The Fever King (Feverwake #1)(73)

“Mmm. Adalwolf would have hated this whole plan. He never wanted me to take power.”

The blood went still in Noam’s veins. Lehrer so rarely talked about his brother. Noam felt like if he moved too suddenly, the moment would shatter.

Lehrer sipped his drink, eyes falling shut. He didn’t seem like he was going to elaborate, so after a while, Noam said, “He was . . . wouldn’t he be happy, though? To see what you’ve made of Carolinia.” It felt false to say he would have been proud when Noam had never known him.

Lehrer made a vague gesture. “Adalwolf didn’t live to see Carolinia established. A witching state . . . yes, he would have wanted that. But now? Overcrowded with the disenfranchised and headed by a baseline like Sacha? I don’t think he would have liked that much at all.”

“But he wouldn’t like you ruling any better?” Noam asked, feeling oddly like he was questioning Lehrer’s own past and half expecting Lehrer to scold him for it. “You’ll return Carolinia to the way it was meant to be.”

“Adalwolf was of the belief,” Lehrer said, “that what I experienced in the hospital made me ill suited for leadership. He believed the trauma did irreparable damage to my mind.”

Noam nearly recoiled, but Lehrer was perfectly calm, swirling scotch in his glass and swinging one foot idly.

“You don’t do things by half measures,” Noam said, battering down the anger that smoldered below his breastbone. Adalwolf Lehrer had been dead for a hundred years. “That’s all.”

When Lehrer smiled this time, it didn’t reach his eyes. “Quite.”

Noam didn’t like that look on Lehrer’s face. It was too strange, too—mechanical. As if it had been pieced together as carefully as the wards around this room.

He fumbled for something to say, anything else. He didn’t want Lehrer to change the subject to the coup, not just yet, even if that’s why Lehrer had brought him here. It felt like, in this moment, Lehrer had chosen to let Noam past the shields he had drawn around his private life. Noam didn’t want that to end. “My . . . I don’t think my parents would have liked me being here, actually. Not the coup; they’d have loved that. Being a witching, though.”

“Really?”

Noam rubbed the edge of his thumb against the lip of his glass. “I don’t know. I guess I’m not exactly part of the revolutionary proletariat anymore, am I?”

Lehrer’s expression eased, something more human softening the edges of his mouth again. “I don’t know if I’d say that,” he said. “Consider yourself part of the proletariat vanguard in the Leninist sense. A professional revolutionary.” He nodded at the room surrounding them, the faded wallpaper and worn curtains. “All this . . . it’s ephemera. When I take power, it won’t be for myself. I might be one man, but I represent a dictatorship of the proletariat.”

“You know, I’ve read Lenin and I still think that sounds bad,” Noam said, grinning.

“Have you?” Lehrer gave him an arch look. “Then you know the quote. ‘Dictatorship does not necessarily mean the abolition of democracy for the class that exercises the dictatorship over other classes, but for the class over which the dictatorship is exercised.’ The dictatorship of the proletariat is true social democracy.”

Noam watched Lehrer over the rim of his glass. “Sacha was democratically elected, you mean,” he said eventually. “But he’s still a dictator because his power disenfranchises refugees and the working poor.”

“Very good.” Lehrer tipped his drink in Noam’s direction. “Knowing that, how could your parents have been anything but proud? You are creating a future for this world, Noam. For refugees, for witchings, for anyone who has ever been oppressed by a system that saw them as tools or weapons but never people.”

Noam’s chest convulsed in a way that made him feel abruptly short of breath; he put the scotch down on the coffee table.

“You should have talked to my mom,” he said after a second. “She was so passionate about Marxist theory. I couldn’t keep up with her half the time, her mind moved so fast.”

“And your father?”

“He was brilliant, but he wasn’t into philosophy. ‘Too much talking,’ he’d say. ‘Not enough doing.’”

Lehrer laughed. “Oh, Adalwolf would have said the same. He gave me such a hard time for reading books instead of spending extra time at the range. That I was a telekinetic who could make the bullet hit my target never seemed to factor into the argument.”

Another hint from Lehrer’s past. Noam seized upon it, like catching fireflies in the dark. “Was that your presenting power? Telekinesis?”

“Oh, no. I learned it early, though. I drove my parents mad sending the saltshaker dancing round the dinner table.”

The image was comical, for all Noam had no mental image whatsoever of Lehrer as a child.

He tried picturing Lehrer his own age instead, sixteen, surviving what Lehrer had survived. Leading a coup. Sitting on a couch just like this one, with State and Revolution open on his knee and a cigarette held between his fingers.

Noam had the sudden urge to reach over and press his hand to Lehrer’s wrist. He wondered what Lehrer would do if he did.

There was no chance to find out. Lehrer’s smile faltered, and a moment later he set his drink aside and stood, narrowed eyes fixed on the door.