HERO HUSBAND'S APOCALYPSE HAREM
The System Chose Him
Chapter Two
Three Women, One Shelter
The blood came fast, faster than I expected, running warm down my forearm and dripping off my fingers in a rhythm I could feel more than hear, and somewhere above the ringing in my ears a woman was screaming my name like it might hold the world together.
I did not know, yet, that it was Lyra's voice. I only knew that my whole right side had gone to fire, that the barrier of pale blue light stretched thin and trembling between two women who wanted very badly to kill each other, and that if I let it fall now, one of them would die on the floor of a laboratory that still smelled faintly of antiseptic from a world that no longer existed.
That was almost an hour later, though. First, you should know how we got there.
*
I had carried Lyra the rest of the way to an old maintenance depot I used as a fallback shelter, a squat brick building with boarded windows and a door I had reinforced with scavenged rebar, and I had left her there with instructions to bar the door and not open it for anyone but me, an instruction she had accepted with far less argument than I expected from a woman who, twelve hours earlier, had threatened me with a scalpel.
"You're leaving," she'd said, not quite a question, propped against the wall with a fresh bandage on her arm and fever bright eyes that tracked me too closely for someone who was supposed to be resting.
"There's someone else. Another, "I'd struggled with the word, still, "another key. The system says I have to find her."
"The system." She'd said it like she was testing the shape of the words in her mouth. "You actually believe this thing in your head."
"I don't have a choice," I told her, which was truer than I wanted it to be. "Lock the door."
She had, and I had stood outside long enough to hear the bar drop into place before I let myself walk away, and something about that small, ordinary sound, a door closing to keep a person safe, had settled a weight into my chest I did not yet have a name for.
ORION marked the second location on the panel only I could see, a converted signal research lab two miles north, in what used to be a university science building, and it did not offer commentary on my mood, for which I was grateful.
*
The lab was worse than the tunnels, in its own way, because it still looked almost like the world before, rows of dark monitors and cracked whiteboards still covered in equations no one would ever finish, and I moved through it with the particular unease of a man walking through someone else's abandoned life.
I found her by the sound of a wrench against metal, sharp and rhythmic, coming from a room at the end of the hall where a woman with hair the color of frost, actually silvered, unnaturally pale, almost luminous in the gloom, stood on an equipment crate wrestling with the housing of what looked like a signal relay dish jury rigged onto the roof access shaft.
She heard me before I said a word. Of course she did. I would learn, later, that Nova Hale heard everything.
"Don't move," she said, without turning around, and there was a pistol in her free hand before I had finished registering the words, aimed backward over her shoulder with a precision that suggested this was not the first time she had done exactly this. "Hands where I can see them, and start explaining why you smell like Ravager blood and old fear."
"My name is Sam," I said, hands raised, because it seemed the least dangerous place to start. "I'm not here to hurt you."
"Everyone says that." She turned, finally, and her eyes, pale gray, almost silver themselves, swept over me with the cold, cataloguing precision of someone doing threat assessment math in real time. Whatever number she landed on did not lower the gun. "Eden's scouts say that too, right before they drag someone back to the Citadel in a supply crate."
"I'm not with Eden."
"That's exactly what an Eden asset would say."
BEARER TWO IDENTIFIED. NOVA HALE. TECHNICAL KEY CONFIRMED.
The panel bloomed in my vision at the worst possible moment, and something in my expression must have shifted, some flicker of a man listening to a voice she could not hear, because Nova's gun hand tightened and her whole body went very, very still.
"You're hearing something right now," she said, quiet, dangerous. "Aren't you."
"It's not what you think."
"I know exactly what it is." Her voice had gone flat, almost clinical, the fear in it buried so deep I nearly missed it. "ORION. Eden rebuilt a fragment of it two years ago and grafted it into a host, tried to use him to hunt down anyone who might still be useful to the old grid. You're a walking leash, aren't you. A puppet with a nice face so people don't run the second they see you coming."
"I didn't ask for this," I said, and heard, distantly, how much that had become the only true thing I knew how to say anymore. "I found it, it found me, this morning. I don't even understand half of what it's telling me."
"Convenient."
I am not going to win this with words, I thought, watching her finger rest, not quite on the trigger but close enough that the distance had stopped mattering, and I had just opened my mouth to try anyway when the door at the far end of the lab exploded inward off its hinges.
*
Reina Cruz came through the wreckage like something already mid-motion, a blade in each hand, dark hair whipped loose from its braid, and there was no hesitation in her at all, no assessment, no pause for questions, only the straight, terrible line of a woman who had already decided the ending of this scene before she arrived.
"Nova Hale," she said, and the name came out of her like an accusation carved into stone. "Helios Project. Systems Division. Your father's signature is on every authorization that opened that facility." She was already crossing the room, fast, faster than anyone should move over broken glass and cable. "You don't get to hide in a lab pretending you didn't help end the world."
"I was nineteen," Nova said, and for the first time her composure cracked, not into fear but into something colder, older, an argument she had clearly had with herself a thousand times in the dark. "I filed paperwork. I didn't build the reactor."
"Tell that to everyone who's dead."
