Cooldown Period

Keiji tested Gin’s shoulder, lightly.

Asleep.

It took some doing to extract himself from the boy, but he wasn’t going to sleep himself. He didn’t want to lie awake staring at the ceiling, either, as everyone slept around him.

‘Everyone.’ Everyone was nearly no one. Kanna and Gin slept on either side of Reko. Her face, scrubbed of makeup, was puffy and red. Kanna was smashed into her side like a kitten sleeping on her mother’s stomach, and Gin, his hood over his face, clung to her other arm.

Other than those three, it was him, Sara, and the doll that Sara rushed to fill with an emergency charge.

Not to the charging machine—she had popped the boy’s whole damn head off and leapt over balconies and across backways he hadn’t even known were connected to put his screaming skull into the collar nullifier and blast it. He kept screaming right up until Keiji hauled his body over and the two parts were put back together, but he sure was charged.

Every other doll had been ground into scrap by the roulette machine. Only Ranmaru and Gin had walked out—and then ‘Q-Taro’ had shut down. Ranmaru, who had been charged once, was already starting to glitch out when Chidouin Sara suddenly, visibly decided she wasn’t going to lose him.

Keiji couldn’t blame her. In fact, he was impressed. He had assumed that was it for the shifty little sneak, but Sara had done the equivalent of pumping an exsanguinated person full of gasoline instead and hooking them to a motor, and it had worked. Ranmaru was babbling for a while, one of his eyes blew out, the replacement limbs were scraped, but with ingenuity and grave robbery they had gotten enough parts in him to function as normal. They had also, to their shock, found a replacement part for his shoulder which included an honest-to-shit charging port. Like, for a phone. They tried not to think about who they could have saved with that part and stuck it onto the one doll they had left. Then Keiji had left the two of them talking through things and gone to help Reko situate the kids.

Now Keiji left them asleep, wandering into the halls of the fifth floor. They had unlocked a corridor in the middle of the floor that was almost dormitory-like for the six survivors (or five and one?) to wash their clothes (eerily identical alternatives had been provided), take showers, and sleep in real beds.

Keiji had appreciated the shower. He would let them have exactly that, it had been a beautiful shower. Beautiful and slightly unnerving—he only remembered about half of the bruises and cuts on his body, and the total number of them were sobering. No wonder he felt so punch-drunk. Punch-hungover, honestly.

He walked into the operating room, poured himself a hot drink, and tried to sit in the silence.

It didn’t work. All of two minutes later, he stood up, leaving the untouched drink, and lumbered off to find Ranmaru and Sara.

He did want to see her, and know that she was okay. He was getting worried about her… slipping, a little. Not that it wasn’t unexpected, but in the past day or two, she had been acting off enough that someone who had known her for only a little time could tell. And if he was being fully honest, the goth bot boy creeped him out a little. Yes, he had seen the kid start hovering over Sara after a mere hour of being close enough to smell her. He remembered being sixteen, though he hoped he hadn’t been quite as blatant as that. But Keiji could not help feeling it was not just artifical hormones that made the doll seem so shifty; he had felt like there was something weird about Ranmaru from the start. He didn’t have anything definite to point to, but by the time he was being tazed in the back, all he could think was that he knew there was something fishy about him.

Still, it had all sorted itself out.

He wasn’t really that worried; he was sure they were trauma bonding. Hopefully they had stopped crying by now. Likely they had both drifted off to sit in solitude, the doll hanging anxiously around a charging port and Sara sitting alone, awake, wondering.

Seeing, in her mind’s eye, the ghosts that crowded the room around her.

He didn’t feel like he could help her, but somehow, illogically, doing whatever he could had worked so far. Him, who had as much worth as the corpses he made, uplifting a sweet girl like her.

He wandered, first, to everywhere he thought that Ranmaru might be. He thought a one-on-one with the little weirdo would be a good idea, and he was putting off seeing how badly off Sara was. But he didn’t see him in any of the many mazing rooms full of doll-upkeep equipment, or in the room where all the other dolls had died, or in the mock-classroom where (Keiji thought) he had considered taking Keiji’s life. (He didn’t have proof of that. Just a feeling.) Keiji let it go and went to find Sara instead.

She had settled into another one of the dorm rooms, apart from the others. Keiji hadn’t tried to convince her against it at the time, because she was still absorbed with Ranmaru. Now, though, that she had been alone for hours, he wanted to at least convince her to wash her clothes and bathe. As he thought it, he realized that should be his angle—just keep convincing her to clean up, take care of herself, eat, brush her hair, whatever it took to feel more normal. Then, eventually, she would be tired enough to sleep, and he could go back to…. This.

