The Regional Office Is Under Attack!

1

Or it would be, shortly.

In ten minutes, more or less.

Rose wished it would be less.

Less would be, Christ, less would be amazing.

Mostly because Rose was ready to get this thing started, but also because she was sitting quiet on forty well-trained and slightly antsy mercs in full combat gear who were also ready. Ready to storm out of their unmarked gray vans, their fake delivery trucks, their ATM vestibules, ready to invade and then take over this plain, unremarkable office building, ready to force their way a mile belowground and into the heart of the Regional Office and wage their full assault on it. Then, soon after that, if all went according to plan, ready to level the place, make the whole thing shudder to the ground.

Metaphorically speaking, that is, what with the Regional Office already located mostly underground and all.

Rose was ready for it to begin because she was seventeen and impatient and she was sitting on all of these men who were amped up on testosterone and protein power shakes. Superpowered, highly trained supergirl or not, Rose felt her control over these grunts slipping, ever so slightly.

And she had to pee.

But she had her orders. They couldn’t move until seven forty-five. She didn’t know why, but those were her orders. Hold the men until seven forty-five.

Rose checked her watch. In five minutes, the assault was a go.

She’d been practicing.

Like, in front of her mirror for almost an hour last night, practiced that fucking move. Twirled her hand in the air in that military circle fist-pump thing that she’d seen before plenty of times in movies but had always assumed was made up. Anyway, she was totally ready to do that thing, whatever it was called, and then, Jesus, finally, these assholes could rush out and go and the hired help would be out of her goddamn hands and on their way to the assault and she could get on with her own business, which involved ghosting her way a mile belowground, without an elevator, thank you very much, in search of the director, who, if these grunts did their job the right way, wouldn’t know what the hell was happening until it was too late.

Not that she wasn’t, deep down, feeling some small sense of pride in the fact that she had been given command of the mercenaries and put in charge of starting the entire assault. She was the youngest one on the team — didn’t hit eighteen for another two weeks — and hadn’t been what anyone would have called a model student at Assassin Training Camp or whatever the hell they wanted to call it. She’d almost quit after just a couple of weeks because she’d been a total spaz, so, sure, what a surprise that she would have risen in the ranks, etc., that this responsibility would have been bestowed, etc., it was an honor and a thrill, etc., etc., but really, if she were going to be totally honest about it, about leading the charge of forty grunts who were actually — no shit — grunting, like, all the time, she’d rather they’d just given her her job to do and not this management position because what a pain in the ass managing people was turning out to be.

She’d already had to separate, like, two of them because they got into a shoving match about a fucking seat in the fucking unmarked gray van, and she’d had to yell at them, like, Are you fucking kidding me, are you goddamned third-graders? and then shove them both apart, almost knocking them both unconscious.

And she could tell, as she was yelling at these two assholes, she could totally see Colleen covering her mouth to keep herself from laughing, which only confirmed what she’d suspected all along: She’d only been put in charge of these assholes because being put in charge of anything was a shit job.

She checked her watch, again.

One minute. Jesus Christ, one more whole other minute.

Fuck it, she thought. Close enough.

She gave the signal.

2

When Henry and Emma had first found her, Rose was running from a couple of assholes — Akard and Schroeder — who were in hot pursuit of her on their four-wheelers because they’d walked up on her pouring eye drops into the water bowls of their mangy yellow country dogs.

It was their own fault — Akard’s and Schroeder’s, not the dogs’—for spreading lies about her all over school after Akard cornered her late one night near the courthouse down on the square and told her to suck him off and she told him she’d rather do one of his sorry dogs before she did him, then she kicked him hard in his nut sack. She ran, then, too, pushed forward on adrenaline and an electric kind of fear, her heart boundboundbounding inside her head. She was surprised not at what Akard had done — word was he’d been making the rounds of all the freshman and sophomore girls — but that she’d been able to think of something smart and mean to say in the heat of the moment, which she never had been good at really, and then for kicking Akard in his balls.

For a short time after, she mistook herself for the kind of girl who could take any shit dished out, and she sure as hell wasn’t the kind of girl who’d let an asswipe like Akard go besmirching her good name, but just now, as Akard and Schroeder caught her eye-dropping their dogs and started coming for her, Rose had seen in their eyes a serious and unsettling look of anger, and worse, a kind of glee at the prospects of what they might do to her. This got her to running, fast and hard but not as fast or hard as she could’ve because her feet were hitting the pavement weird because of how, even in late September, it still felt like summer, and the pavement was hot and she had lost her flip-flops and the roads in her shitty town were, well, shitty and full of rocks and divots and cracks.

Not that running in the grass would’ve been better since there wasn’t much grass, just more rocks and dirt, and the little grass that was there was sick with stickers and fire-ant hills.

She’d slowed Akard and Schroeder down with a couple of rolled trash cans and then by cutting through the Hunts’ backyard, but she could hear them behind her and now she was heading out of the neighborhood and around the next bend into open country — baseball fields, mostly — where she was pretty sure they’d have no problem catching up to her.

As she rounded the bend, she looked over her shoulder to see if she could see them yet, and turned her head back around just in time to see a pickup truck headed right for her.

If she’d had more time, she would have screamed, something along the lines of “Holy shit,” or “Jesus fuck,” but she didn’t have time and so she dove to the right hoping the truck, if it swerved, would swerve to the left.

There was honking and squealing and swerving (left, thank God) and the truck came to a stop on the narrow, rocky shoulder, its front wheel almost tipped into the rain ditch. When the dust had cleared a little, the man driving — if you could call him a man, since he seemed just a few years older than Rose herself — rolled down his window, about to say something, probably along the lines of Are you okay? but Rose got there first.

“Why don’t you watch where the fuck you’re going!” she yelled.

“Me? You’re yelling at me? What the hell, kid? Why the hell are you running down the middle of the goddamn road?”

Except by the time he’d finished asking his questions, she’d walked herself to the passenger side of the truck, opened the door, and slid herself inside. Then she gave him her best smile — which was a good smile, she’d always had a good smile — and said, taking a deep breath, “About that.”

She told him, briefly, sort of what she’d been doing and why and then she told him how it had been harmless fun and anyway they were assholes and they both got what was coming.

He pulled the truck back onto the road just about the time Akard and Schroeder came tearing around the bend, and Rose would be lying if she said she hadn’t enjoyed the look of shock on their faces as they swerved hard to round either side of the truck and then spilled their four-wheelers into the rain ditch.

She rolled the window down quick and stuck her head out and yelled as loud as she could, “Fuck you, jack-offs.”

Then she plopped herself back into her seat, smiled her good smile again, and turned to the guy driving, who she realized hadn’t told her his name yet, and she said, “So.”

He looked at her out of the corner of his eye. “How old are you?” he asked.

“Why? How old are you?”

He smiled and shook his head again and said, “Never mind.”

She looked at him closely then. He wasn’t ugly, exactly, but he wasn’t good-looking, either. His features, when taken individually — his nose, his lips, his eyes, his ears, even — were nice enough, but put together they didn’t seem to match.

Rose didn’t care. She wasn’t going to marry him. She was just using him for a ride.

“My name’s Henry,” he said. He waited for her to say her name; she could feel him waiting in the way he paused. Then, when she just looked at him, he said, “So. Where am I taking you?”

“I don’t know,” she said. She wasn’t ready to give her name just yet, but she wasn’t ready to get out of the truck yet either. “Where you going?”

He lifted his hand off the steering wheel and looked at the dash. “Well, in a second, I’m going to have to get gas, but after that, I’ll take you back home. Sound all right?”

She shrugged. “Whatever,” she said, and then leaned her head back against the seat and closed her eyes.

3

Finally, she gave that signal and the fucking mercs were off, pouring out of their vans like weaponized roaches, and then they were gone, and Colleen, jog-walking right behind the mercs as they charged into the offices of the Morrison World Travel Concern, patted Rose on her ass and gave her a peck on her cheek and told her, “Nice work, kid,” and then waved casually over her shoulder and called out, “See you on the other side” as she ran to catch up with the grunts, leaving Rose standing on the sidewalk feeling like she felt that one summer she agreed to help out with the pre-K kids at church camp, how relieved she’d felt every fucking day when it was recess and all those little shits had run screaming and hitting and shoving out of the multipurpose room and into the play yard and all she’d wanted to do was sit down and revel in the peace and quiet for one goddamn minute.

She took a deep breath. She let it out. She wanted to take, like, five hundred more, but there wasn’t time. She had a suspicion today would be a day full of deep fucking breaths.

Rose sprinted into the parking garage where there was supposed to be an elevator that she couldn’t take because where would be the surprise and fun in that? No, she had to find the vent because of course there was a vent. It was always the same with these fucking places: Something as stupid as a vent opened up the entire labyrinth of a place, no matter how secure the rest of the building was. And sure, there were measures set up to protect the vents, lasers and heat sensors and weight sensors and shit like that, but they’d been taken care of from the inside, from their girl on the inside. And sure, Rose knew that no matter how all-powerful and underground your organization was, you had to make it so the people working for you could breathe and shit, but, Jesus, when she was done with this line of work, she planned to find somebody good at making things, like an engineer or someone, and together they’d invent a way to ventilate air into a building without ventilation shafts and she’d make, like, a billion dollars in the secret agency business. Because if you worked hard enough at it, you could bypass laser sensors and shit, but no matter how hard you tried, you couldn’t get down a ventilation shaft that wasn’t there, and that was the goddamned truth.

Rose climbed into the shaft, hooked her cable to the edge, and taking a deep breath, started counting to five, and then, because she liked surprises and hated waiting, let herself drop at three.

Rose dropped twenty or thirty feet and then caught hold of the rope, threw her feet against the aluminum of the vent shaft, leaving deep boot marks in it, almost breaking the shaft off its column. She should have been wearing gloves. She hated wearing gloves, though, hated the way they constricted her hands, the way she couldn’t grip things as well as she liked, not even with the grippy kind of gloves, not the way she liked to be able to grip into a thing when she needed to, and anyway, she hardly felt the burn of the rope as it burned in her palms. Still, she couldn’t help but hear Henry’s voice in the back of her head: Where the hell are your gloves, newbie?

God, though, she was bored. Bored of Henry’s voice in her head. Bored of this assault, which felt to her like nothing more than a glorified training session.

What was worse was if everything went the way it was supposed to go, she’d be bored the whole time.

Well. Most of the whole time. Taking care of the director of this outfit might offer its own — albeit brief — distractions.

Rose wondered what Colleen was doing. She wondered how the grunts were doing. Rounding up hostages, leading the oblivious fools in the travel agency down to the real offices of the Regional Office. She wondered if the travel agents even knew who they worked for. Probably not. People are idiots. She wondered what Jimmie and Windsor were doing, how they were handling their teams, wondered if they were already done with their assignments. Rose didn’t wonder if anyone had died yet — no one had but someone would soon enough and then others after that — because she hadn’t quite caught up to the idea that people — strangers and people she knew — were going to die. She was only seventeen, after all. So far it all seemed like a game, like an elaborate, somehow less fun game of paintball she was playing with Andrea and Colleen and Windsor back at Assassin Training Camp, but then thinking of Windsor made her think of Henry, which always dropped Rose onto shaky, spazzy ground.

Henry wasn’t even on the fucking premises. He was monitoring the operation from the rendezvous point, but as far as she knew, that meant watching Point Break on Netflix or some shit like that.

But at least he wasn’t with Windsor. Tall, gorgeous, white-blond, blue-eyed, smart, funny, age-appropriate Windsor.

At least there was that.

At least she didn’t have to waste time or brainpower trying to imagine or not imagine what shenanigans might’ve been going on with him and Windsor while she was stuck here in this shitty ventilation shaft.

Not that she cared.

Not that she gave two shits about Henry.

Not that she gave him another thought.

She stopped. Fuck. She’d missed her goddamn turn.

4

Rose didn’t know how long Henry had been driving around, how long she’d had her eyes closed. Not too long, of course. You couldn’t drive around this town for too long before you were driving out of it, but with the windows in his truck rolled down, the hot air blowing across her face, Rose didn’t feel any immediate urge to open her eyes, to see what the hell this stranger was doing or where he was driving her in his truck.

Then she became bored.

She opened her eyes just in time to see two girls she knew standing on the side of the road, looking over something dead on the pavement, giving it serious consideration.

“Hey, wait a minute,” Rose said. “Pull over real quick.”

Then she leaned out of her window. “What the hell are you girls doing?”

The taller girl, Patty, looked up, squinted, crinkled her nose. “Hey, Rose. We were coming to get you.”

“What is that?” she said, nodding at the thing dead in the road, pretending like she didn’t notice or care that fucking Patty had given Henry her name.

“Squirrel,” the shorter, dark-haired girl, Gina, said.

“What’s so goddamn interesting about a dead squirrel?”

“It ain’t dead,” Gina said. “Just smashed.”

“Oh,” Rose said, and then she slipped out of the truck before Henry could stop her. “Let me see.”

It was a sad sight, that squirrel.

The back half of it had been flattened into the pavement by someone speeding down the two-lane road, but the front half of it was still moving, had managed to pull itself a good two or three feet. At that moment, it seemed to be taking a break. Then its front paws started moving again, and she tried to imagine it pulling itself across the road. Tried to imagine the pain — did squirrels feel pain? — and the effort. The confusion, maybe, of having just recently had back legs that worked, of once being quick and acrobatic, able to climb trees and jump branch to branch, terrorize blue jays and mockingbirds, taunt cats and dogs.

And now this.

Where did it think it was going?

Gina and Patty were chatting about something behind her and maybe one of them asked who was that driving her around and another one might’ve asked what had happened to her shoes, but she didn’t pay them much attention, or rather, she listened to them just enough to know they were dead interested in who she was with and what she was doing driving around with this strange man, dead interested, in other words, in her, which was part of the point, wasn’t it?

Making people dead interested?

The squirrel’s chest beat rapidly, and Rose wondered if the beating was its lungs struggling to take in breath, or its heart struggling to pump blood into parts that were leaking that blood straight out again. Watching how fast its chest was beating, she felt that they should do something.

Then she heard the truck door open and slam and she turned to see Henry walking toward them. He was carrying a small hammer in his left hand. He nodded at Gina and Patty, and Patty smiled back because that’s how Patty was and Gina took a slight step back because that’s how Gina was. Henry got up close to the squirrel and said, more to the squirrel or to himself than to the girls, “What have we got here, buddy?” He dropped down into a squat. He pressed the hammer to the squirrel’s head and Rose, suddenly sure of what was about to happen, sure and unhappy about it, said, “Hey, wait,” but before she could say anything else, he drew the hammer back and tapped it sharply on the squirrel’s forehead — if squirrels even have foreheads, Rose thought. The tap wasn’t too hard, just hard enough that the squirrel collapsed and the rapid movement of its chest slowed and then stopped. Someone, Gina or Patty, gasped behind her, and she imagined the two of them flinching, turning their heads into their shoulders.

Pussies, she thought.

Henry gave a small smile, more of a grimace, and said, “There you go.”

“How in the fuck,” Rose said.

He shrugged. “Just a matter of where you hit it,” he said. “Find the right spot,” he said, “squirrels, birds, dogs, cats.” He shrugged again, as if this were common knowledge, that there would be one spot on the skull just vulnerable enough that knocking that spot with a ball-peen hammer would do a thing in. “People, even,” he said.

