by Victoria Lee
“How long’s Lehrer keeping him, anyway?” Bethany said eventually. It took Noam a moment to realize she was still talking about Dara. She looked at Ames. “He’s been gone three days.”
“Why’re you asking me?” Ames said. “I already said he didn’t leave a note or anything.” She dumped more salt on her plate. “He’s liable to show up soon enough. Lehrer probably has him off doing fancy training for people with fancy powers. It’s fine.”
Something about the way Ames said it made Noam think maybe it wasn’t fine.
“Listen, don’t stress out, okay?” Taye nudged Noam with his elbow. “You’ll catch up in no time. Just do a lot of reading.”
“I grew up in a bookstore,” Noam said, but Taye was still looking at him with that same expectancy, Ames stirring the salt mound into her potatoes, Bethany smiling. “Yeah,” Noam said and sighed. “Lots of reading.”
That night, as Noam sat in the common room with an algebra textbook—he figured he could get a bit of that remedial education done early and maybe not look so stupid in front of Lehrer and Lehrer’s clever protégé—he looked at Bethany reading with a pencil in her mouth and wondered what his father would say if he could see him now.
None of these people, Dad would tell him, give a shit about you or anybody you know.
His father had said just that at the dinner table, brandishing his fork like a spear. His mother rolled her eyes, but Brennan—who’d come over for Shabbat dinner—had agreed. Don’t trust anyone in a suit, Brennan had said. Especially ones bearing government insignia.
Government ran screeching through the halls wearing only wet towels. Government watched bad detective movies and ate only the red candies and sketched out new tattoo ideas by the window light.
Noam hated the government, or so he reminded himself as Taye gave him a dramatic tour of the barracks and when Ames let him borrow shampoo and Bethany made sure he had a set of drabs to wear tomorrow. He hated the government. He was here to tear their castle to the ground.
That night he barely slept, and come morning, his alarm went off at five. He choked down a few sickly bites of porridge, and then it was out to a field and the care of an eagle-eyed sadist named Sergeant Li, who put the cadets through the steps of basic training.
Noam used to run track, back when he’d still gone to school, but that was a long time ago and before the fever wasted his strength. Trying to run a seven-minute mile was grueling, the air bone cold in November and the frosty ground crunching underfoot. Noam barely managed to finish the mile under nine. Noam thought it was over, but no, then it was fartleks, and hurdles, and an obstacle course. Finally, after so many crunches and push-ups that Noam suspected he might throw up all over the icy lawn, Li blew her whistle and sent the cadets in to shower. The others headed off to their lessons afterward, leaving Noam alone in the Level IV common room to wait.
Howard showed up around nine, the sound of the front door startling Noam from where he’d fallen back asleep on the sofa. But he refused to leap up like a scolded child, even when Howard gave him a pointed look. He just stretched his arms up overhead, arching his back, and smiled. “Hey, again. Time for class?”
“Minister Lehrer won’t like to be kept waiting.”
“Let’s go, then.” Noam swung his legs off the sofa and stood, tugging the hem of his uniform shirt to make it appear a little less wrinkled.
Howard frowned. “Where’s your satchel?”
“My . . . what?”
She sighed, tapping the countertop. “Your satchel, Mr. Álvaro. There was a satchel provided for you, containing notebooks and pens and other school supplies. It should be in your bedroom.”
“Oh. Right. Hold on.”
Noam remembered the bag from this morning. It hadn’t been labeled with his name or placed anywhere near his dresser, so he’d just assumed the bag belonged to someone else. But there it was, leaning against the wall, a practical brown leather satchel with a strap and handle on top. Much nicer quality than anything Noam had owned before—and they were just giving it to him. To a cadet.
“Minister Lehrer’s office is in the other wing of the building,” Howard said as they set off, moving fast down the narrow halls, Noam’s sore legs barely able to keep up. “You are not allowed in that part of the government complex unless accompanied by a ranking adult—do you understand? This is where the ministers and the chancellor have their offices. It’s no place for an unsupervised cadet.”
“Of course not,” Noam said and smiled his best innocent smile. Howard didn’t look convinced.
