by Victoria Lee
He followed Lehrer out of the car and up the drive. In the foyer, the mahogany display tables lining the walls bore antique vases overflowing with anemones and lilies. The smell was sickly sweet.
“Sign the guest book,” Lehrer instructed, gesturing to one of the tables. Noam added his name below those of major generals and ministers, and Lehrer signed beneath that, bracketing him in.
It wasn’t difficult to figure out where they were meant to go; they followed the sound of voices. Even with their chatter muted, out of respect for the dead, there were enough people present that Noam could hear them all the way out at the entrance. Noam spotted Ames, almost immediately, in the sitting room. Mourners clustered around her like iron filings to a magnet.
Lehrer conveyed his condolences. Noam waited just behind him, not quite able to see Ames’s face given Lehrer’s height but able to hear her voice responding, soft and low. And, if Noam wasn’t mistaken, with the faintest edge; Ames probably still smarted from her arrest by Lehrer’s department. It was only after Lehrer moved away, drawn into conversation by one of the other well-wishers, that Ames saw him.
“Oh,” Ames said. “Hi.” She sounded tired. Looked it too.
“I was sorry to hear about your father.”
Ames snorted. “Don’t give me that bullshit, Noam.”
“Okay, I won’t. But I didn’t think you wanted me saying, ‘Oh, what a relief your dad’s dead now’ when you just got done being accused of his murder.”
“Thanks,” Ames said and actually laughed a little. “Hey. Do me a favor and stay here and pretend you’re talking to me for a while? I can’t stand playing polite with these obsequious old fucks anymore.”
“Sure,” he said, following when Ames gestured for him to sit in one of the empty armchairs.
Ames took the seat next to it, stretching her legs out along the floor and resting her head back. For a moment she was silent, long enough that Noam wondered if she was actually going to say anything or if his presence here was enough. Then: “I didn’t do it, for the record.”
“Do what?”
“I didn’t kill my father.” She glanced over at Noam. “God knows he deserved it, though,” Ames went on, earning a carefully blank stare from Noam. “Can’t say I’m surprised someone finally did him in.”
“Who?” Noam said, widening his eyes just a little. Innocent. “Do you think it was political?”
Ames’s lips twisted. “It was probably someone sympathetic to the refugees, considering all the legislation my dad helped enact against Atlantian citizenship. Anyone who might want to undermine Lehrer’s government.”
The undermining Lehrer part sounded about right. Where was Dara, anyway? Noam was afraid to look around too obviously; Lehrer had a way of seeing everything that happened in his vicinity.
Ames sat upright, her mouth white around the edges. “It wasn’t me. You believe me, right?”
“Of course I believe you. And so does Lehrer, or he wouldn’t have let you go.”
Ames didn’t look convinced, but she didn’t argue. “Whatever. Fuck ’em—I don’t care.” She reached into her jacket pocket and pulled something out—a flask. She unscrewed the top and took a long swallow, then offered it to Noam. “Want some?”
Noam shook his head, and Ames drank again, more this time. Noam was surprised the flask wasn’t empty when Ames finally lowered it.
“I think your dad’s looking for you.”
Noam must have seemed confused—he was confused—but Ames pointed, and he saw Lehrer standing on the other side of the room, watching them. Lehrer didn’t beckon, just inclined his head slightly before turning back to his conversation with Major General García.
Right. Noam should be talking to other people, not just Ames, especially since Lehrer already believed she was innocent. He had to at least act like he was looking for a killer.
“See you, then.”
The funeral itself was at four thirty, which meant a long time lingering around these ornamental rooms. Noam occupied himself with the refreshment table, eating bite-size tartlets and fresh fruit. Maybe, he thought as he munched on a miniature quiche, I ought to slip off to the private parts of the house and make sure Dara hasn’t left any evidence. The Ministry of Defense would have been through here already, of course, but they wouldn’t all be witchings. There might be something they missed. Something they might come back and find.
He waited until Ames came into the room, attention shifting to focus on the bereaved, then stepped over the velvet rope blocking off the hall.
