House of Dolls 3

by Harmon Cooper

  Coma brought up another barrier just as Margo’s doll circled around it, pipes wrapped around her arms.

  Now gasping for air, panic tearing at his insides, Roman could see parts of Celia’s body, her head lying on the pavement, her eyes open, dead.

  It took everything in his power not to run to her, but he eventually kept low to the ground, his form still hidden, his focus on Margo.

  He needed to see the woman to be able to take her out, but he didn’t dare get any closer to the exit of the alley.

  Not now, not when he was this close.

  He checked his power dial to see that he was nearing his breaking point, red is dead echoing in his skull.

  The fact that Roman was semi-powering Coma seemed to prevent Margo from exploding her in the same way she’d done to Celia. That didn’t stop Margo’s doll from nearly getting the upper hand, Coma doing her damnedest to keep a barrier between Margo and her as she engaged the other doll, dodging her fists, skipping around her kicks.

  Roman wished this was a fair fight, as stupid as those two words sounded together.

  It could never be fair. If they were both non-exemplars, Roman’s training and size difference would give him the edge. And in an exemplar fight? Margo would win hands down.

  No, Roman would stick to the shadows and hope for the best, and if she was smart, which she was, Margo would tear through everything in her path until she found him.

  “Where are you?” Margo shouted. “You have to be nearby. Roman, I’m waiting…”

  There was chaos on the streets now, people trying to get as far away from the melee as they could. Two men slipped into Roman’s alley, startled to find him crouched there.

  Rather than deal with them running back out and bringing Margo’s attention, Roman activated the gravel beneath their feet, pulling both men to the ground and bringing his finger to his lips.

  “Quiet,” Roman whispered. “Or I will bury both of you.”

  The men, both non-exemplars, nodded, one of them whimpering as Margo continued to taunt Roman.

  “Quiet,” Roman said again as he moved past him, still crouching in the shadows.

  “Your doll can’t hold on for much longer,” Margo said, even as Coma and the other doll continued to fight. There were no grunts, no moans, no real fatigue—they were both made of a variety of plastic materials, and they didn’t hurt the same way humans did.

  Roman started to get a glimpse of Margo, the woman’s different colored eyes focused on the fight. Coma could no longer sustain her barrier, and before Roman could intervene, a mist began to descend upon the battle.

  No, he thought, no longer able to see Margo. No! He even tried to throw his power forward, to find her, but it was utterly useless by that point.

  An arc of fire moved through the air with dozens and dozens of clones winding through mist, all aimed at Margo’s location.

  But Roman knew she would be gone by then, that she would drop into the sewer or move into one of the buildings, Mister Fist and his crew not able to track her at the speed she could move.

  And Roman assumed that MindLenz would scan the area, but Margo would know how to deal with a telepath. The woman had likely trained as well if not better than most spies.

  No, this was a loss, an utter defeat, and Roman felt it deep in his chest as he stumbled out of the alley, punching at the mist as if that would do anything. He found Coma standing there, her dress torn, marks all over her face and arms.

  The smog started to fade away, ballooning up at first and then falling into a pillar, swirling as Mister Fist’s form took shape.

  “You were told not to go after her,” the strongman said.

  “Fuck you,” Roman told him, tensing up so hard he could feel a migraine coming on.

  He could kill Mister Fist right now. It would only take a second, and the man wouldn’t be able to do anything by the time he struck. But Roman knew better. So he instead moved to Celia, what was left of her.

  “You are not on a risk management team, nor are you on an exemplar team,” the big man said, taking a step closer to Roman, his scowl evident under his mask.

  “I’ll handle this.” Ava landed, the flames instantly disappearing from her arms and legs.

  “Celia,” Roman said as he picked up his doll’s head, portions of her hair torn out, burnt black. This part he could fix, but the part he couldn’t fix was all around him, splashes of plastic, a hand here, a foot there, all lying amidst the rubble caused by the walls Coma had lifted out of the pavement.

