Dollhouse.

{Perplexed? Visit the Prologue, or the first chapter, Leap.}

***

The streets were littered with glass, and I could scarcely move forward without causing large cracks to resonate around the charred ghosts of buildings that grew up around me.
The city was gutted: fire-scarred walls slumped and metal piping twisted from their corpses as rigid veins, long ago dried of any life.
Or drained?
As I passed structures, several containers, free of dust and recently used, could be seen beneath the piping. It looked as though someone was still harvesting water from the structures, perhaps depending on the rain falling through the still-substantial piping.
I stopped and checked my sidemost holster: my TU-45 was there, and though I was not yet uneasy, the touch of the always-warm metal soothed.
The landscape took on a distinctly less blackened appearance I passed further into the city: instead, the asphalt cracked and twisted upwards towards the sky in an almost spiritual pursuit. I rested my hand on an enormous chunk of the stone and glanced down at the plants, far more native in appearance, growing beneath.
This city must have been dropped.

It was not totally uncommon for an entire slice of civilization to be sucked through a more greedy wormhole back on Old Earth, and from the looks of the scars that resonated around the city’s western outskirts, such a process had occurred here. People, buildings, entire lives, simply sucked into the unknown, and relocated to a world so fresh and new that even Oxygen may not have been an immediate given.
This sort of thing was not uncommon at all.
I pulled my spyglass from my pack and scanned the cityscape. It still appeared that no life forms existed within the city limits, but if this truly was going to unravel like most of my missions, it was likely that a particularly hulking creature was standing behind my back. I glanced back, now potently aware, and found nothing.
A wall crumbled suddenly several hundred feet away, spilling from a seventh story in a cascade of misplaced and rotten plaster: something organic and dark tumbled down with the rubble.
“Hello?” I called, before I realized that anything alive would be lethally compacted in such a fall. Wordless, I sprinted, leaping over the asphalt and grinding half-certain steps into the littered ground. The pile reared up before me, and I gawked; it was larger than I had anticipated, and scrambled up the side of the rubble took considerable effort.
I reached the top and heard a voice.
The victim of the fall was alive and talking in a surprisingly calm voice that I could not fully understand from above several feet of the rubble that buried the speaker.
“Hold on,” I screamed, throwing pieces of rubble aside with a sudden vigor. A small hand was suddenly visable- a child?
I dug harder, and after a moment, gripped the hand and pulled the form from the pile.
The digits were stunted, and the palm was far too hard to the touch. I knew it was unliving before my eyes fully registered the face. It lacked a right eye, most of an upper lip, and all of its hair. Plastic, cold, and somehow still talking, the doll managed to jitter as I stared at it.
“Math is boring! Let’s do our hair! Have you seen my new astro-comb? Isn’t being a girl fun?” It jeered, the voice resonating from its chest. Had I not been so potently disturbed and disgusted, I might have laughed.
Instead, a dread filled my own chest.
It was talking, which meant it had been switched on not long ago, as the batteries still remained, which meant it had been placed within the shower of rubble, which could only mean-
As I stared upwards, even my powers of deduction fled in fear.
Trap.
The rubble was crashing down towards my head with a terrifying velocity. Through the nearing shower of concrete blocks, plaster, and discarded items, I caught a glance of a small gas mask’s glimmer. Too small for an adult attacker- a child had, after all been present.
As the incredible weight crushed down on me, I screamed a safety chant, the alien words flying from my lips and causing my imminent doom to falter.
The cascade of grey crushed out the light, the air, the sound, and I was suddenly wrapped in a dark shroud of what felt like unconsciousness.
Still, the warm metal of my TU-45, gripped ready in my nervous hand, told me otherwise.