Harem Apocalypse: Every Moan Levels Us Up!

"Ingrid."

Her eyes came round and met mine through the bars.

"How do you know my name?"

The first words out of her.

The tone should have worried me. It didn’t. Anything was progress.

"Becky. Your sister told me about you."

She looked away, out at the infected flowing past the cart. Then she stood up and looked forward over the top of them—the pale head rising above the mass for a second, oriented on Max’s position somewhere ahead, or on the road, or on nothing that required explanation.

The cart dropped into a pothole and came back up. Her legs took it without a wobble. The welded chair waited. She sat down again.

"How do you know Becky?"

"We’re friends. Good friends." I shifted my back against the bars. "She told me you weren’t a bad person. That’s a direct quote. And so far I can confirm it."

She looked at me for a moment and then put her eyes back on the road, the way you close a door without slamming it. The attention withdrawn.

"You seem lonely," I said. "Do you have friends? Actual ones."

Nothing. The infected continued past on both sides. Empty faces. The occasional upward glance that found the cage and dropped again without interest.

She’s listening. She just isn’t answering.

"Keep quiet."

It came out as an order, not a request. The first real edge she’d put on a sentence since she asked whether to carry me or convert me on the roof. I kept quiet.

I looked right instead.

One window had a light in it. A child, small, up on somebody’s shoulders or standing on furniture, waving both arms at the infected going past. Waving. Delighted. The only moving figure in a street of dark glass. Both arms up.

A man’s arms came around him and pulled him back and the light went out. The curtain dropped. The window returned to the same absolute black as every other window on the block.

He thinks it’s a parade.

"Where’s Becky?"

The voice pulled me back.

Ingrid was looking directly at me.

"I thought you wanted me quiet."

"I asked you a question." Her voice hadn’t dropped an inch. "Where is she?"

"Okay."

She cares about Becky more than she cares about tonight.

The leverage sat clean and complete between us. The cart continued its low vibration. The feet continued their scrape.

"I know exactly where she is," I said. "And I’ll tell you all of it. On one condition."

"I don’t play games."

Her eyes went forward again, out to the moving mass. The withdrawal was faster this time—the particular motion of someone who had reached for something and been offered a transaction instead of an answer.

"Then that’s up to you."

I looked back to my right, at a street of dark windows. The procession continued past locked doors and held breath and the continuous low sound of a capital waiting to see whether the army in the street would stop at the headquarters or keep walking until there was nothing left to walk through.

Ten seconds.

"Fine." She said it to the road. "What’s the condition?"

[ Use this to establish a relationship with her. It may be useful later. ]

Relax. I know exactly what I’m doing.

"I want to see the tattoo on your neck."

She shook her head. Something started to come out of her and she kept it. Then she stood up. Looked forward once, checking the road. The pale head above the mass for a second. Max still ahead. The formation still holding.

And crouched down with her back to me, facing the rear of the cart, and turned her head so the whole of it came into the light.

I read it.

And couldn’t read it.

The letters were clean and even and every one of them belonged to a language I had never seen in my life. Not the script on any sign or file or system message I had ever been given. Small. Tight. Deliberate. A full sentence running from behind her ear across the side of her neck and into the hollow of her collarbone.

Goth.

Or something older than Goth.

"It’s beautiful," I said.

"Is it?"

Something in the way she asked it. Like nobody had ever told her. The question sat between us without armour—the first unguarded thing she had put into the air.

"Yes." I moved closer to the bars. The iron framed the side of her neck. The raised letters. The particular permanence of a sentence put on skin in a place the person wearing it would never fully see. "Can I feel it?"

A pause. The cart lurched over something in the road and settled. Her weight stayed balanced in the crouch. The infected continued past without adjusting their path.

"It’s fine."

I put my hand through and my fingers found her neck.

The letters stood up off the skin. Every curve of them, raised, deliberate, still slightly ridged after however long she’d carried them. Not ink alone. The texture of something cut and healed and left proud of the surface. Warm. The pulse under my fingertips steady and human and completely at odds with everything she had done to the street behind us.

This wasn’t done in a shop. Somebody cut these.

And she can’t see them. Not in a mirror, not properly, not the way I’m reading them right now.

Somebody wrote a sentence on a girl in a place she’d have to take on faith.

"Enough."

She stood and sat back down in her chair. The contact ended. My hand came back through the bars. The tattoo disappeared into the far side of her neck as she faced forward again. Both hands returned to her knees.

"Now tell me."

"She’s safe," I said. "She’s in the Stray town."

"What’s the Stray town?"

"A small town forty kilometres out from the capital."

"Okay."

She said it and her shoulders came down about half an inch, and if I hadn’t been watching for it I’d have missed it entirely. The release was small and absolute and completely without performance. Becky was safe. The information had landed. Whatever else the night required of her could continue from a position that no longer included the specific fear of a sister she could not reach.

"What’s the story behind it?" I asked. "The tattoo."

She leaned back in the chair and closed her eyes.

And that was the whole answer. The closed lids. The tattoo angled away again into shadow. The particular silence of someone who had paid the condition, received the information, and decided the rest of the transaction was closed.

I let it go and put my back against the metal and let the cart carry me. The pendant stayed closed in my fist against the floor. The dark windows continued.

Then it stopped.

I looked up through the roof of the cage at the open sky.

The top of the CGI headquarters stood against it, lit, close. The administrative floors. The sealed windows. The particular hard white of a building that had been in lockdown for more than a day and had kept its lights burning while the rest of the capital went dark.

The cart’s vibration ceased. The bars settled. The single star sat above the roofline as if it had been waiting for us to arrive under it.

Ingrid got to her feet.

And every infected in that street stopped walking at once.

All of them, coming to a halt in a single motion, standing in their positions in the road with the building in front of them. No ripple. No lag from the back ranks. The scrape of feet ended as if a single switch had been thrown across the whole column.

And every one of them was waiting for the next instruction from the woman standing open to the sky in the middle of a cart, and from the man on the horse somewhere ahead of both of us.

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