Harem Apocalypse: Every Moan Levels Us Up!

The rest of the rooms were clear.

Five had made it inside. All five were on the floor behind us now, and that was the whole of it. The quiet that followed felt heavier than the fighting had.

One of the rooms held a small bed. Venna and I lay on it back to back, both of us awake, both of us pretending otherwise. The mattress was thin. The sheet smelled of old soap and dust. Outside the walls of that building the apocalypse that had started a hundred years ago finally got around to reaching the last safe place anyone had built. Somewhere far off a sound rose and fell and neither of us named it.

My mind was on Sherry.

I didn’t call her. I turned it over for a long time and kept arriving at the same place. I had no idea where she was. If she was hiding, if she was pressed into a cupboard somewhere with her hand over her own mouth, a ringing comms would end her. The thought of that single sound in the wrong silence was enough to keep my hand still.

She wasn’t calling me for the same reason. That was how I knew she was alive. Sherry not calling me was the most reassuring thing that had happened all night.

"Abram." Venna turned over in the bed. The mattress shifted under the movement. Her shoulder brushed mine.

I turned to face her. In the thin light from the window her face was all soft edges and blue eyes.

"You can call me Bram."

I said it because I needed to stop thinking. Every person I cared about was inside these walls tonight, and the walls had stopped meaning anything at around the same hour I’d stopped being able to reach any of them. The names kept lining up behind my eyes and I needed them to stop.

"Do you miss her?" she asked.

"All the time."

I held her eyes in the dark. Blue, catching what little light came from the window, steady and open.

"I miss mine too." Her voice went quieter. "I cried the whole morning. It’s the first time I’ve actually let myself understand she’s gone."

"I know."

I moved a strand of blue hair off her face. The strand was soft. It stayed where I put it.

[Venna Belmonte. Source. ]

[ Extraction is now possible. ]

I read it while she kept speaking softly on the other side of it. The words hung in my vision for a second and then faded, leaving only her mouth moving and the small, careful sound of her breathing.

And something had shifted in me tonight that the system hadn’t caught up with yet.

The future is too far away to be worth this much fear.

For days I had carried the awakening like a stone in my chest. Twenty-eight days. Twenty-eight days. Every hour spent protecting people from something scheduled for a month out.

And then the infection had arrived tonight, out of nowhere, on no calendar at all, and I didn’t know if a single one of those people was still breathing. The stone had changed shape. It was still there. It just no longer sat at the front.

"I kept hoping somebody would call," Venna said. "And then you called."

Something in her eyes was pulling at me, offering a way to not think for a few hours. The look was quiet and complete and completely without demand.

I sat up and leaned back against the headboard. The wood was cool through my shirt.

"I understand it," I said.

She sat up too, settling against the headboard beside me and folding her legs under her. The mattress dipped between us.

"Do you?"

"Yeah." I looked at her. "My mother died when I was ten. I didn’t bury her. I ran. I ran as far as my legs would take me with one prayer in my mouth, to a God I’d never been introduced to."

I let it come out. The words had been waiting a long time.

"I prayed I would never have to see her again."

I had never told anyone that. Not once, in ten years. And I was telling it to a woman the system had labelled as a source thirty seconds ago. The irony of it sat somewhere behind my ribs and stayed quiet.

Venna’s face was doing something complicated. Whatever it was, she wanted to hear the rest. Her eyes didn’t leave mine.

"The whole time I was surviving out there, I had one question that never left me." I kept my eyes forward for a moment, toward the dark shape of the window. "Was my mother ever happy? Even once. Because every memory I have of her is her awake. Sitting up. Watching the door so I could sleep. I caught her crying once and she pretended she was laughing."

"Bram." Her fingers found mine. Warm. Careful.

"And underneath that one there was a worse one." My voice broke somewhere in the middle and I let it. The break was honest. "Why did she keep me. In a world where a child is a liability. Where a child is the reason you get caught. Why did she keep me."

Venna didn’t say anything. The silence she gave me was better than any answer could have been.

"I never got an answer. Ten years, no answer." I turned to look at her. "Until tonight. Until you took me into that vision and I watched her kiss a man in the sunlight and smile like nothing had ever gone wrong in her life."

I stopped, because I had said considerably more than I’d intended. The quiet after the words felt larger than the room.

"I saw my mother happy," I said. "That settled something in me I’ve been carrying since I was ten years old."

Venna didn’t answer.

She came up onto her knees and opened her arms, and I went into her, and she came into me, and neither of us said anything for a long time. Her hand moved slowly across my back, the same place, over and over—warmth and pressure and the small, steady rhythm of it. Outside the window something screamed a long way off and neither of us reacted to it. The sound belonged to a different world.

I let myself be held. I hadn’t done that in a very long time. The simple fact of another body against mine, breathing, present, was almost too much and exactly enough.

"I read everyone," Venna said eventually, her mouth near my ear. Her breath was warm against my skin. "Every person I’ve ever touched, I can walk into their past like it’s a room. People I don’t even know." Her arms tightened. "And I’ve never once seen a single day of my own."

"We’ll find it," I said. "That was the deal."

"I know." Her voice caught. "I just needed to say it out loud to somebody."

"All things work together for good," I said against her ear.

"Right."

Our hands started moving without either of us deciding.

Her palms found the back of my head. Mine found the back of her neck. And our mouths met somewhere in between, unhurried, both of us burying everything the night had put in us. The kiss was slow. Careful. The kind that doesn’t ask for more than the moment is willing to give.

Not an objective. Not a source. Not the third name on a list of four.

Just two people building a small world inside a much larger one that was beginning to end.

********

Life is fragile, and the people we love are not promised to us forever.