by Victoria Lee
He sat silently in the back, though, which is good.
April 28, 2015
I take back what I said about silence.
May 2, 2015
Final preparations. Not getting much sleep, thanks to Calix.
Raphael says he needs therapy. Dunno where we’re gonna find that in NC these days. Does he think shrinks set up shop in bombed-out supermarkets and give out pills at the Shell station?
Psychiatry’s a pseudoscience anyway.
May 6, 2015
CDC tomorrow. Driving to Atlanta before dawn. I’m too recognizable, so I stay in the car. Nakir and Suriel take the new wing. Raphael first and second floor west. Gavriel first and second floor east. Michael and her team take the rest, while Azriel/Calix keeps security in line.
If anything goes wrong with the plan, I’ll be losing all my best people. Nothing better go wrong.
May 8, 2015
CDC mission massive success, mostly thanks to C. Starting to think letting him help out isn’t such a bad idea. He’s always been clever, not surprising that applies to military strategy too. Raphael says having C. think about this shit is a bad idea, says he’s too young or too traumatized or some BS. He doesn’t know my brother.
Will have Calix look at specs for June mission, see what he thinks.
CHAPTER FIVE
Autumn dragged into winter with a slurry of ice and snow. Noam met with Lehrer every weekday, and every weekday he was assigned a corner and a book to read, long blocks of problem sets, and chapters from A Physics Primer. Noam slept in the barracks, cold and austere, no mezuzot to touch as he went through doors. No one to take care of but himself. Weekends he spent reading ahead in his textbooks, feverishly late into the nights with sheets pulled over his head and flashlight in hand.
He had to study. The best way to prove his utility to Brennan, at this point, was to use his power and bring Brennan everything he could find from the Ministry of Defense servers. No way was he good enough to break past their firewalls with code.
But if Noam could use magic—Carolinia’s most treasured resource—for the Atlantian cause, then maybe being a witching wasn’t such a bad thing.
Studying meant he had an excuse to avoid Dara, at least. After that first lesson, Dara had made a point of never speaking to Noam. Everything about him was baffling. Dara never met Noam before that day in Lehrer’s study, presumably hadn’t even known Noam was Atlantian. He just took one look at him and hated him. The best justification Noam had come up with was that Dara thought Noam was here to steal his special lessons with Lehrer.
A huge stretch, considering Dara was there every day to see what little regard Lehrer had for Noam’s ability to do more than p-sets. But whatever. Dara could take his good looks and cool power and bewildering popularity and fuck right off.
The only glimmers of respite were Noam’s daily meetings with Swensson, who disliked Noam every bit as much as he disliked everyone else but was a remarkably good instructor all the same. He helped Noam practice his technopathy, assigning him four new programming languages to learn and ordering him to write a basic integer-sorting program without using a single one of those languages (indeed, without touching the keyboard at all). Noam spent the whole hour of their lesson sitting in front of a computer, willing it to sort the damn integers, half-convinced this whole thing was a government conspiracy to make him look like an idiot.
“You’re not thinking this through,” Swensson accused him after two sessions, looming over Noam with his arms crossed. “You understand how magic works, surely. Why are you a technopath and not, say, a telekinetic?”
Noam sat very still, certain that if he moved an inch his frustration would boil over. “Because I understand computers but not physics.”
“Exactly. So why are you sitting here, thinking how nice it would be if this machine just did what you wanted? Think about what you need. Think through each and every step, then tell the computer to execute them.”
But what was the point of writing a program in his head when he could type it out just as quickly? What was the point of being a technopath if it just came down to doing what he could’ve done anyway with a perfectly good Ursascript?
He obeyed all the same, and to his simultaneous frustration and delight the computer spat out an elegantly efficient radix-sorting algorithm. When he asked Swensson why he didn’t just write a code to do the same thing, Swensson said it would get easier the more he practiced, that eventually he’d accomplish impossible technological feats with just a thought.
