Celia, who was still standing near the bed and somewhat prone, looked through the hole that had just been blasted in the wall at a woman hovering outside, the woman’s mouth wide open.
Celia bolted toward the woman, leaping at the last moment and meeting the exemplar with her bladed arm, her weapon going straight through the woman’s chest.
The sound-manipulating exemplar started screeching and then let out a low utterance that shook the foundation of the building, the structure of the hallway starting to give way.
As Celia and the exemplar spiraled toward the ground, the exemplar’s power continued to bring the building down, floor by floor, until the entire quadrant was a collection of rubble, burst pipes, smoke and, somewhere buried underneath it all, Roman and Nadine, Coma and Casper, and Miranda.
It was a miracle that Roman and Nadine hadn’t been crushed by the weight of the floor above.
Something about the way the sound manipulator’s attack had shifted most of the destruction forward had created an epicenter for the damage closer to the opposite side of the hallway in the rooms toward the middle of the hotel.
The only thing on top of Roman was a mattress, which he was easily able to push away with his powers.
Still in the terrycloth shorts he’d crafted from the towel, Roman took control of his environment and found that Nadine was also safe.
She came into his arms for a moment, the two of them hugging amidst the rubble.
“I can’t believe we survived that,” Roman said.
“What happened?”
“Sound manipulator… Type II Class C; I think Celia took her out.”
A wall of ice cut through some of the debris, Roman barely able to stop it before it reached them.
The ice lifted from beneath them, forming a cocoon around Roman and Nadine.
Roman’s first action was to shatter the ice, only to have it reform again.
The ice was opaque, so he couldn’t see where their opponent was; all he could do was continually use his power to stop it from crushing him and Nadine. Roman was growing increasingly cold now, especially with what he was wearing.
Her teeth chattering, Nadine started firing her wrist guard at the ice walls that were closing in, the cocoon now suspending them in the air. This did little aside from creating a misting of ice.
Roman wished he could take Coma’s body, but he didn’t know where she was in the rubble, and he was so concentrated on preventing the ice from reaching him that he didn’t want to disrupt that process.
Things were starting to get colder and colder, the subzero temperatures inside the cocoon really affecting Roman and Nadine.
Every time he tried to take hold of the ice walls, they thickened, Roman never fully able to manipulate them.
He focused all his power into shooting a hole through the ice directly in front of him, and he’d nearly made it to the other side when the iced thickened again, crackling as it filled the hole he’d just made.
Now shivering, Nadine and Roman tried the same thing together this time, the Eastern Spy using her wrist guard while Roman concentrated his power forward.
It nearly made it to the other side, but again, the ice cocoon reformed.
The two were hugging now, trying to use their shared warmth to keep them alive, everything starting to go dark when suddenly the ice cocoon started to shatter.
It first gave way beneath their feet, Roman preventing a collision with the ground by lifting up a section of the collapsed wall to catch them.
He looked toward the center of the hotel to see a naked and bloody Miranda with her back to him, the telepath standing over the ice user.
“Who’s that?” Nadine started to ask.
Miranda was just turning to Roman when a blast of energy cut through her.
The bottom half of her torso was left standing for just a moment before falling to the side, a woman with a charged hand coming into Roman’s view.
It was a cheap shot, but Roman was going to take it.
Yet in the end, he didn’t have to.
The woman began struggling, slapping at her own body.
Roman wasn’t too far away to see that it was Casper, stabbing her way up the woman’s body and reaching her neck.
Coma wasn’t far off, his combat doll finishing the job Casper had started.
Even from where he was standing, a good fifty feet away from the action, Roman could still hear Casper bitching at Coma for taking her kill.
“We’ve got to get out of here,” Nadine said, running her hand through her hair as she let out a sigh of exasperation.
“We really do.”
Chapter Twenty-Three: Coordinated Attack
Roman and Nadine quickly found Celia, who was all right aside from the fact that her arms were covered in blood all the way up to her elbows.
“That was amazing,” Roman told her as he hugged the doll, squeezing her tightly.
Coma caught up with their small group, Casper begrudgingly in her front pocket.
“I’m still pissed at you,” Casper started to say, her complaint cut short when a portal opened, indicating that a massive teleportation event was occurring.
A team of men and women in Eastern Province military gear dropped out of the portal, all of them with wrist guards attached.
More started to appear and fly out of the portal, some by means of technology while others were actual exemplars.
“We need to run,” Nadine said, grabbing Roman’s wrist.
“Let’s at least make it easier for our escape.”
Roman took control of the debris and sent it forward like a tidal wave, bringing most of their incoming attackers to the ground.
“Get those fucks, Roman!” Casper shouted.
Some of the detritus also filtered into the portal, Roman not sure if it reached the other side or not.
It didn’t matter.
By this point they were running, Coma staying back to fend off anyone who made it through Roman’s opening attack.
He shouted her name, letting her know they didn’t need a guard at the moment—they needed to get away.
