Harem Apocalypse: Every Moan Levels Us Up!

Ingrid opened the padlock and I stepped out.

My hands were free. My legs were free. Nobody put a rope on me, nobody assigned a body to walk behind me. The metal floor of the cage gave way to ordinary asphalt.

I looked at her.

She was already turning away, completely unbothered by the fact that I could run.

She isn’t careless. She’s counted.

We walked forward together.

Fire went up in front of us in long arcs, and the explosions rolled back down the street and came through the ground into my boots. The selected infected kept throwing without pause, without rhythm, without anything that looked like effort.

The rest of them stood where they’d been put. Fixed positions. The held silence of the majority while the minority did the work.

Max sat on the black horse ahead, watching a building that hadn’t given him anything yet. The radio unit under his arm. The blonde hair catching the reflected light of the fires.

I looked at it properly.

Whatever CGI had built that thing out of, it was holding. Fire came off the face of it and slid down the glass into the yard, and the yard was burning now, and the building above it was scorched and standing. The administrative lights still burned on the upper floors. The sealed windows still held.

Of course it’s holding.

Bala sat in there for years knowing exactly what was outside these walls.

Max noticed us. His eyes moved over me once, registered that I was out of the cage, and moved on, because that wasn’t tonight’s problem. His attention returned to the building and to the woman walking beside me.

They exchanged something I couldn’t read. A look. A small adjustment of her hand.

She raised her hand and dropped it.

The firing stopped.

The selected infected lowered their arms. The continuous overlapping light cut off mid-arc. The last of the fire spent itself against the scorched glass and slid down into the burning yard.

"How do you give them orders like that?" I asked. "Half of them can’t even see you."

"I don’t give them orders."

She said it with her eyes on Max, who was swinging down off the horse. The animal stood without being held. The infected opened a space around it and did not close it. Max’s boots hit the asphalt.

Then what do you do?

The question sat unfinished. The control she had demonstrated since the external stairs—the single file up the building, the held mass in the road, the emptied street, the stamping, the silence, the selected ability holders, the closed fist—had never looked like orders. It had looked like something closer to a nervous system. One body. A thousand extremities. A single decision expressed across all of them without the delay of language.

He came toward us and the crowd opened for him and closed behind, the radio unit under his arm.

They expected that building to fall in one push. It didn’t.

And the libra came back to me, whole, without warning.

Vince standing in the middle of a burning street. This building open down one side. Sherry in the road. Carrise, Sophia, Monica, Mercury, Venna, all of them on the ground.

So what puts a building like this one down, if the infected and every ability they’re carrying can’t scratch it?

The vision sat complete and cold behind the eyes. The future the libra had given us in the dark room. The open side of the headquarters. The bodies in the road. The purple hair.

Max reached us.

"What’s the plan?" Ingrid asked.

"We put everything on the weakest point." His eyes went to the front. The scorched glass. The blackened entrance. The yard still burning under the administrative lights. "The glass."

"Those doors are thicker than they look," I said. "You know that, Max. You walked through them every day for a month. You’ll spend the rest of the night on them and they might not go."

He didn’t want my input. That was clear on his face. He also didn’t have another idea, and he’d set his own clock at dawn, and dawn was coming whether he liked it or not.

"So what do you suggest?"

"Pressure on Sinn," I said. "Not the building. Sinn. He’s the only reason those doors are shut and everyone inside knows it."

This is Sinn, Lord of the walls.

His voice came out of every speaker in the district before I’d finished the sentence. The volume was controlled. The title sat at the front of the broadcast like a locked door of its own.

Max’s head came round.

This is a message for every citizen who is afraid tonight. For everyone who believes these walls are falling.

The cadence was the same formal cadence he had used when Bagins called him Lord—controlled, absolute, the particular conviction of a man who had spent the evening being called correctly and had decided the title was now the only version of himself available for public use.

Max’s eyes found the speakers and then the building and then the open air between them as if the voice itself were a physical thing that could be located and stopped.

I want you to remain calm. The walls have this in hand. I give you my word that within twenty four hours these streets will be clear, and Max Donman will be in a cell awaiting execution. No man has the right to threaten the citizens.

Max’s eyes came to mine and stayed there. The controlled face had lost a degree of its control.

"It’s the only method you’ve got," I said.

He nodded slowly. The assessment moved across the failed assault, the standing building, the voice still coming out of the speakers, and settled on the only remaining pressure point that didn’t require the glass to break.

The headquarters is secure. I remain Lord of these walls. Everything is under control.

The broadcast cut.

The silence that replaced it was absolute. The thousand infected held their positions. The fires in the yard continued without sound that reached us over the held quiet of the army. The administrative lights on the upper floors continued to burn. The doors remained closed.

Max lifted the C-shaped device off the unit. The tool that had put Bagins’ voice into every locked room and had brought four hundred men onto a road to be converted, now aimed at the same speakers Sinn had just used to name him for execution.

And I pulled my comms out of my pocket and started dialling Melissa.

Because I knew people inside that building. Pauline at her desk. The cooks in the full kitchen who had been the only people doing genuine work since the lockdown began.

Two hundred staff who had never chosen any of this and were sitting in locked rooms while a man who insisted on being called Lord told the capital that everything was under control and a blonde man in the street outside prepared to prove him wrong.

However long this takes, it ends the same way.

The only thing still being decided is how many of them are alive when it does.

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