Chapter Text
A thump. A squeal as her body rolls over the hood and up the windshield.
The car skids to a stop, and the woman goes thumping right back to the middle of the road. Just a lumpy pile in the darkness. A speed bump.
Harry backs away from the door with measured steps that don’t make even the smallest sound. He picks up the knife, checks to make sure he’s still got the phone in his hand, then hustles upstairs on just his tip-toes.
That woman—she could still be alive, right? Just a pile of limbs, but people survive getting hit by a car all the time. Some broken bones, a shattered pelvis. Yeah, it sucks. Yeah, the hospital bills might drive her into bankruptcy.
Harry’s only on sneaky step number five when another double-thump rattles him. He swears it shakes the house, but that’s probably just his pulse playing tricks.
He pauses to catch his breath. It doesn’t work, so he continues up the stairs, letting the breaths go in sharp through his mouth and slow through his nose. He doesn’t run back to check if the woman’s still there in the middle of the road, now flattened from the car driving straight over her.
Just a speed bump.
He doesn’t even make it to the top step before he’s dialing 9-1-1 again. He puts his lips right up against the mic and says, “I need to talk to a real person. A woman was just run over outside my house, on purpose, and it’s not just her. I hear screaming and guns.”
“I understand. Can I get your address? An approximate one is fine.”
He says his address clear as he can make it while he checks that every window upstairs is locked, just in case. His voice doesn’t shake, even if his legs do.
“Thank you. And what is the nature of your emergency?”
His hands feel numb, so after every room he squeezes the knife handle just to make sure it’s still there. “There’s a terrorist attack happening in my neighborhood. People are dying. Please send as many officers as you can.”
“I’m so sorry to hear that. Let me pass you to a specialist.”
He could almost smile, he’s so relieved. He’s finished with the windows and he’s checking all the lamps again, all the light switches, every smart screen or device or monitor to make sure nothing’s got the juice to scream his whereabouts.
“Can I get your address, please?”
Harry licks his lips and says it again, beat by beat.
“Got it. What about your name and age?”
He pulls the battery from the roomba. “Harry Potter. Seventeen.” He repeats his address again for good measure.
“And what’s the nature of your emergency?”
More gunfire outside, and a scream that cuts off so sudden it stays ring-a-linging in Harry’s ears long after.
The call goes dead. He looks at his phone to find his smart assistant popped up on the screen with a chipper little, how can I help you? message.
“Call the police,” he tells it, then runs to check under his parent’s bed, just in case his dad’s got a secret gun he never told anybody about. You know, for protection.
No gun.
The ringing of his phone blasts through the speaker. Harry hangs up, checks the volume, then redials.
The voice that comes out of the speaker is straight gibberish, like someone took a full sentence, chopped it up into all its distinct sounds, then rearranged it into a random order.
Harry says his address. He says, “Please help me.” He tells them about the guns and the woman dead in the street and the gate opening on its own. Everything.
The bot on the other end of the line says something that’s probably meant to be comforting, but instead it sounds more like an old tape recording of a cat attempting to talk.
He hangs up and tries to text Hermione again. Text his parents. He tries calling the pizza delivery guy.
One by one, his messaging apps all have their meltdowns. Instagram. Twitter. His Facebook post clears into the ether and the app refuses to open afterwards. Every call drops. Every message self-destructs.
His fingers smear sweat across the phone screen and his leg bleeds into his pants, and he can’t get a single message out. His phone won’t let him.
He cranks his arm back—but what if they can hear the smash of his phone screen shattering into shards from down at the road?
From the sidewalk?
From just outside his front door?
From standing below his bedroom window, his mom’s stupid bushes scratching up their posh khakis?
Harry ducks into his closet and slides the door shut. It smells like ketchup in here. That’ll be his soccer uniform, splattered from yesterday’s post-scuffle Wendy’s run. All down his shirt and pants and straight into his socks. Every time he wears those cleats for the next year, his feet’ll come out stinking of ketchup, and all because he had the nerve to win.
He should’ve done laundry yesterday like his mom said.
He breathes in the ketchup and dials 9-1-1 again. The phone rings and rings.
Past his closet door, past his grass-stained carpet and dusty computer, there’s a crash. His house shudders with the impact, but not enough that someone’s gone and run their shiny Tesla into it. More like his neighbor’s house.
The call picks up and someone speaks, but it’s more of that chopped up gibberish, so he hangs up and drags awake the camera app for the front doorbell.
There on his phone screen, a man with a neck gaiter pushes his face right up to the camera. He’s hunched and the fabric on his gaiter shivers, the number 29 all blurry from it. His spiked hair used to be brown based on the brows, but it’s a bleached blonde right now.
The spikes shiver, too, because the man’s laughing.
