“It’s nearly six,” Linda said when she found him still there hours later, perspiring from kitchen heat and ladling stew into bowls. She started untying his apron strings without even asking, tugging him back away from the food line. “You have to go back to school, Noam. It’s Remembrance Day today. Aren’t you going to be in trouble if you stay out late?”
Probably. “I’ll be fine.”
She pulled the apron off over his head and tossed it into the growing pile of laundry. “Don’t be ridiculous, sugar. We have plenty of volunteers who can take over from here. You should go home. Get some dinner. Watch the memorial ceremony on TV.”
The food served in Level IV was meat and fresh vegetables. The stew the Migrant Center fed the refugees was carefully prepared to be high calorie and low cost: frozen potatoes, soy protein, broth from reconstituted powder.
The thought of going home and eating like a king was repulsive.
Could magic create food? If someone understood molecular biology, would that person be able to piece together the structure of an apple, or a kale plant, or even meat? Could the virus create life just as easily as it snuffed it out?
Think how many lives they could save.
Noam walked back downtown instead of taking the bus, hood tugged up to keep the snow out of his eyes and ungloved hands stuffed deep in both pockets. Without his uniform he was just another teen—in this neighborhood, a refugee—but as soon as he crossed into the government district he’d become the kid of some important minister, waiting for Daddy’s car.
He stopped at the Gregson Street intersection and stood there for a second, cheeks stinging in the bitter wind as he gazed down toward the smokestack that landmarked the government complex. People in suits edged around him without saying a word, heading to work in the refurbished tobacco warehouses that made up Brightleaf Square or north to their fancy apartments.
For the first time since he joined Level IV, Noam realized he didn’t feel that immediate plunge of nausea when he looked east. The idea of going back to the government complex didn’t make him want to lie down on the cracked sidewalk and let himself get trampled to death.
It wasn’t that he was happy to go back, but...
By the time he got back to the complex, it was late; the guard at the door took down his name with a grim sort of pleasure, meaning Noam would probably be on toilet duty for the next week. When he got upstairs the other students were already eating dinner, all that delicious food designed by nutritionists to help them grow strong, water that didn’t have shit floating in it, real silverware.
Noam ate. The meal tasted like wax.
A new strain of resentment grew inside him, a virus spreading from cell to cell. Bethany was from Richmond; her mother was a doctor. Taye’s parents were still alive, university professors he visited some weekends. Ames’s father was home secretary. None of them could possibly understand where Noam came from.
And then there was Dara, of course, Lehrer’s ward. Dara, whom General Ames recognized in the halls. Dara, who got his indiscretions erased from the record without comment, even felony trespassing. Dara, whose name and face had been kept from the media so he could grow up in cloistered, privileged peace.
Dara, who grew up with more of a father than Noam had these past three years but who seemed determined to blow up his life in a fit of teenage disobedience.
Noam watched Dara push his collards around his plate with the tines of his fork, silently dragging them past a little hill of creamed corn but never eating them. He hadn’t eaten anything on his plate, actually; he’d just cut it all up and left it there. Because he could afford to be not hungry. Because wasting food was nothing to him.
When Noam was a kid and felt picky about choking down gefilte fish on Pesach, his dad sat him down and told him the story of la pobre viejecita.Once upon a time, there was an old lady with nothing to eat but meat, fruit, and sweets... and he’d flop another lump of poached fish on Noam’s plate and say, “God bless us with the poverty ofthatpoor woman.”
Noam had a hard time imagining Lehrer guilt-tripping Dara into eating gefilte fish.
“Wait,” Noam said, when dinner was finished and Dara went to scrape his plate into the trash. He forced a smile for Dara’s benefit and tugged the plate from his hands. “I’ll take that. For later.”
Dara gave him a strange look, but he let Noam pour his leftovers into a plastic container without conflict. Noam could bring it to the Migrant Center tomorrow; maybe someone would eat it.
Dara was still standing there. Noam kept glancing at him out of the corner of his eye as he rinsed off the dishes, Dara’s arms crossed over his chest. Waiting.
Well, fuck him. Dara still might have issues with Noam, but Noam had questions for him too.
“Listen,” he said, when he finally set the last plate on the drying rack. “I need to talk to you. Is there anywhere we can go where we won’t be overheard?”
“I was starting to think you’d lost your nerve. Let’s go down to the courtyard.”
“Is that private?”
“Private enough. Get your coat.”
They ended up on a bench near the stream that cut through the courtyard, right where it poured over a manufactured outcropping of rocks. The water was loud enough that they wouldn’t be overheard, not even by the soldiers patrolling the perimeter or government employees with open windows overhead. Even so, Dara did something complicated with his magic before they sat. A ward muffling their conversation? Noam couldn’t tell what it was, but he sensed it, Dara’s magic as bright and green as summer.
Noam drew his feet up onto the seat and faced Dara, who kept one leg on the ground as he pulled his satchel onto the bench between them and dug out a bottle of bourbon. He unscrewed the cap and pushed it across the wood to bump against Noam’s shin.
It wasn’t exactly what Noam had in mind when he asked Dara out here, but he took a swig anyway. The drink burned going down, like swallowing a smoldering silk ribbon.