It was a minor victory when, a month after he first began lessons in Level IV, Noam managed to get a computer to connect to the internet, open a browser window, bypass security measures, and send an email from his account to Swensson’s, all without coming within ten feet of a holoreader.
“Twelve seconds. Not bad,” Swensson said, “for a juvenile delinquent.”
The next lesson, Noam did it in five.
His success with technology didn’t mean much to the other cadets, though. Somehow word got out that Noam hadn’t just failed the placement exam but that he hadn’t gone to school at all for three years. It wasn’t clear just how much else they knew, but Taye and Dara both started locking their dressers when they left for classes in the morning, like they thought Noam would steal their socks if they weren’t careful.
“I’m sure it’s not personal,” Bethany reassured him one evening. They were both up late with curriculum work, Noam’s intro math books sprawled next to Bethany’s Cardiovascular Physiology. Her presenting power was healing, apparently. Bethany had her toes tucked under Noam’s leg and holoreader propped up against her thighs, slouched so far down on the sofa her head was below the armrest. She was the only cadet willing to spend time with him—and that, he suspected, was just because she was nice.
“Not personal?”
When Bethany glanced up to meet his gaze, Noam made a face.
“Dara’s a really private person,” she said. “Taye’s probably just taking his lead.”
As usual, just hearing Dara’s name sparked a new flame of irritation. Of course Bethany made excuses for him. Dara was perfectly charming when she and the others were around, all smiles, but as soon as it was just him and Noam—or him and Noam and Lehrer—all that switched off like a lamp going dark.
Noam took it as a compliment. If the only person Dara despised as much as Noam was Minister Lehrer, then Noam must be doing something right.
“Where do you reckon they are, anyway?” Noam asked, tipping his head toward the empty barracks.
“The others like to go to this club over in Raleigh on off weekends,” Bethany said, tapping her holoreader screen. “I expect they’re still out.”
And Bethany hadn’t gone with them. Was that because she didn’t want to go, or because she felt sorry for Noam staying home alone?
Noam had never really enjoyed partying. After Carly died he went out some, mostly from a misguided sense that he needed to move on, to meet somebody. And yeah, he met people. But he’d never been able to muster the energy for the kind of relationship they wanted from him. Those romances fizzled out, quick and ephemeral as the rush from a tequila shot.
He chewed the inside of his cheek to keep from saying anything he might regret and tried to pay attention to precalculus—a difficult task, as he couldn’t quite ignore the little blips of electrical current every time Bethany’s word processor autosaved.
“Do you ever get to go home?” Noam asked, giving up. “Your mother’s still alive, right?”
Bethany snorted. “Yeah, she’s alive. I never see her, though.”
Noam tried to imagine not visiting his mother, if he had the option. He still saw her body sometimes, when he was trying to fall asleep, her face swollen and red and her neck bruised where the rope bit into her skin. Her limp feet dangling inches above the floor.
He put his book aside and twisted to face Bethany properly. “Why not?”
She shrugged. “My mother doesn’t unders
tand magic. It’s like she’s in awe of me and scared of me at the same time. The way she acts, you’d think her real daughter died in the red ward and I’m some impostor come to replace her.”
Noam hadn’t considered that. His mother died a long time ago, but what if his father hadn’t gotten sick? What if Jaime Álvaro had survived the outbreak, only to watch Noam transform into a witching and be snatched away to Level IV?
There was a strange guilt about witchings among the older generations. Seeing a witching was to remember your grandparents’ sins, a stain that wouldn’t wash out. Noam went to the memorial with his school once, the black basalt monument carved with more names than Noam could count.
His parents fled Atlantia because they were worried about the virus outbreaks there. They thought Carolinia was safer.
They’d been wrong.
Atlantians didn’t share Carolinian guilt over the catastrophe, even though their ancestors were equally complicit in the genocide. To them, witchings represented Carolinia—Carolinia, with all its careful protections against the virus, with its militarized QZ border, weekly disinfectant sprays, and government-subsidized respirator masks—Carolinia, which refused to use those same protections to shelter Atlantian citizens. Carolinian armies, which marched south with promises of humanitarian aid and then refused to leave.
