The Book of M by Peng Shepherd Page A

something loose.
    It didn’t. Patient RA flew back home with his entourage of doctors, to return to his assisted-living facility. After that, videos of Hemu never appeared on air again. Naz didn’t know what that meant.
    Reports about the other shadowless from Mumbai and Nashik still filled every broadcast, though. The experiments grew wilder asthe scientists grew more desperate. They shocked them, hypnotized them, starved them of sleep and then tried to plant memories in their delirious states, cut into their brains. Nothing worked. It sounded silly, but Naz knew there was no other way to say it. The earth’s rotation aside, what happened to them wasn’t science. It was magic.
    Even so, she couldn’t stop staring at the scientists poking at them on the news, whenever they gave interviews. The world kept following. Everyone hoped they would all get better. That they’d remember who they were, that they’d recognize their families again. But they never did.
    She probably would’ve kept watching forever, rooting for them, but eventually she had to stop. There was just nothing left to watch. Stories about the shadowless disappeared from broadcasts, and even the skeleton crews pulled back, until there was no coverage at all. It seemed to be the end.
    Until eight days later, a curly-haired kid in Brazil looked down during lunch recess and realized he didn’t have a shadow anymore. And then two days after that, he couldn’t remember his own name.
    THE BRAZILIAN PRESIDENT WAS ON THE AIR ABOUT FIVE hours after the news broke, announcing that he’d closed Brazil’s borders to all international travel, to help contain whatever this was. Brazilians abroad weren’t allowed to return, and noncitizens could go only as far as their embassies. It was an international outrage, but no other country dared to actually retaliate or rescue their citizens by force—they’d have to send soldiers in for that. Into the place where shadows were disappearing.
    The kid’s family vanished. There was POLICÍA—NÃO SE CRUZAM tape up around their property on the news, and the Brazilian government released a statement that said they’d been taken into custody in order to provide them “the best treatment possible.” The phrase chilled Naz. Their neighbors put themselves into self-imposed quarantine. None of them lost their shadows. Americans camped angrilyout in the consular hall of the U.S. embassy in São Paulo. Australians built a giant barbecue on the front lawn of their own. Naz emailed Rojan about going home again, but tickets had jumped to $15,000. Airports everywhere but Brazil were overrun with desperate travelers trying to run to—or run away from—somewhere. So instead, Naz just held her breath, hoping it was some kind of strange fluke.
    But it wasn’t. Another case showed up on the other side of Brazil, completely unconnected, near the border with Peru. Then a week after that, it seemed like all the shadows in Panama disappeared at the same time.

I DIDN’T LEAVE A NOTE, BECAUSE I THOUGHT THAT MIGHT BE worse. If you just think that I forgot you and wandered away, you could eventually forgive yourself, I hope. You’d still follow our first rule, before we had the other rules. The only rule that matters now. That you won’t come after me.
    I know, Ory, I know. I know you made that rule to protect me. You never thought that someday, I’d be the one who didn’t return. But don’t you see? That’s why it had to be like this, like I’d already forgotten you, so you wouldn’t follow me. I did it to protect you, Ory. Not to hurt you. If you knew not only that I had left, but that I did it on purpose, while I still remember you . . . you wouldn’t understand. You still have your shadow—you can’t understand. No note I could leave could ever convince you not to look for me—convince you that I left