Nor should she be. Noam’s blood felt sharp in his veins the moment they stepped into the central atrium of the building, where the walls were glass, sunlight streaming in from the courtyard on one side and the open street on the other, wooden floors gleaming underfoot. The glittering chandelier must have taken weeks to build—all those hands threading crystals on string. Men and women in gray military uniforms walked in every direction, people in suits jabbered into their phones or stared at screens in their hands, guards stood alert at the doors and watched with narrow eyes. The cobalt-blue flag of Carolinia hung over the entrance to the administrative wing, emblazoned with the sign of the white phoenix.
Noam was going to be here every day. He’d be surrounded by the most important people in the country: Lehrer, García, Holloway, the home secretary whose name Noam forgot. Chancellor Sacha himself.
If he could get in here sometime—alone, not with Howard, and not on his way to see Lehrer—he could do a whole lot of damage.
He had to get in touch with Brennan. If Brennan was still alive, Linda would know—Noam just had to find a way off campus.
Howard pressed her hand to a screen beside the towering wooden door to the west wing, leaning in to allow a tiny laser to scan her eye. Noam noticed with a burst of adrenaline that he could actually feel the computer working this time, as if his aptitude testing had been a switch just waiting to be flipped, and now he could sense the little electrical signals jumping between pins, the flicker of data packets being transferred, a whole buzzing ecosystem contained behind that panel and visible to Noam alone.
In that moment, he wanted to sink down onto the floor and just sit for a while, letting the tech wash over him. Binary was something he’d only known about on the theoretical level, something he’d considered while writing code or fixing someone’s computer. It wasn’t something to feel in one’s bones, a new sensation as sharp as sight and sound.
Other countries—England, and Canada, and even York—had spent the past hundred years developing the kinds of tech no one in Durham could dream of. And yet when Lehrer closed the borders back in 2019, he’d frozen Carolinia in time. Noam only knew about foreign tech because he’d hacked a Canadian newspaper once. Carolinia relied so much on magic that it barely bothered developing new tech anymore.
But imagine . . . just imagine what it might have been like. How much Noam could’ve done if tech research hadn’t ground to a halt in 2019.
Noam was a technopath in Carolinia—but that could have meant so much more.
Then again, being a witching anywhere else probably wouldn’t bode well for him, considering all those other countries had a bad habit of locking witchings up in secure facilities for public “protection.”
The latch clicked on the door: 1, binary code. Entrance approved. An awed Noam trailed after Howard into the next hall, now blind to the people around them. He was too focused on the things they carried.
Cell phones and tablets. Medical implants. Tracking devices. Holoreaders tucked away in padded cases. Now that he was paying attention, they gleamed in Noam’s awareness like beacons, information content washing over him in tiny humming waves. He tried to translate the data, but no luck.
Soon, he told himself in giddy anticipation. After Lehrer, after he knew magic.
Soon, he’d make sure this place had no secrets left.
They went up two flights of stairs and through a new maze of corridors. When they stopp
ed in front of a plain, unmarked door, Noam realized he hadn’t paid the slightest bit of attention to where they were going. And now they stood in front of what must be Lehrer’s office, no sign or security panel in sight.
Howard didn’t knock. She just turned the knob and let them in.
The room was relatively small, for one—no more than half the size of the common room back in the barracks. The best word for it was cozy. The walls were painted deep blue, the furniture upholstered in a soft burgundy fabric that appeared again in the patterning on the worn Persian carpets draping the floor. Everything here seemed at least a hundred years old and well loved, as if the decorator had stubbornly refused to acknowledge the passage of time and trend in favor of staying locked in a familiar microcosm.
And there was no technology whatsoever. Noam’s power just hung there uselessly, somehow a strange sensation, although he’d only learned to notice tech the day before.
“I imagine Minister Lehrer will be along soon enough, so I’ll leave you two be,” Howard said.
Noam frowned, because there was no one else here, but then Howard stepped back out into the hall and pulled the door shut. There was another chair in the far-left corner that had been obscured by Howard’s body and the open door, and someone sat in it.
