by Victoria Lee
That wouldn’t happen, of course. Lehrer had gone over the data Noam drained from the networks. They weren’t releasing anything that might cost lives. Only enough to make it clear that Sacha wasn’t just too incompetent to prevent the leak—he was actually evil. In a few days, Lehrer would miraculously discover the responsible party and shore up the leak, and all would be well. They were framing one of Sacha’s most trusted advisers, someone known to be antithetical to Lehrer on almost every single policy issue. All the better to position Lehrer in opposition to both Sacha and the hack.
All the better to make Lehrer electable.
Of course, to General Ames, the hack was just punk kids trying to make a statement and a public relations nightmare.
“And I’m sure,” Ames Sr. went on, gesturing with his wine, “you’ve all seen that mess Sacha’s wearing on his head these days.”
“What’s that?” Noam said, sitting straighter.
“Looks like a damn crown,” the general went on. “Tasteless. Utterly tasteless. You should talk to him, Calix.”
The weak light here made Lehrer’s face look smooth as polished stone. “I would, but I’m afraid Harold doesn’t find my company appealing of late.”
Dara, next to Noam, seemed far too pleased with himself.
The general muttered, “Should tell him he’s no king. Damn disrespectful, if you ask me.”
Lehrer nodded once, his expression shuttered, no doubt making comparisons to the gold circlet he’d worn before abdicating as king. All those speeches he’d made about the corruption of power.
The footman drifted forward to refill Lehrer’s scotch. Bowing, even, like he thought Lehrer was still royal.
There was enough power in this room to turn the tide for the refugees, but with the exception of Lehrer, everyone here used that power to make things worse. Perhaps they did it on Sacha’s orders, perhaps not. Noam didn’t care. Major General García helped organize the military intervention in Atlantia. General Ames was responsible for writing immigration policy, including the policies restricting how many legal refugees Carolinia accepted from Atlantia. The Attwoods were socialites whose money fed into the system, buying campaigns, votes, laws.
What would they do, he wondered, if they knew I was Atlantian?
He was dying to just say it, the words weighing on his tongue as the guests finished dinner and went into a new room, one the general called the drawing room.
Everything about the general rubbed Noam the wrong way—how he smacked his lips after he sipped his wine, the oddly paternal way he squeezed Dara’s shoulder as he pushed him down into an armchair, how he didn’t make eye contact with the footman who served his coffee.
Yeah, Noam needed to take a break.
He joined Ames on the sofa. She’d gotten out a new cigarette, though she hadn’t lit it yet.
“Hey,” Noam said.
“Hey.”
“So, where’s the bathroom?”
After a pause, one corner of her mouth quirked up. “I’ll show you.”
She abandoned the cigarette on the end table and got to her feet, tugging Noam up after her with one hand around his wrist. The general scarcely seemed to notice them go, too invested in his conversation with Dara—but Dara caught Noam’s eye just as he and Ames slipped out the door. He looked awful jealous for someone who at least had a whiskey in hand.
Ames and Noam headed down a dim hall, lit only by lamplight glowing odd colors from behind stained-glass shades. The shadows it cast beneath her vertebrae made her neck look thin and vulnerable.
“How do you not get lost in this house?” Noam murmured after what felt like the fifth turn into a new corridor and a set of stairs.
“My presenting power is a keen navigational sense.”
“Wait, really?”
“Nope.”
Ames pushed open a door on the second floor. “Here you go,” she said with an elaborate gesture across the threshold.
It wasn’t a bathroom.
“Is this . . . ?”
“Where the magic happens, yep.”
If the rest of the house was a museum of Carolinian history and architecture, Ames’s bedroom was an exhibit on teenage squalor. Noam was fairly certain the carpet was blue under all the discarded chip bags and T-shirts.
“I thought for sure y’all had maids.”
A comment Ames chose to ignore.
“Bathroom’s through here.” Ames made her way through the maze of debris with the delicate elegance of a dancer to kick open another door. This one actually did lead to a bathroom, one that was bigger than Noam’s entire apartment growing up.
“Are you serious?” he asked, staring at the marble counters. Marble.
“Dead serious. Do you have to pee or not?”