The house was empty and dark, now that Noam had put some distance between him and the wake. The light streaming in through the windows insufficiently illuminated the portraits of austere white men in military uniforms and priceless landscape paintings. On the second floor Noam opened the doors one by one to look inside, using his power so he wouldn’t leave fingerprints on the knobs. He didn’t waste much time on the guest bedrooms or Ames’s room, just kept going until he found the master suite.
The bed, king size and white, was neatly made, the dresser tops all swept clean of dust and personal effects alike. At first Noam just stared at it, because . . . well, if reports were to be believed, this was where Ames Sr. was killed.
Sixteen times.
There was no blood. Someone did a very thorough job cleaning up. Still, it felt like the scene of an assassination ought to be more dramatic.
A small bookcase sat near the vanity: mostly pulp novels, which was surprising, but Noam supposed that explained why they were kept here and not on display downstairs in the library. In the bedside table he found a carton of cigarettes, a strip of condoms, and lube.
There was no computer in the bedroom, but Noam sensed one down the hall, its circuit boards quiet now, powered down. He found it in the general’s study, a smaller room with drawn curtains and an oak desk, an iron poker leaning against the cold hearth.
He seriously doubted Dara had taken a second after killing General Ames to check his email, but he couldn’t pass up this opportunity with the general’s computer right there. The cell drive was probably full of shit Noam could leak on the site.
If Noam was extra lucky, maybe he could even find a way to pin the general’s murder on Sacha’s supporters.
Noam told the computer to turn itself on and took a seat in the comfortable leather chair behind the desk, feeling the processor work as it loaded the desktop and programs.
An empty flopcell was stuffed away in one of the drawers. Noam plugged it into the drive and told the computer to start copying the documents folder to the chip, then open the folder on-screen for Noam to view. He had to do all the work via technopathy, since he hadn’t brought gloves and couldn’t risk touching the keyboard.
He went through General Ames’s financial records first. Pretty normal: food expenses, salaries for the household staff. But then there was the money he spent at the liquor store, nice restaurants, expensive hotels. Local hotels—maybe Lehrer had been right about the general having a lover, if nothing else.
But this was looking more and more like a personal computer; Noam found very few documents relevant to the general’s job as home secretary. A few memos here and there, things he obviously intended to take care of back at the office. Reports from Swensson about his daughter’s bad behavior.
The clock on the bottom right-hand corner of the screen said it was just past three thirty. Noam had spent too much time here. He needed to move on. But if there was going to be something here . . . something actually useful . . . it might not be on the desktop. You didn’t get to be home secretary by being an idiot, after all. Anything good would be hidden.
Noam let the flopcell continue downloading desktop files, but he turned his attention deeper. There were some pretty thorough ways of deleting files, but when Noam had worked in the computer repair shop, half the customers came in for disk recovery. Some stuff was more difficult to recover, and the shop commensurately charged a lot more for it, but at the end of the day,
the only way to really get rid of a file was to destroy the cell drive completely.
The general hadn’t done that.
And . . . yes.
General Ames had covered his tracks—that was for sure. He’d not only deleted files; he’d also reformatted a whole partition of the drive and then overwritten it. That partition was full of bogus temp files and multiple large .mp3s with nothing on them. Amateur. The .mp3s stood out like bloody handprints.
If he’d had to rely on software or even the command line, it would have taken next to forever to recover anything from that kind of damage. But with technopathy it took five minutes, Noam’s power quicker than a program at flipping through the metadata and absorbing it. And metadata was the thing that stood out, in a folder entitled Software Updates. Not unusual itself, but its original path had been from the desktop, not applications.
It was full of video files.
Noam opened it on-screen. Dozens of thumbnails popped up in the window, moments frozen in time. Even just from the preview images, Noam could tell what kind of videos they were—a blur of skin and hair, naked bodies tangled up in sheets and trapped in ecstasy.
Noam’s heart pounded as he told the computer to open one of the videos and play, palms sweaty where he pressed them flat against his thighs to resist the urge to reach for the mouse. The general was instantly recognizable; he or his lover must have held the camera with telekinesis to get them both in the frame at once. For what it was, the cinematography was exquisitely composed. The candlelight gave everything a warmer glow, easing the contrast between the general’s pale skin and the brown flesh of his lover, like snow against maple wood.
