CHAPTERONE
Outbreaks of magic started all kinds of ways. Maybe a tank coming in from the quarantined zone didn’t get hosed down properly. Maybe, like some people said, the refugees brought it up with them from Atlantia, the virus hiding out in someone’s blood or in a juicy peach pie.
But when magic infected the slums of west Durham, in the proud sovereign nation of Carolinia, it didn’t matter how it got there.
Everybody still died.
Noam was ringing up Mrs. Ellis’s snuff tins when he nearly toppled into the cash register.
He all but had to fight her off as she tried to force him down into a folding chair—swore he’d just got a touch dizzy, but he’d be fine, really.Go on home.She left eventually, and he went to stand in front of the window fan for a while, holding his shirt off his sweat-sticky back and trying not to pass out.
He spent the rest of his shift reading Bulgakov under the counter. He felt just fine.
That evening he locked the doors, pulled chicken wire over the windows, and took a new route to the Migrant Center. In this neighborhood, you had to if you didn’t want to get robbed. Once upon a time, or so Noam had heard, there’d been a textile mill here. The street would’ve been full of workers heading home, empty lunch pails in hand. Then the mill had gone down and apartments went up, and by the 1960s, Ninth Street had been repopulated by rich university students with their leather satchels and clove cigarettes. All that was before the city got bombed halfway to hell in the catastrophe, of course.
Noam’s ex used to call it “the Ninth Circle.” She meant it in Dante’s sense.
The catastrophe was last century, though. Now the university campus blocked the area in from the east, elegant stone walls keeping out the riffraff while Ninth and Broad crumbled under the weight of five-person refugee families crammed into one-room apartments, black markets buried in basements, laundry lines strung between windows like market lights. Sure, maybe you shouldn’t wander around the neighborhood at night draped in diamonds, but Noam liked it anyway.
“Someone’s famous,” Linda said when he reached the back offices of the Migrant Center, a sly smile curving her lips as she passed him the morning’sHerald.
Noam grinned back and looked.
Massive Cyberattack Disables Central News Bureau
Authorities link hack to Atlantian cyberterrorist affiliates.
“Haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about. Say, have you got any scissors?”
“What for?”
“I’m gonna frame this.”
Linda snorted and swatted him on the arm. “Get on, you. Brennan has some task he wants finished this week, and I don’t think you, him, and your ego can all fit in that office.”
Which, fair: the officewaspretty small. Tucked into the back corner of the building, with Brennan’s name andDIRECTORprinted on the door in copperplate, it was pretty much an unofficial storage closet for all the files and paperwork Linda couldn’t cram anywhere else. Brennan’s desk was dwarfed by boxes stacked precariously around it, the man himself leaning close to his holoreader monitor with reading glasses perched on the end of a long nose and a pen behind one ear.
“Noam,” he said, glancing up when the door opened. “You made it.”
“Sorry I missed yesterday. I had to cover someone’s shift at the computer store after I got off the clock at Larry’s.”
Brennan waved a dismissive hand. “Don’t apologize. If you have to work, you have to work.”
“Still.”
It wasn’tguilt, per se, that coiled up in Noam’s stomach. Or maybe it was. That was his father’s photograph on the wall, after all, face hidden by a bandanna tied over his nose and mouth. His father’s hands holding up that sign—REFUGEE RIGHTS ARE HUMAN RIGHTS. That was in June 2118, during the revolt over the new, more stringent citizenship tests. It’d been the largest protest in Carolinian history.
“Linda said you had something for me to work on?” Noam said, tilting his head toward the holoreader.
“It’s just database management, I’m afraid, nothing very interesting.”
“I love databases.” Noam smiled, and Brennan smiled back. The expression lifted the exhaustion from Brennan’s face like a curtain rising from a window, sunlight streaming through.
Brennan oriented him to the task, then gave up his desk chair for Noam to get to work. He squeezed Noam’s shoulder before he left to help Linda with dinner, and a warm beat of familiarity took root in the pit of Noam’s stomach. Brennan might try to put up boundaries, clear delineations between professional life and how close Brennan had been to Noam’s family, but the cracks were always visible.
That was pretty much the only reason Noam didn’t tell him up front: database management was mind-numbingly tedious. After you figured out how to script your way past the problem, it was just a matter of waiting around. Once upon a time, he’d have emailed Carly or someone while the program executed. But they were all dead now, and between the Migrant Center and two jobs, Noam didn’t have time to meet new people. So he sat and watched text stream down the command console, letters blurring into numbers until the screen was wavering light.
A dull ache bored into Noam’s skull.
