THE ELECTRIC HEIR

by Lee, Victoria

  “Ames.” Noam’s gaze flicked left, toward Bethany. “Get yourself together.”

  “Really? That’s what you’re gonna say? Get myself togeth—”

  “Are you implying the chancellor of Carolinia would wipe out an entire Level IV cohort for no good reason?” Noam leaned on the last three words and clenched his jaw, hoping to god Bethany and Taye just thought Ames was drunk again. Not thinking clearly. “Is that what Lehrer would find convenient?”

  A long silence answered. For a second Noam almost thought Ames would break right here and now, spill all their secrets over this line.

  But then—

  “I wish they’d just tell us if we’re supposed to be waiting on high command,” Bethany said, pulling out the bag of cheese straws again and crunching into a fresh handful of them a little too aggressively.

  “Noam, what have you heard from Lehrer?” Taye asked.

  “Not much, to be fair,” Noam said. “If I had to bet, I’d say he wants us to use magic. But I’d also say he wants us to wait on orders.”

  “Okay, but he could send those orders whenever he wants,” Bethany said with her mouth full. “What’s he waiting for? Don’t you think there needs to be clearer communication? This is dumb. We don’t know how to wage a war.”

  “Only we do,” said Taye. “What do you think all those strategy classes with Swensson were for, exactly? When we graduate Level IV, we aren’t gonna be lieutenant colonels barking orders for a single battalion. That’s not how Level IV works, and y’all know it. We’re gonna be expected to actually make these decisions. Graduation isn’t all that far away, for any of us.”

  “Exactly! And you think we should attack!”

  “No, I said sixty-four percent chance of success if we did. Probably. I mean, obviously there’s a confidence interval there, so the probability could be as low as forty or high as seventy percent . . . sorry. Point is, I think we sit back. Wait for more data.”

  “Listen, I want to fuck Texans up as much as you do,” Noam said, more to Bethany; he looked directly at her as she wiped the crumbs off her mouth with the back side of her wrist. “I get it. Okay? But we should save that move for when it’ll make the biggest difference.”

  “Cutting off their air supply route is a big difference! They won’t have food, they won’t have medicine—”

  “It won’t matter if we can’t hold the city,” Noam pressed. “Right now their army’s divided up trying to defend too many different points at once. They don’t have enough antiwitching tech to cover all their bases. But if they bring in reinforcements, well. We might have an airport, but good luck getting Houston.”

  Bethany’s knuckles were white where she gripped the edge of the table. “I don’t think the rest of you get it,” she said. “I’m a healer. I’m the one who has to fix all our soldiers when they come back full of bullets and shrapnel from some skirmish on the ground. And I—I can’t. I can’t keep doing this. I can’t keep watching our people die when we’re doing nothing to end this. Not if there’s another choice.”

  “There is,” Ames said bluntly on the other line. “We stop fucking around like a bunch of Level I idiots, and we take charge of the situation.”

  Bethany turned toward Noam, almost beseeching, and for one reeling moment Noam was reminded of Dara—

  Only they looked nothing alike, were nothing alike. Unless he counted the fact they were both perpetually disappointed in him.

  “We will use magic,” Noam promised. “I think that’s implicitly obvious by the fact we were sent here. But we . . .”

  No. He couldn’t bring himself to say We can’t move too soon—because Bethany was right. Ames was right. Every second they delayed, they allowed more Carolinians to die. Carolinians it was their responsibility to protect.

  He wanted so badly to say fuck it and throw it all away, throw out everything he’d ever learned about strategy and forget the Houston mission and just—

  But Taye was right too. And although waiting might lose them soldiers, if they lost the war, it wasn’t just Noam’s unit who’d be dying.

  “For now, we wait,” he said, mouth twisting into a grim knot. “I’ll call Minister García in the morning to confirm. There’s no point in us all arguing about what decisions we’re expected to make when we can ask high command. Is everyone good with that?”

  Bethany’s face was a sickly shade of pink, but she huffed out a breath and made a rough gesture with one hand, a gesture Noam took as consent.

