Harem Apocalypse: Every Moan Levels Us Up!

I stepped out and shut the door behind me. The latch closed with a soft, final click.

Mercury was already out on the road. The night air was cooler than the car, carrying the thin, continuous smell of smoke and the larger silence of the Capital.

It was the right call. The car had to carry nine people back to that camp and it wasn’t going to do that if we drove it into something in the dark.

I came round to her side. She was crouched, turning her ankle, studying the bracelet and trying to work out why it had gone quiet. The metal sat dark against her skin.

"Do these things actually work?" She didn’t look up. The words were quiet, almost careful. "Like properly. Can one of these blow a person’s leg off?"

I glanced back at the car. Neither of the rear doors had opened yet. The dark shapes of Trapper and Linn were still inside, the windows reflecting the yellow of the street light in long, empty sheets.

"Can I be frank with you?"

I kept it low, because Trapper was a few feet away behind glass and we needed that man more than we needed anyone else tonight, and I didn’t want him hearing what I was about to say.

"Speak." Mercury stood up. The motion was sharp, impatient. "You’re starting to sound like Bagins."

"Am I?"

That landed harder than she meant it to. Somewhere far off the organised shouting of the camp continued, thinner now, worn by distance.

"Just be fucking frank with me like you always are. You don’t need to ask me for permission first."

She held my eyes while she said it, and I let it sit for a second.

She had put herself in a car with two people she didn’t know for me. She hadn’t asked a single question about it. And I still had no idea how she’d ended up in that camp in the first place, but I knew Mercury, and I knew it wasn’t somewhere she’d walked into by choice.

"I don’t think the bracelets work," I said. "I think they’re theatre."

"Mhm." She looked at me. "So do I. But why do you think it?"

"Because he kept Venna."

She waited.

"If he believed these things brought people back, he wouldn’t need her. He took her because he knew the bracelet wasn’t enough to make me come back. She’s the actual leash. This is just noise around my ankle."

"Makes sense." Mercury checked her comms. The screen lit her face for a second in cold blue and then went dark again. "And I’m still not stupid enough to test the theory. Forty one minutes."

The rear door opened and the two of them came out.

They had spent four minutes of a one hour countdown on that, which was, in fairness, a defensible use of a night like this one. Trapper’s face was still a dark, swollen map under the street light. Linn’s hair was disordered. Neither of them looked at the other as they stepped onto the asphalt.

"Are you two finished?" Mercury asked. The words were flat, almost clinical.

"Not quite," Trapper said, shutting the door.

He got a hand on Linn’s shoulder and the two of them came over. The contact was casual, proprietary, the particular ease of two people who had known each other longer than the rest of us had known either of them. Their boots struck the asphalt in soft, overlapping rhythms.

"So what’s the plan?" Linn asked, and gave nobody time to answer. The words came fast and sharp, the residual energy of the back seat still in them. "Because if you lot haven’t got one I’d genuinely rather burst with a dick inside me."

"Eww." Mercury pulled the face she pulls—nose wrinkled, mouth turned, the particular expression of someone who has just been handed information she did not request. "Nobody’s making a plan for anyone. We were waiting for your man to finish so we could make one."

She tapped Trapper on the shoulder and said something into his ear that I couldn’t hear and didn’t need to. His expression didn’t change.

"So?" Linn wasn’t letting go. Her boots shifted on the asphalt. "Are we dragging people out of their apartments? Because I don’t see one single person on this street."

"I said we need to plan it."

"What plan? You keep saying plan and there is no plan."

Mercury turned to me. The green dashboard light from the open car door caught the edge of her expression—exasperation, disbelief, the particular energy of someone who had already decided the next thirty seconds were going to be a fight.

"Where the fuck did you find this mouthy bitch?"

I didn’t answer.

Trapper and I looked at each other across the two of them and neither of us said anything, letting them fight over the same four words with a clock running that Mercury and I didn’t believe was real.

We just weren’t willing to find out. The arithmetic of that sat clean and absolute between us without either of us needing to name it.

"Girls," Trapper said.

They both stopped. The word was quiet and absolute and carried the particular weight of a man who had just decided the argument was finished.

"I’ve got a plan."

Something came loose in my chest. First useful sentence anyone had produced all night.

"Beautiful," Linn said. "Because these two zombies had nothing."

"Don’t—" Mercury caught herself, and turned to Trapper instead. The motion was sharp, deliberate. "Go on then."

"I need to talk to you about it first." He said it to Linn. The words were quiet, almost careful. His hand was still on her shoulder. The contact had changed quality—less casual, more deliberate.

And that told me everything.

Whatever his plan was, it had a serious problem inside it. A problem he’d rather discuss with the one person here he’d known before tonight, out of earshot of the rest of us.

And it was still the only plan we had.

"Okay," Linn said. The single word was clean and absolute. The residual energy of the back seat had already begun to reorganise itself around whatever he was about to tell her.

The two of them walked off down the road. Their boots struck the asphalt in soft, overlapping rhythms. The yellow pools of the street lights took them and released them one at a time. The dark between the lights swallowed the shape of the conversation before any of the words could travel back to us.

Right.

I looked at Mercury and said nothing at all.

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