Harem Apocalypse: Every Moan Levels Us Up!

Five. Four. Three. Two. One.

The beeping stopped.

I had my teeth clamped so hard my jaw hurt. The silence that replaced the continuous note was denser than the sound had been. It filled the cabin completely.

Then a click. Small, mechanical, almost polite.

And something let go of my leg.

The weight vanished. The cold band of pressure against the bone simply ceased. I looked sideways. Mercury’s eyes were shut, her whole face braced, her hand still crushing mine. The tendons in her wrist stood out. She was still waiting for the pain she had already decided how loud she was going to be about.

I looked down.

The bracelet had come off my ankle and was sitting loose on the floor of the car—dark metal, inert, the red digits dead. Hers had too. Both of them lay against the rubber mat like something that had finished its only job and had nothing left to say.

I was right.

I was right and it was never worth the certainty, because that’s exactly why he kept Venna. He knew these things wouldn’t bring anyone back. He needed something that would.

"Mercury."

She didn’t open her eyes. "What?"

"Open your eyes."

"Are we still fucking whole?"

"We’re whole. Both of us. We’re fine."

Her eyes came open and she looked down at her own ankle. She started laughing. The sound tore out of her raw and absolute and completely without control. It filled the dead car and bounced off the windscreen and came back larger.

Then she screamed. Full volume, both hands up, no thought at all for what was out there in that city listening, and I didn’t stop her. The sound was pure release—everything the hour had put into her leaving through her throat in one continuous unbroken shout. Her head went back. Her eyes shut again. The scream climbed and held and finally broke into more laughing.

"I thought I was going to lose my fucking leg." She was half out of her seat, leaning across at me, eyes wet, mouth still shaped around the last of the laugh. "I genuinely thought I was going to die of the pain. I had it all planned out. I had decided how loud I was going to be."

I heard myself shouting too, and had no memory of deciding to. The sound left me the same way hers had—unplanned, absolute, the particular noise of a body that had been holding itself ready for something that hadn’t come.

My hand was still in hers. Neither of us had let go.

"Come here."

I crossed the space and we held on to each other over the gearstick, both of us jammed sideways in a dead car in the middle of an empty road. The handbrake dug into my hip. Her shoulder pressed hard under my chin.

I could feel her heart through her chest, going as hard as mine. The two rhythms out of time with each other, filling the small space between our bodies the way the beeping had filled it a minute ago.

Neither of us said anything for a while. Neither of us let go. The empty road beyond the windscreen held its silence. The working lights continued their indifferent yellow pools. Inside the car there was only the shared heat and the gradual slowing of two heartbeats that had been preparing for the end of something and had been given, instead, a continuation.

"I love you, Bram." Her voice went into my shoulder. The words were muffled and absolute. "I fucking love you."

"I love you too, Mercury."

It came out of me without one second of thought. Clean. True. The particular truth of people who have been left in the same places too many times to pretend the bond is anything smaller than it is.

You’ll love me more when we’re moving.

The first thing she ever said to us, in a car heading for the Fallen City, when she was just the driver and I was just another passenger and neither of us knew what was coming. The sentence arrived complete and sat behind my eyes while her arms stayed locked around my back.

Sinn and the whole crew left the two of us in the Forsaken City. The two of us walked into the Safe City. The two of us were tied up and left in open sand outside the Fallen City by people who needed to be faster than us.

And tonight, again.

Every single time this world has decided to abandon somebody, it has picked the two of us together. The pattern was so clean it almost looked like design. The dead car in the middle of the empty road was only the latest room it had chosen for the lesson.

"I love you," I said again. "You’re a true friend."

She held on tighter. The pressure of her arms answered the distinction without needing it explained. Friend. The word that held everything the hour had proven and left the rest alone.

Bagins’ hour had run out somewhere in the middle of all that, and neither of us had noticed. The countdown on her wrist had gone dark. The bracelets on the floor remained inert. Venna was still in a corner two districts away with her arms around her knees. None of it reached the space between us yet.

Then she came out of the embrace and kissed me.

The contact was sudden and complete—her mouth on mine.

She dropped her head back to watch what my face did about it. Her eyes were open. Waiting. The particular look of someone who had already decided the risk was worth taking and was only checking whether the other person had decided the same.

I didn’t have a romantic interest in Mercury. The fact sat clear and undisturbed behind the kiss. I kissed her back anyway, both of us finding out what the other one felt like in the front of a broken car. Her mouth was warm. The angle was awkward over the gearstick. Neither of us adjusted it.

She came up onto her knees and worked her way across the gap between the seats until she was over me, one knee planted either side of my legs, and then she came down into me completely and started kissing me again.

The weight of her settled across my thighs and chest. Her hands found the sides of my face. The car held us both in the same small dark space while the empty road continued outside as if the two people in the front seats had simply stopped mattering to it.

I put my hands on her waist. The fabric of her top was damp under my palms. The heat of her skin came through it.

And for the first time since we walked out of that camp, I stopped calculating anything at all.

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