Because Lehrer trusted them to move past this? Or because he didn’t think keeping Noam happy mattered anymore?
Lehrer turned on the faucet. Only then did he glance back over his shoulder. “You should go back to the barracks. You have reading to do, and I’ll expect you to be prepared in our lesson tomorrow.”
It wasn’t an order, not the persuasive kind anyway, but Noam still had no choice. He went.
But not to the barracks.
When they had returned from the quarantined zone two weeks ago, after Noam and Lehrer split in the atrium to head in their separate directions, Noam’d tracked Lehrer through the security cameras as he made his way back out of the government complex. Noam had watched him go out to the barricade and speak to one of the guards there, have a car brought up. Not driverless: Lehrer was paranoid enough to avoid using a computer system.
Even so, Noam had been able to follow him through CCTV up Roxboro Street until he turned onto Main Street and headed west. It had been a struggle to stay on top of the tech. He’d almost lost Lehrer when he turned onto Duke Street, but then his technopathy had caught a glimpse of the car from the high school’s security system. Lehrer had pulled in front of the school’s main building and emerged into the camera’s black-and-white field of view—disappeared into the building itself.
With the school’s internal security cameras, Noam had been able to track Lehrer through the empty halls—his tailored suit out of place amid the graffitied lockers and sticky floors—at least, until he disappeared down a narrow flight of stairs and vanished from view for ten minutes. When he finally emerged, it had been to return to his car and drive straight back to the government complex.
It took Noam fifteen minutes to walk to the school and another fifteen for the suppressants to finally wear off. He spent those last minutes sitting on the porch railing of the café across the street, legs dangling out over the asphalt, watching the cars zip back and forth and wondering if this was where he’d have ended up if he hadn’t dropped out of school in the eighth grade.
Ninth Street was about a mile from here. They’d started rebuilding. Not tenements, now, but boutique stores and expensive organic groceries. Places where no one who lived there before the outbreak would’ve been able to afford shopping. And there were expensive apartments right next to the school, right across Duke Street. Maybe students from both neighborhoods had attended, Atlantians brushing shoulders with ministers’ kids.
At last, Noam sensed the flicker of tech working in the engines of all those driverless cars, and he pushed off the railing to land in the parking lot, electromagnetism slowing him down before impact.
The school was dark as he darted across Main Street, the cars’ AI forcing them to decelerate and let him pass. Someone honked, irritated, but Noam just held up a hand and kept running.
The security cameras saw nothing but empty space as Noam approached the main building. A twist of telekinesis was enough to unlock the front door—still analog; the school board clearly hadn’t apportioned the money to buy digital security yet—and Noam slipped inside, flicking on the overhead lights.
It looked remarkably like Noam’s old middle school. There was the same off-white tile floor, same student art on the walls and shitty composite-wood classroom doors. Noam followed in Lehrer’s footsteps down the hall, descending the staircase into the basement.
The corridors were narrower down here, as if the building was smaller underground than it was above. Or maybe that was Noam’s imagination. But here it felt like the walls were closing in on him, the air stale and difficult to breathe. It smelled weird too. Like something had died in the heating vents.
Noam inhaled through his mouth and tried the first door on his right.
Just a classroom, albeit a small and windowless one. Lehrer wouldn’t hide the vaccine in plain sight like that, would he? High schoolers were intrepid. If there was a bag of mysterious vials hidden in a regular classroom, they’d have found it in days.
Noam realized after a moment that he thought ofhigh schoolerslike he wasn’t one of them. Like there was something different about teens who went to public school than teens who went to Level IV. Maybe that was true—he doubted any of these kids had hunched over a sink to rinse someone else’s blood off their hands.
Or maybe that was Lehrer’s influence:You’re so much older than your age ...
The smell was really getting to him now. Noam swallowed hard against the urge to gag and stepped back out into the hall, pulling the classroom door shut.
He ruled out the other classrooms on the hall, but the last door on the left was locked. Noam frowned and tried the knob again, like it was somehow supposed to turn on second attempt.
He glanced toward the stairs, half expecting to see Lehrer standing there gazing down at him with shadowed eyes. The landing was empty.
Noam sucked in a shallow breath, anxiety hot in his blood as he drew on telekinesis and turned the latch. The door swung open by forty-five degrees and caught on something heavy, wouldn’t go any farther. He edged through the gap, shoving against the door with his shoulder and forcing it against whatever was blocking the way—just an inch of give—and he squeezed past, stumbling into a dark, dusty space.
His magic caught a sense of electricity above the ceiling; he tugged on it, and a single bulb lit overhead. The light was grayish and weak but still enough to illuminate a large room full of ...
Noam had no idea what all this shit was, actually.
The room looked like it was used as a general storage space for anything that didn’t have a better home elsewhere in the school. Cardboard boxes overflowed with sequined theater costumes and polyester wigs; a stack of student art projects towered on a nearby table, the top canvas displaying abstract splatters of paint and what looked like discarded buttons. There was even a toilet abandoned in the middle of the floor, black mildew creeping over the trap.
Noam was starting to get why Lehrer chose to hide the vaccine at a high school. No way would he find the bag hidden among all thiscrap.
Still, Noam crept forward—carefully, as there were boxes everywhere, the floor littered with general detritus—and tried to figure out where the hell to start. Swensson had told them something about this. Not aboutsearching for illegal magic vaccines the chancellor hid in the basement of the local high school, but about organizing searches more generally. You were supposed to create a grid over the search area and rule out each zone in sequence.
So he’d start at the beginning, the corner nearest the door.
He turned back where he came from and met his own gaze reflected in a large ornate mirror. That was what had been lodged behind the door, gilt edged and age spotted—and over Noam’s right shoulder, a pale figure stared out of the darkness.
Noam yelped and spun around, magic snapping to his fingertips.