“Where?” she asked, standing up again. “On a person. Where would you have to tap a person like that?” she said.

“Oh,” he said. “Well.” Henry smiled at her. “Everybody’s different, you know.”

She knew where, though, knew exactly where you’d have to tap a person on the head in order to send him on his way. Or where you’d have to tap her, in any case. There’d been a spot on her own head that had been itching to be touched, deeply touched. She could feel where it might be with her fingertips but the spot that urgently needed pressing against was too deep inside her, covered by layers of skin and bone and whatever else it was that was held inside her head. She’d been feeling this for the past couple of days and had tried pressing hard against her head with the palm of her hand, and when that didn’t work, had pressed her head against the warm glass pane of her bedroom window, and then the sharp corner of the headboard of her bed, and against her bedroom wall. She’d pressed the eraser points of pencils and the blunt end of a pair of scissors there, too, all to no avail.

She’d never considered the dull tip of a hammer, though.

“Right here?” she asked, pointing to that spot on her head, just at her hairline, straight up from the bridge of her nose.

He barely looked at her, where she was pointing, and then, flustered, focused his attention on the squirrel flattened on the road, and said, with a bit of a hitch in his throat, or maybe that was Rose’s imagination, “Maybe, I guess, I don’t know.”

Then he said, “It’s dead now, anyway.”

Looking at Gina and Patty behind her, he said, “You want me to leave you here with them, then?”

Rose looked at the squirrel and then at Patty and Gina and then at the truck and Henry. She knew the right thing to say to the strange man who’d picked her up on the side of the road and had just killed a squirrel with a hammer. Yes, go on ahead, I’m fine now. But she was drawn. She wasn’t sure what she was being drawn to but it seemed a hell of a lot more interesting than what she’d be left with if she let him go.

Gina, who’d been studying Rose out of the corner of her eye, spoke up. “She’s fine with us,” she said. “Right, Rose?”

But Rose shook her head. “Actually, you mind running me to the store? I told my momma I’d pick something up for her and I lost my flip-flops back there and don’t want to walk barefooted.” She said this and didn’t look back at Gina or Patty, sure she knew what kind of look she’d see on their faces, Gina’s anyway.

“Let’s go, then,” he said. And then as they pulled away, Rose looked back at Gina and Patty still standing next to that dead squirrel, Patty waving limply until Gina noticed this and grabbed her arm and shook her head, and then the truck turned a corner and Rose couldn’t see them anymore.

5

Rose had gone too far down the shaft. She didn’t know how far too far, but too far, she could sense it.

Should’ve taken that left back at Albuquerque — that was her dad’s saying, although Christ if she knew what the hell he was ever talking about. Whatever, though. It was Henry’s fault, somehow, his fault for distracting her and maybe her fault just a little for being so easily distracted.

She pulled herself up, hand over hand, ten feet, fifteen, twenty. She was beginning to wonder when she’d get back to her turnoff, just how far below it she’d lowered herself, when she came to it, the opening — if it had been a snake, it’d have bit you, which was another one from dear old Dad — and Christ, how could she have missed it?

She swung herself to it, close enough to grab hold of the ledge with one hand. She was going to let go of the rope with her other hand, climb into the new shaft branching off to the left, and be on her merry way, but she stopped. She couldn’t say exactly why she stopped, but she did.

Something felt… off. Told her, Hold on, now, what’s wrong with this picture?

But then something else told her, Nah, this is it, go, go, you’ve got shit to do.

Except her arms weren’t tired, and her legs weren’t tired. Nothing was tired. And she was fifteen, maybe twenty minutes ahead of schedule, so why the rush, right? Let’s figure this shit out. Let’s use the Force, Luke, and all that other seeking-deep-within-ourselves-for-the-True-Answer bullshit she had been fed at Assassin Training Camp.

She let go of the ledge, held on to the rope, pushed herself off the wall into a gentle bit of pendulumming. She closed her eyes and went deep, went real fucking deep inside herself.

And here’s what she saw:

A map, in her head, a detailed motherfucker of a map, not just of the ventilation shaft but of the whole ordeal: travel agency, director’s office, training rooms, employee break rooms. Each girl had this same map stuck inside her head. Hell, if she wanted, she could pull up the secret compound in upstate New York, too. So.

Where was she?

A pinprick of light glowing hotly in the ventilation shaft.

Okay. Where was she supposed to be?

Same fucking light.

Good. All good, except, it wasn’t right. She could feel it. Something was still wrong, with her or her map or the fucking shaft.

She felt this overwhelming urge to open her eyes, to just look around and see, Hey, there’s the opening I need, but she wouldn’t let herself. Whatever it was that was wrong, her eyes were in on it, she was sure. Her body — fingers, legs — in on it, too.

Devil’s advocate: Security had been fixed by their woman on the inside, or that’s what she had told Henry and Emma, had told all of them, and Rose had made it this far — the others, too — without sounding off any alarms, so the intel seemed good enough. The opening was dead-to-rights right in front of her. She’d been on this rope for ages and was on a strict schedule. So what was her hesitation?

Counterargument: That she was hesitating at all was her goddamn hesitation. She’d never been one for thoughtful consideration of action and consequence, had been a headfirst, why-the-hell-not kind of a girl, and if anything made her pause even a little, well, fuck, that seemed suddenly enough to make her pause a lot.

Time ticked by.

She opened her eyes. The rope dropped out of sight and into the darkness below her. It stretched out of sight above her. She’d stopped swinging ages ago. Everything was pointless. She closed her eyes again, frustrated.

She had to do something. She couldn’t just hang there.

Okay, just playing devil’s advocate one more time: What if the whole thing is a setup? What if the whole point of this is to stop me in my fucking tracks? What if it all only feels wrong just to make me hang here, immobile and useless, until it’s too late and the whole shebang is finished and I’ve fucked up the whole operation?

Counterargument: Fine. Fuck it.

She opened her eyes. The opening looked as real as it ever had. She swung her legs back and forth to get some momentum and then grabbed, finally, hold of the ledge. It felt as real as it had just five minutes ago. So far so good. She let go of the rope with her other hand and grabbed fully on to the ledge. And then everything she was looking at, everything she was holding on to, flickered like a hinky picture on a shitty cell phone, and then it was gone and she was holding on to the smooth, purchaseless side of the ventilation shaft, or, rather, not holding on to it, not holding on to anything, and she fell.

6

The wind from the truck window caught hold of Rose’s hair, pulling it out of Henry’s truck. Henry wasn’t doing much talking and she didn’t feel like talking much, either. She watched the landscape pass by, familiar and dull, and only half listened to whatever was on the radio in the background.

“Those your friends?” Henry asked.

She had been biding her time, she realized. The last few weeks of summer, these first few weeks of school, sure, but even before that. These past few years. Maybe her whole life. Biding her time. She understood that now, and that here, even in Henry’s truck, she was still biding her time.

“Not really, no,” she said.

How was what she had been doing different from what Gina and Patty had been doing with their lives? she wondered.

They were biding their time, too. They just didn’t know it. That was what was different. They would finish out high school, Gina still a virgin, Rose was sure of it, and then each go off to college, with maybe a stop-off at the junior college for a couple of years first, and then, degrees in hand or not, they would wind their way back to this dump of a town, their eyes set on Randall Thomas (Gina) or Clem Buchanan (Patty), or boys of their ilk, inheritors of their daddies’ body repair shops or small-town construction firms. They might work for a couple of years, teaching kindergarten or managing one of the antique shops on the square, and then quit working once it was time to start pushing kids out of their nethers. It was an oppressive and frightening thought, picturing the two of them not much different from their bitter, hard-smoking mothers. But it was a thought she kept close to the surface, a reminder, a sort of anti-goal she’d set for herself, alongside, Don’t wind up stuck here like your loser parents did, or, more simply, Don’t turn into your loser parents, her dad a shiftless asshole who hadn’t worked an honest day in his life (according to her mother), her mother a nagging, thickheaded harpy who couldn’t see a man’s potential, couldn’t see past the tip of her blunted nose (according to her dad).

Henry turned the truck into the Stop-N-Go and she came out of her head.

“What are we doing here?”

Henry smiled his strange, uncomfortable smile. “I need to get some gas, remember?”

“Oh. Right.”

“Won’t take a sec.”

She opened her door and slid out of the truck. “Since we’re here,” she said casually, tossing the words over her shoulder as she crossed the parking lot.

“Hey, wait,” Henry said, but she wasn’t listening.

She might as well get something good out of this shitty day.

Ian Honsinger had told her he’d be working the Stop-N-Go, and if she came by and she was nice to him, he’d get her some cigarettes. Whatever being nice meant. That she had wound up here, by fate or accident, made her feel better about heading out with Henry. Plus she could use a cigarette.

Honsinger was at the counter, like he’d said he’d be, but seeing him, and his leering smile, and his cheap haircut, she wasn’t sure the cigarettes were worth the effort it would take to flirt with him.

“Hi, Rosie,” he said, stretching out the “e.” Then he looked past her and at Henry, and his eyes squinted and his mouth turned. “Who’s that you’re with?”

She looked casually over her shoulder, even though she knew Henry was the only other person at the gas pump. “Some guy. Henry, I guess.”

Ian stepped out from behind the counter and there was something puffed up and threatening about him now. She noticed, then, how he hadn’t stopped giving Henry the stink eye. “I don’t know him.” He looked down at her for a second. “I’ve never seen him before.”

She wanted to get a pack of cigarettes and a Coke and then get back into Henry’s truck, or maybe not that, either, maybe just the cigarettes and the drink and out of this gas station, which smelled strongly of Ian’s body spray now that he’d started moving around, casting the scent of himself into the farthest corners of this tiny little place.

Why was everything in this fucking town so damn tiny?

“Whatever,” she said. “Like you know everyone.” Then she poked him in the chest. “You gonna get me those cigarettes like you promised or what?”

He stopped staring down Henry, who hadn’t noticed anyway, and looked at Rose, then grabbed her poking finger in that thick palm of his. “I don’t know,” he said, smiling his stupid smile again. “What are you going to give me for them?”

She smiled up at him, sweetly, innocently, then leaned in real close, and he leaned in close and draped his arms over her shoulders, and she could picture him at a school dance, homecoming or prom, maybe, his heavy arms weighing her down, his splotchy face too close to her eyes, and then she shook her head and almost laughed as she stuffed a five-dollar bill in his shirt pocket.

She’d been practicing this.

She’d seen something like it in a movie but was surprised she’d had an opportunity to actually try it out. She almost said, “How’s this for your troubles, loverboy?” But she changed her mind and backed off instead.

Just in case.

“That,” she said. “I’ll give you that.”

He threw the cigarettes on the counter without asking which ones she wanted. She thought she’d heard him say something when he pulled the wallet out of his back pocket, slid the five dollars inside it. Tease, maybe. Or cock-tease. But she couldn’t see his lips when he said it, and it could have been her imagination.

She ignored him, anyway. “Thanks, Ian,” she said, singsongy and sweet again.

He looked at her and then back at Henry, waiting in the truck now, tapping his hands to some song playing on his stereo. Then he looked back at Rose and said, “Better be careful the kind of folk you run around with, Rosie.” He leered at her. “Strange man like that might look at a little girl like you and try to take advantage.”

She rolled her eyes. She backed herself into the door and pushed it open with her backside and said, “Fuck off, Honsinger,” and then did her best to flounce herself to Henry’s truck, and when she saw Ian was still staring at her, or at the truck, or at Henry, even though he couldn’t see Henry through her, she rolled her window down and flipped him off, and then they were gone.

7

At least she wasn’t just hanging there anymore, hanging in the middle of a ventilation shaft, pointless and bored.

There was that.

At least there was that.

Rose hip-checked the side of the shaft, tumbled ass over head and into the other side of the shaft. She scrambled to grab hold of the rope but had kicked it swinging and she couldn’t find it in the near dark. Her headlamp swung the light hither and yon, but she was still too high up to see any semblance of a bottom.

Assuming, of course, there was a bottom. Colleen had jokingly told her to be careful down that ventilation shaft, that she’d heard the woman who’d founded the Regional Office had magicks enough to have conjured a bottomless pit that enemies of the Regional Office were thrown into. What better place to hide a bottomless pit than in a ventilation shaft, right?

Hardy-fucking-har-har, Colleen.

Fucking fuck.

The impact. Assuming there would be an impact, she was worried about the impact, but only because it would hurt like a motherfucker. But besides that, she’d survive the fall, and whatever parts of her didn’t immediately survive would start to stitch themselves back together soon enough.

Getting out. She was worried about what would happen after she was dropped at the bottom of a shaft that was well over a mile belowground, but not so worried about this, either, because, well, she’d find some way out, by stealth or by force. She knew she would.

But the mission. God, those assholes had drilled it into her good. The fucking mission, she was worried about that, about missing out. That’s what had her scrambling so hard to find the rope.

She closed her eyes and reached out blindly and grabbed hold of air and then grabbed hold of air again, and thought maybe she should just give up this plan, and then something glanced against her wrist, and she grabbed again and caught hold of the rope and held tight, for a second, for less than, jerked to a bounding halt, before her shoulder gave out as it jarred up against gravity, and she let go again, but flung herself this time, whipped herself with some small deliberation so she could land hard against the side of the shaft, so she might slide down it, maybe catch hold of a different ledge, first with her forehead and her chin and then, when that slipped off, her elbow, which didn’t hold on much better, until finally her knee and calf and shin and ankle and then her boot caught, thank God for that fucking boot with its zippers and straps, its nooks and crannies, and then she held, for long enough, anyway, to pull herself up and in, and once she was in, she collapsed.

Now what, newbie? Henry, fucking Henry, pestering her inside her head.

You don’t know where you are or how to get to the director’s office, so, now what?

She’d figure it out, okay? Jesus.

But now what? Henry asked again, smug asshole. He knew the answer, of course, always knew the answer. Why else would he ask the fucking questions?

Just give a girl one goddamn minute, okay, a fucking minute to pull herself together, to take a fucking break, Christ.

She took a breath. She closed her eyes. Then she passed out, was out cold for at least fifteen minutes.

8

Back in Henry’s truck, she offered him a cigarette, which he took even though she could tell by the way he held it that he didn’t smoke.

The lighter popped out of the dashboard. Rose took it and pressed her cigarette into it and then took a deep drag from it and then held the lighter out for him. He had been holding the cigarette in his left hand and took the lighter in his right, trying to manage some rigmarole with his elbows on the steering wheel so he could light his cigarette, but the road began to twist and bump, and he startled, swerved a bit, and managed to drop the cigarette into his lap and the lighter onto the floor.

“Christ in a basket,” he said, glancing down and up and down and up, one-handing the steering wheel while he scrambled, hunched over, for the lighter.

“No wonder you almost hit me,” Rose said. Then she said, “Here, relax.” She placed her hand high up on his thigh and bent down, her body twisting just enough to give her scrunching room below the gearshift on the steering column. She could feel her tank top riding up her back and wondered at the peep show she was giving Henry, and hung down there a second longer than she needed to, and then she sat back up, the lighter held in front of her as if it were a diamond or some other gem she’d just pulled out of the earth. Then she said, “Here, gimme that,” and she reached into his lap and grabbed the cigarette, which had fallen in between his legs. She brushed the zipper of his jeans lightly and he jumped in his seat, sending the truck to the left before pulling it hard back to the right.

“Sorry,” he said.

