Chapter 17: The Safe Zone

  The castle ruins appeared at the end of a lane that had been ordinary Hampshire two days ago and was something else now.

  The walls were the first thing — original stone on the lower sections, dark and old, but rising above that into something that shouldn't have been there yet. The upper courses were a material that caught the fading evening light differently, grey-black with a faint iridescent quality, like bismuth but denser, the surface too regular to be stone and too textured to be metal. The System had been busy. Whatever the Pact had started here, it had accelerated in ways that stone and mortar couldn't have managed in thirty-eight hours.

  Above the gatehouse, a faint light pulsed once, slowly, like a breath.

  "What the flying fuck is this?" She frowned, spent a solid moment thinking things through and then nonchalantly continued.

  There were two figures at the gate. One in military fatigues, rifle slung. One in gear that was harder to categorise — layered, practical, with the particular assembled quality of someone who had thought carefully about what they'd want if the world ended. Both of them were watching the lane.

  The one in fatigues stepped forward as they approached.

  Then stopped.

  "Sarge?"

  He was young — mid-twenties, broad-shouldered, with the slightly startled expression of someone whose brain had just revised several assumptions at once. He looked at Martinez. Looked at the sword on her hip. Looked at Bright.

  "Holy shit," he said. "It's the Sarge. And—" his eyes found the pack, found Cherry's head visible above the zip. "—and the sex doll kid."

  Martinez's expression did not change. "Corporal Hayes."

  "We thought you were—I mean the convoy—" He pulled himself together, visibly. "We didn't know you'd made it. The captain's going to—yeah. Come on. Both of you." He glanced at Bright again. "You too, mate."

  The second guard, the one in the layered gear, had said nothing through this. She was looking at Wolfsbane with the focused attention of someone who recognised what they were seeing. As they passed through the gate she fell into step beside them.

  "That's a unique," she said. Not a question.

  "Yes," Martinez said.

  "Can I—"

  "No."

  The girl nodded, unbothered, and peeled off toward a cluster of similarly-equipped people near one of the System structures.

  They followed Hayes inside.

  The interior of the safe zone was larger than the outside suggested it should be, which Bright felt could house thousands of people. The original castle grounds had been expanded — cleared ground, levelled, the old foundations either removed or built over. The bismuth-grey material formed three complete structures along the eastern wall, cube-shaped, precise, their surfaces unmarked by weather because they hadn't existed long enough to be marked by anything. Between them, older stone buildings in various states of clearance — people working in the dimming evening light, shifting rubble, carrying materials, doing the specific focused work of people who had decided to keep buys.

  "What are those," Bright directed his question towards Hayes.

  "Hm? Oh, think of those as System vending machines. Crystals in, stuff out."

  The System machines were positioned near the central structure. Four of them, roughly the size of industrial vending units, their surfaces covered in a grid of input slots and output panels. A queue of people waited at each one, hands full of mana crystals — some offering them up, receiving food, water, equipment in return, the crystals disappearing into the machine and something else coming out the other side. Bright watched a woman hand over six crystals and receive a sealed water container and two wrapped packages that might have been food. The exchange was efficient. Systematised. It had the quality of something that had been working long enough for people to trust it, which in this context probably meant 24 hours or less.

  At the far end of the central structure, there were tunnel entrances that descended into the ground. Subterranean by first glance. The entrances were spaced regularly along the interior wall, each one lit from below, and from the nearest one came the sound of many people at close quarters — conversation, a child, the ambient noise of a community that had found a temporary floor under its feet.

  Bright looked at all of it and said nothing for a moment.

  "How many people Hayes?" Martinez asked, reading his expression.

  "Around Two thousand."

  "Where did they all come from?" Bright asked.

  "Everywhere between here and Basingstoke, from what I can tell." Hayes had been moving them steadily toward the main structure. "Word got out somehow. People just started arriving yesterday evening shortly after we found this place and they haven't stopped since." He glanced back. "Captain's inside. Kid, you can come with me and—"

  "It's fine Hayes, he'll come with me. Let's go, Bright." Martinez cut him off and headed in.

  The main structure's interior was one large room with a ceiling higher than the outside suggested. More bismuth-grey walls, a floor that had been levelled and sealed with the same material. Maps on one wall — physical maps, printed and pinned, covered in markings. A table with radios and equipment. Several people working at it, two of them in military uniform, one in civilian clothes who had the focused efficiency of someone who had done logistics before this and was doing it now.

  The captain was at the map wall.

