from its head.
“He really did,” I said.
She continued to stare, transfixed. She had dusky skin, and the same soft, buoyant afro that matched the shape of my own shadow’s, when I looked at them both in front of me. “Did it hurt?”
“I don’t remember.” I smiled. I crouched down next to where she was sitting on the edge of what would become her bed now, since I would leave the sanctuary, and my shadow copied. Perfectly bound, perfectly in sync. “But I don’t think so.”
“Vienna fought together with your husband against a great danger—more than once. She’s a good friend of his,” Gajarajan said, sliding across the wall to where we were.
“I am?” she asked.