He was in bed with Turquoise and Obsidian, the group in a new hideout that Scarlett, their teleporter, had arranged using the old woman’s healing power as payment. It was a basement home, not an ideal place if they were attacked, but the small group wasn’t too worried about that at the moment.
Scarlett and James Tew, the telepath, were gone, James having someone in his family healed. They would be back soon, and then they could begin discussing what would happen next, if they would stay together or try to separate.
After all, not only was Centralian law enforcement looking for them, the woman who had attacked them at the prison was likely trying to find them as well.
Kevin had no idea who the hooded bitch was or what she wanted, but whoever she was, Kevin would have personally classified her as a Type V, the most dangerous classification for an exemplar.
And yes, his natural urge to classify her with Centralia’s backward-ass classification system still annoyed Kevin, considering that a Type I was supposed to be the most dangerous and a Type V was often reserved for someone with a godlike ability, which made them even more dangerous.
It made absolutely no sense.
But there was nothing Kevin could do about that at the moment. And if anyone had a godlike ability, it was the woman who seemed to be able to modify all types of matter.
Yet even with all that on his mind, he still couldn’t quite comprehend what Turquoise had just told him.
“You are the one that told me to go down there,” Turquoise reminded him.
“I didn’t expect there to be an exemplar in HR,” said Kevin, his tone apologetic. “But it’s impossible. Roman is not an exemplar. I sat next to him for years. Trust me. He’s just a normal guy.”
“I asked the man if his name was Roman, and he nodded and attacked me. That’s the last thing I remember.”
“And he had white hair?”
“Yes.”
“Orange eyes?”
“Yes,” Turquoise said.
“No way. He’s a non-exemplar like me,” Kevin said, whispering the last two words.
Obsidian still didn’t know about Kevin’s ring, nor did Scarlett. James Tew knew, but the telepath hadn’t mentioned it, and of course Turquoise knew. Kevin planned to keep it this way in an effort to maintain control.
“Did you see the man who blasted me through the ceiling?” Turquoise asked. “Did you actually happen to see him?”
“No. As soon as you came through the floor, Scarlett teleported over to me and took me to safety, which, by the way, was what you told her to do. If I had stuck around longer, I would have been able to see him to…” Kevin swallowed hard. “To stop him.”
“You couldn’t have stopped him,” Turquoise said with true sincerity. “I’ve never seen a power like that. It was like he could just change the molecular structure of anything.”
“No, that can’t be the same Roman Martin I know. It was someone else. The Roman I know is a normal guy.”
“But he wasn’t on your floor, right?” she asked. “And you asked where he was, and they told you in HR. It has to be him.”
“Roman wasn’t always the nicest guy to me, but he was generally pleasant. He wasn’t the type to randomly attack someone, and he doesn’t have a superpower. I can’t emphasize that point enough.”
“He’s the one who did this to me,” she said, whipping away from him.
“Wait,” Kevin said as he reached out to her.
Obsidian woke, the cute cat girl with black ears yawning, licking her lips, looking at the two of them and curling up into a ball, her tail lightly settling.
She was topless, in a pair of panties and still wearing socks, the blanket on the floor because it had been hot last night.
By this point, Kevin was out of the bed going to Turquoise, his hand reaching out for hers and pulling her back to him.
“Careful,” she told him, her eyes flaring up and claws coming out.
“I’m not trying to…” Kevin took a quick breath in. “Okay, I believe you. If you say it’s Roman, I believe you. But I just don’t see how it’s possible. Just put yourself in my shoes; imagine you had been working with this person for a long time, and then you found out that they attacked someone you cared for. Not only that, they attacked this person using a superpower I’ve only seen used by one other person…”
“The lady at the prison?” Turquoise asked.
“Yes, the one I told you about. That’s the only exemplar I’ve ever seen who could use this type of power.”
“Maybe they’re related,” Turquoise said, turning away from him but letting him put his arms around her, and eventually letting him lift her into his arms. Kevin wasn’t a strongman, but Turquoise was incredibly petite, and it gave him some pleasure to know he could lift her so easily.
With his arm around her now, his other hand under her legs, and her tail lightly flitting against his hand, Kevin was truly happy.
Just looking at her made him happier.
And in that moment, tears came to his eyes. He was so glad she hadn’t died. If anyone else had died, it would have been terrible, but nothing would have stung like Turquoise’s death. Not Obsidian, not his estranged brother, no one.
“I’m just so glad you’re back,” Kevin told her.
“I can tell,” she said softly.
“And I don’t know what we should do when we get there, but I do know where Roman lives. So maybe we could pay him a visit.”
“We need to be ready if we do,” she said, her ears twitching. “I know you don’t believe me fully, but he almost killed me. If we show up there unannounced, he could kill all three of us.”
“Well, we have a teleporter,” Kevin reminded her, “and we have a telepath. But I don’t know how we’ll convince them to take a little side mission with us.”
“Then again, if you do know him well and he does secretly have this power, maybe he could be of use to us,” Turquoise said as Kevin carried her into the bathroom.