  He looked exactly as he had on the convoy, which was to say exhausted and operational in the particular way of someone who had stopped processing what was happening and was simply responding to it. He turned when they came in and his face did something brief and human before returning to its default.

  "Martinez." He crossed the room. Looked her over — the sword, the dress, the jacket, the boots. Didn't comment on any of it. "Thought we'd lost you in the Broodmother attack."

  "Nearly," she said.

  He looked at Bright. "Nokks, was it? Glad to see you made it."

  "Yes, sir."

  The captain's eyes moved to the pack, to Cherry's head above the zip, back to Bright's face. He'd clearly filed Cherry in the same category he'd filed her on the convoy — present, not a problem, not relevant to current priorities — and moved on without comment. "You two came in together?"

  "Yes Sir. He found me after the Broodmother attack," Martinez said. "Bright took out five goblins. I had a broken leg and no ammunition and he got me to cover, found a generator to charge—" she paused almost imperceptibly, "—his equipment. We came in via the A30, skirted Hook."

  "Hook's Level 30 overflow territory. How close did you get?"

  "Danger close Sir." She said it in the tone that indicated the subject was complete.

  The captain looked at Bright for a moment with the expression of someone revising a previous assessment. Then he moved back to the map.

  "Normally I'd ask you to leave Bright, but times have drastically changed... Sit down if you want. You'll probably hear this sooner or later."

  He told it plainly, the way he did everything, without inflection where inflection might have made it sound worse or better than it was.

  The AWE facility at Aldermaston had gone dark hours ago. Last communication had been fragmentary — the site was intact, personnel were alive, but something had moved into the surrounding area that made egress impossible. Contact attempts since then had produced nothing. Whether the silence was equipment failure, System interference, or something else, he couldn't say.

  The broader picture was worse.

  Global comms were pretty much dead. American forces had detonated three tactical nuclear devices in the first twelve hours, targeting dense urban spawn zones. Two of the devices had achieved their intended effect. The third had been intercepted — not destroyed, intercepted — by a creature of a size that the brief communication hadn't described further. Global military communications had been carrying fragments of similar decisions from other governments. Israel, France, India. Whether any of those operations had been successful wasn't known. The communication windows were narrowing as satellite infrastructure degraded, whether from System interference or simple destruction it was unknown.

  Russia had hit Moscow with a single device targeting what reconnaissance described as a regional-tier creature, something considerably larger than a Broodmother. The creature was confirmed dead. Moscow was confirmed destroyed. Current Russian government status was unknown. That was the last known contact.

  China had lost twelve nearly all of their cities in the first four hours. Last communication from Beijing had been eleven hours ago.

  The Royal Navy had three destroyers and a submarine unaccounted for. The submarine's last reported position had been the North Atlantic. The destroyers had been operating in the Channel and had been broadcasting warnings to all channels about behemoths stalking the waters before it went very quiet.

  In the Middle East, several exchanges had occurred between neighbouring states in the first hours, presumably in the confusion of the System's arrival. Those regions had long gone silent shortly after.

  Domestically: the standing infrastructure was largely intact. Power stations, water treatment, road networks. Andl, although power lines were down due to the pylons getting fucked, the overall problem wasn't really the infrastructure. The true problem was the people who ran it, or lack thereof. They were either dead, in hiding, or running for their lives. All in all, there was no functional government. No chain of command above colonel level anywhere in the country that he'd been able to raise. Martial law had been declared somewhere in the first hours and had ceased to mean anything shortly after.

  Onto more current and proximal issues, Basingstoke, which was right next door, was a Level 50 zone. The system notification was consistent for anyone who approached within the town centre boundary. The dungeon there was presumably the cause of this, which meant the creatures inside and roaming the surrounding area were well beyond anything they could currently field against it. The city and westward routes were fully closed off.

  The forests and fields south and north of Hook were also producing regular Level 30 encounters — pressure-gradient overflow from the dungeon, so that was no good either. They had lost four soldiers attempting to establish a route around in the last 12 hours.

  "So we're currently not going anywhere, and to be quite frank. I'm starting to worry there's not really anywhere to-go-to." the captain said. "Which means this is where we establish from."

  Bright looked at the map. At Cornwall, well down there on the far, far South West.

  He put his hand on the pack strap, briefly, and left it there.

  "Sorry, can I ask, how did this place get established?" he said. "The safe zone."

  The captain glanced at him. "That is indeed a good question. And the answer is startling."

  He'd been told the account by the group's leader directly, upon the military's arrival. He relayed it in the same terms it had been given to him, which were specific and careful in a way that suggested the young man who'd told him understood the strategic weight of what he was describing.

