“So it works,” Ava said. “And you’ve taken over its consciousness as well. I know this sounds morbid, but I can’t help but wonder if you could do this with an actual person.”
“An actual person?” Roman gulped.
“Yes,” she said, light behind her eyes. “If you animated a dead person, would their consciousness be theirs, or would it be yours? And what about an animal? Could you take over a live dog’s brain, for example?”
“I… I never thought of trying that.”
“We should try an animal before we move on to our next task. I know it’s a little strange, but we’ve seen you now animate a dead object—so can you actually adjust a living being’s consciousness? That remains to be seen. I’m ordering a teleporter.”
The cricket lost its balance and fell to the floor, dead again as Roman took its life force away.
A teleporter appeared a minute or so later, a cage tucked under her arm. Inside the cage was a white rat with beady black eyes.
“What do you want me to do exactly?” Roman asked Ava.
“I want you to try to take over the rat’s brain, imbue your consciousness into it. Remember, this is just a test, and there are plenty more rats where this came from.”
“Where did the rat come from exactly?” Casper asked, an icky look on her face.
“To answer your question, the Centralian government catalogs and tests a multitude of powers. Since the lottery commission is co-sponsored by the government, we have access to their testing materials, including live animals.”
Roman was about to mention how poorly the government was cataloging exemplars if it was still using an outdated classification system, but decided not to.
“Okay, I’m going to give it a shot. Let’s keep it in the cage for now.”
“It’s all yours,” Ava said, stepping aside.
Roman steadied his breath and the caged rodent stopped dead in its tracks. He could feel its consciousness in this weird, totally surreal way.
He visualized moving up its spine, to its neck, and into the rat’s skull.
The rat stopped moving. His ears flickered and fell to the side, seemingly dead.
“I don’t think I can do it,” Roman said, his head aching as a migraine made its presence known.
“Keep trying,” said Ava as she moved to the cage.
Roman refocused his energy into the rat and it came alive, its whiskers twitching as it stood on its two back legs.
“I see.” Ava glanced from Mister Fist to Roman. “To take over its body, you first have to kill it. Good to know. Gruesome, but good to know.”
Roman couldn’t help but feel a sense of shame. He had vowed to his wife Celia that he would do something for the good of the public, to help those in need. But raising the dead wouldn’t be helpful to anyone, and the morbid factor alone made his power much less appealing.
“He needs more work,” Mister Fist said with a grunt.
The big man had his hands at his sides, his weight pressed to his back foot.
Roman realized then that he’d seen Mister Fist before, at an event featuring an exemplar team from the northeast quadrant of Centralia. The man had lifted a trolley, but he hadn’t shown the crowd his mist power.
The memory brought a bittersweet smile to Roman’s face, as he had been out shopping with Celia that day. It was her idea to stop and watch the show; Celia had always had a thing for exemplars, and she could name the most famous ones of Centralia, past and present. She read books about them, and followed the tabloids, many of which Roman still had stuffed away in one of his closets.
So that’s where I know you from, Roman thought as Mister Fist scratched at the wrapping covering his right forearm.
“One more test, and this one’s easy,” Ava assured him.
Roman glanced at the table to see that there was nothing there. “I don’t see it,” he started to say.
“Exactly,” she said with a chuckle. “We’ve seen you work with elemental forces, but there’s one we haven’t tested yet, at least not in an isolated way.
“What’s that?”
“Wind. So try to use the wind to move my flames.” A fire ignited on the tip of Ava’s finger, growing in size until it was a good three feet tall—hot too, the heat already hitting Roman’s face. “And not the flames. You’re not modifying fire, you’re modifying wind. I don’t know if you’ll be able to do this or not; we already saw the other day that you can move my flames, but not control them in the same way you were able to control water or solid objects. So I want to see if you can create a gust of wind that flickers the top of the fire. Theoretically, you should be able to.”
Try as he might, Roman wasn’t able to modify the wind.
The problem was, he felt like part of him needed to see an object to initially take it over, to intuit how it would move. But the wind was invisible, and even deactivating all his dolls and focusing everything he had on utilizing it proved fruitless.
“I’ve got nothing,” he finally said, lowering his hand.
So there were limitations, but the training session with Ava had also opened a door he had almost opened on his own at the funeral parlor, albeit accidentally. The ability to animate the dead made Roman an even more formidable opponent.
But something about it seemed wrong, made him feel off. It definitely wasn’t something he wanted to be known for.
Chapter Twelve: Dead
It was fortuitous that the woman had provided a room for the shadow user known as Hazrat Inayat, a place for him to get his bearings. He still didn’t know who she was, but he’d heard what she’d done back in the prison, and the fact that no one had even come after them—or handled them quickly—gave strength to her power.
And even though she’d rescued him, Hazrat didn’t plan on sticking around for very long. He wasn’t worried about her power, whatever it was.
He knew he was strong, and as he stirred his eyes flickered open, afternoon light filtering into the dimly lit room. He began to make a plan to get out of this mess.
