Harem Apocalypse: Every Moan Levels Us Up!

Daphne sat in the small bar with a glass of wine in front of her while the town threw itself a party.

The young ones had organized it, poles dragged in from somewhere and bolted to the floor, and the evening had answered.

That was the way of this place. People here wanted a reason to drink, and the new government was as good a reason as any, though nobody in that room needed one.

Days ago these same people had filled this room celebrating. Free food, free drink, and a government promising every one of them an ability. She’d stood up in the park afterward and asked them to refuse it, and they’d listened to her, every one of them, and turned it down.

And that government was gone now anyway. Pulled down in a night.

This was what they’d done with all of it.

She couldn’t decide whether that made her want to laugh or leave.

"Hey."

The waitress came round from behind her.

"Aren’t you getting up there?"

Daphne looked back. The girl had on a short maroon skirt that barely covered the tops of her thighs and a sleeveless top cut low enough to show the full line of her collarbones and the soft upper curve of her breasts. Nothing like the shapeless thing she’d worn across every shift Daphne had ever watched her work.

"No."

She turned back to the four girls on the poles. Three topless, skin shiny under the lights, breasts moving with every turn and climb. One with nothing on at all—completely bare, bare feet gripping the wood, the full length of her body on display as she spun, hips rolling, nothing left to the imagination.

"Come on." The waitress dropped into the chair opposite and glanced across the room. "Is it because of him?"

Daphne didn’t need to follow the look.

Her father was in the corner where he was always in the corner, sunk low in the chair with a glass in his hand, and he was watching the girls on the poles with his whole face open. Eyes tracking every lift of a breast, every slow roll of a hip, mouth slightly parted. Enjoying himself. Genuinely enjoying himself, the way she hadn’t seen him do in years.

"No," she said. "It’s not because of him."

She picked up her glass. The stem was cool against her fingers.

The door went and another group came through, boys and girls already loud, already halfway into the evening before they’d arrived, laughter spilling ahead of them into the heat of the room. Some of the boys already had their shirts open.

"He doesn’t remember you. You know that."

Daphne said nothing.

"He’d fuck you if he got the chance. He genuinely would. So he isn’t going to mind seeing your tits."

"Ew." She choked on the wine, the liquid catching hard in her throat, and put the glass down hard enough that it rang against the table. She turned in her chair, the wood scraping. "That was inappropriate. That was extremely inappropriate."

"Sorry. It came out wrong." The girl stood, hands already lifting as if to take the words back. "What I meant is you’re a stray girl. You were born in this town. You used to be the first person on that floor." A shrug, one shoulder rising and falling, the sleeveless top shifting with it. "What happened to you, Daph?"

Daphne let it sit.

Everything that had been her life growing up here had gone somewhere over the years, one piece at a time, and she still couldn’t name the day it left.

"Where are your friends?"

She picked the glass up again.

The girl read it, took the message, and turned toward the poles.

Sherry and May and Becky going back to the capital was the only reason Daphne had come out at all. Days. That was all it had taken to get used to having people in the house, and now the house was quiet and the bar was better than the house.

A wind came through the open door as the waitress walked away.

Strong enough to take her short maroon skirt right up above her waist in one clean lift. The fabric flipped high and stayed there for a full two or three seconds.

There was nothing at all under it. Completely bare from the waist down—smooth skin, the full curve of her ass, the dark line between her legs—mid-stride, under the lights, while she fought the skirt back down with both hands, palms pressing, fingers scrambling for the hem.

Somebody laughed. She laughed too, the sound bright and unbothered, and kept walking, the skirt finally settling again around her thighs.

That doesn’t happen.

Not the underwear. Daphne wasn’t surprised by that, not on a night like this one, in this town.

The wind.

Wind didn’t come through the stray town like that. Not in this season. Not in any season. The buildings sat too close and the whole place had spent her entire childhood being still.

She turned to the window beside her table.

The clouds had gone black.

Not evening. Black, and moving, coming down across the last of the sun with a speed that had nothing to do with weather. Smoke spreading out flat above the rooftops, closing over the sky, taking the light out of it an hour before it was due to go.

The bar didn’t notice.

Daphne looked back at her drink. Then at the room. The music still thudding. The poles still turning, bare skin still moving under the lights. Her father with his glass, face still open to the girls, eyes still following every shift of a naked hip.

Some of the boys had stripped off now too—shirts gone, chests bare, one already down to just his underwear—and the whole thing was still only starting, because half the town hadn’t arrived yet.

She picked up her glass and didn’t drink from it. The rim stayed against her lower lip, the wine untouched.

And she saw Mute come in through the back door.

Her heart went straight away, before any part of her had worked out why.

He’d been her student. She’d stood in front of that boy in a classroom at Hogsby and watched him say almost nothing for a whole term, sitting at the back with his shoulders forward.

The one crossing this bar wasn’t him. She knew it from the walk. Nobody walks into a room like that unless they’ve already decided everything about it.

Black jacket, and smoke coming off the shoulders of it in thin lines, rising and curling like he’d come down through the sky outside on his way in. The smoke didn’t catch the light the way ordinary smoke would. It simply moved with him, trailing faintly as he crossed the floor.

Nobody looked up.

Not one person in that room turned. The music kept going and the girls on the poles kept moving and the boys kept shouting, and a boy in a black jacket walked through the middle of all of it and none of them registered a thing.

Daphne watched him the whole way, and her heart climbed with every step he took, and she couldn’t make herself stand up.

He reached her table.

Pulled out the chair the waitress had been sitting in.

And sat down.

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