“It does, my love. It’s almost as if someone wanted to make sure there were no civilians around.”
“That doesn’t seem like a very smart idea.”
Margo smiled. “No, it really doesn’t.”
As she approached the fence surrounding the warehouse, Margo noticed that the gate was open. The wind caused it to swing slightly on its hinge, creating a squeak that cut through the silence of the night.
Margo was the first to step in, a rat scurrying by. It didn’t make it very far; within moments the rat was lying on its back, its legs curled and its tail twitching.
“No, we don’t need a pet,” Margo told Paris.
Her doll laughed quietly. “That’s funny. If we’re going to have a pet, I want something a little bit bigger than that. I want a horse.”
“A horse? What about the baby?”
“That too.”
“A horse and a baby, huh?” Margo asked as she looked into the entrance of the boarded-up warehouse, signs plastered across it reminding the general public that this was government property and trespassers would be prosecuted.
Margo suddenly felt a telepath in the vicinity, that familiar creep moving up the back of her skull. She was still using Catherine the wind user’s body, meaning it wasn’t her brain per se that the telepath was trying to affect, which would work against the telepath’s power as the hallucination started to take shape.
It was suddenly snowy, an environment entirely unfamiliar to Margo.
There was a snow-covered house before her, lights flickering, something eerie about the setting. Margo’s first instinct was to go toward the home, but she quickly snapped out of it, focusing instead on the ground beneath her.
Even though it looked like it was covered in snow, it only took her a moment to sense the concrete, to feel vibrations in it, to know there were others in the warehouse.
“I see one,” Paris said, her voice barely breaking through Margo’s hallucination.
And perhaps if it had been her own brain, her own memories, the hallucination would have thrown her off guard.
Maybe the telepath would have shown her what had really happened between Margo and her father Malus, or made her relive killing her adopted parents, or some of the horrors she had witnessed during the Western Plague.
Maybe.
Margo had to slightly shift her consciousness into the concrete below to disrupt the telepath. She then lifted her hands and wrapped concrete around the person’s legs, immediately breaking them off at the knee.
“Saint!” a female cried, the inside of the darkened warehouse returning to Margo’s sight as a woman made of stone bolted toward her.
Such amateurs.
Margo lifted two slabs from the flooring and smashed the woman between them. The slabs pulled away and clapped together again, the echo ricocheting to the far corners of the warehouse, making the structure quake.
She then cast her hand in the direction of what was left of her opponent, the woman’s stone head separating and falling onto the ground with a loud thump.
Paris picked up the severed head.
“Looks like the head of a statue,” she said as the solid rock face let out a final gasp.
A teleporter appeared behind Margo, a dark-skinned woman with short white hair and a white mask. She was just about to latch on to her when Margo simply exploded the woman’s heart in her body.
The woman fell forward, dead to the world.
“Did someone say Saint?” Margo asked as she moved further into the warehouse. “As in Team Saint?”
“Who’s that?” Paris asked as they both heard someone charging in their direction, the footsteps coming from above.
A snarling blue wolfman leaped down from the rafters; Margo sent a spike straight through his body. The smell of blood and intestines filled the air as he slid down, the tip of the spike bending over and pushing him down further until it tore out of his body.
“Team Saint was a famous group of Centralian exemplars; but now it looks like all but one of them is dead…” Margo said as she made her way to the telepath, who was lying on the ground, concrete snakes having snapped his legs and wrapped up into his torso. “Hello, Saint.”
“Fuck,” he said, another hallucination flashing across Margo’s borrowed mind’s eye.
She kicked him in the nose, the hallucination disappearing almost instantly. “I’ve killed everyone on your team except you.”
“Fuck…” he whispered, his mask with the jewel on it now barely hanging on by a thread, his nose a bloody mess.
“Where is Roman Martin? You’ve set this trap up for me, or someone did. Who agreed to this anyway?” she asked, crouching before him. “Who would be stupid enough to send people with your powers against me?”
Paris walked up and placed her hand on Margo’s shoulder. The doll brought her foot back and kicked the man in the face as well.
“Not too hard, dear,” Margo told her.
“Sorry, it just looked like fun.”
“I have to admit, Saint—and this is very rare for me—tonight I have felt pity not once, but twice. First for the invisible exemplar you sent to tail me. And now for your team. Such a famous team brought down in such a savage, unnecessary way in…” Margo pretended to check a watch on her wrist.
“It was quick,” Paris said.
“Five minutes? It may have been less than that. The point is, and maybe you can relay this to the people that eventually find you: I’ll die when I want to die,” Margo said, enunciating each word. “There’s nothing your government or mine will be able to do to stop me, which, as I’m guessing you’ve realized by now, is why they only sent four people. Better to kill off disposable exemplars than have the humiliation of losing an elite team, which clearly you aren’t.”
