by Victoria Lee
“Courtyard?” Lehrer suggested, and Noam nodded.
The courtyard was every bit as lovely as it had been that night with Dara and the bourbon. The spring air was a cool rush on Noam’s face as soon as they stepped out onto the flagstones, chilling the nape of his neck and ruffling through his hair. Beside him, Lehrer turned his face toward the sky.
“I prefer winter,” Lehrer mused. Wolf walked at a measured pace by Lehrer’s heel, not trying to rush ahead the way Noam had seen other dogs do. “Summer’s too humid and muggy. Before the catastrophe it was far worse than it is now. Say what you will about the nuclear option, but it certainly improved the weather forecast.”
The history books had always seemed remarkably sparse on foreign relations details, unless you counted making it clear the US had been evil. Lehrer was the only person left who could answer any question Noam threw at him.
“Why didn’t the rest of the world keep bombing North America after the catastrophe was over?” Noam asked Lehrer. “Surely they were motivated to wipe out Carolinia before it was even founded. They hated you.”
“Oh yes,” Lehrer said, shooting Noam an amused glance. “They tried. I deflected the first bomb into the Atlantic and told them the next would find its way back where it came from.”
Deflected a nuclear bomb.
Lehrer, at age nineteen, deflected a nuclear bomb.
It shouldn’t be shocking, not after what Noam saw Lehrer do today. Resurrection, even if partial resurrection, was completely unfathomable. In fact, Noam was pretty sure his theory books had said it was outside the ability of magic.
Someone really did need to update those books.
They meandered along the perimeter of the courtyard under the trees, still bare from winter. The chill settled into Noam’s bones the longer they stayed outside. For his part, Lehrer barely seemed to notice the unseasonable cold; his bare hand only loosely grasped the handle of Wolf’s leash, skin unmottled.
“You’re doing well,” Lehrer said at last, after Noam started wondering if Lehrer planned to say anything at all. “Your progress in our lessons has been exponential, and Colonel Swensson tells me you are succeeding in your classes with him. Starting tomorrow, you’ll join your peers in regular course work.”
Noam ought to have been relieved—finally, he was good enough to be done with remedial lessons—but he felt like something heavy had dropped into his stomach.
No more lessons with Lehrer. That was what this meant.
He was normal now, no different from any of the rest. He’d go to basic training, then lectures on engineering and war strategy and law, then do his homework in the common room next to Bethany and Taye and Ames, and graduate when he turned eighteen. Then he’d join the army or be filed into some bureaucratic position to serve his country from behind a desk.
And this connection to Lehrer, this opportunity to find out if Lehrer might sympathize with Brennan, might aid the cause, would disintegrate.
“Of course,” Lehrer went on, “you’ll still have your private lessons with me.”
Noam startled, jerking his head up to look at Lehrer so fast it earned a low laugh on Lehrer’s part.
“Oh yes. I have no intention of abandoning our sessions. In fact, I think we should start sparring soon. You have such impressive dynamics, Noam—and, like me, you are remarkably intelligent despite a paucity of formal education. It would be criminal not to take advantage.”
A wave of heat lit Noam’s cheeks. He shouldn’t be so thrilled by Lehrer’s attention. Lehrer was the means to an end, nothing more.
And then there was the matter of whatever Lehrer had planned for Noam, those secrets he kept cryptically hinting at. Was it connected to Dara and what Dara had been up to in the government complex? Only it hadn’t seemed like Lehrer and Dara were working together.
But then there was the way Lehrer watched Dara beg earlier today, Lehrer’s expression as placid as calm water. As if Dara’s pain was a moderately interesting academic observation.
“I won’t disappoint you,” Noam said. “But I need to know why I’m here. Why are you training me?”
Lehrer turned them onto a fresh path, crossing the stream that cut through the courtyard. For a moment, Noam thought he wasn’t going to answer. But then—
“You and I have a lot in common,” Lehrer said again. “More than just being Jewish and uneducated, I think. But it appears patience is not one of those shared virtues.”