  No, it was a complete loss, aside from her head, which Roman animated almost immediately.

  “Roman?” Celia’s head asked, looking around with despair in her eyes.

  “I’m so sorry,” he told her, looking down at her face. “I’ll make this better, I promise.”

  “Plume, this is unacceptable,” Mister Fist started to say.

  “She came after my wife!” Roman screamed at the man, Celia’s head now tucked between his arm and his side body.

  “Roman, calm down,” Ava started to say. “Just calm down.”

  “I will not calm down!” Roman said, the ground rippling around him. “I could have ended this,” he said loudly, enunciating each word carefully. “Then you show up with a bunch of mist, and clones, and fire…”

  “We’re going to have to do something about you,” Mister Fist said through gritted teeth.

  “You want to do something about me?” Roman asked him. “Because you’re going to have to do it quickly.” Roman lifted his hands. “I’m serious here—try something.”

  Roman knew the telepath was playing with his head now; he could feel her whispering at the back of his mind, but he also knew how to ignore, at least…

  It was a few more seconds before Roman lowered his hands, calm all of a sudden, still a little twitchy because of the adrenaline. A telepath couldn’t take the chemical sensation away, but feeling peaceful amidst the chaos, slightly relaxed even though he was holding Celia the doll’s head under his arm, that was definitely something a telepath could do.

  “You can’t go after people like this,” Plume said, taking over for Mister Fist. “This is not how we operate.”

  “I know you have done something to my mind,” Roman told MindLenz, who stood next to Mister Fist now, her face completely concealed by a mask. “But that doesn’t mean I can’t think, and the four of you ruined my chance to neutralize this threat. Now, I may have acted out of order here, but someone had to do it. She would have reached the morgue by now…”

  Roman’s eyes went wide as he turned to the morgue, the ground lifting from beneath him and carrying him forward rapidly. Coma ran up beside the form he had created and hopped on, Roman helping her up with his free hand.

  Ava was beside him in a matter of moments, but rather than stop him, she flew toward the morgue as well, flames licking off her heels.

  “No,” Roman said as he tore away the morgue’s wall with his powers—the desks, the chairs, the papers, lab material, everything strewn about, shattered, melted.

  They were too late. There was a giant crater in the floor, the staff’s bodies mangled and broken.

  Hazrat was gone.

  “It’s about to get so much worse,” Roman said, looking at Ava, who slowly lowered onto the platform he’d created.

  “I know,” she said, Roman still not used to seeing her in her exemplar uniform and matching mask.

  By this point Mister Fist had caught up to them, moving in the mist form to travel quickly.

  “What happened here?” Mister Fist asked before the realization hit him. “We’re… we’re too late.”

  “I would have stopped her,” Roman said, clenching his teeth. “Now she has the body of a shadow user, a Type I named Hazrat Inayat. Don’t you see what’s going to happen here? Not only can she control any objects, but now Margo can control shadows. We are so fucked.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two: Guardian Angels

  “I don’t know how they are going to be ab
le to handle him,” said Oscar, standing next to Nadine and Lisa as they watched Roman shout and point his finger at Mister Fist.

  “I would be angry too,” Lisa offered.

  “Same here.” Nadine could feel Roman’s tension even though her body was in a room miles and miles away, attached to her current form through a cord of light. She wished there was something she could do, that she could turn her form visible and go after Margo, a surprise attack from behind to take the woman out once and for all.

  Lisa, Nadine and Oscar hadn’t entirely heard the argument between Roman and Mister Fist.

  As soon as Margo had slipped into the sewer, they had moved with her, traveling behind her and eventually up through a hole in the morgue, watching as Margo killed indiscriminately. With the flick of her hand, the hooded woman had torn the wall blocking Hazrat’s body away, animating it in an instant.

  There weren’t many exemplars who could manipulate light or darkness, and the ones that could generally were given the highest classifications possible. Their power to kill almost instantly and their ability to adapt to almost any environment made them formidable opponents.