“Not, actually.”
He wandered in anyway, mostly to examine the gold taps. Ames followed.
“Want some?” she asked and pulled a bag of white powder from her trouser pocket.
“Don’t tempt me.” Noam hitched himself up onto the counter, legs dangling in midair and shoes bumping against the mahogany cabinets. “But I think if I took an upper right now, I’d end up trying to fistfight your dad over Marxist-Leninism.”
It was the least judgmental thing he could think to say. And he was judging her—but only a little, and only because rich people had no need to use drugs. The people Noam knew who used had lives that weren’t worth living sober. Ames’s family was too rich to have problems.
“Oh, my dad’s a card-carrying capitalist all right,” Ames said and shook a tiny pile of coke out onto the counter. “Don’t know how he and Lehrer can stand each other. Mutual interests, I guess.”
“Only your father pushed through a whole lot of anti-Atlantian legislation last year,” Noam said. “Not exactly Lehrer’s style.”
“I suppose you’d know,” Ames said.
“What the hell does that mean?”
“Nothing.” She drew a couple short lines—with her fingers, not a razor. “Anyway. Dara thinks you’re cool, which means I think you’re cool. So be cool and do a line with me.”
“Dara thinks I’m cool?”
Ames rolled her eyes dramatically and hunched forward. The first line disappeared up an elegant metal straw she seemed to have produced from thin air. “Oh Jesus. Don’t go all pathetic. I know Dara can’t help it—he just transforms gay boys into these drooling stalkers by existing in proximity, but I don’t want to start puking this early.”
“Okay, well, I’m not gay. Must be your lucky night.”
“Noam. Come on.”
He kicked his heels against the cabinets and smiled at her.
Of course, now he wanted to know about these pathetic gay boys. He wanted to know who all Dara had been kissing. If Dara kissed a lot of men. If Dara kissed only men.
“Dara and I aren’t together, in case you were wondering,” Ames said, straightening up. When she met Noam’s gaze, arms crossed over her chest, it felt like a challenge.
Noam pushed himself back to his feet. He moved closer to Ames, one step, then another, until he could lift his hand and brush a bit of white powder off the tip of her nose. A part of him braced for her to flinch the way Dara had, as if Noam carried some deadly disease.
“And I meant it when I said I wasn’t gay,” Noam said.
Ames looked disbelieving, but she didn’t pull away.
Noam smirked. “Bisexual isn’t gay.”
At last Ames laughed. Her hand came to rest on Noam’s hip, and his fingers skimmed over the line of her cheekbone, past her ear and into short-cropped hair. She had brown eyes the calm color of cedarwood and smelled like cigarette smoke.
She was beautiful, but she wasn’t who Noam wanted. Not at all.
“Hope I’m not interrupting.”
Noam took a sharp step back, blood turned to ice water.
Reflected in the mirror, a bladed smile cut across Dara’s mouth. He lifted a glass of whiskey and took a sip.
“Don’t yo
u knock?” Ames snapped.
Noam twisted around to meet Dara’s gaze properly, but Dara wasn’t looking at him anymore. He’d fixed Ames with that same strange expression on his face, head tilted toward the doorframe.
“I can’t believe,” Dara enunciated slowly, but his words slurred all the same, “you would leave me alone down there.”
Ames looked a little guiltier than was strictly warranted, in Noam’s opinion. She snatched the whiskey out of Dara’s hand and set it on the sink, then grasped both his shoulders, propelling him out the bathroom door and into her room. Noam trailed behind them like an afterthought.
“Sit,” Ames demanded.
Dara dropped back on Ames’s bed and stared up at the ceiling. Noam sat next to him, a bit gingerly; his weight dipped the mattress so that Dara’s hip leaned against Noam’s. For a moment that single warm point of contact was all Noam could think about.
“Are you okay?” he asked Dara, bracing a hand against the headboard.
“I’m fine.”
He didn’t look fine. He closed his eyes, lips parting as he exhaled. His lashes were like a smudge of charcoal against his cheek—Noam wanted to touch him. If he did, he imagined Dara’s skin would be fever hot.
“Do you need to puke and rally?” Ames asked him.
“No.”
“Want to do a line, then?”
