Harem Apocalypse: Every Moan Levels Us Up!

Daphne finished eating and stayed in her seat.

The restaurant had filled slightly since we arrived. Locals mostly, people with the unhurried movement of people who had nowhere urgent to be because everywhere they could be looked roughly the same. She seemed comfortable here in a way she hadn’t seemed comfortable at Hogsby, the tension she carried in the school corridors, the careful voice, the professional smile, none of it was present in this room.

I was noting that when I noticed her eyes had fixed on something.

In the far corner of the restaurant, at the counter, an elderly man sat alone over a bowl he wasn’t eating. He had the look of someone who came here regularly and ordered the same thing and sat in the same seat and nobody questioned it. Daphne hadn’t moved her eyes from him in two minutes.

"You know him?" I asked.

She came back to the table like someone surfacing from water. "Sorry." A pause. "Yes. I know him." She picked up her purse. "I think we should go."

She didn’t offer more and I didn’t push. Whatever that man meant to her lived in a room she hadn’t opened the door to yet.

She produced a small bronze card from her purse and set it on the table. I didn’t catch what was written on it. She left it without explanation, either payment or something else, and walked out. I followed.

Outside, the stray town moved around us at its own pace.

"This has to be your favorite place," I said.

"One of my favorite places," she corrected, which meant there were others and she had a whole geography of places that belonged to her in ways Hogsby didn’t.

We were halfway to the car when a woman passed us carrying a large box on her head, walking with the focused balance of someone who had done it many times and was still working hard at it.

Daphne stopped. "Wait for me, Abram."

She turned and caught up with the woman. I watched her say something, the woman hesitate, Daphne insist gently, and then Daphne took the box herself and fell into step beside her.

I leaned against the car and watched. The outside had taught me many things. How to move quietly. How to read the specific quality of different silences. How to eat quickly and sleep lightly and never stand with your back to an open space. What it had not taught me was that. The casual, unthinking impulse to stop and help a stranger carry something heavy.

My mother had it. Before the plain took everything she had left to give, she had it. I had watched it drain out of her slowly and assumed it was just what the world did to people eventually.

Daphne still had it. A burn out, living in a town she hadn’t chosen, teaching students who didn’t respect her, and she still stopped for strangers with boxes.

They reached wherever the woman was going. Another person was waiting there. The three of them talked. Daphne raised her hand and waved across the distance at me. I raised mine back, feeling slightly ridiculous and not minding it.

Hopeless people who seemed happy, I thought, looking at the street around me. The stray town had the specific texture of people who had built something out of nothing and made peace with the size of it. Street vendors. Hookers working the corner in the afternoon heat. An old man fixing something on a step. Community assembled from whatever the walls had left behind.

Daphne came back smiling, walking freely, the Hogsby version of her temporarily somewhere else.

"Sorry for making you wait," she said.

"I could have waited considerably longer," I said. "What you just did was genuinely something."

She looked at me sideways. "You talk like someone who’s seen too much."

"I have," I said.

"And you’re still functional."

"That," I said, "is currently debatable."

She laughed and opened the car. We settled in and she reached for the key.

"Do you have friends?" she asked, then caught herself. "Did you have friends. Outside."

"Not really," I said. "The outside doesn’t build much friendship. Everyone’s moving too fast in too many directions."

"Family?"

"No." My voice came out flatter than I intended. I adjusted it. "Had a mother. She died years back. Thirst, in the end."

Daphne was quiet for a moment.

"I’m so sorry, Abram."

"It’s okay, Daph."

She seemed fine with the abbreviation. Filed it away and started the car. We pulled out and got approximately one hundred meters down the road before the engine coughed and died.

"Fuck." She said it before she’d decided to say it, the specific profanity of someone who had just remembered something they should have dealt with days ago. "I forgot to refill."

I looked at the dead dashboard. Cars outside the walls were not part of my operational experience. I had no contribution to make to this situation.

"What do we do?" I asked.

"I’ve got it," she said, with the confidence of someone who was going to try the key again regardless of the evidence.

She tried the key. The car started. She laughed, genuine and delighted, the laugh of someone who had just gotten away with something.

"Yes," she said, to no one in particular, and drove.

We found a fuel station two streets over. A girl, maybe eighteen, working the pump alone. On the wall behind her a poster: Gifted Person Needed. Security Position.

Even here. Even in the stray town. A gifted person was still a different category of human being. The life layer ran on ability, the walls ran on ability, the security of every street inside every wall ran on ability, and everyone from the restaurant waitress to the fuel station girl understood that in their bones without being told.

Daphne handed over the Burn out card. The girl read it and immediately straightened.

"Thank you for your service, ma’am."

Not thank you for the payment. Thank you for the service. For what you gave before the giving ran out.

Daphne thanked her back, easy and genuine, and we drove away. I looked at her while she drove.

She was attached to these people. The rhythm of her in this town that was completely different from her rhythm in the school. There was a story here she hadn’t told me and I wasn’t going to ask for it today.

What I knew was this. She deserved to level up. Whatever she had given, whatever the extraction cycle had taken from her, she deserved to have it back. And I was the only person who could give it to her.

Adding her to the list, I thought, is going to be one of the better decisions I’ve made since crossing the life layer.

Which, given the competition, was saying something.

[Daphne: Burn out. Two full charges per climax.]

[Missed Opportunity.]

On it, trust me.