Harem Apocalypse: Every Moan Levels Us Up!

"Don’t you think there’s another way to get these things off?" Mercury asked as we came out onto the road.

The headlights cut hard white across empty asphalt. The night air coming through the open vents was cooler than the car, carrying the thin, continuous smell of smoke.

Behind us, Trapper and Linn were still going at each other. They had used every single second since the lot to argue about something neither of them could name anymore. The words overlapped and cancelled. The dark shapes of their bodies shifted in the rear-view mirror under the occasional street light.

"There has to be," I said.

She glanced sideways at me. The dashboard light laid a soft green edge along the side of her face and left the rest in shadow.

"But?"

She’d heard the but before I got anywhere near saying it. The single syllable sat between us like something she’d already weighed.

The streets were empty and she was driving slowly, which was the only sane way to drive tonight. Speed meant meeting something at a corner with no time to decide, and they were out here. Somewhere in this city, all of them, doing whatever they’d been called away to do.

The street lights burned in long, isolated pools of yellow. Between them the dark sat thick and complete. Shopfronts stood shuttered and dark.

"Bagins has Venna."

Mercury pushed her right hand back through her hair and kept the other on the wheel. The motion was sharp, impatient.

"Is she worth our lives, Bram?" She didn’t wait for me. The words came fast and clean. "Honestly. She’s a girl you met at a funeral. If it were Sherry I’d understand it, I’d drive us into that building myself. But she’s just another girl."

"Don’t touch me," Linn shouted from the back. The sound bounced once off the interior and died against the larger quiet of the empty road.

The bracelets had stopped beeping entirely. All four at once, somewhere in the last few minutes. That was worse than the beeping. The silence where the countdown had been sat against the bone like a held breath. The metal on my ankle was still cold, still tight, still counting something I could no longer hear.

"I know a man," Mercury said. "Not far. Thirty minutes, maybe less. He can get these off us. I’d put money on it."

She stopped the car in the middle of the empty road and turned to look at me properly. The headlights stayed on, throwing a hard white rectangle ahead of us that ended in darkness. The engine idled low. The green dashboard light held both of our faces in the same small, overexposed stage.

Behind us, the arguing had stopped.

It had been replaced by something else, in a very small space, and neither of us acknowledged it.

The soft, continuous sounds of two people who had run out of words and found another use for the dark.

"You’re going back." Mercury read it off my face. The words were flat, almost resigned. "Why?"

"She’s my sister."

Mercury stared at me. The light caught the exact moment the expression changed—disbelief, calculation, the particular stillness of someone rewriting everything they thought they knew about the person in the passenger seat.

"She is not your fucking sister, Bram. You were born outside the walls. Your mother died out there. You told me that yourself in a car."

"She’s my sister."

I didn’t put anything behind it. There was nothing I could put behind it that wouldn’t take an hour and a system in my head to explain. The words sat in the dark between us clean and absolute and completely without evidence anyone else could use.

Mercury looked at me for a long moment and swore quietly at the windscreen. The word was short and private and completely without performance.

"Fine." She dropped her hand off the wheel. The motion was sharp, final. "Then let’s go hunting for Bagins."

"You don’t have to." I turned in the seat. The bracelet answered the movement with its small, continuous weight against the bone. "All three of you can go. Find your man, get those things off, disappear. I’ll handle the rest."

Fuck. Do you think I’m leaving you on your own at the exact moment you’re most vulnerable? That is not happening.

Her thought surfaced in my head the way Venna’s did.

Her mouth hadn’t moved. She was reaching forward killing the headlights while it happened. The white rectangle ahead of us collapsed into darkness. The street lights in the distance became the only fixed points in a larger black.

"Did you say something?"

"No." She frowned at me. The dashboard light caught the expression. "Did I fucking say anything out loud?"

"No."

"Right." She sat back. The seat accepted her weight with a soft complaint.

The sounds from the back seat continued and both of us went on ignoring them. Soft. Continuous. The particular rhythm of two people who had decided the hour on their ankles was long enough for more than one kind of urgency.

"Thing is," Mercury said, "I can’t leave you out here. We’ve got what, forty five minutes? Let’s get the man his five people."

"Thank you."

"I’m not doing it for you."

I waited for another one.

Nothing came. Not a word, not a fragment, nothing at all, and I sat there in the dark reaching for a woman’s head two feet from me and getting silence.

The system said primordials. It said I could hear the minds of primordials.

So either I just heard Mercury’s, or I didn’t hear anything and I’m starting to invent things.

And I know which one of those I’d rather be true.

The knowledge sat cold under my ribs beside the weight of the silent bracelet. Outside, the empty capital continued its long, dark waiting. Somewhere in it, five people we hadn’t met yet were about to become the price of an hour.

Mercury twisted around in her seat.

There was the flat crack of a palm on somebody’s back and Trapper made a noise like something had gone through him—short, involuntary, the particular sound of air leaving a body that hadn’t planned on giving it up.

"Fuck you, bitch," he said, with no wind in it. The words were thin and flattened and completely without the volume he’d been using for the argument.

"Let’s go." She stayed turned around. The silhouette of her against the windscreen was sharp and absolute. "We don’t have time for this shit."

"She’s right," Linn said. The voice was breathless, almost cheerful under the breathlessness.

"I’m close—"

"Pull out. NOW."

Mercury opened her door. The night air came in cool and immediate, carrying the thin smell of smoke and the larger silence of a city that had stopped being a city and become something else.

I opened mine.

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