He stood there for a second, staring woozily at the mess while sirens shrieked in his ears. He was sick. Magic festered in his veins, ready to consume him whole.
An outbreak.
His father, when Noam managed to weave his way back to his side, had fallen unconscious. His head lolled forward, and there was a bloody patch on his lap, yellow electricity flickering over the stain. The world undulated around them both in watery waves.
“It’s okay,” Noam said, knowing his dad couldn’t hear him. He sucked in a sharp breath and hitched his father’s body out of the chair. He shouldn’t—he couldn’t just leave him there like that. Noam had carried him around for three years, but today his father weighed twice as much as before. Noam’s arms quivered. His thoughts were white noise.
It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay, a voice kept repeating in Noam’s head.
He dumped his father’s body on the bed, skinny limbs sprawling. Noam tried to nudge him into a more comfortable position, but even that took effort. But this . . . it was more than he’d done for his mother. He’d left her corpse swinging on that rope for hours before Brennan showed up to take her down.
His father still breathed, for now.
How long did it take to die? God, Noam couldn’t remember.
On shaky legs, Noam made his way back to the chair by the window. He couldn’t manage much more. The television kept turning itself on and off again, images blazing across a field of static snow and vanishing just as quickly. Noam saw it out of the corners of his eyes even when he tried not to look, the same way he saw his father’s unconscious body. That would be Noam soon.
Magic crawled like ivy up the sides of the fire escape next door.
Noam imagined his mother waiting for him with a smile and open arms, the past three years just a blink against eternity.
His hands sparked with something silver-blue and bright. Bolts shot between his fingers and flickered up his arms. The effect would have been beautiful were it not so deadly. And yet . . .
A shiver ricocheted up his spine.
Noam held a storm in his hands, and he couldn’t feel a thing.
CHAPTER TWO
Noam drowned in a sea of white heat and electric current. A dizzy free fall into the ocean, salt water drenching his lungs.
Then the tide receded. The storm cleared. Noam opened his eyes to bright light.
Everything hurt.
God, everything . . . his body was a knot of pain and exhaustion. Noam shivered as he shoved the bedsheets down, pushing upright. His mind blurred, and he couldn’t remember—
Noam tipped his head back, a fresh wave of heat searing down his spine.
Where was he?
The room smelled of spoiled meat. He looked to the left.
A girl lay on the bed next to his with her mouth open, her face a solid gray mask, frozen midbreath.
Noam lurched out of bed, ankle catching in the sheets and sending him crashing sideways into an abandoned metal cart. The girl stared back with white eyes.
Jesus—how long had she been there? Days? Perhaps even weeks, her flesh rotting into the mattress three feet away while Noam shook through his fever and never noticed.
Door. There was a door. Get to the door.
Noam stumbled across the room, bare feet sticking to whatever fluid had congealed on the tile. He swore—swore—he could feel the bones of the building, cameras overhead, little electrical signals sizzling down the wires.
Hallucinating, that was it. Identifying patterns in the world, seeing himself—but from the outside, all edges and too-long pants.
Madness.
The hall was a long white ribbon stretching toward a pair of steel doors.
And silence. The sort of silence that suffocated, pouring into Noam’s nose and mouth and ears like black water.
A camera gazed dispassionately down from the ceiling. Noam gazed back.
“Hello?”
His voice didn’t sound like his own.
A crash behind him. Noam spun around, half expecting to see the girl from his room with skeleton fingers reaching for his throat—but there was nothing. Just empty hallway, fluorescent lights flickering on tile.
He had to get out. Anywhere was better than being in this dead air.
Noam faltered toward the double doors. He had made it three feet before they crashed open, spilling a small army of aliens in strange white space suits, oxygen tanks strapped to their backs and gloved hands held aloft.
“Hey, there,” one of them said. His voice came out sounding odd, synthetic. “Hey, now. Take it easy. Stay where you are.”
