The Fever King (Feverwake #1)(71)

He held the water bottle to the side of his face, but that only felt cold for a second. His mind circled round and round its imaginary map of the slums. What if someone got sick? There were elderly here, children. If they weren’t citizens, that meant they didn’t have insurance. How were they supposed to get medical care at a proper hospital? The tent clinics wouldn’t have power, so there’d be no help there.

If people died, it was Noam’s fault. He wasn’t stupid enough to pretend he hadn’t thought about this when he came up with the plan. He was responsible. Telling himself those victims were only hypothetical was lying.

Noam preferred the lie.

Two days. Just two days, then Lehrer would publicly denounce Sacha for failing to fix the problem in good time, would personally supply free generators to those in need.

Of course, generators wouldn’t bring the internet back. That was the real endgame here. No email, no messaging, and most importantly, no news.

He picked up one of the pamphlets left behind by the girl who had the shift before him, although he had every word memorized.

THE TYRANNY OF HAROLD SACHA.

He and Lehrer spent a while making sure the wording was perfect. Lehrer had a hundred years’ experience in rhetoric, so he knew what worked. Noam paid street kids ten argents to plaster these all over the city, and it’d been worth the price. Folks were talking. On his way in, Noam had spotted the pamphlets tucked into back pockets, stacked on the edges of food carts for customers to take, scattered in the gutters.

He’d also seen the immigration officials rounding up people two streets over, tagging them for deportation.

Right now, these pamphlets were the only link the refugees had to the outside world. Without internet, print was communication. Noam and Lehrer controlled the flow of information. And when that information said exactly what people wanted to hear, it could be very effective indeed.

The door opened and a fresh wave of heat poured into the store, bearing Brennan on its crest.

“I got your note,” Brennan said.

Noam slid off the plastic desk chair. Standing upright put him a couple inches taller than Brennan, though it didn’t feel like it when he was behind this counter. “I didn’t mean to be cryptic,” he said. “I just didn’t think I could talk about this at the center.”

And Lehrer would probably notice Noam going over there to meet with Brennan. There was that.

Then again, in his government suit, hair all gelled back, Brennan wasn’t exactly flying under the radar coming here either.

“Yes, you haven’t been to the Center in a while, have you? Linda mentioned it.”

“I know. I’m sorry, things have been—” Noam waved his hand and made a face. “Never mind. Listen. I looked into the power outages. I read that people thought Sacha might be behind it, and . . . well, with my ability, that’s an answerable question.”

“Ah, yes.” Brennan drummed his fingers atop the pamphlet on the counter. “I saw these. Noam, you shouldn’t believe everything you read. They’re just propaganda. There’s no evidence Sacha had anything to do with the outages.”

“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.” Noam fiddled with the unscrewed cap of his water bottle. It wasn’t real anxiety, just an affectation. He didn’t want to come across too scripted, but he had to make sure Brennan walked away from this with the right ideas. Noam needed him pushing the refugees toward reaction, not acceptance. “It looked like failing circuit breakers. And there was a problem with the breakers, but it was caused by a rootkit installed in the electrical system mainframe. Somebody hacked the power grid and scheduled a massive blackout. Then the rootkit executed a script that made it look like a circuit breaker issue.”

“I don’t speak hacker, Noam.”

“The point is,” Noam insisted, clenching the water bottle cap in his free hand, “someone made the power go out on purpose. And they made it so it only affected the refugee zone.”

Brennan frowned, gaze slipping down to the pamphlet, although he didn’t pick it up. At first Noam thought he wasn’t going to speak at all—like maybe Noam wasn’t convincing enough, or Brennan just didn’t want to believe him—but then he said, “Plenty of people don’t like the refugees. How do you know it was Sacha?”

“Hacktivists sign their work. If you have a message, you want that message to get conveyed, right? So you take credit for whatever you did, either writing your name into the script or claiming it on social media or something. But not this. There’s nothing on the rootkit about who wrote it or why, and no one’s come out online taking responsibility.”

“That’s a stretch, Noam.”

“It’s not a stretch!” Noam slapped the bottle cap down onto the counter. “What other evidence do you want? Am I supposed to have traced it back to Sacha’s home computer or something? I know he did it. Or more likely paid someone to do it. But he did it.”

Brennan didn’t so much as blink. “Even if that’s true, I’m afraid there’s nothing we can do. We’re guests in this country, Noam. Fighting for better treatment is one thing. Fighting against the occupation, for better pay, for health insurance, even for citizenship—fine. But we can’t depose a sitting chancellor.”

I don’t see why the hell not. “Fine,” Noam snapped. Beneath his hand the bottle cap contorted, losing its shape to conform to the hills and valleys of his palm. Almost hot enough to blister. “Fight, then. You’re the one among us with any kind of influence. Why aren’t you doing something?”