The Fever King (Feverwake #1)(56)

The satisfaction he felt seeing the man stagger back, blood flooding from his broken nose and dripping onto the concrete, was short lived.

It didn’t matter who threw the first blow. As far as Sacha would be concerned, Atlantians just incited a riot.

Fuck. Fuck—Noam’s cheek throbbed, the pain sending him staggering into the waiting hands of the counterprotesters. Someone grabbed his arm, yanking him back behind the lines before the fash could retaliate.

The invisible, thin ribbons holding people back all snapped at once. Sacha’s protesters surged forward, and the counterprotesters were there to meet them, people shouting, one of the fascists breaking a signpost over his knee and waving it in front of him like a sword. The police moved in, trying to get bodies and riot shields between Sacha’s people and Noam’s.

To protect Carolinians, of course. Not because they were concerned about keeping the peace.

“Disperse!” The police megaphone was loud enough to be heard over the chanting and the screams. “Disperse now!”

“Like fuck we will,” Noam shouted back, and a fresh wave of agony rippled from his eye socket down to his mouth. He didn’t care. He didn’t give a single shit about anything but the fire burning white hot down to his very last nerve.

The person next to him roared a wordless noise and punched the air, the other arm looped around Noam’s neck and tugging him into a rough embrace.

The protest was fast becoming something else, rage claiming a life of its own as it swept through the crowd. Someone shouted, and Noam sensed metal careening toward them—tear gas. On reflex, his power latched on to the grenade and sent it hurtling toward the fascists instead.

Shit.

The knowledge that there was a witching with the Atlantians rippled through the crowd. It grew as it spread, a fresh tide of anger and fear. Older Carolinians might respect witchings, in memory of the catastrophe, but this new generation didn’t care. To them, the catastrophe was ancient history, and witchings were just dangerous creatures afforded far too much power by the government.

He sensed, too, when the police called for an antiwitching unit, but he couldn’t use his power to shut off comms without giving away his technopathy and, by extension, making it obvious exactly which witching hid under the antifascist masks.

“We gotta get out of here,” he shouted at the nearest guy he could grab—Sam, he was pretty sure. “They just called in backup!”

“Fuck their backup!” Sam yelled back and made a violent gesture toward the statue.

Noam looked. A knot of Carolinia First protesters had managed to get one of the Atlantians away from the group—Grace, on the ground, her mask fallen, someone dragging her by the hair while another guy kicked her in the gut over and over. The police stood five feet away and did nothing. Nothing.

“Come on!” Noam and Sam ran forward, ducking under someone’s swinging sign and sprinting toward the statue of Adalwolf Lehrer.

The police saw them coming and rounded with plastic shields thrust out, someone tugging the pin out of another tear gas grenade. Grace was screaming. Noam and Sam dodged right and let themselves get swallowed by the roiling crowd, out of sight.

“This way,” Sam said. He and Noam elbowed their way through all the nameless and faceless bodies until they somehow slid around the police line before the perimeter closed.

Noam’s power was all instinct, an ungrounded electric current. He wanted to use it to burn the life out of the men beating Grace. Instead he sent it unfurling through the square, mapping metal until he sensed something familiar and yanked it toward himself. Police-issue 9 mm handgun, with a plastic casing that felt cold when Noam’s fingers closed around the grip. Not far off from the model they used in Level IV basic training.

Grace remained on the ground, coiled in on herself to protect vital organs, but Noam could still see the blood on her face.

“Leave her alone,” Noam yelled, and twin smirks curled round the mouths of the two guys holding her.

The one with his hand twisted in her hair said, “Fuck off, kid. Go home to Mommy.”

But then he saw the gun in Noam’s hand, and his skin went the color of fish meat. “You don’t know how to use that.”

Noam raised the pistol and pointed it at him. “Don’t fucking try me.”

The two guys exchanged looks and immediately released Grace. Hands up in the air, they backed away two steps—three—then turned tail and ran.

Sam darted forward, kneeling on the ground at Grace’s side. Her blood was all over the pavement. Noam’s hands were shaking, the gun suddenly impossibly hot in his grasp. He dropped it and kicked it away.

“Shit,” he whispered, nausea crawling up his throat. “Shit.”

“You’d better get out of here,” Sam advised.

Yeah.

Noam ran.

The air was thick with tear gas to the east, so he went west, stumbling over a broken section of sidewalk and scraping his palms. He pushed himself up, had to keep going, because once antiwitching units got here, it would be fifty times harder to break perimeter.

Fuck.

The cavalry had already arrived. The antiwitching armor gleamed like abalone shell in the afternoon sun. Noam’s power slid off them, oil on wet asphalt.

“Okay,” he told himself, ignoring the fear prickling like heat at the nape of his neck. “Okay—think, think—”