Harry shakes his head hard and forces himself to look closer. That corner of the welcome mat just at the corner of the frame—that’s not his mom’s kitschy Hope You Brought Wine! mat. Harry’s front walkway doesn’t have any flower pots dangling from the eaves, but this one does.
Not his house. It’s not his house he’s looking at.
The feed slips, smearing down the screen, and then the man’s standing back so he’s only visible from the nose downward. That number 29 churns as the man says something that doesn’t make it through the feed.
Behind him, the light on the front porch grows bright enough to pop the bulb, but it just keeps going until it could be daylight out there.
The man opens his mouth and the fabric pulls inward, forming a concave scoop with no sharp points of teeth to get in the way. He reaches up with both hands and shoves them inside his mouth. His jaw goes wider and wider as he reaches deep inside his own head.
A third arm curls over his shoulder and joins the other two. Then a fourth, except this one waggles its six fingers and two thumbs at Harry. Hello. Hello.
Harry’s heart pounds as he hits the power button on his phone, then yanks the back open and scrabbles at the battery.
That wasn’t real, or at least the last part wasn’t. The attack on his neighbors, the broken fence, all the smart devices in his home going haywire, and that AI-enhanced show that just played out for him—it’s all connected.
This isn’t some random invasion. It was planned.
He can’t get the battery out. It’s screwed or glued in there hard.
He’s considering whether it’d successfully flush down the toilet when there’s a thump downstairs.
Harry holds his breath. He grips the phone in one hand and the knife in the other. Did he imagine it? No, that was real.
But if someone’s walking around, they’re sneaking just like he was.
How many houses are in this neighborhood? Surely someone was able to get a message out. Emergency services are compromised, but out of all those neighbors, all those smart devices, someone was on a video call with a faraway loved one when gunshots rang out. Someone was livestreaming to their pitiful audience of a couple dozen when a woman and her strollered baby were chased down the sidewalk just outside.
Someone’s coming. The police, the marines, whoever handles terrorist attacks.
Harry positions the knife so it’s ready to stab outward and upward. He’s got his eyes pinned where the closet door meets the frame.
No parents, no working phone. He’s more alone than he’s ever been in his life.
Sounds from outside—laughter, screaming, the slap-slap-slap of running flip-flops against pavement—spackle the inside of his brain until they could be coming from inside his house. He listens for the creak of floorboards or the cocking of a weapon.
Maybe the thump came from next door after all. Next door, just outside, who’s to say. Or maybe—
The closet lights up. Harry automatically jabs his knife forward, but the blade hits the door, which is still shut tight.
The light’s from his phone coming to life in his hand, the screen beaming out at full brightness.
He fumbles for the power button. The phone slips from his grip. Just as it hits his foot, it screams its power-up welcome song. Maximum volume.
He can’t hear anything above that soothing jingle straight out of an ad. He holds down that power button until the thing goes dead again, then straightens to find the closet door sliding wide open.
He forgets which hand holds the knife, but his body doesn’t. The blade goes swinging out before he can even register the tall man standing there.
The knife clips the man’s chin—no, the hard shell of his mask. The tip of the blade catches at the lip of it with a squeal of plastic and jerks the whole thing skiwampus.
Harry’s bracing himself for another jab forward when the man catches him by the wrist. Too fast.
He careens out of the closet and his head bangs into the door frame as the man yanks him into the room. He slams face first into the wall.
“HELP!” he yells, still trying to wrestle away from the man’s grip. It gets him nothing but a sharp pain up his elbow as his arm twists the wrong way. His cry for help turns into a grunt.
The knife slips away. A second later, a thin cord winds around his wrists.
Zllp. Plastic cuts into his skin. He’s been zip-tied.
Hands grope Harry’s waist and hips. Then the voice—
“No gun. You weren’t kidding.”
Harry pushes his face against the wall in an attempt to spin around. Surprisingly it works, but the man only takes Harry by the throat and shoves him backwards again.
It’s hard to tell in the dark of the room, but his hair looks heavy black. That blackness leaks down his face in a cheap plastic mask, carving out flattened features. From forehead to chin, running straight down the nose and lips, a big white number 1 practically glows against all that darkness.
He holds up Harry’s knife and tilts his head. “Normally I’m all about the foreplay,” he says, “but I’m afraid we’ll have to skip straight to the good stuff today.”
“Don’t—” Harry starts, but then his throat goes tight as the man gives it a hard squeeze.
He stops his thrashing when he feels the blade of the knife against his clavicle. The man cuts his shirt straight down the middle. A couple slices through the sleeves and the whole thing falls in tatters to the floor.
Harry tries to swallow, but it gets stuck in his throat. He can only just breathe, like sucking air through one of those tiny coffee straws.
When the man goes for the button on his jeans, he kicks out. That earns him a knee to the groin. He’d keel over but for the hand at his throat still pinning him. By the time his vision returns, his pants and underwear are tangled around his ankles.
