“You know what I mean. This is the capital city, right?”
He nodded. The potato patty was good, crisp on the outside and soft on the inside. The spice had an aftershock to it, the flavor finally reaching Roman’s nostrils after he’d swallowed his second bite.
“There’s got to be a disco somewhere, or a really cool bar, or a cosplay café. I know how you like to have your girls cosplay for you.”
“You don’t know that,” Roman told Casper.
“I’d love to cosplay for you,” Celia told Roman. “Maybe I can even cosplay as Coma.”
Casper started laughing. “Everything you say both amuses me and annoys me at the same time.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Celia told the tiny doll, never once raising her voice at Casper.
As Casper and Celia continued to speak, Roman sent a mental message to Miranda.
Miranda. Can you hear me?
I believe we’re near your hotel. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have received this message, the telepath responded almost instantly. Also, I don’t hear you. That’s a weird way to phrase that. Where are you?
I needed to grab some food. Nadine stepped out to check on something. I should have some information soon.
And what hotel are you staying at?
Roman thought about this for a moment before replying. I wish I knew the name of the place. It’s unmarked. But I can show it to you. Can you find me?
I don’t have an echolocation ability, so no.
I’m on the main boulevard, which has a trolley running on it. There’s a median and some trees.
That’s a terrible description.
Roman looked around, trying to find a street name. When he couldn’t, he went back to the man running the roadside food stand and asked him where they were.
“Are you asking for teleportation reasons? Or just in general?” the food stand owner asked in a grumpy voice.
“Let me find out,” he said as he thought another message to Miranda.
Are you going to teleport here?
For me to arrange teleportation will mean I have to get back in touch with the embassy and use their private service.
Well, do you want to meet or not?
Just find out where you are, Roman.
“Not for teleportation reasons. Just generally.”
“This is Verne Street,” the man said. “That building over there used to be the botanical gardens. So people just call it Verne and Botanical, but it’s really Verne and State Street.”
Verne and State Street, near the botanical gardens, Roman thought back to Miranda.
“Thanks,” he told the man as he moved back toward his seat.
Let me check… Actually, our hotel is just a block from there, believe it or not.
I believe it, Roman thought back to her.
We’ll be there in a moment. Make sure no one is watching you.
I don’t think anyone is watching me; I haven’t felt any telepath or anything.
You wouldn’t feel the good ones.
I’m not so sure about that. I felt you, Roman thought back to her, smiling at the double meaning of the statement.
Don’t flatter yourself. We’re on our way.
Roman was just finishing his food when Miranda and Naomi walked up.
Celia stood, allowing Naomi to sit in front of Roman while Miranda ordered food, a disgusted look on her face as she did.
“Naomi,” Roman said.
“We haven’t spoken much, have we?” asked the woman with dark purple skin. Rather than her hair being slicked back, it was parted to the side this time, and she almost resembled a boy.
“We really haven’t. I’m Roman.”
“We’ve met,” she reminded him.
“Yeah,” he said, recalling that he had introduced himself to her once or twice by this point. “What’s your power, anyway? You know what I’m capable of.”
“Are you always this forthright with the opposite sex?” she asked, smiling with just the left side of her face.
“I just want to know what I’m working with.”
“We are working together. We are following and tracking you. You aren’t an agent,” Naomi said.
“Could have fooled me.”
“I’m sure it could have.”
Roman shrugged. “I’m the best shot you have at figuring out what’s going on here, and what they’ve learned from my powers.”
He didn’t know if this was actually the case; Roman was merely a cog in the machine of intelligence and disinformation, and he was self-aware enough to know the Centralian government might be holding more cards than he had originally assumed.
But he went with this line of reasoning anyway.
“Perhaps,” Naomi said as Miranda came to the table with a wooden plate stacked with fried potato patties.
“Dinner is served,” she said, still with a disgusted look on her face as she slid the plate onto the table. She looked around for a chair, and when one didn’t present itself, she glanced down at her purse. “Jess?”
When she was sure no one was watching, Miranda set the purse on the ground, the designer handbag instantly morphing into a chair.
“She’s okay with you sitting on her?” Roman asked.
“We’re professionals,” Miranda said with a smug grin.
She hates it, the telepath thought to Roman.
I figured as much. But you like it, don’t you?
I’d rather be sitting on you. Preferably your face.
Would you? Roman thought back to her. I didn’t think I made a very good chair.
You are good enough, and sometimes it’s the best a telepath can do.
“How is your hotel?” Roman asked, trying not to smirk at Miranda’s last statement.
He still knew he needed to play coy with her, that the more he led her on, the more relaxed she would be around him, not digging too deeply into his head.
“It’s dingy and subpar. We’ve already had to switch rooms twice,” Miranda informed them. “There was water dripping in the first room. And the second room had a funky smell to it.”
Naomi nodded. “It smelled like cheese. But it was stronger than cheese. I don’t know.”
“It smelled like the inside of a corpse’s ass,” Miranda said bluntly.
