She snorted. “That’s fine. Yeah. You know what? Iwanthim to know it was me that shot him. I want him to know some crazy Texas bitch with a sniper rifle shot Calix Lehrer right in the skull.”
“You’re Texan?” he asked, latching on to that with a slight sense of desperation. He couldn’t escape the sense that if they kept on this track, she’d see him too clearly—take a good long look at Noam and see how much touching Lehrer in that office, Lehrer’s skin bloody but his skin warm, had felt like heartbreak.
“Yep. Studied engineering at Austin. I was going to get a master’s degree, only then I got drafted and spent the next three years playing sniper for the army.”
“I thought Texas exiled all their witchings to the QZ.”
“Oh, they do,” Claire said bitterly. “I was two months out from discharge. Someone broke quarantine protocol after a QZ mission, and my whole unit got sick. I was the only survivor. Woke up in the hospital and realized I could move things around with my mind. I didn’t want to wait for the police to come for me, so I did their work for them and exiled myself.”
“I’m sorry.”
Claire shrugged. “It wasn’t so bad. I ran into one of the communities out there a few weeks in. I was able to have a life, sort of. I met Priya.”
“But then Dara showed up?”
“Nope. Then Lehrer destroyed the vaccine lab Priya was working in, and she barely got out with her life. It was sixweeksbefore we were sure she was even gonna make it. Lost a lot of friends in that attack—a lot of good people trying to cure the worst plague this world’s ever seen.ThenDara turned up.”
Noam had spent a lot of time trying to imagine what the QZ was like for Dara. He knew what the QZ wasgenerallylike, obviously—he’d been there plenty of times with Lehrer or on Level IV training missions—but living there was something completely different. Before he and Lehrer had started searching out the vaccine, he’d had no idea people had settled out there. Or not really. They’d all heard rumors of squatters in the wilderness, surviving off mushrooms and wild animals, half-feral with fevermadness. But he hadn’t imagined whole communities. Whole labs high tech enough to develop vaccine research programs.
“So,” he said, once they’d turned onto the street that would take Noam almost all the way back to the government complex if he stayed on it, “y’all had like ... a whole town? Or what?”
“Yeah,” she said. “There are lots of abandoned cities out in the QZ. A lot of them are uninhabitable—they got all grown over with magic and plants, or they’re all irradiated still—but there are a few that are just a little crumbly. People have been living out there since the catastrophe. Some never left. They just hunkered down and stayed put—and were lucky enough to survive the virus when they inevitably got infected. It’s a town like any town you might have in Carolinia. Only all witching. And maybe a little more communal, I guess. People do what they can.”
“It’s amazing no one knows about these towns.”
“Not really. I mean, passenger jets have a minimum height they have to fly over the QZ to avoid getting caught up in magic. Governments probably have satellite data on us, but for the most part we’re harmless. They let us be.”
“Till now,” he said.
“TillLehrer.”
There was no arguing with that. They parted ways close to downtown; Claire couldn’t risk being recognized on CCTV, had to head back to the apartment she and Priya had rented on the east side.
And maybe Noam was personally complicit on some level for the destruction of Claire and Priya’s way of life out there. After all, he’d helped Lehrer do his dirty work. Before Noam had figured out Faraday, he’d evenbelievedin it. He had convinced himself that the threat of letting the vaccine fall into the wrong hands—Texan hands—was great enough to justify destroying those labs. Lehrer was a lot of things, but he was right about the threat the rest of the world posed to witching survival. Lehrer knew that much from personal experience.
Noam had seen how those labs affected Lehrer. So many of the facilities were built in old hospitals—and there was always something particularly vicious about the way Lehrer destroyed those. The nights following, Noam would wake up to find Lehrer upright in bed beside him, staring blank faced into the darkness like he could see something in the shadows that Noam couldn’t.
I hate doctors,Lehrer had said in his office, still covered in blood, and ... god. Noam should have realized the moment he stepped into that room, the moment he saw how Lehrer flinched back from the stethoscopes and gloved hands. He should have—
Don’t sympathize with him,Noam ordered himself.
Another voice answered:Too late.
Lehrer was still awake when Noam returned. He’d made it halfway to the barracks before his phone buzzed in his pocket with a text from Lehrer—Come back to the apartment when you’re done—and he’d had to turn around in the middle of the atrium to take the stairs up to the west wing instead.
Lehrer was in the living room, reclining on the sofa with Wolf curled at his feet and a book open in his hand. He put it down when Noam entered, resting its pages open atop his stomach.
Noam glanced around the room—an empty mug of tea sat on the floor by Lehrer’s hip, the lights dimmed so low he was amazed Lehrer could read the words on the page. Wolf’s pink tongue flicked out to lap at Lehrer’s ankle; the dog didn’t even look at Noam when he came in.
“Is everything ... okay?” Noam said, because Lehrer didn’t look well. He was paler than usual, his usually neat hair messy like he’d been raking his fingers through it. Fingers that trembled, however minutely, where they rested atop his book.
“Sit down,” Lehrer said instead of answering.
Noam paced over to the empty armchair nearest the sofa, perching on the edge of the seat and gripping the cushion beneath him. He couldn’t stop looking at Lehrer. He felt—concern, maybe, but something else too. Wariness.
An injured predator could be lethal.
Lehrer’s cool gaze drifted over Noam’s face, as if cataloging it. “I met with my personal physician,” he said. “As you might imagine, I lost a lot of blood in the assassination attempt.”
