The Regional Office Is Under Attack!

27

Something — electricity, blue magicks? — crackled out of the director’s hand, the one that looked like it was covered by another hand, crackled in a way that reached out for Rose, for her face, for her neck. Like, there was this crackling fucking energy shooting out of the glove or hand or whatever and usually when you saw that shit in a movie or on a TV show, you knew, whoa, that crackling blue thing must be hot with some real fucking power, and sure there was some power there, she could feel it, but that wasn’t the whole story with that crackling blue energy, she could tell.

That crackling blue energy was a living thing.

It had a hunger she could sense. It had its own goddamn desires. To touch her face, to wrap itself around her pretty neck. Like, the energy was whispering shit into her ear, trying to bring her closer so it could caress her cheek, tickle the sensitive, ticklish parts of her.

It knew all about her.

It was seducing her.

It was mesmerizing and pretty fucking convincing, say what you will about its being the inanimate blue energy of a severed hand.

And it almost grabbed her.

But then training and her own instincts shook through, and she ducked, rolled under the director’s swinging arm, rolled out of the reach of the glove and its crackling blue wants, and was up on her feet behind the director.

Then before any more of that weird energy and its hocus-pocus let-me-nibble-your-ear shit could happen, she’d sweep the legs out from under the director, shove him forward, stand on his neck just hard enough and at just the right angle to snap it, and then leave for the rendezvous spot, and somehow, even with the delays, even with all that bullshit in the ventilation shaft and even with having to defeat spinning, twirling robots, she would find the rendezvous (and Henry) before Windsor did and fuck, why the hell not, she would grab Henry roughly by the collar of his shirt and pull him close to her face and whisper, “You guys suck at intel,” and then give him a kiss, a real kiss, Jesus, finally a real kiss.

Except that when she swept the director’s legs out from under him, he wasn’t there to be swept.

He was in the air, flipping up and over her in a long, lazy arc, graceful, like he’d just dismounted the uneven bars.

Where the fuck was the intel on this? That’s what Rose wanted to know.

The magicks in the ventilation shaft? All that shit waiting for her outside the director’s office? And now this?

“What the fuck?” she said.

And then he kicked her in the face.

28

Rose knew it was a drill, just a field exercise at Assassin Training Camp, but still, she couldn’t help but feel nervous. Nervous and sweaty. Although the sweat bit of it had less to do with her nerves and more to do with the uniform — a cotton and polyester blend that didn’t breathe for shit.

She looked down at Wendy, twenty feet below her, scouting around, seeking her out. This was going to hurt both of them, what she was about to do, drop down from her perch in that tree and land squarely on Wendy’s shoulders, but it was going to hurt Wendy a hell of a lot more. And maybe a few weeks ago, she wouldn’t have cared how much it was going to hurt Wendy, would have maybe relished the fact that it was going to hurt Wendy, but today, she felt a little bad about it.

But not bad enough not to do it.

She dropped. She knocked Wendy out cold even before Wendy knew she’d been dropped on.

Next up, Colleen.

It was Henry, she knew. Henry, watching her, watching all of this play out. He was making her nervous.

God, what a spaz.

She meant herself too, of course. She’d gladly admit that she was acting a total spaz, but Jesus. Sixteen- (almost seventeen!) year-old girls were supposed to be spazzes, weren’t they? Wasn’t that, like, some kind of God-given right?

What was Henry’s excuse? That’s what she wanted to know. What was his fucking excuse?

Sure, Henry might have been a martial arts expert, a demolitions expert, a hard-ass who pushed and pushed and pushed her and the other girls in their training and was damn good at it, too, but give him a kiss, a simple little kiss, and you totally fucked up his game.

Not that there was any kind of game, not that it wasn’t absolutely fucking clear to anyone with half a brain in her head that Henry was totally, madly, absolutely in love with the Woman in Red. But still. A girl can dream, can’t she? Not to mention, Windsor was all over that shit, especially now that Emma was off on some other mission, wasn’t set to come back until it was time to attack the Regional Office. And if nothing else, it was Rose’s responsibility, wasn’t it, to make sure Windsor didn’t fuck things up for Henry and Emma, even if that meant getting in the way of Windsor by trying to get closer to Henry and, well, Christ. Whatever.

No it didn’t make sense.

No she didn’t care.

Colleen was close. Rose could sense her. Too close for her to scramble back up the tree and get the drop on her the way she had Wendy. She stripped Wendy of her boots and heaved them high up into the trees. She was going to be pissed. Those were her favorite boots and it was cold out, but Rose couldn’t have Wendy waking up and joining Colleen and the others. It was just a field exercise, yes, but it was a competition, too, and Rose wanted to win. For a lot of reasons, she wanted to win.

Still. Those were Wendy’s favorite boots.

“I’ll come back for them,” Rose said. “I’ll climb up there and get them for you, I promise,” she said.

Then she slipped away, back into the trees.

