“But I –” Topher began.
Adelle cut in. “Do not speak unless you can improve the silence.”
Topher shut his mouth so fast his teeth clicked. He raised his eyebrows and made a series of highly expressive and inexplicable gestures that indicated he was very agitated about the situation at hand, but Adelle was pondering a serious problem and ignored him.
A voice broke through Adelle’s brooding, and she spun, ready to deliver a sharp invective to the person who had dared act against a direct order, but it was just George, tall and golden and beautiful and so much a victim, standing in the doorway with a pleasantly passive expression on his face.
“ – Ready for my treatment.”
Topher, very deliberately not saying a word, gestured for George to cross the room and seat himself in The Chair. Adelle studied George, and remembered when she’d first seen him, a broken runaway who’d ended up past the other side of the tracks and almost drowned himself in the river of humanity that was Los Angeles. In his doll state, he didn’t have the accent that reminded Adelle fiercely of home.
Six more months on his contract, and his very wealthy parents would be pleased at the sane, healthy, confident young man who returned their vast estates in the Southeast.
Topher was distracted from his mime act by pulling up The Pipepline and parameters of the engagement. He’d done the work beforehand, but once Ivy, sleep-deprived and too afraid to confess it, had mixed up the imprints and the dolls, and Topher was one for leaning from mistakes.
He lowered the chair, and the light flared blue. Adelle didn’t even flinch anymore when George hissed, arched his back in pain, but then Topher was raising the chair, and George was no more.
George’s handler, Perry, was a slender slip of a thing, and underestimated by everyone who looked at him.
“Are you ready?” Perry asked.
“Of course,” George said, only he was someone else now, someone who sounded like home, and Adelle wished, for one moment, he could stay for a chat.
(350 words)
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