Harem Apocalypse: Every Moan Levels Us Up!

The sound of it filled the small space of the car.

Mercury was moving above me and my hands were on her back and she was kissing me with real hunger in it.

Her weight settled fully across my thighs. The gearstick dug into my hip. Neither of us adjusted for it.

I couldn’t tell whether she’d been swept into it by the last ten minutes or whether this was something she’d been carrying for considerably longer and had finally found a night careless enough to use.

The question sat somewhere behind the heat of her mouth and didn’t get answered. My hands were on skin. Her blouse was already gone—I had no clear memory of when it had left—and the bare line of her back was warm and slightly damp under my palms.

Then my comms went off against my wrist and the light broke the dark open, bouncing off the windscreen and coming back onto both our faces in a hard blue rectangle.

The glow caught the edge of her cheekbone.

"Mer—"

She didn’t let me finish it.

She’d heard it. She’d felt the vibration against my wrist where her own hand had been a second before. And she had decided, without consulting anybody, that this was not the moment.

Her mouth came back down on mine harder, as if the sound itself were something that could be kissed out of existence.

"Mercury."

She pulled back an inch and put one finger flat across my mouth, her breathing uneven.

"Shhh."

Both her hands went to the hem of my shirt and started working it upward. The fabric caught under my arms. Whatever she had planned for the next few minutes did not involve talking and it definitely did not involve answering calls.

The comms stopped as my shirt came off over my head. The cabin returned to the softer dark of the dashboard’s residual glow. Cool air found my chest. Her hands found it a half-second later.

"Don’t say anything, Bram."

She lifted herself slightly, my legs still between hers, and her hands went down and started on something else.

Her hair fell forward across both of us.

The comms went again.

The blue light returned, harder this time.

She stopped. The stillness was complete. Her hands remained where they had been.

"You want to answer that?"

I turned my wrist over. The screen lit the name clean and absolute against the dark.

"It’s Melissa. You know I have to."

"Now?" She didn’t wait a second for an answer. "Fuck you."

She came off me and worked her way back across the seats. The loss of her weight left a sudden coolness across my chest and thighs.

"Fuck you, Bram."

I answered it.

The line opened. Mercury and I had come through more than this and we’d come through it together every single time. The Forsaken City. The Safe City. The open sand outside the Fallen City with the rope still on our wrists. We’d sort this out too. We always found a way.

And underneath all of it I preferred her exactly as she’d always been which was the one thing I couldn’t say out loud in a car this small while the blue light of the call still held both of us.

"Bram." Melissa’s voice came through while Mercury was on her knees in the driver’s seat feeling under it for her blouse. The search was noisy. Deliberate. The particular sound of someone who wanted the other person to hear exactly how much effort the recovery was costing.

"Melissa. Is everything all right?"

"No. Where are you?"

"Not far." Mercury surfaced with her blouse in one hand and gave me a middle finger with the other, still wearing nothing above the waist. The blue light from the comms caught the line of her bare shoulders and the hard shape of the gesture. She held it long enough to make sure I’d seen it. "Do you need help?"

"Sinn is out of control." Her voice was low and fast. "A man called him tonight. Said he made the infection. He called to negotiate."

"Was he called Max?"

A pause on the line. The silence carried the particular quality of someone recalculating.

"Yes. Max." Something shifted in how she said it, hearing that I already knew. The name landed differently the second time. "All he wanted was the gates opened for a handful of his people. That was the whole demand. In exchange he stops the infection. Sinn refused him."

I sat with it.

That’s not even a bad offer. That’s barely an offer at all. He asked for a gate and Sinn laughed at him.

An open gate. A closed gate behind them. The infection stopped. Sinn had looked at that and chosen the alternative—pride, the chair, the particular refusal of a man who had decided that being pushed was worse than watching the capital fill with the dead.

"There’s a great deal happening in this building," she went on. "More than I can put into a call. I think Sinn needs you. You’re one of very few people left who can say anything to him and survive it."

"Okay."

I didn’t give her more than that. Beside me, Mercury was forcing her arms through the sleeves of the blouse with more force than the fabric required.

"You need to come back to headquarters, Bram. If this spreads past the capital—"

"I know."

And I did. I’d stood in the mouth of an alley and watched hundreds of them stand still in a road, and watched one turn around and choose not to come. Whatever was out there tonight wasn’t going to be stopped by a wall or a closed bridge.

The bald girl on the stairs. The mass facing the building. The held silence of things that had been given an order. The capital was already past the point where headquarters could contain it by sitting still.

"I’ll come," I said. "In the meantime, keep working on him. Don’t stop."

"Bram."

My name came out differently—lower, the particular tone of someone adding a piece they had almost decided to hold back.

"Vince is back," Melissa said. "And I think he’s extremely interested in you. Please take care of yourself."

"Okay. Thank you."

The line disconnected. The blue light died.

I sat in the dark for a second and then looked over at Mercury.

She was dressed again. Mostly. The blouse was on and badly buttoned. Her hands were still. She was watching the windscreen the way she had watched the metal door.

"What?" Mercury said. The word was flat.

"I’ve got a plan." I reached for my shirt. The decision had arrived complete while Melissa was still talking and had only needed the line to die before it could be said out loud. "Let’s go back to Bagins’ camp."

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