Harem Apocalypse: Every Moan Levels Us Up!

"The person holding them is up there." I put my finger against the inside of the shell so he could follow the line of it.

The charge was transparent enough to see through, everything outside it running slightly blue at the edges. Infected moved past the light in broken, stuttering paths.

Max turned his head and looked down the length of the building. The blonde hair caught the streetlight. His posture didn’t change—patient, unhurried, carrying the same confidence he had the first time we met, before any of us entered the walls.

An infected came at us and hit the shell and reeled off it. The impact registered as a dull pressure against the charge and nothing more. The last few men still standing out there were going down now, one after another, and coming back up wrong. The process had almost finished. The street was running out of living material to convert.

"You’re right." Bagins nodded slowly. His back stayed against the brick. The rawness in his face had settled into something tighter and more useful. "That blond head. That’s the one running them."

"His name’s Max. He made the infection."

"Then he’s the actual threat here."

"I don’t think he is."

My eyes had moved off him to the girl standing beside him.

She watched the street the way someone watches weather—present, unmoved, already past the point of needing to intervene.

I’ve never seen her. Not at CGI, not at Hogsby, not in any briefing I’ve ever read.

And Max is fighting for Goth. Goth is outside these walls.

So how did she get in here?

The question sat incomplete. The shell hummed. Outside it the conversion continued its last few conversions and then there was almost nothing left on the street that still answered to Bagins’ name.

"If we can reach him," Bagins was already building it, "and offer him what he actually wants, he isn’t a threat at all. He’s the most valuable ally in this city."

"Men like him are hard to trust. He’s not his own man, he’s bound to a group of people out there." I watched the roof. Max’s face remained turned toward the street. The bald girl hadn’t moved. "Bala took that exact gamble with Mary Stam and it put him in the ground."

"Trust me." Bagins turned to me. The tired eyes. The residual blood at the corner of his mouth from whatever had reached him before the shell. "I can handle this. We only need to get him on a call."

"I was thinking about a negotiation too." I kept my eyes up. "But my target isn’t him. It’s the girl. Without her, every one of these things out here stops being his."

"So what’s the plan?" Bagins studied my face. "Killing her?"

I didn’t answer, and I didn’t need to. The silence held the shape of the option and left it there without requiring the word.

Another infected came off the shell. The blue edge of the charge flared once and settled. The body staggered back into the mass and was absorbed by it.

"That won’t work, Abram." He said it flatly. "Look at how many are between you and that roof. Do you have his number?"

"No. But I can get it."

"Then get it and leave the rest to me."

"Okay."

I pulled my comms out and went looking for Becky.

She’d told Sherry about the infection minutes before it started. She’d stood in a corridor with her hand on my arm and told me it was life and death, and I’d put my palm on her cheek and asked her to wait. The memory arrived complete and without mercy.

"Who are you calling?" Bagins had gone twitchy. The shell hummed around both of us. An infected tested the light and reeled away. "Is that him?"

"His sister."

"You know his sister." A smile started on his mouth. The first real one since the conversion began. "This is going to be very easy for us."

"Can’t be reached."

The line went nowhere. The tone of a network that had decided this particular connection was no longer available. I lowered the comms and raised it again.

"Try again."

I tried again. Then Sherry’s. Same thing, both times. A network buckling somewhere between here and the stray town—towers down, or overloaded, or simply past the point of caring whether two people in a shell on a converted street could reach two people in a town that had already been told to stay indoors.

I dialled May.

It rang.

Probability manipulation, doing exactly what it does.

The line held. The ring continued. Outside the shell the last of Bagins’ army finished standing up wrong.

"Please pick up."

"Bram."

"How are you doing?"

"The odds you called to ask about my wellbeing are low." A pause. The particular dry accuracy of someone who had always known what the call was actually for. "But I’m good."

"That’s good to know." I brought my voice down to something normal. The shell’s light put a blue edge on Bagins’ face as he watched me. "Are you near Becky?"

"No. I’m with Daph. Becky’s outside with Sherry."

Something turned over in my chest.

Outside. The two of them, alone, in the dark, in a town nobody’s watching.

Both of them were capable. Both of them could handle almost anything that came at them.

Almost.

Vince was moving. Celestine was moving toward him. And the person I had asked May to stay near was standing outside a door in a stray town with the network failing and the night already past the point where locked doors meant what they used to mean.

"You promised me you’d stay near Sherry."

"Relax." She was already moving; I could hear it—the soft continuous sound of someone crossing a room toward a door. "They’re literally outside the door. Let me put the bitch on." A beat. "And why do you want me glued to Sherry, exactly?"

Because Sherry copies whatever is standing next to her. Because if Vince walks into that town tonight, your ability is the only thing in it that can somehow survive him.

I didn’t answer.

May didn’t push. She never does when it matters. The line stayed open. The soft sound of a door. Voices in the background—Sherry’s, then Becky’s, the particular cadence of two people who had been standing outside talking about something that was no longer theoretical.

"Hey." Becky’s voice.

"Rebecca Donman."

"My partner." Something lifted in it, and then dropped straight back down. "Bram, I’m so sorry. I tried to stop it. I was too late."

"It isn’t your fault."

We don’t have time. Bagins was in my face. The tired eyes. The residual blood. The particular urgency of a man who could still see Max on the roof and had already decided the only remaining move was a conversation. Ask her for the fucking number.

I put a hand up at him. Relax.

"It is my fault, actually." Becky’s voice went very quiet. "I stole the specimen from CGI."

And the last piece went in.

We’d stood in that sub-level looking at the glass chamber and decided the girl had a material transmutation ability, because that was the only explanation that fit. Sherry had copied it. The empty chamber. The missing specimen.

Not one of us had considered that Becky had let her out.

You had access. You had clearance. You’d been in that building for weeks.

And you came to me twice trying to say it out loud.

She had been trying to tell me she had already done the thing that would start all of this, and I had asked her to hold it until my head was in a better place.

"What’s Max doing?" Becky asked. "Have you seen him? Bram, have you met him?"

GET TO THE POINT, ABRAM.

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