His eyes clenched shut, Roman poured everything he could remember about her face into the pane of glass, breathing deeply as he did so, until Ava shouted for him to stop.
“What?” Roman asked, opening his eyes.
Formed out of the glass before them now was the bust and face of a woman, her chest moving up and down as she breathed. Roman gulped, turning from Ava’s shocked face back to the bust and shattering it immediately, leaving the shards on the ground.
“So I can do that as well,” he whispered.
“That was… unsettling, to say the least. Did it transmit anything to you?” Ava asked as she stepped to the fourth pane of glass.
“Nothing. Why?”
“How cool would it be if the creations you gave life to were able to relate what they were seeing to you? With a power like that, you’d be able to gather intel as good as any of the spies running around Centralia.”
“Spies?” Roman gulped.
“What? You think people aren’t spying on us, and we’re not spying on them?” Ava laughed. “You’re naive, Roman, but that’s one thing I like about you. You’re genuine in that way.”
Roman glanced from Ava to Coma, whose red eyes carried a hint of irony in them.
“Yeah,” he finally said to Ava, “I guess you’re right. There probably are spies. Sadly, my power doesn’t work that way, at least not yet. I could send someone incredibly small to gather intel, though…”
Ava glanced over to the tiny doll lying on Celia’s lap. “Not a bad idea. You plan to keep her after the full-sized model arrives?”
“Thinking about it. I imagine she may come in handy in two different sizes.”
“Roman, I want you to meet William Bottorf,” said Ava, “who is also on the same exemplar team as Mister Fist.”
“Nice to meet you,” Roman told the man, who wore Centralian city camo, gray and covered in black lines laid out in a crosshatch pattern. A black visor covered the majority of William’s face, hiding his true identity. He was a thin man, taller than Roman, and he held a pair of batons. “Also, shouldn’t you have a codename?”
“It is my codename, and nice to meet you as well,” said William as his form began to split, a replica taking shape next to him. In a flash there were twenty replicas—the fastest replicator Roman had ever seen in person.
Type II, Class C, he thought as he returned life to Casper and Celia.
The smaller doll started complaining almost immediately, berating Roman for deanimating her before she could get into position. Celia lifted Casper (even as she complained), gently sat her on the arm rest, and stood, smoothing her hands over the front of her athletic gear.
She pulled her red hair into a ponytail and joined Roman, her purple eyes focused on the replicator.
“Good call,” Ava said as she stepped between Roman and William Bottorf’s clones.
“This next task is going to see you trying to deal with multiple enemies, so use your dolls accordingly and no, you can’t borrow any fire.”
“He can wield elements too?” William asked.
“Yes. The only thing he hasn’t been able to wield yet is air, but maybe that will be a power that comes later. Who knows?”
Celia dropped her fists to her sides as Roman pulled some of the concrete from the floor, forming a thick pair of boxing gloves for her.
It struck him as odd that the gym was always repaired after their bouts, and he wondered if Centralia had a duplicator in its employ.
Likely, he thought as he turned his attention to his masked doll.
For Coma, Roman looked up to the ceiling, recalling there was a water pipe hidden beneath the concrete. Feeling his chest expand, he crumbled the wall and found the pipe, cracked it open and grabbed hold of the gushing water, bringing it to Coma.
Casper fell lifeless as Roman imbued Coma with the power to manipulate the water.
“Are you okay?” Ava asked Roman, nodding to his power dial.
He checked it to see where he was; the green bar that he still didn’t quite understand was more than halfway full and the red bar was at least at the seventy-five percent mark, a lot higher than Roman would have liked.
“Remember, red is dead,” she started to tell him.
“And green? It doesn’t seem to correspond with what you originally told me about the bars. It seems to change at random, or maybe it is an extension, in a way, of the red bar.”
“I’ll ask the tech guy about it,” Ava said as she moved to the sideline. “It’s not our tech, after all.”
“From the East?” he asked his teacher.
“Yes, used for elementalists whose power is tied to their well-being.”
“Are we going to talk tech or are we going to spar?” William asked, another few clones forming behind him. “Because we’re ready.”
And that was all that needed to be said.
Coma pushed a gust of water toward the clones, more from the ruptured pipe fueling her power.
Celia wasn’t the best fighter, which was why Roman shouted at her to protect him while he tried to figure out which one was the real William, a task he knew would be nearly impossible.
That was the thing about good replicators—they were impossibly hard to take down because the good ones weren’t stupid enough to expose their main power holder. William could be any number of the clones moving around, trying to get a hit in with their baton; and Roman didn’t for an instant expect that the exemplar would do something like use his replicas to protect his main form, thus exposing himself.
The man was clearly too experienced for that.
And this meant Roman and his dolls had to try and take every one of them down, treating each clone as if it were the original.
Celia met the face of one of the clones, blood flying out of the guy’s open mouth.
The dolls knew the stipulation of all the fights they participated in, and Roman was surprised to see Celia had struck him so hard.
“Careful!” he reminded her, as he ripped the floor up and tossed several of William’s clones into the air, their batons clinking against the ground. He immediately flattened the batons into pancakes, rendering them useless.
