Harem Apocalypse: Every Moan Levels Us Up!

We settled into the back seat. Mute took the passenger seat, which put his eyes on the rearview mirror and the mirror on us, which I noted and chose not to make a thing of.

Sherry and I were shoulder to shoulder in the back. The car was small enough that there was no version of this that involved personal space.

"Why are you telling me this now?" I asked, keeping my voice low.

"Because you’re the leader, Bram."

"Nobody said that."

"It didn’t need to be said." She kept her voice even. "I didn’t want us to get there and have someone bleeding in front of me that I can’t help."

She was right. Mr Kim had specifically requested two healers. He had built Mira’s extraction around that. And he had zero healers. He just didn’t know it yet.

"How does Miss Brown not know?" I asked. "She’s telepathic."

"One way," Sherry said. "She can send. She can’t receive. She projects but she can’t read."

"And how do you know that?"

"Because I tried to copy it." She paused. "I’m a temporary copy, Bram. I can replicate any ability I make physical contact with. That’s how the machine read me as a healer. I had contact with a healer before the assessment." She looked at her hands. "But I couldn’t copy yours. Whatever you are, I couldn’t get a read on it. That’s why I kept asking questions."

In the rearview mirror, Mute’s eyes moved to us. I watched him watch and said nothing.

"Don’t worry," I told Sherry. "Everything is under control."

"Says the man who’s never been on a mission that didn’t involve surviving zombies."

"And I always made it out."

She almost smiled. Then: "People like you wouldn’t have survived in Goth."

"I actually thought about Goth once," I said. "Heard it was safer."

"Goth was survival of the most ruthless," she said, with the flatness of someone describing weather. "Strength and politics and who you knew. If it weren’t for Max I would have died young. Probably before sixteen."

She said it without drama. The outside version of without drama, which meant she had processed it long enough to say it like a fact.

My mother had thought Goth was the safe option. She had considered it when things got bad enough. Something had stopped her, I had never known what, and now I was sitting in a car with a girl who had lived inside it and was telling me quietly that my mother’s instinct to stay away had probably been correct.

Sherry settled her head on my shoulder. 𝗳𝐫𝚎𝗲𝚠𝚎𝗯𝕟𝐨𝘃𝚎𝗹.𝗰𝗼𝗺

At first it was nothing. Just weight and proximity. Then she shifted slightly, closer without meaning to, her breath evening out against my neck. I didn’t move.

Just a matter of time, I thought. I’ll charge you.

She was asleep before the city appeared.

I sat in the dark of the moving car and felt her weight against me and thought about Max Donman at CGI headquarters, who had put her in my hands because he loved her and couldn’t come himself.

She was attached to him in the way of someone who had been saved by a person and didn’t know yet whether what they felt was love or debt or something that had started as one and become the other so slowly the border was invisible.

Not my problem tonight, I thought. Tonight has its own problems.

The city came up around us slowly, then all at once. The capital. The same streets Bala had driven us through on the first day, the tall buildings and the working lights and the people moving freely on pavements at night. Night clubs. Music coming from somewhere above street level. The specific vitality of a civilization that had decided to be alive and was doing it loudly.

I tapped Sherry awake when the car stopped.

She lifted her head, blinked, looked at the city outside the window with the expression of someone remembering where they were.

We got out.

****

Mr Kim’s man led us to a warehouse two streets back from the main road.

Empty inside. High ceilings. Screens mounted on the walls, active, showing feeds I couldn’t identify from the entrance.

[Ability destabilizers in use. Output reduced 40%.]

I stopped just inside the door.

Destabilizers. Technology that weakened ability output. Which meant whoever had built this facility had anticipated working around ability users, either their own or someone else’s. Either way they had invested in the infrastructure to manage it.

File that, I told myself.

"This is your destination," the man said, pointing at the screens. One of them showed a building exterior. The Post Apocalypse Hotel, the sign visible. "Two hundred meters. You bring her here. Mission complete."

He moved down the line of us, distributing earpieces, then masks. Not fabric masks. Face-shaped. The kind of disguise that said: the people looking for her may scan faces to look for, and yours need to not be those faces.

I put the earpiece in. It sat small and specific in my ear, a technology I had never encountered before, and I kept that off my face.

He handed us cards. White. Nothing printed on them.

"Room 34. Second floor. Show her the card, say Kim sent you. She’ll come."

She’ll come, I thought, looking at a blank white card. And she’ll trust it because Kim is the name she’s been waiting for and because her other option is staying in room 34 until the hunters find her.

The van dropped us at City Square. Open space between us and the warehouse, between us and the hotel. The driver killed the engine.

"This is as far as I go," he said. "Past this point you trigger their sensors."

We climbed out into the city night.

"I’ll hold here with the healer," Mute said. He was looking at Sherry, not me, which was professional of him given the circumstances.

"Yes," I said. "Sherry, you’re with Mute. City Square."

Sherry nodded. She and I exchanged a look that covered what words couldn’t, which was: I’m not a healer, you’re not a healer, and the guys we’re protecting don’t know that yet, so let’s not let them get hurt.

Wells, Annabelle, and I walked toward the hotel. The city moved around us. Music from above. People on the street who didn’t know and didn’t care. The Post Apocalypse Hotel was new construction in a block of older buildings, its sign lit and clean, its lobby visible through the glass. We went in.

"Elevator?" Annabelle asked.

I had no idea what that was. I kept that off my face.

"Stairs," Wells said, already moving.

Second floor, long corridor with room numbers running right.

"Let one person approach," the man said through the earpiece. "Two back. Less threatening."

Wells and Annabelle held at the stairwell. I walked the corridor, reading numbers, until I reached room 34. I knocked once.

"I’m from Kim."

Silence on the other side of the door. Then a sound. Movement. Someone deciding.

The door opened. She stepped back slowly, not in relief. In warning.

"You shouldn’t have come," she said.

Behind her— someone shifted.