THE ELECTRIC HEIR

by Lee, Victoria

  Suddenly his heart was in his throat. Because why wouldn’t Dara have told Noam the truth about what Lehrer did to him? Why would that not have been the first thing out Dara’s mouth the moment they were alone?

  Did Lehrer already suspect? Did he think Noam’d abandoned him a long time ago—that all these weeks were a last desperate attempt on Dara’s part to kill Lehrer for good?

  Shit. Goddamn it, fuck.

  “You persuaded her,” Noam said to buy himself time. The accusation came out tight and harsh: the first shot of war. “You made her your spy.”

  “And was that wrong of me, in your estimation?” Lehrer drew nearer still. “Two spies are better than one.”

  Especially when you need one spy to spy on your other spy.

  “She’s my friend.”

  “She’s Level IV. Her duty is to this country—to me.”

  Noam swallowed. The back of his throat was too dry, raw. “You fucked with her mind.”

  “Persuasion is hardly permanent.”

  “I dunno, seems plenty fucking permanent to me.” Tears prickled at Noam’s eyes now, traitorous heat threatening to spill down his cheeks. He scrubbed at them angrily, wiped the wet heel of his hand on his hip.

  Lehrer was close enough now he could have touched Noam. Noam half expected him to—but Lehrer gripped the back of a chair instead, thumb pressing into the upholstery. “She’s the same person she’s always been,” he said. “My persuasion ties to memory. The command will only last so long as she remembers the circumstances under which I gave it.”

  “And I assume you made damn sure the circumstances were memorable.”

  He couldn’t stop envisioning Lehrer’s fingertips pressing into skin instead of fabric. Driving bruises into bone.

  “Is that what you really think of me?” Lehrer said softly.

  Yes.

  Noam gritted his teeth. He couldn’t do it. Whether Lehrer thought he’d betrayed him or not, at least he’d let Noam live thus far. After all . . . for Lehrer, there were two possibilities. Either Dara had told Noam the truth, or—for some reason—he’d kept Lehrer’s secrets.

  Lehrer doesn’t have your conscience. And he isn’t stupid.

  Noam had committed himself to this path, knowingly or not. Now he had to see it through to its inevitable end.

  “I don’t know anymore,” Noam snapped. “You tell me. Did you torture her?”

  Lehrer released the chair now, drawing closer. For a second Noam half expected Lehrer to reassure him. But the smile that drew along Lehrer’s lips was thin and unbalanced. “Only a little.”

  It was as if Lehrer’d torn a rope of barbed wire through Noam’s lungs. He couldn’t breathe, couldn’t—

  “Fuck you,” he got out, and he rocked forward, hit Lehrer in the chest with both fists—he wanted it to hurt, wanted to leave marks—knew Lehrer barely felt it at all. Lehrer grasped the back of Noam’s skull, and Noam’s own forward momentum sent him stumbling in against Lehrer, his brow hitting the center of Lehrer’s sternum. Lehrer twisted one finger in Noam’s hair, caressing it.

  Ames. God fucking damn it, Ames, she didn’t even . . . she hadn’t said a thing.

  Noam shoved at Lehrer’s shoulders again, and this time Lehrer let him go, Noam stepping back quickly enough he bumped into an end table. The lamp on its surface rattled, Lehrer’s magic catching it just in time to not-fall.

  “You,” Noam said in a shaky voice. “I did this—I’ve done all of this for you. I—don’t you get that?” He was crying freely now, didn’t even bother wiping his face clean. “All of it. Because I want to protect my friends. Like—like Ames. Because I don’t want them to get hurt, because I thought you would be the one to keep them safe.”

  Lehrer watched without speaking, without flinching.

  “I wanted you to protect—I didn’t—not torture them.”

  Lehrer let out a soft huff of breath. “You’ve tortured plenty of people on my orders. Don’t pretend you find it so immoral now.”

  “That’s not how this works,” Noam burst out. He very nearly stamped his foot—didn’t, thank god, because Lehrer would never let him forget something like that. “It’s not a zero-sum game! You don’t make—moral evaluations aren’t independent of context!” The phrase was dragged directly from one of the readings Lehrer had thrust upon him, early after Brennan’s death. Probably Lehrer had seen the book as a peace offering.

