And really, how dare Noam play the victim? How dare he sit there with that sad, wounded look on his face, likehewas the one who got hurt?
Dara tugged his napkin out from beneath his glass and smoothed it flat on the bar in front of him.
“Tell us what you’re offering, Noam,” Priya said, laser focused as ever. “You’re Lehrer’s protégé. How close are you, really?”
“Close enough,” said Noam. “I see him almost every day. For lessons. And he’s taken me into the QZ before, looking for vaccine samples. He ... relies on me.”
Slowly, carefully, Dara began tearing his napkin into strips.
“Do you have access to his apartment?”
“Yes. Lehrer trusts me. I know how to get past his wards.”
Not that he needed to most of the time, surely. Lehrer was probably there, always, to take them down himself. To tug Noam over the threshold and deeper into his web.
And now that they had Noam, probably Black Magnolia wouldn’t even need Dara anymore. What use was he now? His face was too recognizable. He’d blown his cover at that gala. Lehrer was looking for him. He didn’t have any magic. Yes, he was trained in physical combat, but he’d have to get past so many layers of security to use it.
Essentially, he was useless. Dead weight.
“I’ve been collecting material from his apartment,” Noam said—and this, at last, made Dara look up.
Noam had his water held between both hands, undrunk. At least he wasn’t still staring at Dara; he was focused on Claire, back straight and his feet hooked through the rungs of his stool.
Not for the first time, Dara was struck with the thought that Noam seemed so ... different from how he was six months ago. He didn’t think he could blame all of that on the clothes or Lehrer. But Dara missed the version of Noam that wore clothes he got from the thrift store—or, on one memorable occasion, from a dumpster. Dara had fallen in love with the Noam who drifted off surrounded by calculus books and made terrible decisions in the name of what he thought was right, who read Karl Marx and trusted himself more than he trusted anyone else.
The old version of Noam didn’t have this Noam’s eyes—wary, watchful. Dara could never have imaginedhisversion of Noam killing Tom Brennan.
Killing whomever else Lehrer had made Noam murder since.
“Dara started that, back when he was working with Sacha,” Noam went on. “I don’t know what he did with the stuff he found”—he glanced toward Dara, briefly—“but I’ve been trying to find anything I can that might help undermine Lehrer’s reputation. Because that’s the thing, right? We can’t just assassinate him or put him on trial. We have to turn public opinion against him. The same way we turned public opinion against Sacha to bring Lehrer into power.”
He faltered on thewe.
“Do you think no one’s ever tried to dig up dirt on Lehrer before?” Dara interjected at last, dropping the final clump of ruined napkin onto the bar. “Like you said, I tried. But it takes a lot to sway public opinion. And even if you do, you really think Lehrer will care? He’ll just declare himself dictator andmakethem obey.”
“It’s better than nothing,” Noam said. “And maybe that’s why I haven’t released any of the shit I’ve collected yet—I don’t know. You’re right. We need to do more.”
Claire and Priya exchanged glances. Whatever the new plan was—the one to replace the gala plan—they weren’t sharing. Not until they’d vetted Noam better than this.
Noam clearly noticed, because when he finally took a sip of his drink, he watched them over the rim the whole time. When he set the glass down again, he said, “We don’t have much time. If I’m going to play both sides of this, Lehrer will catch on eventually. Especially now that he knows Dara is back. I’d give us about four weeks, if that.”
Dara’s next breath hitched in his chest, but he didn’t get a chance to respond.
“But I can do better than find dirt on Lehrer,” Noam barreled on. “I told you we’ve been going into the quarantined zone. There are labs out there developing a magic vaccine. I’m sure all y’all know that already. And you also know Lehrer’s been collecting it. Studying it to find a way to prevent it from being effective.”
Of course they knew. Dara had been there, in the QZ, when Priya stumbled into camp bloody and covered in dirt. She’d been one of those lab techs working on the vaccine. One of thirty at the location near Asheville.
Lehrer had razed it to the ground.
After that, the labs fell like burnt kindling. There was no vaccine left. Lehrer had stolen it all.
“We know about the labs,” Claire said coolly. “I have friends who died in those labs, thanks to him.”
More than just friends. Not everyone in the quarantined zone survived birth—the vaccine wasn’t ubiquitous yet, and with magic grown deep into the land, it infected everyone who lived there. A baby was born while Dara lived there—born, and infected, and sick, and dead: all within a week. They’d buried its corpse outside town, deep in that soil still teeming with old magic from Lehrer’s dirty bombs, scraping away at the earth with shrapnel. No one in Carolinia ever talked about that. Winning the war back in 2018—defeating the United States—came at this cost.
The quarantined zone was more Lehrer’s child than Dara had ever been.
“I can find the vaccine,” Noam said. “I’ll steal it. We’ll inject Lehrer with the vaccine, and then we’ll kill him.”
