“I did.”
“I injured one of the cat girls Kevin had with him. If you’re telling me that a fat guy with a cat girl and some others exemplars broke out a healer from Prison South, that was probably Kevin. Sounds inexplicable, but he is a fat guy with a cat girl. I don’t know how many of those there are.”
“And they were intercepted by this woman, the same woman who has your wife.” Ava shook her head for a moment. “This just keeps getting weirder and weirder.”
“Look, I wasn’t trying to get involved with any of this. It all started with Paris, who has gone missing, according to one of my sources.”
“And Paris was the Western spy, correct?” Ava asked.
“Yes, Paris…” Roman thought for minute. “I believe her last name was Renara. Paris Renara.”
“Let me check on that.”
Ava sat quietly for a moment as she fired off a few mental messages, similar to what Nadine had done earlier.
Roman was still on guard, not sure if she would try to do anything to him or not.
He kept casually glancing around the room, looking for a mist, or one of William’s clones. It would make sense for her to call her team, especially since Ava knew that Roman had come up with more lethal ways to use his power.
“Yes, she’s dead,” Ava finally said. “Paris Renara is dead.”
“What happened to her?” Roman asked, continuing to pick at his salad.
“Her body was found in a warehouse,” said Ava, “strangled to death.”
“So someone killed Paris, okay. Does she have any known associates?”
“To be honest with you, while we do have some information on the spies from other countries, they are spies, and they’re generally good at hiding their true identities. Your Eastern spy friend, if you want to call her that, is probably hiding her identity from you.”
“No, I don’t think she is. We have grown closer than we…”
“Than what?”
“Than maybe we should? Not like that,” Roman assured her. “I’m just saying that I rescued her from an Eastern Province military facility.”
Ava nearly dropped her fork. “Come again?”
“It doesn’t matter now. We are close, that’s all that matters.”
“It matters. What you just said matters. Tell me everything.”
So Roman told her an abridged version of going to the East in search of a healer, then having to rescue Nadine and the healer from an Eastern military facility. He didn’t tell her about what he had bartered, but he pretty much told her everything else.
Ava looked at him long and hard for a moment after he finished. “Fuck, Roman. This is one part of the story that you don’t tell anyone. Understand me? There are going to be questions, and your trip to the East will definitely be part of those questions, but this is the part that you don’t tell anyone about. The healer boy? Which, by the way, we’ll discuss later. Fighting Eastern military officials? Everything is off-limits. In fact, I believe we may need to have that stripped from your mind.”
Roman noticed the memory starting to leave him, becoming fuzzy around the edges, as if it were a dream he’d had a few years back.
“Where’s the telepath?” Roman asked, his hands tensing under the table.
“Around. And I’m not going to ask her to do anything aside from clean up your thoughts a little,” Ava said. “It’s a technique she’s perfected that allows you to keep the memories, but anyone looking into your mind will think you are recalling a dream you had.”
“It’s okay,” Roman told Coma, who had started to stand. On his right, Celia looked completely worried, the sweet doll glancing between Roman and Ava.
“You called a telepath?” Roman asked, even though it was obvious this had happened.
“MindLenz is here and she knows everything. Roman, I’m sorry for this, but we are going to have to rework your thoughts a little bit.”
Roman started to move but suddenly felt frozen, time slowing to a standstill. “Please don’t, Ava,” he told her. “Please…”
“Relax, Roman,” Ava said calmly, “it’s not what you think. I’m granting you your wish; I’m officially registering you as an exemplar. But before I can do so, we need to clean up your thoughts some, like I said.”
“Wait, are you fucking serious? You’re registering me?” Roman asked, his heartbeat slightly heightened.
“You and I still have more training to do. In fact, we will start training after lunch is over. But I want to get you approved because I personally believe the things that you have uncovered not only represent a danger to all of Centralia, but also a solution, and that solution is you. I was wrong about the type of exemplar you could be.”
“Wrong about me?” Roman asked. “What do you mean?”
He glanced over his shoulder, expecting to see the telepath sitting behind him, but he knew she wasn’t. She could be anywhere in the room, or outside, for that matter, depending on how powerful she was.
“Yes, I was wrong about putting you on a risk management team. You are a risk yourself, and you would be ill-suited for a team of people whose job it is to mitigate risk. No, a career as a first responder isn’t right for you, but you will never—and I mean this from the bottom of my heart—you will never be on an exemplar team. You are not a superhero, Roman, but that doesn’t mean you don’t have a use to the Centralian government.”
“A use for me?” Roman asked.
“Yes, as a spy. You’ve already infiltrated Eastern and Western spying sources,” she said, her eyes lighting up. “We know that the Northern and Southern Alliance also have a network of spies in Centralia. After I approve your exemplar status, you and I will continue your training, and once you get a security clearance, you will be brought up on some of the issues Centralia faces. I believe you will be a good spy. I believe you will appreciate that this information is better to keep to yourself. You should consider yourself lucky.”