“Who—” Noam’s throat was raw. It hurt to speak. He staggered against the wall and leaned there, cheek pressed against cold plaster. “Who are you?”
“We’re doctors,” the space suit said. “We’re here to help. You’ve been very sick.” He gestured at one of the others, who stepped toward Noam, dragging a stretcher. “Just relax. It’s all okay.”
I am relaxed, Noam wanted to say, but he could barely keep his eyes open. He slumped farther down the wall. It was almost a relief when the other doctor reached him, grabbing Noam’s arm to help hoist him onto the stretcher.
The doctor injected him with a clear fluid.
“Whassat?” Noam mumbled.
“Sedative. Just to keep you calm, honey. Can’t have you accidentally blowing this place to high heaven, now, can we?” The doctor patted him on the sternum with one huge gloved hand.
Noam tipped his head back and closed his eyes. He felt like he was spinning in place. Something buzzed between his ears like static.
He was distantly aware of the other space suits moving toward him, a low hubbub of untranslatable conversation. Someone plastered sticky sensors onto his chest.
“What’s happening?” he managed to get out.
“Shh, it’s all right. We’re gonna get you out of here.”
He gave up arguing.
They rolled him out those double doors, through an air lock that sprayed some acrid disinfectant all over him. Then out again, into a white-walled maze of corridors and too many machines, beeping, buzzing, the sound loud enough it shuddered down into his bones.
It was only after he’d been settled in a new bed that he managed to get his thick tongue working again. “Is this . . . hospital?”
“Yes it is, sweetheart,” someone said.
Noam opened his sluggish eyes. Not a space suit, this time—a regular woman wearing scrubs. Nurse, his mind provided helpfully, if a beat too late.
“How much do you remember?” the woman asked.
His thoughts slogged along like heavy boots trudging through mud. “Nothing.”
Only, that wasn’t true. He remembered the dead girl. He remembered how she smelled.
They’d left her there with him. They’d left her with him because they had no reason to think he would live.
He gagged, and the woman made a soft noise in the back of her throat, dabbing his sweaty brow with a cloth. “You had the virus, sugar. Magic. There was a bad outbreak in west Durham.”
Magic. That’s right. The electricity in his hands. The blood on his father’s face.
Noam rubbed chilly fingers against his temple and squeezed his eyes shut. There—he got sick, they all got sick, there was—he’d survived. That meant—
“Where’s my father?” The words were sandpaper scraping against his throat.
“You need to rest,” the nurse said. “The doctor’ll be in later. He’ll answer any questions.”
Tar oozed through Noam’s stomach. Dead. He’s dead. My father’s dead. “Where is he?” It wasn’t a question anymore. “He’s alive.” He’s not alive. “He’s okay.”
The nurse couldn’t look him in the eye. Noam pushed himself upright. This time, she didn’t try to stop him. He was falling, falling toward a ground that kept getting farther away.
“Tell me!”
She pressed him back against the pillows with one hand. “I’m sorry, Noam. You�
�re the only one who made it.”
Noam didn’t hear what she said after that. The words were a language he’d abruptly ceased to understand, ears filled with the beep of his heart monitor and the shallow heave of his own breaths. The noise from the oxygen machine was a distant roar.
If once he’d hoped his father might get better, might wake up from that catatonia one day, might read the books Noam gave him, kiss Noam’s cheek on early mornings and say, “Te amo, mijo”—that future had crumbled to dust.
The nurse said something else as Noam pushed himself farther down in the bed and put his back to her, closing his eyes. That made her stop talking. She just cut off midsentence and left, though not before patting him twice on the shoulder.
Something clawed at his chest, leaving long gouges in its wake. The wounds were bloodless. Nothing rushed in to fill them, not even the relief he’d feel if he believed the dead went to a better world.
He only realized later what that really meant—later, after he’d let an endless stream of doctors run tests and draw blood, after they’d put little objects on the table and asked him to levitate them. After they’d shined lights in his eyes and interrogated him: What can you feel? Anything unusual? Anything useful?