  In some of the cases Nadine had studied, she’d read about taking down these types of exemplars, strategies that were used and ones that failed. This would only grow more complicated now that Hazrat was in Margo’s control, which likely meant the man wouldn’t fight in any conventional way.

  Plus he couldn’t really die.

  Sure, they could find a way to explode his body parts, but blasting him away or cutting his arm off wouldn’t really stop him.

  Even though it wouldn’t hurt her, Nadine stepped aside as the ground lifted Roman up, the white-haired former non-exemplar just now becoming cognizant of the fact that Margo may have taken Hazrat.

  He would be in for a rude awakening when he reached the morgue, and he would probably get even angrier.

  Nadine couldn’t blame him.

  The umbilical cord made of light now behind her, she moved toward the morgue again along with Oscar and Lisa, the young exemplar commenting on William Bottorf’s clone.

  “I wish someone would carry me around like that,” she said, referring to the team’s telepath, MindLenz, whom one of William’s clones carried in his arms as he ran toward the morgue.

  “I hope they don’t do something drastic with Roman, considering he’s gone against their best wishes,” Oscar said, ignoring Lisa.

  “What do you mean?” Nadine asked.

  “There’s a chance that Roman is cast aside. But from what I have seen, they rarely strip an exemplar’s power after one has been granted; you have to really piss them off to make them do that.”

  “Rarely?” Nadine asked as they neared the morgue. “The way you say that makes me think this has happened before.”

  “It has,” said Oscar. “You’ll want to refer to some of the case files I’ve left in your room if you would like to know more about Centralia’s lottery program. It was one of the reasons we were so interested in examining Roman more closely.”

  Nadine stopped. “I thought you were interested in his power…”

  Oscar shook his head at the woman. “Nadine, I know you and I haven’t quite gone over what happened in the East as well as we should, and maybe I have reasons for that, but the reason we wanted to examine Roman was because of both his power and the way his power was given to him. What if we could turn everyone in the East into an exemplar? Have you ever thought of that?”

  “Not really,” she admitted. “And did our people uncover how Centralia did it?”

  Oscar shook his head. “Not yet. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was something esoteric, like a Northern or Southern Alliance rune or something. Our people tend to dig too deeply into the science side of things, forgetting there are mysteries in this world that have yet to be explained.”

  “I feel like I’m not supposed to be part of this conversation,” said Lisa, backing away.

  “Nonsense,” said Oscar. “You are in so deeply now that the only way to drag you back out would be through a complete mind sweep. So enjoy the information you are privy to at the moment, because it may not last forever.”

  “Is that a threat to wipe my mind?”

  “No, my dear child, it is the truth. Sometimes the truth sounds like a threat, but I’m not threatening you. I’m telling you what will happen. As long as you’re cooperating with us, your memories will be intact, and you will be exposed to very private information. Once you decide to go your own way, or back to your country, that information will be taken from you. Is that not what you want?”

  “I…” Lisa shrugged, her translucent pigtails bouncing as she did so. “I haven’t really thought about that. But maybe you’re right. Maybe it’s best I don’t know what’s going on here.”

  “We will all eventually have our minds wiped,” Oscar said. “My time may be sooner than yours.”

  “Are you thinking of retiring?” Nadine asked.

  “I’m already semi-retired—thanks to you, I’ve become more active. But yes, there will be a point when I retire and move to a nice, secluded spot of land somewhere outside of Brattle where I will join my family and forget all of this. Every single part of it. Ha. Whether I want to forget it or not.”

  Nadine nodded, aware that this would be an awkward reunion.

  If Oscar didn’t know what had happened to him over the last thirty years because of a mind wipe, his family definitely wouldn’t know. But there would be a telepath available to catch everyone up to speed, give Oscar a narrative and let him live out the final years of his life.

  And part of Nadine didn’t think this was actually a bad thing.