“I wouldn’t know what that smelled like,” Roman told her. “Moving on, Nadine is out at the moment and I expect she’ll be back sooner than later. We aren’t very far from here. Just up the street,” Roman said, pointing to the south and motioning toward the right. “There’s a gray building. It’s taller than the other buildings. There’s a lot of gray buildings, actually, but this was the tallest one. And it’s a hotel.”
“Are you sure you didn’t see a name for the hotel?” Miranda asked. “Who am I kidding? They don’t name things here like they do in Centralia. You know, I used to get annoyed with how many monikers and glitzy signs there were in Centralia, but then I visited some of the other shitholes in this world and have come to the conclusion I prefer the lights and advertisements. It makes things easier to navigate.”
“There is a calmness to this place as well,” Roman said, noticing that Celia was now talking to the owner of the food truck, the man happy to explain to her how he made his potatoes. Roman’s combat doll was still behind them, standing guard as always.
“And no one says hi to me?” Casper asked, startling Roman. She had been quiet for a moment, and he’d actually forgotten she was there.
Naomi looked down at the tiny doll, who stood on the table with her hands at her sides. “Hi.”
“You never answered his question,” Casper reminded the exemplar. “What’s your power?”
“It’s a power you wouldn’t understand, dear,” Naomi told Casper.
“Oh, fuck off,” Casper said, her arm morphing into a blade. “I’m sure you read the report about what I did in the West. Care to try me?”
“Let’s not and say we did,” Roman said as he deactivated the tiny doll. He then real
ized her arm was still morphed into a blade. He returned life to Casper, the doll suddenly angry. “Don’t take my power away!” she said, pointing her bladed arm at Roman.
“Don’t threaten people, and put the blades away. We’re not trying to draw attention to ourselves.”
Casper wagged her tongue at him. “Roman, think about what you just said. You’re sitting here at this crappy little roadside restaurant with a woman in a maid outfit standing guard next to you. Seated before you is a lady with purple skin, and next to her is this crazy bitch with blue hair, sitting on a chair that wasn’t here just moments ago. That’s not to mention Celia over there flirting with the owner of the food stand.”
“Crazy bitch?” Miranda said, her eyes narrowing on Casper.
“She’s not wrong,” Naomi said. “Not about you, Miranda, but about saying we’re easy targets out here. Let’s wrap this up. As soon as you know more, Roman, I want you to relay the information to Miranda.”
“Will do.”
“We also need to know if you’re planning to do something. We have to make sure things go through the proper chain of command.”
“How am I supposed to delay her if she asks me to do something that needs to go through an approval process?”
Naomi considered this for a moment. “We should at least try,” she finally told Roman, still not too keen on eating the fried mashed potato patties. Miranda had started on one, picking away at the sides while sticking mostly to the greens on the plate.
“I’ll see what I can do,” Roman said. “I’m assuming that whatever information she comes back with will dictate how we proceed. But it is getting late, so maybe we won’t have to proceed tonight.”
“Hopefully, we can go back to Centralia tomorrow,” Miranda said. “I miss it already.”
“Yeah, I’m hoping for the same,” Roman told her. “So keep all channels open. Be ready to act, and be ready to get approval for me. You guys know how much I like following the rules.”
Jess the chair scooted a bit, her legs scraping against the pavement.
“What she said,” Miranda told Roman.
“In all seriousness, don’t do anything that…” Naomi paused, considering how she should frame what she wanted to say.
“I’ll try not to,” Roman told her.
Chapter Eleven: Trolley
Margo cast her hand at the wall, spikes tearing from it and pressing into the body of a man.
He let out a yelp, his Centralian Intelligence Agency outfit tightening as the spikes pressed through his body. The protrusions were made of a combination of brick and concrete, which Margo knew made it even more painful with their abrasive surfaces.
“How long have you been following me?” she asked the man in an innocent voice.
She was in an alley somewhere near the 33rd Street Station with Paris the doll, where she’d been planning to take refuge in an old safe house she knew of when she’d sensed the presence.
The former Western Province spy had been tailed enough times to know when there was someone following her.
“I’m now controlling the veins in your body,” Margo told the man, his eyes bulging, spit dripping from his chin. “If you try to teleport away, it will kill you.”
The man cried out.
“I can stop the pain, but I need to know something before I do.”
“What?” he asked.
“Where is Roman Martin?”
“I don’t even know who that is, lady,” he blurted out.
Paris came beside Margo and placed a hand at her waist. “I want to play before you kill him,” she said.
“I know you do, dear, but now is not the time to play with our toys.”
“What the hell is wrong with you?” the man managed to ask.
He was growing more delirious with each passing moment, his form wavering between solid and invisible. It occurred to Margo that someone, a very cruel someone, had perhaps sent this man for the sole purpose of being caught. She didn’t know exactly who would have done it or what their intention was, but there was something about his amateur stalking ability that told her he hadn’t trained for very long.
And he was quite young, likely no older than his mid-twenties, his youth soon to be cut short.