No. If Noam’s dad survived, he’d hate Noam just as much as Brennan did.
“I’m sorry,” Noam said.
“Why? It wasn’t your fault.”
“I know. It just felt like the right thing to say.”
“Anyway, she’s the reason I got the power I did, I think. So I’m grateful to her for that.” Bethany gave him a slight smile. “She’s a doctor, so I was exposed to a lot of medical stuff growing up. She used to take me in with her to work and let me watch the med students dissect cadavers.”
“That didn’t gross you out?”
“Me? Nothing grosses me out. Seriously. Try me.”
Noam grimaced. “I’d rather not,” he said. “I just ate.”
She laughed and kicked his thigh.
They worked in silence for another hour or so until Bethany went off to bed, taking her books with her. Noam stayed. Sleep seemed a long way off, chased away by an anxious determination to read just one more chapter, two more, three. Everything was finally knitting together, concepts he learned in math reappearing in physics, the physical laws threaded into the fabric of chemistry, chemical reactions shaping biology . . .
He could catch up. He could.
Ames and Taye returned around one, draped in clubbing clothes and exhaustion.
“Hey, Noam,” Taye said. He was so drunk that when he waved, even his hand looked slurred.
Noam’s grip tightened on his textbook. “Hey.” A beat, Noam turning the question over in his mouth a few times, before deciding he didn’t give a fuck what they thought of him for asking. “Where’s Dara?”
Ames tried tugging her jacket off and got her arm stuck in the sleeve. She laughed, stumbling as Taye tried to help her get free. “Dunno,” she said at last. “Probably went home with someone. Probably suffocating himself on dick as we speak.”
Right. Noam tapped the tip of his tongue against his teeth. It wasn’t any of his business what Dara did. “Does that a lot, does he?”
Taye laughed. “Can’t take him anywhere.”
Ames’s mouth twisted, her expression somewhat less amused. “He usually makes it about fifteen minutes before abandoning us for better prospects.”
She must have seen the look on Noam’s face because she shook her head. “Whatever. If he hasn’t given himself alcohol poisoning again, I’m sure he’ll stumble back here eventually.”
Noam felt like they were talking about two totally different people. Dara being an asshole was unsurprising. Dara losing his grip on that perfect self-control for even a second, on the other hand, struck Noam as less characteristic.
Ames and Taye departed for their separate bedrooms, leaving Noam in the common room still clutching his math book. Any hope of sleeping tonight had evaporated; Noam got up and made himself coffee instead of following Taye to bed. No point in wishing he’d gone to Raleigh, too, when he could barely summon an electric charge. Better to focus on p-sets. Better not to be such an embarrassment to Level IV. And then maybe one day Lehrer would say, I’m impressed, Noam—you learned this so quickly, and Noam would perform feats of magic far more magnificent than eating a goddamn apple.
He wasn’t worthless. He wasn’t.
The door finally opened again around five in the morning. It was still dark out, the world blanketed in a midwinter silence broken only by the click of Noam’s keyboard and the turn of the latch. Dara slipped inside. He didn’t see Noam at first, too focused on pulling the door softly shut and glancing down at the glowing white screen of his phone. His hair was messy, like someone had been dragging their fingers through it over and over, party glitter caught in the curls and dusting the line of a cheekbone.
“Ames and Taye got back ages ago,” Noam said, just to watch Dara startle. A dark twist of schadenfreude coiled up through his gut. He smiled. “Where’ve you been?”
Dara stuck his phone in the back pocket of his jeans, which were tight—really tight. “At the library,” he said.
Noam arched a brow and sank back against the sofa, coffee cupped between both hands. He was exhausted, and he’d held his tongue for weeks now—so he said, in a light tone that was very nearly teasing, “Oh yeah? Those jeans’re so tight I can see your religion. Does the librarian make you bend over to get the good books?”