“Lucky?” Roman asked. “I’d say I’m anything but lucky.”
“And you’d be wrong. If I didn’t see your potential, I would have your mind wiped now and your power stripped from you. You would be without a job, without your dolls—no offense, Coma and Celia—and you wouldn’t know why a woman with the ability to animate inanimate objects was holed up in your home.”
“This… is the last thing I was expecting.”
“Listen, Roman, I believe in you, and I want to see you succeed. And even though you’ve gone about this in a terrible way, I believe we can make something good about it. So finish your salad.”
“Yeah, sure…” Roman said, still not sure of how to process all this. “Thanks.”
“I pretty much saved your life and all you can say is thanks?” Ava laughed. “Kidding, you responded about the way I would have responded had I been in the same scenario. Oh, and one more thing.”
“What’s that?”
“This woman with the power to animate inanimate objects? Her name is Margo.”
“Margo,” Roman said, subvocalizing the name a few times.
“She was Paris’s handler, and former lover. The woman wasn’t always as crazy as she is now, and we think hunting vampires in the Western Province is what kickstarted her mania. As for how we will respond to Margo, I’m not aware of that yet. We didn’t expect someone like her to actually come to Centralia.”
“How powerful is she exactly?”
“She’s a Type V.”
Roman swallowed hard, knowing that this meant the woman named Margo had godlike powers and it wouldn’t be easy taking her down, not even for an exemplar team.
“We will discuss more about what we should do with her later,” said Ava, “but for now, I think it’s best if we just keep her in your place and monitor her around the clock. She’ll be waiting for you, and we don’t need to bring down the entire city block trying to get her out. I also don’t know how we will kill her yet.”
“But you have an entire country’s worth of exemplar resources at you
r disposal, right?”
Ava shrugged. “Strange as it sounds, going after the spies of foreign entities can lead to wars. While the Western Province is war-torn, at least along the borders, it is a proxy war right now between the North and the South. We are neutral in it, and by neutral I mean we are supporting both sides. We’re also supporting the Western Province through aid. We will have to be careful about how this goes down. Here’s something you’re going to find out over the next few weeks.”
“What’s that?”
“Optics matter,” Ava said, taking a bite of her salad. “And speaking of which, we need to get to our training soon. I will also arrange the ceremony.”
“A ceremony for what?”
“Everyone who moves from non-exemplar to exemplar gets a ceremony. What? You’re not looking forward to people celebrating the fact that you now have a superpower?” Ava shook her head at him. “Be happy, and congratulations.”
Chapter Thirteen: Needles and Clone Wars
“Is your blindfold secure?” Ava asked.
“Yep, I can’t see anything,” Roman told her honestly.
They were at the training facility, Roman still in disbelief that his confession had gone so well. He thought about sending a message to Nadine, letting her know how it played out, but decided against it, wondering if it would change the way they interacted.
Would she want to be associated with him in the same way once he was a Centralian spy?
If anything, he could make something up, claiming that Ava wasn’t happy but that she’d eventually accepted it, especially after the part about his wife’s body being taken. He could paint Ava as sympathetic to his cause, an ally.
So for now he’d keep Nadine in the dark, just like he was with the blindfold over his eyes.
Roman could smell the hay.
It was almost funny that Ava had gone to the trouble of having it delivered, three bushels, to be exact, all stacked on top of one another, the scent in the air reminding him of the Eastern Province.
Roman had been thinking a lot about the East since arriving back in Centralia, once again becoming familiar with the sights and smells of the city versus the tranquility of the countryside.
There was something about it that soothed him, made him feel at home, even though he didn’t have his condo or the faux sense of security felt in Centralia with its large crowds, the ever-moving and ever-changing city.
Roman took a deep breath in, readying himself for the next task.
Coma stood next to him. Celia was already sitting against the wall, dead as the day she was created. Roman wanted to spend more time with his dolls later, but part of him also wanted to ignore the advice everyone was giving him and go after Margo.
Why this woman wanted to destroy his life, Roman could hardly comprehend, but he wasn’t the type to give in without a fight, not when the stakes were this high—not when she had defaced his wife’s corpse.
He felt his fists tensing as he returned his focus to what Ava had told him to do.
With his eyes closed, he was supposed to mentally move through the haystack, looking for a needle.
At first, he thought it was a little cheesy, but then he started to realize the genius in it: Roman usually needed to see what he was affecting, but what if he already knew what was there? Could he sense it? Could he modify it without being able to see it? What then?
She had told him to stare at the haystack long and hard before putting the blindfold on, and she’d even had him stand in front of it, to the point that he could reach out and touch it if he wanted to.
But he wasn’t supposed to touch it; he was supposed to move through the individual strands of hay searching for a needle, using the hay to feel for the needle.
He grew frustrated at the twenty-minute mark, the darkness of the thick blindfold making him lose his concentration. Eventually he got the gist of it, envisioning himself tunneling through the hay, listening intently as he sent a small vortex past each strand.
