Harem Apocalypse: Every Moan Levels Us Up!

"Do you think I would hand my people to somebody who has never once cared whether they lived?"

"No," I said.

"I’m telekinetic." He was looking down at the concrete now, not at either of us. "I can do a great many things without ever using my hands. So when Bagins called me tonight, I was already in the middle of something."

He let that sit. The wind at the edge of the roof moved across the open slab and did nothing to the ten infected still holding their sectors. Ingrid still faced the street.

"And what he offered me was the chance to be a follower. To stand still and wait while another man made decisions about my people—"

"You’re not a follower." Bagins stepped in with both hands out. The radio unit shifted under his arm. "You’re a partner. Exactly as Abram is a partner. That’s the whole arrangement."

Max turned to him.

And I started calculating.

Ingrid. She’s still facing the wrong way. Eight metres, maybe nine.

Becky told me she’s a good person. But if Max loses her, that thousand down there stops being anybody’s, and he’s one man on a roof.

It’s the only version where I walk off this building.

The distance. The angle. The ten bodies between me and the edge.

"Do you have an army?" Max asked him. "How many men do you actually have, Professor? Why would I want to work with you, of all the people inside these walls?"

"I don’t have an army." Bagins lifted the radio unit. "I have this. It reaches every speaker inside these walls. Every room. Every house. That’s worth more than men and you know it."

Max had already turned back to me.

"As I was saying." His voice hadn’t changed once. The same controlled volume. "I only wanted one thing tonight. To put my hands on him."

His hand was already at Bagins’ throat.

And before Bagins had even registered the contact he was off the roof, thrown across it like something weightless, straight out past the edge. No run-up. No visible strain.

One moment the failed professor was standing eighteen inches from Max with the radio unit under his arm and the residual smile still on his face. The next he was airborne, arms wheeling, the unit leaving his grip, the parapet falling away under him.

My eyes tracked him and my hands were already moving.

I saw all of it the way I always see it.

Bagins clearing the parapet with his arms wheeling, already falling. The tired face open in a shape that had not yet decided to become a scream.

Max’s eyes travelling between me and the falling man at a speed nothing human moves at—the particular wrong attention of someone who could hold two trajectories in the same second and adjust both. The ten infected standing exactly where they’d been, not one of them involved in any of this.

And Ingrid still facing down at the street.

I put everything I had into a charge and sent it at her back.

The light left my palm clean and hard and crossed the open roof in a single white line aimed at the centre of the black dress and the pale curve of the bald head above it. Eight metres. Less. The only version of the next five seconds that ended with me still standing.

I watched it cross the roof.

And stop.

The charge froze in the air three metres short of her spine—a hard white point of light suspended against the dark sky, still burning, going nowhere. Bagins stopped too, out beyond the edge, hanging in open air with his back arched and his arms still reaching for a railing that was no longer there.

The radio unit hung a metre from his hand as if the same decision that had stopped the man had stopped the object with him.

Max hadn’t even fully turned around.

He moved one hand and Bagins came back over the parapet, and the charge came back at me with something else riding inside it, and it took me off my feet and put me flat on the concrete.

The impact drove the air out of my lungs. The pendant skidded from my open hand. The reversed charge and whatever Max had put into it lit the roof slab in a single hard flash and then went out against my chest.

What is he.

He didn’t need help. He didn’t need Ingrid, he didn’t need the ten, he didn’t need the thousand in the street. He’d stopped two things in flight while looking somewhere else entirely—a falling man and a charge aimed at the only person on the roof who could unmake his army—and returned both of them to the positions he preferred without the visible effort of someone working at the edge of their ability.

I lay on my side and watched Bagins hanging in the air with his back arched, making a sound I hadn’t heard a man make before. Not a scream. Something thinner. The particular noise of a body that had already understood the next part and was only waiting for the physics to finish arriving.

Both of Max’s hands came up, palms toward him.

I sent another charge and it went wide, well clear of where I’d aimed it. The light left my hand and curved—not from my decision, from his—and spent itself against the parapet ten metres from Ingrid’s back. She still hadn’t turned around.

Max moved his hands apart.

And Bagins came apart with them.

Everything that had been a man went across the roof and down the concrete—the tired face, the grey at the temples, the residual blood, the residual smile, the body that had walked out of a warehouse with four hundred men and a broadcast device and the genuine joy of someone who thought the night had finally given him a direction.

The radio unit landed somewhere in the middle of it and skidded, the machine tumbling once across the slab and stopping against the boot of one of the evenly spaced infected. The infected did not look down.

There’s no coming back from that. There’s nothing left of him to come back into.

Max turned toward me.

His hand came round, fingers working, and I came up off the ground into the air. No contact. The pressure closed around my throat from the inside and the outside at once—something with no fingers and no temperature finding the exact architecture of a living neck and beginning to close it.

My hand went to my throat and found nothing to pull against. Only the skin and the absolute fact of the pressure.

He was choking me, and I could feel it as pressure and as pain, real pain, something closing that had no fingers on it at all. The roof slab dropped away under my boots. The night air at this height moved across my face without giving me any of itself to use.

The ten infected continued to hold their sectors. Ingrid continued to face the street. The pendant lay open on the concrete where it had fallen, Becky and Sherry looking up at a sky they could no longer see.

"Do you know how much I hate you?" he asked.

His fingers moved again and I felt my body start to give way from somewhere deep inside it—not the throat alone, something lower, the particular wrong sensation of a structure that had always held beginning to consider the alternative. Vision narrowed. The hard white of the street lights below became a single continuous blur.

I forced the words up through a throat that wasn’t opening.

"It... is raining... in Goth."

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