But William was better with his heavy black batons than Roman had anticipated, and as some of his clones began maneuvering through sharp spikes of cement Roman had lifted from the ground, others began tossing their batons, more clones taking shape, Roman barely able to pull a wall up to stop their advance.
A burst of water cut down some of the clones, taking their feet out from beneath them.
Do they feel pain? Roman thought, his eyes on his power dial as he used one of the flattened batons to ensnare a clone.
He watched as Celia jumped from one of the ledges he’d created and caught one of William’s clones in the air, driving him to the ground with her fist. He was proud to see her fighting so hard, impressed as hell with the effort she was giving even though she was surrounded.
There are too many of them, he thought as a clone made it over his wall and engaged Roman. The clone swung the baton, just barely missing Roman, who lifted a fist from the ground to knock the man back with an uppercut.
More appeared, an overwhelming number now descending upon him.
Coma was surrounded as well, fighting them off as best she could with spurts of water. Roman’s power dial was flashing now, clones closing in.
His heart was racing, his fingers trembling as he raised his hand to do something about the clones who had made it past his barrier and surrounded him.
A baton struck him in the knee.
“Fuck!” Roman shouted as he hit the floor, his hands wrapping around his knee as the pain spread over him.
“Death strike,” said William, who now stood over him ready to finish the job. Instead, he dropped his hand to Roman and helped him to his feet.
“My knee…” Roman said.
“At least it isn’t broken,” William offered.
“It’s definitely bruised.”
As Will
iam walked back over to his side, Coma allowed Roman to lean on her shoulder for a moment and catch his breath. Her eyes were still locked on William as the thin, blond man’s replicas began to merge back into one.
“I didn’t expect you to win, you know,” Ava said as she sidestepped Celia.
Roman was already hobbling over to the doll named after his wife, who’d been assaulted by the troupe of William’s replicants. He brought Celia into his arms, and as he ran his hand over her body, her eyes opened, and the parts of her body that had been caved in by the batons returned to their original form.
“Is she okay?” Coma asked, crouching before the two.
“I’m fine,” said Celia. Her hand came to Roman’s cheek. “Did you get injured?”
“Just my knee. It’s fine. I’ll be okay.”
Ava cleared her throat. “Um, like I was saying, I didn’t expect you to win. William is a trained fighter who has spent years and years of his life studying the proper usage of his replicas.”
“Decades,” the exemplar added.
“Aware,” Roman said, barely able to make eye contact with either of them.
He didn’t like losing, even with the severe disadvantage he had against a trained exemplar. Part of him wanted to truly test his powers; part of him wondered if he could have won had he been able to inflict lethal damage.
After all, he wasn’t supposed to be able to beat someone like Ian Turlock, yet he’d used the man’s own body against him. If Roman were to meet an enemy replicator in a real-life scenario, would he have enough power to do the same? Would he be able to truly harness his environment to put an end to the duplicator before he or she could clone himself?
Maybe that was the biggest flaw in Ava’s training method: the situations weren’t real enough, and nothing was truly at stake.
Chapter Twenty-One: Just Another Day at the Office
The looks on their faces.
That was something Kevin would never forget as he, Obsidian and Turquoise appeared in the middle of his former place of work.
The money Kevin had borrowed from his brother had easily afforded Scarlett’s services. She was the same teleporter who had helped Kevin and the cat girls flee from Paris’s warehouse, and like the cat girls, she seemed to have little regard for the lives of others.
This was evident as she began flashing away, gathering immigration officials who were trying to escape.
As she caught them, Scarlett returned them to the space before Kevin, where Obsidian stood ready, her claws extended as she either corralled people or intoxicated them, depending on how well they followed Kevin’s directions. Kevin stood with his hands on his hips in his exemplar-ish outfit, ignoring the pleas from those who had once known him.
“Kevin!” Phil Pott shouted. “What the holy fuck are you doing? Please… don’t kill us!”
Obsidian had been close to clawing Phil, but she stopped when Kevin nodded her over to another man, the one who had yelled for Kevin to jump when he’d been standing on the rooftop.
Turquoise scrambled across the tops of the cubicle walls to meet Coco, the office’s security apparatus. Kevin knew Coco would prove troublesome, which was why he’d entrusted Turquoise with his power-negating ring.
He saw a few blasts of pink energy light up the right side of the room. Kevin’s stomach twisted into a knot for a moment with the unsettling feeling that Turquoise had been bested, a feeling that rapidly faded away once he saw the fit cat girl dragging Coco in their direction.
Coco’s arm was bleeding out where Turquoise had bit her. The powerful woman had fallen relatively quickly in Kevin’s opinion, but the shock of suddenly losing her power because of the ring had likely aided in getting her to her current state.
Turquoise dropped her to the ground, causing a high-pitched yelp from Phil Pott.
Security was down, just a few more to round up.
As Obsidian hissed and continued to stop people from leaving the space in front of Kevin, Turquoise slinked over to the former immigration advisor, where she wrapped her hand in his, much to the discomfort of his former colleagues.
