Noam’s mouth tasted like copper. “Dara...”
“Noam.Get in the goddamn car.”
“I’m not going with you, Dara.” Noam stepped around the front of the car, toward the other side where Dara stood, staring at him with his hand still on the open door. “I can’t.”
“What are youtalkingabout?” Dara’s voice had its own blade to it now, pitch rising on the final words: both a question and a demand. “You—”
“I have to stay here. I started this.” He gestured vaguely, encompassing the Migrant Center, Durham, Carolinia—all of it. All the things he’d done, the people he’d hurt. The one he’d killed. All those sacrifices, all for the greater good. “I have to finish it. The Atlantians are finally—Lehrer gave them citizenship. Did you know that? We won, Dara. I have to be a part of that. I can’t leave now.”
Dara’s face was a mask of uninterpretable emotion, wide eyed and thin mouthed, his shoulders rising and falling in rapid, shallow motion. For one heat-seared moment, Noam thought Dara might actually attack him—but he didn’t.
“You...” Dara wet his lips. “You don’t... do you? Noam...”
“Dara, you have to go. Lehrer will be here any second.”
“God. You—Noam, I have to tell you something, please—”
Lehrer was here. Lehrer washere—that was him, the angles of his face and slim lines of his suit captured on the security cam a block away.
Fuck.
“I know,” Noam said. He tried to grin, but it felt weak. He said, “I love you too.” And he grasped Dara’s face between both hands and kissed him on his shocked mouth. Dara didn’t resist. Dara didn’t say a word, even when Noam pushed him back and into the car and slammed the door shut behind him.
“I’ll take care of him,” Linda promised. She patted Noam on the shoulder and gave him a sad little smile. Then she got in the car, and they drove away.
Noam stood there and watched the sedan vanish into the city traffic, watched until it turned the corner at the far end of the street and disappeared.
Lehrer found him still standing like that a minute later, watching the far traffic light change from yellow to red. Noam’s pulse beat in his throat like a second heart, but he didn’t run.
Lehrer didn’t speak at first. And then he rested his hand on Noam’s back, high up between his shoulder blades. It wasn’t the anger Noam had been anticipating. It wasn’t like that at all.
“I’m sorry,” Noam said and didn’t look at him. He shut his eyes instead.
“He’ll die out there.”
It hurt when Noam swallowed, like splinters cutting his throat. “Maybe. It was what he wanted.”
Lehrer sighed and didn’t say anything to that.
The distant streetlight went back to green. The color, through the heat waves, looked blurry and surreal.
At last, Lehrer’s hand fell away from Noam’s back.
“Promise me you won’t go after Dara,” Noam said.
“You’re asking me to kill my own child.”
“I’m asking you to let him make that decision for himself.”
Noam turned toward him, squinting against the sunlight. Lehrer’s expression was blank, unreadable. He could have been a still frame from a propaganda film.
Then the façade cracked, and Lehrer nodded. The lines of his face were sharper than ever as he said, “I promise.”
Noam wasn’t sure if he believed him. But for now he had no other choice.
“I almost went with him,” Noam confessed.
“I know. I’m glad you didn’t.” Lehrer tugged at his sleeves. Noam felt it in the metal when his touch grazed the silver cuff links. Lehrer said, almost wryly, “I also know you aren’t staying for me.”