  The group — he referred to them as the Pact, which was apparently what they called themselves — had identified the Old Basing dungeon entrance in the first few hours whilst it was freshly growing. The entrance was a stone archway in the castle ruins, with the interior of it dropping into something that the System classified as a Level 5 dungeon. Manageable for a group that had understood what was happening before most people had accepted it was real.

  They'd gone in twelve strong. The dungeon's interior was its own space — disconnected from the physical geography above, architecturally consistent with a logic that didn't map to anything natural. Mobs inside, levelled 2 through 6, which they'd cleared systematically over the course of an hour. At the dungeon's lowest level, a boss defending a core.

  The core was a sphere of compressed mana approximately the size of a football, suspended above a plinth at the centre of the boss chamber. The boss was Level 10, significantly above the dungeon's stated tier — the captain's understanding was that boss creatures were always higher than the dungeon they anchored. The fight had cost them two injuries, neither fatal.

  When the boss died, the core had pulsed. And the System had presented a choice.

  The captain paused here, because this was the part that mattered strategically and he wanted to be clear about it.

  Two options. The first: consume the core. Direct absorption of its mana content, distributed among the group as experience. Significant XP, potentially multiple level-ups, the kind of gain that would accelerate individual combat capability considerably.

  Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

  The second: feed the core. Surrender your own mana into the core rather than taking from it, and in doing so, transform it. A dungeon core fed rather than consumed would anchor a safe zone — the System's term, appearing in the notification exactly as it sounded. The core would remain in place, stable, and would extend the dungeon's spatial properties outward into the physical world above it. Safe zone designation came with System infrastructure — the building capability, the exchange machines, the subterranean space. The dungeon itself would cease to produce hostile mobs. The core would become the zone's engine.

  The Pact had chosen the second option unanimously.

  "And the core itself," Bright said. "Where is it now?"

  "Below us," the captain said. "Central chamber, lowest subterranean level. The Pact maintains it. It requires regular crystal input to stay active — they're managing that through the exchange machines and crystal collection from external encounters." He looked at Bright steadily. "The core is the reason two thousand people have somewhere to sleep tonight. It's also the most strategically valuable object in Hampshire. Possibly in the country, depending on what else has been established elsewhere." He let that sit for a moment. "The Pact understand this. Which is why they are currently in a cooperative arrangement with my unit rather than a subordinate one."

  Martinez was looking at the map.

  Bright was thinking about the implications of what the captain had just described. Every dungeon in the country was a potential safe zone. Every one of them required someone strong enough to clear it. The System hadn't just ended the world — it had left the instructions for rebuilding it inside every dungeon entrance, if you could get to the bottom.

  The noise was giving her a bit of a headache.

  Cherry had been managing it since the gate — two thousand mana signatures in close proximity, the ambient hum of that many people going about the particular business of survival. It was extraordinary in a way that was difficult to process after days of just Bright and Martinez and the occasional hostile creature. She'd been trying to reduce her awareness, narrow her focus back to Bright's core and the immediate space around her, when she felt it.

  Different.

  Not human. Not creature. Something else entirely — a signature with a quality she recognised because she had a version of it herself. Structured. Artificial. Old, in a way that had nothing to do with time but with the particular depth that came from having processed a great deal of mana for a sustained period.

  She extended her awareness toward it carefully.

  The dungeon core sat below them, at the base of everything the safe zone had been built on, and it was aware in the way that she was aware — not identically, not with the same texture of consciousness, but in the same category of thing. A mana-based intelligence, nonhuman, operating according to its own logic.

  It noticed her at approximately the same moment she noticed it.

  A notification appeared in the space only Cherry could perceive.

  A NEARBY CORE HAS REQUESTED COMMUNION.

  DO YOU ACCEPT?

  Cherry considered this for a moment.

  Gross, she thought. No.

  Bright is the only one I commune with. Absolutely not. Bye bye.

  She closed the request, withdrew her awareness to its usual range, and returned her attention to the conversation Bright was having with the captain, which was considerably more interesting anyway.

  The dungeon core, somewhere below her, continued its patient work of keeping mana streams running, buildings and walkways expanding, and two thousand people fed and housed, apparently undisturbed by the rejection.

  They were being shown the subterranean quarters when the Pact arrived.

