Harem Apocalypse: Every Moan Levels Us Up!

Ingrid stepped down off the cart.

She moved around through the infected, threading between bodies that were shaking themselves into a frenzy, and came round to my side. She stopped beside my cage and looked forward at something I couldn’t see from in here.

Max. She’s watching Max.

The infected were not moving from their positions, but the noise coming off them and the tremor running through the whole mass said everything about what they’d been brought here for.

Then they began stamping.

A thousand feet coming down on asphalt at once, and I knew the sound of that ground under my own boots. I’d crossed it every morning for days. Come through those doors, past Pauline at reception, up to the fourth floor.

And tonight I’m arriving in a cage.

Ingrid raised her right hand.

The noise died.

It went out from the front in a wave, back through the crowd, past the cart and away behind me until the whole street was silent. The stamping ended as if a single switch had been thrown. The tremor in the mass held but did not express itself.

They can’t see her.

Most of them are facing the other way. Some are a hundred metres back. She lifted a hand and every one of them stopped.

There was no logic in it that I could reach.

One thing was clear enough. Max was opening those doors tonight, and whether they opened from the inside was the only part still undecided.

Ingrid breathed in and let it out and kept her eyes forward.

This isn’t nerves. This is a woman arriving at something she’s been building toward for years.

The shoulders. The stillness. The particular absolute attention of someone who had walked hundreds of infected across a capital for a single building and a single man inside it, and had just put the last piece of the formation in place.

[ Whatever happens tonight will not stop the awakening. ]

The system, keeping me pointed. The messages arrived clean and private under the held silence of the street.

[ It is a distraction, nothing more. Your best odds of marking and extracting the remaining targets are from inside a prison. ]

That is not encouraging.

[ If Max overthrows Sinn, ensure he moves against the primordial families. ]

And how does that work? They’ll fight. Sophia would burn this city before she let anyone put a hand on her.

A sharp electronic sound cut across the night.

Bagins’ radio unit, live, hunting for its frequency in the silence.

[ They will not resist arrest. Their victory is not fighting. It is waiting for the day. ]

[ When it comes, they will have the numbers, and they will take everything. ]

I sat with that while it dumped itself into me.

This system wanted me here.

Here, in a cage, on the winning side of whatever happens next.

And the worst part was that it was right. Some of those women could take a room apart without standing up. But what does any of that do against an army that’s already dead?

"My name is Max Donman."

His voice came out of every speaker in the district at once. The volume was controlled. The cadence was the same finished cadence he had used on the roof.

"I know all of you can hear me. But this is not your message. This is for the people inside the headquarters."

"What’s your name?"

Ingrid asked it without turning her head. The question sat between us under the broadcast, private, almost careful.

I looked at her. Her eyes were forward and there wasn’t an infected within reach of her voice.

"Abram."

"Abram. Do you have people you love?"

"Yes."

"Then you understand. This is what we do for the people we love." Still facing the building. The words arrived without armour—the same unguarded quality that had appeared when she asked if the tattoo was beautiful. "You asked what the words on my neck mean."

She paused. Max’s voice continued from the speakers. Ingrid’s voice stayed under it, quieter, meant for the bars and the prisoner behind them.

"They mean I will repay my debt."

"I’m going to count to ten," Max said. "If those doors are still closed when I finish, I will take that as your permission to open them ourselves."

"I was dying in the streets of Goth," Ingrid said. "Nine years old. And the Donmans picked me up and gave me a life."

The two voices occupied the same air without touching.

"To anyone inside who has no interest in dying alongside Sinn for reasons that were never explained to you, I’m giving you one final chance. Open the doors and bring him out to me."

"This is the smallest possible thing I can do to pay that back." Her voice didn’t move at all. "I don’t expect you to understand it."

"I understand it," I said.

And I did. Better than she’d ever believe.

Ingrid raised her right hand.

Max started counting.

And with every number, one of her fingers moved.

Out to my right, small groups of the infected shifted forward and turned to face the building. Not the whole crowd. Selected ones, pulled out of the mass in ones and twos—bodies that moved with a different precision, a different readiness, the particular orientation of things that still carried the shape of an ability even after everything else had been taken. They came out of the ranks the way tools come out of a case.

Ability holders.

She knows which ones. Out of a thousand, she knows exactly which ones.

"Seven. Eight. Nine."

They came into position with their arms up and back, hands open, loaded like men about to throw. The street lights caught the open palms and the set of the shoulders.

The rest of the mass held its silence and its stillness and its absolute attention on the building. Ingrid’s fingers continued their count.

"Ten."

Ingrid closed her hand into a fist.

And the whole street lit.

Fire went up off the road in a dozen arcs at once, and things that weren’t fire went with it, blue and white and something that made no light at all, all of it converging on the front of the building I’d walked into every morning for a week.

The light was wrong—too clean, too deliberate, the same quality as the fireballs that had come off the roof when Max and Ingrid had spent the first of their attention on Bagins’ army.

The explosions came back down the street and shook the cart under me. The bars sang. The metal floor jumped.

Ingrid turned her head and looked at me through the bars for the first time since she’d stood up.

The young face. The full attention.

"Do you want to see it?" she asked.

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