Noam tilted his head away, brow pressed against the cold window. The gray landscape rolled past, bare trees and bombed-out shells of old buildings. Lehrer seemed to hit every single pothole, the chassis of the car jolting each time and jarring Noam against his seat.
“You seem to have taken a liking to that Beretta.”
Noam glanced back at Lehrer, who flicked his gaze down toward the gun holstered at Noam’s hip. Noam’s fingers skipped down to graze the textured grip.
“I’m glad,” Lehrer went on, smiling slightly before he looked back toward the road. “There’s a reason I chose this model for you last year. It’s the perfect size and weight for your hand.”
Noam curled that hand into a fist. “What did you do with the original one?”
“Disposed of it. Don’t worry—I told you they’d never trace that gun back to you. The Brennan case is closed.”
Right. No one cared about the assassination of a refugee liaison when there was a coup to contend with.
Four hours later—on the other side of decontamination showers, after a thousand tests to be sure they weren’t bringing virus particles over the border and another long drive back to Durham—Lehrer walked side by side with Noam across the government complex courtyard.
“You did very well today,” Lehrer said at last, as they passed a manufactured waterfall on the stream, the crash of water loud enough to drown out their words for passersby. “It won’t take long, now. That’s good. We can’t afford for Texas to get their hands on the vaccine.”
“I know.” Noam tugged at the hem of his sweater, self-conscious of the Beretta—now tucked into the back of his jeans, the holster safely sequestered in the QZ car.
“Carolinia would be left defenseless.”
“I know.”
Lehrer was still looking at him when Noam glanced up; Lehrer’s expression was unreadable. “I hope that you do,” he said as they approached the atrium, the noise of the stream fading. “I’m relying on you.”
When Noam returned to the barracks, heading past the empty common room and the generic framed wall art—which still struck him as bizarre, even though Noam had lived here over a year—Ames was waiting for him. She sat in the boys’ bedroom on an empty bunk, a dark figure silhouetted against the window. “Where were you?” She kept her voice low, but Taye—who occupied the bed across from Noam—didn’t stir. He always slept like the dead.
“Work.”
Ames had a bottle of vodka clutched between her knees. She held his gaze as she took a long swallow. “No, you weren’t. I went by the store, and you weren’t there.”
“Not the store. The computer repair place.”
“I thought you quit that job.”
Noam shrugged one shoulder. He pointed at the vodka. “Give me that.”
Ames rose to her feet. He couldn’t make out the expression on her face, not in this light—not until she’d already stepped closer, and closer again, near enough he felt her breath on his skin. Her face was all tight lines, eyes narrowed and lips thin. She pressed the bottle into his hand. “You don’t need to adopt all of Dara’s old habits.”
“Dara didn’t even like vodka.”
“You know what I mean.”
He did, but he was never going to admit it.
She left the bottle, although there wasn’t much left. He stared down at the vodka, clear liquid sloshing around like the contents of Noam’s stomach—sickly, intoxicating.
Noam poured the vodka down the sink. Better wasted than back in Ames’s hands—she’d been drinking as much as Dara these days. Noam could count on one hand, probably, the number of times he’d seen her sober since her father had been murdered. MurderedbyDara, although that seemed like the kind of detail Ames didn’t need to know. What good would it do her now?
Even though Noam hadn’t drunk any of the vodka himself, when he lay down—curled up in Dara’s old bed under Dara’s old blanket—the room tilted and swayed before stabilizing. Noam pressed his face into the pillow and breathed in his own humid air, eyes clenched tight shut.
It had been six months. Dara was dead by now. Noam knew that.
Still.
The room rocked again, dizziness rippling in waves through Noam’s mind. Or maybe that was the effect of the sleeping pills.
When he closed his eyes, lately, too often it was to see Dara’s face. The way he’d looked when Noam put him in that car and sent him over the border into the QZ. The way he’d grasped at Noam during the coup before Lehrer’s soldiers dragged him away. The way his body would have decayed out there in the forest, rotting into the magic-infested soil until only his bones remained. One of these days Noam would be out there on a mission with Lehrer, and they’d find Dara’s skull half-buried in a tangled root system.