29

Four months ago, when she first arrived at the compound, she had been expecting things to be different.

She had been expecting it to be like The Karate Kid, maybe. Where she would be taken in by a lovable if befuddled and frail old man, who would, at a crucial point, reveal himself to be neither of those — befuddled, frail — but instead a subtle but powerful fighting machine and mentor, who would ultimately provide the love and wisdom of an otherwise absent parent. She would spend weeks performing a number of mundane, idiotic, useless tasks — sweeping the already swept floor, cleaning the pristine toilet bowl, making fried-egg sandwiches, which he would then refuse to eat (“I’m allergic”) — which would reveal themselves to be mysterious but powerful kung fu poses. Sweeping the Floor, Cleaning the Toilet, Frying the Egg.

Or if not that, then like An Officer and a Gentleman, but without the gentleman bit. Her pitted against the hard-ass drill sergeant. She’d be the spitfire who constantly mouthed off and who would ultimately reveal herself to be pitted against her inner demons, not the drill sergeant at all, who would prove herself foolhardy but full of bravado, and in the process develop a bond with her fellow trainees, becoming in their eyes an example of what not to do, of how not to act, but also, in the end, by the end of boot camp or whatever this place was, becoming for them, also, an example of a hard battle fought and won with difficulty, tenacity, and through her indomitable spirit and unfathomable skill.

Hell. She would have taken The Parent Trap, even. Warring factions of girls at summer camp who were so similar in nature and looks, strengths and weaknesses, all of them hemmed in by a male-dominated world that strove to limit their power and strength, that their first instinct was to undermine the force they would have become if only they worked together, but finally they would be brought together by the threat of some other Big Bad outside of themselves — maybe something more threatening than a really bad thunderstorm, and more like a drug-dealing camp counselor or something, but whatever.

That.

She would have been happy to have experienced that upon her arrival at the compound.

What she hadn’t expected, though, and what she couldn’t quite handle, was the sense of overwhelming indifference that had been waiting for her when she arrived.

She had been the last girl recruited and no one had been expecting her and they didn’t seem to care that she was there.

But then somebody must’ve cared, somebody must’ve wanted her since they’d come to her, had broken into her mother’s house, had recruited her to the team.

The Woman in Red — her name was Emma but for a while Rose could only think of her as the Woman in Red — apologized for how long it had taken for her to pick Rose up, as if Rose had been waiting for someone to come get her at the bus station or the airport, bags in hand. She had only learned about Rose very recently, she explained. The Oracles, she said. Her weak connection to them, not to mention the physical distance and all the protective charms Oyemi had put in place, she said. All of it made the system, which was already imperfect and glitchy, practically impossible to manage. It was like driving at night through heavy fog with nothing but more heavy fog as your headlights, she told Rose.

“If you know what I mean,” the Woman in Red said.

Rose had no idea what she meant or what she was talking about, but at the time, she didn’t care. She just nodded and smiled. She knew things were about to change, her life was about to change, and she didn’t want to risk fucking that up by asking questions.

“There’s not a lot of time left,” Emma said with a sad smile. Time for what, Rose didn’t ask. “But you’ll do splendid. I just know you will.” Splendid at what, Rose again didn’t ask.

Then, in Rose’s mother’s living room, Emma introduced her to Henry, formally introduced them. “This is Henry,” she said. “Henry, this is Rose,” she said. She said all of this as if Rose and Henry had never met, hadn’t just moments ago altercated the way they had altercated, then kissed the way they had kissed.

“Henry’s in charge of training and orientation,” the Woman in Red said. “He’ll take good care of you, I know.” Then she smiled and said to Henry, “Won’t you, Henry?” She said this in the way that Rose’s mother would tell her, Best behavior, Rose, whenever they went to church, which was hardly ever, which was why she never knew how to behave at church, which was why she always failed the best-behavior test, and she wondered if Henry would do the same.

She hoped he might.

“She’s in good hands,” Henry said, and then shook his head and said, “You know what I mean.”

“Quite,” Emma said. Then she took Rose’s hand again and they whisked her off.

30

Rose saw the director’s kick coming, or Spidey-sensed it. She didn’t like to spend too much time trying to figure out what was training, what was mystical properties of herself, and anyway, did it even matter? She was moving, that was the point, moving backward even as his foot connected (with her chin instead of her nose, and another half second later, she would have back-bended clean out of the way, but whatever). She was thrown back into her own flip but not as hard as she could have been thrown, and jarred by this kick — way more than she would have expected to be by this overweight, soft-chinned desk jockey — but not so jarred she couldn’t keep her wits about her enough to turn in the air and land on her feet.

“Do you like it?” he asked, holding the hand within a hand in front of his face, looking at it as if he were a little surprised, too, at how badass the glove was turning out to be. Then he flipped his wrist at her, like he was throwing an imaginary Frisbee to her, and blue bolts shot out of the fingertips.

She jumped out of the way. Just.