Magic killed his father and left Noam alive.
His body had fought magic and conquered it.
That made him a witching.
Witching. The word was practically synonymous with power, but Noam had none of that. His body was fragile, spun-sugar bone and translucent skin. If magic swam through his blood, he couldn’t feel it. He held a hand over his head and stared at the greenish veins snaking along his fingers and down toward his wrist. The virus was still in there, wild and alive. He imagined it as blue ink, bleeding into every cell.
He tried summoning that storm again.
Nothing.
Maybe he’d be the first. A medical mystery. A witching without the witch.
Fuck witchings, anyway. Noam’d rather have his dad back.
Two days later, after he was off fluids and able to walk around, someone knocked at the door. Noam tilted his book down, realizing only then that he’d lost his place, had been turning pages without really reading them. The thought of another doctor prodding and poking him was unbearable.
“Come in,” Noam said anyway. Apparently the manners his mother’d instilled in him were stronger than resentment.
The door swung open, and a man stepped in. He was taller than anyone Noam had ever seen, swallowing up the length of the doorway, his angular face as artful as if sculpted from marble. The creases of his suit could have cut Noam to ribbons. “Noam Álvaro?”
“Yes?”
The man shut the door. “I hope I’m not disturbing you. Do you have a moment?”
There was something strange about his voice, though perhaps it was just the accent. Noam couldn’t place it. European, maybe.
Noam folded down the corner of his page and set the book aside. “I have lots of moments.”
The man didn’t take off his coat or gloves, just advanced into the room, his movements as precise and measured as everything else about him. Noam couldn’t stop looking at him—like he was the center of gravity around which all things must orbit.
Why did he seem so familiar?
The man took the chair opposite Noam. He was far too long for the seat but didn’t seem to notice.
“I’m told,” the man said, elbows perched on his thighs, “your dynamics are quite impressive. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen antibody titers as low as yours. I wanted to meet you myself.”
He didn’t look like a doctor.
But maybe all that meant was that he was a fancier doctor, seeking another publication for his curriculum vitae.
“I won’t make a very good case study,” Noam said. His father was dead because of this virus. That made it hard to care about antibody levels, yet antibodies were all anyone talked about.
No one really knew what made some people witchings and others not. Witchings had the same viral load as those who died, so it wasn’t any kind of natural resistance. Whatever the secret to survival was, it ran in families—though clearly it hadn’t run in Noam’s family.
He folded his arms across his chest. “I can’t do magic. Everyone’s already tried.”
The doctor waved away Noam’s argument. “Sometimes it can take a few weeks. That’s not unusual. Would you like to see?”
It took Noam a second to realize he meant the blood results. Noam shrugged, which the man took as consent. He pulled a slim black phone from his pocket and tapped a few times on the screen. “There,” he said, passing the phone to Noam. “Beautiful, isn’t it?”
It was a photograph. A GIF, actually, a brief recording at magnification showing the antibodies glowing like alien green lights on his blood smear right alongside the tangled threads of the virus, keeping it in check. A banner of nausea unfurled through Noam’s gut. He couldn’t help imagining that virus festering inside him even now.
“They look like worms,” he said. He passed the man back his phone.
“Worms can’t do what this virus does to people,” the man said, almost reproachfully. But then he put the phone away and offered his hand, palm up. “May I?”
Noam nodded and placed his arm in the man’s grasp. The man pressed two fingers to Noam’s wrist and closed his eyes, concentrating on Noam’s pulse. Noam was amazed he could feel anything at all through those leather gloves. They were real leather, too, despite how expensive meat was these days. Did doctors make that kind of salary?
He swore his skin tingled where the man touched it.
“I’m sorry about your father,” the man said when he opened his eyes. He squeezed Noam’s arm before releasing him, though he didn’t lean away. “I lost my parents, too, when I was a few years younger than you are now.”