He set her down and she hopped up on the sink, where she perched as he took a piss.
“You don’t have to watch, you know,” he told her.
“It’s not like I haven’t seen it before,” she said with a smile.
“And I don’t know about trying to recruit Roman, even if he has a power…” Kevin sighed as he felt his piss coming to an end, just a trickle now. “Like I said, he can be kind of an ass, definitely not a team player. But if he really does have this power, it would give us an advantage against the hooded woman. Because she’s coming for us. I fucking know it.”
Kevin finished pissing and shook his cock for a moment.
“We can cross that bridge when we get there,” Turquoise said, “but first we need to pay Roman a visit. And at that point, we either kill him or he joins us. Either way, we need to act fast.”
Chapter Five: The Best Day and the Worst Day
The letter pretty much wrote itself.
In fact, it actually wrote itself, Roman not bothering to lift his pen. There was no point in faking it any longer, no point in trying to be something he wasn’t, even if it threw him under the trolley with Ava. He would figure something out, some angle, and he had enough savings to last him until she approved of his exemplar status.
And if he ran out of savings, well, he could just counterfeit money.
So the letter wrote itself: I, Roman Martin, hereby resign from my position as an immigration advisor, effective immediately.
“I bet you’re feeling pretty fucking special, aren’t you?” Casper asked.
He had animated her a few moments back, needing something to distract him from the news he’d learned from Phil Pott.
Kevin Blackbook is alive, and he attacked the office.
Roman shook his head, not quite believing it, not quite ready to come to grips with what this meant.
If Kevin was alive, perhaps there was a chance he would find out Roman had taken his power.
It wasn’t like he could do anything to Roman; it had
been relatively easy to take out the cat girl, as Roman’s power was far superior to someone who relied on close range attacks. But it did complicate things in a way, and…
No, there was no way Kevin would have done something to Celia’s dead body. Roman knew enough about his former co-worker to know that.
He may have been a weirdo loser fuck, but he wasn’t a necromaniac, and he certainly didn’t have sway over someone who could animate the dead.
“It does feel good,” Roman finally told Casper. “Do you know how long I’ve been wanting to do this?”
“It’s not like your job is that hard,” said Casper. “From what I can tell, you sit here in this desk, people come talk to you, and you either give them good news or unwelcome news.”
“I find it hard to understand how you’ve gathered all of what I do in the thirty minutes or so we’ve been here.”
“There are way worse jobs out there. One million worse jobs I can think of,” said Casper. “And I don’t even know all the types of jobs your world has.”
“It’s just hard for me to explain.”
“It can’t be that hard,” Casper said.
“No, what I’m trying to say is it’s hard for me to explain my feelings when it comes to this job. It’s not that I don’t have respect for the job, nor am I stupid enough to think it’s actually a bad job or anything, especially compared to some of the jobs non-exemplars have. It’s just that it no longer applies to me. I don’t need this job. I’m simply staying here until I get approved. So why don’t I just sit at home until I get approved, or train, or do other things, maybe with Nadine?”
“I don’t know how Celia will feel about you cozying up to Nadine.”
Roman frowned, and Casper laughed at the look on his face.
“That’s not what I meant at all.”
“My humor comes from you. You remember that, right?”
“Unfortunately,” Roman said. “And it has made me question my comedic tastes.”
“It’s not like you wouldn’t give it to her, right?” asked Casper. “Nadine is pretty hot. Tall, thin, that dirty-blond hair of hers, that determined look on her face like she’s out to save the world yet she knows she’s a fucking spy and she feels guilty about it.”
“That’s enough for you,” Roman said, just about to take away her power when Casper talked him out of it.
“Come on, just let me kid! Besides, I want to hear you quit. I promise to be quiet. This will be so juicy. Please don’t deanimate me!”
“You need to be quiet, because if you’re not quiet, then…” Roman bit his lip. “I don’t know exactly what I would do if you weren’t quiet, but it would definitely cause trouble for me. And to answer your question, there are plenty of things I could do with Nadine that don’t involve hooking up. We’re still trying to get to the bottom of what’s happened to our world’s healers, remember? Everyone could use a little healing.”
Casper clasped her hands together and placed them under her chin, looking up at Roman with a dreamy, sarcastic look on her face. “Aren’t you just a little hero,” she finally said.
“Keep quiet,” Roman said.
“You know you love me.”
“Debatable.”
Roman stood, folded his letter, and smoothed his hands over the front of his jacket.
Roman thought about going to Selena, but if these were the last ten minutes or so that he would be at work, he definitely didn’t want to spend those ten minutes with her.
With each step, Roman felt as if his shackles were coming free and he was exiting the prison, walking past other cells while the prisoners in their cubicles looked out at him. He nodded to a few of them; he ignored the ones he thought were cunts.
They would say shit about him after he left, about how he had cracked because of his wife’s death, whatever. Fuck them. Anything to keep the office gossip going, especially now that it had been a few days since the attack and they needed something else to talk about.
They could only relive the same scenario so many times, no matter how close it brought a few of them.
