Harem Apocalypse: Every Moan Levels Us Up!

"I think those two planned this," Mercury said as we crossed the last stretch of wall. Her voice was low, almost careful. "That whole private conversation. Walking off down the road so we couldn’t hear. That was them building it."

"Why would you even think that?"

I asked it and my own heart answered before she could, going at a pace that had nothing to do with running.

Because part of me had agreed with her at the corner, the instant that latch clicked.

They walked off together and I decided it wasn’t worth prying open. I stood there with the ability to hear every word of it and I turned it the other way, down an empty road, listening for something that never came.

We reached the door.

Metal. Heavy. Set flush into the brick with no handle on this side, and no window anywhere along that whole wall at ground level. The surface was cold under my knuckles when I tested it. Somebody had chosen this building for exactly the reasons King’s crew needed—one way in, nothing to see through, nothing to force from the outside without noise and time.

I knocked.

"Don’t open it."

Linn’s voice came through, and my hearing put her in front of me like there was nothing between us at all. Clear. Close. The particular intimacy of thin attention applied to thick metal.

"Those are the ones we came in with. They’re with the professor. They came here to take you."

Mercury heard none of it. The wall was too thick and she had no ability to thin it. She stood beside me with her hand still raised, waiting on a door, her breath fogging in the cold. She watched the metal as if it might open if she stared hard enough.

And under the voices, something else.

Clippers. Metal biting into metal, twice, and then a third time somewhere further into the room. Short, decisive sounds. The particular efficiency of people who already knew the tool and the work.

Somebody in there was cutting bracelets off ankles.

So they do come off. Good to know. Wrong side of the door to know it.

"What if you were followed?" King’s voice, closer to the door than the others. Older. The same authority he’d carried on the street when he’d opened our bag of essentials. "That was a stupid thing to do, bringing anybody to this address."

"They’re not dangerous," Linn said. The words were easy. Practised. "Five minutes from now they’ll be lying in the road without legs."

Wow.

I stood there and let that finish arriving. The sentence rearranged the whole night behind it—every delay, every hesitation, every minute spent arguing under a street light while the clock ran. The cold of the metal door under my palm suddenly felt like the only solid thing left.

Mercury knocked again, harder, with the side of her fist. The sound was dull and final and didn’t travel into the room the way my hearing did.

"We slowed them down deliberately," Trapper said. His voice carried the same flat practicality it had when he’d told us he had a plan. "That was the whole point of it. We didn’t want them having any time out there once we were inside. By the time it matters, they’ll be harmless."

And there it was. The full architecture of the night, laid out by the man who built it, through a door he thought was thick enough.

The long route through the alley, the twenty minutes she claimed we were saving. The stop at the mouth of it where she couldn’t step out, planted in the gap, blocking two people behind her while the clock ran. Four minutes in the back seat. Five minutes conferring about a conversation. Nine minutes arguing in a street light.

Every single delay tonight had a name on it and I’d walked us into all of them.

You trust people too easily.

Owen’s voice, out of nowhere, from a man I’d watched die on a floor. The words arrived complete and without mercy.

"What’s happening, Bram?"

Mercury was looking at my face and reading it. The small blood at her mouth. The set of her jaw. The particular stillness of someone watching another person receive information she couldn’t hear.

"Do you remember Richard and Jenn?"

I watched her get there. It took about a second and a half—the names landing, the open sand, the rope, the water walking away from us in someone else’s hands—and something in her expression closed. The light above the door hummed once and steadied. The cold between us sharpened.

Twice now. Same arithmetic, different side of the walls. Last time we were roped together and left in open sand to cook while a man we had rescued took our food and drove away. This time we were sent the long way round in the dark with hardware on our ankles by two people who only needed to be faster than us.

That’s all it ever takes. Not stronger. Faster.

"Not again." Mercury laughed and there was nothing at all in it. The sound was short and dry and completely without the energy she’d put into punching Linn a few minutes ago.

"I still don’t think these things work."

The laugh stopped. Her eyes dropped to her ankle, then came back up. The silent band of metal sat dark against her skin under the working light.

"And if they do?" She looked down at her own ankle, then back up. The question was clean and absolute. "I’m not putting a leg on your instinct, Bram. I’m attached to both of mine."

"How long?"

She turned her wrist into the light. The screen lit her face for a second in cold blue. The numbers sat there without pity.

"Seven minutes."

I looked back down the length of the wall toward the road. The single working light threw our shadows long toward the corner we had come around. Beyond it, the empty stretch we had run. Beyond that, the mass of infected still facing their building, still held by whatever the bald girl had climbed toward. Seven minutes. No bodies. A man who has Venna sitting in a corner with her arms around her knees, waiting for me to walk back through that door with five people I do not have.

"If we get to the car," I said, "how long to your man?"

"Two minutes’ drive. Three if the road’s blocked."

She was holding herself together with visible effort and making a good job of it, and I noticed and didn’t say so. The split knuckle from Linn’s face. The particular tightness around the eyes of someone who had already run the arithmetic and found the same ugly answer I had.

"Can we make the car in three?"

"We can’t know that without running it."

We were already moving. Boots on packed dirt. The blank wall sliding past on our left. The working light falling behind us. The cold air opening ahead toward the corner and the road beyond it.

The bracelets don’t work. I’m nearly certain the bracelets don’t work.

Nearly certain is a stupid thing to bet a leg on. And I’ve got nothing else to bet.

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