Noam flushed, but he didn’t get a chance to respond.
Lehrer’s hand caught Noam’s for the briefest moment, long fingers curving in against Noam’s and pressing something into his palm. Noam grasped it on reflex, and Lehrer withdrew, shifting Wolf’s leash over to that hand as if nothing happened. Noam’s heart pounded in his throat, and Lehrer glanced toward the sky like he could divine the time from the orientation of stars and said, “Let’s head back.”
The note was folded four times over. Later, when Noam was alone in the barracks, he unfolded it by the light of his phone screen and read the single word written there in Lehrer’s neat, slanted script:
Faraday.
Brief audio recording, stolen from C. Lehrer’s personal collection.
MAN 1: Okay, it’s recording.
MAN 2 (a softer voice): This is stupid.
MAN 1: You don’t know till you try, Calix. Come on.
MAN 2/CALIX: It doesn’t work this way. Turn it off, Wolf, we’re going to be late.
MAN 1/ADALWOLF: They can’t start the meeting without us. Pretty please?
CALIX: I said no. Stop asking.
ADALWOLF: Don’t you dare—
CALIX: I didn’t!
ADALWOLF: Okay. Okay, but, just once. For me.
CALIX: Fine. Turn this thing off.
ADALWOLF: Thank you.
[The recording ends.]
CHAPTER TEN
Faraday.
There was only one thing that could mean, of course—Faraday, as in Faraday shield, as in a conductive material that blocked electromagnetic waves.
Why Lehrer was passing him notes about this was harder to understand.
Noam stayed up late thinking about it almost every night that week, turning the word over and over in his mind until it lost all meaning.
Faraday.
How was that supposed to help the refugees? Was Sacha planning some kind of electromagnetic attack against them? Was Noam meant to use his newfound power over electromagnetism to build a Faraday shield and protect them?
Noam lingered after lessons every day, hoping Lehrer would give another hint (or another note, or another several notes), but Lehrer seemed to have said all he planned to on the matter. As if oblivious to how much mental energy Noam spent trying to decrypt his code, Lehrer even gave him just as much homework as usual—on top of everything his new regular teachers assigned.
A week later, there was another outbreak of the virus.
Magic hit a refugee camp near the coast, piling up so many bodies that the local authorities couldn’t burn them quickly enough. Without any safe way to transport patients to the major hospitals in Richmond or Raleigh, Sacha declared a state of emergency. That meant resources pouring east, and those resources included as many witching students and soldiers as Lehrer could spare.
After the plane landed, the cadets were ushered into army trucks that carried them over broken roads, every pothole jostling them against the fabric walls and adding salt to the nausea that swelled up in Noam’s stomach, bilious and thick. He was grateful when they finally came to a shuddering stop. Or, he was grateful until he took a breath and his lungs filled with the stench of blood and vomit and rotting flesh.
Next to him, a Charleston cadet retched, lurching forward over his knees. Luckily, nothing came out. Noam pressed a hand over his nose and mouth, breathing in shallow little gulps of his own humid air.
“What the hell is that?” someone said in a thin voice.
The driver drew back the curtain at the rear of the truck, a
nd they found out.
The dirt streets of the camp were crowded with huge white tents constructed of some material thicker than canvas, each tent opening on to a little courtyard filled with tables and chairs and soldiers milling about. The source of the smell was obvious. At the rear of each pair of tents, piles of black body bags awaited incineration, buzzing with flies.
“God,” Bethany said from just over Noam’s shoulder as they jumped out of the truck. “What is this? Where are the red wards?”
“Not enough room,” Dara said. Noam hadn’t even noticed him coming up, and now he stood just to Noam’s right, looking out at the street and its tents stretching as far as the eye could see. “Backwater places like this, they run out of space in the red wards fast, especially in a bad outbreak.”