Noam swallowed around the tight feeling in his throat and glanced down at his lap. His skin itched beneath the gauze over his old IV site; he picked at the tape with his thumb. “The virus killed them?”
When he looked up, the doctor was giving him a strange look. “No.” A pause, long enough that Noam started to wonder if he’d said something wrong, but the man went on. “Nevertheless, I understand what you’re going through. I won’t promise it gets easier. But you learn to live with the grief in other ways.”
Noam turned his face toward the window so the man wouldn’t see the wetness stinging at his eyes. Now that both his parents were gone, the world was much larger than it had been before—gaping around him, sharp toothed and hungry.
“I should let you rest.” The doctor unfolded that long body to stand, buttoning his coat. Noam quickly rubbed the heel of his hand against his face while the man was distracted, though it occurred to him that maybe the man was just offering him a chance to pull himself together in relative privacy. The man gave him a small smile. Not pitying but . . . soft, somehow. Understanding. “Get some sleep, Mr. Álvaro. I’m sure I’ll see you again soon.”
The next day they discharged Noam from the hospital.
Not to go home, though. Not even to Charleston, where so many new witchings went for basic training.
They sent him to the government complex.
From Tides of History: Shifting Political Power in the Modern West, an Atlantian eleventh-grade textbook from 2098. Illegally imported copy found in the personal library of C. Lehrer.
The first new nation to rise from the ashes of the catastrophe, Carolinia, established itself in May 2019 under the leadership of committee-elected monarch Calix Lehrer. Texas followed in June. But by late August, the rest of the former United States remained a shambles of fire- and nuclear-bombed wasteland, surviving communities separated by hundreds of miles of land infected with lethal magic.
The difficulty of transporting resources across these distances—especially considering Carolinia and Texas both closed their borders to travel, trade, and immigration—was perhaps the primary reason why Texan president Marcus Harlow calle
d an emergency summit of representatives from the largest remaining communities. Originally, this event was to be hosted in Dallas. However, Carolinian leadership refused to meet at this location, citing concerns about Texan antiwitching sentiment. The location was changed to Boulder, in the present-day Midlands.
The Boulder Summit marked the decision to form nations from the remaining major communities in the former United States. A single-state solution was vastly considered impractical, both due to infrastructure difficulties in navigating the quarantined zone as well as Carolinian refusal to rejoin with any nation that would not commit to legislative protection of witching rights. Therefore, borders were drawn based on a combination of natural landmarks (e.g., rivers, mountain ranges), cultural similarity (e.g., the historical Deep South states of Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia, which became modern Atlantia), and, of course, consideration for the boundaries of the quarantined zone, where endemic magic and residual nuclear fallout made the land uninhabitable.
The Boulder Summit was also meant to host the signing of both a peace treaty between all the new nations as well as a mutual support agreement in pursuit of developing a magic vaccine. These plans went unmet, with competing claims as to why the treaty was not signed: Carolinian propaganda stated that other nations—including Texas and Atlantia—demanded an 80 percent reduction in witching population from Carolinia as a gesture of goodwill. Atlantian officials claimed that no such demands were ever made and that the refusal to sign a treaty was a strategic move by Lehrer and others to establish Carolinian military dominance in the region.
The true series of events at the Boulder Summit remains unclear to historians, as the original classified records were destroyed in a freak fire in 2063. With other witnesses since deceased, Calix Lehrer (then king of Carolinia, prior to his abdication in 2024) is now the only one with accurate knowledge of the Boulder Summit. Given limited diplomacy between Carolinia and other nations, it is unlikely these secrets will ever be told.
CHAPTER THREE
The car arrived on schedule: a sleek black vehicle with tinted windows and cushioned seats. Durham sped past, a blur of ancient brick buildings and glittering neon nightclubs paving the way to the government district. They passed the old stadium, lit up for some event or another. Here the streets were peppered with green-uniformed Ministry of Defense soldiers. Not too many, not enough to frighten, but enough for Noam to get the message: don’t try any shit.
The Fever King Page 2
