“Not your own guardian, you haven’t.” She slid off the dresser and tugged at the hem of her shirt, straightening out the wrinkles. He reached for her mind before remembering,Oh. He couldn’t anymore. The Claire who looked back at him from across the room might as well have been a corpse, thoughts quenched out.
“It’s not gonna be the same,” she said. “I don’t need you losing your shit on me day of.”
“I won’t.”
She left, eventually, but only after giving him one last look, like she thought she might read some reluctance from the set of his mouth or the way he had his arms crossed over his chest. He thought about saying,I want him dead more than all the rest of you combined, but didn’t.
He wasn’t even sure that was true.
The room seemed even smaller with Claire gone. Dara could pace from one end to the other in four strides, touching fingertips against the frigid window glass and those same fingers, a beat later, against the grimy wall opposite. He unpacked his duffel, folding his clothes into the dresser. They were the same clothes he’d left Durham with, now ill fitting and weak at the seams. He toed off his shoes and pushed them into the corner. There was a vanity mirror over the dresser; Dara avoided his own gaze as he slid the drawers shut. He was darkly, dreadfully certain that if he looked, he wouldn’t be the only one reflected there.
This room was full of shadows and distant noises: cars on the street, the burble of laughter from the apartment down the hall, a door slamming shut. It was all so much louder than he remembered, like the absence of telepathic voices in his head was a void that sucked in more sound than usual. This dead city reverberated inside his skull.
Not just the city. This whole country felt like a graveyard. Like every single body populating it was a corpse—an empty shell, reanimated and going through the motions but notreal. Not really.
Dara sucked in a breath, made himself exhale slowly. Then he looked at the mirror.
There was no one reflected in the room behind him. Just his own face, cheekbones more pronounced than they used to be—he’d lost weight in the QZ. His eyes were wide, whites showing around the irises.
He made himself keep looking: another second, one more.
He took off his wristwatch last. It was an expensive piece: mechanical, with a leather strap and a white face. Lehrer had given it to him for his fifteenth birthday. Back then Dara had been able to sense the cogs turning inside it, the hand ticking away the seconds of his life. Now it was as dead as everything else—but it was the only nice thing Dara had.
He set it atop the dresser at a perfect right angle to the outer ledge.
Six months since Dara left. Five since Lehrer had been elected chancellor. The news they got out in the quarantined zone had been sporadic and vague, enough to make Dara wonder if Lehrer had tightened restrictions on the press. He’d let himself start imagining some horrific dystopia, soldiers in the streets and the bodies of traitors hung from the walls of the government complex.
But if anything, things in Carolinia seemed better. They’d repaved Mangum Street, which had been full of potholes for as long as Dara could remember; the drive through downtown had been smooth. There was new construction, the tenements replaced with safe, affordable housing and schools. No more beggars, at least that Dara had seen. No breadlines or Atlantian refugees rioting for equal rights.
Lehrer, damn him, had his utopia after all.
And this time he hadn’t even needed to declare himself king.
Dara had to remind himself of the truth: no matter how many social programs Lehrer implemented, no matter how efficiently he used taxes or how much the people seemed to adore him, Lehrer was a killer. A mass murderer. Every one of Lehrer’s adoring citizens had lost loved ones to the virus. Every Carolinian feared the infection Lehrer had released on his own people.
It was Dara’s job to make sure they knew the truth. It was Dara’s job—the Black Magnolia’s job—to free them.
Dara turned off the lights and lay down on the thin mattress, staring up at the cracks that spindled across the ceiling like spiderwebs. His chest felt tight when he inhaled. His fingers curled into fists atop the sheets.
This apartment was one mile from the government complex.
It was ten minutes past midnight. Noam might still be awake, sitting cross-legged in his barracks bed with a magic-cast light floating overhead illuminating the pages of the book in his lap. His hair a little messy, as if he’d tried to sleep but given up early. The cap end of his pen stuck in his mouth. His mind a glowing ember in the sleepy darkness.
When this was done ... when Lehrer was dead ... Dara might see him again.
He almost didn’t dare imagine it.
The Black Magnolia wasn’t interested in suicide missions, generally speaking. This was an exception—and only because Dara had insisted he be the one to pull the trigger. Even if Dara managed to kill Lehrer, he wouldn’t make it out of that gala alive. Not without magic—and he’d given up magic four months ago, when he finally gave in and accepted the vaccine. He’d waited as long as he possibly could, until he was barely coherent with fever. He kept thinking, maybe, maybe he’d be the exception. Maybe he’d hold on to his sanity. His life.
Dara hadn’t even planned on coming back to Carolinia at first. That was all Claire.You have to face himandwe need what you know.
At last he shut his eyes and rolled over onto his stomach, pressing his face against the pillow and breathing in the smell of mildew. He already knew he wouldn’t be falling asleep tonight. He’d lie awake and flinch when the radiator finally rattled to life, certain every shifting shadow was a tall figure slipping out from the dark.
After all, Noam wasn’t the only person who was just a mile away.
CHAPTERTHREE
NOAM