  “Nor is this independent of context,” Lehrer said calmly. “Why shouldn’t I cause one girl some brief, temporary pain to assure the safety of an entire witching nation?”

  “This isn’t a witching state, Calix. Three percent. That’s not a fucking—”

  “Not yet.”

  Noam made himself exhale long and slow, digging his heels down against the floor. “There was another way. You didn’t have to torture her to protect Carolinia.”

  Lehrer tilted his head a fraction. “Didn’t I? What other choice did I have?”

  A horrible laugh tore itself from Noam’s throat, and he flung both hands in the air. “Me,” he shouted and jabbed his fingers in against his own breastbone. “You—have—me.”

  Whatever else Lehrer might’ve said to that—for now, perhaps, or do I have you?—he kept silent, watching Noam as if Noam were a particularly confusing museum exhibit.

  Noam wanted to dig his fingernails into Lehrer’s hairline and peel his face away from the bone. Crack open his skull and—see. Spread Lehrer’s mind out on the table like the contents of a dissection.

  “You just don’t trust me,” Noam said when Lehrer said nothing. He hated how uneven his voice sounded. How . . . weak. “You don’t . . . have you ever? Trusted me?”

  “Would I have made you my protégé if I didn’t?”

  “Let me rephrase. You don’t trust me anymore.”

  Lehrer pressed one finger under Noam’s chin, tilted his face up toward the light. “And why should I? You betrayed the man who all but raised you. You killed him in cold blood. I’m not under any illusion you care more for me than you did Tom Brennan.”

  “Fuck you.”

  Noam was shaking now, a dead leaf against Lehrer’s unmoving touch.

  Lehrer was . . . right. He was—Noam did kill Brennan. He shot his head open like a rotten fruit. He abandoned Dara to the quarantined zone. He let—his own mother killed herself to get away from him.

  And who could blame her?

  Noam was under no illusions that he was a good person anymore. Lehrer had been right, that night in the courtyard after the coup. They were the same, Noam and Lehrer: two faces of one coin.

  “Fuck you,” he said again, barely a whisper.

  Lehrer shook his head slightly. “And yet,” he said, “you won’t even do that.”

  Noam jerked his face away, out of Lehrer’s reach. Lehrer’s hand retreated to his side, as if it meant nothing, and Noam stared at a vase on the far side of the room so long it blurred and bled in his vision.

  “Go back to the barracks,” Lehrer said. He reached out, and a book sped from across the room into his waiting grasp; he pushed Ethics in Virological Discourse into Noam’s arms. “And read this. Return tomorrow prepared to discuss.”

  He stepped back, giving Noam space to grab his satchel from the floor and stalk away. Noam glanced over his shoulder at the door, his hand slippery on the knob, but Lehrer had already crossed back to the end table and retrieved the remaining book to flip through its pages. He didn’t look up, although he knew Noam was there. Knew Noam watched.

  So Noam left. He went back to the barracks, clutching the book and his own spared life, and the guilty weight of too many crimes.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  DARA

  Living with Ames was a sight better than living alone.

  Dara was still restricted to this building, but at least now Ames was here—both of them sitting cross-legged on the cold floor, Ames shuffling cards for poker; Ames eating all the high-calorie bits of Chinese takeout that Dara wouldn’t
touch; arguing about which sister from Little Women was the objective best (Amy March, said Dara, obviously). They managed to share the narrow twin bed. After all, they’d done it plenty of times back when Ames’s father was still alive, both too drunk to go back to the barracks, tangled up together under Ames’s childhood duvet with a convenient bucket on the floor by the pillows.

  It was almost like those days again. Dara felt guilty for thinking that way—after all, it wasn’t like Ames had a choice about being here—but he did feel better for having her around. She was the third living thing in this apartment, now—last week Dara had asked Claire to bring him a houseplant. She’d come back with a tiny little pothos vine in a ceramic pot. Dara had positioned it near the window, and he was embarrassed to admit he’d taken to talking with the plant, one-sided conversations to fill the empty hours. Now that Ames was here, though, Dara’s social life expanded beyond vegetation.

  Another bonus was that Ames, unlike Dara, still had magic. That meant that once Noam gave her the codes, she could undo and redo Noam’s wards whenever they wanted to escape the studio apartment and head downstairs to Leo’s bar.

