The Fever King (Feverwake #1)(70)

“Fine. What do you mean?”

Lehrer’s gaze skipped away from the lights, fixing on Noam. “No fevers, no chills, no aches and pains?”

“No.”

“And nothing else either?”

“I haven’t gone crazy yet, if that’s what you mean,” Noam said. He’d been examining the bruise left on his wrist from sparring with Lehrer earlier, a purpling mark that Lehrer hadn’t offered to heal. He rolled his sleeve down now, to look at Lehrer instead. “I’m playing by the rules. Magic only on special occasions.”

Lehrer gave him a crooked smile. “Now why don’t I believe that?”

He didn’t give Noam a chance to respond. Instead he leaned back against the edge of his desk and crossed his arms, surveying Noam with an even expression.

“So. What was it you had to talk to me about? We can go for another walk through the city. Perhaps the fresh air would do us both good.”

It took Noam a second to catch what Lehrer was getting at.

“Oh,” Noam said. “No. I checked. There aren’t any bugs here or in your apartment.”

“I’m relieved to hear it. Very well, we’ll speak freely. Have you given our plan some thought?”

Noam nodded slowly. Hard not to think about it when he’d spent half his evenings sitting at the store register watching Atlantian parents fumble through change on the counter and come up short. Lisa, sugar, go put those canned peas back on the shelf.

“You’re right about Brennan,” Noam said after a second. “He’s not going to do anything big. Now that he’s got that liaison job, he thinks he can make Sacha see reason.”

“That,” Lehrer said, “will never happen.”

“Yeah, no shit,” Noam said, then flushed, because Lehrer—but Lehrer didn’t say a word. “So . . . so, I was thinking that if we want something to happen, we need to make it happen. Things are shitty right now, but they’ve been shitty for a long time. People are used to it.” He smiled, a quick upward flick of his mouth. “Let’s make things worse.”

That got a reaction. Lehrer’s arms uncrossed, hands grasping the edge of his desk. The way he looked at Noam now, it was like he was trying to see past his face and right into his mind. “What do you mean by that?”

“I mean, you need an excuse to take power, right? We can’t let people get complacent. If we make Sacha seem terrible enough . . . tensions are high already. It wouldn’t take a lot to push that over the edge.” Noam caught himself fidgeting with the sleeve of his shirt and pressed his palms against his thighs. God, Lehrer was still looking at him like that, like . . . was this too far? Surely not. Lehrer and his brother did a lot worse during the catastrophe. Maybe the situations weren’t comparable, but Lehrer was no saint.

Still, he didn’t speak, so Noam had no choice but to keep going. “When people get angry enough, they’ll protest. Not little skirmishes like what happened with Carolinia First, but massive, organized marches. Sit-ins. Strikes. Last time that happened—I was eight, but I still remember all the soldiers out on the street. Trying to prevent riots, right?”

Lehrer said nothing.

“But those are your men,” Noam went on. “They’re all Ministry of Defense. Shit gets bad, people protest, the army goes out to keep the peace, then—”

“Then things get even worse,” Lehrer finished for him, his voice soft. “Bad enough to incite a riot. With my men already on the streets, we’re positioned to isolate Sacha and his loyalists completely. We will deliver him to the people’s justice.”

Noam nodded. “And when you offer the Atlantians citizenship rights, they’ll beg you to run for office.” He couldn’t help sliding that in there, but Lehrer didn’t disagree, just grinned and straightened away from the desk.

“Very good,” he said. “You have an intellect for politics, Noam. That will serve you well.” He moved closer now, and closer again. Noam felt Lehrer’s magic like this, a constant golden static.

“Tell me,” Lehrer said, “what do you think we should do first?”

Noam told him.

And only after Lehrer drew Noam’s holoreader out from his satchel and watched Noam put their plan into motion did Noam wonder if this is how it happened, how Lehrer won Carolinia the first time. If this was Lehrer’s particular brand of utilitarianism: the first of many sins committed in the name of the greater good.

They had the battery fan up and running by the time Noam got to work the next weekend.

“It’s hotter than Satan’s house cat up in here,” the girl on the previous shift said as she passed Noam the door keys, still waving a folded-up magazine toward her face. Her skin was as red as her hair. “Lord. They still got AC downtown?”

“Power’s on everywhere east of the university.”

“I swear they’re fucking with us.” She slapped the edge of the counter with the magazine and shook her head. “Look, I’m fixin’ to take one of them water bottles—you won’t tell Larry, right? He won’t know better. Camera’s dead.”

“Go ahead,” Noam said, and when she grabbed a bottle out of the cooler, she tossed him one too.

He usually liked to play around with scripts during his shifts at the store, mostly writing little games for himself—internet in the city wasn’t good enough for activism—but for once he found himself adrift in this new analog sea. He had a book, but it was too hot to concentrate. His shirt plastered against his skin, and every time he moved, it dragged against his shoulder blades, waves of humidity swimming over his nape.