“Hey yourself,” Ames’s voice said back, crackly—they were using satellite signal to avoid getting tapped in Texan wires. Noam nudged the signal a bit with technopathy, and her next words came out crisp and clear: “Just checking in to make sure y’all haven’t gotten killed yet.”
“Not yet,” Noam said dryly, and when he looked toward Bethany, she rolled her eyes.
“Taye’s here too,” Ames said. “Taye, say hi.”
Taye’s voice piped up through the speaker. “Hello, hello. How’s the east side?”
“Cold,” Bethany said, drawing closer and perching on the edge of the table near the phone. “Uneventful.Especiallyuneventful.”
“Yeah, well, we’ll see how long that lasts,” Taye said, and from the muffled way he said it, he probably had candy in his mouth.
“They have to let us fight,” Bethany said, tilting closer to the microphone like she was worried she wouldn’t be heard otherwise. “Otherwise, why send us? It’s certainly not for our prodigious strategic ability. They obviously want us to use our magic.”
“Rules of engagement with Texas are alwaysno magic till otherwise ordered,” Ames pointed out.
“Only we’re the ones supposed to begivingsaid orders,” Bethany said. “If we all agreed to use our powers, we could have the airport under Carolinian control overnight. We’d take Houston in two days.”
“Sixty-four percent probability,” Taye piped up. “If we were gamblers, we’d have the best odds in the house.”
“This isn’t a math problem,” Noam said.
“Everything’s a math problem.”
“Oh yeah? And where did you pull those figures, out of your ass?”
“Actually,” Taye said. “I calculated it from—”
“You know what?” Noam said. “I don’t want to know. The point is right now they don’t know which regiments have witchings and which don’t. That’s our ace up the sleeve. If we play it too soon, they’ll fix us with antiwitching units, and we’ll lose our upper hand.”
“What upper hand?” Ames said, and this time if her voice sounded tight, it had nothing to do with radio signal. “We’re sitting ducks, Álvaro. Don’t you think it’sweirdthat Lehrer didn’t give you better instructions than this? He put you on the front lines. He putallof us on the front lines. Be pretty convenient if we died here, wouldn’t it?”
“Ames.”Noam’s gaze flicked left, toward Bethany. “Get yourself together.”
“Really? That’s what you’re gonna say? Get myself togeth—”
“Are you implying the chancellor of Carolinia would wipe out an entire Level IV cohort for no good reason?” Noam leaned on the last three words and clenched his jaw, hoping to god Bethany and Taye just thought Ames was drunk again. Not thinking clearly. “Is that what Lehrer would find convenient?”
A long silence answered. For a second Noam almost thought Ames would break right here and now, spill all their secrets over this line.
But then—
“I wish they’d just tell us if we’re supposed to be waiting on high command,” Bethany said, pulling out the bag of cheese straws again and crunching into a fresh handful of them a little too aggressively.
“Noam, whathaveyou heard from Lehrer?” Taye asked.
“Not much, to be fair,” Noam said. “If I had to bet, I’d say he wants us to use magic. But I’d also say he wants us to wait on orders.”
“Okay, but he could send those orders whenever he wants,” Bethany said with her mouth full. “What’s he waiting for? Don’t you think there needs to be clearer communication? This is dumb. We don’t know how to wage awar.”
“Only we do,” said Taye. “What do you think all those strategy classes with Swensson were for, exactly? When we graduate Level IV, we aren’t gonna be lieutenant colonels barking orders for a single battalion. That’s not how Level IV works, and y’all know it. We’re gonna be expected to actuallymakethese decisions. Graduation isn’t all that far away, for any of us.”
“Exactly! And you think we should attack!”
“No, I said sixty-four percent chance of success if we did. Probably. I mean, obviously there’s a confidence interval there, so the probability could be as low as forty or high as seventy percent ... sorry. Point is, I think we sit back. Wait for more data.”
“Listen, I want to fuck Texans up as much as you do,” Noam said, more to Bethany; he looked directly at her as she wiped the crumbs off her mouth with the back side of her wrist. “I get it. Okay? But we should save that move for when it’ll make the biggest difference.”
“Cutting off their air supply routeisa big difference! They won’t have food, they won’t have medicine—”