Nova's gun swung toward Reina. Reina's blade was already too close for the gun to matter. And I understood, with the particular clarity that comes right before something irreversible happens, that in about two seconds one or both of these women was going to die in front of me, and that ORION's voice had gone very quiet in the back of my skull, waiting.
I did not decide to move. My body simply did it, the way it had at the flooded platform, the way, I would understand much later, it always had, in every version of me that had ever mattered.
"STOP." The word tore out of me raw and useless, because words were not going to stop a knife that was already falling, and some animal part of my brain understood that before the rest of me caught up, and I threw myself between them with my arms out like that had ever stopped anything in the history of the world.
HOST INTENT REGISTERED. DEPLOYING DEFENSIVE PROTOCOL. WARNING: UNTESTED SKILL. PHYSICAL COST UNKNOWN.
The blue light did not ask permission. It poured out of me, out of my chest, my hands, every place blood moved close to skin, and solidified into a curved wall of pale, humming light between the two of them, absorbing the downward arc of Reina's blade with a sound like a struck bell and knocking Nova's gun hand wide as the recoil of her shot went wild into the ceiling.
The cost came a half second later, and it came all at once.
It felt like every vein in my right arm had been set on fire from the inside, a pain so total it briefly erased language, and I heard myself make a sound I did not recognize as my own voice before my knees gave out and the light guttered and I hit the floor with my forearm already slicking dark with blood that had no visible wound to explain it, seeping up through unbroken skin like the barrier had borrowed it from somewhere I could not see to pay for itself.
"Sam." Lyra's voice, impossibly, from the doorway, because of course she had not stayed locked in that depot, of course she had followed the only person who had been kind to her in longer than she could remember, and she was across the room and on her knees beside me before either of the other two women had fully processed what had just happened.
"You absolute idiot," she said, and her hands were already on my arm, pressing, steady despite the tremor I could feel under her fingers, and the closeness of her, the warmth of her body angled protectively over mine, the low, furious concern in her voice, did something to the pain that had nothing to do with medicine. "What did you do."
"Bought us thirty seconds," I managed, and even through the haze of it, some reckless, exhausted part of me almost smiled at the way her jaw tightened, the way her fingers pressed just a fraction harder against my skin like she could hold me together through will alone. "Was hoping for more."
She did not answer that. She only bent lower, her hair falling forward to brush my jaw, her breath warm and quick against my temple as she worked, and for one strange, suspended moment the fight in the room seemed to recede into something distant and unimportant, replaced entirely by the fact of her hands on me, careful and certain, and the small, unguarded noise she made low in her throat when the bleeding finally began to slow under her palm.
"Don't do that again," she said, quiet, close enough that only I could hear it, and there was something underneath the anger in her voice that neither of us was ready to look at directly.
*
Reina had not lowered her blade. Nova had not lowered her gun. But both of them, I noticed, through the fog of pain, were staring at me now instead of at each other, and the silence in the room had changed shape entirely.
"He did that for her," Reina said slowly, to no one, working it out loud. "For a stranger. Didn't even flinch."
"Barrier tech," Nova said, and her voice had lost its flat certainty, replaced by something closer to real curiosity, dangerous and reluctant. "That's not Eden's design. Eden's constructs don't bleed to cast." She crouched, finally, gun still in hand but pointed at the floor now instead of at either of us, studying me the way she might study a piece of equipment that had just done something the manual said was impossible. "What are you."
VERIFICATION COMPLETE. BEARER TWO, NOVA HALE, TECHNICAL KEY, CONFIRMED. BEARER THREE, REINA CRUZ, MILITARY KEY, CONFIRMED. ALL THREE SURVIVAL KEYS NOW LOCATED.
The words rang through my skull loud enough that I flinched, and Lyra's hand tightened on my arm at the movement.
"All three," I said out loud, half to the women in front of me, half to the system that had upended my life twelve hours earlier and showed no sign of apologizing for it. "It says all three of you. You're all keys."
"Keys to what," Reina demanded.
"I don't know yet." I pushed myself up against the wall, ignoring the way the room tilted, ignoring Lyra's hand trying to hold me down. "I don't have most of the answers you want. I have a system in my head that picked me for reasons it won't explain, and it's telling me the three of you are the only thing standing between whatever's left of the world and total extinction. That's what I've got."
Nobody spoke for a long moment. Reina's blade lowered another inch. Nova's gun found its holster, slowly, like she resented the decision even as she made it.
"So what happens now," Lyra asked, still kneeling beside me, still close enough that I could feel the warmth radiating off her skin.
"Now," I said, "we don't stand in one place long enough for anyone to find us."
I had barely finished the sentence when the panel flared red across my vision, a warning shape I had not seen before, sharp and urgent.
SIGNAL INTERCEPTED. ORIGIN: EDEN CITADEL COMMUNICATIONS ARRAY.
YOUR LOCATION HAS BEEN TRIANGULATED.
ARMED PURSUIT UNIT DEPLOYED. ESTIMATED ARRIVAL: UNDER TWO HOURS.
"We have a problem," I said, and for the first time since the light had first bloomed in front of my eyes, three strangers who had, an hour ago, been ready to kill each other, all turned to look at me at exactly the same moment, waiting to see what the man the system had chosen would do next.