He knew the Southern Alliance had resources the Centralian authorities didn’t know about, from judicial representatives to people able to organize covert night departures—there were a good many ways Hazrat could get back home. Of course, he would need to get word to his wife first, but that could be arranged through these channels as well.
There was nothing money couldn’t solve, and Hazrat’s family had plenty to go around.
When he was finally able to open his eyes, comfort came to Hazrat. There were shadows in the corner of the room, near the door, adjacent to the bookshelf—the long mustached, tattooed, Type II, Class D from the South finally felt like he was in his element, like his power had been restored.
And his first reaction wouldn’t be to take out the woman or the strongman he heard stomping alongside her—he owed them that much.
But if they provoked him, he would do what he needed to do. Money, he could handle, but any sort of allegiance—like the one the woman had already had him swear to her—was out of the picture.
A knock at the door caught his attention, the shadows quivering, preparing to strike like myriad scorpion stingers.
“What?” he asked, his voice a low growl.
“I have something you should probably see,” came the woman’s voice.
“Who are you?”
“I never properly introduced myself, but I will in good time. Would you care to see what I’d like to show you?” she asked through the door. The handle began to twitch, eventually opening on its own.
Hazrat stood, his legs a bit wobbly. If he had to, he would use the shadows of the room to create stints to hold his weight.
Nothing was going to stop him from getting out of here once he wanted to go.
While cocky, and generally an asshole to those who didn’t know him intimately, Hazrat had honed his ability to a level that would have surprised other exemplars who could manipulate more subtle energies like light, sound, or shadows.
&nb
sp; It had cost his family a fortune to get him trained, but he’d taken his training seriously, and anyone who crossed him realized this relatively quickly.
The shadows still available, Hazrat took a disgruntled step toward the open door.
“I have food too, if you’re hungry,” the woman said, stepping into his view.
She wore a hood, the bottom part of her face covered by a mask. She was shapely, and from what Hazrat could see of the top half of her face, he could tell she was beautiful.
Foolish, as well, because the shadows cast by her hood would make it incredibly easy for him to suffocate her, or use the shadows as projectile needles and completely eviscerate her face, rip her teeth from her gumlines, zip into her nostrils and pierce her brain.
But the woman had piqued Hazrat’s interest, and as he followed her to a large, open space, he caught the strongman standing near the door.
Hazrat hadn’t been able to see him last night. Taking him in now, he saw the man’s red flesh, the protrusions jutting out of his skin, the dead look in his blackened eyes.
Hazrat didn’t know what he was, and once this went down, he wouldn’t stick around long enough to find out.
No, there were shadows near the red man as well, and Hazrat could easily cut all the nerves and vital muscles in the man’s legs and back, completely debilitating him.
But Hazrat stopped planning his assault right there when he saw the body resting before him.
Lying on the Mandarin couch was his wife, her throat slit, a large gash in her chest open and some of her vital organs missing, the smell reaching his nostrils along with the sight.
And that was when the apartment shook, the shadows coming alive, Hazrat on the verge of killing the hooded woman and her bodyguard.
And he would have done it too, seething as he was, if not for the fact that the woman remained incredibly calm, bored even, as she took a step closer to him, even as one of his shadows formed a razor-sharp tip that stopped inches away from her throat.
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” she told him, and it was then Hazrat felt something in his chest move—almost as if his bones were compressing.
“What are you doing?” he asked, feeling his throat constrict.
“I suggest you lower your shadows, or I will use your rib cage to puncture your lungs and send all the blood in your body rushing to your extremities. It’s a strange way to die, or so I’ve been told. Actually, no one has ever lived to tell me.”
“What did you do to my wife?” Hazrat asked, anger, fear, and sadness hitting him all at once. He could barely get the next words out, but he managed to force them through his teeth: “I’ll kill you for this! Nova, may the gods be with me, I will kill her for you!”
“This?” The hooded woman stepped aside, leaving his pointy shadow hanging in the air. She stopped in front of his wife and shook her head at the dead woman. “I didn’t do this. I found her like this.”
“How do you know who I am?” Hazrat asked, his voice quivering. “How do you know who we are?”
“I will get to that later. But I assure you, I’m not from Centralia, and this isn’t some sort of test, nor am I trying to blackmail you in any way. I want to stop the person who did this.”
The shadows began to lower, hanging from Hazrat’s shoulders like fallen wings.
“Who did this?” he whispered. “Who did this to Nova!?”
“Oddly enough, someone you know did this.”
“Someone I know?”
Every enemy Hazrat had ever made came to him in that moment, and for the life of him, he couldn’t think of a single person who would stoop this low.
It was baffling, really, as most of the enemies he’d made had either gone their separate ways or were dead now, likely due to a misplaced shadow. The next thought that came to him was that it could have been a relative of someone he’d killed. This made some sense to him—a sort of revenge attack.
But the way the hooded woman shook her head made Hazrat second-guess this thought, and it took him a moment to place the man when she revealed the killer’s name was Roman Martin.