The man pushes him up the wall, cutting off his air completely. He must step on the bundle of Harry’s pants, because they yank free of his ankles, and both his socks with them. He’s naked.
All at once, the man releases. Harry goes sliding to the floor. His head knocks against the wall on his way down, sending his brain swimming through a sea of imagined red and blue flashing lights that he so desperately wants to be real. His lungs burn as he forces the air back into them.
Still, he tries to kick. His shoulders scream as he twists at the zip-tie binding his wrists.
A flash of light. That one’s real, but bright white, like the flash from a camera.
The man laughs. He prods at Harry’s dick with the toe of his shoe and takes another picture with the tip pinned between his sole and Harry’s thigh.
“You—d-don’t touch me, you piece of shit,” Harry chokes out.
The shoe disappears. “You can call me Tom.”
Tom’s shape all but disappears against the dark backdrop of the room. No khakis or polo for him. He’s wearing black up to his jaw and down to his wrists—or further, because when he takes Harry by the throat again and drags him to his feet, it’s cool leather against his neck instead of hot skin.
Harry forces himself still. “If you don’t get out of my house right now, I swear to god I’ll kill you.”
That number one stares him right in the face. “Oh, yeah. Threaten me some more. That’ll make me want to spare you for sure.”
Harry kicks out, and this time it connects with the guy’s shin. He grunts, but his grip only tightens.
He drags Harry away from the wall and across the room. With the sweep of an arm, Harry’s computer monitors go crashing to the ground.
The edges of Harry’s vision sparkle, more from the pressure at his throat than the new burn starting up in his chest. Those sparkles shatter over his blinking eyes as Tom slams him onto the desk, sending his glasses flying.
It takes him a good few seconds to figure out he can breathe again.
The light flicks on, and more zip-ties cinch closed, now just under each of his knees. He kicks again, only to find that his legs are secured to the desk legs.
Tom replaces Harry’s glasses, then shoves the computer chair aside and sighs, head turning as he looks down the length of Harry’s exposed body.
“You’d make a good ad,” he says. He stands between Harry’s spread knees and holds his hands up, gloved fingers making a picture-perfect box. “Right here. Low angle with all the goods front and center. Do you have any idea how many drooling-dicked nobodies you’d lure in? They’d click you so fast their router would stutter.”
Harry’s chest heaves hard. Between breaths, he asks, “Are you going to kill me?”
Tom pats a quick rhythm on his thighs, then slides up and thumbs Harry’s soft dick, pressing it against his lower belly. “That’s tricky. If I say no, you won’t believe me, and if I say yes, you’ll fight like hell.”
One gloved finger traces Harry’s balls. A sick chill runs straight through his gut.
“Does it help if I promise I’ll fight like hell either way?” Harry asks.
Tom pinches the loose skin of his scrotum and massages it, casual like he does this every single day. “What if I made you a deal?”
That sick chill ping-pongs around inside until his abdomen prickles from pubic bone to lungs. Harry turns his eyes to the ceiling. “...Not to be rude, but I don’t even fucking know you. I can’t trust any deal you make with me.”
“Sounds like you’re insistent that death could be my only possible end goal here. How boring. You know I could’ve already gutted you with that knife, right? Slit your throat. Stabbed through your eye and into your brain.”
The thumb at the base of his cock presses harder and wiggles, just a little. The other hand works and works at his balls, never going so rough to make him flinch, but enough that he can’t ignore it, not even for a second.
Harry opens his mouth, then closes it as the prickling gets stronger.
“At least if you make a deal, you’ve got a sliver of hope. There’s always the chance I’ll honor it after all. Isn’t a sliver better than nothing?”
This guy’s got the voice of those peckers who speed up to the front of the classroom come debate time. He’s going over on his essay’s required word count just so he’ll have more to read aloud, his smile all cocked and loaded on his face so he can bam, bam his point home, sources be damned.
Harry hates those guys.
He looks down at his own half-hard dick pointed straight at his face, pressed against his belly.
Above that, the guy watches. Number 1 of the group. Tom.
Harry says, “If you expect me not to fight—”
“Oh, I do. I’m counting on it. And if you uphold your end of the deal, I’ll let you live regardless of how bad you fought me.”
Already, his fingertips are going numb where they’re curled into fists under his lower back. Harry asks the big question. The lazy raised hand at the back of the class asking the leading question Tom’s been elbowing towards.
He asks, “What’s the deal, then?”
Tom lifts his chin, revealing the pale white underside of his jaw where his turtleneck doesn’t quite reach. “All you have to do is pinky promise me you won’t come, no matter what it is I do to you.”
Harry stares at him, then cranks his arms to one side until his tied wrists jut out from under his back. His shoulder burns from the stretch, but he holds the pose and lifts one pinky.
Tom pauses, then winds his own gloved pinky around Harry’s.
“Deal.”