  “Well, good luck with that,” Taye said. “I’m gonna sign off, get some sleep while I can.”

  “I’ll touch base tomorrow with an update after I talk to García,” Noam said and hung up with a twist of his technopathy.

  Bethany slid off the table. She pulled her hair out of her ponytail, but it was only to put it back up again in the same style, an anxious tic.

  “I’m going to check on my patients,” Bethany said, meeting Noam’s gaze. He couldn’t tell if it was an accusation.

  But he let her go, and as the door closed behind her, he dropped into the nearest chair and pressed the heels of his hands against his shut eyes.

  Fucking Lehrer. Fucking—no, fucking Adalwolf Lehrer. Because this was his fault. Because he was the reason Calix Lehrer thought it was totally appropriate to let a bunch of teenage Level IV students run their own battalions and make independent tactical decisions without oversight from high command.

  Because if it worked in the catastrophe, it should work against Texas, apparently.

  “Goddamn it,” Noam muttered against his own wrists, and sighed, and told himself tomorrow. Tomorrow, he’d talk to Defense Minister García and get this all figured out, if only so he could report back to the others and definitively say the choice was theirs. Tomorrow.

  But he didn’t get a chance to wait that long.

  He woke with a start, his heart pounding out of his chest—and for a moment he thought he was somewhere else, half expected to turn and see Lehrer there—

  But it was Bethany, both hands gripping Noam’s arms and the whites of her eyes glinting in the dark. “Noam,” she said, voice taut and thin. “Get up. You have to get up.”

  He shoved himself upright, Bethany releasing him only to tug open the drawers of his dresser and start tossing clothes onto the foot of his bed—uniform shirt, wool socks, jacket.

  “What happened?” he asked, already pulling his T-shirt off over his head.

  “Ames happened,” she said, and it felt like a shot of adrenaline right in his heart. And he knew, he knew, even before she said, “She didn’t want to wait, I guess. She went and used her magic on the Texan encampment in B3—redirected a bunch of water to destabilize the ground beneath them. Earthquake. Bad one. Not bad enough.”

  “Shit,” Noam muttered, telekinesis finishing the buttons of his shirt as he pushed out of bed and grabbed his trousers. “What did Taye say?”

  “They’re in retreat,” Bethany said. “Trying to get across the river. But . . .”

  But they were fucked. There weren’t enough choppers to pluck a whole battalion off the ground and fly them out to safety. They might get across the river, but it’d just be to sit and wait for Texan antiwitching units to sweep in and burn them all to ash.

  “How long?”

  “I don’t know. We aren’t picking anything up on radar, but that doesn’t mean anything.”

  Not with Texan technology. Although Lehrer had been content to freeze Carolinia in the twenty-first century, for the most part, that nostalgia hadn’t extended toward weapons tech. Noam’d had plenty of time to compare specs between their weapons and those of the Texans barricading the airport. Their abilities were well matched—which, of course; Lehrer would never put Carolinia at risk by letting her military’s capabilities fall behind the rest of the world’s.

  But that didn’t mean the antiwitching units hadn’t figured out some kind of cloaking tech Carolinia didn’t know about. And with no way to code his way past the antiwitching shi
elds, Noam wouldn’t sense the enemy troops coming until it was too late.

  He followed Bethany out of the barracks and down the hall to the tactical room. Lieutenant Colonel Harris was there already, alongside Major Xia, who looked very well composed for a man who must’ve been woken up not long before Noam had been.

  “I strongly advise inaction,” Xia said before Noam could get a word out. “Third Battalion is already headed to First Battalion’s aid. We should hold here. We cannot afford to lose the ground we’ve gained.”

  Noam glanced toward Lieutenant Colonel Harris, but the woman had no words to add. She gazed back with flat eyes and thin lips.

  Fine.

  “We aren’t abandoning this ground,” Noam said, tilting his chin up and looking back to Major Xia. “But we aren’t letting Texas massacre both First and Third Battalions either.”

  And—this might be too far; this might be exactly one step too far. If so, Noam had to hope Calix Lehrer’s name was powerful enough to get him out of a court martial.