“Jesus, Henry,” she said, laughing. “Settle down, will you?”

Then she tipped the cigarette between her lips and lit it and then she took a drag off it, her own still lit in her left hand. She blew the smoke out of the side of her mouth and then leaned over and said, “Open,” and then put it in his mouth, where he held it for a moment, not smoking, but breathing out of his nose and the side of his mouth, until he remembered his hands on the steering wheel, one of which he freed to pull the cigarette out of his mouth and hold out the open window.

“So. Which store am I taking you to?” he asked.

“I lied,” she said. “I don’t need to go to the store.”

Then she took a breath and looked at him and said, “It’s been kind of a weird day.”

“Where are we going, then?” he said.

“I don’t know. Home, I guess?”

He looked at her. He’d dropped the cigarette out of the window. “So, weird, huh?”

“A little, yeah.” She didn’t know why but she felt her voice hitch. Voice hitching wasn’t a normal thing for her. Her sister, sure. That girl’s voice hitched at the drop of a pin. At the first sign of trouble — the house was out of milk, their mother’s cat had been sleeping on the kitchen table, Rose had borrowed her favorite sweater — you could count on that one for a tremble of the lip, a hitch of the voice. But Rose liked to think she was made of stronger stuff than her sister, and sure, she’d seen some strange look in Tyler Akard’s eyes when he came chasing after her, and sure, the sight of that squirrel might’ve troubled her a touch, and maybe almost getting hit by a truck earlier in the day, etc., but Jesus Christ.

Pull yourself together.

“How old are you?” he asked again, catching her off guard, pulling her out of her head.

“Sixteen,” she said, forgetting she’d wanted to keep that a secret from him. “Well, next week. I turn sixteen next week.”

He sighed and in that sigh she thought she heard him mutter, “Too young,” but she couldn’t be sure. Then he didn’t say anything and neither did she and then he turned onto Church Street and turned to look at Rose and smiled at her and said, “Just about there.”

Only later — too late, in fact — would she realize how strange it was, what he said, when he said it.

Just about there.

They were, though. They were only a couple of blocks from her momma’s house, and so she didn’t think about it too much at the time, didn’t let it register that she’d never told him where she lived, hadn’t given him directions or an address. And then later still she would think how strange it was that he would have said that at all, said anything, in fact, to tip her off, to let her get her guard up, even if she hadn’t.

Gotten her guard up, that is.

They pulled up to her house. She tried to open the truck door but it wouldn’t open. “Hey,” she said, just as he was reaching across her, maybe a little uncomfortably so, to fiddle with the lock, the handle, saying, “Sorry about that, it gets funny.” He couldn’t open it and something inside her hitched again. Then he opened his own and got out and she turned herself to climb over and he said, “No, no, stay there, I’ll get it,” and he closed his door and trotted around the other side and opened her door from the outside.

“I need to get that fixed,” he said when he held out his hand to help her down from the truck.

“Yeah,” she said. “Well, thanks, anyway, for the ride.” She tried to let go of his hand.

“Here,” he said, the flat of his other hand resting lightly against her back between her shoulder blades. “Let me walk you to the door, make sure someone’s home for you.”

She didn’t say, There’s no one home, which there wasn’t, or that she had a key, which she did, or that it wouldn’t matter on account of how her mother never locked the door anyway. Her chest fluttered but in no good kind of way and her palms started to sweat, and little unwelcome shivers shot out of her skin where his hand was pressed against her.

Well, hell, she thought.

What she would do would be simple enough, Henry behind her or not. Shove the door open, just enough to slip inside, and then shove it shut and lock it behind her.

Which she did, in one smooth motion, as much of a surprise to her as it was to Henry just how well that had worked. Henry yelled after her, “Hey, wait.” He pounded on the door and she shook her head and thought, Fucking creep. And then she turned and stepped into the house and was ambushed.

9

When Rose came to, she didn’t know how far behind schedule she was. It took a second or two to figure out that she had made it across the shaft and into the next set of tubing.

The fall had shattered her piece-of-shit shatterproof watch, and don’t think Henry wasn’t going to get an earful from her about being such a cheap-ass on accessories.

She was enough behind schedule anyway (she could just feel it) that she said, Fuck it. Fuck the pain, fuck her weak legs, fuck her torn arm, and she jumped across the ventilation shaft to an opening just across from and above the opening she’d landed in. Don’t think there wasn’t a shitload of scrambling for some kind of hold, a lot of embarrassing kicking with her feet and grunting as she became frightened and then desperate to push through all that pain from the fall and grabbing the rope so she could pull herself up, because there was. That, and a heavy desire to go right back into unconsciousness that she almost didn’t resist. But then she pushed her way blindly out of the shaft into what turned out to be an office, dark and unoccupied. She kicked the computer onto the floor while scrambling onto the desk from the ceiling, and then she hopped down after it.

She closed her eyes, took some deep, deep breaths (who would have thought all that meditation crap from Assassin Training Camp would have come in so useful), then recalled her map.

Two floors down, half a wing across from where she needed to be.

She snuck into the hallway and she ran.

The halls were empty. A good sign, she supposed. The rest of the plan must have been moving along smoothly enough. And sure, great, that was good to know, of course, but also that meant that if there was a wrench in this mechanism, she was it.

She found the stairwell, jimmied open the door, took the stairs three and four at a time.

Surprise. The whole point of this exercise had been surprise. Which, fuck that. No way the director of this operation didn’t know that his world was caving in all around his ears by now. At worst, he’d found some way to sneak out of the fray. At best, he was sitting tight, arming the defenses in his office. And neither scenario was any good for her.

Wendy, their woman on the inside, the one who’d undone the main security system, had briefed them all. “I can’t touch the director’s office, sorry, it’s on its own system, and he’s the only one who controls it. But catch him off guard,” Wendy had said, “and Mr. Niles won’t have enough time to cue it all up.”

At the time, Rose had wished Wendy would stop using the guy’s name, would stick to the script and say director.

“Mr. Niles,” Wendy continued, “from what I’ve been told, he’s real twitchy about this sort of thing, didn’t want any defenses in the first place, because he’s always worried the system will screw up, won’t recognize him one day, will decide it’s time to weed him out, so to speak, and so he keeps it dark, the whole system, unless he knows he needs it. So if you do it right, you do it quick.” She shrugged.

Right and quick. That was all it took.

Henry and Emma probably shouldn’t have assigned the “right and quick” job to her then, the fucking spaz.

Two floors up, she kicked open the stairwell door, not even pretending to be subtle anymore. Subtle hadn’t ever been one of her strengths, anyway. She flew down the empty hall and slid to a stop just outside the glass door that opened to the receptionist’s desk and the receptionist who stood careful guard over the director and who was right then — Rose couldn’t believe her fucking luck — working some kind of crossword or Sudoku bullshit on her computer. Caught completely unawares.

Rose ducked out of sight. She pulled herself together. She counted down from ten.

Then, at seven, she charged.

Or, she didn’t exactly charge. She threw her momentum into this nifty slide across the tile, still out of the line of sight of the crossword genius, and didn’t pop herself out of it until the very last moment, like she was sliding into third base, like she was one of those real fast base stealers who can pop back up to standing after a wicked slide but like they didn’t stop, didn’t even pause to think about stopping, and that was how she slid: At the last second, she lit herself up onto her feet and grabbed the door handle and shoved herself inside, and before the receptionist could even register what kind of hell was barreling down on her, Rose had her by the throat.

Or should have.

She should have had her by the throat. Or, rather, by the whole fucking head and neck, if you were going to be technical about it, her arm wrapped around from behind, squeezing the receptionist’s windpipe shut, knocking her out cold, except that the receptionist wasn’t even fucking there.

Nothing was there.

Not the computer, not the Sudoku, not even the goddamn desk, all of it some image or hologram, probably the same make as the image or hologram that dropped her down that fucking bottomless pit (yeah, now that she was out and away from it, bottomless, why the hell not?).

But who the fuck cared because whatever it was, hologram or magicks, what it also was was a trap, most definitely a trap.

10

There were three guys waiting for her in her mom’s living room, and they grabbed her and she screamed and one of them clamped his hand over her mouth and she bit, and then he screamed and let go, and she kicked back with her right leg and felt it contact something — his knee, maybe — felt something crunch, heard someone fall. She stomped another’s foot, hard, and then yanked her arm out of his grasp, but the third one grabbed her free arm and pulled her to him by both her wrists and smashed his forehead into her face, and she saw stars, actual stars, little motes of light that swirled around in front of her eyes. And she heard him chuckle and say, “Jesus, guys, this was too easy,” and then she kicked him in the balls and he crumpled and let go of her wrists, and she grabbed him by his shirt, and then fell backward, pulling him forward on top of her, and in one swift hard kick, she threw him over her head so that he landed hard on his partner, knocking them both down.

How she’d done this, she had no fucking clue.

The closest she’d come to a fight was when she’d kicked Akard in his balls.

She scrambled up, looked around, and found Henry leaning against the door, his lips pursed, his eyes regarding her coolly. He nodded.

“That was pretty good,” he said.

Then he said, “These guys, they weren’t amateurs.”

Then he looked around the room at them and said, “But they did underestimate you, didn’t they?”

Said, “People always underestimate you, Rose. Isn’t that right?”

She didn’t ask him how he’d gotten inside, didn’t ask him what he was doing there, what he wanted, who those guys were, didn’t waste her time screaming, had let go of the hitch in her voice, that or had let it grow into something else, and instead she focused her energy on charging straight at that fucker, and then, as she was charging, then she yelled.

He watched her as she charged him and smiled and said, “But not me,” though that could’ve been her imagination since it didn’t feel like she could hear much of anything.

He stepped to the side and he grabbed her by her arm, pulled her in close like they were ballroom dancers, trapping her strong arm against her side, and then grabbed her by her neck with his other hand, so tight she couldn’t breathe, and then his leg swept her off her feet and she landed hard on her back against the hard, thin carpet that reeked of her mother’s Pall Malls, her free arm suddenly trapped under her own body weight and his weight as he bore down on her, and she could see his eyes, calm, blue eyes, and she could see his lips moving, but she couldn’t hear him, there was too much noise already banging around in her head.

Then, as he choked her, as he tried to choke the life from her, she swung her leg, she didn’t know how, but she swung it high and hard and kicked Henry in the side of the head, hard enough to throw him off her, hard enough to make him stumble, and she hand-sprung onto her feet and before anything else could happen, anyone else could pop out of the darkness and surprise her, she ran straight to Henry, ran at him as he got himself to his knees, though to her last dying day some part of her will always wonder why she didn’t just run the other way, didn’t just do what any sane person would have done, why she didn’t push her way out and run like hell. She ran at Henry instead and delivered a swift kick to his side, and then another, and then she realized there were more parts to him to be kicked or scratched or punched and she was aiming her next kick for his face, his not-ugly, not-handsome face, when the lights in the house shut off and everything went dark, darker than normal when the lights were shut off, and Rose couldn’t see anything, and a woman’s voice called out, “Enough. That’s quite enough.”

11

Training. Remember your goddamn training.

So the receptionist isn’t here. So this is a trap. So what? She’s been in traps before.

She jumps up — straight up like fucking Luke Skywalker in Empire when Vader tries to freeze his ass in carbonite — and then flips herself around to a) get a good look at the shit gunning — literally gunning — for her and b) push herself off the ceiling, which isn’t that drop-tile bullshit but nice wooden planking, thank God for egotistical directors of demonic organizations and their urgent need for evil-lair trimmings of the fancy, Nate Berkus sort.

What she sees before throwing herself into the fray:

1. Gun turrets, five of them, already out and targeting her since probably as soon as her hand grabbed the door handle.

2. Some real Last Crusade or Dr. No shit, by way of blades, half as tall as she was, spinning vertically and horizontally across the room.

3. Strange-as-shit whirling-dervish-type miniature robots spinning round and round like some kind of hybrid of the gun turrets and the spinning blades, in that they’re shooting out lasers (pell-mell enough that, in the nanosecond she took to get her lay of the land, one accidentally took out a gun turret) and have spinning blades spinning out of their tiny torsos and thin robot arms, Maximilian style. (The Black Hole, Henry. Please do try to keep up.)

And last but not least:

4. Gas pouring into the room out of secret cubbies.

Jesus Christ, this Niles guy sure is a nervous fuck.

Take a deep, deep, deep breath and hold it.

Don’t think about what kind of mess is waiting for you in his actual office if this is what he has lined up for anyone who dares approach his receptionist.

Don’t think at all.

Pivot.

Shove.

Handspring.

Land.

In between handspring and land, of course, grab one of the whirligig ones by the top of its whirligiggly head and throw it slicing into one of the big spinning slicers, the side-to-sider, not the up-and-downer, to cut the dervish clean in two, but which won’t quite stop the whirling, which will keep the laser-gunning head going long enough to knock out another gun turret (that’s two, three more to go) and the bottom going just long enough to mangle one of the other dervishes.

She doesn’t see this, not in real life, anyway, can only picture it in her head before she leaps.

Land.

Throw.

Double back handspring.

Super jump with a backflip.

Land again with a kick to disable the other spinning-blade number, stop it cold, and turn it vertical to act like a shield against two of the gun turrets on her weak side.

Another kick to knock it off its spinny hinge-arm doohickey.

Henry would know the name of this shit. Hell, so would everyone else, but she could never bring herself to give a fuck.

Knock it off its hinge, catch it by its center before it sinks into the floor, and discus that bitch at two more gun turrets.

Round-off.

Spin-kick the head free from the last whirling-dervish bot and into the last gun turret and the body into the glass partition separating the hallway outside from the receptionist’s office inside, cracking it open enough, anyway, for Rose to stick her head through and let a breath out and take one more big gulp of nontoxic air before twirling herself in and out and about and around the last three spinning slicers, which aren’t so much to tackle once there aren’t any more guns or spinning robots targeting you, and then she’s at the door.

Shove yourself through, and there he is.

The director himself.

Mr. Niles.

And he’s all alone and there are no whirligigs swarming around him in some sort of protective shell, and he’s standing back against his desk, and there’s a look in his eyes, a look that for a moment she mistakes for the kind of look you give when you’re done, when you’re finished with all of this, when you’re ready to go home, or to cross over to the last frontier or whatever the fuck you want to call it. But then he grins and pulls around his left hand and it’s covered in something she can’t make out at first but that looks, well, his hand looks like it’s covered in another hand, not a glove but a different kind of hand, and his grin grows wider and wider, and then Rose realizes, no, it’s that he’s coming closer and closer, and almost but not quite too late, she realizes he’s coming right at her.

12

The lights came back on, brighter somehow, and there was a woman sitting on Rose’s mother’s couch, a woman dressed all in red, sitting there not bored exactly but like she wasn’t as interested as she actually was.

Then she stood up.

She stood up and up and seemed just so damn tall, beautiful and tall.

Rose didn’t know who she was, didn’t know her name, and only later would she learn about her connection to the Regional Office or what the Regional Office was, and about the personal war she was about to wage against it.

But that would be later.

At that moment, Rose only knew that here was this woman, stunning and calm and powerful, and that simply looking at her made that hitch in her voice come back.

