Harem Apocalypse: Every Moan Levels Us Up!

The car came to a stop outside the building.

Bagins’ men were shouting somewhere inside it, back at whatever they’d been doing before Trapper put a net around their leader’s throat. The night had absorbed that and moved on. The loading entrance stood open under a single working light. The rest of the facility sat dark and ordinary against the larger dark of the district.

Mercury kept both hands on the wheel and looked at me.

"You never change, do you?"

I didn’t fully know what she meant. I got fragments of it.

"I genuinely can’t believe we’ve come back to this place." She shook her head at the windscreen. "And that’s exactly why everyone around you likes you, Bram."

"Why?" I opened my door. The night air came in carrying the distant organised noise of the drill. "Because I ride around with the most dangerous woman in the world?"

She laughed, short.

"No. Because you can call a vampire out of the dark to bring you fuel, and then use it to drive back to a warehouse full of lunatics run by a man with an unbalanced sack of balls, just to get one friend out."

"I followed none of that except the last part."

"His balls aren’t balanced." She got out her side. The door shut harder than it needed to.

"Balls aren’t supposed to be balanced."

"Yeah, but his are an exceptional case." She shut her door. "One of them is significantly—"

We started toward the entrance. The packed dirt of the yard gave under our boots.

"And how exactly did you get a look at them?"

"Come on." She threw a wink at me over her shoulder. "I have my methods. And you saw them yourself at the naked mansion, so you know precisely what I’m describing."

"Sadly, yes."

"Thing is." Her voice changed. The joke left it. What remained was quieter and closer to the ground. "You’re a good person, Bram."

"So are you, Mercury."

She stopped.

The entrance was ten feet ahead of us. I stopped too. The shouting from inside continued without us—boots on concrete, the rhythmic call-and-response of a drill that had no business running at this hour and was running anyway.

"No. I’m not a good person." She wasn’t smiling anymore. The light from the entrance caught the edge of her face and left the rest in shadow. "If you knew who I actually am, and what I’m supposed to do to you, I doubt you’d say that."

"What are you supposed to do to me?" A small smile came onto my face. The only defence available for a sentence that had just turned a corner I hadn’t seen coming. "Fuck me?"

"Sadly true." Her voice had gone flat and cold. "I’m supposed to fuck the hell out of you."

Supposed to.

Not want to. Supposed to.

The distinction landed clean and stayed there. Whatever sat behind the word belonged to a conversation neither of us had room for in a yard outside a warehouse full of Bagins’ men. We looked at each other for a moment. The working light hummed above the entrance. The drill continued inside without us.

Then we walked in.

The red corridor took us the way it had the first time. Low light the colour of old brick. The air warmer, thicker, carrying the continuous noise of the factory floor ahead of us. The men were shouting somewhere ahead, deep into a drill at an hour when nobody should have been drilling—hundreds of voices moving together in a rhythm that had been built in less than two days and already sounded like it had been practised for years.

I pulled the curtain aside and we stepped into the white light.

Hundreds of them on their feet with Bagins at the front.

He looked up. And every head in that room turned around to the back to see what he was looking at, and the noise died out in a wave—front ranks first, then the middle, then the back, until the silence was complete and the hard white lights from the high ceiling held hundreds of faces all oriented the same direction. Toward us.

Without a word from anybody, they opened up down the middle of the floor and made a corridor of themselves, running the length of the room to where Bagins stood. Bodies stepping left and right in a single coordinated adjustment. The scarred concrete of the factory floor appeared between them like a path that had always been there and had only been waiting for someone to need it.

We walked into it.

Mercury fell in beside me, and behind us the bodies closed the gap again as we passed, step by step, sealing the route we’d come in on. The sound was soft—boots, fabric, the low continuous shift of a crowd rearranging itself.

My eyes worked the crowd the whole way.

No blue hair. Not in the front rows. Not at the sides. Not anywhere.

The absence sat heavier with every step. Four hundred faces. None of them hers. She was either in a room I couldn’t see or she was no longer in the building at all, and neither option was available for examination while Bagins watched us close the last of the distance.

We came to the front and stopped. Bagins two metres away.

"Where are my men?" He came a step closer. The words were for us and not for the room.

"We didn’t get them."

He looked down at our legs.

Both bracelets gone. The pale bands of skin where the metal had sat were visible above our boots. He took that in without comment and brought his eyes back up.

"And where are the other two?"

"They ran."

"Good." The smile arrived and his voice dropped so only we could hear it. "So why are the two of you standing in my building?"

"Because I have something you need."

His eyes went past us, over our heads, to the four hundred men listening to a conversation they couldn’t hear. The assessment moved across the ranks and came back to my face. Whatever calculation he was running had already included the missing five bodies, the missing hour, and the fact that we had walked back in anyway.

"So the arrangement is that I hand you the girl, and you hand me whatever it is you claim to have. Is that it?"

"Yes."

"And why would I believe you?" Still quiet. The smile had thinned. "Why would I spend one more minute of tonight listening to you?"

"That’s entirely up to you."

He held my eyes for three seconds. The hard white light didn’t flicker. Behind him the front ranks waited without shifting. Mercury stood still at my shoulder. The whole warehouse seemed to hold its breath around the length of that look.

"CONTINUE THE PRACTICE." His voice filled the whole warehouse, and the room went back into motion behind us—boots, voices, the sudden return of the drill’s rhythm as if it had never stopped. The noise rose in a wave from the back ranks forward until the private conversation at the front was sealed inside it again.

Then, low again: "Follow me."

He was already walking toward the office. The same thin door. The same yellow light waiting behind it.

Four of his men peeled off the front row and started after him. He turned his head and waved them back without breaking stride. The men stopped. Whatever was about to be said in that office was not for them.

Mercury and I followed him in.