Otherworld Harem

The first thing I remember is the taste of copper and dirt. The second is her boot on my chest.

"Don't move." Her voice was low, rough, like gravel rolling downhill. "If you're bit, I'm putting you down before you finish blinking."

I wasn't bit. I was pretty sure I wasn't bit. My head throbbed and my mouth tasted like I'd been chewing on a penny, but nothing on me felt torn open. I tried to say so. What came out was a wet cough.

The boot pressed harder. I got a good look at her from the ground up. Scuffed leather, a knife strapped to her thigh, a jacket that had seen better decades. Her hair was pulled back so tight it looked painful. She had a scar cutting through one eyebrow and eyes the color of dishwater. Not pretty eyes. Watchful eyes. The kind that had already decided I was a problem.

"I asked you a question," she said.

"You didn't ask a question. You made a threat."

Something flickered across her face. Surprise, maybe. Or annoyance that I could still form sentences.

"Same thing out here," she said. But she lifted her boot.

I sat up slow, hands where she could see them. The world swam for a second, then settled. We were in what used to be a parking lot. Weeds cracked through the asphalt in thick green veins. Beyond that, a strip mall with half its windows gone and a faded sign that read NAILS · SPA · VACANCY. The sky was the color of old milk. Somewhere behind me, water dripped.

"You alone?" she asked.

"I don't know."

She stared at me.

"I mean it," I said. "I don't know where I am. I don't know how I got here. I don't even know my name."

The knife was in her hand before I finished the sentence. I hadn't seen her draw it. That was the kind of thing I noticed, apparently, even with a head full of static. She crouched in front of me and turned my chin with two fingers, tilting my head left, then right. Looking for blood, bruises, the telltale gray of infection creeping up the neck.

"Head wound," she muttered. "Back of your skull's got a knot the size of a walnut."

"That would explain the everything."

She let go of my face and stood. I stayed sitting. Standing felt like a commitment I wasn't ready to make.

"You came from the east," she said. "That's where the horde was two days ago. If you walked out of there alive, you're either lucky or lying."

"I'm not lying."

"Then you're lucky." She wiped the knife on her jeans and sheathed it. "Lucky gets people killed. Mine, specifically."

She started walking. Not toward me. Away, toward the strip mall, her boots crunching on broken glass. I watched her go and understood, with a clarity that cut through the fog in my skull, that if she left, I would die here. Not today, maybe. But soon. I didn't know how I knew that. I just knew.

"Wait."

She didn't stop.

"I can carry things," I said. "I can keep watch. I can shut up and follow orders."

She stopped. Turned. The look she gave me was the look you give a stray dog that's been hanging around your porch. Weighing the cost of feeding it against the cost of chasing it off.

"You can shut up and follow orders?"

"Yes."

"Prove it. Don't talk again until I tell you to."

She walked. I got up and followed.

Her name was Reyes. I learned that an hour later, when we reached her camp, a hollowed-out laundromat with the windows boarded and a fire pit made from a washing machine drum. She didn't offer the information. A second woman did, a wiry redhead with a shotgun across her knees who took one look at me and said, "Reyes, what the hell is that?"

"That's a stray," Reyes said. "He's got amnesia. Or he's a liar. Either way he's useful until he's not."

"Amnesia." The redhead laughed, a short, ugly sound. "Sure. And I'm the queen of England."

"Marisol," Reyes said, and the redhead shut up. Just like that. I filed that away.

They gave me a corner. A blanket that smelled like mildew. A can of beans and a plastic spoon. I ate the beans cold while the two of them talked in low voices on the other side of the room. I caught maybe every fourth word. *Route. Supplies. The kid.* That last one made me look up. There was no kid in the room.

I didn't ask. I'd promised to shut up.

The beans were the best thing I'd ever tasted. That was a fact I couldn't verify, since I couldn't remember any other meal, but my body knew it. My body knew a lot of things my brain didn't. It knew how to hold a knife. It knew to sit with my back to the wall and my eyes on the door. When Marisol tossed me a canteen, my hands caught it before I'd decided to move. Reflexes like that don't come from nowhere.

So I wasn't nobody. I was somebody who'd been erased. The question was who, and why, and whether the answer would get me killed before I found it.

That night I dreamed of a woman's voice. Not Reyes. Not Marisol. Someone softer, saying a name I couldn't hold onto, the syllables slipping through my fingers like water. I woke with my heart pounding and the fire burned down to embers and Reyes watching me from across the room.

"You were talking in your sleep," she said.

"What did I say?"

"Nothing that made sense." She poked the fire with a stick. Sparks climbed into the dark. "Get up. It's your watch."

I got up. My head still hurt. My mouth still tasted like copper. But I took the stick she handed me and I sat by the door and I watched the black street through a crack in the boards, and I thought: *this is the first thing I've done on purpose since I woke up.*

It felt like something. I didn't know what yet.

Behind me, Reyes settled onto her blanket with her back to me, which meant either she'd decided I wasn't a threat or she'd decided I wasn't worth worrying about. I wasn't sure which one bothered me more.

An hour before dawn, I saw movement on the street. Three shapes, hunched and shambling, drawn by the smell of smoke. I watched them pass. They didn't stop.

But one of them turned its head toward the laundromat. And for a second, in the gray light, I could've sworn it was looking right at me.