He was older, seventeen or eighteen, brown skinned with unruly dark hair that fell in tousled curls around a perfectly symmetrical face. He had one leg drawn up onto the seat and an open book perched against his knee, the sleeves of his uniform rolled up to his elbows as if he’d decided to wear his drabs for fashion purposes rather than practical. He looked up over the pages of his book at Noam, a small frown tugging down the corners of his mouth, and Noam realized he was staring. It was hard not to. The boy looked like he belonged in a magazine.
As if he could tell what Noam was thinking, the boy raised an eyebrow.
“Hello,” Noam said, trying to cover awkwardness with false bravado. “I’m Noam. I take it you’re Dara, then?”
“I must be.”
Noam waited for him to keep going, to say whatever else polite people usually said when meeting someone new, but that appeared to be all Dara had in him. He’d already turned his attention back down to his book, disinterested. Fighting a twinge in his stomach that felt suspiciously like embarrassment, Noam cast his gaze around the room. Was he supposed to sit down? How late was Lehrer going to be?
He looked back at Dara, lifting his satchel. “Is there somewhere I ought to put this?”
Dara glanced up. “Hmm? Oh.” He tilted his head toward one of the other armchairs, the one nearest the window. “Right there’s fine.”
“Thanks.” Noam carried the bag over and dumped it on the seat. He hovered there a moment, trying to figure out if it would be rude to go examine the bookshelves. Lehrer had a broad collection, it seemed, everything from glossy new titles to tomes so old the binding had worn away to expose hand-sewn pages.
Noam settled for sitting instead, choosing the chair nearest Dara. He stole a glance at the spine of Dara’s book. Ava. Another Nabokov, just like the one he’d left on the table back at the dorm. Noam seriously doubted that was assigned material. He thought about saying something else, That’s a good book, maybe, to try to draw Dara back into conversation, but that was probably pointless.
This close, barely a foot between their chairs, Noam thought he detected the shadow of a bruise on Dara’s brow, only just obscured by the fall of his hair.
The door opened. Noam’s gaze jerked away from Dara as he leaped to his feet, wondering if he ought to salute. He was glad he didn’t, because Dara hadn’t moved from his spot in the armchair, still looking at his book as if he hadn’t noticed his commanding officer walk in.
Lehrer, for his part, didn’t correct either of them. He smiled when he saw Noam, the door falling shut and cutting off the brief noise that had filtered in through the hall. “Good,” he said. “I see you found the place all right, Mr. Álvaro.”
Noam nodded, the back of his throat dry. Once again, that uniform made Lehrer look far too tall, like he wasn’t built to exist in such small spaces. “Yes, sir.”
Lehrer’s gaze slid away from him to Dara, who was still reading. Then he looked away without saying anything, moving toward the armchair by the window. He made as if to sit, then paused, brows raised. He pointed to the satchel. “Whose things are these?”
“Mine,” Noam said at the same time as Dara said, “His.”
The nape of Noam’s neck burned as he moved to retrieve the bag from the chair—from Lehrer’s chair, Dara had him put his bag in Lehrer’s chair—unable to look Lehrer in the eye as he retreated back over to his spot in the corner, his hands white knuckled around the satchel’s strap.
Lehrer sat down in that chair, long legs crossed at the knees and his hands folded in his lap. His expression was impassive. “I gather the two of you made acquaintance,” he said. His tone was as dry as dead leaves.
Noam nodded. Dara did nothing.
“Very well. Noam, you’ll just be reading today. I put a book on the table there. Read through chapter four, do all the practice problems, and check them against the answer key. Let me know when you’re done. Dara, you’re with me.”
Noam and Dara both got up, Dara finally abandoning his book in the chair and crossing the room to Lehrer. That left Noam to grab what was on the coffee table: Algebra and Trigonometry, Book 2. He sat on the sofa and tugged the book into his lap, opening up his satchel for a spare pencil.
This wasn’t what he’d imagined when Lehrer said he’d tutor him. But then, Lehrer was still the reason Noam was even here at all. He turned to the first chapter.