  Sure, she didn’t want to have her memories wiped, but how nice would it be to start afresh? A government pension always there for you, to not remember the people you had killed, the incriminating knowledge that had made up such a large part of your life.

  To be free.

  Who wouldn’t want something like that?

  Nadine had rarely thought about retirement, aside from the paperwork she was required to fill out once she made it through basic training.

  She still had many years to go before she even reached that milestone, and that was if she managed to stay on best behavior and not betray her own country again.

  But it was something she should think about.

  Where did she go after this? Staying in Centralia would be ideal for her, but she wanted to see her mother and father again, even if just for a day.

  She wondered what the telepath who mind-wiped her would come up with. How would they explain the scar on her side? How would they explain where she’d been all that time?

  “Let’s move inside,” Oscar said, taking control of the silence.

  Once they were inside the morgue, they heard Mister Fist and the others wrapping up their conversation. The exemplar known as Plume was instructed to take Roman back to her apartment, where he could get hold of himself.

  It pained Nadine to see Roman so distraught, Celia’s head tucked under his arm, Coma at his side, her dark-blue dress tattered and torn.

  Nadine felt pity for the man.

  He was a strange creature, but even with his flaws, he wanted to do good; he wanted to help people, and this was what Nadine felt she was trying to do, which led her to unconsciously believe he was a mirror representation of her. Same, same, but different.

  “It’ll take us a little bit of time to find out where Plume lives…” Oscar started to say.

  “No, let’s let them be for now,” said Nadine. “I’m sure there are better things we could be doing.”

  “There are always better things we could be doing,” Oscar said with a soft chuckle. “Always.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three: Hot for Teacher

  “I need you to calm down,” Ava told Roman as soon as their forms took shape in her apartment. She had a lovely place, on the top floor of one of Centralia’s taller buildings, windows every direction Roman looked. Ava’s fluffy little do
g ran over to them as soon as they appeared.

  “Do you mind?” Coma asked as she crouched in front of the animal.

  “Sure, play with Bonbon as much as you’d like.” Ava nodded Roman over to the couch. “Please, take a seat.”

  His teacher didn’t have a lot of furniture, but the furniture she did have was made of white leather.

  “Please.” Ava gestured toward her couch.

  Roman sat and exhaled deeply, eventually setting Celia’s head next to his body.

  In the time it took Ava to get a glass of water from the kitchen, Roman sent a message to Emelia, the coordinator at the sex-doll shop, telling her they needed to meet. He also activated Casper, who was tucked away in his pocket.

  “Holy shit! What did you do to her?” Casper jumped down to his arm, running along his sleeve. She transitioned to the couch and stopped in front of Celia’s head, the tiny doll’s hands coming to her sides.

  “Just be glad you weren’t there,” Roman said with a grimace.

  “Let me get this straight. Are you just going to carry her head around?” Casper asked him. “Because I’m totally not cool with that.”

  “You’re not cool with that?” Roman asked as Coma sat in the other chair, Bonbon now in her lap, licking Coma’s face.

  “I don’t know what you’re planning to do with that head, but I can think of at least one thing it would be useful for, and I don’t want to be around when you do it.”

  “Enough, Casper,” Roman said as Ava handed him a glass of water.

  The tiny doll fell to the side, the life leaving her body. Roman didn’t know why he had activated her in the first place, but he was definitely not in the position to take her shit at the moment.

  “Sorry,” Roman said, referring to Casper.

  “I can’t keep covering for you,” Ava said, referring to something else. She stood in front of him, her arms crossed over her chest.

  “I know you can’t.” Roman took a sip from his water, settling his thoughts. “Look, you’ve done more than anyone could possibly expect, I understand that, but you have to understand that I need to see this through. There is no other option for me. I have to take this woman out. And I really don’t know what happens after that. I am aware of the fact that she’s much stronger than me. But I had her today,” Roman said, gritting his teeth. “All it would have taken was just another thirty seconds or so, and all this would have been handled…”