Whatever else Lehrer might’ve said to that—for now, perhaps, ordo I have you?—he kept silent, watching Noam as if Noam were a particularly confusing museum exhibit.
Noam wanted to dig his fingernails into Lehrer’s hairline and peel his face away from the bone. Crack open his skull and—see. Spread Lehrer’s mind out on the table like the contents of a dissection.
“You just don’t trust me,” Noam said when Lehrer said nothing. He hated how uneven his voice sounded. How ... weak. “You don’t ... have you ever? Trusted me?”
“Would I have made you my protégé if I didn’t?”
“Let me rephrase. You don’t trust meanymore.”
Lehrer pressed one finger under Noam’s chin, tilted his face up toward the light. “And why should I? You betrayed the man who all but raised you. You killed him in cold blood. I’m not under any illusion you care more for me than you did Tom Brennan.”
“Fuckyou.”
Noam was shaking now, a dead leaf against Lehrer’s unmoving touch.
Lehrer was ... right. He was—Noam did kill Brennan. He shot his head open like a rotten fruit. He abandoned Dara to the quarantined zone. He let—his own mother killed herself to get away from him.
And who could blame her?
Noam was under no illusions that he was a good person anymore. Lehrer had been right, that night in the courtyard after the coup. They were the same, Noam and Lehrer: two faces of one coin.
“Fuck you,” he said again, barely a whisper.
Lehrer shook his head slightly. “And yet,” he said, “you won’t even do that.”
Noam jerked his face away, out of Lehrer’s reach. Lehrer’s hand retreated to his side, as if it meant nothing, and Noam stared at a vase on the far side of the room so long it blurred and bled in his vision.
“Go back to the barracks,” Lehrer said. He reached out, and a book sped from across the room into his waiting grasp; he pushedEthics in Virological Discourseinto Noam’s arms. “And read this. Return tomorrow prepared to discuss.”
He stepped back, giving Noam space to grab his satchel from the floor and stalk away. Noam glanced over his shoulder at the door, his hand slippery on the knob, but Lehrer had already crossed back to the end table and retrieved the remaining book to flip through its pages. He didn’t look up, although he knew Noam was there. Knew Noam watched.
So Noam left. He went back to the barracks, clutching the book and his own spared life, and the guilty weight of too many crimes.
CHAPTERTWENTY-EIGHT
DARA
Living with Ames was a sight better than living alone.
Dara was still restricted to this building, but at least now Ames was here—both of them sitting cross-legged on the cold floor, Ames shuffling cards for poker; Ames eating all the high-calorie bits of Chinese takeout that Dara wouldn’t touch; arguing about which sister fromLittle Womenwas the objective best (Amy March, said Dara,obviously). They managed to share the narrow twin bed. After all, they’d done it plenty of times back when Ames’s father was still alive, both too drunk to go back to the barracks, tangled up together under Ames’s childhood duvet with a convenient bucket on the floor by the pillows.
It was almost like those days again. Dara felt guilty for thinking that way—after all, it wasn’t like Ames had a choice about being here—but hedidfeel better for having her around. She was the third living thing in this apartment, now—last week Dara had asked Claire to bring him a houseplant. She’d come back with a tiny little pothos vine in a ceramic pot. Dara had positioned it near the window, and he was embarrassed to admit he’d taken totalkingwith the plant, one-sided conversations to fill the empty hours. Now that Ames was here, though, Dara’s social life expanded beyond vegetation.
Another bonus was that Ames, unlike Dara, still had magic. That meant that once Noam gave her the codes, she could undo and redo Noam’s wards whenever they wanted to escape the studio apartment and head downstairs to Leo’s bar.
This was perhaps the one downside to Ames’s presence too. If Dara had gotten used to spending time in that bar for meetings—or alone with Leo—it was completely different with Ames around. Some part of his brain still implicitly associated Ames with ... well, with getting trashed. Ames-and-bars was flickering club lights and loud music, gin and bourbon and pills tipped back, fucking strange men in grimy bathroom stalls.
It didn’t make a difference that it was only four p.m. The sky was already dark this time of year, time blurring into time when Dara didn’t have classes and meetings and basic training to track the hours.
He was pretty sure Leo would give him a drink if he asked. He might not approve, but he’ddoit. Dara was nineteen; he was old enough. And maybe Dara could keep himself in control. One drink, or two. Then stop.
But that wasn’t really true, was it? Dara didn’t have control. Dara would drink himself unconscious—had, in fact, drunk himself to the point that Lehrer had started sending his personal physician to draw Dara’s blood every week to check liver function.
If Dara had one drink, Dara would drink himself into the grave.
So Dara sipped his club soda as Leo passed Ames her third tequila cocktail, then used his straw to macerate his lemon slice against the bottom of his glass.
“You wouldn’t believe the kinds of embarrassing stories I could tell you about this one,” Ames was saying, jerking her thumb in Dara’s direction. Dara grimaced at her, and she grinned back. “Like the time he was sick and Lehrer made him go to this big gala thing anyway, and Dara puked all over the Italian ambassador’s shoes. Or how Dara went through like a zillion nannies as a kid—apparently none of them could stand him ’cause he’d read their minds and repeat all their worst thoughts back to them just to prove he could.”