It only took a moment for Coma to catch up with Roman. He began raising the ground beneath them, bits of rubble spritzing the air every time one of the flying exemplars fired upon them as they continued to rush forward.
To make their small group harder to hit, Roman also brought up random walls made of pavement, sending ripples through the streets. He lifted pillars and tore a few of the trees up as well, animating their limbs, all in an effort to create numerous targets and distractions.
His group now ran along the platforms he’d lifted from the ground, Nadine shooting one of the high flyers down with her wrist guard.
Nadine an expert shot as always, her blast connected, and the flying exemplar spiraled into a concrete wall.
Growing his platforms even higher now, and starting to feel the strain, Roman eventually reached a rooftop, where he and Nadine were able to pause for a moment and take stock of how many opponents they had on their tail.
“Can you order a teleporter?” Roman asked over his shoulder, tracking one of the exemplars making a beeline toward them.
It was something he had never really tried before.
Roman focused on the exemplar’s quadrant in the sky and took control of the parapet of a building she was flying by, missing her on his first attempt but connecting with the woman on his second try. He managed to blindside her, the woman zipping toward the ground below.
Nadine shook her head. “We’re going to have to get somewhere a little further away from the epicenter of all this for me to call a teleporter.”
“I figured as much,” Roman said as he looked to the other side of the building, noticing there were taller buildings next to it and beyond that, the Quad they had been at a day ago.
“Stop standing around and do something!” Casper shouted from Coma’s front pocket.
“We can disappear,” Roman said suddenly. “We just need to ca
use more destruction before we do. That should throw them off a little bit.”
“All right,” Nadine said. “I’ll leave you to that then.”
Roman looked down at the street below and saw that a trolley had stopped, the passengers long gone.
“Coma, take Celia.”
His combat doll lifted Celia just as Roman took her power away along with Casper’s.
Focusing on the trolley again, Roman raised the front end of it like a snake, then snapped it forward and lifted it again once he got better control over it.
He sent the animated trolley racing forward, its tail flying off the tracks as it collided with some of the rubble of the hotel, its middle section lifting and buckling back down.
Again wishing he had his power meter so he could gauge how much juice he was using, Roman flung the trolley’s middle cabin to the right, tearing it away from its counterparts and taking out a storefront.
The few exemplars who were still in the air saw this and immediately made their way down, only two of them continuing to fly toward Roman’s location.
Still in control of the trolley, Roman lifted his hand in the direction of the two flying exemplars coming toward the rooftop, ignoring the fact that he was now prone and they could blast him.
The first one dropped from the sky, Roman collapsing her heart. The second one managed to fire on Roman, his shot going wide but still causing Roman to cringe. His action set a spark down his back, Roman feeling the laceration at the tops of his shoulders.
He focused even harder, a vein pulsing on the side of his head as he took hold of the man’s body and broke all his bones, the man immediately falling out of the air.
“That should… that should do it,” Roman said, feeling weak now and finding it harder and harder to stand.
“Let’s go,” Nadine told him as she let Roman place his arm around her shoulders, leading him to the other side of the roof.
Roman took hold of the building material and lowered them to the ground, where Nadine led him and Coma into an alley. From there, they made it through another alley to the door of a restaurant and bar.
“This may have to do,” Nadine said.
“Right.”
Roman used his power to break the lock, the door squeaking open.
Nadine ran in first, her wrist guard drawn.
Roman heard a blast followed by another, and as he came in he saw she had taken out the bartender. But rather than kill him, Nadine had set her weapon to stun, the man now in the kitchen with drool dripping from his lips as he lay on the ground staring absentmindedly at the wash bin.
“I can take her…” Roman told Coma, who was still holding Celia in her arms.
“No, I’ve got it.”
“I can give her power.”
“Just rest,” his combat doll said, concern flitting across her red eyes.
“Yeah,” Roman told her once they reached the front of the bar.
Roman plopped down onto a leather chair, careful of his back. He took a deep breath in and shook his hands out.
“The teleporter should be here soon,” Nadine told him.
“Well, I guess our cover is blown,” Roman said bitterly, now reeling from the adrenaline dump.
“Not only is your country trying to kill us, but mine is too.” Nadine couldn’t help but smirk. “Fucking figures. And apparently, they are working together.”
“Yeah, figures. We were close, though.”
“We weren’t just close—it’s going to happen. Trust me, Roman,” she assured him. “They were just trying to clean up the pieces by getting rid of us. But they’re not going to really do that, and public sentiment is already calling for war.”
A black sphere appeared in the air, a pair of white-gloved hands pressing out of it. The gloved hands continued to stretch the sphere until it was large enough for a person to step out of, and a woman did just that.
“Whew, this area sure is difficult to teleport to right now,” the teleporter said.
“Something happened,” Nadine told her, purposefully being vague.
“Well, step on in.”
The female teleporter motioned toward the black oval she had spawned.
Roman looked at Coma and nodded.
