The Fever King (Feverwake #1)(6)

He didn’t look like a doctor.

But maybe all that meant was that he was a fancier doctor, seeking another publication for his curriculum vitae.

“I won’t make a very good case study,” Noam said. His father was dead because of this virus. That made it hard to care about antibody levels, yet antibodies were all anyone talked about.

No one really knew what made some people witchings and others not. Witchings had the same viral load as those who died, so it wasn’t any kind of natural resistance. Whatever the secret to survival was, it ran in families—though clearly it hadn’t run in Noam’s family.

He folded his arms across his chest. “I can’t do magic. Everyone’s already tried.”

The doctor waved away Noam’s argument. “Sometimes it can take a few weeks. That’s not unusual. Would you like to see?”

It took Noam a second to realize he meant the blood results. Noam shrugged, which the man took as consent. He pulled a slim black phone from his pocket and tapped a few times on the screen. “There,” he said, passing the phone to Noam. “Beautiful, isn’t it?”

It was a photograph. A GIF, actually, a brief recording at magnification showing the antibodies glowing like alien green lights on his blood smear right alongside the tangled threads of the virus, keeping it in check. A banner of nausea unfurled through Noam’s gut. He couldn’t help imagining that virus festering inside him even now.

“They look like worms,” he said. He passed the man back his phone.

“Worms can’t do what this virus does to people,” the man said, almost reproachfully. But then he put the phone away and offered his hand, palm up. “May I?”

Noam nodded and placed his arm in the man’s grasp. The man pressed two fingers to Noam’s wrist and closed his eyes, concentrating on Noam’s pulse. Noam was amazed he could feel anything at all through those leather gloves. They were real leather, too, despite how expensive meat was these days. Did doctors make that kind of salary?

He swore his skin tingled where the man touched it.

“I’m sorry about your father,” the man said when he opened his eyes. He squeezed Noam’s arm before releasing him, though he didn’t lean away. “I lost my parents, too, when I was a few years younger than you are now.”

Noam swallowed around the tight feeling in his throat and glanced down at his lap. His skin itched beneath the gauze over his old IV site; he picked at the tape with his thumb. “The virus killed them?”

When he looked up, the doctor was giving him a strange look. “No.” A pause, long enough that Noam started to wonder if he’d said something wrong, but the man went on. “Nevertheless, I understand what you’re going through. I won’t promise it gets easier. But you learn to live with the grief in other ways.”

Noam turned his face toward the window so the man wouldn’t see the wetness stinging at his eyes. Now that both his parents were gone, the world was much larger than it had been before—gaping around him, sharp toothed and hungry.

“I should let you rest.” The doctor unfolded that long body to stand, buttoning his coat. Noam quickly rubbed the heel of his hand against his face while the man was distracted, though it occurred to him that maybe the man was just offering him a chance to pull himself together in relative privacy. The man gave him a small smile. Not pitying but . . . soft, somehow. Understanding. “Get some sleep, Mr. álvaro. I’m sure I’ll see you again soon.”

The next day they discharged Noam from the hospital.

Not to go home, though. Not even to Charleston, where so many new witchings went for basic training.

They sent him to the government complex.





From Tides of History: Shifting Political Power in the Modern West, an Atlantian eleventh-grade textbook from 2098. Illegally imported copy found in the personal library of C. Lehrer.

The first new nation to rise from the ashes of the catastrophe, Carolinia, established itself in May 2019 under the leadership of committee-elected monarch Calix Lehrer. Texas followed in June. But by late August, the rest of the former United States remained a shambles of fire-and nuclear-bombed wasteland, surviving communities separated by hundreds of miles of land infected with lethal magic.

The difficulty of transporting resources across these distances—especially considering Carolinia and Texas both closed their borders to travel, trade, and immigration—was perhaps the primary reason why Texan president Marcus Harlow called an emergency summit of representatives from the largest remaining communities. Originally, this event was to be hosted in Dallas. However, Carolinian leadership refused to meet at this location, citing concerns about Texan antiwitching sentiment. The location was changed to Boulder, in the present-day Midlands.

The Boulder Summit marked the decision to form nations from the remaining major communities in the former United States. A single-state solution was vastly considered impractical, both due to infrastructure difficulties in navigating the quarantined zone as well as Carolinian refusal to rejoin with any nation that would not commit to legislative protection of witching rights. Therefore, borders were drawn based on a combination of natural landmarks (e.g., rivers, mountain ranges), cultural similarity (e.g., the historical Deep South states of Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia, which became modern Atlantia), and, of course, consideration for the boundaries of the quarantined zone, where endemic magic and residual nuclear fallout made the land uninhabitable.