“It won’t matter if we can’t hold the city,” Noam pressed. “Right now their army’s divided up trying to defend too many different points at once. They don’t have enough antiwitching tech to cover all their bases. But if they bring in reinforcements, well. We might have an airport, but good luck getting Houston.”
Bethany’s knuckles were white where she gripped the edge of the table. “I don’t think the rest of you get it,” she said. “I’m a healer. I’m the one who has to fix all our soldiers when they come back full of bullets and shrapnel from some skirmish on the ground. And I—I can’t. I can’t keep doing this. I can’t keep watching our people die when we’re doingnothingto end this. Not if there’s another choice.”
“There is,” Ames said bluntly on the other line. “We stop fucking around like a bunch of Level I idiots, and we take charge of the situation.”
Bethany turned toward Noam, almost beseeching, and for one reeling moment Noam was reminded of Dara—
Only they looked nothing alike,werenothing alike. Unless he counted the fact they were both perpetually disappointed in him.
“Wewilluse magic,” Noam promised. “I think that’s implicitly obvious by the fact we were sent here. But we ...”
No. He couldn’t bring himself to sayWe can’t move too soon—because Bethany was right. Ames was right. Every second they delayed, they allowed more Carolinians to die. Carolinians it was their responsibility to protect.
He wanted so badly to sayfuck itand throw it all away, throw out everything he’d ever learned about strategy and forget the Houston mission and just—
But Taye was right too. And although waiting might lose them soldiers, if they lost the war, it wasn’t just Noam’s unit who’d be dying.
“For now, we wait,” he said, mouth twisting into a grim knot. “I’ll call Minister García in the morning to confirm. There’s no point in us all arguing about what decisions we’re expected to make when we can ask high command. Is everyone good with that?”
Bethany’s face was a sickly shade of pink, but she huffed out a breath and made a rough gesture with one hand, a gesture Noam took as consent.
“Well, good luck with that,” Taye said. “I’m gonna sign off, get some sleep while I can.”
“I’ll touch base tomorrow with an update after I talk to García,” Noam said and hung up with a twist of his technopathy.
Bethany slid off the table. She pulled her hair out of her ponytail, but it was only to put it back up again in the same style, an anxious tic.
“I’m going to check on my patients,” Bethany said, meeting Noam’s gaze. He couldn’t tell if it was an accusation.
But he let her go, and as the door closed behind her, he dropped into the nearest chair and pressed the heels of his hands against his shut eyes.
Fucking Lehrer. Fucking—no, fuckingAdalwolfLehrer. Because this was his fault. Because he was the reason Calix Lehrer thought it was totally appropriate to let a bunch of teenage Level IV students run their own battalions and make independent tactical decisions without oversight from high command.
Because if it worked in the catastrophe, it should work against Texas, apparently.
“Goddamn it,” Noam muttered against his own wrists, and sighed, and told himselftomorrow. Tomorrow, he’d talk to Defense Minister García and get this all figured out, if only so he could report back to the others and definitively say the choice was theirs. Tomorrow.
But he didn’t get a chance to wait that long.
He woke with a start, his heart pounding out of his chest—and for a moment he thought he was somewhere else, half expected to turn and see Lehrer there—
But it was Bethany, both hands gripping Noam’s arms and the whites of her eyes glinting in the dark. “Noam,” she said, voice taut and thin. “Get up. You have to get up.”
He shoved himself upright, Bethany releasing him only to tug open the drawers of his dresser and start tossing clothes onto the foot of his bed—uniform shirt, wool socks, jacket.
“What happened?” he asked, already pulling his T-shirt off over his head.
“Ames happened,” she said, and it felt like a shot of adrenaline right in his heart. And he knew, heknew, even before she said, “She didn’t want to wait, I guess. She went and used her magic on the Texan encampment in B3—redirected a bunch of water to destabilize the ground beneath them. Earthquake. Bad one. Not bad enough.”
“Shit,” Noam muttered, telekinesis finishing the buttons of his shirt as he pushed out of bed and grabbed his trousers. “What did Taye say?”
“They’re in retreat,” Bethany said. “Trying to get across the river. But ...”
But they were fucked. There weren’t enough choppers to pluck a whole battalion off the ground and fly them out to safety. They might get across the river, but it’d just be to sit and wait for Texan antiwitching units to sweep in and burn them all to ash.
“How long?”
“I don’t know. We aren’t picking anything up on radar, but that doesn’t mean anything.”
