“Get to class,” she said, jerking a thumb over her shoulder, and Noam didn’t wait to be told twice.
By the time he burst out onto the sidewalk in front of the school building, breathless in the icy air, all that brief comfort had vanished, because he remembered what Lehrer had said when he first realized Dara was involved with the resistance:
I need to tear this little rebellion out by the root, not simply trim the weeds.
If Lehrer knew Noam betrayed him, he wouldn’t kill him. He’d leave Noam in place. He’d let Noam go to those meetings, let Noam prove what a traitor he really was.
Then ... and only then ... would he crush them all.
Recovered from digital archives.
THE DURHAM HERALD
April 23, 2020
NEW ADALWOLF LEHRER STATUE UNVEILED AT CATASTROPHE MEMORIAL
Durham, Carolinia—A statue of catastrophe war hero Adalwolf Lehrer was revealed today at the catastrophe memorial, located in the square between Chapel Hill Street and Main Street. King Calix Lehrer was present at the unveiling, although he did not make a statement.
The catastrophe memorial was erected in winter last year as a symbol recognizing the deaths of innocent witchings who lost their lives during the former United States’ genocide. The addition of the statue acknowledges the unique contribution of one of those witchings—Adalwolf Lehrer—to the end of the genocide and the establishment of the Carolinian state.
The statue was designed by renowned artist Emily Martin. The monument represents the first Carolinian historical figure to be thus memorialized.
[Attached: a photograph of Calix Lehrer at the statue’s unveiling. He wears a gray suit and stands with his head tipped down and one hand lifted as if to block the camera’s view of his face.]
CHAPTERSIXTEEN
DARA
“We’re going to have to meet more often than this,” Claire muttered to Dara that next Monday night, sitting at the bar with her leg jiggling up and down and her gaze flicking toward the door every three seconds. It was ten minutes past start time, and neither Noam nor Holloway had shown up yet.
Dara squeezed his lemon slice into his club soda and nodded and didn’t say anything. He didn’t think he could open his mouth without his fear spilling out, black and tarry all over the floor. The radiator had broken in the bar two hours ago, and it was starting to get cold, the tips of Dara’s fingers numb no matter how close he stood to the space heater.
Three weeks.It had been three weeks since Noam showed up at that first meeting and said he was staying with Lehrer, undercover. Three weeks since Noam told them he could last four weeks under Lehrer’s gaze.
Even right now, Noam could be lying dead or dying in that apartment, his blood seeping into the antique carpet and that beautiful mind of his gone silent forever.
Leo kept pacing back and forth behind the counter with a gray dishrag in hand, occasionally scrubbing at an invisible spot only to start pacing again. Priya watched him with shuttered eyes, her vodka tonic left untouched.
At last the door opened again and Noam entered the bar, pink cheeked and scrubbing gloved hands together. But he wasn’t alone.
Dara leaped to his feet, heart surging up into his mouth; beside him, Priya’s hand was already on her gun.
“Shit,” Ames said, eyes wide when they met Dara’s. “Shit, you really are—”
Dara put his soda down and was at her side a beat later, wrapping both arms around her body and tugging her in tight. She smelled like smoke and snow, her fingertips digging into the nape of his neck and his brow buried against her hair. She’d grown it out since he saw her last. It was almost chin length now.
After a moment she pushed him back, holding him by the shoulders as her gaze traversed his face, like she was checking to make sure he really was himself and not some kind of clever simulacrum. It took him a second to recognize that expression she was making—the same look she used to get when she was thinking something really loud in his general direction that usually meant she wanted him to read her mind.
“I can’t anymore,” he said, and his pulse still skipped a beat every time he said that. “I took the vaccine.”
“So it’s true. You don’t ... you’re not ...”
“A witching? No. Not anymore.”
Noam hovered at Ames’s side, both arms crossed over his chest now with a muscle twitching in his cheek. “She kind of made me let her come,” he said, more to Claire and Priya than to Dara. “Ames—she’s an old friend.”
“Wouldn’t take no for an answer,” Ames said, but it wasn’t in the tone she’d usually take. No levity, no edge of self-deprecation. All flat vowels and clipped consonants. “I’d have followed him if he hadn’t given in.”
