No. Don’t think about that.
Noam turned away from the bones. He imagined instead that he was on a small boat with Dara out in the middle of a vast and empty sea, dark and lifeless below them as above. It was snowing. The white flakes glittered in Dara’s hair and melted before they could touch the surface of the ocean. Dara’s fingertips, where they brushed Noam’s hand, were cold. Noam watched him, the silence of his mouth and unreadable eyes, until Dara went blurry, the whole scene tilting sideways and smearing out of sight.
After that, the night was dreamless.
CHAPTER TWO
DARA
Midwinter hung over the city like a blade waiting to fall, the streets silent as a held breath, the night Dara returned to Carolinia.
He didn’t know what he’d been expecting. Asphalt slick with blood, perhaps, the virus like a viper snapping at passing heels. But Durham was perfect as a postcard, glittering with fresh snowfall and holiday lights that still hadn’t been taken down. The air smelled like pine and cold. And no matter how far Dara reached, all his mind met was void.
“Your name is Daniel Holland,” Claire said. She passed him a federal ID card. The photo had been taken when he was still fevermad, too much magic burning him from the inside out. Dara’s gaze stared up at him from the laminated plastic, sharp with mania. “You’re twenty-two. You just moved here from Beaufort, and you’re looking for work.”
“Not looking very hard,” Dara said.
“Well, yeah. Can’t have anyone recognizing that pretty face of yours.” Claire smiled and thumped him on the shoulder with her fist. “Come on. This is the place.”
They’d rented out an apartment on the second floor of a run-down old tenement just north of downtown. The building was sandwiched between two bars and across the street from a suspicious-looking burger joint. A man in an apron loitered in front of that door, puffing on a cigarette and giving the pair of them dirty looks from twenty feet away as they fumbled with the rusty lock. The air inside was musty and worse when they got to Dara’s new apartment. A thin layer of ice crusted the windowsill.
Claire kicked the radiator, which emitted a weak stream of hot water against the wall, then shuddered and died.
“We’ll get you a space heater,” she reassured him.
Dara sat on the narrow bed next to his duffel, tucking his hands under his thighs. His breath clouded in front of his face every time he exhaled. “It’s fine. I can put up with anything for six days.”
Claire hitched herself up onto the dresser on the other side of the room, legs swinging through empty space. “Sure. Of course you can. Focus on that—in less than a week, this’ll all be over. We’ll be sleeping pretty in the government complex, and Lehrer’s head will be up on a spike.”
Dara tried to match her optimism, but his smile felt weak.
Claire noticed, of course—she didn’t miss much. But she didn’t mention it. Just tapped long painted green nails against the dresser and said, “You got the plan down?”
He nodded.
“Want to repeat it to me? Sorry. I don’t think you’re an idiot. But I gotta be sure.”
“I’ll sneak into the Sunday gala at six thirty. You and Priya will be there, disguised as serving staff. I’ll wait until you’ve confirmed Lehrer’s been given the suppressant. Then.” He tipped two fingers against his temple and mimed pulling a trigger.
Claire gave him two thumbs up. “Great. Good. Now, is there anything else you need from me before I go back to Priya’s? Food? There’s that burger place across the street.”
“I’m not very hungry. Thanks, though.”
“You sure?”
“Positive.” Anything he ate would come right back up. His stomach was a sickly mess of bile and adrenaline.
Claire pursed her lips. “Listen . . .”
“Please don’t,” he said before she could start in on him again. He’d heard it all before—from her, from Priya, from the doctor back at base who monitored him as he struggled to make it through alcohol withdrawal. “I’m fine. Really. I can keep it together for six days.”
“It’s different out here,” Claire said. “You didn’t have any other option in the QZ; we ran out of booze back in 2043. Are you sure you—”
“I said I’m fine. Stop asking.”
She raised both eyebrows at him, then held up her hands in a gesture of surrender. “Okay, whatever. Just let me say one last thing. I’m here. Yeah? If you need to chat. It’s not every day you’re plotting to assassinate a head of state.”
“I’ve killed people before.”
“Not your own guardian, you haven’t.” She slid off the dresser and tugged at the hem of her shirt, straightening out the wrinkles. He reached for her mind before remembering, Oh. He couldn’t anymore. The Claire who looked back at him from across the room might as well have been a corpse, thoughts quenched out.
“It’s not gonna be the same,” she said. “I don’t need you losing your shit on me day of.”
“I won’t.”
She left, eventually, but only after giving him one last look, like she thought she might read some reluctance from the set of his mouth or the way he had his arms crossed over his chest. He thought about saying, I want him dead more than all the rest of you combined, but didn’t.
He wasn’t even sure that was true.
The room seemed even smaller with Claire gone. Dara could pace from one end to the other in four strides, touching fingertips against the frigid window glass and those same fingers, a beat later, against the grimy wall opposite. He unpacked his duffel, folding his clothes into the dresser. They were the same clothes he’d left Durham with, now ill fitting and weak at the seams. He toed off his shoes and pushed them into the corner. There was a vanity mirror over the dresser; Dara avoided his own gaze as he slid the drawers shut. He was darkly, dreadfully certain that if he looked, he wouldn’t be the only one reflected there.
This room was full of shadows and distant noises: cars on the street, the burble of laughter from the apartment down the hall, a door slamming shut. It was all so much louder than he remembered, like the absence of telepathic voices in his head was a void that sucked in more sound than usual. This dead city reverberated inside his skull.
Not just the city. This whole country felt like a graveyard. Like every single body populating it was a corpse—an empty shell, reanimated and going through the motions but not real. Not really.
Dara sucked in a breath, made himself exhale slowly. Then he looked at the mirror.
There was no one reflected in the room behind him. Just his own face, cheekbones more pronounced than they used to be—he’d lost weight in the QZ. His eyes were wide, whites showing around the irises.
He made himself keep looking: another second, one more.
He took off his wristwatch last. It was an expensive piece: mechanical, with a leather strap and a white face. Lehrer had given it to him for his fifteenth birthday. Back then Dara had been able to sense the cogs turning inside it, the hand ticking away the seconds of his life. Now it was as dead as everything else—but it was the only nice thing Dara had.
He set it atop the dresser at a perfect right angle to the outer ledge.