“Ugh…”
“There, there, Saint, it’s not time to pass out from the pain just yet. I need to know where Roman Martin is. Tell me that and…” she cooed. “There’s not a lot I’m going to be able to offer or promise you, and I certainly can’t repair your legs. Maybe a healer would be able to do that, but we both know how rare they are. I suppose one thing I could do would be to end your suffering relatively quickly, rather than letting it draw out. I’m sure by now you’ve sent a mental message and others are on the way. If they find you like this, they may be able to give you some medicine, but the pain you will experience in that time will be excruciating, both before the medicine kicks in and after you’ve sort of recovered. You will be crippled for life, I’m afraid.”
“No,” he said, choking back a sob with a grunt. “Can heal.”
“Then I’ll make sure you can’t heal. Now, Roman Martin. And I end this now. Paris?”
“Yes?”
“Be a doll and use some of the beastman’s blood to write this message on the wall, and do it quickly. Please write: ‘I’ll die when I want to die.’ but make it fast. I’m surprised no one has arrived already.”
“I get to do some painting?”
“That’s right, love. Hurry.” Margo returned her attention to Saint. “So where is he?”
Saint shook his head.
Margo responded by trailing the concrete up his body even further, digging it into his ribcage.
“The Eastern…” he barked. “The Eastern Province.”
“Why would they send him there?”
“I… I don’t know…”
Margo shrugged. “That’s way too far for me to travel. Do you know when he will return?”
“Tomorrow or the day after… soon.”
“Thank you,” Margo said as she placed her hand on Saint’s cheek. “It’s sad to see a famous exemplar go.”
Blood started to trickle out of his eye sockets, the man letting out one final gasp before his brain ruptured.
Chapter Fourteen: One Last Visit
Nadine couldn’t quite relate to how Roman felt, but she understood why he looked so vexed when they arrived back in the hotel room.
The white-haired man
paced back and forth in front of her, ready for anything, worried that innocent lives had been taken. He calmed himself down with a few breaths, then smoothed his hands over his black jacket and finally took a seat next to lifeless Celia, animating her.
“Did you do it?” the doll asked with immediate concern.
“I did. I just don’t know…”
“It’s fine,” Nadine told him.
Even though Roman was well aware of some of the things going on behind the scenes, there were a few details Nadine had kept to herself, knowing they would make his story more convincing.
“You don’t think anyone saw this, do you?”
“Again, relax, we’re fine. We’re safe here. Just take a moment to breathe, Roman.”
“Yeah, you’re right,” the orange-eyed man said, steeling himself.
A thin smile took shape on Nadine’s face. She knew neither of the buildings they had destroyed were the same building where the devices were being manufactured.
This was by design.
What happened next and the distraction that followed would be their ticket out.
Roman was subconsciously aware of this, but he had done a very good job of keeping the overall strategy to their dream conversations with Abby, and he seemed entirely convinced by what they’d just done, which was exactly where he needed to be once he met with the Centralian telepath again.
“It’s going to work out,” Nadine said after the two were silent for a moment.
She still had the case with the fake device in it and planned to leave it behind, knowing full well that Roman would get it to the right people.
“And you can destroy this while I’m gone, right?” she asked, nodding to the case, which sat on the end of her bed. “I have to leave in a few minutes.”
“Yeah, no problem. I might want to play around with it too.”
“There’s no need for that,” Nadine told him firmly. “This may be one of the last known prototypes. From what I was told yesterday, everything was kept in those two buildings. That doesn’t mean they won’t be able to replicate them, as the schematics will be somewhere else. But we destroyed a lot of the jewels they used to power these things. It’s…” She swallowed. “It’s definitely a setback for my country.”
“But a necessary one,” Roman reminded her.
“Yes. At least according to us.”
“I can’t believe we’re doing this.”
“We have to, Roman.”
The two of them winced as an ear-piercing sound met their ears, and Coma’s right arm morphed into a blade. Roman’s combat doll loosened up once a teleporter appeared, this one a man with spiky hair and a big grin on his face.
Nadine joined him, Roman putting his fingers in his ears as the two vanished.
“See you soon, Roman.”
“Bye.”
Nadine and the telepath reappeared in an authorized teleportation zone near a village known as Rutland.
It was a quaint place, the homes set along narrow lanes with plenty of foliage—so much, in fact, that in the summer it seemed like many of the houses were built into the trees. This wasn’t quite the case, but there were some trees that had grown into the houses over the years, the families accepting them, always respecting the forest no matter how intrusive it became.
Nadine cringed as the teleporter started to disappear, the same screeching howl leaving with him.
She took a deep breath then, trying to remember the last time she had come to Rutland.
Technically, Nadine wasn’t supposed to come here, but that had never stopped her from visiting in the past.
While she generally liked to follow the rules, she was also well aware that many rules were made to be bent, as long as one was careful.
Nadine passed a bakery as she walked toward the town center, the smell of baked bread reaching her nostrils.
She stepped in, remembering what the place had looked like so many years ago and seeing that it hadn’t changed a bit.
