The Fever King (Feverwake #1)
Victoria Lee
March 9, 2018
Calix,
As I write this, they’re packing up the fighter jets. Your virus gets packed into the belly in these big crates. Frozen, of course, so the magic doesn’t get loose while we’re in the air.
Did you know viruses aren’t actually alive? They’re useless without a host. They’re just chemicals. Even magic. The problem is they can infect just about anything, from people to animals to plants to bacteria.
Of course, you knew this already. You know everything, right?
I still don’t know if I’m going to DC because you fucked up your order and I have to or because I want to. I’ve decided it doesn’t make a difference. I’m going, and that’ll be the end of me.
Don’t get angry. I can tell you’re unhappy, Calix, and I know it’s my fault. I’ve always been like this. I hurt people just being around them. Usually it’s by accident, but with you it was on purpose, at least at first.
I’m trying to make up for that now.
Power’s a nasty thing, and none of us are immune. Get out, go to college, and get some kind of doctor degree and save the world—just don’t try to save it the way I did. The war will be over soon, and I want you to move on. Promise me. Please. If it helps, you can consider it my dying wish.
You’re the best person I know. Always have been. You just need to learn how to feel something again.
Maybe when I’m dead, you’ll at least feel something for me.
I love you, little brother.
Wolf
Letter stolen from the personal archives of Calix Lehrer, on behalf of H. Sacha
CHAPTER ONE
Outbreaks of magic started all kinds of ways. Maybe a tank coming in from the quarantined zone didn’t get hosed down properly. Maybe, like some people said, the refugees brought it up with them from Atlantia, the virus hiding out in someone’s blood or in a juicy peach pie.
But when magic infected the slums of west Durham, in the proud sovereign nation of Carolinia, it didn’t matter how it got there.
Everybody still died.
Noam was ringing up Mrs. Ellis’s snuff tins when he nearly toppled into the cash register.
He all but had to fight her off as she tried to force him down into a folding chair—swore he’d just got a touch dizzy, but he’d be fine, really. Go on home. She left eventually, and he went to stand in front of the window fan for a while, holding his shirt off his sweat-sticky back and trying not to pass out.
He spent the rest of his shift reading Bulgakov under the counter. He felt just fine.
That evening he locked the doors, pulled chicken wire over the windows, and took a new route to the Migrant Center. In this neighborhood, you had to if you didn’t want to get robbed. Once upon a time, or so Noam had heard, there’d been a textile mill here. The street would’ve been full of workers heading home, empty lunch pails in hand. Then the mill had gone down and apartments went up, and by the 1960s, Ninth Street had been repopulated by rich university students with their leather satchels and clove cigarettes. All that was before the city got bombed halfway to hell in the catastrophe, of course.
Noam’s ex used to call it “the Ninth Circle.” She meant it in Dante’s sense.
The catastrophe was last century, though. Now the university campus blocked the area in from the east, elegant stone walls keeping out the riffraff while Ninth and Broad crumbled under the weight of five-person refugee families crammed into one-room apartments, black markets buried in basements, laundry lines strung between windows like market lights. Sure, maybe you shouldn’t wander around the neighborhood at night draped in diamonds, but Noam liked it anyway.
“Someone’s famous,” Linda said when he reached the back offices of the Migrant Center, a sly smile curving her lips as she passed him the morning’s Herald.
Noam grinned back and looked.
Massive Cyberattack Disables Central News Bureau
Authorities link hack to Atlantian cyberterrorist affiliates.
“Haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about. Say, have you got any scissors?”
“What for?”
“I’m gonna frame this.”
Linda snorted and swatted him on the arm. “Get on, you. Brennan has some task he wants finished this week, and I don’t think you, him, and your ego can all fit in that office.”
Which, fair: the office was pretty small. Tucked into the back corner of the building, with Brennan’s name and DIRECTOR printed on the door in copperplate, it was pretty much an unofficial storage closet for all the files and paperwork Linda couldn’t cram anywhere else. Brennan’s desk was dwarfed by boxes stacked precariously around it, the man himself leaning close to his holoreader monitor with reading glasses perched on the end of a long nose and a pen behind one ear.
“Noam,” he said, glancing up when the door opened. “You made it.”
“Sorry I missed yesterday. I had to cover someone’s shift at the computer store after I got off the clock at Larry’s.”
Brennan waved a dismissive hand. “Don’t apologize. If you have to work, you have to work.”
“Still.”
It wasn’t guilt, per se, that coiled up in Noam’s stomach. Or maybe it was. That was his father’s photograph on the wall, after all, face hidden by a bandanna tied over his nose and mouth. His father’s hands holding up that sign—REFUGEE RIGHTS ARE HUMAN RIGHTS. That was in June 2118, during the revolt over the new, more stringent citizenship tests. It’d been the largest protest in Carolinian history.