The Woman in Red stepped up close to Rose and touched her finger gently to Rose’s forehead, where there would be a nasty bruise soon enough, and in that touch Rose felt some living, pulsing, twitching memory shiver under her own skin, a thing that started at the touch, coursed through her down to her feet and into the earth, and then rose up from the ground all over again, up her legs and through her whole body to rush tingling up the back of her neck — she could feel it, could trace the shiver’s path — up her neck and over and through her skull, where it landed, finally, on that spot, touched her the way she’d been desperate to be touched, and her body went limp. After everything that had happened that day, her body decided now was the time to give out, and she felt herself start to fall, and she hoped — deeply hoped — that the Woman in Red would reach out and grab hold of her, but she didn’t.

Henry — where he’d come from she didn’t know — Henry caught her, instead, and she looked up at his not-unhandsome face, and the feeling continued to move through her and seemed to grow out of her, seemed to want to envelop him, too.

She didn’t push him away or struggle out of his grasp. She let him hold her and despite everything, she moved in, instead, for a kiss.

Her first.

Despite what she’d told Patty and Gina, despite all the things assholes like Akard and Schroeder said about her, her very first kiss.

When she’s older, when she’s back in this small town, when she’s drunk and half-asleep in her car, having pulled herself over because even in this state she knows she shouldn’t be on the road, and before the police pull up behind her with their bright flashing lights, and before she mouths off to them, before she tells them to go fuck themselves because for Christ’s sake she’s doing the right thing and not driving back home shit-faced unlike most people she knows, and before she resists arrest and struggles so strongly against the handcuffs that for the next week her wrists will be red and swollen, before she head-butts the window of the police car and cracks the window, and then tries but fails to smash the foot of one of the officers with her booted heel, before any of this happens, she’ll be thinking about this kiss, which wasn’t a great kiss, by no means was it a great or sexy or even sensual kiss, but it was her first real kiss, which made it memorable in and of itself, but also because of how she likes to joke with herself about that kiss and how fireworks lit the sky, right as they kissed, likes to joke with herself about how all hell broke loose with that kiss.

Which, in a way, it did.

Then the kiss broke and the room and her momma’s house and the people in it and the Woman in Red all came back into focus.

Judging by the look on Henry’s face and the sound of the woman’s laughter, the kiss was unexpected. Henry stood her up.

“Are you all right?” the Woman in Red asked.

Before Rose could answer, Henry shook his head. “Nothing that won’t heal.”

The Woman in Red smiled. “That wasn’t what I meant.” Then she looked at Rose and then back to Henry. “Well? Your assessment.”

Henry shook his head again. “You saw it all for yourself,” he said. He paused and pressed his palm gingerly to his side. “She’s strong.” He looked at Rose. “Angry,” he said. He didn’t touch his fingertips to his lips but Rose will always imagine that he did when he said, “Passionate.”

The woman smiled again, the look on her face so genuine and welcoming that Rose couldn’t help but smile back and feel, for whatever reason, relief.

“Still,” Henry said, and the smile on the woman’s face wavered.

“Yes?” the Woman in Red asked.

“I think she’s too young.”

Rose thought she saw the Woman in Red roll her eyes. Then she took Rose by the hand and squeezed Rose’s fingers slightly, playfully, and said, “She’s ready.” Then, to Rose, she asked, “Are you ready?”

“Ready?” Rose asked, surprised to find her voice there, just waiting for her but sounding not like herself at all. “Ready for what?”

She pulled Rose closer to her, close enough that Rose could smell what she thought was a light, citrusy perfume, but what she would later come to find was just the woman’s natural smell, and the Woman in Red said, “Come with me.”

She smiled her smile again and said, “I’m going to tell you a story.”

~ ~ ~

From The Regional Office Is Under Attack:

Tracking the Rise and Fall of an American Institution

In order to grasp the full consequence of both the rise and fall of the Regional Office, in order to better understand where these women — both the Operatives of the Regional Office and their attackers — came from, what wellspring delivered them their mystical properties, how Oyemi and her partner, Mr. Niles, sought them out when these mystical properties manifested, why Oyemi focused her energies only on these women, in order to understand what had been lost when the Regional Office lost its way, one must know one’s history.

When it comes to the history — the complete and accurate history — of the Regional Office, one might begin with the day Mr. Niles and Oyemi met, back in the third grade, back before their names were Mr. Niles and Oyemi, even. Or one might move farther along in time to the day Mr. Niles devised and drew up the plans for the Black Box, which was instrumental in guiding both Oyemi’s mystical properties and the focus of the Oracles when seeking out new Recruits and which brought them Jasmine, one of their most successful early Operatives. Others endeavor to begin with the day Mr. Niles and Oyemi “recruited” the first Oracle, a young woman named Nell, whose recruitment sent ripples, far-reaching ripples, into the fate of the Regional Office. Some scholars focus their attentions almost entirely on the Golden Age of the Regional Office, on the exploits of the likes of Jasmine (for obvious and sophomoric reasons, her battle against Mud Slug never fails to find its way into almost every scholarly study of the Regional Office); and, before her, Gemini and her long-running battles against Harold Raines; on the missions conducted by Emma, on Emma’s mysterious death, and so on, these authors favoring the flashier (but shallower) accounts of the Battle of Blanton Hill; on the capture of the interdimensional terrorist Regency; but ever failing to delve into the deeper history of the organization and the ramifications of choices made by the less visible operators.

This paper, hoping to offer a more nuanced and complete consideration of the Regional Office, will assign the beginning of the Regional Office to the accident that should have killed Oyemi but didn’t. The accident that didn’t kill her, but in fact imbued her with mystical properties. The accident that happened on a Tuesday, at or near IKEA.

Oyemi was shopping at IKEA, not because she needed anything but because she was bored. Mr. Niles had left town for a week and she had few other people — i.e., no other people — she called friends, and walking through IKEA killed more time than anything else she could think of to do. Not to mention, it was heated and she couldn’t afford to run the heat in her own apartment.

In six months, she and Mr. Niles would graduate from Rutgers University. In two months, her great-uncle would die — aneurysm — and would, much to everyone’s surprise, leave Oyemi the bulk of his sizable fortune. A surprise both because he and Oyemi had only met once, and because no one knew he’d amassed any kind of fortune, much less a sizable one.

People can be funny that way.

But at that moment, she was broke, barely paying her rent, arguing with financial aid to wrangle more money out of them her last few months of college. She could take the bus to IKEA for free with her student ID, could walk around for free, could bring a book and sit in a living room or a bedroom diorama and pretend she was home, although it felt perhaps more like she was in some strange zoo or amusement park, an exhibit for future generations to see: Poor College Student (Circa 1993).

After a while she left the store.

It is possible she was asked to leave.

Feeling restless and unwilling to wait for the next bus, she decided to walk home.

Here is where most accounts differ, despite the fact that all accounts from this time are Oyemi’s, namely because she was by herself when everything that happened happened.

Either in the parking lot or half a mile or three-quarters of a mile down the road, something happened: Oyemi was irradiated by an unseen alien force, or she was struck and subsequently irradiated by a small meteorite, or she was irradiated by an eighteen-wheeler that lost control of its cargo, jackknifed off the turnpike, and crashed, sending its oil drum of irradiated liquids spinning right at her and bursting open just before crashing over her, but no matter which story she told, each one ended with Oyemi irradiated, and, somehow, discovered in a small park near Rutgers University, twenty-three miles away from the IKEA.

A couple found her, naked and faintly glowing. They found her near a picnic table. The man called 911 while the woman looked for Oyemi’s clothes or a blanket or anything to cover her with, but finding nothing, the woman walked quickly back to her car, where she kept a blanket for picnics, and draped this over the girl (if that’s what this glowing, naked thing was) — only for the blanket to begin smoldering before catching fire and then burning to ash, which it did even before the woman could yell out to her husband, who was still on the phone with emergency services. This was also when the woman noticed that Oyemi, in a fetal position, lay in the center of a widening circle of bare earth, the grass and weeds on the outer edge of this circle shriveling into black tendrils and then to ash as the woman stood staring at them. Which was also when Oyemi woke up, opened one eye, an eye that glowed hotly, or no, not that, an eye that seemed a window, rather, like the window to an old furnace, so that the eye itself wasn’t glowing hotly, but that the inside of Oyemi glowed hotly. Seeing this, the woman screamed and ran and grabbed her husband, made him drop his phone and run too, before whatever had happened to their blanket, whatever had happened to the grass and weeds and ground, before any of that could happen to them.

Nobody, not even Oyemi, could explain how she made it back home, how she managed not to set all of New Brunswick ablaze, although until just recently, if one knew what signs to look for, one could trace the path she took from the park back to her apartment — a melted metal pole, a tree trunk singed in the shape of a woman’s handprint, a path of footprints where the earth had been burned to dirt that refused to grow back to grass for nearly twenty years — small markings of her passing that day.

Regardless of how she made it home, by the time she made it home, enough of the radiation had burned itself out of her that she could pick up the phone and call Mr. Niles and tell him to come back to New Jersey sooner rather than later before the handset melted around the pads of her fingertips.

Of course, a faction of scholars has formed under the shared belief that none of this happened, a faction that has, over the years, gained members and support and influence, which is why this piece of the history of the Regional Office often goes unmentioned, unexplained. And only recently, the faction itself has split into two separate groups:

Those who believe this never happened and that Oyemi always possessed the powers she possessed, who believe that she used this story as a way to reveal and contextualize these powers; and,

Those who believe she never possessed any mystical properties at all, possessed only the power to fool the powerful into following her lead.

If one chooses, one can seek out these theories on one’s own, though the authors of this paper assure one that they offer little but speculation, biased and unfounded.

Regardless, while Oyemi waited for Mr. Niles to return, she fashioned a plan. This plan became the foundation for an idea of what she could do now that she had changed. The possibilities opened up inside her even as her mind and the mystical properties of her expanded, even as she began to sense and see the power of the girls and women she would seek out and train to be her Oracles and her Operatives. The Oracles would find the Operatives. The Operatives would do what, she didn’t know, not at first. But while she waited and cooled, she began to think thoughts that became ideas that grew into what she and Mr. Niles would come to call the Regional Office.

13

Sarah’s time with the Regional Office had trained her to harbor certain suspicions, take few risks, set in place specific precautions, and so it was more than a surprise that there was an envelope waiting for her when she got home. It had been taped to the inside of her door. The locks hadn’t been picked or forced. The small piece of black thread she set in the doorjamb every morning when she left for work hadn’t been disturbed.

She’d once told Henry how she left her apartment every day before leaving for work — the thread, the locks — and he had laughed and he had told her she was too serious, that she worried too much, but see? She was right to be so cautious. Sure, her precautions hadn’t kept anyone from breaking into her apartment and taping an envelope to her door, but still. At least she’d had precautions set in place.

In fact, she only saw the envelope when she turned to dead-bolt the door. In other words, she hadn’t even sensed that someone else had been in her apartment. She should have at least sensed something, right?

Her name was written in black Sharpie across the front.

She stared at it.

Then she turned away and walked into her kitchen.

Ten minutes later, with a cup of tea in one hand, a cookie in the other, she walked back to the door to see if the envelope was still there.

It was.

She put the cookie in her mouth to free her hand and she pulled the envelope off the door. It peeled right off. She’d assumed it had been taped there, which had annoyed her because it was her experience that, no matter how hard you tried, the tape goo just never came off, but it had been hot-glued.

How considerate.

And strange.

She sat down at her breakfast table and opened it and slipped a file out of it and began to read what was inside.

This was at midnight.

It had been a long day. Mr. Niles had been acting strange. The Oracles had been unusually quiet. No one had seen Oyemi in almost a month. And Henry. Well. Henry had been acting a little strange ever since that last mission with Emma, the one that killed her. That had been two years ago now. She’d been covering for him, sure, because she was a friend, but still. They were going to have to have a chat. Enough was enough. They all missed Emma, but work was work. Sarah sighed. She stopped ranting in her head. She would skim through the file, see what kind of serious trouble it might mean, call the head of security and leave him a message, maybe call Mr. Niles, too, and then she’d be in bed by one, one thirty tops.

Three hours later, her apartment was a shambles, or not a shambles, really, as the word itself—shambles—implies something with more charm and less total destruction to it. So let’s say more than a shambles but shy of totally wrecked. And so: Her apartment was just shy of total wreckage. It’s fair to say what she found in that envelope had made her upset, or rather, it’s fair to say that upset was a far piece from what she was. Angry, let’s say. Infuriated. That, too. But also clarified. What she had found in that envelope had given her a clear path forward. A sense of what she needed to do next. She picked up what was left of the file, stepped gingerly through and around the rubble of what was left of her apartment. She sighed. She grabbed her keys and her security badge. She grabbed her shoulder bag, turned, and looked one more time at the wreck of her apartment — the eat-in kitchen’s table broken into thirds; the dishes smashed across the floor; the pillows and cushions torn, their batting ripped out — looked for perhaps the last time, and then stepped into the hallway.

She ignored the small crowd of neighbors who had gathered there and who had been banging on her door for, oh, twenty minutes, and pushed past them so she could go downstairs and head for her office.

14

When Sarah first came to the Regional Office, the streets had been noisy and smoggy and the air damp and the day hot, made hotter still by the buildings, the concrete, the glass, the steel, which trapped all that heat and let it radiate out all day and most of the night. Sarah had missed the city, the heat and the noise and the smell, had missed it because she loved it.

She had thought moving to California would have been a good thing, moving away from home (everyone moves away from home, right?), moving away from the look that people in the old neighborhood gave her, even still, because she was the girl whose mother had disappeared. Moving away from all of that had seemed a good idea, but she didn’t like California. The weather made no sense. The air, the sky, there was just too much of both. She hated driving, not that she had had a car out in California, but she had hated being driven around, too. The people were too easygoing, too smug for her tastes, and for a while now, she had wondered if the move had been a tragic mistake. It was good to be back in the city, anyway, even if just for a short while, and even if she didn’t know exactly why she had come back home, what she hoped to gain by coming back.

Sarah had found the building and the office she was looking for — Morrison World Travel Concern — almost half an hour ago. She stood outside it and then walked away from it and bought a hot dog and a pretzel and a soda. She sat on a half wall just down the street from the travel agency to eat and afterward walked back up to the front door and stared at the scripted name, the travel posters in the window, and wondered what the hell she was doing here, what she hoped to find here for herself. Sarah thought about taking the train and then the bus to her aunt’s house. Her aunt would be at work and she didn’t know Sarah was even in the city, but Sarah could surprise her. She could pick up some food or grab some things from the store, bake her a cake. Her aunt loved cake. That was what she should do. Go back to Brooklyn, where she belonged, and make this a visit with her aunt and not a complete waste of her time. When she had received the letter from the Morrison World Travel Concern inviting her — directing her, more like it — to come to their offices on this day, a first-class ticket included, she had assumed it was a scam or a high-priced piece of marketing that had been mailed to her by accident. But then she saw her mother’s name in the letter and she read it more closely, and then read it again — information about your mother, etc., etc., unusual circumstances surrounding her disappearance, etc., etc. — and while she had no idea what a high-end travel agency could or would tell her about her mother, who was she to pass up a free first-class plane ticket back to New York?

Now that she was here, though, she felt uneasy about the whole situation.

She clenched her fists in resolve and nodded as if coming to a hard-won decision and half-turned to head back to Fifty-Ninth, back to the subway, back to a real life, but before she could change her mind again, she stepped inside.

A shiver ran through her, which she blamed on the air-conditioning.

A pretty, young receptionist smiled at her. “Good afternoon. Can I help you?”

