“No!” Dara shouted, lunging.
The syringe rolled over the cobblestones, its clear contents sloshing in its vial. Dara scraped his knees on the rock; someone’s foot caught him in the shoulder, and Noam was shouting something up above him, but Dara couldn’t make out the words, couldn’t think about anything but the suppressant. He flung out a hand, grasping a beat too late.
The syringe was crushed underfoot, broken glass ground into the street and the vial’s contents a slick stain on stone.
Someone grasped Dara’s arm and hauled him up—and for a split second Dara was reeling through blind space, terror climbing up his throat, before Noam’s voice in his ear said: “It’s me—Dara, it’s me,” and his vision refocused on Noam’s familiar face.
“It’s gone,” Dara said, clutching at Noam with both hands. “Noam, it’s—”
All at once the color drained from Noam’s face, his body gone still against Dara’s grip.
“No,” Dara gasped, faltering forward to catch Noam’s weight as he listed to one side. “No—”
Too late. They were too late. Noam’s skin already felt hot against Dara’s palms, his head lolling against Dara’s shoulder as Dara tried to heave him back onto his feet.
The first part of the plan had worked perfectly. They’d collapsed the tower on Lehrer, forcing him to expend a massive amount of magic to keep himself alive.
The rest of the plan—cutting off Lehrer’s power source—had gone desperately wrong.
“Is he okay?” someone asked, their hand grazing Dara’s arm. The voice sounded familiar.
Dara looked up.
“Taye?”
Taye, in his Level IV uniform—Taye with the bright grin and the omnipresent red candies, Taye the mathematics genius—was staring at Dara like he’d never seen him before in his life.
“Wow,” Taye said. “You’re, like ... alive and shit.”
“Old news,” Dara said. “What are you—how did youfindus?” He grunted as Noam’s legs gave out.
“Tell you later. Grab his left side.”
Taye hooked an arm under Noam’s other shoulder, and between them they heaved Noam up enough to drag him forward over the stones. “What the hell are you doing here? Why is Noam in a leather jacket? Why is Noam unconscious? And why are you not dead?”
“That’s a lot of questions,” Dara got out through a tight jaw. “Right now, we need to get Noam ... somewhere else. Not ... here.”
The fallen boulders were already shifting in front of the chapel, dust blooming toward the dusk sky like a cloud of ash. Noam made a low, pained sound.
“Inside,” Taye suggested. “That building, there?”
No. Too obvious. They had to go somewhere defensible, somewhere with limited entry points. Somewhere Lehrer could find them, but where they wouldn’t be taken by surprise. Somewhere like—
“The crypt,” Dara said.
For once, Taye didn’t argue. He did some complicated bit of magic—likely involving math and gravity—and suddenly Noam was much lighter against Dara’s shoulders. Light enough Dara could bend down and grab him under the knees, hoisting him up into his arms like a child.
“Who are we running from?” Taye asked as they shoved their way through the pandemonium. “The people who brought down the tower, or the other people?”?“The other people,” Dara said grimly.
“Yeah. Kinda figured, after half of Level IV disappeared under mysterious circumstances.”
“You won’t turn us in, will you?”
“Are you serious? I’m not a snitch, Shirazi.” Taye looked deeply offended by the suggestion, so Dara let it go.
They burst free of the crowd closer to the chapel. All the guards and soldiers had abandoned the area—or been crushed under the falling rock, more likely. Not that it helped that much—the army was already setting up a barricade on the far end of the lawn, a helicopter’s blades cutting through the air somewhere overhead. That’s where Priya and Claire and Ames would be now, preventing those soldiers from searching the grounds for Dara and Noam before they finished their job.
The wreckage of the tower had started to shift more visibly now, stone and brick tumbling toward the quad as Lehrer slowly forced his way free. They had to run right past it to get to the chapel.
