“I didn’t have anything better, sir.”
Lehrer gave him a faintly incredulous look.“Improvise.”
The way he said it made Noam want to shrivel up with embarrassment. “Yes, sir.”
“Then,” Lehrer said, completely unmoved by Noam’s anxiety, “there’s the matter of your digital trespassing.”
Anger resurfaced like a monster from the deep, surging up into the shallows of Noam’s mind and subsuming the anxiety of a moment before.
“You read that email,” Noam burst out. “You heard what he said. Sacha’sevil, sir. He’s crazy, or he’s stupid, or—peoplediein those refugee camps. They’re overcrowded, and people get sick, and they never come back. And we all know Atlantia’s a death trap.”
“I did read the email,” Lehrer confirmed. He sat down in his usual chair, perching an elbow on the armrest and cupping his tea between both hands. “And I agree with you, Noam. Sacha’s behavior is reprehensible.”
“But you aren’t going to do anything about it.” Noam’s voice hurt, like broken glass in his throat. “That makes you just as bad as he is.”
Lehrer’s oddly transparent eyes did not blink. “I wouldn’t say I’m doing nothing.”
The words hung in the air between them. They grew there, transformed, spread long limbs into the empty corners and twined around Noam’s heart.
“What, then?” he said, when he couldn’t stand the silence anymore. “Whatare you doing? Because as far as I can see, you’re full of sympathy and promises but not much else.” The last word cracked on its way out, Noam’s chest seizing painfully.
Lehrer put down his tea and leaned forward, bracing his forearms against his knees and clasping his hands between them. The smile was gone.
“Listen to me, Noam,” Lehrer said. “This has happened before. My grandparents were so-called foreigners in their own land. Their German countrymen locked them away in prison camps for the crime of being Jews. And then, in the 2000s, the United States rounded up all witchings and their families and had them killed, allegedly for the safety of the uninfected. I survived not because I was spared, but because I was powerful enough to be studiedbeforeI was killed. What Sacha is trying to do now is no different. He’s afraid of the virus, but fear is just as infectious. This country is paralyzed by it. Sacha believes he is protecting the people from disease by taking a hard line on immigration, buthe is wrong.”
Lehrer said the last part so forcefully that Noam felt it like a blow to the gut. Something shattered on the other side of the room; Noam leaped to his feet before he could stop himself.
The decanter had fallen off the table, heavy crystal in pieces all over the floor and scotch dripping onto the rug.
“My apologies,” Lehrer said. “I forget myself.”
The decanter repaired itself before Noam’s eyes, and the spilled liquor vanished.
Slowly, slowly, Noam sat down.
His heart still raced.
“I didn’t know,” Noam said, when he could talk without the words coming out raw and bloody. “About your family, that is. I didn’t...” But then something else occurred to him, and he said, “You’reJewish?”
Lehrer lifted a brow. “Do they leave that part out of the history books?” he said, and Noam laughed, surprising himself.
“No, it’s not that. But. My mom is—was. Jewish. I’m Jewish.”
A moment ago Noam had been so—he’d been furious, and he wished he could go back to that feeling, because it felt wrong to justmove onafter what he’d read in Holloway’s office, but right now his mind had short-circuited on this one fact, this tiny common thread tied between him and Lehrer. He wanted to weave that thread into a ribbon, a rope. He grinned, and after a moment, Lehrer smiled back. It was a small smile, a quiet smile, but worth so much more for that.
Lehrer’s grandparents had survived the Holocaust—had survived a genocide that shipped millions of Jews and other undesirables off to camps to be brutally, efficiently exterminated—only to die sixty-some years later. This time at the ends of a different nation’s guns, killed not for being Jewish but for daring to have magic. For having children who had magic. Noam couldn’t fathom trauma like that.
But he couldn’t forget what he’d read today either.
The same magic that gave Lehrer his power would kill the population of an entire country if Sacha forced Atlantians back down south.
“What can we do?” Noam said. He kept his voice low; no one was there to overhear, but speaking the words felt dangerous. “About Sacha. You’ve tried to talk him out of it. But you have to do more than that.”
Lehrer took in a shallow, audible breath. “These things are... complicated. Right now, you will just have to believe me when I tell you I haven’t forgotten the refugees. Iamon your side, Noam—I promise you that much.”
A politician’s answer. Noam wasn’t sure what else he expected.
But then Lehrer’s expression softened further. He reached over to place a hand on Noam’s wrist, fingertips pressing in against the pulse point.