His words didn’t quite garner the reaction Noam anticipated. Dara, usually so cold and dispassionate, turned a delicate shade of red. It was fascinating, a sea change that sent little shock waves of anger radiating between them. Or it would’ve been, if Noam didn’t suddenly taste magic crackling in the air.
I’ve gone too far.
Dara looked like he wanted to reach for that magic and fashion it into a weapon. Like he might be far more dangerous than Noam anticipated.
“I don’t need to pull all-nighters to do well,” Dara said at last, voice laced with frost but steady—too steady. He started off past the common room toward the bedrooms, but he paused right by Noam’s sofa. Noam could smell the alcohol on him.
Dara’s gaze dragged over the books Noam had scattered across the coffee table and seat cushions, the discarded eraser nubs and scribbled notes. It lingered on the cover of A Physics Primer, then lifted to Noam’s face. Dara’s eyes were black wells, pupils bleeding into iris.
“You can study all you want,” he said softly. “It isn’t going to make a difference.”
And then he vanished down the hall, leaving Noam to clutch his coffee and stare at those same notes, wishing Dara hadn’t carved out the guts of what Noam already feared was true.
Noam couldn’t get Dara out of his head. He’d set up shop there right alongside Brennan, the imaginary pair of them watching Noam and judging him every time he fumbled when trying to learn electrical magic or went to bed at the end of another day without making himself useful to the cause. It was all well and good swearing to Brennan that his magic would save them all, but so far Noam had only managed to glare at Chancellor Sacha’s photograph in the papers and think nasty thoughts.
Brennan didn’t answer when Noam called his cell, and when Noam did manage to get hold of Linda, Brennan had always conveniently “just stepped out.”
Fine. Noam hacked the Central News Bureau all on his own. He could find a way into the government complex servers without help too.
The next several times he went to the west wing for lessons with Lehrer, Noam paid attention. He noticed tech whenever he could, everything from traffic control to people’s texts. It didn’t count as snooping when he spied on people he didn’t know, or so he’d decided—although that meant he now knew way more about strangers’ hemorrhoids and marital problems than he’d have liked.
He tried to notice, too, the
inner workings of the biometric security system between the training wing and the government complex. But when he dipped his magic into the circuits, it slid right off like oil on water. He tried a second time, and a third, fumbling with the wires and pins and failing to comprehend the engineering at all.
The problem wasn’t his magic; he knew that much. He could easily fiddle with people’s holoreaders or the electrical system. But trying to influence the biometric reader was like chasing a vanishing horizon. Some kind of antitechnopathy ward, maybe?
He should’ve known. Why had he assumed the government would be stupid enough to leave its system open to powers like Noam’s? That would’ve been an egregious oversight, considering Noam’s ability was on record with Level IV.
He pushed his power into the next biometric reader he passed, trying to sense the shape and structure of the magic blocking his access, but it was impossible. He wasn’t that good.
When he reached Lehrer’s study, Dara was there—outside, in the hall, leaning against the wall with a book perched in hand. He didn’t look up when Noam approached. With his head tilted over the pages, chewing on the inside of one lip, Dara seemed too absorbed to notice his presence at all. But then when Noam reached for the doorknob, Dara spoke.
“Don’t go in there.”
“Why not?”
Dara didn’t answer.
It was so goddamn tempting to ignore him. But if Dara was just trying to make Noam late, well, he was making himself late too. So Noam found a spot on the opposite wall and sat on the floor, pulling out his phone and pretending to read something on-screen. He prodded his technopathy against the wards on the government servers once more, that hard kernel of frustration in his chest winding tighter as his power slid right off the shields. Again.
No wonder Brennan didn’t trust Noam. Noam had no real power—just magic-contaminated blood and a cadet uniform. A uniform that was, apparently, made by some famous fashion designer and tailored to the cadets’ personal measurements, because of fucking course that was a thing. Noam couldn’t call himself an anarchist when every single thing he owned was bought and paid for with federal blood money.