“And especially when the patients are refugees,” Noam added, heart a stone in his chest. “Better save space for the people you actually want to survive.”
Dara and Bethany exchanged looks, but Noam didn’t care if they thought he was militant. They hadn’t read those emails. They hadn’t grown up in places like this.
He couldn’t imagine a worse place for an outbreak than a refugee camp. Close quarters and high population, poor access to health care or hygiene facilities. The tents probably made things even worse. Even though they made volunteers shower when they entered the wards and when they left—even when they sprayed them all with decontamination fluid—those seemed like half measures compared to what was possible in an actual hospital. Here, they couldn’t even filter the airflow.
The soldiers split the cadets up into platoons, assigning three platoons per tent. Noam’s group was under Colonel Swensson’s command, which was just Noam’s luck because Swensson hated him.
“Listen up!” Swensson said. He didn’t even have to raise his voice to get their attention. “You might be immune to the virus, but you still have to follow hygiene protocol. That means washing your hands before and after each patient. Use full decontamination procedure when entering and leaving the ward. Wear gloves and a face mask, always. You might not be able to get sick, but you can still get other people sick if you’re carrying virus particles around on your skin and hair and clothing. Understand?”
He waited for them all to shout, “Yes, sir!” before going on.
“Good. You’d better. Now, the staff tell you to do something, you do it. No questions asked. These people are risking their lives to help in this crisis, and they know more than you. Respect that.”
With that, he funneled them past the gate, through decontamination, then across the courtyard toward their assigned tents. Stepping through that door was like stepping onto another planet. Noam would never have thought they could cram so many beds into such a small area, except they did, just enough room left between the mattresses to stand. A couple soldiers milled about carrying linens or jugs of water. Amid them drifted doctors and nurses wearing what looked like space suits. The smell was stronger here, reeking of the latrine buckets and the sick, sweaty bodies of the patients on their cots, interspersed with the chlorine scent of bleach.
The ground underfoot sprouted with flowers: magical little buds of gold and silver that moved without breeze, glittering petals spiraling up into the air. They weren’t real—when he reached out to touch them, they dissolved in a shower of sparks. When Noam inhaled, their magic was spun sugar on his tongue.
He was assigned to Dr. Halsing, as were Bethany and Taye. It was impossible to tell what kind of woman Dr. Halsing was behind all that protective gear: her eyes were the only thing visible, glinting above her paper face mask and shielded by the lenses of her plastic goggles. She’d never been infected.
“You’ll be helping me with patient care today,” she said, voice muffled. “Have you been through training?”
The others nodded, but Noam shook his head. Halsing muttered something behind her mask, possibly a curse.
“I know we’re shorthanded, but . . . well, you’re what we’ve got, and it’s better than nothing. Come on. I’ll show you our patients.”
There were six. Noam repeated their names over and over in his mind so he wouldn’t forget: Martha, Shaqwan, Lola, Amy, William, Beatriz. Most were too sick for it to matter, drifting deep in comatose waters. He dabbed the crusted blood from the corners of their mouths and moved sharp objects out of the way when they had seizures, kept an eye out for rogue magic with a habit of setting bedsheets ablaze.
The little girl was the best off. Beatriz King. Bea. She still hovered on the knife-edge of consciousness, tipping over to one side or the other from time to time. When they first met her, she was sitting up in bed, hair damp with sweat and pulled back from her face, a bucket between her knees and a book resting against her thighs. She put the book down when the doctor needed to check her heart and lungs, though no one needed a stethoscope to hear the way air rattled in her chest.
“How are you feeling?” Bethany asked, sitting on the edge of the bed.
“All right,” Bea said. Even her voice was weak, like watered-down tea. “Who are you?”
“I’m Bethany. This is Noam and Taye. We’re helping Dr. Halsing today.”
“You don’t have those big space suits,” she said, pointing at Bethany. “You’re going to get sick.”
“We’ve already been sick,” Taye reassured her. He angled his body away from her all the same.