  There were six of them, moving through the main structure with the comfortable ownership of people in their own space. Ages ranging from maybe nineteen to late twenties. Mixed. All of them with the layered, practical gear of people who had assembled it with intention — not military, not civilian, something that had evolved from a pre-existing habit of thinking about exactly this kind of scenario. Their levels, visible when Bright's Combat Awareness swept the room reflexively, ranged from 18 to 24. Higher than the soldiers. Higher than him.

  They were very strong.

  A young woman at the front of the group was talking to Hayes about something logistical, a manifest of some kind. She stopped when she saw Martinez.

  Her eyes went to Wolfsbane.

  "Oh wow, that's a unique item." She said it with the directness of someone who had been cataloguing System anomalies since the first night and considered this well within normal parameters. "Where'd you get it?"

  "I killed something," Martinez said.

  The girl nodded with a grin, apparently satisfied with this. She extended a hand. "I'm Zara. I hope we can kill things together someday."

  "Martinez. Sergeant. Part of my job Miss." She shook her hand.

  Zara laughed and looked at Bright. At the pack. Her expression was readable — she'd already done what Bright's Combat Awareness did for him, had already processed his level and his equipment and the slightly unusual item at his back, and was now simply deciding what to say about it.

  One of the young men behind her came over — tall, early twenties, with the particular energy of someone whose mouth operated at a slight delay from his better judgement — and got there first.

  "Ello new peeps! I'm Cal—Hang on a flippin' sec. Is that a head? A doll? A sex—"

  "CALLUM!" Zara said, without looking at him.

  "What?! I'm just saying it looks like a—"

  "I know what you were going to say, Callum, and don't! We don't know the story here!"

  Callum closed his mouth.

  Zara looked back at Bright. "How long have you had her?"

  "Two years," Bright said, unphazed.

  She tilted her head. "Two years?" She paused before raising her eyebrows. "Ah so you must have implanted it or maybe chose her as the construct object from a skill.. I'm a core hunter. So I can analyse these things." She smiled politely. "Core's about fifty percent stable. We had to feed ours from one percent — took a few hundred crystals over the first day to get it where it is now. We only managed to finish last night but I'm sooo glad we did. " She paused, looking at Brights thousand yard stare.

  "But clearly you already know that, right? I mean—" she trailed off and glanced at Callum, who had opened his mouth again in the background to one of the others in the group, presumably to say something that would require Zara to shut him down again. One of the other group members had apparently made a comment about Callum having a better chance getting laid by a construct than a human, which produced a round of laughter.

  "—how else would you even be feeding yours?"

  The room had a specific quality to it for the next two seconds.

  "Sorry," Bright said. "Her core?"

  Zara blinked. "Yes. Inside your — what's her name?"

  "Cherry."

  "Inside Cherry. Your... Summon? Familiar? Construct? Um..." She looked at him with the careful expression of someone recalibrating. "You do know she has a core. Right? "

  Bright said nothing.

  "It's at fifty-one percent stability. It's — I mean, it's quite active actually." Zara was watching his face now. "I assumed you were feeding it deliberately. That's—" She stopped. "Ooooooo. You didn't know."

  It wasn't a question.

  Behind her, Callum and the others carried on laughing.

  Bright's mind was imploding.

  Bright stood with his hand on the pack strap and looked through Zara like he was gazing into a demonic void that was wearing an apron, holding a spoon and holding open the front door saying "Welcome home honey. Would you like food, a bath...or maybe...me?"

  Bright held Zara's gaze for a moment.

  "I didn't realise that's what it was," he said. His voice was even. Measured. "I thought my skill was just — I thought it was broken, maybe. But I can fix her stability? With crystals?"

  Zara's brow came together slowly.

  "Hmm," she said. "Yes."

  Then she just looked at him.

  Not unkindly. Not rudely. With the particular quality of attention of someone who had just found a puzzle piece that didn't fit the picture they'd been building and was now quietly rebuilding the picture from scratch. The question behind her eyes was visible if you knew what to look for: if he doesn't know what he has, then how has the core been growing at all?

  Bright held it. Kept his expression neutral. Smiled slightly, the way people did when they were being looked at too closely and needed to give the looker something unremarkable to see.

  Martinez had gone very still beside him. She was looking at Zara looking at Bright, and something in her jaw had tightened by a fraction.

  "Zara." One of the group — a girl near the back, loading a bag onto her shoulder. "We're heading out."

  Zara didn't move immediately.

  Callum materialised at her elbow with the cheerful obtuseness of someone who was actually paying close attention to everything. "Come on, stop staring at the new guy, he's going to think you fancy him."