“I’m looking to, um, book a trip to Akron, Ohio?” Sarah said.

Sarah had looked up the Morrison World Travel Concern before coming. She couldn’t find a website for them but had read a number of stories — many of them in magazines like the Aston Martin Magazine and the Robb Report. She knew the kinds of vacations booked here, which were not the kind of vacations one took to Akron, Ohio. She expected the receptionist to frown at her, or to look at her blankly, or send her to Travelocity or something, or worse yet, to book her a trip to Akron, Ohio, where Sarah had no intention of going. Instead, the young woman held her pretty smile and said, “Great. I’ll let them know. While you wait, can I offer you something to drink? Water? A glass of champagne?”

Five minutes later, another woman escorted her to an elevator and told her, “Someone will be waiting for you,” and smiled at her as the doors closed and the elevator began its descent, which was a long descent, and then a few minutes after that, when the doors opened, there he was: Mr. Niles.

15

It was almost five in the morning by the time Sarah made it back uptown, back to the Regional Office. She would’ve been at the office sooner if she’d taken a cab, but she didn’t trust a cab — or much of anyone at this point. She could have called one of the Regional Office drivers. They were on call twenty-four hours a day, mostly for the Operatives, whose assignments often required oddly timed comings and goings, but she wasn’t sure she could trust their drivers, either — their own drivers! — not to mention, calling for a car at this hour would have drawn unwanted attention, might have tipped off someone she didn’t want tipped off. Not just that she’d received their envelope, but that she’d refused to accept their offer, which had been contained within that envelope, but not only that: She was preparing to take action against those who’d made the offer.

So she took the trains. The F train was murder. The 4 was worse. But the platforms and the cars, aside from the occasional drunk passed out on a bench, were empty, and she would see anything weird or out of sorts that might be coming for her.

Not to mention all the waiting, all the time she spent stewing, helped to clear her head, helped her relax.

Still.

What a drag.

Not what she’d had planned for her Tuesday morning. Or her Monday night.

She unlocked the first-floor office door and then punched in the elevator code, started the long descent.

No one else was in, at least. Even the cleaning crew had long since come and gone.

When she first started working for Mr. Niles, she came in early every morning, hoping (and failing) to impress him and the Operatives — Mr. Niles, if he even noticed, never said anything, hadn’t cared, and the Operatives hazed her for it, but back then there hadn’t been much that they hadn’t hazed her for. She would come in before sunrise and use her key to Mr. Niles’s office — which she had kept even after he had given her her own office — and sat at his desk and watched the sun rise over Manhattan through the three tall video screens that were built to look like windows, the pictures on them so vivid, so real, that there were moments when the rising sun would force her to shade her eyes, when sunlight seemed to stream into the room, when she almost forgot she was a mile, at least, belowground.

Those mornings, that sunrise, were the best things about working for the Regional Office those first few months. Better than all the fancy gewgaws and super-advanced technologies they used to find new Recruits, better than the training room with its hologram modules and Danger Room sessions, better than the advanced weaponry, better than Mr. Niles and what he’d done for her, and way better, so, so much way better than her mechanical arm made of a nearly impervious and unbreakable metal alloy and controlled by hyperadvanced nanorobots but disguised to look no different than her other, normal arm.

But back then, just about everything was better than that arm.

Not because she hadn’t wanted the arm, though in truth, she hadn’t asked for it, either, had been talked into it. The arm had been Mr. Niles’s idea — if she wanted to avenge her mother, she would need enhancement, etc. — and sure, she appreciated it now, couldn’t imagine her life without it now. But back then, she didn’t know how to use it, how to control it, or why she needed it. Back then, what she had wanted from the Regional Office were answers, and when she was given those answers, what she wanted were actions — of the vengeful sort, full of violent retribution — and Mr. Niles had insisted, had promised that revenge would come, but before she could have revenge, she would have to take the mechanical arm.

Now she rubbed the key to Mr. Niles’s office between her normal thumb and forefinger (she tried her best not to rub things between her mechanical fingers as that made her body twitch the way it twitched when she accidentally bit into a piece of tinfoil or handled those paper towels that were less paper and more towel). She thought hard about that sunrise, about setting herself up in that office in front of those big windows again, letting these newly arisen troubles take their own course. If she had known that Mr. Niles was already in there himself, had been there all night trying to figure out whether he should stay with the Regional Office or find some other thing to do with his life because he’d become tired, so tired of all the bullshit of working with Oyemi and her Oracles, she would have gone to him, and would have told him everything she’d learned reading that letter left on her door, and might have possibly changed the trajectory of not just this day but of her life, and not just her life, but the life of Mr. Niles, and maybe the life they might have had together, not as a couple, though maybe she wouldn’t have minded that, but more as a globe-trotting, world-saving duo. Rogue demon hunters, and the like. A thought, she wasn’t afraid to admit (to herself, horrified by the thought of admitting it to Mr. Niles or any other living soul), she’d pondered not a few times. But she didn’t know he was there, and instead she believed — correctly — that the Regional Office was going to come under attack, and believed — incorrectly — that this attack would come in the next few days, the next few weeks, and that she was going to be the one to save the Regional Office, and that to do so, she had to stay down here and work instead of watch for a rising sun.

If only she had known that the Regional Office was already under attack, had been under attack, in one subtle way or another, for the past two years… but she didn’t know, wouldn’t know until too late. Not too late to save the Regional Office, which, let’s face it, was done for, at least the way Mr. Niles and Oyemi had envisioned it. But too late to save herself.

And way too late to save Mr. Niles.

16

“My mother disappeared,” Sarah had told Mr. Niles at that first meeting, even though clearly he would have known this, since they had found her, they had invited her to their offices promising information on her mother’s disappearance.

Still. Sarah believed in coming right to the point. People could be so awkward the way they danced around the topic of her mother.

“She disappeared when I was eight.”

Mr. Niles had offered Sarah his hand and had led her off the elevator into an open office thrumming with activity. He’d introduced himself and hadn’t bothered with the unnecessary You must be Sarah that she had expected. He’d offered her something to drink, something to eat, and when she had refused both, had taken her to his office, and that was where they were talking now.

Mr. Niles, who had short black hair that would have been curly if he’d let it grow out, and a soft, round face, and very little chin to speak of, smiled at her and told her, almost gently, “I know.”

Sarah didn’t know what to say to that so she didn’t say anything. Mr. Niles tented his hands together and pressed the tips of his index fingers to the tip of his nose. He tilted back in his office chair and regarded Sarah with what Sarah took to be some skepticism.

“I know that she was abducted,” he said, finally, “and I know a lot more than that.” He dropped his hands into his lap and leaned forward in his chair and said, “What I don’t know is if you’re ready.”

“Ready?” she asked.

“For the truth. About your mother. And about you.”

She didn’t know what truth there would be for her to find out about herself, but she didn’t know why the Regional Office would have contacted her in the first place if Mr. Niles hadn’t thought she was ready to learn what they knew about her mother. That was the whole reason she had come.

It was strange, though, being here, telling Mr. Niles the small piece of her story, waiting to hear what he had to say. Strange because she had long ago stopped killing herself trying to puzzle out what had happened to her mother. After her mother had disappeared and she had gone to live with her aunt, Sarah hadn’t known what had happened to her mother, not even in the abstract. She only knew that her mother was gone, and that she missed her, and that she was sad because of this, but the other aspects of her life hadn’t changed very much. She still had to go to school, still had to wake up in the mornings and go to bed at night at the same specified times. She still liked the same foods — not many of them — and still had the same friends — again, not many of them. What it meant that her mother was gone wouldn’t occur to her until she was older, which was when she started to think seriously about the things that might’ve happened to her mother. And as a teenager, Sarah tortured herself — that’s how Sarah liked to think of it — with all the possibilities. From: Her mother took an honest look at what the next ten to twelve years held in store for her alone in the city with a daughter she didn’t fully understand and simply walked out, wiping her hands clean of that potential disaster, to: She was nabbed on the way home, forced to live in a basement in a building two doors down or the next block over, a sex slave, or worse. Sarah couldn’t imagine what worse would look like, could only imagine that there could be worse.

There could always be worse.

She didn’t know what Mr. Niles would tell her, or what would happen after that, but what she knew was that she was ready.

Ready for something, ready for anything, ready to move on, ready for the truth.

“I’m ready,” she said. “I’m as ready as I’ll ever be,” she said, and this made Mr. Niles smile, maybe because he admired her confidence or maybe because he knew she was wrong.

17

Sarah brewed a pot of coffee.

It was nice being in the office before anyone else. It was quiet, true, but that wasn’t what was so nice about it. Late at night, after everyone else had gone home, it was quiet then, too. No. This was different. Desks were still cluttered and the mail room was still a mess and someone had left a dirty coffee mug and plate in the kitchen sink, but still, there seemed to be something fresh and untouched about the office. This early and as empty as it was, the office contained a well, or a bubble, a fragile bubble of potential for great work to be done, grand and fantastic deeds to be accomplished. That was it. That was the difference. By the end of any day, of every day, it seemed, all the day’s potential had been undone by phone calls and meetings, e-mails and paperwork.

Plus, this early, with no one around, she could get to work without everyone scrambling to her with their problems, most of which weren’t even her responsibility. She wasn’t the office manager or the intern coordinator or the director of outreach or assistant to the regional manager. She worked directly for Mr. Niles, was his go-to, had been so almost from her first day working here, but without fail, every single day someone would come to her with some stupid question about toner cartridges or to complain about that idiot intern Jacob, or to hand her a list of supplies the office had run out of. But whatever. Let those nitwits send her e-mails about resetting their voice mail passwords; she didn’t care. Not today. Today and in the coming weeks, she would be too busy saving their goddamn asses, so thank God no one else was around.

She poured milk into her coffee and looked out over the empty cubicles and told herself she would make a habit of this again — once this attack was thwarted — of coming in early, maybe not every day, but often.

Often enough.

But for now: the attack.

It wasn’t explicit, the warning she had received, if that was what it had been.

The envelope had contained a letter, an offer letter of sorts. Someone trying to lure her away from the Regional Office. Not sent, though, from any kind of headhunter firm — not that there were many headhunter firms trafficking in the world inhabited by organizations like the Regional Office, but there were a few, and this hadn’t been sent from any of them. This had been sent, or delivered, rather, from the organization itself. She didn’t know which. Whoever had sent the offer hadn’t specified.

And there was information, about the Regional Office, about Mr. Niles, about her arm. Information that had made her mad, violently and destructively mad. Information clearly, blatantly false. Damning and cruel, intended, she was sure, to turn her against the people she had come to think so highly of, to work so hard for, trust with her life and, quite literally, her limb.

Not that her anger had passed but had been refocused. She had curbed her impulses and trained her anger on making whoever left her that envelope pay and pay dearly.

The question she had to answer, then, was: who?

By the time anyone else showed up at the office, Sarah had narrowed the list of suspects down to six. Six organizations or conglomerations or evil confederations or anarchist splinter groups with a) any vested interest in the total destruction of the Regional Office, b) the logistical and mystical support and backing and training and time to carry out such an attack, and c) as her aunt would have dubbed it, the brass fucking balls to even think of such an attack.

Six of them. On a spreadsheet. Leadership outlined, strengths and weaknesses enumerated, potential readiness for such an assault, earliest timeline for such an attack. That’s as far as Sarah had gotten when she heard, “Wow, you’re here early.”

It was Wendy. Thank God it was Wendy and not that idiot Jacob.

If she was going to deal with one of the interns this morning of all mornings, better it be Wendy.

She could not handle Jacob right now.

“Check your tablet, I sent you a spreadsheet just a minute—”

“Yeah, I got it, just now,” Wendy said, scrolling through the names. “This year’s Christmas card list?”

Sarah was scanning the building schematics for the Regional Office on her computer, looking for weak points, points of entry, defense positions, and, frankly, she didn’t have time for jokes. She shook her head. “The Regional Office is under attack,” she said. “Or will be, soon, quite possibly very soon, so, if you don’t mind.”

Wendy smiled and then just as quickly stopped smiling. “Wait, what? Are you kidding?” Sarah stopped scrolling through the schematics to pause long enough to throw Wendy a look. “I mean, right, you’re not the jokiest person I know, but, really? We’re under attack? Guns a-blazing attack?”

“Minus the guns, yes, we’re under attack, or I’m pretty sure we will be.” She paused. “Actually, there might be guns.”

“Cool,” Wendy said, and then so she wouldn’t get a second look or worse, said, “I mean, not cool as in ‘awesome,’ but.” She paused. “How very interesting.” She paused again. “So, is this new intel from one of the Ops?” she asked. “Or something from the Oracles?”

“Look at the list, will you?” Sarah said, ignoring her questions, not yet ready to mention to anyone else the letter on her door, the information inside it. “Keep it between you and me for now. I would prefer not to have people in a panic all day, and maybe if we work real hard at it, we can stop it before it becomes too interesting. Hmm?”

“Oh. Stop it?”

Sarah sighed, spun in her chair to look at Wendy, to make sure it was Wendy and not, who knew, Jacob in a Wendy outfit. “I’m sorry, but are you feeling okay? Yeah, I think we can all agree that we should stop the attack. Right? Stop it?”

“Oh, yeah, sorry, it’s just that, well, you said we were under attack and I thought you meant, like, right now, that we were in the middle of it, that’s all.” Wendy cleared her throat. “Stop it, definitely. Stop the attack before it happens. That’s definitely what we should do.”

“Great. Glad we’re all caught up. The names, please?” Sarah went back to the drawings. What was she missing, what had she missed, where were the flaws? She wanted it all narrowed down, the attack scenario and her counterattack options worked up and presentable before the end of the day, but there was something missing. She couldn’t pinpoint what, but there was something. She could sense it.

Wendy hadn’t moved. Sarah stopped and took a deep breath and rubbed one of her eyes with her thumb. “What, Wendy?”

“Should we tell Mr. Niles?”

“How do you know I haven’t told him already?”

“Right, sorry. What did Mr. Niles say?”

Sarah’s shoulders slumped. She couldn’t feel the weight of her mechanical arm, that’s how it had been designed, but this morning, she could feel the weight of it pulling her down, she swore she could.

“We’ll tell him when we have something more concrete, how about that? We don’t… storm into his office with six possible attackers and a probable attack.” Wendy was nodding. “The list, Wendy? Can you focus on the list, please, and help me figure this out?”

“Right, boss,” Wendy said. “I’ll run probability reports for each name, create three — no, five — possible counterstrategies for each, get them to you by… what time is it now?”

Sarah checked the clock. It was almost eight. How had it gotten to be almost eight? Sarah stared at the clock.

“Whatever,” Wendy said. “I’ll have it all to you before ten?”

Relieved that Wendy was acting like Wendy again, Sarah smiled. “Perfect, thanks.” Wendy smiled back, was about to leave when Sarah said, “Oh, and”—she sighed, God, why couldn’t she stop sighing—“I should probably bring Jasmine in on this. What time does she come in today?”

Wendy cocked her head not unlike a spaniel. “Oh, nine I guess?” she said.

“Never mind. I’ll look it up,” Sarah said. Wendy was usually on top of this shit, and Sarah didn’t really have time or patience for her to come down with a case of the “interns,” but whatever. She’d figure it out herself.

Wendy moved closer to Sarah, reached over her shoulder for Sarah’s tablet. “Here,” she said. “You’re super busy. I can look it up for you, put her on your schedule.”