Nadine was the first to enter, followed by Coma and Celia, the teleporter commenting on Roman’s second doll as her eyes clearly landed on Celia’s blood-soaked arms.
“Don’t worry about her,” Roman said, offering the teleporter a look that told her great harm would come to her if she asked any questions.
The woman swallowed hard, immediately looking away. “Please,” she said, motioning him again toward the black oval, her voice quivering. “I can’t keep it open forever.”
The teleporter stepped into her black hole, disappearing again.
Nadine immediately summoned another teleporter, this one appearing in the form of a butterfly before morphing into an eccentrically dressed man in a skirt and a turquoise top.
Roman barely had a chance to gauge his surroundings, which looked to be a city setting of sorts. The man’s wings had already grown to full size and when he batted them once, a cloud of sparkling dust reached Roman, Nadine and his dolls.
They appeared in what looked almost like a village, Roman glancing around with the hope it would be labeled.
He knew this wouldn’t likely be the case, especially in a country that rarely had advertisements, and he wasn’t able to spot anything as the teleporter left and yet another one appeared, this one sprouting like a mushroom.
Roman felt himself shrinking until suddenly he was full-size again, his group in yet another location as the man returned to mushroom form and disappeared.
This place also looked like a village, almost reminding Roman of Brattle and its quaint cobblestone streets.
“You can set her down now,” he told Coma, who lowered Celia just as Roman returned life to her.
“Good call,” Nadine said as she turned toward the village. “We already look out of place as it is.”
“Where are we?” Celia asked.
“Outer Haven. A village not so far from the Centralia–Eastern Province border,” she explained quickly.
“Are you okay?” Celia asked, her concern shifting to Roman.
“I just need to recharge a bit.”
“We’ll find an inn,” Nadine said.
“Aren’t we too obvious?” Roman asked, casting his arms wide.
“Definitely. I’ll go into town first and get a change of clothing for your dolls. I can say they’re my sisters, that we’re family. Right now, they’re way too obvious,” she said, referring to Coma’s sexy gothic dress and Celia’s tight superhero outfit. “You too, Mr. Terrycloth Shorts.”
“Okay,” Roman said, looking to the left and seeing a cemetery. “I guess we’ll just hang out there…”
“Don’t worry, I won’t be long,” Nadine told him.
Roman and his dolls moved toward a corner of the cemetery, Roman glad there wasn’t anyone at the graves.
He crossed his arms over his chest.
“It just looks so bad,” Celia said as she observed the scar running across his back.
“It’s fine.”
“Maybe you could take some of Coma’s dress and make a shirt to cover it.”
“Nadine will come back with clothing. We have to trust her.”
“How many people do you think are buried here?” Celia asked at some point, looking out over the cemetery, which rolled over a couple of hills, the larger gravestones in the far-left quadrant evidence of wealth.
“I really don’t know.”
“Do exemplars and non-exemplars get to be buried in the same cemetery?”
“Yes,” Roman told her.
“Will you be buried with us?” she asked, turning to him suddenly.
“If I’m buried and I have a choice, yes. I don’t know if I will have that choice.”
“I really wish you wouldn’t say things like that.”
“He’s
just being honest,” Coma said, still on guard, one of her arms now morphed into a blade.
“I know, but it’s just better for me if…” Celia bit her lip. “I’m sorry. I’m getting ahead of myself.”
“No, you’re fine. You’re perfect,” Roman told her, smiling at the kind doll. Her arms were still covered in blood, the image of violence totally at odds with her caring demeanor.
“So Centralia and the Eastern Province are trying to kill us,” she said, shaking her head. “It’s always something, isn’t it?”
Roman had to laugh. “It really is. Especially lately. Believe it or not, there were years and years of my life that went by without anything interesting happening. Then Kevin tried to commit suicide, and now here I am. Well, maybe it would be best to start when…”
“When she fell into a coma?” Celia asked.
“Yes, but even then, there were months and months where not much happened. So it was Kevin’s suicide attempt. That’s what kick-started all this. I guess there’s a little more to it. If Hazrat hadn’t tried to kill me, destroying my cubicle and Kevin’s, I probably wouldn’t have found the lottery ticket. And if I hadn’t found a lottery ticket, I wouldn’t have met Ava, and so on. Although I would probably still be working for Paris, her spy at the immigration office. I don’t know. Who knows?”
“That’s right, who knows?” Celia repeated as the three continued to wait for Nadine to show up with clothing.
It took her about an hour, but she returned with simple dresses for the two dolls and a pair of black slacks and a shirt for Roman.
“What about shoes?” he asked.
“I didn’t think about that. Do you think you can make a pair of sandals? Just temporarily.”
“We don’t want to draw attention to ourselves,” Roman reminded her.
“I can go back; the cobbler wasn’t very far from the cemetery.”
“It would probably be better,” Roman said.
After getting his size, Nadine returned to the village and came back to the cemetery with a pair of black boots. They were a little tighter than Roman was used to, but he stretched them with his power and they fit comfortably in the end.
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