Harem Apocalypse: Every Moan Levels Us Up!

"What do you think those two idiots are talking about?" Mercury asked, watching Linn’s hands moving.

The street light nearest to them laid the two figures in hard relief and left their faces in soft shadow. Linn’s hands cut the air in short, sharp shapes.

Trapper’s posture was the particular stillness of a man selling something he already knew the other person didn’t want.

"No idea."

We were both leaning back against the wall with our eyes on them.

I couldn’t hear a word of it and I didn’t turn my hearing on to fix that. I was using it for something else. I’d had it running low and wide since I stepped out of the car, sweeping past them, down the length of the road, into the mouths of the side streets, into the gap between the buildings behind us.

Nothing. Which was not the same as nothing being there.

Whatever those two were saying, it wasn’t worth prying open. I could read the shape from here anyway. Trapper was selling and Linn wasn’t buying.

"Are we seriously going to hang all of this on whatever they come back with?" Mercury folded her arms. "Because frankly it doesn’t make sense."

She wasn’t wrong.

I’d known both of them about an hour, and in that hour one of them had put a net around a man’s throat in front of four hundred people and got every one of us sent out here with hardware on our legs.

But they were on the team now. And the one thing I’ve never done, on the plain or inside these walls, is decide a member of my own team is useless.

If they were with me, they were useful until they proved otherwise.

"It’d be easier to grab five people ourselves," Mercury said. "Hand them over, then spend the rest of the night working out how we get out of that camp with your sister."

"You’re right." I came off the wall. "Let’s hear what they’ve got anyway."

"Fine."

They were already walking back.

Whatever needed settling out there had been settled. Same pace, not touching, neither of them looking at the other.

"So what’s the plan?" Mercury pushed off the wall.

"Relax, lady," Linn said. The words came fast and sharp, the residual energy of the argument still in them. Her boots stopped a few feet short of us. Trapper stopped with her.

For God’s sake I’m going to punch this bitch. Say one more stupid thing.

Mercury’s voice, straight into my head, and her mouth had not moved.

That’s twice now.

And it isn’t constant. I’m not sitting inside her head, I’m catching pieces. Loud ones. Whatever she’s feeling hardest at that exact second.

Maybe it’s spreading past primordials. Maybe it’s still growing in.

Look into it.

[ Okay. ]

"So I was speaking to this beautiful goddess." Trapper glanced sideways at Linn and both of them smiled.

"Cut to the chase," Mercury said.

"I told her we can’t go round knocking on doors, breaking into houses, dragging people out of their—"

"Cut to the fucking chase." Mercury’s hands came up. The motion was sharp, absolute. "Thirty five minutes. Thirty five. And you—God."

Her voice went up the street and came back off the buildings. The echo was thin and angry and completely without the organised weight of the camp’s chanting.

I turned my head. The empty road stretched in both directions.

"Keep it down," I said.

"What?"

"Keep it down." I nodded at the dark either side of us.

Everyone shut up at once, which told me they’d all been thinking about it and none of them had wanted to be first to say it.

I let my hearing run out again. Down the road. Round the corners. Up into the buildings.

The city gave me back what it had been giving me all night. Wind moving something metal a few streets over—a loose shutter, or a sign on a single remaining hinge. A door swinging somewhere, the soft regular complaint of wood against a frame that no longer held it. Water running out of a broken pipe, the thin continuous sound of something that had been left on when the people who used it stopped being people who used things.

And under all of it, far off and impossible to place, the sound of a very large number of people moving together. Not the organised chanting of the camp. Something else.

Not here yet. Somewhere. But not here.

"Okay." Trapper straightened up, quieter now. "Linn has a crew. She knows exactly where they’re based. Which building, which floor, which room. So instead of hunting strangers across a dead city with a clock running, we go there and we take five."

"That’s good." And it was. The arithmetic of it was clean and immediate—known location, known numbers, no wasted minutes on empty doors. "How do we get five people out of them?"

"Force." A small smile. The expression sat strangely on the broken face. "Force."

"Right."

"The question isn’t how we take them." Mercury cut in, and she’d dropped her volume without being asked twice. "It’s how we trust her." She pointed at Linn. "That’s her crew. Her people. Think about it properly for one second." She turned. "How do we trust you?"

"Simple." Linn didn’t hesitate. The words came fast and clean. "One, I don’t want to fucking die. Two, those motherfuckers stood and watched Trapper’s crew net me and they ran. All of them. Not one turned round."

That’s called survival.

I didn’t say it out loud. I’d have done the same at fifteen and lived with it afterward.

"Good points." Mercury nodded slowly. "Thirdly?"

"Thirdly, I’ll put a stake through your pussy."

"Try it."

"Girls." Trapper stepped between them. The street light laid the three of them in hard relief against the larger dark. "We don’t have time for this. That’s the plan."

All right.

I looked once more down the length of the empty road behind us.

Still nothing.

That was starting to bother me more than something would have.

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