Kevin ignored them as she quietly transferred the ring back to his finger. His hand fell to her lower back and from there, her ass.
Turquoise’s ears twitched, and she careened her head to the right.
“Go get them,” Kevin whispered, then watched in admiration as the odd exemplar from the West, wearing clothing that matched his, sprang from a desk to the cubicle wall again, dropping on all fours to begin her pursuit, leaping from cubicle wall to cubicle wall.
Obsidian continued corralling, making sure no one got away. Kevin didn’t think Coco was completely dead, but the guy who’d laughingly told him to jump from the roof so many days ago lay on his side, his eyes rolled back in his head, dead to the fucking world.
And for a second—a brief second—Kevin started to regret what he was about to do. But he also knew this was the course he was taking with his life, and there truly was no turning back now.
No regrets, no time for remorse.
So it was with great gusto that he pointed at the ten to twelve people now huddled before him and asked a simple question. “Where is Selina?”
A few swallowed hard; others just looked down at their knees, sobbing.
“Well?” Kevin asked, focusing on Phil, who seemed the most likely to talk.
“She’s… she’s on a retreat or something,” Phil finally said. He sniffed and continued. “Roman reported her to HR, everyone knows, and they sent her off on a retreat.”
Kevin’s face turned white. His entire reason for being here was to extract revenge on Selina, and now…
“Where’s Roman?”
“HR, last I saw him,” said the receptionist known as Tara.
“I’ll get him,” Turquoise said, dropping to her haunches.
“No, I mean to say he went to HR last wee—” Tara’s speech was cut short when Obsidian clubbed her in the back of the head with a fist.
“She talks too much,” she hissed, and Kevin simply nodded, even though he secretly liked Tara.
“I can go in her place,” Scarlett the teleporter started to say, but by this point, Turquoise was already racing toward the exit.
“Let her go,” Kevin said. “She’ll be just as effective.”
Chapter Twenty-Two: Moving on Up
“And sign there, and there—oh, and initial here. Good,” Dante said as Roman finished filling out the paperwork. “I do appreciate you coming in during your week of grievance. I hope getting out of your home has been a breath of fresh air for you.”
“Who said I’ve been at home the entire time?” Roman asked.
“Well, I assumed that’s where you had been. And the funeral? How is that coming along?”
Roman bit his lip. No funeral had been planned, as per Celia’s wishes, but the mere word had triggered a flash of anger inside him, anger directed at the person who had taken her body from the funeral parlor.
It was still hard for Roman to wrap his mind around this, to think that someone would do something so vile.
And who?
That remained the proverbial question at the back of Roman’s mind as he’d taken a trolley from the gym to his office, as he’d left the dolls outside near the pond, and as he’d made his way up to HR with the hopes of not being seen by any of his coworkers.
They were a few floors up, anyway, and he’d timed it just right to avoid all of them completely.
“I may be taking a few more days off,” Roman said. “For, um, funeral proceedings.”
“That is what this week has been for,” Dante reminded him as he shuffled some papers. There was a mess of paper clips on Dante’s desk, and Roman had the notion to animate them and put them in order, but he knew better than to act on these impulses.
“You’re right, and thanks for reminding me. Regardless, I’ll be back sometime next week. I don’t know exactly when, but I just wanted to give you a head’s up.”
“Th
at’s not how this works, Mr. Martin,” Dante said, his shoulders tensing.
Roman caught some movement out of the corner of his eye. It was incredibly fast, and before Roman could swivel around, a petite woman with turquoise hair and cat ears had leapt onto the edge of Dante’s cubicle, where she was now peering down at the two men.
“Are you Roman?” she asked, tilting her head to the side, her slit eyes slightly dilated.
Dante screamed out, kicked back from his desk, and tried to crawl beneath it. While Roman was startled, he was also interested to see what the woman had to say.
To be safe—and he knew they’d hate that he did this—Roman took the power from two of three of his dolls, leaving only Coma. They were all at the pond near the admin building, after all. Even if Celia had been standing, Coma would help her to the bench.
He knew she would do this because it was precisely what he would do.
“Roman?” she asked again.
“I am Roman,” he said, his orange eyes narrowing on the cat girl. “And you picked the wrong guy to fuck with.”
The partition she was perched on moved up and bent backward, sending the cat girl straight to the floor, where it doubled down on her like a wave, expanding until its breaking point as it wrapped around her body.
The turquoise-haired cat girl cried out, her claws digging into the carpet as she scrambled to free herself.
“What did you just do?” Dante asked, peeking around the corner of his desk.
Roman grimaced, deciding to ignore the HR rep for now as he focused on dealing with the cat girl and the sinking suspicion moving through him.
“You took her,” Roman said, his fists curling. “You took Celia!”
“I’ll fucking kill you,” the cat girl hissed, even though Roman already had her pinned.
“Not if I kill you first.” Roman lifted his hand, curling the partition up and slamming the cat girl through the ceiling, where he breached the floor above them. Debris and dust fell as Roman slammed her through another ceiling, the floor and ceiling now taking an active part in driving her upward as she cried out in pain.
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