Help Versus Hostages

The shower does not wash the morning off him.

Grant comes back into the main room in clean clothes with his hair still wet and the map in his head. Twenty claimed women moving through glass and stone. Jaycee in his bed, sore and pleased and pretending she is not listening. Tessa in the other unit, sitting very straight, like posture might make up for last night. The four unclaimed are still a dull absence behind the guest-suite door.

Mary has coffee. She gives him a cup and keeps one for herself. She then nods at the terrace.

They step out. The city looks almost normal from thirty floors up. It is not. Gone is the ocean of cars that once filled the streets. A column of smoke is hanging west of downtown. Somewhere below, a car alarm has been screaming long enough to become scenery. The Explorer is still in the lot. Jose is asleep in the passenger seat. Garret is not. Garret is watching the building like it might blink.

Mary sets her cup on the rail.

“The four in the suite are not guests,” she says. “They are hostages who have not been told the word yet.”

Grant rests his hands on the glass. He can feel every claimed woman in both units and none of the four. The blank spots itch now. That is new. Or he is only noticing it because Mary is about to make him say it.

“I told them they could stay unclaimed.”

“You told them that before Tessa tried to escape by sneaking to the elevator and before you found out claiming twenty of us did something to your body.” Mary does not raise her voice. She never needs to. “They heard you take Jaycee. They heard Tessa change her mind in a hallway. They are sitting in a room waiting to see which version of you comes through the door. That is not mercy. That is delay.”

“If I claim them, I am the thing they were hiding from at the school.”

“You already are.” She looks at him sideways. “The only question left is whether they work for this house or sit in it like furniture that might come to life and turn on you again.”

Grant watches a bird cut across the terrace and disappear. His hands are now stronger than they have any right to be. He can feel Lily rinsing a glass. He can feel Jaz shift her weight on the stair. He can feel Sarah still sitting up because nobody has given her a better order. Useful. All of them useful. The four blanks are just risk with pulses.

“You want me to claim all four.”

“I want them helping,” Mary says. “Watching. Cooking. Cleaning. Supply runs. Four more bodies who will not bolt, will not scream, will not bargain with the next man who smiles at them in the lobby. Right now they are four reasons for someone else to come up here and challenge you.”

He almost argues from habit. The argument dies on the glass.

Mary goes on before he can find a better response.

“And it is not just them.” She taps two fingers against her cup. “You changed at twenty. Jaycee did not do that. Nineteen did not do that. Tessa made twenty and your body evolved. That means this is not random. That means there is a next time.”

“We don’t know that.”

“We don’t know the number,” Mary corrects. “We know there is a number. You felt nothing for a whole night with eighteen, then nineteen, and then the twentieth one turned the lights on. So either Tessa is magic, or quantity is. I do not like betting this building on Tessa being magic.”

Grant hates how clean that is. It is the same voice she used in college when she took apart one of his half-finished plans and left the usable pieces on the table.

“You want me to farm women like XP in a video game.”

“I want you to stop pretending the meter isn’t running.” Mary glances through the glass at the cut wall, at the life stacked behind it. “Claim as many as you can. Not because it feels good. Because we need to know if you evolve again, and because somebody out there is going to figure out the same thing if they haven’t already.”

That lands.

He thinks of Kyle’s hungry look in the intersection. Of Jose watching Zoya. Of the broadcast going to every phone. Of every aimless man in a mid-sized city who woke up yesterday and got told the rules.

If it happened to Grant here, it can happen in a shopping mall, a precinct, a campus, a concert…

“Other men,” he says.

“Other men,” Mary agrees. “If claiming changes the claimant, then this city is about to grow a food chain. The ones who grab one girl and hide will stay small. The ones who keep going might not. If someone else hits twenty, or whatever comes after twenty, and they get there first…” She does not finish it. She does not have to. “You need to be stronger than the threat we have not met yet. Strength. That map in your head. Whatever comes next. Sitting on twenty because it felt like a complete thought is how you get surprised by greater power in somebody else’s hands.”

Grant’s jaw tightens.

“So the plan is I walk into the suite and take the last four, then go back outside and collect until the world tells me what the next prize is?”

“The plan is you stop leaving loaded variables in your own house.” Mary’s voice softens by a fraction, which on her is almost affection. “Then yes. You claim when it is safe to claim. You watch your body every time. You keep count. If nothing happens at twenty-one, we learn that. If something happens at thirty, or forty, or some ugly round number, I want us to be the ones holding the knowledge and power. Not the man in the next building.”

He looks down at the Explorer.

“And those two?”

“They are not women and they are not yours. They are a car and a problem. We deal with them after the suite is empty of blanks.”

Grant feels Jaycee sit up in the bedroom, attention turning toward his name even though nobody said it. He feels Tessa’s guilt like a warm tack in the other unit. He feels the four unclaimed not at all, and the absence is worse than fear. Fear he can use. A hole in the map is just a door he has not locked.

“If I do this,” he says, “I am not doing it to hear myself become a worse person out loud. I am doing it because four prisoners are four leaks, and because I do not like the idea of another man getting faster or stronger with bad intentions.”

Mary nods once.

“That is the correct ugly reason.”

He almost asks her if she hates him for needing it. He does not. Claimed Mary will not hate him. That is the problem and the tool.

“Get Jaz and Eve,” he says. “Bring the four into the main room. No audience in the hall. No elevator. I do it here, where I can see their faces and my own hands.”

“All four together?”

“All four.” Grant pushes off the rail. The terrace door is heavy. It moves easier than it should, and he hates that he notices. “Then we count to twenty-four and we see if the world cares. If it doesn’t, we keep going until it does.”

Mary picks up her coffee.

“And if it does?”

Grant looks at the smoke over the city, at the Ford in the lot, at the two penthouses full of completely loyal women who will do anything to please him.

“Then we find out what the next man looks like,” he says, “before he finds out what I look like.”

He goes into the open main living area of the penthouse.

He notices the guest suite door is open.

The four girls are sitting together on the sofa. They look up as his shadow fills their view and, for one thin second, Grant sees the version of this morning where he lets them stay blank and calls it kindness.

Mary is already behind him.

The kindness does not survive the walk across the room.