He really is beautiful, Noam thought, gazing at Dara’s face. He was everything Noam had ever wanted.
Noam’s body remembered Dara’s heat, as if Dara had branded himself on Noam’s skin when he touched him. He felt sick.
Everything—everything took on new meaning now. The way the general had looked at Dara, touched Dara, tried to get Dara to stay with him after the dinner party. Did Lehrer know? Is that why he’d insisted Dara come home with him instead?
Fuck—did Lehrer suspect Dara killed Ames Sr.?
Noam felt like all his guts had been torn out, leaving him empty of anything except this knowledge.
He checked the dates in properties. The videos were from all different times. Some were recent, taken last month. Some years old. Noam didn’t want to calculate Dara’s age, didn’t want his mind to start automatically ticking down the years from age eighteen, seventeen, sixteen, fifteen . . . Noam tasted bile, no matter how many times he tried to swallow.
The videos uploaded to the flopcell. Noam pulled it out of the port and slipped it into his pocket, then cleared the last few minutes from the computer’s memory. He floated back out into the hall and down the stairs to the ground floor. The low hum of conversation from the wake sounded far away.
Noam couldn’t stop thinking about those bruises on Dara’s skin, where someone’s fingers had pressed in. And he couldn’t get those videos out of his head.
God.
Noam’s pulse was so loud in his ears it was a miracle he heard them at all: soft voices, in a room to the right. Or maybe it was because he was thinking about Dara, a kind of psychic self-fulfilling prophecy—speak of the devil and he shall appear.
Only, no, of course Dara had come. The home secretary had been like a father to him (some father). So here he was, returned to the scene of the crime.
But why was he talking to Lehrer?
Noam drew closer. His chest felt tighter than it had just a moment ago because—Lehrer. Lehrer must have figured it out. Somehow, without saying a word, Lehrer knew Dara was a killer, would arrest Dara here and now—
“Well?” Dara’s voice said. He was barely audible. “Is this it, then? The final step in your master plan?”
A moment of silence, broken only by the rustle of cloth. It stretched on and on, long enough it felt like Noam’s nerves were being dragged over razor wire. He wasn’t thinking clearly, Noam decided later; he was still in shock from what he’d seen upstairs. That was why he crept toward the door, close enough that he could press his face to where it was held ajar and peer within. Out of pure bloody luck neither Lehrer nor Dara saw him. Lehrer stood just two feet from Dara with his back to Noam, close enough to be heard while speaking quietly. Lehrer had one hand on Dara’s shoulder. There was something paternalistic in the way he squeezed it, like he was giving reassurance.
Dara didn’t seem reassured. In fact, Noam had never seen Dara this on edge. Tension practically rolled off him in poisonous waves, his gaze so fixed on Lehrer that he didn’t notice Noam watching.
The wood of the doorframe was cold against Noam’s brow, Noam’s own anxiety a fever inside him.
“With your remarkable gift, Dara, surely you must know the answer to that question,” Lehrer said, far too calmly.
Noam gripped the flopcell in one hand, tightly enough it dug into his palm. What gift?
His stomach was full of hot tar.
“You know I don’t,” Dara said. “You’re stronger than I am. You’ll always be stronger.”
Noam didn’t have to see Lehrer’s face to know he was smiling. “And don’t you forget it.”
His hand fell from Dara’s shoulder back to his side. Dara, both hands pressed to his own stomach, was visibly relieved.
“I do wish you would trust me more,” Lehrer said, sounding genuinely disappointed. “I taught you better than this. Such accusations should not be made lightly.”
“I’m sorry, sir,” Dara said, and when Lehrer moved, he flinched, even though all Lehrer was doing was lifting a hand to adjust his own tie. Lehrer laughed softly.
“Relax. You’re a nervous mess today, really. And you should be out there with your friend, who is mourning her father. We’ll speak again later.”
