This wasn’t what he’d imagined when Lehrer said he’d tutor him. But then, Lehrer was still the reason Noam was even here at all. He turned to the first chapter.
Polynomials. Basic enough—even if the later sections looked like they were gonna be hell. What was a radical function? But for now, solving polynomials meant it was only too easy for Noam to get distracted by what was unfolding between Lehrer and Dara just five feet away.
Dara had taken up the seat nearest Lehrer’s, frowning down at the small table between their chairs. There was nothing on the table; Dara was just looking at it. Opposite him, Lehrer sat with his elbow perched on the armrest and watched. He’d lit a cigarette. Every now and then he’d take a drag and then exhale the smoke away from Dara’s face, toward the open window.
How the hell had Lehrer lived to be over a hundred years old if he was a smoker?
He imagined Lehrer’s lungs staining black, crumpling in on themselves like burned paper, only to heal themselves and expand, pink and fleshy. Over and over again.
Noam wrote down the answer to the problem he was working on, then traced over the numbers again with his pencil.
“You can use gesture, if you must,” Lehrer told Dara.
Dara lifted his hand, holding it palm down over the table, and almost instantly an apple appeared beneath it. Noam, startled, pressed too hard on his pencil, and the tip broke off. He hunched over, using the excuse of digging around in his bag for a fresh one to keep watching Dara and Lehrer.
The apple rocked once, twice, as if touched by a hand, then went still. It was green darkening to red, only barely ripe, and a little bruised toward the base.
“Good,” Lehrer said, although he sounded dubious, as if illusion were nothing and not the most impressive piece of magic Noam had seen in his life. “But how complete is the illusion? Is it merely aesthetic?”
Dara didn’t say anything, just picked up the apple and bit. The apple’s juices leaked over its skin, trickling down onto Dara’s wrist as he chewed, then swallowed. That appeared to answer Lehrer’s question. He smiled and took the apple from Dara’s hand, tossing it into the air once. The fruit vanished before it could fall back into his palm.
“Not bad. I’d like to see you do it without the gesture next time. You won’t always have that crutch to rely on, especially if you’re trying to fool someone who expects magic.”
Noam turned the page in his textbook and started working through the next set of problems, but it was hard to concentrate with Dara practicing his illusions just a few feet away. He wanted, more than anything, to perform magic like that. Dara made illusion seem so easy, but Noam couldn’t fathom how he was doing it. If your ability to do magic was based on how much you knew about whatever it was, like knowing physics to do telekinesis, then what kind of knowledge was required to make someone see and feel and taste something that wasn’t there? You couldn’t just change the way light was refracting off the air; you’d have to influence the signals sent by the nerves in Lehrer’s hand when he touched the apple to get the weight and texture right. Then you’d have to titratethosewhen Lehrer threw the apple into the air, making quick and miniscule adjustments as fast as Lehrer could decide he wanted to throw the apple in the first place. And how did you manage taste? He supposed Dara could have faked that part, since he was the one who had bitten the apple, not Lehrer, but even so.
Dara was obviously every bit as powerful as the others said he was. He deserved to be here, getting private lessons from Minister Lehrer. Dara was the kind of person Level IV recruited... not middle school dropouts who didn’t even understand radical functions.
If Noam hoped to ever catch up to Dara—if he hoped his power would be any use to the cause—he had a long road ahead of him.
Saturday, Noam had been in Level IV for a week, but all he’d accomplished in his lessons with Lehrer was to sit quietly and read remedial math. He hadn’t even left the government complex. He’d thought about sneaking out to find Brennan, but he wouldn’t get his new ID card until Thursday, and without ID he was pretty sure he wouldn’t be let back in. Then on Friday they sprayed the city with some kind of chemical that allegedly sanitized everything and prevented viral outbreaks—not, of course, that anyone believed that actually worked. Even so, nobody was allowed outside for eight hours, and by then it was dark.
That left Saturday.
The others spent their free day in the common room, all four caught up in some poker game Dara had roped them into with a buy in Noam couldn’t afford. Noam sat in the corner chair with his books and notes and watched as Ames threatened to fight Taye and Bethany for the spot on Dara’s team. Ames sat in Dara’s lap and refused to get up even when Bethany laughed and tugged at her hands; Dara smiled and locked his arms neatly round Ames’s waist.
None of them seemed remotely aware—triumphantly trading chips, Taye accusing Dara and Ames of cheating with his typical melodramatic flair—that outside these walls there was a whole world where the money Ames scraped off the table into her lap could have fed an Atlantian family for three weeks.
Finally, Noam just left. No one seemed to notice.
Even the guards at the front door didn’t stop him, although Noam had wondered if they might—and then Noam was free, stepping into chilly winter air and the seething warren of the city.
The first thing that hit him was the tech.
The whole world was a sea of data, so many electrical impulses sparking from pockets and tablets and streetlights and cameras and drones. It was like someone had plugged in a cord and turned on the galaxy.
The streetlight: yellow in three seconds.hey don’t think i’ll be home for dinnr but i’ll see you later ok?$59.21. The weather today is forty-nine degrees and sunny. Breaking news. In twenty feet, turn left on West Pettigrew Street. The CIP is down 1.2 percent.
Noam struggled just to see properly, eyes refusing to focus when there was so much... so mucheverythingspinning out all around him, from here to the horizon. It was too much, dizzying, a wild free fall that left Noam breathless and grasping at the rough brick wall to keep from losing balance. Inside hadn’t been as bad. Why?
He blinked, hard, sucking in several deep breaths. Eventually the noise retreated to a quieter murmur in the back of his head, still there but not overwhelming.
People started giving him weird looks as he stood there staring at the street with his mouth open. Noam grabbed his new Level IV–issued phone and looked at it like he had somewhere important to be. He set off north.
The Sunday afternoon market that had built up around the sidewalks was nearly impassably crowded. Vendors shouted their wares, fresh chickens and cantaloupe and apples shipped in from the mountains. Noam bought a foam cup of hot cider for five aeres—insane, absolutely insane, that Level IV gave him an allowance that meant he could afford this—and drank while he walked, the sweet spices heating him from the inside. He paused for a while, too, in front of a cart that was piled high with fabrics of every hue: deep, bruised purples to silky scarlets. Cheaply made, but the shock of color was exotic after being in the government complex, where no one wore anything but drabs and dress grays.
They used to buy food here when his parents had been alive. He’d have the cash from his paycheck folded in his back pocket, would argue the shopkeepers down to a reasonable price for eggs and buckwheat. He’d go home, where his mother would have made lunch already. He’d eat arepas in his favorite chair in the history section and read a book in front of the window light.
He missed that life.
