Harem Apocalypse: Every Moan Levels Us Up!

Melissa slipped out into the corridor and pulled her office door shut behind her. The latch caught with a soft, final click. Inside it, Vincent Vale was still going through the files.

She had left a dead man alone with everything CGI held on Abram Nadez and she had done it without arguing.

Why is he so obsessed with him?

She knew part of it. Abram had been involved in his death, and men who die badly come back carrying the details. But that wasn’t the whole of it. There was something underneath, older and heavier, and Vincent had never once offered it to her. The borrowed face had given her nothing but the request and the certainty that the request would be met.

That’s his business.

She started walking. The corridor stretched ahead under the same indifferent administrative lighting it had always used. The floor was polished enough to hold her reflection in broken pieces as she moved.

But it’s Bram. He’s one of the reasons I’m still breathing.

Should I actually care this much about a mortal?

She stopped in the middle of the hallway and turned her head slightly, as though the question had come from behind her. The silence of the corridor offered nothing back.

Why do I feel attached to him at all?

She wasn’t supposed to feel like that. Not about any of them. Hundreds of years watching mortals arrive and go—faces, names, the particular brief heat of lives that burned out before she had finished learning the shape of them—and none of them had ever managed to get a hand around anything in her. The detachment had been the point. The only way the centuries remained survivable.

Then a boy stood between her and a blade in a house full of bodies and asked for her life like it was worth something to him. The memory arrived complete: the angle of his shoulders, the absolute simplicity of the choice, the way the blade had stopped because he had put himself in its path. She had not asked him to. He had done it anyway.

The corridor was completely empty.

That was the strange part. There were more people inside this building. Staff who couldn’t go home, departments collapsed into each other, the entire administrative machinery of the capital pressed into these floors by the lockdown—and every corridor was deserted.

The lockdown had gone past forty eight hours and something in the population had changed. People had stopped moving around. They had found a room and stayed in it.

The only sound was her own heels on the floor. Soft. Regular. The particular rhythm of someone who still had somewhere to be.

Then a second set joined it from behind her.

She turned.

Pauline, hurrying to catch her up. The younger woman’s face was tight, the particular expression of someone who had been rehearsing a sentence and had not yet decided whether she was allowed to say it. Her heels struck the polished floor in short, urgent bursts.

"Miss Veyron."

Melissa had already stopped. "Paula. What is it?"

Pauline covered the last of the distance and stood in front of her, slightly out of breath. The air conditioning hummed above them. The empty corridor stretched away in both directions and offered no witnesses.

"Miss Veyron, please, could you tell Lord Sinn—"

"Lord?" Melissa cut straight across her. The word landed wrong. "Why are you calling him Lord?"

"It’s an order, ma’am." Pauline’s eyes went down. The submission in the gesture was new and ugly. "Anthony called him by his name in the corridor and he was put out on the street. And then—"

"Wait." Melissa stopped her again. The second interruption was harder than the first. "Wait."

She took a breath. She held Pauline’s shoulders in her attention before she put her hands on them.

"First. Don’t call me Miss. Don’t call me ma’am. You call me Melissa, exactly the way you have since the day I walked into this building."

"Things have changed so quickly," Pauline said, and her voice had a shake underneath it.

"Are you telling me Sinn has put someone outside, onto that street, with those things on it, because they said his name?"

Pauline was trembling.

"Not one person," She said quietly. "Not just one."

Melissa held on to her shoulders and said nothing for a moment. The empty corridor continued its indifferent hum.

And I have been in an office all evening arguing with Monica about the gates.

The gap between the conversation she had just finished and the one she was standing in now opened under her feet like something structural.

"What was it you needed to tell me?"

"I want him to order the cooks to prepare something else." Pauline lifted her eyes and held Melissa’s. The shake was still in her voice but the sentence itself was steady. "The stores have everything. Every kind of food is down there, all of it. And some of us can’t eat beans. We physically can’t. We’re going to starve inside a building full of food. Please."

Melissa nodded slowly. The information settled into the same cold space as the rest of it. People put outside for using a name. A full storeroom reduced to a single dish. A man who had spent the evening being called correctly while the building around him rearranged itself into something she no longer fully recognised.

She hadn’t known. Not one part of it. She had been in her office with the door closed while a man threw people out onto an infected street for using his name and rationed a full storeroom down to a single dish. The closed door had done exactly what closed doors always did. It had kept the sound out. It had not kept the facts from accumulating on the other side of it.

"I’m on my way to his office now," she said.

"Thank you."

Pauline turned and went back the way she’d come, and her heels faded down the corridor—soft, receding, the particular sound of someone returning to a sealed room because the connecting spaces were no longer safe to occupy for long. The emptiness took her and left Melissa alone again under the administrative lights.

Melissa walked to the elevator.

The doors slid open on an empty car. She stepped in and they closed behind her, and she stood alone in the small bright box watching the numbers begin to climb. The polished walls held her reflection in warped panels—striking white hair, tired eyes, the particular stillness of a woman who had just been handed more of the truth than she had asked for and was carrying it upward toward the only door that might still open for it.

I took it to Monica. I said all of it, every part, and she gave me one word back.

People.

The word sat in the ascending car with her like a third passenger. Monica’s voice.

She pulled her comms out and dialled. The metal was cool against her palm. The numbers on the panel continued their steady climb toward the floor where Sinn’s office waited with its own closed door and its own version of the evening.

"Bram." The line opened into the particular empty tone of a call that had not yet been answered. "Please pick up."

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