Something about the way Ames said it made Noam think maybe it wasn’t fine.
“Listen, don’t stress out, okay?” Taye nudged Noam with his elbow. “You’ll catch up in no time. Just do a lot of reading.”
“I grew up in a bookstore,” Noam said, but Taye was still looking at him with that same expectancy, Ames stirring the salt mound into her potatoes, Bethany smiling. “Yeah,” Noam said and sighed. “Lots of reading.”
That night, as Noam sat in the common room with an algebra textbook—he figured he could get a bit of thatremedial educationdone early and maybe not look so stupid in front of Lehrer and Lehrer’s clever protégé—he looked at Bethany reading with a pencil in her mouth and wondered what his father would say if he could see him now.
None of these people, Dad would tell him,give a shit about you or anybody you know.
His father had said just that at the dinner table, brandishing his fork like a spear. His mother rolled her eyes, but Brennan—who’d come over for Shabbat dinner—had agreed.Don’t trust anyone in a suit, Brennan had said.Especially ones bearing government insignia.
Government ran screeching through the halls wearing only wet towels. Government watched bad detective movies and ate only the red candies and sketched out new tattoo ideas by the window light.
Noam hated the government, or so he reminded himself as Taye gave him a dramatic tour of the barracks and when Ames let him borrow shampoo and Bethany made sure he had a set of drabs to wear tomorrow. He hated the government. He was here to tear their castle to the ground.
That night he barely slept, and come morning, his alarm went off at five. He choked down a few sickly bites of porridge, and then it was out to a field and the care of an eagle-eyed sadist named Sergeant Li, who put the cadets through the steps of basic training.
Noam used to run track, back when he’d still gone to school, but that was a long time ago and before the fever wasted his strength. Trying to run a seven-minute mile was grueling, the air bone cold in November and the frosty ground crunching underfoot. Noam barely managed to finish the mile under nine. Noam thought it was over, but no, then it was fartleks, and hurdles, and an obstacle course. Finally, after so many crunches and push-ups that Noam suspected he might throw up all over the icy lawn, Li blew her whistle and sent the cadets in to shower. The others headed off to their lessons afterward, leaving Noam alone in the Level IV common room to wait.
Howard showed up around nine, the sound of the front door startling Noam from where he’d fallen back asleep on the sofa. But he refused to leap up like a scolded child, even when Howard gave him a pointed look. He just stretched his arms up overhead, arching his back, and smiled. “Hey, again. Time for class?”
“Minister Lehrer won’t like to be kept waiting.”
“Let’s go, then.” Noam swung his legs off the sofa and stood, tugging the hem of his uniform shirt to make it appear a little less wrinkled.
Howard frowned. “Where’s your satchel?”
“My... what?”
She sighed, tapping the countertop. “Your satchel, Mr. Álvaro. There was a satchel provided for you, containing notebooks and pens and other school supplies. It should be in your bedroom.”
“Oh. Right. Hold on.”
Noam remembered the bag from this morning. It hadn’t been labeled with his name or placed anywhere near his dresser, so he’d just assumed the bag belonged to someone else. But there it was, leaning against the wall, a practical brown leather satchel with a strap and handle on top. Much nicer quality than anything Noam had owned before—and they were just giving it to him. To acadet.
“Minister Lehrer’s office is in the other wing of the building,” Howard said as they set off, moving fast down the narrow halls, Noam’s sore legs barely able to keep up. “You are not allowed in that part of the government complex unless accompanied by a ranking adult—do you understand? This is where the ministers and the chancellor have their offices. It’s no place for an unsupervised cadet.”
“Of course not,” Noam said and smiled his best innocent smile. Howard didn’t look convinced.
Nor should she be. Noam’s blood felt sharp in his veins the moment they stepped into the central atrium of the building, where the walls were glass, sunlight streaming in from the courtyard on one side and the open street on the other, wooden floors gleaming underfoot. The glittering chandelier must have taken weeks to build—all those hands threading crystals on string. Men and women in gray military uniforms walked in every direction, people in suits jabbered into their phones or stared at screens in their hands, guards stood alert at the doors and watched with narrow eyes. The cobalt-blue flag of Carolinia hung over the entrance to the administrative wing, emblazoned with the sign of the white phoenix.
Noam was going to be hereevery day. He’d be surrounded by the most important people in the country: Lehrer, García, Holloway, the home secretary whose name Noam forgot. Chancellor Sacha himself.
If he could get in here sometime—alone, not with Howard, and not on his way to see Lehrer—he could do a whole lot of damage.
He had to get in touch with Brennan. If Brennan was still alive, Linda would know—Noam just had to find a way off campus.
Howard pressed her hand to a screen beside the towering wooden door to the west wing, leaning in to allow a tiny laser to scan her eye. Noam noticed with a burst of adrenaline that he could actuallyfeelthe computer working this time, as if his aptitude testing had been a switch just waiting to be flipped, and now he could sense the little electrical signals jumping between pins, the flicker of data packets being transferred, a whole buzzing ecosystem contained behind that panel and visible to Noam alone.
In that moment, he wanted to sink down onto the floor and just sit for a while, letting the tech wash over him. Binary was something he’d only known about on the theoretical level, something he’d considered while writing code or fixing someone’s computer. It wasn’t something to feel in one’s bones, a new sensation as sharp as sight and sound.
Other countries—England, and Canada, and even York—had spent the past hundred years developing the kinds of tech no one in Durham could dream of. And yet when Lehrer closed the borders back in 2019, he’d frozen Carolinia in time. Noam only knew about foreign tech because he’d hacked a Canadian newspaper once. Carolinia relied so much on magic that it barely bothered developing new tech anymore.
But imagine... justimaginewhat it might have been like. How much Noam could’ve done if tech research hadn’t ground to a halt in 2019.
Noam was a technopath in Carolinia—but that could have meant so much more.
Then again, being a witching anywhere else probably wouldn’t bode well for him, considering all those other countries had a bad habit of locking witchings up in secure facilities for public “protection.”
