Noam forced a tight smile for the aide as he shut the door. The moment he turned the lock, he twisted his face in a silent scream.
God fuckingdamn it!
How the hell was he supposed to get loose and find himself a computer if he couldn’t even go to the bathroom without a chaperone?
He used the toilet while he was there, buying time to think. But by the time he was washing his hands in that pretty gold-tapped sink, he still hadn’t figured anything out. His best option was to jolt the aide with a shot of electricity and escape while he was unconscious, but while that might get himtothe computer, he’d have a hell of a time getting out again. What happened when someone realized the aide was missing? Or worse, when the aide woke up and told them all that Lehrer’s protégé had knocked him out and disappeared?
At that point, Noam was pretty sure whatever flimsy sense of diplomatic etiquette had kept Méndez from injecting them both full of the vaccine would evaporate.
He scrubbed damp hands over his face, dragging fingers back through his hair. Which, of course, only served to mess up the perfect pomaded style he’d spent ages fixing up to Lehrer’s specifications. He made a face at his reflection and did his best to comb it back into place, mostly succeeding in making himself look more or less like he’d been kissing some stranger in the back closet.
Actually.
That was an idea.
Lehrer would fucking kill him, but what Lehrer didn’t know ...
Noam frowned at himself for a moment, then let his weight tip to the left, toppling against the sink and knocking the soap dish into the bowl. It was loud enough to earn an immediate knock on the door.
“Mr. Álvaro? Everything all right in there?”
Noam waited several seconds, pinching his cheeks until his skin was flushed pink. Then he opened the bathroom door, leaning against the counter as if for support. “I’m sorry,” he mumbled. “I ... dizzy, all the sudden.”
Concern creased the aide’s brow. “Do you need me to get a medic?”
“No—no, I’ll be ... I just. Is there somewhere I can sit? For a second?”
“Of course,” the aide said immediately. He offered Noam his arm, and Noam hooked their elbows together, letting himself list in against the man’s body as they made slow progress farther down the hall, into a new sitting area. This one was warmly lit by a few lamps glowing on end tables. Perfect.
The aide helped Noam down onto one end of a sofa, then hovered there in front of him, clearly feeling helpless. “Do you want water? I can ring for some.”
“Oh—no. I’m. It’s okay. I only need a moment.”
Noam tipped his head down into the palms of his hands, breathing in the scent of his own skin. After a few seconds he looked up again, one hand lifting to grasp at the back of his own neck. “I’m sorry about this,” he said, a bit self-deprecating. “I don’t know what came over me. Usually I can hold my liquor a little better.”
“Ah,” the aide said, comprehension dawning on his face. “Yes, I understand. I used to be like that when I was your age too. You’re ...”
“Eighteen,” Noam lied, because that was presumably the legal age in Texas same as it was in Carolinia. He shrugged one shoulder. “Yeah. It’s probably the Aperol spritz from earlier. I wasn’t thinking—with the wine, at dinner ...”
“You’ll feel better soon,” the aide reassured him. “Especially if you’ve gotten some food on your stomach.”
“I’m already feeling better,” Noam said and gave him a soft smile. He reached forward and caught the man’s wrist, fingertips pressing in against its soft underside. “Thank you. Really. I—from all I’ve heard about Texas, I wasn’t expecting kindness.”
“Not all of us hate witchings,” the aide said. “I’m sure it’s the same way in Carolinia. The government thinks one thing. Some people agree; some people don’t.”
That was not at all what Noam had been led to believe. After the catastrophe, Texas had hung up the bodies of dead witching militants around the walls they built bracketing them safe from the quarantined zone. A warning—to Adalwolf and Calix Lehrer’s Avenging Angels and to anyone else. They’d declared themselves a witching-free zone, as if that were something to advertise proudly.
But the catastrophe was over a hundred years ago now. Things could change. And the longer Noam spent around Lehrer, the more he was starting to wonder how much of what Carolinians knew about Texas was propaganda.
“Texas keeps witchings in government hospitals,” Noam said. “You experiment on them. You torture them.”
“No,” the aide said, and he tugged his wrist out of Noam’s reach—but he didn’t move away. “I don’t know what you’ve heard in your country, but it isn’t like that. The program is voluntary. And there’s no torture.”
Noam couldn’t admit how he got the information, though. Couldn’t say,That’s not how it seemed from the emails I found on the phone of the Texan spy I killed.
Maybe Texas was just like Carolinia.
Maybe both governments did terrible things. Secret things. And the majority of the population continued on with their lives blissfully unaware, convinced of their own government’s benevolence in contrast to the evil of everyone else.