There were still chairs with red seat covers, the white drapes covering the windows yellowed by the sun. The owner of the bakery, now considerably older than the last time Nadine had seen her, still had the same friendly demeanor and a wise look on her face, as if she’d had plenty of time to think while watching dough rise.
“One of the apple pastries,” Nadine said instead of hello.
“Just one, dear?”
“You know what? Make it three.”
The woman retrieved three of the pastries and handed the bag to Nadine. After paying, Nadine thanked the woman before stepping back out to the cobblestone streets of Rutland.
She ate one of the pastries as she walked, the sweet taste of the apple bringing back a whole slew of memories.
She remembered running along this lane as a child, climbing the trees, the falls and scrapes, how the village beamed with pride when the soldiers would pass through. The surrounding trees had enough foliage to protect them from the rain, children still able to play outside even if it was storming.
Then there were the winters, which could be bitterly cold but were often rather dry, with just a couple days with snow.
At about the point she had finished her apple pastry, Nadine saw the home at the end of the lane, manicured bushes before it, a picket fence surrounding the property.
The roof had recently been reshingled, but other than that the place was almost identical to the way it had looked the last time Nadine had visited.
She paused at the freshly painted gate, steadying herself as she remembered she couldn’t give too much away.
It was important that she merely be thought of as a kind stranger, that nothing happened to the two people she was about to visit.
When she was ready, Nadine took the steps to the front door, knocking softly.
A man eventually came to the door, opened it, and immediately looked from Nadine’s face to the bag of pastries in her hand.
“Can I help you?”
“I’m new in town, and I just thought I would stop by with some pastries.”
“New in town? Where are you living?” the elderly man asked, wrinkles appearing on his forehead as he took her in. He wore overalls and his hair was a bit of a mess, whiskers hanging from the bottom of his chin.
“Just around the way.” Nadine motioned in a direction that he wouldn’t be able to follow with his gaze.
“And you brought these for me?” the older man asked, surprise filling his eyes.
“And your wife.”
“Oh…” He cleared his throat. “She died a few weeks back. I’m sorry to…”
“Mom’s dead?” Nadine asked, all her nerves tensing at once.
The man paused, one of his bushy eyebrows rising. “Excuse me?”
“What I meant was, um, your wife, she’s dead?”
“Maurine came down with something,” the man acknowledged with a grimace. “You know, back in my day, we would have had a healer that could cure whatever illness she had. But none of those exist anymore.”
Nadine recalled that she had been in the country with Eli over a month ago.
Had she known…
She shook her head. There was no way she could have slipped away with the healer boy, especially at that time.
A sense of quiet dread spread between them.
The man sniffed, excused himself and turned away from Nadine as he went for a handkerchief in his back pocket. He pretended to blow his nose, but she knew he was wiping tears away.
She’d seen him do this before.
“Do you mind if I come in?” Nadine asked softly. “I don’t want to be a bother.”
“How many pastries do you have in there?”
She smiled, trying to hold back tears herself. “Two.”
“Sure, why not? What harm can it do? No one wants to eat pastries alone,” he said, trying to smile.
A flood of emotion came to Nadine as she took a step into her childhood home, especially once she saw that anything tying her to her mother and fath
er had been completely erased. Even in the quick tour he gave her, Nadine saw that her old room was now a workshop, the animal drawings she’d left on the wall as a child painted over.
Nadine hadn’t been in the house since she’d joined the agency.
She had visited her parents a couple of times, just to drop off pastries, always playing the role of a mysterious new neighbor.
But she’d never been inside.
And Nadine realized as she ended up in the kitchen, sitting at the same table she used to sit at as a child, that this was as closest to a dream in real life as she’d ever come before.
She knew this was actually happening; she knew she had just been at the hotel with Roman, and she was well aware of what they had done at Eastern University earlier and what it would spark.
But to be here, to be here now, her father sitting across from her and eating a pastry with a knife and a fork, a gentleman as always. And to think that her mother was dead, that her own country hadn’t even told her that her mother had passed…
Nadine’s melancholy turned to a sudden flash of anger, the woman barely able to say anything as her father spoke, telling her things she already knew about her mother, how kind she was, how she had changed their wild backyard into a garden that had sustained them through some of the thinner times.
And she wanted to tell him at that moment that she was his daughter, that she knew all these things.
But she couldn’t.
Nadine knew better.
Regardless of what happened to her, and something was definitely going to happen to her, Nadine didn’t want her father getting involved in any way, and she most certainly didn’t want anyone showing up at the doorstep, ready to have a conversation that would end poorly on his part.
So she kept up the act and held back the tears.
As much as it pained her to do so, Nadine just let him speak, never revealing to him the truth, that his mind had been wiped, that he wasn’t alone in this cruel and often unnecessary world.
Sitting before him was his only daughter. The man truly had somebody, his own flesh and blood, even.
“Are you going to eat that?” the man asked at some point, casually pointing his knife at her pastry.
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