Harem Apocalypse: Every Moan Levels Us Up!

We walked down the stairs together.

"I saw how you looked at Ivy," Sherry said, in the tone she used when she had noticed something and had decided to make it everyone’s business.

"Stop that."

"I mean it’s understandable, Bram. That girl is fire." She said it with the easy generosity of someone who had no personal stake in the observation. Then: "What do you think Bala wants?"

I put on my best approximation of his voice. "You’re taking too long. Level up or I’ll throw you back outside the walls."

Sherry laughed. The real kind.

"Whatever he wants," she said, "it would have been cooler to send a message than to put our names on the campus speakers like we’re students in trouble."

"We might be students in trouble," I said.

She considered that. "Fair."

***

Miss Brown was waiting outside the administrative block. The first time I’d seen her since we’d arrived at Central, and she looked like someone who had spent the morning navigating a new institution and was genuinely relieved to see two familiar faces in it.

"How are you finding it?" she asked as we reached her.

Sherry paused deliberately. "I’d say..." She let the pause do its work. "A downgrade."

Miss Brown laughed. "Can’t even disagree. You’ll get used to it." Then the professional voice came back, the one that meant the small talk was done. "You have a visitor. But first." She looked at me. "A word."

Sherry took the hint and moved a few steps away, suddenly very interested in the architecture of the administrative block.

Miss Brown stepped closer.

"You kept the Kim job quiet," she said. "Didn’t tell anyone. I noticed that."

"Okay," I said, giving her nothing.

"I need another favor." She held my eyes. "Tell Lord Bala that Hogsby registered a level up before I left. Find a way to frame it. Do that for me and I’ll reward you beyond your expectations."

I looked at her.

Beyond my expectations, I thought. From the woman who sent me into a hotel room to heal a criminal without telling me that was the plan. Her expectations of my expectations might need calibration.

I said nothing. I nodded once.

She led us down the corridor and gestured to a door standing open.

***

Lord Bala was in the chair like he’d been there long enough to own it. He gestured to the two chairs across from him without standing. We sat.

He took a minute before speaking. The minute of a man who was used to people waiting for him and had never felt the need to fill silence on anyone else’s timeline.

"How are you both doing?" he asked finally.

"We’re good," Sherry answered for both of us.

"Good. You seem to be working well together."

"Yes, sir," we said, simultaneously, which would have been funny under different circumstances.

He nodded. "The rest of your team is performing well at CGI. Max and the others have been stopping operations across the capital. The walls are stable." He said it like a report. Information delivered, box checked. "But there’s a mission that requires the two of you specifically."

I looked at Sherry briefly. She kept her eyes on Bala.

"It will involve going outside the walls," he said.

There it is, I thought.

"There’s a confidential research operation," he continued. "We need a live infected specimen. High level. We’re assigning this to you because we don’t want to disrupt the operations Max’s team is currently running."

"When?" I asked.

"Seven days."

Seven days. I ran the math automatically. The system had told me to charge. I had six days before the mission and an institution with two hundred and fifty nine ability users and dormitories I still hadn’t been shown.

"We’ll provide six ability users from this school as backup," Bala said. Then, almost as an afterthought, the way people mention things they’ve decided aren’t negotiable: "If Sophia asks about the mission, tell her you’re a team of six outsiders."

Not a request. The shape of the sentence was a request. The content was an order.

Expendables, Mute had said, in a corridor at Hogsby, on his knees with his pride in pieces. That’s what you are. All six of you.

I looked at the communication watch Bala was pulling from his pocket and thought about the plain.

He handed one watch to each of us. Small, solid, the same model Del Slater had pressed to his mouth in the detention room at Hogsby.

"Put them on. That’s how we communicate." He stood. Meeting over. "That’s all."

Before we could reach the door, a knock.

"Lord Bala. I’ve got her."

"Send her in."

Mable walked through the door.

She found me immediately, the way she always found me in rooms, and something moved in her face that she controlled before it became visible to anyone else.

"My baby." Bala’s voice changed completely. The authority stripped away, something warmer underneath it, the specific warmth of a father looking at a daughter he had been worried about and was now relieved to see.

Then: "Abram."

I turned from the doorway.

He was looking at me with the direct expression of a man issuing his third order of the meeting.

"This is my daughter. Be her protector at this school."

He said it without knowing. He said it with the complete confidence of a man who had no reason to suspect that the person he was handing his daughter’s safety to had already spent a significant amount of time in her personal space.

"Yes, sir," I said.

I turned and walked out before my face could do anything worth reading.

***

Sherry and I walked away from the administrative block in silence. The kind of silence that means two people are both calculating and have nothing useful to say until they finish.

Seven days. Outside the walls. A live high level infected. Six School Central ability users we didn’t know yet as backup.

And the system, running its own calculation in the corner of my vision:

[Outside the walls requires maximum charge. Current level insufficient for what’s coming.]

[Six days. Use them.]

Six days, I thought.

I looked at the campus around us. The students. The buildings named after a family the system had classified as unknown entities. The communication watch on my wrist that connected me to a government I still didn’t fully trust.

Six days to charge. Six days to prepare. Six days to understand what we were walking into before we walked into it.

Starting tonight, I told the system. No wasted time.