  He wrapped his technopathy up in the nearest comm device and forced it to send an encrypted message straight to Major General García; let no one accuse him of acting in secrecy, at least.

  The message pinged out into the night. Noam took in a shallow breath, one that did very little to steady his nerves.

  “We’re moving on the airport,” Noam said. “Tonight. And we’ll do it using so much magic they’ll sense it all the way back in Houston.”

  They approached openly, emerging from the woods to the south of the airfield to move across the wide close-cropped grass bracketing the runways. The barbed wire fence surrounding the property was meant to keep out delinquents and wildlife; it was no match for Carolinian tanks. It crumpled like jewelry wire under their tracks.

  The Texans retaliated fast—they had their soldiers in some kind of loose formation by the time Noam’s boots hit tarmac, tanks rolling out from hangars and turning their turrets toward Noam’s battalion.

  Noam’s blood felt like it was buzzing in his veins, his breath coming shallow and fast and this—

  It was nothing like what Noam had experienced before.

  Noam had trained in close quarters—fighting to stay one step ahead sparring with Lehrer, mock skirmishes drawn up in tactics class and acted out on constructed sets, Noam and Lehrer slipping through the close-grown trees of the quarantined zone in pursuit of a target. This wasn’t a riot turned violent, tear gas and ballistic shields and the constant threat of police weapons.

  The sky felt too big, splayed out overhead like a black sea. They were open on all sides, visible at all angles, and even if riots and QZ missions held the threat of death, they’d been nothing like this.

  Texans up in the air traffic control towers froze their aerodrome beacons so the white light glared down in their faces. Noam squinted against the sudden glow of pain behind his eyes—and if he hadn’t been ready for it, hadn’t been waiting, the brightness might have been enough to distract him from the charge as it ignited in the chamber, the swelling heat and pressure against the metal body of the first projectile.

  Noam flung his magic out and pushed.

  It wasn’t delicate. It was magnetism, a great humming pulse that jammed the round in its chamber and bent the fiercely strong ferromagnetic buckypaper that constructed their tanks.

  So that’s why I couldn’t detect anything on radar, Noam thought grimly. The carbon nanotubes that made up the buckypaper were highly electrically conductive; they could block microwave electromagnetic interference. Their planes were probably made of the same shit—pretty damn effective for keeping Noam’s technopathy off their computers and electrical equipment.

  But the magnetism Noam had thrown against it was far more powerful than radar. All that advanced technology buckled and caved like paper crushed in a fist.

  “Holy shit,” Noam heard someone mutter behind him, and any other day he might’ve found the time to be flattered.

  Tonight, all he could think about was how silent Texan planes would be when they dipped down to spill their antiwitching soldiers across the grass.

  Think about Ames, he told himself, extending his magic again to tear guns from their owners’ hands, knotting rifles up like ribbons. Think about Taye.

  He wanted those antiwitching soldiers here. Because if Texas thought this was it—if they thought Carolinia was finally making its move, exposing the witchings among its units—well. They only had so many antiwitching soldiers. They couldn’t send them all. Texas would have to send a battalion to deal with Ames and Taye, a battalion for Noam and Bethany. Then they’d want to hold the rest in reserve, defending Houston and Dallas and San Antonio, dancing in anxious anticipation of Lehrer’s next move.

  It was a gambit. But Noam didn’t have another choice.

  Not one that left Ames and Taye alive.

  Behind him the sergeants shouted orders to their units; rounds of tank fire blasted out from the front Carolinian lines. Then they stood there and watched the Texan lines bloom with smoke and asphalt and shrapnel.

  Noam should tell them to hold fire. They should march in and take the Texans prisoner. They were defenseless; it was . . . was capturing enemy troops any worse than slaughtering civilians?

  Only if they did that, they’d all be sitting ducks when the antiwitching reinforcements came in. Their hostages would become weapons used against them.

  So he stayed where he was, feet grown roots into the tarmac, and watched his soldiers kill thousands of unarmed Texans.

