Harem Apocalypse: Every Moan Levels Us Up!

I stopped. He waited until the last footsteps faded down the corridor.

"Boy." His voice dropped to something the walls couldn’t carry far. "Whatever Brown told you your role is tonight." He smoothed his coat once, unhurried. "That’s not why I asked for you specifically."

I held his gaze and said nothing. Outside the walls, people who had something real to say always got there eventually. You just had to give them the space.

"The girl has a complication. A medical one." He shifted in his chair. "A healer needs to be in close proximity during the teleportation itself. That’s why I requested two healers. One for the team. One for her."

"Okay," I said. "Why me and not Sherry?"

He almost smiled. "She won’t accept a woman. She was held by women. She won’t let one near her, not voluntarily, not in a state like this." He looked at me directly. "That’s why I need you. The girl healer is backup, in case."

He had nothing else. I nodded and walked out.

The biggest complication of all, I thought, is that everyone believes I am a healer. And they had just built an entire mission around that belief.

Whatever the girl’s actual complication was, whatever close proximity was going to involve, I was going to have to navigate it without the ability they thought I had and with the ability they didn’t know about.

One problem at a time, I told myself. The plain taught you that.

***

Sherry was waiting approximately one hundred meters from the office.

She wasn’t pretending to be passing. She was standing. Waiting. With the specific patience of someone who had questions and had decided to ask them in the corridor rather than anywhere else.

"What were you still doing in there after Miss Brown had already left?" she asked, as I reached her.

"Nothing much."

"Don’t say nothing much, Bram." Her voice was steady but there was something underneath it that wasn’t quite frustration and wasn’t quite fear.

"There’s something you don’t understand about this place." She started walking. "The only person you can trust inside this school is me."

"I trust you, Sherry."

"Then why do you hold back information from me?"

I didn’t answer. She kept walking, and the silence between us had a different texture from our usual ones. This one had weight.

"Abram Nadez." She used the full name, the way my mother used to when something mattered. "The walls are a lie and everything inside them is a lie. We both know that."

"Sherry—"

"This mission. They gave us highlights. They gave us a plan that works if nothing goes wrong. What happens if the government catches one of us standing between them and that girl?"

She was right. The consequences of failure hadn’t been mentioned. Not once. Miss Brown had given us the plan, the gold cards, the mission brief, and the door.

"The government can do anything," I said, "but they won’t ship off an ability user. We’re too valuable."

"You sound very confident for someone who’s been inside for less than a week," she said.

She had a point. I had come to that conclusion from what I’d learned, the life layer, the extraction cycle, the burn outs, the gift schools, all of it built around the specific value of gifted people inside the walls. But she was right that I was operating on four days of information in a world that had been running its own rules for decades.

We walked in silence for a moment. Then she said it.

"I saw you last night. With Mute."

Not fighting. She’d said beating. That was a specific word choice and she had made it deliberately.

"Ohh," I said.

"I don’t think you’re a healer, Bram." Her voice dropped slightly. "You’re electrokinetic. Right?"

She had assembled it from what she’d seen. The discharge. The current moving through Mute from contact. Clean, visible, explainable as electrokinesis by someone watching from a window in the dark.

"Yes," I said. "You’re right."

She nodded. Filing it. "Your secret is safe with me." A pause. "But what I still can’t work out is why you’d fight Mute at all. You’ve been here four days."

She let that sit. She wasn’t asking for an answer right now. She was telling me she had the question and would be returning to it.

I said nothing. Anything I gave her would become material for an analysis I wasn’t ready for.

"Miss Brown said rest until five," Sherry said, switching gears with the efficiency of someone who knew when to store a line of inquiry. "Final preparations before we move."

"Okay."

We continued toward our wing. The rest of Hogsby was in class, the normal afternoon routine proceeding without us, and there was something strange about walking through it knowing what the evening held.

"Bram."

I turned. Annabelle was coming down the corridor toward us, still a few meters out, moving with the particular energy of someone who had something to say and had timed their approach.

"Speak to your girlfriend," Sherry said, with the pleasant tone of someone who had decided she was done with this section of the morning. "I’ll be going." She walked ahead without waiting.

Annabelle reached me. She stood close, in the way she did now, the particular closeness of two people who had shared something that couldn’t be unreplicated.

"I wanted to talk about Isabelle," she said.

"Another day, Anna." The mission was tonight and I needed to rest and I wasn’t going to start a conversation about her sister with seven hours left before we moved.

"Yeah. Okay." She accepted it. Then: "The mission. I feel like they haven’t told us everything."

I had now been approached by two members of the team separately, both carrying questions they hadn’t raised in the office. That was information. Half a team going into a mission with private doubts was the beginning of a problem.

"Are you afraid?" I asked her.

"Yes," she said, without hesitation.

There was something I respected about that. Not performing courage she didn’t feel. Just answering the question honestly.

"Nothing is going to happen to you tonight, Anna," I said. "You’re going to come back to Hogsby. I promise."

She looked at me for a moment and then she hugged me. Not a polite one. A real one, arms around my back, the specific weight of someone who needed to be held for a minute and had decided I was the right person to be held by.

I held her back. Over her shoulder, down the corridor, Mable came out of a classroom and saw us. She looked for exactly one second, something moving across her face that I couldn’t read from that distance, and went back inside.

That’s a conversation for another day too, I thought.

"Go rest, Anna," I said, stepping back. "We’ll meet at five."

She nodded and went. I walked the rest of the way to my room alone, running inventory. Mr Kim’s private briefing. Sherry’s questions.

Annabelle’s fear. The boys I hadn’t spoken to yet, who might be carrying their own doubts in their own private corners.

Half a team uncertain before the mission even started.

This is either going to go very smoothly, I thought, opening my door, or extremely interestingly.

I lay down and closed my eyes.

Rest first. Interesting later.