Dara didn’t need to be told a second time. It took Noam a moment to realize—shit—and dart back: one, two steps, reaching behind him with his power for the knob to another door. He shut himself inside the hall closet not a second too soon. Dara’s footsteps echoed off the hardwood floor as he walked past. Noam waited there, holding his breath, until he heard the other door open and shut again and Lehrer’s own steps passing by, slower than Dara’s.
What the hell had Noam just overheard?
Lehrer and Dara’s creepy-ass relationship was a problem for another day, though. Right now there were bigger issues—like what Ames did to Dara. Like Lehrer possibly knowing Dara killed the general.
Several minutes passed before Noam was able to make himself open the door again. He half expected to find someone waiting there in the hall outside, standing silently between Noam and where Noam was supposed to be, but the corridor was empty.
Noam didn’t want to go back. He wanted to stand in this dim light until he learned to stop feeling, because right now everything hurt.
Only someone would find him eventually, and Noam couldn’t be caught here.
No one noticed him stepping over the velvet rope and rejoining the guests. He looked for Dara first and found him by the windows with Ames, touching Ames’s wrist with his head slanted toward her; backlit, he looked like he came from another world. Noam’s heart ached.
“We should go,” Lehrer’s voice said from behind Noam’s left shoulder. “The service will be starting soon; people are already leaving.”
Noam managed to exhale, then looked back at him, hoping none of what he felt showed on his face. “I’m ready.”
He followed Lehrer out to the car. The thought of driving to the church, then sitting for the service, the funeral procession, the burial . . . it was a weight crushing Noam’s chest.
But he didn’t want to go home either. Home was the barracks, close quarters. Dara.
The driver shut the car door. Lehrer turned to him, expectant. “Any luck?”
“Ames—Carter Ames—still insists she’s innocent,” Noam said as normally as he could. “I believe h
er, for what that’s worth.”
“As do I,” Lehrer said. “Which means the killer is still out there. Did you have the opportunity to search the house?”
The flopcell in Noam’s pocket smoldered against his thigh. “Yes. I didn’t find anything, though. Nothing useful.”
“Really?”
Noam had always been a good liar. But his lips still felt foreign when he spoke again. “Really.”
Lehrer made a quiet noise. He reached out and touched Noam’s temple with just the tips of his fingers. Noam’s skin tingled, an electric current darting up his spine as Lehrer brushed his hand back to sweep a lock of hair out of Noam’s face. “All right,” he said.
Noam sat frozen in place while Lehrer turned to look out the window at the city sliding by. The sky outside was the same color as the steel watch around Lehrer’s wrist. Strange detail to notice, but Noam couldn’t stop staring at it the rest of the way to the service, its mechanical insides ticking away the seconds like a heartbeat.
Newspaper clipping, carefully preserved between the pages of a book in the apartment of C. Lehrer.
THE TORONTO STAR
Tuesday, May 8, 2019
CALIX LEHRER CROWNED KING IN CAROLINIA
DURHAM—Following a unanimous committee vote, Carolinia crowned Calix Lehrer its first king yesterday in a small ceremony.
Lehrer is the twenty-year-old major general of the Avenging Angels, the militia founded by his brother, Adalwolf Lehrer, and labeled a domestic terrorist organisation by the former United States. A survivor of the US-attempted genocide against so-called witchings, Lehrer was once notorious for his role as strategist with the Avenging Angels. That infamy has been overshadowed, however, by recent events: Reports suggest Lehrer is the official who gave the order to detonate a weaponised form of the magic virus across multiple locations in Washington, DC, an attack that killed millions of civilians and effectively ended the United States. Lehrer is also implicated in a number of specific actions taken against foreign military troops.
Lehrer delivered a press conference last week, which was broadcast internationally. In his speech, he directly addressed Canadian, British, and French leadership. “I wish to state clearly,” Lehrer said, “that any retaliatory measures taken by foreign powers against Carolinia will be met with the full force of our extensive military resources, both magical and nuclear,” a pronouncement praised by Carolinian civilians. Intelligence reports corroborate Lehrer’s claims that he possesses a large proportion of the US nuclear arsenal, along with the weaponised virus. Officials believe Lehrer’s threats are not idle. Canadian diplomats meet with Lehrer this week to discuss a treaty.