It took him another ten minutes or so, but Roman finally found something that felt different than the strands of hay—the needle. Ava applauded him immediately when the needle lifted out of the top bundle on its own, the hay actually pushing it up.
“I really am a good teacher,” she said, “when my students aren’t betraying their country.”
“Sorry about that,” Roman said as he removed his blindfold, not sure of how he was supposed to respond to what she’d said. The light in the gym was too bright all of a sudden, Roman having to keep his eyes shut for a moment as Ava spoke.
“Sorry, I should be more professional. Anyway, good news. Your ceremony has been set for tomorrow morning. Please do not disappoint me in this decision I’ve made,” she said, more softly this time.
“I will do my best,” Roman told her as he moved over to Coma.
“Good. It was actually one of your dolls I wanted to experiment with next—no, how about both of them?”
“Experiment with?”
“I suppose there is a better way for me to say it,” his teacher said, swiveling on her heels, her long red hair bouncing off her back.
She was hot, both in the literal and metaphorical sense, and Ava definitely knew it. She had a way of walking that immediately drew attention to her, and it was a wonder to Roman that he hadn’t recognized her as being on an exemplar team, especially with the way she looked.
A fiery exemplar with a body to kill? She must have gotten some press…
“You might be wondering why there is a pile of discarded metal objects here.” She waved her hand at the floor.
“Yes, I wondered that at least once,” Roman said with a wry grin. “Among other things.”
“From what I’ve seen, you tend to give your dolls boxing gloves as weapons, likely based on your time as a fighter. I know you can do more, such as form large blades, that sort of thing, but I thought it might be interesting if you took this a step further.”
“A step further?” Roman asked.
“Have you thought about crafting weapons yet?”
“I can’t say that I have,” said Roman. “What are you suggesting? That I just make a knife?”
“Actually, that’s not a bad idea, but I was thinking you could make something on the fly for Coma, or maybe Celia if she’s up to trying to stab someone to death. William should be here any moment, so let’s see what you can do in the meantime.”
“It’s worth a shot,” Roman said, just starting to lift his hand toward the metal. “What kind of weapon do you want?” he asked Coma.
The doll was in her gym clothes but still wore her mask, her dark hair in pigtails. “I never really thought about that,” she said with a shrug. “I kind of liked the fist.”
Roman picked up a hunk of metal and started moving his hands, forming a handle with a guard over it. Once he’d done that, he pulled out a large spike from another big piece of metal and set it on the piece he had formed, the metals instantly merging together.
“Interesting,” said Ava. “It’s like a handheld spike or something.”
“Not exactly what I was going for, but it will do,” said Roman.
“And her other hand?” Ava looked around the room, expecting William to appear at any moment.
“What do you think?” Roman asked Coma.
“Well, William is going to have batons, so what if I had a bigger baton?” she asked. “Maybe with a knife on the end.”
“I like her,” Ava said with delight in her eyes.
“So a baton with a knife on the end.” Roman crouched in front of the pile of metal and found some good pieces to work with. A flash in the corner of the room signaled that William Bottorf had arrived, the duplicator yawning and stretching his hands over his head as the teleporter zipped away.
“Need more sleep?” Ava asked him.
“I’m good,” he said as he started replicating, his clones peeling out of his own skin, dressed the same way as William was dressed, with batons hooked to their sides.
Coma immediately spiked one of the clones, moving quickly on her feet, bouncing left and right as he tried to get her with the batons. She responded by taking two out at once, ducking under another baton swipe, hitting the ground at one point and coming back up, fast as ever.
Once the clones realized they couldn’t simply surround her, and that she was able to better utilize her new weapons by being unpredictable, they tried to come at her one at a time.
A clone came with his baton spinning, and Coma lifted her bladed baton at the same time, their weapons meeting, a percussive clack echoing across the room. She brought her spiked hand into his stomach, pushing him to the ground as she slipped away. Her pigtails bounced as she met another clone, this one able to get the upper hand by sweeping her off her feet. He quickly brought his foot down onto her neck and said, “Death strike.”
“Not bad,” Roman said, moving over to Coma to help her up.
He pushed the clone aside, almost daring it to try and do something, but the clone simply stood there while Roman checked Coma, making sure she was okay.
“Let’s try something else,” Roman said as he merged her spike weapon into her hand, the material swirling together and forming an even larger club by infusing it with her arm.
“Don’t worry, I’ll return your arm to normal once we finish,” Roman assured her with a hand on Coma’s shoulder.
“Thanks,” she said with a smile.
“And after, I want to take you and Celia somewhere. Anywhere you want to go. Just be thinking about it.”
“Maybe a cosplay café?” Coma asked. “Celia was talking about one of those the other day.”
“She wants to cosplay?” Roman whispered, aware that Ava and the clones were waiting on him to do something.
“That’s what she says.”
“Well, who am I to disappoint her?” Roman asked. “Cosplay café it is. Good luck.”
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