The Fever King (Feverwake #1)(116)

“You can trust him,” Noam said.

Linda put the plant down on the table. It was several seconds before she said, “Yeah. Yeah, I helped.”

“Can you take people the other way?”

“What?”

“Can you get people out of Carolinia?”

Linda stepped closer, wiping both palms against her skirt. “Honey, are you in some kind of trouble?”

“Not him. Me.” Dara managed a grim sort of smile and shrugged. “I need to disappear. Fast.”

“Is he . . .” Linda started.

“Please,” Noam said. He was ready to beg if he had to. No telling where Lehrer was now, not without checking all the cameras from here to the government complex. He could be right outside. “Linda, please, just trust me. Will you do it?”

“Right now?”

“Yeah. Right now.”

For a moment, he was so sure she was going to say no. That she might look at him and see what he had done to Brennan. Might realize he had no right asking her—or them—for anything at all.

But then she exhaled and said, “I have a car out back.”

“Perfect,” Noam said. It felt like all the blood drained from him at once. He could have lain down on the floor right there and slept for ten years. “Okay. Let’s go.”

Linda’s car was an ancient black sedan, not even driverless, covered in a thin layer of road dust with smashed bugs on the windshield.

It looked incredibly generic. It was perfect.

Noam tossed the pack into the back seat and then turned to face Dara, who stood there with the door held open and an expectant look on his face.

Just looking at him hurt more than Noam had thought it would. Right now, Dara seemed almost healthy. The brightness in his eyes wasn’t mania but adrenaline. The color in his cheeks wasn’t fever, but exertion. He could have been the same boy Noam had held in his arms in the barracks bedroom, the same boy he’d kissed and touched and wanted so badly it ate him alive.

He was getting better. Lehrer’s treatment was working.

If Noam sent Dara into the quarantined zone, where magic ran rabid in the water and ground, how long would he last?

“Why are you looking at me like that?” Dara said slowly. “Noam, get in the car. We have to go.”

Noam’s mouth tasted like copper. “Dara . . .”

“Noam. Get in the goddamn car.”

“I’m not going with you, Dara.” Noam stepped around the front of the car, toward the other side where Dara stood, staring at him with his hand still on the open door. “I can’t.”

“What are you talking about?” Dara’s voice had its own blade to it now, pitch rising on the final words: both a question and a demand. “You—”

“I have to stay here. I started this.” He gestured vaguely, encompassing the Migrant Center, Durham, Carolinia—all of it. All the things he’d done, the people he’d hurt. The one he’d killed. All those sacrifices, all for the greater good. “I have to finish it. The Atlantians are finally—Lehrer gave them citizenship. Did you know that? We won, Dara. I have to be a part of that. I can’t leave now.”

Dara’s face was a mask of uninterpretable emotion, wide eyed and thin mouthed, his shoulders rising and falling in rapid, shallow motion. For one heat-seared moment, Noam thought Dara might actually attack him—but he didn’t.

“You . . .” Dara wet his lips. “You don’t . . . do you? Noam . . .”

“Dara, you have to go. Lehrer will be here any second.”

“God. You—Noam, I have to tell you something, please—”

Lehrer was here. Lehrer was here—that was him, the angles of his face and slim lines of his suit captured on the security cam a block away.

Fuck.

“I know,” Noam said. He tried to grin, but it felt weak. He said, “I love you too.” And he grasped Dara’s face between both hands and kissed him on his shocked mouth. Dara didn’t resist. Dara didn’t say a word, even when Noam pushed him back and into the car and slammed the door shut behind him.

“I’ll take care of him,” Linda promised. She patted Noam on the shoulder and gave him a sad little smile. Then she got in the car, and they drove away.

Noam stood there and watched the sedan vanish into the city traffic, watched until it turned the corner at the far end of the street and disappeared.

Lehrer found him still standing like that a minute later, watching the far traffic light change from yellow to red. Noam’s pulse beat in his throat like a second heart, but he didn’t run.

Lehrer didn’t speak at first. And then he rested his hand on Noam’s back, high up between his shoulder blades. It wasn’t the anger Noam had been anticipating. It wasn’t like that at all.

“I’m sorry,” Noam said and didn’t look at him. He shut his eyes instead.

“He’ll die out there.”

It hurt when Noam swallowed, like splinters cutting his throat. “Maybe. It was what he wanted.”

Lehrer sighed and didn’t say anything to that.

The distant streetlight went back to green. The color, through the heat waves, looked blurry and surreal.

At last, Lehrer’s hand fell away from Noam’s back.

“Promise me you won’t go after Dara,” Noam said.