Polynomials. Basic enough—even if the later sections looked like they were gonna be hell. What was a radical function? But for now, solving polynomials meant it was only too easy for Noam to get distracted by what was unfolding between Lehrer and Dara just five feet away.
Dara had taken up the seat nearest Lehrer’s, frowning down at the small table between their chairs. There was nothing on the table; Dara was just looking at it. Opposite him, Lehrer sat with his elbow perched on the armrest and watched. He’d lit a cigarette. Every now and then he’d take a drag and then exhale the smoke away from Dara’s face, toward the open window.
How the hell had Lehrer lived to be over a hundred years old if he was a smoker?
He imagined Lehrer’s lungs staining black, crumpling in on themselves like burned paper, only to heal themselves and expand, pink and fleshy. Over and over again.
Noam wrote down the answer to the problem he was working on, then traced over the numbers again with his pencil.
“You can use gesture, if you must,” Lehrer told Dara.
Dara lifted his hand, holding it palm down over the table, and almost instantly an apple appeared beneath it. Noam, startled, pressed too hard on his pencil, and the tip broke off. He hunched over, using the excuse of digging around in his bag for a fresh one to keep watching Dara and Lehrer.
The apple rocked once, twice, as if touched by a hand, then went still. It was green darkening to red, only barely ripe, and a little bruised toward the base.
“Good,” Lehrer said, although he sounded dubious, as if illusion were nothing and not the most impressive piece of magic Noam had seen in his life. “But how complete is the illusion? Is it merely aesthetic?”
Dara didn’t say anything, just picked up the apple and bit. The apple’s juices leaked over its skin, trickling down onto Dara’s wrist as he chewed, then swallowed. That appeared to answer Lehrer’s question. He smiled and took the apple from Dara’s hand, tossing it into the air once. The fruit vanished before it could fall back into his palm.
“Not bad. I’d like to see you do it without the gesture next time. You won’t always have that crutch to rely on, especially if you’re trying to fool someone who expects magic.”
Noam turned the page in his textbook and started working through the next set of problems, but it was hard to concentrate with Dara practi
cing his illusions just a few feet away. He wanted, more than anything, to perform magic like that. Dara made illusion seem so easy, but Noam couldn’t fathom how he was doing it. If your ability to do magic was based on how much you knew about whatever it was, like knowing physics to do telekinesis, then what kind of knowledge was required to make someone see and feel and taste something that wasn’t there? You couldn’t just change the way light was refracting off the air; you’d have to influence the signals sent by the nerves in Lehrer’s hand when he touched the apple to get the weight and texture right. Then you’d have to titrate those when Lehrer threw the apple into the air, making quick and miniscule adjustments as fast as Lehrer could decide he wanted to throw the apple in the first place. And how did you manage taste? He supposed Dara could have faked that part, since he was the one who had bitten the apple, not Lehrer, but even so.
Dara was obviously every bit as powerful as the others said he was. He deserved to be here, getting private lessons from Minister Lehrer. Dara was the kind of person Level IV recruited . . . not middle school dropouts who didn’t even understand radical functions.
If Noam hoped to ever catch up to Dara—if he hoped his power would be any use to the cause—he had a long road ahead of him.
Saturday, Noam had been in Level IV for a week, but all he’d accomplished in his lessons with Lehrer was to sit quietly and read remedial math. He hadn’t even left the government complex. He’d thought about sneaking out to find Brennan, but he wouldn’t get his new ID card until Thursday, and without ID he was pretty sure he wouldn’t be let back in. Then on Friday they sprayed the city with some kind of chemical that allegedly sanitized everything and prevented viral outbreaks—not, of course, that anyone believed that actually worked. Even so, nobody was allowed outside for eight hours, and by then it was dark.
That left Saturday.
The others spent their free day in the common room, all four caught up in some poker game Dara had roped them into with a buy in Noam couldn’t afford. Noam sat in the corner chair with his books and notes and watched as Ames threatened to fight Taye and Bethany for the spot on Dara’s team. Ames sat in Dara’s lap and refused to get up even when Bethany laughed and tugged at her hands; Dara smiled and locked his arms neatly round Ames’s waist.