The Fever King (Feverwake #1)(48)

But then there was the way Lehrer watched Dara beg earlier today, Lehrer’s expression as placid as calm water. As if Dara’s pain was a moderately interesting academic observation.

“I won’t disappoint you,” Noam said. “But I need to know why I’m here. Why are you training me?”

Lehrer turned them onto a fresh path, crossing the stream that cut through the courtyard. For a moment, Noam thought he wasn’t going to answer. But then—

“You and I have a lot in common,” Lehrer said again. “More than just being Jewish and uneducated, I think. But it appears patience is not one of those shared virtues.”

Noam flushed, but he didn’t get a chance to respond.

Lehrer’s hand caught Noam’s for the briefest moment, long fingers curving in against Noam’s and pressing something into his palm. Noam grasped it on reflex, and Lehrer withdrew, shifting Wolf’s leash over to that hand as if nothing happened. Noam’s heart pounded in his throat, and Lehrer glanced toward the sky like he could divine the time from the orientation of stars and said, “Let’s head back.”

The note was folded four times over. Later, when Noam was alone in the barracks, he unfolded it by the light of his phone screen and read the single word written there in Lehrer’s neat, slanted script:

Faraday.





Brief audio recording, stolen from C. Lehrer’s personal collection.

MAN 1: Okay, it’s recording.

MAN 2 (a softer voice): This is stupid.

MAN 1: You don’t know till you try, Calix. Come on.

MAN 2/CALIX: It doesn’t work this way. Turn it off, Wolf, we’re going to be late.

MAN 1/ADALWOLF: They can’t start the meeting without us. Pretty please?

CALIX: I said no. Stop asking.

ADALWOLF: Don’t you dare—

CALIX: I didn’t!

ADALWOLF: Okay. Okay, but, just once. For me.

CALIX: Fine. Turn this thing off.

ADALWOLF: Thank you.

[The recording ends.]





CHAPTER TEN

Faraday.

There was only one thing that could mean, of course—Faraday, as in Faraday shield, as in a conductive material that blocked electromagnetic waves.

Why Lehrer was passing him notes about this was harder to understand.

Noam stayed up late thinking about it almost every night that week, turning the word over and over in his mind until it lost all meaning.

Faraday.

How was that supposed to help the refugees? Was Sacha planning some kind of electromagnetic attack against them? Was Noam meant to use his newfound power over electromagnetism to build a Faraday shield and protect them?

Noam lingered after lessons every day, hoping Lehrer would give another hint (or another note, or another several notes), but Lehrer seemed to have said all he planned to on the matter. As if oblivious to how much mental energy Noam spent trying to decrypt his code, Lehrer even gave him just as much homework as usual—on top of everything his new regular teachers assigned.

A week later, there was another outbreak of the virus.

Magic hit a refugee camp near the coast, piling up so many bodies that the local authorities couldn’t burn them quickly enough. Without any safe way to transport patients to the major hospitals in Richmond or Raleigh, Sacha declared a state of emergency. That meant resources pouring east, and those resources included as many witching students and soldiers as Lehrer could spare.

After the plane landed, the cadets were ushered into army trucks that carried them over broken roads, every pothole jostling them against the fabric walls and adding salt to the nausea that swelled up in Noam’s stomach, bilious and thick. He was grateful when they finally came to a shuddering stop. Or, he was grateful until he took a breath and his lungs filled with the stench of blood and vomit and rotting flesh.

Next to him, a Charleston cadet retched, lurching forward over his knees. Luckily, nothing came out. Noam pressed a hand over his nose and mouth, breathing in shallow little gulps of his own humid air.

“What the hell is that?” someone said in a thin voice.

The driver drew back the curtain at the rear of the truck, and they found out.

The dirt streets of the camp were crowded with huge white tents constructed of some material thicker than canvas, each tent opening on to a little courtyard filled with tables and chairs and soldiers milling about. The source of the smell was obvious. At the rear of each pair of tents, piles of black body bags awaited incineration, buzzing with flies.

“God,” Bethany said from just over Noam’s shoulder as they jumped out of the truck. “What is this? Where are the red wards?”

“Not enough room,” Dara said. Noam hadn’t even noticed him coming up, and now he stood just to Noam’s right, looking out at the street and its tents stretching as far as the eye could see. “Backwater places like this, they run out of space in the red wards fast, especially in a bad outbreak.”

“And especially when the patients are refugees,” Noam added, heart a stone in his chest. “Better save space for the people you actually want to survive.”

Dara and Bethany exchanged looks, but Noam didn’t care if they thought he was militant. They hadn’t read those emails. They hadn’t grown up in places like this.

He couldn’t imagine a worse place for an outbreak than a refugee camp. Close quarters and high population, poor access to health care or hygiene facilities. The tents probably made things even worse. Even though they made volunteers shower when they entered the wards and when they left—even when they sprayed them all with decontamination fluid—those seemed like half measures compared to what was possible in an actual hospital. Here, they couldn’t even filter the airflow.