Harem Apocalypse: Every Moan Levels Us Up!

The door banged shut behind Mercury and the dark took everything.

Outside, the shouting dropped away to almost nothing, and for a second the whole world was two people breathing hard through their mouths in a space neither of them could see.

The air was close and still and carried the residual smell of dust and something older—wood, closed rooms, the particular staleness of a place that had not been opened from the street in a long time.

"Is he." Venna’s voice came out uneven. "Is he going to be all right?"

"Yeah."

Mercury lit her comms and the screen carved out a small circle of the world—cold blue against the absolute dark, finding the edge of Venna’s face, the blue hair, the set of a jaw that had not yet accepted the instruction to stay put.

The door behind them was solid under Mercury’s shoulder. Outside it the continuous wet noise of the street continued without either of them.

"Then why did he tell us to run?"

"Because it’s a bad fight." Mercury kept her eyes on the door. The blue light held the grain of the wood and the thin gap at the threshold where the street’s noise still leaked through. "He told us to run because he thinks they might win."

"Then why didn’t he come with us?" Venna wasn’t accepting it. The words came faster, sharper, the particular urgency of someone who had been given one job and was already rewriting it. "He could have run. He was standing right there, nobody could have stopped him."

"I don’t know."

Mercury killed the screen. The dark returned complete. The two of them stood inside it with the sound of their own breathing and the thinner sound of the street beyond the door and the particular held silence of two people who had just been told to survive and were already arguing with the instruction.

"We should go back out. He needs us."

"Venna."

"What could he have done differently if it was one of us out there?" She was already at the door. The handle found her hand in the dark. "Because I don’t think he’d be standing in the dark hiding while somebody he cared about—"

"Girl." Mercury’s voice came up. "Something must be itching between your legs. Maybe you want them ripped apart out there. You should be on your knees thanking whoever you thank that you’re not on that street right now, because most of the men we walked in with are probably infected by this point."

Something hit the door.

Hard, like it had been thrown rather than swung, and the sound went through the whole space and came back at them from somewhere deep behind.

An echo.

A long one. The impact travelled past the two of them and kept going—down a length of air that no shop storeroom should have held, bouncing off surfaces that were further away than any back wall had a right to be, returning thinner and later than the size of the dark had suggested.

"Is that door locked?" Venna asked.

"Did you hear that?" Mercury didn’t answer her question. The street’s noise beyond the door continued.

"Hear what?"

"That." She turned the torch on and swept it out ahead of them. The beam cut a hard white path through the dark and found no wall where a wall should have been. Dust hung in the light. The floor continued. The air continued. "This isn’t a room."

It wasn’t.

The light went out and kept going, past where any wall should have been, running down a corridor until it hit a bend and stopped. Brick. Old paint. The particular narrow geometry of a passage that had been built to connect things and had been forgotten by the street above it.

A shop doesn’t have this.

"We’re not staying here." Mercury was already moving. The torch beam swung ahead of her boots.

Venna didn’t argue. Whatever was down that corridor, it was further from the street, and further from the street was the only direction that meant anything tonight. Her boots found the same rhythm.

"You shouldn’t worry about Bram," Mercury said as they walked. "He always finds a way through. It’s genuinely irritating."

Venna caught up with her. The corridor narrowed and then opened again. The torch found another stretch of brick and the suggestion of another bend beyond it.

"I know he’s your brother." Mercury kept the light moving—floor, walls, the places where a body could be waiting in the dark without the courtesy of announcing itself. "But you don’t actually know much about him."

"I know enough."

"Right. Enough from a funeral and a walk to Bagins’ camp." She stepped over something without looking down—debris, or a dropped object, or the particular anonymous shape of a thing that had been left in a forgotten corridor and had stopped mattering to anyone who used it. "Don’t act like you care more than you do."

There. Do that. Keep doing that.

Because if she keeps arguing with you she isn’t listening to the street, and if you keep insulting her you aren’t either.

Mercury kept the torch moving. Venna kept matching her pace.

"I was with Bram for two full days," Venna said. "We fought together. We survived a building together. We fucked."

"Wait."

Mercury stopped dead and the torch beam stopped with her. The hard white light held a section of brick and the dust hanging in it and the sudden absolute stillness of someone who had just been handed information that refused to sit correctly against everything else they knew.

"You did what?"

"We slept together. And not once."

"Aren’t you two siblings?"

"We didn’t know at the time."

"Brother fucker." Mercury started walking again and the torch swung forward.

Good. Talk about anything. Talk about that.

The corridor ran on and turned again and then ended at a door.

A wooden one, ordinary, with a handle.

And light underneath it.

Both of them saw it at the same time and neither of them said anything about it. The torch beam found the grain of the wood and the thin yellow line at the threshold and the particular fact of a lit room at the end of a dark forgotten passage while the capital converted itself in the street above.

Mercury put her hand on the handle. The wood was warm. Someone had been using this room. Recently enough that the light was still on.

She pushed it open.

A bedroom.

Somebody’s actual bedroom, lit low, lived in—a bed, a chair, the small ordinary debris of a life that had been interrupted and had not yet been given permission to resume. The light came from a lamp on a table beside the bed.

The air was warmer than the corridor.

Mercury’s torch found a face she knew.

Asleep on the bed with nothing on. One leg stretched out flat across the mattress, the other bent up at the knee, and a fortnight of regrowth showing between them. Breasts lay natural and heavy against her ribs, nipples the same darker tone as the new growth between her legs.

The face turned toward the door as if the sound of the handle had already begun to pull her up through whatever she had been dreaming.

Her eyes opened and came straight to Mercury’s.

"You zombie," she said.

Venna shut the door behind them. The latch caught.

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