“I wondered about that,” Ames said, sitting a little straighter. “Lehrer didn’t tell me he couldn’t read Noam’s mind anymore, obviously, but I kinda figured something had to have happened. Otherwise ...”
Persuasion stole the rest of the sentence, but Dara got the gist:Otherwise, why would he need me?
A short laugh tore out of Ames’s throat. “Although now that you’ve told me as much, I guess I’m not getting out of here anytime soon. Either Noam does his little trick, or you have to kill me.”
“Ames—”
“No, don’t worry about it. I bet Taye five hundred argents you’d be the death of me one day. I mean, I can’t use five hundred argents once I’m dead, obviously, but it’s the principle of the thing.”
Dara managed a weak smile, one that did nothing to quell the waves pitching in his stomach. He drew his hand back into his lap.
Ames turned her face toward the ceiling, tapping her toes against the hardwood floor. “Well,” she said, “since we’re gonna be here awhile, I guess we should, like ... figure out a topic of conversation or something. Just not astronomy, Dara—you know that shit’s boring.”
“All right.” Dara drew his legs up onto the bed, crossing them under his body. “Tell me about Texas.”
“Oh,that. That was ... I fucked up. Basically.”
“What do you mean?”
Ames exhaled. “I mean I didn’t wait for orders. I attacked the enemy encampment on my own and brought all hell raining down on our heads. So then obviously Texas sent in all their antiwitching units, and Noam’s unit had to attack the airport to split their manpower. We barely got out of there.”
“How? With antiwitching units—”
“We retreated over a river, and I drew up all the moisture to make the ground soggy and swampy. Antiwitching armor was too heavy to get through. They went back for helicopters, but by that point we’d had reinforcements come in. Probably would’ve won, if the powers that be hadn’t called for a cease-fire.”
Clever. Ames’s presenting power was influence over water.So you’re essentially a cartoon character,Dara had said to her when they first met, Ames eight and himself nine—but she’d just come back withI probably got it from watching too much anime. It made her one of the first people Dara had met who seemed impervious to his insults. And that made them friends. Even so, it took a solid year of training and seeing the destructive strength of Ames’s abilities firsthand before Dara learned to respect them.
Maybe Leo was right. Maybe he was a bully.
“Are you okay?” he asked softly. He didn’t really mean it in the physical sense. Ames had always wanted to climb the ranks in the military.
That dream was probably dead now.
“I’ll live. Whatever. It doesn’t matter anymore, does it? Everything’s fucked.”
“I’m glad you’re safe,” he said. “Not that being locked up in here is all that much better.”
Ames raised her brows. “Not better than getting shot at?”
Dara grimaced. “I didn’t mean it like that. But you have to admit, this”—he gestured, encompassing the tiny apartment: the broken radiator, the protein bars Priya had brought him that he never ate, the unmade bed—“is not exactly where I thought I’d be by age nineteen.”
“And where did you think you’d be? Lehrer was never gonna let you fly off and be a diplomat in fuckingPragueor wherever—”
“Dead. I thought I’d be dead,” Dara said. And for a moment they looked at each other, Dara’s fingers twisting up in the bedsheets and Ames strapped to that goddamn chair, messy hair casting shadows over her eyes. Dara sighed. “Not like that. Not ... necessarily. But I never thought I’d make it this far. I was so sure Lehrer would kill me once he could prove I’d betrayed him—and if he didn’t, Sacha would, the second I stopped being useful.”
“Yeah, and if neither of them got around to assassinating you, you’d have taken matters into your own hands. Is that it?”
“For god’s sake, Ames—”
She blew out a heavy breath and shook her head. “It’s a fair fucking question, and you know it.”
The words were punctuated with a long silence, both of them remembering the day after Dara got home from the hospital—the first time Lehrer let Ames visit, her sitting at the foot of his bed with both of them staring at each other and refusing to speak. She’d been so furious with him. He had seen it written in the line of her mouth, the way she dug her nails into her palms.
It was the first time Dara had thought Lehrer actually cared if he lived or died. He’d stayed home all week. Slept in a chair in the corner of Dara’s bedroom, snapping awake every time Dara rolled over.
“No. Well—I don’t know. I hadn’t really thought that far ahead. It’s not ... it doesn’t matter now, anyway. It’s over.”
Ames wet her lips. “Okay. So. I’m trying to trust you, Dara. But you have to promise me ... promise you’d tell me if you ever felt. Like that. Again. Okay? Because I’m not doing that shit a second time, I ...”
