MONDAY: Alfie
WEDNESDAY: Euan
FRIDAY: Kit
SUNDAY: The Pack
"It's Tuesday," Alfie pointed out, flopping onto the velvet sofa without moving out of Zia's line of sight, and cracking a beer. Foam spilled over his painted, but chipped, fingernails. "Technically almost Wednesday morning. Does that mean it's a rest day? Because my brain is doing zoomies. I have way too much voltage for a rest day."
Zia turned. She looked at us, one by one. Her gaze settled on me, then Kit, then Alfie.
"The calendar is a construct," she said. Her voice was level, deeper than usual. The Producer voice. The tone she used when she was deleting a frequency that clashed with the vocal.
"Elaborate," I said, leaning against the doorframe, crossing my arms over my chest to keep from reaching for her.
"We signed the papers," she said. "We trapped the rat. We played the show. We changed the rules out there." She gestured vaguely toward the window, toward the world we had just conquered.
She walked over to the windows and pulled the blackout blinds down, one by one, sealing us into the indigo-lit capsule. The streetlights of Manchester disappeared. There was only the low hum of the generator and the sound of our breathing.
"I don't want a rotation tonight," she said. "I don't want a schedule. I don't want to parse it out."
Kit paused with a bottle of water halfway to his mouth. He set it down on the counter with a softthunk. The scent of espresso and molasses began to drift from him, warming the air. "What do you want, Z?"
"Sunday," she whispered.
The word hung in the air.Sunday.The Pack designation. All of us. No turns. No waiting.
The air in the room got heavier. The atmospheric pressure dropped as the scents collided, Alfie's sharp sugar, Kit's dark coffee, my own toasted tea and sesame, bleeding together, thickening into the complex, intoxicating chord that wasus.
"Conductor Mode?" I asked, my pulse jumping in my neck. Conductor Mode meant she directed, we obeyed. It was high-structure.
"No," she said, shaking her head. The movement released a fresh wave of grapefruit zest. "Not Conductor. Just... Pack. All of us. No audience. No performance. No constraints on who touches whom, as long as the safeword holds."
She looked at me, her eyes locking onto mine. She knew the chaos variable was the hardest for me to integrate. "Can you handle the chaos variable, Euan? Can you function without the lines?"
I swallowed hard. My biological imperative to serve was red-lining, fighting against my need for order. But looking at her, standing there in her oversized hoodie, the architect of our sound and our safety, the equation balanced out.
"I can process the input," I said, my voice rough.
"Good." She pointed to the back lounge, where the nest waited. "Move."
The nest in the back lounge had been rebuilt. Kit had reinforced the base layer with memory foam flight-case lining, and Alfie had contributed every soft item he owned. It was a sprawling, chaotic landscape of textiles.
Zia was in the center of it.
"Rules," she said. She was stripping off her layers, the hoodie, the flannel, the jeans, until she was standing in a simple black bra and underwear. She looked small against the backdropof the bus, but her gravity was immense. "We need constraints. Otherwise, we're just excessive."
"State them," I said, actively suppressing the urge to kneel.
"One," she said, holding up a finger. "Anyone can say stop. Obviously. Safety word is 'Red'."
"Standard," Kit agreed, pulling his t-shirt over his head. The ink on his torso seemed to shift in the low light.
"Two," she continued. "No marking unless asked. I'm full. My sensors are maxed out. If you scent-mark me without permission, I will bite you back."
"Understood," I said. "Pheromone containment active."
"Three," she said, looking at Alfie, who was already naked and prowling the edge of the mattress. "We stay verbal. I need to hear you. I need to know where you are."