“Oh. Can you do magic, then?”
“Sure can,” Noam said. “Want to see?”
She nodded, perhaps not as enthusiastically as she might have had she been well. Noam rubbed his gloved fingertips together, capturing the static and letting it spark into seed lightning, sizzling white against his palm.
“Be careful!” Taye said from somewhere over his left shoulder, but Noam ignored him. Bea’s face lit up, a smile spreading her cracked lips.
“Does it hurt?” she asked, leaning forward a little, and Noam shook his head.
“Not me. I wouldn’t touch it, though, if I were you.” He clenched his hand into a fist, and the lightning quenched. Bea pressed her fingers to the middle of his hand, as if testing to see if it was still warm. To her, maybe it was. Her skin was dry and cracked, fragile as paper.
“What else can you do?” she said.
“I can make things bigger and smaller,” Taye said. It was the kind of confession that made Noam twist round to look at him—Taye’d never talked about his presenting power before, at least not where Noam could hear.
“What kinds of things?” Noam said.
“You know. Whatever. Anything. Could do this table. Could do myself, even.”
Noam frowned. “Isn’t that complicated? I mean, you’d have to concentrate on . . . a lot of organs.”
Taye just smiled at him and said, “Nah, man. It’s just, like, exponents.” As if to demonstrate, a pen on the table by Bea’s cot expanded to almost six times its original size, then shrank just as easily.
“Exponents.”
“Yeah.”
“Exponents as in . . . math.”
Taye picked up the pen and twirled it between his fingers, completely unfazed by the flabbergasted look on Noam’s face. “Yeah, like math. If you think about cells and atoms and shit as numbers and then just raise them to whatever power, it’s easy.”
Easy if you were a goddamn math prodigy.
Still, Bea found Taye’s tricks delightful—so they spent the next five or ten minutes showing some of the more interesting applications of both their powers until at last Halsing swept down to demand they go and see to other patients.
Bea seems to be doing well, Noam thought as he sponged down an older man who was hours into the coma stage. She was alert, even if she wasn’t strong, and she was reading. Maybe she would be like them. Maybe she’d be a witching, and one day she’d be showing off magic tricks of her very own.
The idea stuck with him, a warm kernel of hope he returned to later when one of the other patients died and he and Dara carried the body out wrapped in a sheet—they ran
out of body bags ages ago—and tossed it onto a pile with the others to be burned. Dara’s cheeks were pink, a few curls stuck to his forehead; with all those feverish bodies crammed inside, the tent was sweltering.
“Do you remember this?” he asked Noam before they went back in, the pair of them sharing a bottle of water near the entrance. “Being sick.”
“Not really. I was unconscious most of the time.”
“So you had it bad, then. You didn’t know you were going to survive.” He passed Noam the bottle, and Noam took a sip; the water was lukewarm.
“They left me there, actually. In the red ward. I woke up alone.”
Dara stared. “They left you there?”
“They probably assumed I was going to die either way. When you can’t afford to pay for all those fancy experimental drugs, survival odds kinda go down a bit. There were cameras, though. When they realized I survived, they had people there in minutes. Even Lehrer came.”
Noam gave Dara back the water, but Dara just stood there, holding it in one hand without drinking. At last Dara shook his head and said, “Fine. Fine, I shouldn’t be surprised.”
Right. Because Dara had the luxury of finding such things surprising.
Some of that must have shown on Noam’s face, because Dara sighed. “I know.” He dragged his fingers back through his hair. “All right, come on. Let’s go back inside.”
The cadets were housed in barracks, unused now that most of the soldiers were down south “reconstructing” Atlantia. The barracks faced the sea; when the wind rolled in off the ocean, it whistled through the cracks in the walls and tasted like salt. All their clothes smelled like death, sinking into fibers and bruising itself on skin.
Noam didn’t sleep well that night.
The next day was worse. Four patients died, but six more were brought in to take their place, spreading the ranks of doctors and cadets even thinner.