Noam’s heart felt strange, like it was being crushed in a giant fist.It doesn’t matter. I don’t care.“Cool. Guess I don’t need to pack.” It wasn’t like he owned anything. “Mind if I keep the toothbrush?”
“You’ll stay here,” Howard told him, perfectly matter-of-fact. “You failed the exam, but Minister Lehrer has offered to personally oversee your remedial education until such a point as you can join your peers in regular course work.”
What?“What?”
Howard repeated herself, the words the same as before. Lehrer had offered to tutor him. Defense Minister Lehrer, socialist revolutionary hero of the catastrophe, was going to teach Noam algebra? It was the most ridiculous thing Noam had ever heard. He pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes, clenching them tight, as if he could cast off the insanity of the situation and see things more clearly. But when he opened them again, nothing had changed.
“I don’t understand,” he said, and goddamn it, his voice was quivering. “Why? Why would he bother?”
“To be honest, I don’t know. He’s a very busy man. But then again, he finds time to give private lessons to Mr. Shirazi as well. Perhaps he sees you as an investment.”
Noam frowned.
Interesting. So, Calix Lehrer had a good use for technopathy, did he?
What was he planning? And more importantly, was Noam smart enough to stay one step ahead of him?
“Okay,” Noam said. “But tell him if I’m doing this, I want a new computer. And I want to be allowed to keep my job at the corner store and to keep volunteering at the Migrant Center.”
Noam wouldn’t be one of those assholes who turned his back on where he came from. Besides, if Lehrer wanted Noam here badly enough to give him private tutoring, he’d agree. And if he agreed, that in itself would be useful data.
Howard gave him an arch look. “Tell him yourself. You start lessons tomorrow after lunch.”
In the archives of the Carolinian Ministry of the Interior: a documentary, never broadcast
FADE IN:
INT. CAROLINIAN NATIONAL HISTORY MUSEUM – DAY
Focus on an exhibit displaying instruments of torture used in US witching research programs during the catastrophe.
NARRATOR (V.O.)
By 2011, over two million witchings had already died at the hands of the US government. Dr. Granley is a history professor at Duke University and a world-renowned expert on the catastrophe.
INT. DR. GRANLEY’S OFFICE
DR. GRANLEY
Especially powerful witchings—usually those with multiple abilities or unusual presenting powers—were enrolled in massive federal experiments designed to understand how witchings attain new powers, with a secondary goal of developing a vaccine against magic. The...the sheer sadism of these experiments cannot be understated.
INSERT – PHOTOGRAPH OF ST. GEORGE’S HOSPITAL
NARRATOR (V.O.)
One such hospital is famous, not only for particularly extreme cruelty but because of the famous witching who survived it.
In 2015, four years after the US began rounding up witchings for extermination or experimentation, Adalwolf Lehrer’s militia liberated the witching patients of St. George’s Hospital near the historical town of Asheville, North Carolina.
INSERT – PHOTOGRAPH OF ADALWOLF LEHRER AND HIS MILITIA, VICTORIOUS AFTER THE BATTLE FOR S. CAROLINA
NARRATOR (V.O.)
Of the patients they saved, only one ultimately survived: Adalwolf’s own brother, the future king of Carolinia, sixteen-year-old Calix Lehrer.
CHAPTERFOUR
“I’m glad you’re staying,” Bethany declared over dinner that evening, with the decisive tone of someone who’d considered her thoughts on the matter carefully. “We need new blood.”