“Who?” Hazrat asked, tears coming. He sucked them back and ran a hand over his nose to stop.
“I believe you know him, and I believe you know his name,” she said. “Does a white-haired immigration advisor…”
The shadows that had fallen around Hazrat grew static, enlarging his form as they swelled all around him.
“That Roman?” Hazrat shook his head incredulously. “Impossible! He was a non-exemplar, a nobody, a fucking piece-of-shit, high-on-his-horse government employee. He didn’t have any powers—he was a nobody.”
“I think you would be surprised at what Mr. Martin can do.”
“He’s the…” Hazrat gritted his teeth, reliving his arrest and then imprisonment at Prison South, blasted with bright lights. “It’s impossible. The government doesn’t let exemplars work in those roles…”
“He killed Ian as well.”
The red man took a step forward, the floorboards rattling.
“What you mean?”
The woman continued speaking for her bodyguard. “Roman has the power to animate inanimate objects, and he used that power to kill Ian a few days back. But I brought Ian back to life, because I have the same power.”
“You can animate lifeless objects?” Hazrat asked, glancing back to his wife, Nova.
“I can do much more than that,” she said. “And don’t worry, I have a way we can get back at Roman for what he’s done, but you’ll have to trust me.”
“Can you bring her back?” he asked, his eyes still fixated on Nova.
“You wouldn’t want me to bring her back…” the hooded woman said, the first sign of hesitation in her voice. “But we can kill Roman to avenge her death, to make this right.”
Hazrat clenched his fists together, a few of the shadows wailing around him as others stayed put, waiting to strike.
Chapter Thirteen: A Lonely Telepath
“Remember,” Roman told Celia, Coma, and his newest doll, Casper, “I can’t risk anyone finding out you three are alive, so I’m going to take your power away. Please get in a comfortable position.”
“Oh come on, it’s not like this lady is going to care,” Casper groaned.
“Yes, she may care,” Roman told the action-figure-sized woman who stood on the coffee table in his living room. The sun had set and his apartment was now lit by a single light in the corner, something Coma had moved when she’d rearranged things.
The light used to be next to the door, but Roman recognized it did look better in the far corner, and it provided a nice glow that gave his living room a den-like feel even though he had large windows overlooking Centralia.
Roman knew her visit was a bit unorthodox, but it had been the woman’s suggestion, and she was beautiful, so Roman wasn’t going to say no.
Besides, there was something about her that had caught his eye the first time he’d met her at the sex-doll shop, something mysterious, something that made him readily agree to letting her come in his home.
Maybe it was her smile, or maybe it was Emelia’s violet eyes, but the exemplar whose job it was to help clients select sex dolls had definitely gotten Roman’s attention, especially with the mental message she had sent about an hour ago (hell, while he’d been on his way to surprise Harper), asking if he would meet her at his apartment privately.
So here he was, a few minutes before Emelia was supposed to arrive, taking a look at the place and wondering if he should rearrange anything, make it more presentable, less of a bachelor pad.
This last thought hit Roman like a brick thrown by a strongman.
This home hadn’t always been a bachelor pad, and remembering that two people had once shared it pained him to know now.
But he had to move on. Above all, Roman needed to move on. After all, hadn’t that been what the last two years were about? Moving on, getting used to the fact that the real Celia wouldn’t be around? In a way,
yes, but also, he’d always held the hope that she would recover from her coma.
“Is something wrong?” Celia the doll asked, wrapping her hand in his.
Her skin was warm, soft, and he felt like pulling her into his chest, burying his head in her red hair, holding her for a moment.
But Roman stopped.
Emelia would be here soon, and they needed to get in place.
“You know, it’s going to be kind of creepy if she shows up and we’re all just sitting on the couch.” Casper stretched her arms back, then bent down and got into a runner’s position. Propelled by a quick jog, she made the leap from the coffee table to the couch. “Just saying.”
She was spunky, Roman would give her that.
The blond-haired woman in tight black clothing who still wore cat ears had been teasing him in a flirty way since he’d given her life.
And she showed no sign of letting up as she smiled at Roman, placed her hands under her breasts, and pushed them forward a bit, adjusting her outfit.
“No watching,” she said in her tiny voice.
Rather than comment, Roman simply took her life force from her, the small woman falling forward with her hands tucked under her breasts.
“That was funny,” said Coma, who stood off to his left, having just finished tidying up the living room.
“It was cruel,” Celia opined.
“I’ll be kinder with you two. Maybe it’s best if you go to the other room; I hate to admit that Casper is right, but if Emelia appears and you two are just sitting there, it might make this a little bit creepy.”
“No one likes things that are lifeless,” Coma said, a hint of disdain to her voice. “Makes sense to me.”
She locked hands with Celia, and together the two dolls turned to Roman’s bedroom.
“Just tell me when you’re ready for me to power you down,” he called after her.
Roman ran his hand through his white hair. He sat on the couch next to Casper’s lifeless body, then picked her up, adjusted her pose as best he could, and placed her on the table so she lay on her back.
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