  This was perhaps the one downside to Ames’s presence too. If Dara had gotten used to spending time in that bar for meetings—or alone with Leo—it was completely different with Ames around. Some part of his brain still implicitly associated Ames with . . . well, with getting trashed. Ames-and-bars was flickering club lights and loud music, gin and bourbon and pills tipped back, fucking strange men in grimy bathroom stalls.

  It didn’t make a difference that it was only four p.m. The sky was already dark this time of year, time blurring into time when Dara didn’t have classes and meetings and basic training to track the hours.

  He was pretty sure Leo would give him a drink if he asked. He might not approve, but he’d do it. Dara was nineteen; he was old enough. And maybe Dara could keep himself in control. One drink, or two. Then stop.

  But that wasn’t really true, was it? Dara didn’t have control. Dara would drink himself unconscious—had, in fact, drunk himself to the point that Lehrer had started sending his personal physician to draw Dara’s blood every week to check liver function.

  If Dara had one drink, Dara would drink himself into the grave.

  So Dara sipped his club soda as Leo passed Ames her third tequila cocktail, then used his straw to macerate his lemon slice against the bottom of his glass.

  “You wouldn’t believe the kinds of embarrassing stories I could tell you about this one,” Ames was saying, jerking her thumb in Dara’s direction. Dara grimaced at her, and she grinned back. “Like the time he was sick and Lehrer made him go to this big gala thing anyway, and Dara puked all over the Italian ambassador’s shoes. Or how Dara went through like a zillion nannies as a kid—apparently none of them could stand him ’cause he’d read their minds and repeat all their worst thoughts back to them just to prove he could.”

  “Okay,” Dara said.

  Ames kept going: “Or how when he was fifteen, Dara got arrested for solicitation, like literally solicitation.”

  “That was a misunderstanding,” Dara cut in quickly. “I was joking. How was I supposed to know he was an undercover cop?”

  “Didn’t we just talk about how you were a telepath?” Leo pointed out.

  “I try not to read minds in public. There are too many of them. It gets . . . noisy.”

  “So . . . to be clear, you weren’t actually asking a cop to pay you,” Leo said.

  “You two are both the worst.” Dara tilted forward and tipped his brow against the edge of the bar counter. “No. I was not, in fact, a teenage prostitute. Despite evidence to the contrary.”

  A beat of silence answered that, stretching on long enough Dara could hear his own pulse in his ears.

  “I didn’t mean it like that,” Ames said at last, her voice gone soft. He felt her hand on his arm, squeezing. “I’m sorry. I’m just . . .”

  Drunk? Right.

  Dara remembered what that was like.

  “It’s okay,” he said on a heavy exhale, lifting his head and pasting a smile onto his lips. “Moving on now.”

  “Time for embarrassing Ames stories instead?” Ames said, a false note of levity lighting her tone. “I’m sure Dara has just as many.”

  Dara did, in fact, have plenty. He stuck to the palatable ones, though—told Leo about the time Ames crashed Lehrer’s government car when she tried to take over from the AI, how Ames used to be pathologically afraid of the color orange because it, quote, reminded her of gas station hot dogs.

  And, slowly, the embarrassment faded.

  At five, someone knocked on the door. Dara and Ames and Leo exchanged confused looks—the bar didn’t open till eight, and there was no meeting today. Leo held up a hand to tell them to stay in place as he crossed to the door, peering through the spy hole. But then, instead of waving for them to hide, he sighed and turned the latch.

  “Did I miss the invitation?” Noam said as he moved into the bar, trailed a step behind by—

  “Bethany?” Ames said, rising from her chair. If she’d been slurring her words before, that was gone now, each syllable crisp and sharp. “What are you doing here?”

  “Wow, thanks, nice to see you too,” Bethany said, pushing the door shut behind her with her heel. “Hi, Dara.”

  Dara slid off his stool as well, suddenly not at all sure what to do with his hands. She was staring at him, a brightness rising in her wide eyes—tears. After a moment she sniffed and laughed, shaking her head, wiping her face with one hand.

  “Sorry,” she said. “Noam already told me; it’s just . . . seeing you. It’s a lot.”

