Noam kept expecting Lehrer to change his mind. But no men in anti-witching armor showed up at midnight to demand Noam hand over his flopcell. No Ministry of Defense soldiers reached for him as he left the government compound Sunday morning and dragged him back behind bars. He stepped out into the snowy December streets with treason burning a hole in his pocket and Lehrer just let him.
Noam’d managed to keep his job at the convenience store, which had been spared the firebomb post-outbreak by a scant four hundred yards and opened back up again last week. If anything, Larry the owner was desperate for staff since half his people died in fever, and though he must’ve known Noam survived the virus—that Noam was a witching now and working for the government if he was still in Durham—he didn’t ask too many questions. Noam was dying to go straight to Brennan and hand over the data and watch the look on Brennan’s face transform from disgust to delight. Would have, if not for the early shift. He might not have his dad to support anymore, but going to work felt more important than ever. Just another way to prove Noam wasn’t one of those government soldiers, not really, that his blood still belonged to the west side. To Atlantia.
Level IV covered taxi fare, but Noam took the bus. He liked that better: sitting on a hard plastic seat next to someone’s grandmother holding that weeks’ groceries in her lap, the kid in the back blasting music from his phone, the man in a secondhand suit on his way to a job interview. He tipped his head toward the window and watched the city slide past. Still his city, even with an empty scar where Ninth used to be.
He sat behind the counter at work and rubbed his thumb against the flopcell’s outer shell. He found he could actually read the data off it without a laptop, just like this. He went over that email so many times he memorized it, every dirty word.
What next? That was the question he kept coming back to. Lehrer wasn’t going to intervene—Lehrer had some mysterious unspecified plan—but what that really meant was it was up to Noam to make things change in Carolinia.
This was a start. Atlantians had no voice in government, but Noam could be their ears.
The bell rang over the door. Noam looked up just in time to see Taye and Dara tumble in with a fresh flurry of snow.
Taye was laughing about something, staring down at the screen of his phone, but Dara’s gaze found Noam’s almost immediately.
Noam thrust the flopcell back into his pocket.
“What are you doing here?”
Taye dragged his focus away from the phone to grin over at Noam. “Dara—” he began, still laughing, but Dara interjected smoothly: “Taye wanted candy.”
Taye shot Dara a sidelong look and a snort.
Dara just shrugged, infuriatingly unaffected as always. He still hadn’t stopped watching Noam.
Noam resisted the urge to reach down and check the flopcell, as if Dara somehow knew what Noam was hiding. He couldn’t stop thinking about what Lehrer said. Dara will not see things our way.
“You couldn’t find candy any closer than Broad Street?” Noam said, and propped his elbows on the counter.
“Never mind that,” Dara said, waving Noam’s question away with one hand. “The bigger question is why you’re still working at a corner store. Do you really have time for this?”
At least, Noam thought, Dara managed to keep from adding a snide comment about remedial lessons.
Before he could answer, Taye grabbed Dara’s arm and said, “Ooh, look, are those pig’s feet?”
Dara let himself get dragged off to the pickle jars, leaving Noam to sit there behind the counter and pretend to read his book—remedial biology, because of course he was reading something embarrassing the day his classmates decided to slum it—while Dara peered at the liquor selection and Taye cracked jokes from the tabloid aisle.
He was well mired in his resentment when the door opened again and a woman came in with a child hitched over one hip and another wandering at her heels. “Drain cleaner?”
“Aisle two.”
She smiled and followed where he pointed. He knew the moment she spotted Dara and Taye because of the way her gait faltered, half a stumble and one hand reaching for her older child to tug him closer—away from Dara, Taye, and their green military uniforms.
They’re not with immigration, Noam wanted to say, only that probably wasn’t the only reason she was afraid. He couldn’t say they aren’t government or they aren’t witchings and have either be true.
Neither of them had noticed, of course, too engrossed in reading the ingredient list on a bag of pork rinds and snorting over the boiled peanuts.
The woman couldn’t even hold his gaze as he rang her up. Dara and Taye sauntered up to the counter right as Noam finished bagging her stuff; she made it past them with stiff shoulders and a downturned face, disappearing out the door into the city like she wanted it to swallow her whole.
“Did it even occur to either of you to change out of your drabs before you came out?” Noam snapped, ignoring the pile of candy and snacks the pair of them dumped on the counter.
“No, what’s wrong with them?” Taye asked. He seemed genuinely confused, which was baffling and infuriating in equal measure.
Noam didn’t answer, just grabbed the closest item—a box of red hots—and rang it up.
Dara was staring past Taye out the window, apparently fascinated by the people walking by. Maybe, Noam thought charitably, he’d never been outside his cloistered little castle before. Maybe, in all his private tutoring, Lehrer never thought to tell him people existed past the walls of the government compound.
“Seventy aeres,” Noam said eventually, and pushed their bags back across the counter.
Dara handed him a ten argent note. At least he had the decency to look embarrassed about it.
“Thanks, Noam,” Dara said, and he reached for Taye’s arm, tugging him out before Taye could get distracted by the soda display. He didn’t even wait for change.
Noam counted it out anyway. Nine argents, thirty aeres.
The single-argent notes had Adalwolf Lehrer’s face on them, in profile. Because of course they did. Because these days Noam hung out with the kind of people who paid ten argents for candy and pork rinds, people with the privilege of deciding how soon was too-soon to push back against Chancellor Sacha, whose brothers were on currency.