Harem Apocalypse: Every Moan Levels Us Up!

Mercury went into the alley ahead of me and she was fast, faster than she had any right to be after everything that night had already taken out of her. Boots striking the uneven ground. Breath tearing. The dark took her shape and gave it back in pieces.

My right palm hung down toward the concrete, charge bleeding out of it in a low steady wash, throwing white light up the walls ahead of her so she had something to run on. The light was clean and hard and cost me with every metre. It ate at me to spend it. I spent it anyway. A twisted ankle in there cost us more than the charge ever could.

"Did they turn?" she called back. The words bounced once off the close brick and came back thinner.

"No." I got it out between strides. The walls took the rest of the air. "They were still... facing... the building."

Neither of us could use our arms properly in that gap. The walls took them. We ran with our shoulders scraping brick and our elbows tucked and our feet doing every bit of the work. The scrape of fabric on stone was continuous.

The white light from my palm jumped and steadied and jumped again with each stride, throwing Mercury’s silhouette ahead of me in broken flashes.

We didn’t slow. Not once. Not for a corner, not for the narrow section that had caught her hips on the way in. The tight place arrived and she turned sideways without breaking rhythm, shoulders finding the gap, hips following, and then she was through and the light from my palm found her again.

Past Mercury’s head I could see the light at the far end. The only fixed point. The only thing that mattered.

Closer. Closer. Bigger with every stride until it stopped being a shape and became a street—yellow spill, open air, the sudden absence of brick on both sides of the body.

Mercury came out first, her left hand slapping the corner of the wall to swing herself round it, already running as she cleared it. No pause. Not half a second wasted on looking around.

I came out behind her.

She was already ahead, going hard down the middle of the road toward where we’d parked. The empty asphalt stretched under the working lights. Shopfronts dark. Nothing moving in either direction that I could see.

I went after her and opened everything up.

Eight strides and I was on her shoulder. The distance between us collapsed. My lungs burned. The bracelet on my ankle was a cold dead weight that no longer mattered because the only number left was the one on her wrist.

"The doors—" I was already passing. The words tore out of me. "Are they open?"

"Yes." She never broke rhythm. The single word was all she could spare.

I went by her at a speed I had not touched in my life. Not on the plain. Not running from the things that took my mother. Not once. The road unrolled under me. The street lights became a continuous streak of yellow. The air itself seemed to thin around the effort.

And she understood immediately, because she’d have made the same call herself. One of us reaches the car, the other one gets picked up on the way. The faster one runs. That was me.

The gap between us opened up fast. Her footsteps fell behind. Mine kept climbing.

The car came into sight exactly where we’d left it, dead centre of an empty road, a dark ordinary shape under a single street light, and I put everything I had left into the last stretch.

The final twenty metres cost more than the whole alley. My vision narrowed to the driver’s door and the handle and the single fact of reaching it.

I got the door open and dropped in. Dash still lit—green. I turned it over, threw it into reverse and went back up the road with my eyes locked on the side mirror, because turning my head cost time I didn’t have. The engine note climbed. The empty road filled the mirror and then Mercury filled it—small, driving, still coming.

The distance closed.

Mercury arrived at the door and I braked, shoved it open and threw myself across into the passenger seat as she came in over the top of me and got both hands on the wheel. The door slammed. We were moving before it had finished slamming. The lurch of acceleration threw us both back into the seats.

She was panting hard, hands and feet working the car through three things at once—gears, wheel, the continuous adjustment of a vehicle being asked for more than it wanted to give. The street lights streaked past the windows.

"What have we got?" I pulled the belt across.

It had done something for me outside Abuela’s and I wasn’t arguing with it twice in one day.

Mercury stole one glance at her wrist and put her eyes back on the road. The numbers on the screen were the only cold thing left in the car.

"One minute."

"One minute."

I could hear both our hearts in that car. Mine and hers, out of time with each other, filling the space between the engine note and the rush of air past the windows.

She took the corner anyway.

Out of time and still driving, because there was a man two minutes away and a chance was a chance. The tyres protested. The body of the car leaned hard and then corrected. The road ahead opened again under the working lights.

"Fuck."

"What?"

"It’s warning." She flicked her eyes at the dash. The fuel light sat red and indifferent among the green. "The fucking fuel."

"Can it still push?"

I looked forward. We were still moving. And we were slowing, gradually, the way a thing slows when nothing underneath it is arguing anymore. The engine note dropped. The streak of the street lights began to separate back into individual pools of yellow.

"Let’s find out."

The car rolled another twenty metres and stopped in the middle of the road. The engine died with a soft finality. The green dashboard light held for a second longer and then dimmed. Silence arrived in the cabin like something that had been waiting its turn.

And both bracelets started beeping.

The sound was small at first—two separate electronic pulses, out of time with each other, filling the sudden quiet of the stopped car. Then they found each other and began to climb.

"How long?" I already had my door open. The night air came in cold and immediate. The empty road stretched in both directions under the isolated lights.

Because her man wasn’t far. Two minutes by car meant something on foot, something with a number attached to it, and any number was better than sitting still.

"Twenty seconds," Mercury said.

Her voice was completely calm. The particular calm of someone who had already run the last of the arithmetic and found nothing left to spend.

I closed the door.

There was nothing anybody could do with twenty seconds. The latch clicked.

The beeping climbed. Faster, higher, both of them hunting the same rhythm and finding it, and the whole car went dark except for the red digits on our ankles and the small light of Mercury’s watch counting itself down. The numbers on the bracelets were the only colour left.

I looked at it.

Then I reached across and took her hand.

Her palm was slick. The contact was the only clean thing left in the hour. We’d spent it badly. Every minute of it. And whatever came out of that was ours to take. The empty road beyond the windscreen held nothing that could help us and nothing that could make it worse.

Ten. Nine. Eight. Seven. Six.

The beeping went to one continuous note—a single held electronic scream that filled the cabin and left no room for anything else.

Mercury’s hand closed hard on mine and neither of us looked at each other. We both looked straight ahead through the windscreen at an empty road.

The street lights burned in their isolated pools. The dark between them stayed dark. Somewhere far off the capital continued whatever it had become. In the car there was only the continuous note and the pressure of her fingers and the last of the numbers spending themselves.

Five.

Four.

Three.

Two.

One.

Zero.

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