The Fever King (Feverwake #1)(18)

“Minister Lehrer’s office is in the other wing of the building,” Howard said as they set off, moving fast down the narrow halls, Noam’s sore legs barely able to keep up. “You are not allowed in that part of the government complex unless accompanied by a ranking adult—do you understand? This is where the ministers and the chancellor have their offices. It’s no place for an unsupervised cadet.”

“Of course not,” Noam said and smiled his best innocent smile. Howard didn’t look convinced.

Nor should she be. Noam’s blood felt sharp in his veins the moment they stepped into the central atrium of the building, where the walls were glass, sunlight streaming in from the courtyard on one side and the open street on the other, wooden floors gleaming underfoot. The glittering chandelier must have taken weeks to build—all those hands threading crystals on string. Men and women in gray military uniforms walked in every direction, people in suits jabbered into their phones or stared at screens in their hands, guards stood alert at the doors and watched with narrow eyes. The cobalt-blue flag of Carolinia hung over the entrance to the administrative wing, emblazoned with the sign of the white phoenix.

Noam was going to be here every day. He’d be surrounded by the most important people in the country: Lehrer, García, Holloway, the home secretary whose name Noam forgot. Chancellor Sacha himself.

If he could get in here sometime—alone, not with Howard, and not on his way to see Lehrer—he could do a whole lot of damage.

He had to get in touch with Brennan. If Brennan was still alive, Linda would know—Noam just had to find a way off campus.

Howard pressed her hand to a screen beside the towering wooden door to the west wing, leaning in to allow a tiny laser to scan her eye. Noam noticed with a burst of adrenaline that he could actually feel the computer working this time, as if his aptitude testing had been a switch just waiting to be flipped, and now he could sense the little electrical signals jumping between pins, the flicker of data packets being transferred, a whole buzzing ecosystem contained behind that panel and visible to Noam alone.

In that moment, he wanted to sink down onto the floor and just sit for a while, letting the tech wash over him. Binary was something he’d only known about on the theoretical level, something he’d considered while writing code or fixing someone’s computer. It wasn’t something to feel in one’s bones, a new sensation as sharp as sight and sound.

Other countries—England, and Canada, and even York—had spent the past hundred years developing the kinds of tech no one in Durham could dream of. And yet when Lehrer closed the borders back in 2019, he’d frozen Carolinia in time. Noam only knew about foreign tech because he’d hacked a Canadian newspaper once. Carolinia relied so much on magic that it barely bothered developing new tech anymore.

But imagine . . . just imagine what it might have been like. How much Noam could’ve done if tech research hadn’t ground to a halt in 2019.

Noam was a technopath in Carolinia—but that could have meant so much more.

Then again, being a witching anywhere else probably wouldn’t bode well for him, considering all those other countries had a bad habit of locking witchings up in secure facilities for public “protection.”

The latch clicked on the door: 1, binary code. Entrance approved. An awed Noam trailed after Howard into the next hall, now blind to the people around them. He was too focused on the things they carried.

Cell phones and tablets. Medical implants. Tracking devices. Holoreaders tucked away in padded cases. Now that he was paying attention, they gleamed in Noam’s awareness like beacons, information content washing over him in tiny humming waves. He tried to translate the data, but no luck.

Soon, he told himself in giddy anticipation. After Lehrer, after he knew magic.

Soon, he’d make sure this place had no secrets left.

They went up two flights of stairs and through a new maze of corridors. When they stopped in front of a plain, unmarked door, Noam realized he hadn’t paid the slightest bit of attention to where they were going. And now they stood in front of what must be Lehrer’s office, no sign or security panel in sight.

Howard didn’t knock. She just turned the knob and let them in.

The room was relatively small, for one—no more than half the size of the common room back in the barracks. The best word for it was cozy. The walls were painted deep blue, the furniture upholstered in a soft burgundy fabric that appeared again in the patterning on the worn Persian carpets draping the floor. Everything here seemed at least a hundred years old and well loved, as if the decorator had stubbornly refused to acknowledge the passage of time and trend in favor of staying locked in a familiar microcosm.

And there was no technology whatsoever. Noam’s power just hung there uselessly, somehow a strange sensation, although he’d only learned to notice tech the day before.

“I imagine Minister Lehrer will be along soon enough, so I’ll leave you two be,” Howard said.

Noam frowned, because there was no one else here, but then Howard stepped back out into the hall and pulled the door shut. There was another chair in the far-left corner that had been obscured by Howard’s body and the open door, and someone sat in it.

He was older, seventeen or eighteen, brown skinned with unruly dark hair that fell in tousled curls around a perfectly symmetrical face. He had one leg drawn up onto the seat and an open book perched against his knee, the sleeves of his uniform rolled up to his elbows as if he’d decided to wear his drabs for fashion purposes rather than practical. He looked up over the pages of his book at Noam, a small frown tugging down the corners of his mouth, and Noam realized he was staring. It was hard not to. The boy looked like he belonged in a magazine.