And so would Lehrer. The moment Noam started parsing the data, Lehrer would sense it. He’d feel Noam’s magic, and he’d expect an answer.
Lehrer dried his hands on the dish towel and moved back to the table, resuming his seat and steepling his fingers.
Noam stared down at the phone, its unassuming black casing, the dark screen.
“Do you need a flopcell?” Lehrer asked eventually.
“No.”
“Then what’s the delay?”
Noam looked up. One of Lehrer’s long fingers tapped the backs of his own knuckles in rhythm with the tick of the second hand on his expensive wristwatch. Was that suspicion flickering in his eyes or just a reflection from the Shabbat candles?
“I’m thinking,” Noam said.
He couldn’t stall any longer. At last, Noam focused on the binary and translated it into information. In his peripheral vision he saw Lehrer lean back in his chair at that, apparently satisfied that Noam was finally doing something—and he didn’t speak again, even though it took Noam the better part of twenty minutes to find what he was looking for.
The blood drained from his face so immediately that a flush of dizziness crested through Noam’s mind, and he jerked his gaze up to meet Lehrer’s. Lehrer sat forward, his expression gone sharp as his suit collar.
“What is it?”
Noam didn’t know how to put it into words. How could he possibly—how could he look right at Lehrer’s face andsay—
“There was an email,” he said, the words like chunks of ice in his mouth, cold and painful. “And I don’t—maybe I misunderstood—no. I didn’t misunderstand. And it sounds like ...”
“Spit it out, Noam.”
Noam sucked in a narrow breath. “Texas has been locking up witchings. In ... facilities. For study.”
Just like in the catastrophe.
Lehrer’s face went blank—not neutral, butblank, as if he’d extinguished all emotion in that single moment, quenching it as efficiently as pouring a bucket of water over coals.
Somehow this—more than the knowledge that Lehrer had infected and killed his own people, more than the adrenaline that shot through Noam’s veins sometimes when Lehrer drew too close—thisterrified him most of all.
After a moment Lehrer pushed back his chair and stood, tugging the cuffs of his sleeves down so a careful quarter inch showed below the hem of his suit jacket.
“I should have expected this,” he said, voice tight and bitter. “Bad enough that they exile their witchings to the quarantined zone—but of course. Of course. How else did they develop antiwitching technology, without witchings to test it on? How else was a vaccine developed? Those labs in the QZ had to get their funding somewhere. Foolish of me to think ...”
He turned on his heel, pacing away from Noam—toward the kitchen window. He paused there with the fingertips of one hand perched on the sill, gazing down into the courtyard at ... something.
Noam stayed in his chair, both hands gripping the underside of his seat. It was like everything in his chest was crumbling slowly, an ancient structure falling into dust.
“I’m sorry,” he said after a moment. What else was there to say? He couldn’t fix this. He couldn’t even imagine what Lehrer felt. It was an incomprehensible evil.
Lehrer faced him, bracing both hands back against the window ledge. “No. I don’t need you to be sorry. I need you to beangry. Last year you would have torn the world up at the roots for Atlantian justice.” Lehrer’s gaze was still and dangerous as shattered glass. “So now I need to know: Will you do the same on behalf of witchings?”
A year ago, Noam would have answered without hesitation. A year ago, he wanted nothing more than to make his anger into something caustic and violent: a tool he could use.
And maybe he was still willing to burn half the world down if it meant justice for all those people Lehrer killed. For his parents. For Dara.
But last year he let Lehrer wield Noam’s anger as a weapon to seize power, and it was a mistake.
Was he so willing to make that mistake a second time?
Lehrer’s right,a different voice murmured in the back of his mind.Hating him doesn’t make him wrong. Hating him doesn’t make Texas right.
If Noam did nothing, he was just as much a monster as Sacha had been.