  Was this how Lehrer felt? During the catastrophe, when he ordered the massacre of DC, all those dirty bombs injecting virus into the air and dirt. The wreckage he’d left in his wake, Lehrer’s power pulling skyscrapers down to their knees until nothing and no one was left.

  The decision felt like a steel shell closing round his heart. And then he felt nothing at all.

  “Secure the infrastructure,” Noam ordered once the dust had cleared.

  They marched forward down the runway, picking their way through smoldering metal and bloody bodies. Some were still alive, trembling hands waving like poppies in a red field.

  Later, once they’d swept the area for survivors and placed their own soldiers in all the buildings and towers, Noam found Bethany vomiting right outside the largest aircraft hangar. She wiped her mouth and lifted her head when he approached, her cheeks a mottled pink.

  “Sorry,” she said.

  “Don’t be sorry.”

  “It was the right thing to do,” Bethany said, in the kind of firm tone that made Noam think she was trying to convince herself as much as him. “For Ames and Taye and their battalions. But for the war too.”

  Noam didn’t say anything. He couldn’t open his mouth. He felt certain if he did, he’d spill his stomach on the ground next to hers.

  Bethany’s hand caught his, her slim fingers lacing together with Noam’s. She squeezed. “We’re Level IV,” she said. “That includes Ames and Taye. Like it or not . . . like it or not, we’re too valuable to die here.” She inhaled, as if steeling herself, and said: “Lehrer would have wanted you to do whatever it took to save them. You did the right thing.”

  And she was right. Of course she was. In Lehrer’s perverse utilitarian calculus, a single Level IV cadet was worth four battalions of baseline soldiers.

  Maybe more.

  Noam wished he could promise her—promise himself—that he was still as good a person as Dara had always thought he was. Wished he could believe he’d ever truly been good.

  “I don’t know if it was right,” Noam managed to say at last. He glanced toward her, then out again toward the sky—what he could see of it, anyway, past the light pollution of those aerodromes. “When those antiwitching units get here, we might not be able to fend them off. We won’t have our magic. What if I . . .”

  What if I just damned us all?

  “You didn’t,” Bethany insisted, and she gripped his hand still harder, until the tips of Noam’s fingers went num
b. “Listen—look at me, Noam.”

  He looked.

  “You didn’t,” she said again. “These are good soldiers. They’ll do their job. This is what they trained for—it doesn’t matter to them if those men have antiwitching armor. They can still get shot.”

  Noam made himself exhale slowly, and after a moment, he squeezed her hand back.

  “We need a plan,” he said. “Better than just waiting here. We need a plan.”

  “Okay,” Bethany said. “Then let’s make a plan.”

  The antiwitching units arrived two hours before dawn.

  They swept down from the skies as silently as Noam had predicted, black birds that almost blended into the starless sky. Noam waited with one of his units in a dark hangar, staring out into the night with his pulse pounding in his throat.

  Right now he wished he had Bethany back with him, there to whisper it’ll be all right—but she was deeper in the building, sequestered away where she could focus on healing as many of their soldiers as she could. Noam only had these strangers. Strangers who watched him with glowing eyes, marking his every motion, every breath, looking for fear.

  Noam was afraid. Noam was terrified.

  But he kept his body steady, his expression set to neutrality. He kept thinking, What would Lehrer do? A horrible thing to think, a repulsive standard to aspire to, but at least Lehrer would’ve known what came next.

  Noam had cut the power to the airport and to as much of the surroundings as he could reach. That was one thing he’d learned from reading the Texan antiwitching schematics, at least. They relied on electricity. If they couldn’t charge up, eventually they’d run out of juice.

  It was a dumb hope. Noam’s battalion might not last long enough for it to make a difference. But at least it was something.

  “Air defense systems,” Noam murmured, not audible to anyone but himself. No one needed him to give orders now. They knew what to do.

  Clusters of soldiers broke off from a far structure—unoccupied, in case the aircraft returned fire. Even from here Noam could make out the cylindrical missiles perched on their shoulders. He sensed their internal computerized mechanics: the command line-of-sight system that let the operator identify a target, the laser data link that would ensure the missile achieved its goal.