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 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.

Say, have you got any scissors?” “What for?” “I’m gonna frame Linda snorted and swatted him on the arm. Massive Cyberattack Disables Central News Bureau uthrities link hack t tlantian cyberterrrist affiliates “Haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about. “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. Sure, maybe you shouldn’t wander around the neighborhood at night draped in diamonds, but Noam liked it anyway. 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. The catastrophe was last century, though. Noam’s ex used to call it “the Ninth Circle.” She meant it in Dante’s sense. All that was before the city got bombed halfway to hell in the catastrophe, of course. 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. The street would’ve been full of workers heading home, empty lunch pails in hand.

Once upon a time, or so Noam had heard, there’d been a textile mill here. In this neighborhood, you had to if you didn’t want to get robbed. That evening he locked the doors, pulled chicken wire over the windows, and took a new route to the Migrant Center. He spent the rest of his shift reading Bulgakov under the counter. 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 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. Ellis’s snuff tins when he nearly toppled into the cash register.

But when magic infected the slums of west Durham, in the proud sovereign nation of Carolinia, it didn’t matter how it got there. 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. Maybe a tank coming in from the quarantined zone didn’t get hosed down properly. Outbreaks of magic started all kinds of ways.

The Fever King by Victoria Lee