“I’m all right.” Dara opened his eyes again and pushed himself up, that brief vulnerability so thoroughly erased that Noam might’ve thought he’d imagined it. Would have, if not for the way Ames still looked at Dara with her brow knit, like she thought Dara was two heartbeats from breaking apart.
Noam got the distinct sense Dara had swallowed something else with all that whiskey. His pupils were dilated.
But no matter how fucked up Dara already was, it didn’t stop him and Ames from digging out the tequila hidden in her underwear drawer. Somehow, over the next fifteen minutes, they all ended up sprawled over Ames’s unmade bed—Noam’s legs slung up against the wall, Dara’s head on his stomach, Ames’s feet hitched over Dara’s knees. Noam lost count of how many rounds that bottle of tequila had made in their little circle, but he knew it was a lot. His whole body was pleasantly overwarm, the bottle was half-empty, and Dara’s head was practically in his lap, oh god. Noam never wanted this moment to end.
“How many blow jobs do you think my dad’s managed to give Lehrer by now?” Ames asked between swigs, and Dara laughed.
“I’m just imagining Lehrer down there, on his seventh bottle of scotch, wishing he could actually still get drunk enough to make it through this evening.”
“Lehrer can’t get drunk?” Noam asked, propping himself up on his elbows and sending Dara’s head shifting a few inches lower on his torso.
“Nope, utterly incapable. Spends all his magic keeping himself young and alive. Of course, that means fast alcohol metabolism. Drinking doesn’t affect him at all.”
Ames passed Noam the bottle when Noam reached for it. “Kind of surprised he hasn’t given himself that viral intoxication syndrome thingy by now, if it takes that much work to keep himself looking pretty.”
“Not likely,” Dara said.
“I know.” Ames kicked her feet up in the air above her head. “He’s, like, immortal.”
“Immortal to fevermadness?” Noam asked.
“Immortal.”
Noam sighed. Ames and Dara were both cracking up again over whatever-it-was, but Dara’s hand was on Noam’s thigh, fingers tracing odd little circles against Noam’s hip, Noam slowly sinking through a dark and starry sea. His eyelids were heavy.
Eventually, Ames shifted—or Noam thought it must be Ames, because Dara’s head was still on his stomach—and another weight settled down on the bed next to him, someone’s breath warm on the side of his neck.
“I wish my dad would try something like that. Use too much magic, kill himself trying to stay young.”
Noam snorted.
“I’m serious,” Ames said. “I wish he’d die.”
Noam opened his eyes. It was a struggle to draw Ames’s face back into focus, even though she was so close. “You don’t mean that.”
“Oh, but I do.”
“Be careful what you wish for.” Dara shifted, arching his back like a cat. Noam stared at him, at the way that movement dragged the hem of his shirt up just enough to expose a swath of flat brown skin, Dara’s trousers tugged taut against his thighs. Dara cracked open his eyes to look back at the pair of them, black irises barely visible beneath his lowered lashes. “I suspect there are plenty of people who’d love to see your father dead.”
“Good. I hope they assassinate him.”
Ames said it with a viciousness that cut through the haze of Noam’s intoxication. He blinked, twice, and looked back to her.
“He doesn’t seem that bad. I mean, he’s like . . . bougie, I guess . . . but not that bad.”
“He killed my mother.”
Noam sat upright, quickly enough that Dara had to flinch out of the way of Noam’s elbows. “What?”
Ames hadn’t moved from where she lay, one arm flung overhead with fingers dangling off the edge of the mattress. Her eyes glinted in the lamplight. “You heard me. He brought me and my brother and our mom into the quarantined zone when I was, like, six. Got us all sick. Mom and brother died, but I lived. Obviously.”
Noam couldn’t—he didn’t want to believe it. Who would do something like that? Nobody was that crazy. Right?
Ames’s other hand was on his side, toying with the hem of his shirt. She said, “Guess he didn’t want to bother with a family if we weren’t gonna be witchings.”
He stared at Ames’s profile, her elegant features so incongruous with the half-shaved head and tattoos, her gaze fixed on her hand and Noam’s shirt.