If Roman had known those things, he would have felt for those people.
He wasn’t cold, he wasn’t heartless, and he realized the selfishness in what he was doing, leaving them to the wolves if they ever returned. But maybe that wasn’t the way for him to look at it; maybe he would make it onto a risk management team and he would be called in to help a similar office next time something like an office attack happened.
Roman was closing this chapter of his life and not looking back, scratching from his memory the hours upon hours, days upon days, weeks upon weeks, years upon years that he had spent sitting in that cubicle or one like it, a cell that he’d chosen for himself, one he could freely leave yet had chosen through monetary desires to remain in.
Those that saw him walk past would later say he looked like a ghost as he was leaving, the white-haired man with orange eyes, the constantly brooding immigration advisor who had something wrong with his wife that no one really knew any details about, the guy who showed up late. who was friendly at times yet often cold.
What ever happened to that guy?
Who cared?
The walk down to HR was a blur.
Handing his resignation letter to Dante was also a blur, the bald man looking up at him with curiosity and a bit of fear when he saw Roman’s chiseled visage.
“Are you sure about this?” Dante called after him. “We have counseling services…”
But Roman had already raised his hand to cut him off. “I hope you find happiness,” Roman told him over his shoulder.
“I hope you do too,” Dante finally said.
And with that, it was done. Roman headed straight to the exit, Casper mumbling something about how serious he was acting and Roman ignoring her. It was weird being free, especially knowing that he’d held the key to his own cage all along.
When he stepped outside, the air felt fresher, but it also seemed suspicious of him, like maybe he shouldn’t be there.
And he didn’t feel like going home, not yet—not that he had any problem with seeing Celia or Coma. He felt like just walking. He didn’t know where he would stop, but he would start at the entrance to the immigration office.
He walked for over two hours heading southwest and eventually reached Central Park, where he decided to rest for a while.
Roman sat on the grass and then laid back, his hands behind his head as he looked up at the sky, gray clouds overhead. A normal day in Centralia. Casper was quiet for the most part.
The nap that came next was a powerful one, a nap that kept him asleep in the park for a good two and a half hours, Roman’s thoughts lost in the twilight meadow.
He kept dreaming of the real Celia again, the same damn dream on replay, falling, reaching out, finding his wife at the last moment but never being able to actually save her.
And it was in that moment, a few minutes after he’d woken up that Roman recalled how Celia had ended up in a coma in the first place, which was the same reason Roman was required to go to Heroes Anonymous meetings.
It had been her idea.
Celia was a spontaneous soul; she loved going to public events, festivals, carnivals, farmers markets, that sort of thing.
And it was at one of these events that Roman’s life had been changed forever.
It was a chilly night, Roman and Celia walking through the crowd at a local festival, Roman holding a warm bag of caramel popcorn as the two of them headed toward a stage where a band was just starting up.
There were Ferris wheels around, carnival games, fun houses, all ways people could waste money in search of cheap thrills.
Of course, these were all non-exemplars.
Exemplars usually had their own carnivals because of their powers, and no one ever said anything about how the two groups of people were separate but equal. It just worked that way.
At the time, Roman was sick of dealing with exemplars, both at work and in the years befor
e when he’d participated in Centralian fight clubs.
Roman was powerful among non-exemplars, fast, his dormant power seeming to give him an enhanced agility. But around most exemplars he was still lacking, not that he hadn’t won a few bouts.
Of course there were class Es, and Type IIIs and IVs who weren’t dangerous, but those weren’t the ones that got people’s attention. As with any world, it was sheer power that drew eyeballs and praise.
So Roman didn’t care that their carnivals and festivals were usually separate. The middle-of-the-road administrator was just happy to be with Celia after a long day of work, at an annual event she had gone to since she was a child.
Initially, Roman wanted to watch the band, but Celia said she wanted to ride the Ferris wheel, something he wasn’t too keen on.
“You know that’s not really my thing,” he started to tell her.
“It’ll be fine, I used to always go when I was a girl. You would have liked me then,” she said.
“More or less than I like you now?” he asked her, moving in for a kiss.
“I don’t know; I had more energy then.”
“You definitely have enough energy for me,” he told his wife, and their lips pressed together.
Celia laughed at his cheesy line and led him toward the Ferris wheel, the great structure easily seven stories tall and covered in blinking lights, with a small line waiting to board.
Roman and Celia made it on the next intake. They walked past the turnstile, a man clicking a device with each person that entered, and from there they took the stairs to one of the cabs.
Celia got in first, then Roman after setting their popcorn down on a bench.
Once they were securely in their seats, the wheel moved up a little, letting the next pair get in. It worked this way until the wheel had already made a full rotation. Once everyone was secure, the Ferris wheel started up, slowly at first, then faster.
Too fast.
Roman was squeezing Celia’s hand hard now, grinning at his wife, hoping the Ferris wheel would come to a stop soon. His sense of gravity was off every time they went around, the wind changing directions, the blinking lights getting to him, making everything flash in a strange way.
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