Sarah held her tablet firm. “It’s fine, Wendy, Jesus. I can take care of it.”

She scrolled through the schedule. It took her a moment to realize something was wrong and another moment for her to recognize what that something wrong was. Wendy was still leaning over her and then she felt Wendy stand up, step one or two steps back.

Jasmine wasn’t there. On the schedule. That was what was wrong. She was on a mission. Sarah didn’t recognize the mission, but more surprising even than that — which was pretty damn surprising since Sarah approved and cleared every mission — was how no one else was on the schedule either. How every one of their girls was also on a mission. Against all protocol, every single Operative was gone, off-site, and in Jasmine’s case, off-dimension.

“What the hell is going on?” Sarah said.

A creeping, slow-moving sense of what was going on crept and slowly moved into the pit of Sarah, and she was about to say, Jesus, we’re too late, it’s today, but then the client elevator dinged and that ding was followed by voices, unfamiliar, gruff voices, and those voices were followed by screams, which were followed then by more voices and gunshots and then more screams, and so, really, Sarah was too late to say even that.

18

The day Sarah’s mother disappeared (was abducted), she forgot to pack Sarah a school lunch. She promised Sarah she’d bring it to school before lunch, that she’d bring it right away, and later Sarah wondered if her mother had been on her way to bring that lunch to school when she was taken, or if she’d simply forgotten about the lunch altogether, which had happened before. Sarah always hoped that her mother forgot about the lunch a second time and was tootling around in their apartment or somewhere in the city, doing something silly and unrelated to Sarah or Sarah’s school or Sarah’s well-being, when she was nabbed.

Sarah would have been happy to know, for instance, that her mother had gotten sidetracked even on her way home from dropping Sarah off at school. That she had walked by a Duane Reade and remembered that her hair dryer had broken and that she wanted a new one, and that while in Duane Reade, she remembered other things she needed to get — makeup, a humidifier, Q-tips — and that she was grabbed as she was walking out of the store.

Sarah loved her mother and loved it when her mother did things that were motherly, which she didn’t do too often, but Sarah would have preferred it if her mother had been taken away from her while doing something frivolous or ordinary, and not in one of the rare moments she exhibited any kind of maternal instincts.

Sarah’s mother never came back, in any case, and Sarah’s teacher shared some of her lunch with Sarah when it was clear there wouldn’t be a lunch. She ate half an apple and half a ham sandwich, drank half a Tab. The rest of the day was normal. The entire day, in fact, felt normal. Her mother’s forgetting her lunch — they were running late and her mother had almost forgotten her own shoes — the two of them running the last two blocks together, Sarah spacing out during most of the school day, running around the playground by herself, crossing two bars on the monkey bars before falling off, and her mother running late to pick her up from school. These all pointed to any ordinary day.

But then her mother was really late.

And then her mother was so late that the receptionist called the only other number on file, which was Sarah’s aunt’s number, because she’d already called Sarah’s house four times and the receptionist had kids of her own, you know, and couldn’t spend the whole night waiting there with Sarah.

“I wonder what happened to that mother of yours,” her aunt said as they walked hand in hand to the subway. Sarah didn’t mind at the time. She didn’t suspect, in other words, that anything had gone wrong, and plus her mother never let her hold hands this long because it made their hands sweaty and Sarah’s mother didn’t like sweaty hands, so Sarah shrugged and squeezed her aunt’s hand quickly and her aunt squeezed back.

They picked up pizza on the way to her aunt’s apartment. Her aunt let her watch television while she called around looking for Sarah’s mother. She gave Sarah a bath and gave her a T-shirt to wear as pajamas, too big and wonderfully soft and thin, and then she read to Sarah from A Wrinkle in Time—“One of my favorites when I was a girl”—and then she tucked Sarah into her big, fluffy bed and told her, “In the morning, guess what? You’ll wake up in your own bed!” And as she fell asleep, Sarah thought to herself that she wouldn’t be upset if she didn’t wake up in her own bed, that it would be just fine, thank you very much, to wake up in her aunt’s bed, which felt clean and lovely, but then she woke up and it was the morning and she was still at her aunt’s, and she was surprised by how much this upset her.

Her aunt took a day off work and took Sarah to school and picked her up again in the afternoon, and the rest of the afternoon and that night, her aunt told Sarah things like, “She’s probably just with some friends in the city and lost track of everything,” and, “You know how your mother can be sometimes, like she’s on a different planet,” which was true, or had been true when her mother had been a younger woman. As a girl and into her teens, Sarah’s mother had the habit of disappearing from the house for a day or two, crashing on the couches of friends in the city or in Brooklyn, or not sleeping at all, sitting in diners or cafés with friends or people she had just met, and then coming home to any number of punishments, which didn’t bother her at all because she hadn’t been a rebellious girl, just forgetful and thoughtless. When she had become pregnant with Sarah — she hadn’t the slightest idea who the father was, or else convincingly pretended she hadn’t — she’d changed, or if nothing else, she had stopped leaving the house and forgetting to come back, at least until now.

Another night passed, and then it was Saturday and there was no school, and her aunt said, “Hey, do you want to go to Coney Island today?” and Sarah said, “Sure,” even though what she really wanted was to go home and for her mother to come back. But she didn’t want to upset her aunt, who seemed more than upset enough, and she didn’t want to say what was on her own mind, either, as she would only upset herself by saying out loud the thing she wanted to do but couldn’t do. And so, fine, she would go to Coney Island with her aunt, except her aunt stayed home and Sarah went with a friend of her aunt’s who also had kids, three of them, the oldest four years younger than Sarah, and for most of the day, Sarah watched her aunt’s friend yell at her kids or caught her aunt’s friend staring at her with a strange, sad, pitying look in her eye.

On Sunday, her aunt bought cookies and pizzas and cake and popcorn and closed the blinds and turned her apartment as dark as she could and ran movie after movie after movie, Sarah’s favorites, which weren’t many and which were mostly her favorites because they were the ones she had at home—Labyrinth and Top Gun and Time Bandits. When they ran out of movies, Sarah’s aunt kept the apartment dark and the popcorn popped and they sat and watched whatever was on TV, and then, on Monday, the police came over. After that, a man and a woman from CPS came to her aunt’s house, and after that, Sarah’s aunt took her back to her mom’s apartment, where they packed her clothes and her toys up, and Sarah asked her aunt if they couldn’t just stay there. Sarah’s aunt told her, “Maybe, maybe we will, maybe we’ll come back here and stay until your mother comes back,” but they never did. One day while she was at school, her aunt moved what she could from Sarah’s old apartment and sold the rest and what she didn’t sell was left on the curb. And then time passed and Sarah changed and while she didn’t know it, her mother changed, too, which was why when Sarah was older and she saw her mother week after week, year after year, she never once knew they’d been brought back together.

19

Sarah stood up and pushed by Wendy and then stopped in the doorway.

She knew she should have kept going, should have barreled down the hall and into that fray, should have put her mechanical arm to the good use it had been designed for, but she didn’t. She stopped instead. Not because she was afraid — she wasn’t — or because she didn’t think she’d do well in the fight — she would have — but because it wasn’t her instinct to barrel into anything.

She was careful — had always been careful, even and especially as a child, even and especially when situations required bold action. She was a thinker, a planner. She thought through everything, the possibilities, the action and reaction, the cause and effect, the consequences of therefore and but.

People were screaming — not just people, but coworkers — and hostages were being taken, therefore she should put an end to it all, and the Operatives were missing, therefore she was the strongest and most skilled defender on site, and she should get to work defending, but then what? she thought. She runs down the hall wielding her mechanical arm, disarms and neutralizes three men, or let’s be generous, let’s say five, if you give Sarah the element of surprise, five men, neutralized, or dead, but how many are there in all? And so let’s hope for the best but prepare for the worst and say there are twenty, no, forty men with guns, now down to thirty-five, and now she has lost the element of surprise, and all that’s left to her is brute force, cunning, and speed, which she contains, not just in her mechanical arm, but contains in the all of her, but still, brute force and speed and cunning, set up against thirty-five men with guns and who knows what else. And Jesus — are there magicks involved? There would have to be magicks involved, otherwise how would they have conspired to push past security? How would they have managed to send all the Regional Office’s own defensive team of Operatives off on missions so that not one of them was on campus? So, yeah, sure, let’s throw magicks into the mix, too, and let’s take away complete surprise because they would have to know by now that she was not on board with their offer, with the package that she had found that night in her apartment, that she would be, in fact, lurking somewhere to join in on this fight, so maybe not total surprise. Add to that technological wizardry, because who would plan an attack against an organization equipped with a semi-cyborg (although Sarah didn’t love the word, cyborg, and liked to think of herself more as enhanced) and not come equipped with its own technology to counter? Which mostly takes away her brute force. Takes away brute force and leaves speed and cunning, which don’t come into play as much when running headlong into an uneven fight. Leaving her only one real option: to Die Hard it John McClane — style, but with Wendy working with her, the two of them squeezing through air ducts and lurking in stairwells and plotting in empty offices, picking off these bastards in small guerrilla groups.

So it was settled.

She had her plan, not just the only but also the very best plan, contrived in a matter of seconds while she stood there in the doorway.

Not bad, O’Hara. Not bad at all.

She turned to pull Wendy along with her, down the hall in the opposite direction to the back stairwell and from there to the upstairs break room, but when she saw Wendy, Wendy had changed.

Sarah couldn’t tell how. Not right away. Wendy looked at the clock and made a wincing smiling face and said, “They’re a little early.” And then she punched Sarah in the face. “But better early than late, right, boss?” And she punched her again, in the chest this time, so hard and so fast that Sarah couldn’t react, couldn’t think, could only fly backward, crashing through the glass wall of her office and into the cubicle right outside it — Wendy’s fucking cubicle — and then things went dark and she didn’t get up.

20

“We will give you a mechanical arm, Sarah,” Mr. Niles told her just before the men cut off her real arm.

“A mechanical arm so perfect,” he said, “that not even your own mother will know which arm is the real arm and which is the mechanical arm.”

He said, Not even your own mother, even though they both knew that her mother was dead, that she was killed by the very men whom Sarah had sworn to hunt down, with the help of Mr. Niles, and with the assistance of this mechanical arm. He said, Not even your own mother, but Sarah liked to think he meant, Not even the person closest to you, not even the person who might know you better than you know yourself, not even the person who reared you from infancy and has since gazed unflinchingly into the darkest depths of your soul and who, nonetheless, continues to love and admire and watch over you, not even this person will know which arm is the mechanical arm.

Of course, before he said any of this, before they prepped her for surgery, before she even knew about a potential for prepping for surgery, he sat her down in his office and passed a file folder across his desk. On the folder was a picture of her mother, and inside the folder a detailed account of what had happened to her after she was taken, which included more photos, confusing photos, disturbing photos, disturbing because they were so confusing.

Her mother with an AK-47. Her mother bent over what looked like a dirty bomb, her face turned to the camera, her eyes wide and full of mirth. Her mother in full camo, lined up with a group of similarly aged men and women also outfitted in camouflage, holding what looked like grenades over their heads, grenades as if they were flutes of champagne. Her mother in an apron leaned over a stockpot at an old white stove, the kind Sarah always pictured when imagining a life out in the country with a mom and a dad and land. Her mother looking in that photo more motherly than Sarah had ever remembered her looking, and to the right of her, a table of bearded men and limp-haired women, one looking at the camera, the others looking at a map or a roll of papers in front of them.

“A terrorist cell of anarchists working out of Damascus took your mother. They thought your mother had been imbued with gifts,” Mr. Niles said as she flipped through the file folder, “gifted with special abilities, powers, you might say, and maybe she had been, and maybe not, that we cannot say, but that’s why they took her.” He sighed. “Why they brainwashed her, why they trained her.”

Then he sat back in his chair and let a silence settle into his office as Sarah turned slowly, carefully through all of the pages in the file folder, and not until she looked up at him did he lean forward again and say, “I’d like to offer you the services of this office. I’d like to offer you a deal.”

21

The problem with having a mechanical arm nearly impervious and super fast and super strong, comprised of hyperadvanced nanorobot technology and looking no different than her regular arm, was that people always assumed just because Sarah had the ability to crush metal with her armored grip that, when faced with a situation not to her liking, her first reaction would be to crush something with her mechanical fist.

Or if crushing weren’t possible, smashing.

The elevator control panel, for instance. People seemed to always be waiting for that moment when, impatient with the often glitchy elevator, she would throw her fist into the elevator control panel, or the glass wall of her office, or through one of the interns.

A number of people seemed to be waiting for her to throw her fist through an intern.

Jacob, perhaps.

Not many people in the office would have blamed her for throwing her fist through intern Jacob.

All of which was only made more frustrating and disappointing when you woke up one day to find all that potential squandered by time and inaction and an inability to risk losing what you loved to gain something more.

In other words: When Sarah woke up, she woke up and her arm was gone.

Her mechanical arm, that is, and not gone, not entirely gone, just no longer attached to her. It had been a day full of strange uncertainties, but if anything was for absolute certain, it was that her mechanical arm was no longer attached to her. Instead, it was on a metal gurney not more than five feet in front of her.

Sarah was tied up in a chair and her other arm burned with not a small amount of burning pain, and when she finally got the chance to look at her other arm, which wouldn’t be until they pulled her out of that chair and carried her to where the other hostages were being kept, she would see the three-inch gash, down to what she’d think might be bone, and would think happily to herself, They couldn’t tell which was which, either.

Would think, Mr. Niles will be so pleased.

But at the moment she wasn’t thinking of her normal arm and hardly noticed the burning pain and was only barely aware of the idea of thinking of Mr. Niles or the Regional Office or what was going to happen to her next.

All she could think of was what was right in front of her. How she had wasted what was right in front of her and how all she could do now was simply sit and stare at it and let it all continue to go to waste.

Hell no.

She took a deep breath and jumped or did whatever that thing was when you were tied tight in an office chair to try to scooch it across the floor.

The back legs tilted but not by much and she didn’t feel the front legs do anything at all.

Leverage. She had the wrong kind of leverage.

If she had her arm, boy, these ropes and this chair and this office wall and even the concrete floor below her, boy, they wouldn’t stand a chance, and then the men outside, however many of them, the men scattered throughout the whole Regional Office, they’d get what was coming to them, too.

The real problem with having a mechanical arm that was etc., etc., ad infinitum, was that she never did: throw her metal fist through Jacob, the elevator panel, the glass wall of her office. It was her job, she thought, not just her job but her position, her responsibility, her role in the Regional Office, not to throw her fist around willy-nilly, mechanical or not, though now she understood that she had misunderstood her role in the organization, her value to Mr. Niles, and that she had held herself in check, had pulled everything back, had stilled herself — not just her mechanical arm but her regular arm, too, and not just that but everything — had stilled herself to the point of stillness by mistake and for the wrong reasons, and now the problem was she was going to be killed, was going to die at the office, not ever once having fully let herself go.

22

When Sarah woke up from the operation, she woke up standing in the middle of a wrecked lab and operating room, fairly unconcerned about her arm, about either of her arms.

She was breathing hard. Her chest heaved. Her hands were clenched into fists. A red light was pulsing and a small series of sparks lit up the heart-rate machine to her left and then the machine collapsed into a heap.

For a few seconds, Sarah didn’t know where she was, what had happened, how she had gotten there.