“Did you tell anyone?” Noam asked, his voice barely audible even to his own ears. Surely Lehrer hadn’t known. “Before now?”
Ames shrugged. “Told Dara. Hard not to tell Dara.”
“What do you mean?”
A strange smile curled round her lips. “Don’t you know? Dara—”
“Shut up, Ames,” Dara snapped.
Noam looked. Dara was sitting up now, too, but he didn’t seem drunk anymore; his shoulders rose and fell with quick, shallow breaths.
“Jesus, fine, fine,” Ames said and rolled onto her stomach, pushing herself up. She made a face at the pair of them. “The point I’m trying to make is that I fucking hate him. Yeah?”
“Yeah,” Noam said. He kind of hated the general now too.
“Great. Okay. I think I’m gonna be sick.”
Dara grabbed at a nearby wastebasket, getting it under Ames’s head just in time for her to puke dinner and tequila into the liner bag. Dara had one hand on Ames’s back, rubbing circles and murmuring quiet words of reassurance, and Noam—
Noam tipped his head back and closed his eyes and tried to keep his own stomach where it belonged. Six years old. Six, and General Ames had taken his daughter—his wife, his son, his whole family—out where magic was endemic. Knowing they’d get sick. Knowing they’d rot from the inside just like Bea King, knowing they had a 90 percent chance of dying. Finding those odds favorable.
Ames was right. Someone ought to kill him.
“Noam.” Dara’s hand was on his knee, Dara’s voice murmuring in his ear. “Look at me.”
Noam looked.
Dara was close, close enough that Noam could’ve counted each eyelash were he sober enough to see straight. Ames still hunched over the trash, shivering.
“We need to go back downstairs,” Dara said.
“Why?”
“Because Lehrer’s going to send someone looking for us if we don’t. We’ve been gone a long time.”
Noam couldn’t look away from Ames, the damp back of her neck where her collar stuck to her skin. “What about—”
“She’ll be okay,” Dara said. “Promise. You’ll be okay, right, Ames?”
Ames managed
a weak thumbs-up.
“She’s fine. Can you make it downstairs?”
“I’m drunk, not incapacitated.”
Dara smiled and crawled back off the bed. He offered Noam a hand, pulling him up to his feet. The room swayed, then settled. “Good?”
“Good.”
They made it downstairs without breaking any bones, but it was a near thing. Dara could barely stand upright half the time, stumbling into Noam and knocking him against the wall. Dara’s body was too hot, his waist firm when Noam grabbed at it to keep Dara from tripping down the last few stairs. Dara laughed, and Noam was dizzy, bright.
In the drawing room, General Ames lounged in one of his overstuffed, claw-foot armchairs, puffing away at a cigar.
All that rage crashed back in at once, quenching the dazed euphoria of a second before. Noam glared, wishing one of his abilities was the kind where you could cause someone incredible pain just by looking. He wanted to see the general writhing on the floor like a fish out of water, skin purpling in agony.
Next to him, Dara finally let go from where he’d been clinging to Noam with both hands. He wavered on his feet, and for a second Noam thought he might have to grab the back of Dara’s shirt to keep him from tipping over.
Lehrer stood by the lit fireplace with James Attwood. He’d discarded his suit jacket to wear just his shirt and waistcoat, a cigarette held between his fingers. “You look pale, Noam. Are you feeling all right?”
Your friend is batshit fucking crazy, Noam thought in Lehrer’s general direction and wished Lehrer could hear him. God. Someone had to tell Lehrer. Someone had to.
Noam opened his mouth to answer, but Dara got there first. He sidled up to Lehrer and Attwood, stumbling just a little as he hooked his arm through Attwood’s elbow.
“Do you mind if I . . . ?” he asked and took Attwood’s drink out of his hand.
Attwood stared at Dara in shocked silence as Dara sipped his scotch and leaned a little farther into Attwood’s side. When Dara finally lowered the glass and looked at Lehrer, he smiled.
“Where were you?” Lehrer said, too calmly.
Dara’s smile chilled. “Don’t you know?” he said. He tapped one finger against the rim of Attwood’s glass. “You and Noam are very close now, aren’t you, Calix? What with all the time you’ve spent together lately. Bonding.”