  “Why would you bring her here?” Ames snapped, turning on Noam instead. “What the hell, Álvaro? You of all people should know how dangerous—”

  “I’m almost sixteen,” Bethany interjected. “I can decide for myself, thanks.”

  “You’ve been gone five days, Ames,” Noam said after a slow moment. “Everyone’s worried about you. But . . .”

  “Especially me,” Bethany finished for him.

  Ames’s color was still high in her cheeks, one hand braced against the bar counter like that anchor was the one thing keeping her from launching herself at Noam. Dara lifted an arm, touched the tips of his fingers above her elbow.

  Bethany sighed after several seconds. “I’ll be fine. I really don’t need a second mother, Ames.”

  Not that Bethany’s actual mother took care of her at all—but both Dara and Ames knew better than to say that out loud.

  “Fine,” Ames grumbled eventually. “Just . . . sit down, I guess. Leo, can we—”

  “Club soda?” Leo said archly. “Coming right up.”

  Bethany slid onto a stool near Ames, Noam taking a low seat at a nearby table. Noam’s gaze followed Leo around the bar as Leo filled up a glass for Bethany at the spigot, like he still expected Leo to whip out a gun and a badge at any second.

  “So,” Ames said. “What’s . . . new, I guess? Latest updates from the barracks?”

  “Nothing, really,” Bethany said. “Taye’s working his way through all the original James Bond films, so we’re all being subjected to that.”

  “Not the worst thing in the world,” Ames said slyly. “I mean, that blond Bond was pretty fucking built, right?”

  “I’m more intrigued by Vesper Lynd, actually.”

  “Fair. She was the most interesting of the Bond girls—”

  “I’m interested in most of them,” Bethany said.

  “Really? You can’t tell me Pussy Galore had character development.”

  “Not interested like that.” Ames still looked confused, so Bethany added: “Interested. In a gay way. Because I’m gay.”

  “Oh.”

  Dara covered a laugh with a quick gulp of club soda. He’d known since—well, always, of course; telepathy didn’t allow many secrets. But as far as he knew, this was the first time Bethany had put it into words.

  He had, however
, thought Bethany’s being lesbian was a tiny bit obvious.

  “Cool,” Ames added lamely. “Like . . . no, I mean, it’s cool. Of course it’s cool. Dara’s gay, so.”

  “Let’s not make this weird,” Bethany said.

  “Nope, no weirdness here,” Ames said, and after a second she reached over and grabbed Bethany round the shoulders, pulling her in for a rough sideways hug. Bethany yelped, and Ames laughed, said, “You’re weird enough in other ways.”

  “Look who’s talking.” Dara quirked a brow at Ames, who let go of Bethany to flick some of her drink at him.

  They managed to shift the conversation back to Taye and his movie preferences, which transformed into a lively debate about whether James Bond or the hero of a newer Carolinian spy movie would win in a fight, and Dara ate his way, again, through all Leo’s bar snacks trying to fuel his argument.

  Pig, said a voice in Dara’s head. It sounded a lot like Lehrer’s.

  “I’ll get more,” Leo said, moving to get off his stool, but Dara stood first.

  “No—I ate them all, so I’d better take responsibility for my own gluttony. Where do you keep the rest?”

  “Back room.” Leo gestured over his shoulder, past the bar, toward a shut door. “In a big box labeled, unsurprisingly, bar snacks.”

  “I’ll go with him,” Noam said swiftly, pushing up from his chair and flashing a brief smile in Dara’s direction. “I wanna check out your beer collection, anyway.”

  More likely he didn’t want to send Dara into a room full of booze alone, but Dara didn’t call him out on it. Noam trailed him into the back room, wandering past Dara as Dara searched for the snack box, both of Noam’s hands thrust in his pockets, gazing up at the labels on all the beer crates. As if Noam had actually developed a nuanced palate for craft ales in the past six months on top of everything else.

  “You and Ames doing okay?” Noam said eventually. He still had his back to Dara, was pretending to be fascinated by a box of IPAs. “Anything . . . do you need anything?”

  “Not really,” Dara said.

  “Is she . . . I mean, she was kind of spiraling, back in Level IV. She’s been spiraling ever since her dad. So . . . I don’t know.”