Faintly, Sarah remembered lying down on the operating table. She remembered a mask being placed over her mouth and nose. She remembered counting down from one hundred. She remembered becoming stuck on ninety-three. And that was all she remembered.

A heap of something in the corner of the operating room moaned and shifted.

The doctor. A heap of the doctor in the corner of the operating room moaned and shifted.

Then she heard Mr. Niles speaking to her, but his voice crunched and crackled, and it was too loud, everything was too loud, and she stuck her fingers into her ears, but carefully, she remembered, because one of the fingers might have been mechanical. She remembered that, she was beginning to remember that.

She looked around the operating room for Mr. Niles, but he wasn’t there, and then she realized he was speaking to her over an intercom.

“What?” she said. “What’s going on?” she said.

“We’re opening the door, Sarah,” Mr. Niles said. “It’s okay. Everything’s going to be okay. We’re opening the door. Nothing’s going to happen. Try not to hit anything or anyone.”

Someone else in the intercom room with Mr. Niles said, just loud enough for the microphone to pick up, “Anyone else, you mean.”

“What?” Sarah asked.

“Just rest your arm, okay? Just rest everything.” Mr. Niles paused. “I’m coming inside now.”

A hiss escaped the door and she realized she hadn’t known she’d been locked inside, that the doctor had been locked inside with her. The door pushed open and there was Mr. Niles. She had expected him to be dressed in scrubs or in a hazmat suit, or, judging by the state of the room, full body armor, but he was wearing his normal office clothes, minus the jacket, his sleeves rolled up, his tie pulled loose.

He smiled. “Well. That was unexpected.”

Two paramedics stepped cautiously into the room behind him and then crept over to the doctor heaped into the corner.

He stepped closer to her, closer than she felt comfortable with, considering. Considering what she must have done coming out of the operation, considering her own inability to remember any of it, considering the doctor, whose femur had been pulverized, according to the muted chatter she could hear from the paramedics.

Mr. Niles studied her, studied not just her arms, which would have been expected, but looked closely into her eyes, stepped around her in a slow circle. The paramedics lifted the doctor onto a stretcher. Mr. Niles came back around to look her in the face.

“Fantastic,” he said.

“Fantastic?”

“I’d certainly call this a success,” Mr. Niles said.

“A success?”

“You’re alive. I’m alive.” He looked around the room. “This is an easy cleanup, frankly. You should see what some of the other girls have done, the Operatives.” He took a deep breath and let it out and placed his hand on her shoulder, her normal shoulder. Then he smiled at her again and placed his hand on her other shoulder and shook his head and said, “Remarkable.” He took her by her hands and lifted them up and put her palms flat against his palms and her whole body shuddered, and she couldn’t tell if she was afraid and shuddering or thrilled and shuddering, but her breath caught in her throat when he intertwined her fingers with his.

Then the moment passed and he let her hands go and he took her by the arm — her normal arm — and started walking her out of the ruined lab.

“Yes,” he said, “yes, very much a success.” Then he said, “I want you to remember this, though.” He stopped and turned her to look at the wreckage. “Take a good look around you and remember this very clearly. Maybe back when you were just a normal girl, back when you were Sarah O’Hara, girl with two normal arms, this kind of outburst would have been okay. Uncivilized, of course, but otherwise harmless.” He swept his arm across the damage she had done. “But now. We must demonstrate a modicum of self-restraint, mustn’t we?”

She nodded. She opened her mouth to apologize, but he stopped her from saying she was sorry, that she didn’t know what she was doing, that she wasn’t in control of any of it.

“You’ll learn,” he said, shaking his head. “Soon enough, you’ll figure it out.”

23

Sarah wasn’t going to give up.

That was what they wanted, of course. For her to give up.

Or, rather, what they wanted was for her to be captured and neutralized and, apparently, they wanted to take away her mechanical arm, all of which they — whoever They were — had achieved without much, or any, difficulty, and so her giving up might have been, in Their minds, a rather moot point.

In anyone’s mind, a moot point, actually, including hers. Especially hers.

Not giving up meant she was going to do what, specifically?

Scooch the chair inch by inch the five or so feet to the metal table where her mechanical arm now lay lifeless and possibly ruined? Fine, sure, okay, and then what was she planning to do?

Her arm. The skin — her skin — had been stripped from it in uneven patches. The circuitry showed through, sinewy and blood-smeared, and the joints and the skeleton made of steel, or rather, made of an alloy that was better than steel, unbreakable and nearly impervious.

So what if she could get to it? She didn’t even know if it still worked, and even if it did, who the hell was going to reattach it?

Her?

Tied tight in this chair and not a doctor or a surgeon or a robotics engineer or whatever the hell she would have to be to reattach a mechanical arm, to herself?

She jump-scooched her chair another inch closer. Her forehead and her neck began to sweat. She jump-scooched another inch, maybe even two inches, and then the pain in her regular arm and the pain where they had pulled off her mechanical arm and the pain in her face and skull from where Wendy — that fucking bitch Wendy — had sucker punched her were all homing in on her, waking up to her, but she didn’t care.

She jump-scooched.

She jump-scooched.

She jump-scooched.

Her foot, if her legs hadn’t been tied down to this chair, her ankles hadn’t been strapped to the legs, her foot could have touched the table now if she extended her leg all the way.

And now her ankle, she could have wrapped her ankle around the wheeled leg of the table and drawn it to her.

And now her shin, she could have touched her shin to the leg, and her leg, she could have kicked the table over by now, or better yet, she could have thrown her foot onto the tabletop itself and brought the whole thing crashing down to her if she wanted, if she’d been able.

Jump-scooch. Jump-scooch. Her knee tipped against the closest leg, shifted the table a hair. She could smell it now, her arm, the metal and the blood of her arm swirling together in a perfect storm of copper penny down her nose and into her throat.

She breathed in huffing gusts through her nose and her wide-open mouth. She had drenched herself in so much sweat that the dried blood from Wendy’s punch had loosened, mixed, had run over her lips, onto her teeth and tongue.

But she didn’t care.

She had made it, goddamn it.

And now what?

She could close her eyes. She could let her body shudder to a halt. She could faint!

She could do practically nothing she wanted!

In truth, she had harbored the notion that making it would be enough, would be trial and sacrifice enough, that the universe or her arm would recognize her effort, would reward her for it somehow — That’s it, Sarah, you’ve done enough, you’ve done more than enough, let us take it from here — so she sat there huffing and sweating and wincing and concentrating, willing the arm to do some damn thing, waiting for the universe to right itself back in her favor, but nothing.

Not one damn thing.

She closed her eyes. She slumped her head — the rest of her, too, but the ropes wouldn’t slump with her — and she would have sobbed, would have started heaving and crying, but then the door opened, and two men came inside, and she pulled her shit together.

24

Mr. Niles and the doctor didn’t show her the arm they’d cut off after the operation.

Sarah wasn’t sure when or how she’d devised the notion that they would have, as if her now-detached arm were nothing more substantial than a pulled tooth, but she found herself asking about it, after the incident, after crushing the doctor’s leg, wrecking his lab and the operating room, after Mr. Niles led her quietly to her room, where she could heal and recover and come to some sort of grips with everything.

“Can I see it?” she asked when Mr. Niles, just before leaving, asked if there was anything else she needed.

“It?” he said, although, even then, even that early in their friendship, she could read him well enough to know he understood her question just fine.

“My arm,” she said. “The other one,” she said.

She expected him to cough or lick his lips or fiddle with his tie or look to the left or the right, expected him to employ any number of stalling techniques that would give him time to figure out how to answer this delicate and weird and horrifying — even Sarah understood it was weird and horrifying — request, but he didn’t deliberate. He didn’t hem or haw. He said, “No, of course not.” And then he nodded once and said, “Let me know if there’s anything else,” and then he was gone and she was alone with an arm that wasn’t hers, that wasn’t even human.

When it hung there at her side, her arm felt surprisingly just like any other arm. It didn’t feel heavy or deadened. Her shoulder, where the arm had been attached, felt numb, but only for the first hour or so after the operation.

Her room was bare. She had expected a dorm room or a hotel room of some kind, with a kitchenette and a living suite, but it was gray and quiet and, but for a twin bed attached to the wall and a sink and a closet for her clothes, empty. The mirror over the sink was small, square, and only just large enough for her to see her face, her hair, her shoulders, the very tops of her breasts if she were naked, and nothing else, but she found herself staring at the mirror every morning and every night for hours on end.

She stared at her shoulders and the tops of her arms, at her biceps, or what she could see of them if she let her arms hang at her sides, or what she could make of them — or the one, at first, her real bicep, which was the only one she could lift and squeeze into shape. A tiny white line of a scar wrapped itself around her shoulder where they’d attached the mechanical arm, and another identical scar wrapped around her other shoulder, and the two arms looked so much alike that there were days when she could convince herself that she couldn’t tell, either, which was which.

That first week and most of the second week, she couldn’t move it at all, not by thinking, not by trying. What had happened in the operating room, the way she had torn it apart, must have been a fluke, Mr. Niles told her. “Muscle memory, or a knee-jerk reaction,” he told her. “Like a chicken running around with its head cut off,” he told her. Which didn’t make her feel better, nor did it make any sense to her.

“It’s a process,” the doctor, crutched and timid in her presence, told her. “The internal operating system is still working out the best way to communicate with your own neurological system. And then your muscles and your synapses all have to be retrained. But it will work itself out. Leave it to its business and it will work itself out.”

But she couldn’t just leave it to its business. It was her arm, damn it. She couldn’t not try. She tried the first moment Mr. Niles left her alone, even though he’d told her not to, not for a couple of days at least. She walked into her room and closed the door with her normal arm and then turned around and stared at the closed door in front of her and willed her mechanical arm to lift. She tensed muscles. She closed her eyes and imagined a reality. A reality that involved her mechanical arm lifting full of grace and fluidity to open the door. She pretended the arm wasn’t even there, or was nothing special, that the last thing she wanted or needed was for the arm to make some movement, operate some simple machine. She tried to trick herself into using it. She let herself fall forward, tried to sneak up on the arm, jolt it into the action of catching her as she fell. She tried this sort of thing for what must have been hours, but none of it worked, and she was tired and sore and ready for bed. She struggled one-handed with her clothes and her shoes. Everything about her hurt and wanted to sleep. She sat down at the edge of the bed, winded and unhappy, only to remember she hadn’t turned off the light. She debated lying back on the bed and covering her eyes with her normal arm and sleeping with the light on but she hated sleeping with the light on. She sighed and leaned forward to give herself the momentum to stand back up, but leaning forward, something else happened: Her mechanical arm swung down of its own volition and grabbed her shoe, and before she knew it, her arm had thrown the shoe, hard, so very hard, at the light fixture over her head, hard enough to smash the fixture and the bulb and to stick her shoe firmly into the ceiling.

And after that, all she could do was stare at it, even in the dark, stare at that arm and wonder what, if anything, it might do next.

25

Their faces were masked. She could tell by the way they moved, by the way they walked and swung their arms and held their chests forward, she could tell by the look of them, they’d been trained by someone who had once worked for the Regional Office.

They stopped when they saw her, saw how close she was to the gurney, to her arm, and they looked at each other and then one of the men shrugged and the other shrugged back and then he glanced briefly down at the arm on the table, as if to make sure it was still there, that it hadn’t left, hadn’t sprouted legs and walked away on its own.

She didn’t say, Where am I?

She didn’t say, Who are you?

Didn’t say, What have you done with Mr. Niles?

She didn’t say anything except for with her eyes, which said, quite clearly and pointedly, I am going to kill you, to the man who’d looked down at her mechanical arm, but he didn’t flinch or take on a concerned look or falter in his step or step backward in fear as she had hoped he might. Instead, he smiled at her and then looked at the other man and nodded at him and they laughed as if they’d just shared a joke, and she wondered if they were talking to each other, if they’d been talking all along but in a secret way, in a way that she couldn’t hear. Telepathically, maybe.

The two men untied her and moved to lift her out of the chair. They weren’t rough with her, and the one trying to pick her up by the armpit that wasn’t an armpit anymore because it was a stump shied away a little bit at first, uncertain where to lift from. The other one had forgotten his gloves and was barehanded. He had soft, gentle hands. They concerted their efforts and lifted her up, and she saw the gash on her other arm, and thought, They didn’t know! and she ignored the burning, ignored the sight of her own bone, and she thought of Mr. Niles, and she did not panic.

She didn’t panic at all.

She made a silent vow to Mr. Niles that she would not panic, that she would find some way out of this mess, a mess she imagined was of her own devising, and that she would find him, find him at least to apologize to him, and in her mind, she clenched her fist. She imagined herself standing in front of everyone who might stand in her way, and in her mind, she clenched her mechanical fist, ready to wreak havoc on all of the enemies of Mr. Niles and the Regional Office. As the two men walked her past the table where her mechanical arm lay useless and lifeless, and just before they yanked her out of the room, she looked at it and imagined her mechanical fist tightly clenched and full of its unimaginable power.

And that’s when she saw the fingers twitch and jerk and then swiftly close, her mechanical hand, swiftly close into a powerful fist, and she felt a gasp rising in her throat, but then they hit her in the back of the head with something heavy and blocky, and everything went blurry, and they hit her again, and things went black.

26

Once in a while, Sarah would get a call from Mr. Niles. He would bring her into his office. He would sit her down in the chair across from his desk. He would sigh. He would lean forward and smile and ask about her, ask about her arm, about the apartment he’d found for her, ask about her aunt, who he knew lived in Queens now and was very important to Sarah.

He did this every time, and every time, this ritual made her feel anxious. Or not anxious, but antsy.

She appreciated his attention but because she was barely twenty and had a mechanical arm and was desperately seeking vengeance, she really just wanted him to get to the point, which she knew would come only after she’d answered his questions, refused his offer for water and then for coffee, assured him that she was doing fine, thank you, and that she was ready, she was ready to see whatever he’d called her in to show her.

Namely, she was ready for the file on his desk, the name inside that file, the photograph, the last known whereabouts.

“We found another one,” he would say. He would start to slide the folder to her. “I won’t bore you with the details of how we found him,” he would say. But then he would. He would bore her with the details. He told her how these men and women had changed their faces through major surgeries, had hidden themselves away in the farther reaches of Nepal, had quietly joined religious cults in western Colorado, had faked their own deaths in airplane tragedies, train derailments, house fires, suicides.

And she would wait, growing ever more impatient for him to finish and to give her the damn file, which he finally would after one last, “Are you sure you want this, want to continue this work?”

At which point she knew she was allowed to simply take the file, that she was almost expected to do so, that for whatever reason Mr. Niles preferred not to give her these things, preferred that they be taken from him almost but not quite against his will.

Then she would sit back in her chair and open the folder and look at the photograph, study it, study the face, study the other photos that might be in the file, and then she would read from cover to cover and then from cover to cover again. And then, having lost track of all time, she would look back up for Mr. Niles, who would have left his own office, left her to it so she could study the file alone, and find the room almost dark, the sun nearly set, and on the desk in front of her, a ham and cheese sandwich and a diet orange Fanta, which she would take — the sandwich in a few bites, the Fanta in two or three swallows — before she returned to the file, committing it to memory, all of it to memory.

What she didn’t expect was how good she would be at tracking down and killing the men and women who had abducted and, ultimately, murdered her mother.