“Where is he?” Margo asked.
“I don’t know who you’re talking about.”
“I think you do. Tell me where he is, and I’ll let you go. You know how this works.”
“But…” The man started to sob, realizing that not only was he about to die, he was going to die in a most excruciating way. This caused him to vomit.
“Gross,” Paris the doll said. “I don’t want to play with him anymore.”
“I agree. We’ll make this fast.”
“Where am I going to find him?” Margo asked. “This is the last time you’ll hear this question.”
The man shook his head, eyes darting left as he discovered he could no longer hear from his left ear. Margo had lifted his earlobe and pressed it into his earhole, sealing it up, taking control of the man’s skin in doing so.
“Warehouse, 77th and 34th Street. That’s all I know,” he managed to say. “I swear. I was part of the meeting. They said they were going to take them there, that I had to check on you first. I really don’t even know who you are…”
“Thanks,” Margo told him as she snapped his neck, the man going limp, instantly dead.
“I suppose we need to take a trip,” she told Paris.
“Where are we going, dear?”
“It sounds like we're walking straight into a trap. They sent this poor fellow to bait me. I wonder what he did to deserve this fate. Agents that can turn invisible are a dime a dozen; perhaps he was the worst of his group. There really is no telling.”
Margo exited the alley, her doll catching up with her. They looped their hands together and were about a block away when a different man turned into the alley to take the trash out.
Margo heard his scream as they approached the trolley station.
“He sure got a surprise, didn’t he?”
“That’s right,” she told Paris.
After checking the posted trolley map to make sure she knew where she was going, Margo took the trolley that would get her to 75th and 33rd, which was close enough. It was a bit windy out, cold, a nice night for a walk.
Especially if she was walking into a trap.
She didn’t pay to use the trolley; with the snap of her finger, Margo simply broke the turnstile and stepped up, making her way to a cabin with an old man sitting in the corner, leafing through a newspaper.
He glanced up at Margo and Paris, grunted, and returned his focus to his newspaper.
“Should we play with him?” Paris asked as she took a seat next to Margo. The sex doll was wearing a ruffled dress Margo had stolen from a shop a few hours earlier. It had been rather humorous, at least to Margo, to see the mannequin suddenly running out of the shop still wearing the elaborate dress, the shop owner chasing it until he ran out of breath.
The dress also revealed a good amount of cleavage, which Margo liked, and the old man in the corner of the trolley took a few sidelong glances at the two of them.
Margo smiled over at him.
The trolley made it to the next station, continuing toward 75th Street.
At one point, a mother got on with a baby strapped to her chest. She was also holding a young boy’s hand, an exhausted look on her face.
Paris turned to them. “What’s your daughter’s name?” she asked the mother.
“I’m sorry?”
“What’s your daughter’s name?”
The woman nodded. “Her name is Green.”
“That’s a pretty name,” Margo said. “I used to have a green eye and a blue eye,” she told the baby, even though she was too young to comprehend what Margo was saying to her.
“Why?” asked the boy, who was old enough to speak.
The lights in the trolley flickered off and on as it hit a rough patch on the t
rack.
“Just because,” Margo said.
“He’s cute too,” Paris added. “A little chubby, but I like chubby cheeks. What’s his name?”
“Nice to meet you both; this is our stop,” the woman told them when the trolley slowed, her motherly instinct kicking in as she grabbed her son’s hand and checked on her daughter.
“But Mom, our home is the next… I think,” the boy said as she dragged him toward the door.
“It looks like we scared them off,” Paris told Margo after they were gone.
“You two aren’t scary,” the old man with the newspaper said from his corner.
“Is that so?” Margo asked, turning to him.
“Just two young ladies on the train. Beautiful ladies, I might add. Remind me of my daughters. Well, they’re a bit heavier than the two of you, but they eat well, and that’s a good thing.”
Margo and Paris exchanged glances.
“I don’t know,” Margo said as she looked at her own reflection in her beautiful doll’s eyes. “The night is young.”
“So are we, apparently,” Paris said with a snicker.
The trolley came to a stop again and the older man stood, waving to the two of them before stepping off.
“Too bad,” Paris said with a pout, the doll turning to watch the man make his way onto the platform.
“He really did get lucky, didn’t he? I guess he lives to see his fat daughters another day.”
“I guess.”
The doors shut.
“What’s wrong?”
“We should get a baby,” Paris said. “That would be fun.”
“A baby?” Margo shrugged. “I don’t know; babies are a lot of work. But if you really want one…”
“I really do,” Paris said, moving in to kiss Margo. The two continued to kiss as the trolley started up again, the old man pausing to watch them from the platform.
“We’ll see about it,” Margo finally said.
She thought about killing the older man as the trolley started to speed away, but decided to save her energy.
There was no telling what they were about to be up against.
Chapter Twelve: Change of Plans
Roman watched as needles began to rise from the carpet in his hotel room. They swirled together, stacking on top of one another as they formed two distinct bodies.
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