Harem Apocalypse: Every Moan Levels Us Up!

Miss Brown’s office at 9:49 in the evening looked exactly like what it was. A room belonging to a woman who had stayed too long and was now sitting with the consequences of a decision she had made three days ago and hadn’t stopped turning over since.

She reached for her communication watch.

Sophia Vale’s name sat at the top of her contacts like an accusation. The person she would call if everything went wrong. She set the watch back down.

What was I thinking, she said to herself, to the empty office, to the framed certificates on the wall that had been there longer than most of her students. Essential for the safety of the school.

She said it until it sounded like a reason rather than a justification. It took three tries.

Sending students on a job for Mr Kim had been a risk she had taken with her eyes open, which was the only honest thing she could say about it. She hadn’t wanted to leave Hogsby. That was the truth at the bottom of all the other truths.

This institution was nineteen years of her life. She had turned down promotions before, endured funding cuts before, managed administrators who underestimated her before.

But Sophia Vale arriving with that specific offer at that specific moment, after Annabelle’s level jump, after the first real evidence that the research worked, had felt like being pushed out at the moment of harvest.

So she had made a deal.

Give me a healer, Kim had said, three days ago. One of your students. I’ll return them safe. Simple. Contained. A transaction.

Now it was almost ten o’clock and Kim’s man was not answering his communication device and Miss Brown was sitting in her office counting everything that could go wrong with a group of students in a city she had sent them into without full information.

She dialed Kim directly.

"Yes, Brown."

"Tell me what’s happening. Your man isn’t answering."

"My girl is safe." Kim’s voice carried the specific relief of a man who had been afraid and wasn’t anymore. "Everything is fine."

"Then why isn’t he answering?"

A pause. "Minor issue. The healer hasn’t left the room yet. They’re managing it."

"Kim." She kept her voice level with some effort. "All of my students come back. Every one of them."

"This is really on you." Kim’s tone shifted, the warmth of relief cooling into something more transactional. "I asked for one healer. You sent four additional students. That decision was yours."

She closed her eyes briefly. He wasn’t wrong and she wasn’t going to argue it.

"I needed the outsiders to accept the job," she said. "They wouldn’t have agreed to it alone. I had to make it look like a mixed team. Like it was normal." She paused. "They’re outsiders, Kim. They don’t understand how things work here yet. I needed them to trust the structure."

"The healer will be fine," Kim said. "He’s an outsider. We’ll handle it."

"That makes it more complicated, not less." Her voice sharpened. "Outsiders entering the city without CGI clearance is a serious matter. They’re not Strays. You can’t just—" She stopped herself. "Make sure every student comes back to Hogsby tonight."

"Hold on." His voice moved away from the device. "He’s calling."

The line went quiet. She sat with it, turning the weight of the evening in her hands.

Give me a healer. He heals a criminal. I get my daughter back.

That had been the whole of it. A father. A daughter. A deal that had seemed clean when Kim had presented it and was showing its edges now in the dark of an empty office.

Her watch lit up. Kim.

"Yes."

"Your boy is safe in the warehouse." He hung up.

She exhaled. Long and slow and complete. They had done it. Whatever had happened in the hotel, the team had come through it and the job was done and she could leave this office and go home and sleep knowing that the decision she had made had not cost anyone anything irreplaceable.

She walked home. Her house sat outside Hogsby’s gates, a building she had put half her life into making comfortable because the school had taken the other half and something had to give. She bathed. She ate. She went to bed with the specific peace of someone who has been afraid all evening and is now, finally, on the other side of it.

Sleep took her in under a minute.

****

Her watch alarm pulled her back out.

She reached for it without opening her eyes, read the name on the screen, and opened her eyes.

Kim. Past midnight.

"Yes," she answered, already sitting up.

"Mira is missing again."

She held the watch and said nothing for a moment.

Missing. The girl had been safe an hour ago. Kim had confirmed it himself. And now she was missing again, which meant something had happened between the warehouse and wherever she was supposed to be, something that had nothing to do with Miss Brown or Hogsby or any of the calculations she had made tonight.

"I’ve given you two days," Kim said. "Find her, or I’m closing Hogsby."

He hung up. She kept the watch to her ear for a second longer, like the line might come back. It didn’t.

She sat on the edge of her bed in the dark of her house and held the watch and tried to find the thread that connected Mira being missing again to Hogsby closing and came up with nothing that made complete sense.

But she knew Kim. She had known him for years, long enough to know that when he said something he meant it, and when he set a deadline he kept it.

Two days. Then Hogsby was gone. Seventy students. Nineteen years. The research that had just started to prove itself. All of it closing because a girl was missing somewhere in the city for the second time in one night.

She got up. Walked to her living room. On the shelf, a panel she rarely looked at, microphones connected to every room at Hogsby. She had never used them. She had installed them years ago when the campus had a security problem that eventually resolved itself, and then she had left them there and stopped thinking about them.

She found the one connected to Daphne’s room.

Daphne. The person she trusted most inside Hogsby, for reasons that had never needed to be articulated between them. The person who understood the school the way someone understands a place they chose to stay in when they could have left.

She pressed the connection and spoke before she had time to doubt it.

"Daphne." She composed herself. "If you’re awake, respond immediately."

She waited. The silence of a room at midnight, ambient and still.

She’s asleep, Miss Brown thought. Obviously she’s asleep. It’s past midnight.

"Hogsby is closing," she said anyway.

She set the microphone down. Sat in the living room in the dark. And said, very quietly, to no one:

"Sophia."

The name that had saved her from countless problems. The name she had resisted calling all evening, that now sat on her tongue like the only remaining option.

She picked up the watch.