Although, really, if she was being honest with herself, she had proved to be good at so many other things that, in hindsight, she wasn’t entirely surprised. Hunting down targets and eliminating them in secret simply happened to be just one more thing she had taken to, no different, really, than nanophysiology, or artificial subconscious dichotomy, which was what she had been studying in college before she dropped out in pursuit of the truth about her mother.

Not to mention that the Regional Office itself had done most of the heavy lifting. Less seek-out-and-destroy and more just destroy on her part.

Then one day she arrived in Mr. Niles’s office expecting to pick up another file, go after another man or woman responsible for her mother’s death, only to find Mr. Niles standing behind his desk empty-handed.

“That was the last one,” he told her. He held his hands up, spread his fingers wide, and then clapped them together and smiled. “There’s not one of them left.”

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“I mean, you should be proud of yourself. You took care of every last one of them.”

She didn’t like this. “You should have told me,” she said.

“I just did,” he said, still smiling.

“Before. You should have told me before. I thought there would be more. There aren’t more?”

“There was,” he said. “There was one more, but there was an accident.”

“An accident?”

“He got wind of our man following his trail, tried to run, stole a car, wasn’t the best driver.” He picked up a small envelope full of photographs. A car wreck. An oil-slick road. Burned wreckage.

“We checked it out,” Mr. Niles said before she could say anything. “It’s real. He’s dead.” He paused and leaned heavily against his desk. “And he was the last one.”

Sarah held on to the photos and flipped through them but had stopped looking at them.

“And now what?” she asked.

Mr. Niles sat in his chair and shrugged and looked up at her and said, “Now you have your whole life, your whole life in front of you. Whatever you want.” He looked down at the paperwork on his desk, began reading through memos. “You could go back to school, I don’t know. The apartment is yours as long as you like it.” He looked up at her again. “Don’t feel in a rush to leave, in other words.” Then he turned back to his work.

Sarah, having avenged her mother’s kidnapping and murder at the hands of an anarchist splinter group, and not sure what else to do, and a little stunned, turned to leave his office.

“Oh, Sarah?” he said before she got to his door. She turned back to him, expectant, though she couldn’t have said what she was expecting. To be offered a position, maybe. To be told she had proven herself the equal of any one of the Operatives. To be told how far she had surpassed anyone’s small expectations of her and her mechanical arm. And later, she would learn from Mr. Niles himself that he had wanted to offer just that — a position as an Operative, his unfettered praise — but that Oyemi had very clearly said, “No, not Sarah. Operatives are Operatives, Oracles are Oracles, and everyone else is everyone else.” He had cajoled, he had begged, and finally he had threatened to leave the Regional Office altogether, and had only been brought back from the brink — why, she would wonder, would he care so much about someone he knew so little about? — by Oyemi’s promise that Sarah would come back, that the Oracles had made their prediction, and that he wouldn’t lose her. But Sarah wouldn’t know any of this for some few years yet, and so when she turned expectantly and he said, “I’m going to need those photos back, please,” and shook his head, and said, “Record keeping, filing. You know how it is,” and she handed the photos back to him, a troubling feeling of anger and disappointment welled up inside her.

“Don’t be a stranger,” he said then, as he went back to the work on his desk.

And she left, without so much as saying good-bye, and she stayed away for two days, until she couldn’t stay away any longer. On the third day, she stormed back into the travel agency and down the elevator. She shoved her way into Mr. Niles’s office, ready to yell, ready to rant, ready to throw her anger and frustration and confusion behind her mechanical fist and maybe tear his office apart, and maybe Mr. Niles himself apart, too, except that when he looked up from the papers on his desk, he looked so happy to see her, and said so casually, as if she hadn’t left in the first place, “Oh, good, I was just thinking about you,” that she forgot all about how angry she had been.

He handed her a file folder and said, “Take a look at that, tell me what you think. Serious threat? Think Jasmine could pull it off herself, or do we need a team?”

She took the folder and sat in the chair across from his desk and read the report. Together they argued out a plan of attack, the logistics, the fail-safes, and an hour later, Mr. Niles stood up, stretched, said, “Nice work, Sarah.” Said, “I’ll be in my office if you need anything,” and then he patted her gently on the shoulder and he left, and it wasn’t until then that she noticed the nameplate on the desk, and then outside the office, the newly stenciled name next to the door — both of which read SARAH O’HARA — and she had been there, for the Regional Office, for Mr. Niles, ever since.

~ ~ ~

From The Regional Office Is Under Attack:

Tracking the Rise and Fall of an American Institution

When looking through the literature describing the process by which Oyemi and Mr. Niles gathered together not only their team of mystically inclined superwomen but also the famed and dreaded Oracles, who at once directed the movements and growth of the Regional Office and quite possibly predicted its downfall, one finds little more than stark conjecture and bland assumptions. In other words: One is faced with a wasteland of crackpot theories penned by junior research assistants. Still, the Oracles proved pivotal in the rise and fall of the Regional Office, and no serious study of Oyemi and Mr. Niles and their awesome accomplishments would be complete without some critical consideration of the acquisition of the Oracles.

Evidence of this process, however, is not easily found.

Clearly, dangers lurk in the shadows and at the edges for scholars who find themselves stretching beyond tangible and reproducible pieces of evidence, reconstructing conversations, the physical movements of people long gone, whenever they presume to obtain an understanding of the thoughts of great and horrible figures from history. Scholarship is scholarship. Art is art. To shoehorn one into the other is to invite confusion and bedevilment, and yet, there are times when one must push forward, must offer a narrative if only because there cannot be a void.

Nature abhors a void.

And so: Oyemi’s great-uncle died, money was passed down, and an office in Queens was illegally sublet. Then for six weeks, Oyemi and Mr. Niles sought out their first Oracle.

By whatever means — the reading of auras, probing the young woman’s mind, trying to see into her future based on the pattern of freckles on her face, etc., etc. — Oyemi peered at, judged, and found wanting what must have been over five hundred young women in the first six weeks she and Mr. Niles hunted for their Oracle.

An advertisement was not placed, flyers were not posted all over the city, girls did not line up outside the offices of Oyemi and Mr. Niles, though what a lovely image, the line of them circling the block as if each girl were hoping to be cast in some strange and dark Off-Off-Broadway show, or to care for the Banks children before Mary Poppins swooped in and blew them all away.

But no. They walked the city together, Mr. Niles and Oyemi, as Oyemi cast her new mystical glance down dark alleyways, in brightly lit lobbies, at girls on the subway or walking through the Sheep Meadow, or in a coffee shop or in a library or hailing a cab or anywhere at all, really.

Everywhere, in fact. She looked everywhere.

By the end of each day, Oyemi had exhausted herself so completely that Mr. Niles had to carry her home — to conserve the money she had inherited, they had decided to live in the same office they’d rented — where she would fall asleep on the sagging, smoke-stained love seat they had found on the street the day they had moved in. She fell into a heavy sleep no later than six o’clock each evening, out of which she could not wrench herself until nearly ten the next morning.

She lost weight. The dark, unearthly sheen of her skin turned a sickly, lackluster pale green. At night, while she slept, her nose bled, so that she would wake with a face crusted over by her own blood and snot. Her eyes watered and her ears itched and she broke out in hives once or twice a day, and Mr. Niles told her to stop, begged her to stop, worried that she was draining herself looking for whatever or whoever it was she was looking for. But Oyemi would not quit, until finally Mr. Niles told her, “One more time, I will go with you one more time and then I’m done, tomorrow is the last time, and after that, I’m gone, and you can come, too, and we can do some other thing with the money and power, or not, I don’t care about any of it, I care about you, but no matter what, this is the last time, because I’m not going to bear witness, not to this, not to the end of you.”

The next day, they found Nell.

She was walking out of a Duane Reade.

The procedure, up until that point, had been for Oyemi and Mr. Niles to walk around various neighborhoods and wait for Oyemi to “get a feeling,” and then Mr. Niles would approach the woman attached to this feeling and ask her questions — they had written a fake survey on the increased cost of living — with the idea being that Oyemi could then examine the woman unnoticed (despite how un-unnoticeable Oyemi had become), as all of the young woman’s attention, all her psychological and emotional defenses, would be trained on Mr. Niles. Oyemi, then, could sneak up behind the mark and close her eyes and proceed however it was she proceeded and then a minute or so later, open her eyes and shake her head and they would move on.

It is safe to assume that Mr. Niles understood little of what was going on and that, to him, the entire procedure was slipshod and inefficient and doomed to failure. So when Oyemi spied Nell stepping out of the store and tapped Mr. Niles on the shoulder and told him, “Her, quick, her,” he failed to notice the urgency in her voice, the heat from her hand when she tapped him.

Mr. Niles walked over to the young woman, smiled his charming, useful smile, and asked her if she would mind answering a few questions for his survey. The young woman barely had time to answer “Yes” or “No, thanks,” before Oyemi clubbed her on the head from behind, catching her just as she fell.

“Don’t just stand there,” Oyemi said. “Grab her, quick. We need to get her to the office.”

They brought the woman back to their building. Oyemi carried her into her office and laid her on the floor, still unconscious. Mr. Niles searched her purse, found a wallet, and in the wallet found a handful of receipts; a photograph of a little girl, which he tucked into his pocket; and a driver’s license, which was how he discovered her name was Nell. He also discovered she was twenty-four years old (two years older than himself at the time) and lived on East Tenth.

It’s unclear what Oyemi had done to the girl when she hit Nell over the head, how hard she’d hit her or with what. Regardless, Nell didn’t wake for almost three hours, during which time Mr. Niles and Oyemi sat in the front room of their office, Oyemi quietly and expectantly on the couch, and Mr. Niles, unsure what to do or where to sit, pacing around the room.

It is safe to say he became increasingly nervous.

Then Oyemi perked up and looked at the closed office door and said, “She’s awake. Finally.” Then she rushed into the room, closed and locked the door behind her, and didn’t come out.

Let us conjecture that, at this time, Mr. Niles decided to go, to leave, to go where? Anywhere, really, and to seriously consider whether he could ever come back.

When Mr. Niles first met Oyemi, the two of them had been children. Her name hadn’t been Oyemi and his name hadn’t been Mr. Niles; those were names they adopted to play a game, a prescient game in which they took over the world, or, rather, she took over the world. Oyemi, supreme ruler of the planet Earth, and her butler, Mr. Niles. Well, her butler at first, and then her superpowered butler, and then not a butler at all but her right-hand man, unless she was mad at him for any of a number of reasons that children become mad at each other, and then he was her butler again.

Mr. Niles didn’t know what a butler was, so Oyemi pointed him to Alfred, from Batman, as a reference and that was who he pretended to be. Mostly, though, Oyemi had an odd sense of humor and thought the idea of a supreme ruler of the planet with a butler named Mr. Niles was funny, and while Mr. Niles didn’t always quite understand, he played along anyway.

Then and until his death, he played along anyway.

But knocking a woman unconscious, kidnapping her, that was where the line was drawn, obviously. This is what he must have thought to himself as he walked out of the office, down three flights of stairs, onto the street. What he must have thought to himself as he looked left and right, looked for signs of having been followed — even then, Mr. Niles would have been, to some degree, paranoid — looked for some piece of this world that still looked familiar as he operated under a new understanding of Oyemi, of this project he had signed up for, of the life forward he was staring at, and at his not unreasonable decision to leave it behind. But then something — the sound of Oyemi crying out, perhaps, a deep-welled, anxious, mournful sound in her voice, maybe, or a crash of glass and brick, or the welling up of some deep-seated and unfaded and urgent love he had nearly forgotten — called him back.

Often, it is at this point in the story of the Regional Office that people ask the question: Was Mr. Niles in love with Oyemi?

No one knows the definitive answer to this question. Mr. Niles left no diary or journal, no hoard of love letters he had received from Oyemi, nor letters written but never sent on his own part. Might he once have loved Oyemi, might he once have adored her, might she once have been his first true love, might he have been love-struck in the third grade, when they first met? Certainly any of this is possible, and it is possible he continued to love her, to be in love with her, even after she suffered the accident that should have killed her but didn’t.

The far more interesting question, however, and the question no one can answer but for oneself, is this: Is love enough? Was love enough to justify or explain what happened next and then after that and then after that and then again until the end?

Mr. Niles turned. He rushed back upstairs. By the time he burst back through the office doors, everything had finished, and Oyemi’s office door was open, and standing in the doorway was the girl, not Oyemi.

To those who ask, Where is your evidence? Your proof that Mr. Niles harbored doubts, that Mr. Niles left at all, that any of this happened the way you say it happened?

We say: How else could it have happened? Mr. Niles waiting patiently in the front office while Oyemi performed her administrations on the young woman, Nell? Mr. Niles with a newspaper or a magazine, or looking over the business strategic planning report for the Regional Office while whatever horrifying sounds might have been emitted by either Oyemi or the girl, or both of them, filled the small office? Mr. Niles brewing a pot of coffee because maybe it would be a long night ahead?

The authors of this paper leave it up to the reader to decide which scenario is most reasonable.

The girl looked fine, in any case, which surprised Mr. Niles. It is not difficult to imagine what he might have expected outside of fine. Ever since the accident that should have killed Oyemi but instead imbued her with mystical powers, a lot of things had been less and less right with Oyemi. The way she moved. Books could be penned simply about the way Oyemi walked after the accident, the fluid look of her as she stood up from a couch. The way she twitched. Her odd manner of speaking, the faraway look in her eyes, her smile, which grew ever more toothy. She flared her nostrils in the days after her accident, wider and wider. An affinity for raw meats, the nosebleeds, an ability to predict things five minutes into the future. It is not unreasonable, then, to assume that what he expected to find were the remains of the girl, her skin-covering perhaps, crumpled in the corner of Oyemi’s office, the rest of her, the whole of her, sucked out of her skin by Oyemi, who would, after having feasted on the girl’s immortal soul and whatnot, reemerge as a creature vibrant and shiny-new. At the very least, he must have expected the girl to be frightened or confused or beaten up, that the whites of her eyes would not be white anymore. Yet she looked so untroubled, so at ease, that it took a moment for Mr. Niles to see the one thing that had changed about her, which was her hair, which had been shoulder-length and a dull brown color, and now was entirely gone.

Not shaved, not as if it had been shaved off, but as if it had never been there to begin with.

Mr. Niles said something to her like, “Is everything all right?” but she didn’t say anything back. She smiled serenely, not at him but through him, and then made her way to the window, where she stared out at the traffic and the other windows across the street from them.

Oyemi, stumbling out of the office behind Nell, looked the way Niles had maybe expected Nell to look. Scooped out. Pale, sweaty, exhausted, red-eyed. A smell wafted off her that made Mr. Niles self-conscious and uncomfortable. Oyemi struggled to get to a chair and then sat heavily down in it, and then she sighed, and then she smiled.

“Whatever you do, don’t call her by her name,” she said. “Her former name.”

She closed her eyes and let her heavy head fall heavily into her shaking hands.

“She’s in. She’s agreed to come on board, to be part of our plans,” she said.

With great effort, Oyemi pulled her head back up to look at the girl or maybe to look past her. Maybe she was looking at what Nell represented, the future that was even then being laid out before her because of this girl, or maybe she was looking at the same thing the girl was looking at, which seemed to be nothing and everything, and then she let out a long, ragged breath.

“She’s the first,” Oyemi said. “The first Oracle.”

And then she collapsed.