As he approached close to the door, which was cracked open just an inch (no one liked shutting and locking doors anymore after too many had been slammed on them to trap them in), he heard hushed voices coming from inside the little room, packed with more beds than any group could possibly need at this point. Was Ranmaru still with her? Yes, he must have been, because he heard Sara’s voice, and a lower one, but with a softer timbre that marked his youth. They hadn’t split up.

Keiji wasn’t sure how he felt about that. It would depend on what they were talking about. He couldn’t help a certain… suspicion rising in him, up from his guts, up his throat, as he remembered the looks that Ranmaru had cast at the back of Sara’s neck, his hints that he might be willing to do just about anything…

If Ranmaru was trying to convince her of some plan…

Keiji resisted the urge to eavesdrop. Perhaps it would have been wise, but he trusted Sara enough at this point. Even if Ranmaru had dark ideas, she would talk him out of it. Surely.

But just to be very sure, he decided to interrupt. He would watch Ranmaru’s face as he opened the door, saying “Well, what are you kids doing at this time of night,” because even the slightest flinch on his face—

The door opened under Keiji’s arm. He got about halfway through his planned sentence.

Sara and Ranmaru were on the floor, between rows of unused beds, both naked as the day they were made (Sara in childbirth, the little sneak in the lab across the hall). Sara was on top of him, they both had their hands in absolutely deliberate places on each other’s bodies, and the doll was anatomically correct.

Sara’s face snapped to Keiji like a snowy owl hearing a mouse in the brush, and it went just as pale. The boy made a noise—rather, he cut off a noise he had been making with a sudden, strangled snap.

Keiji did have to take a moment. You know, he prided himself on quick reactions, among other things, but he had to process this one. That thing wasn’t human—except that he was, essentially. And if he wasn’t human, then he was a doll, which was also something acceptable to be used in this situation. He was—nearly Sara’s age exactly, and likely as practiced or as calculating about what he was doing right now as she was (not at all). She shouldn’t be worried about—well, no, since they didn’t bleed, Sara surely had no other fluids to be worried about either. He couldn’t be—no, he absolutely couldn’t be pressuring her into this, because Sara had him as down for the count as a lioness pounced on a gazelle right before ripping its throat out. She was looking about as coerced as a baby with its face slathered in frosting.

After a second of being startled dead-still, Sara’s hands clenched, and then lifted off of Ranmaru’s anatomy (one from out of his mouth, where it looked like it had been in pretty deep, and one from the surprising anatomical accuracy). Ranmaru forgot to do the same, likely because he looked like he had forgotten his own name in the moment.

“Well,” said Keiji, “Huh. Nothing wrong with that, I suppose.”

There… wasn’t, actually. Not a damn thing. Some would argue that this was ‘too fast’, but these teenagers were staring down death. Almost anything else they could have been doing would actually have been less beneficial for their mental states than this. Logical, frankly. If there was an adult woman around other than Reko (who was one of the most stately, admirable lesbians he had ever met, and he knew a lot of female cops), Keiji might have made some more short-sighted choices of his own in the past few days.

“My mistake,” he said, and backed out of the door. Through willpower alone, he kept his face straight instead of cracking up. He grabbed the handle of the door and said, “I’ll close that, then.”

So he did, and turned around, and managed to get nearly halfway down the hall before he starting snickering through his hand. He wanted to slap that girl on the back and call her a fucking champion. That poor little sucker was actually and literally eating out of her hand on day one.

He had to stop when he was almost all the way down the hall to put his hands on his knees and wheeze. The poor baby idiot. That man was so had he was fully past tense. They were going to see absolutely pathetic activity out of him going forward, and it was going to be so funny.

Keiji did consider going back to know on the door and remind them that there were cameras everywhere, but that honestly just felt mean. Besides, their captors had simulated a staggering number of potential death games before this corporeal one—they had surely seen it already. Freaks.

It would be better to let them get back to it. They would surely manage after they got over the embarrassment (provided the poor simp could actually feel any at the moment). Frankly, he was just glad that Sara wasn’t stewing in her head right now.

In fact, he felt better himself. He had no idea when he had last laughed like that. Maybe he would swing by one of those drink machines then, and see if any of them would give him a beer. Just one—maybe two. It could well be his last night on the world and, it occurred to him just now, it didn’t have to be a terrible one. It might end up a solemn rumination, without a moon to view or a breeze to feel, but he could at least reminisce about the good times, and let himself feel decent for a night. What a shame it would be to die the day after a terrible night.