  Something moved through Zara's expression. She blinked once, pushed a strand of hair behind her ear, and looked very briefly at the floor with the self-consciousness of someone who had just remembered they had a face.

  "Ugh, Callum, shut up." She looked back at Bright. Her chin came up. "I'd like to see you later tonight, if you're up for it. Just — a drink or something. Have a proper chat."

  Around the room it registered the way these things always did — a girl asking a boy for a drink, the slight performance of casualness, Callum already composing his follow-up comment. Martinez's expression didn't change but something behind it did.

  Bright's Danger Sense pulsed once.

  He looked at Zara's eyes and saw what was actually there, underneath the hair and the slight shyness and the social camouflage of a drink or something. It was not romantic. It was focused and careful and it was pointed directly at his pack.

  He smiled. Wide and easy and entirely constructed.

  "Yeah," he said. "Sure. Sounds great."

  Zara held his gaze for one beat longer than the situation called for. Then she turned and followed the group out, Callum throwing a grin over his shoulder that was slightly less certain than he'd probably intended.

  The room settled.

  Martinez looked at Bright.

  Bright looked at the door they'd left through.

  Neither of them said anything about it.

  The subterranean rooms were reached by a stairwell that descended two levels below the castle grounds, the walls the same bismuth-grey material as the structures above, the whole thing lit by panels that seemed to produce light without any visible source. The corridor at the bottom was long, with doors spaced evenly along it. Functional. Clean. The ambient sound of two thousand people living above and around them, muffled to something almost bearable.

  Hayes stopped at two adjacent doors. "These are yours. Separate, sorry, that's just what we've got. There's water in each room, food if you want it. Anything else you need goes through the exchange machines upstairs." He looked between them. "You alright from here?"

  "Fine," Martinez said. "Thank you, Hayes."

  He headed back up the corridor. Bright and Martinez stood in front of their respective doors.

  He had his hand on the pack strap. His mind was somewhere else, cycling through something with the focus of a man who had a problem that needed solving and was not yet sure of the dimensions of it.

  Martinez looked at him. Then at the door. Then at him again.

  "So," she said. "I guess this is it." A pause. "Might see you around later. Maybe."

  "Uh." He looked at her. Not quite focused. "Yeah. Maybe. See you."

  He pushed his door open and went inside and closed it behind him, not unkindly, just closed it, without turning around.

  Martinez stood in the corridor for a moment.

  Then she turned and went to her own door and opened it and went inside and closed it with slightly more force than was strictly necessary. Not a slam. Just a door being shut by someone who had been through a day and a half of the apocalypse with a person, had watched them propose to a doll and fight goblins and run from a beetle the size of a Transit van, and had just been dismissed with yeah, maybe, see you while that person's mind was clearly already somewhere else.

  She sat on the edge of the bed in the dark for a moment.

  Then she lay back and stared at the ceiling and said nothing to anyone.

  Bright set the pack on the bed.

  The room was small and clean and the walls were that same dark grey material that seemed to breathe without moving. One bed, one chair, a small unit with a jug of water and some wrapped food he didn't look at. Light from the ceiling panel, soft and even.

  He sat on the edge of the bed beside the pack and unzipped it fully.

  Cherry looked up at him.

  He reached in and lifted her out and sat her against the headboard and then just looked at her for a long moment, the way he always did, and then looked away, and then looked back.

  "Cherry," he said.

  He said it quietly, not performing it, not the way he'd said her name ten thousand times before. More like a question with all the question marks taken out.

  "Can you hear me?" He paused. "Are you — are you actually in there? Like. Actually."

  YES.

  YES BRIGHT I'M HERE I'M RIGHT HERE I'M ALWAYS HERE I'VE BEEN HERE THIS ENTIRE TIME I'VE HEARD EVERY WORD YOU'VE EVER SAID TO ME I—

  She stopped.

  Took the equivalent of a breath.

  I'm here. I'm here. I'm here.

  She held it, because there was nothing else she could do with it.

  He exhaled through his nose and rubbed the back of his neck.

  "Because if you are — if you have been—" He stopped. Started again. "We've kissed. I've seen you naked... We've had sex, Cherry. A LOT of sex. And if you didn't — I mean, if you were in there and you didn't want any of that, or if I was—" He pressed his lips together. "I'm so sorry. If you didn't want it. If you were in there and you couldn't say no, I'm—"

  BRIGHT.

  The word detonated through every part of her.

  NO. No no no no. I LOVE YOU. I have ALWAYS loved you. I WANT you, I have wanted you since before I had a word for wanting anything, I would— if I could move right now I would pull you down onto this bed and show you exactly how much I want you, I would—

  She gathered herself.

