“Oh. Can you do magic, then?”
“Sure can,” Noam said. “Want to see?”
She nodded, perhaps not as enthusiastically as she might have had she been well. Noam rubbed his gloved fingertips together, capturing the static and letting it spark into seed lightning, sizzling white against his palm.
“Be careful!” Taye said from somewhere over his left shoulder, but Noam ignored him. Bea’s face lit up, a smile spreading her cracked lips.
“Does it hurt?” she asked, leaning forward a little, and Noam shook his head.
“Not me. I wouldn’t touch it, though, if I were you.” He clenched his hand into a fist, and the lightning quenched. Bea pressed her fingers to the middle of his hand, as if testing to see if it was still warm. To her, maybe it was. Her skin was dry and cracked, fragile as paper.
“What else can you do?” she said.
“I can make things bigger and smaller,” Taye said. It was the kind of confession that made Noam twist round to look at him—Taye’d never talked about his presenting power before, at least not where Noam could hear.
“What kinds of things?” Noam said.
“You know. Whatever. Anything. Could do this table. Could do myself, even.”
Noam frowned. “Isn’t that complicated? I mean, you’d have to concentrate on...a lot of organs.”
Taye just smiled at him and said, “Nah, man. It’s just, like, exponents.” As if to demonstrate, a pen on the table by Bea’s cot expanded to almost six times its original size, then shrank just as easily.
“Exponents.”
“Yeah.”
“Exponents as in...math.”
Taye picked up the pen and twirled it between his fingers, completely unfazed by the flabbergasted look on Noam’s face. “Yeah, like math. If you think about cells and atoms and shit as numbers and then just raise them to whatever power, it’s easy.”
Easy if you were a goddamn math prodigy.
Still, Bea found Taye’s tricks delightful—so they spent the next five or ten minutes showing some of the more interesting applications of both their powers until at last Halsing swept down to demand they go and see to other patients.
Bea seems to be doing well, Noam thought as he sponged down an older man who was hours into the coma stage. She was alert, even if she wasn’t strong, and she was reading. Maybe she would be like them. Maybe she’d be a witching, and one day she’d be showing off magic tricks of her very own.
The idea stuck with him, a warm kernel of hope he returned to later when one of the other patients died and he and Dara carried the body out wrapped in a sheet—they ran out of body bags ages ago—and tossed it onto a pile with the others to be burned. Dara’s cheeks were pink, a few curls stuck to his forehead; with all those feverish bodies crammed inside, the tent was sweltering.
“Do you remember this?” he asked Noam before they went back in, the pair of them sharing a bottle of water near the entrance. “Being sick.”
“Not really. I was unconscious most of the time.”
“So you had it bad, then. You didn’t know you were going to survive.” He passed Noam the bottle, and Noam took a sip; the water was lukewarm.
“They left me there, actually. In the red ward. I woke up alone.”
Dara stared. “Theyleftyou there?”
“They probably assumed I was going to die either way. When you can’t afford to pay for all those fancy experimental drugs, survival odds kinda go down a bit. There were cameras, though. When they realized I survived, they had people there in minutes. Even Lehrer came.”
Noam gave Dara back the water, but Dara just stood there, holding it in one hand without drinking. At last Dara shook his head and said, “Fine. Fine, I shouldn’t be surprised.”
Right. Because Dara had the luxury of finding such thingssurprising.
Some of that must have shown on Noam’s face, because Dara sighed. “I know.” He dragged his fingers back through his hair. “All right, come on. Let’s go back inside.”
The cadets were housed in barracks, unused now that most of the soldiers were down south “reconstructing” Atlantia. The barracks faced the sea; when the wind rolled in off the ocean, it whistled through the cracks in the walls and tasted like salt. All their clothes smelled like death, sinking into fibers and bruising itself on skin.