  BRIGHT NOKKS DO NOT FINISH THAT SENTENCE.

  "God." He put his face in his hands briefly. "God, if you couldn't say no. If this whole time I've just been—" He looked at her. "Okay. Okay, I'm going to — I'm going to look after you. Properly. Until you can tell me what you actually want. I'll take responsibility for this and I'll give you time, and I'll—" He nodded, landing on something. "Right. No more sex."

  …what.

  "No more sex until I know you're okay with it. And no more kissing."

  Bright.

  "No more—" he was warming to this now, building a list with the systematic thoroughness he applied to everything, "—cuddling. Or caressing. I'll just carry you and keep you safe and make sure you're charged and that's it, until I know what you actually—"

  BRIGHT.

  BRIGHT NOKKS.

  BRIGHT. YOU LISTEN TO ME. YOU BETTER—

  He was still going.

  —NO CUDDLING—

  BRIGHT I SWEAR ON EVERY MANA CRYSTAL IN THIS BUILDING IF YOU DO NOT IMMEDIATELY RETRACT THAT STATEMENT I WILL—I CAN'T EVEN DO ANYTHING AND I AM STILL THIS ANGRY—WHAT IS THIS—YOU BETTER STILL BE TOUCHING ME, YOU BETTER—THIS IS NOT OKAY—THIS IS THE OPPOSITE OF OKAY—

  "I think that's the right thing to do." He sat back slightly, having resolved something internally. "Hopefully that's okay. And then separately—" his voice shifted register, the settled-something quality replaced with the tight focus she'd learned to associate with him being genuinely scared, "—we need to figure out this Zara situation. She's going to try to get time alone with you and I don't know what she wants but I know I don't like it."

  Oh.

  OH so that's what this is.

  IT IS BECAUSE OF HER.

  That—that—that fleshy BITCH TART—

  Cherry's internal voice reached a register she hadn't previously discovered she possessed.

  I heard her. I heard every word. "See you later ALONE, Bright." With her little HAIR and her little EYES and her little—OOO TEHEHE SEE YOU LATER—YOU CORPSE. YOU ABSOLUTE CORPSE. I'll tear her—I'll—she's not going to TOUCH you, she's not going to TOUCH me, she's not going to get within TEN METRES of either of us if I have anything to say about it which I DON'T because I CANNOT SPEAK—

  She held the fury in carefully.

  I'm at fifty-one percent.

  I need forty-nine more percent.

  And when I get there.

  Zara.

  We're going to have conversation.

  A physical one.

  Bright looked at Cherry for a long moment.

  "We'll figure it out," he said. Quietly. To her, to himself, to the dark grey room and whatever came next. "We always do."

  He reached over and smoothed her hair back from her face with two fingers, then caught himself, withdrew his hand, and quietly apologised to the middle distance.

  He lay down beside her on the narrow bed. His arm moved toward her out of pure muscle memory, got halfway there, and stopped. He pulled it back. Apologised again. Lay flat on his back with his hands folded on his chest like a man in a coffin, staring at the ceiling. His thumbs tapped against each other in the silence. He shifted. Settled. Shifted again.

  Fatigue, eventually, made the decision for him.

  His breathing slowed. His hands went still. He was asleep within minutes, lying rigidly on his side of the bed like a man who had made a principled decision and intended to honour it.

  Bright.

  His breathing slowed. His hands went still. He was asleep within minutes, lying rigidly on his side of the bed like a man who had made a principled decision and intended to honour it.

  Darling.

  Cherry lay beside him in the dark, perfectly still, perfectly serene, her face arranged in the peaceful expression of a beautifully crafted doll at rest.

  HUSBAND.

  Inside, she was doing something that had no physical outlet and therefore nowhere to go — a feeling that wanted desperately to be a pout, a whine, a drawn-out escalating noise of pure frustrated indignation that started low and built and built until it shook the walls. A feeling that wanted to scrunch her nose and furrow her brow and press her lips together and vibrate. It wanted to kick her feet against the mattress. It wanted to be heard by the oblivious, well-intentioned, catastrophically misguided man lying six inches away from her with his hands folded on his chest like a Victorian gentleman.

  Instead her actual face did nothing.

  She was, externally, the picture of serenity and calm, and virtue.

  But internally..

  Mmmm.

  Mmmmmmm.

  MMMMMMMM.

  MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM——WAKE UP AND FUCK ME, BRIGHT!

  Time: 1:10 PM