“It was a gift, you know. From the woman who sent you,” he said.

So he knew, she thought. Knew who’d sent her, probably knew they were coming for him, had known for how long? Days? Weeks? The whole fucking time?

Henry and Emma were going to get a fucking earful.

“Funny she didn’t warn you about it,” he said. “Maybe she forgot I had it.” A flick of his wrist, a bolt of lightning. “Maybe she forgot about me altogether. What was it? Did one of the Oracles tell her? Remind her I was here? Is that why they’ve been so quiet? They’ve known all along and she’s been waiting? Biding her time?”

She rolled herself to his desk, not sure what she would find there to help her defeat a crazed lunatic who had been waiting for her and who had a magical, all-powerful glove made out of someone else’s hand and that gave him superpowers, but it beat sitting around dodging bolts of lightning.

“The Hand of Raines,” he said as he arced more lightning bolts at her, scorching the desk and the air around her. “Maybe you’ve heard of it. Maybe not. Top secret, you know. When Gemini finally destroyed the warlock Harold Raines, all that was left was his right hand.” He stopped and looked at the glove and then craned his neck to see if he could see Rose hiding behind his desk. “Oyemi magicked it — who knows how — turned it into a glove.” He clenched the fist and then closed his eyes and then, for a moment, for two moments, floated inches off the floor. Then he dropped and opened his eyes and nodded his head. “I was supposed to test it out with her, you know. The two of us, together. Oyemi and me. Like always.”

Rose crouched and tested the weight of the desk and then sprung up, lifting the desk up (use your legs, not your back) and flipping it log-roll style right at the director’s head. He karate-chopped it, the way you karate-chop something in a cartoon, the way that would never really work in real life, but that gloved hand just sizzled through wood, solid oak or cherry, she didn’t know, but a heavy fucker of a desk, she knew that much. The desk sliced into two pieces, fell harmlessly to the floor on either side of the director, and now she didn’t have any good cover.

Fuck.

“But, you know how it goes,” he said. “Or maybe you don’t.” He took a step toward her and then another. Unhurried. Unconcerned.

“She got so busy and then she had her Oracles and then they all moved out of the city, her and her Oracles and a few others she brought with her to her compound in the Catskills.” He stopped and shook his head and sighed. Then he looked right at Rose, looked at her as if they were at a Starbucks, catching up over a latte, looked in her eye and gave her half a smile and said, “I didn’t even know where it was for the first six months she was out there.”

None of this made any sense to Rose but she didn’t care all that much, either. All she could figure was that maybe he thought someone else had sent her, which, fine, what did she care. All that mattered was getting herself out of this, and if he wanted to go on and on about the woman who gave him this glove instead of using the glove and then writing a long, emotional blog post about it, fine with her.

For every step he took forward, she took one back, thinking that this would buy her a little time, that he wouldn’t really notice anyway. He was standing between her and the door, but if worse came to worst, she could make her own door, get out of the immediate vicinity of this loon, and open the fight up, give herself breathing room, space to work, to improvise. This office was just too cramped.

Step, step. Step, step.

“So, fine, I understand, we were both busy,” he said. “We were running the Regional Office, I get that, but”—he shook his head—“there was something else, too, I don’t know, some distance between us. You know? Not that there wasn’t. Not that we didn’t.” He paused. He sighed. “We’ve both changed, haven’t we? But this, this seemed more than just normal growing apart.” He had been walking toward her but not looking at her, had been looking at his hands or his feet, had been distracted by his own story, his own memories, but then he looked at her and noticed where he was, what he was supposed to be doing, what she had been doing. “No, no, no. Stop. Stop, just. Don’t be an idiot. Don’t think I’m an idiot.”

“A distance,” she said. “I’ve had that, like, with my best friends from school,” she said.

“Don’t patronize me,” he said, and then he charged at her.

She kicked him, aiming for his nuts because, well, desperate times, etc., but he grabbed her foot, with the blue-crackling magical fire-hand, grabbed her foot and threw her up and over and God that burned, more than she could have imagined a burning sensation burning, and she flipped ass over head, and she thought, briefly, everything now flitting through her mind so damn briefly, about kids she remembered from when she was a kid. Kids with their dads at the beach or at the one pool in her shitty hometown, whose fathers would throw them high into the air, make them do these spectacular flips and falls off knees or shoulders or chests, and how jealous she had been watching those kids fly into the air and land graceless in the water, splashing and giggling and asking for more, for again, and how she wished she had some water right below her to land gracelessly into, instead of the cold, marble floor of the director’s office, or worse yet, his waiting arms — how the hell did he move under her so damn quick? She made an adjustment, which she knew was going to hurt, was going to hurt more than just a little, but less than if she let him catch her however he wanted. She wrenched control of herself midair and aimed herself at the director’s head, her fist outstretched, one leg stretched back, the other leg knee up, her other fist cocked and at the ready at her hip, like she was Supergirl, flying off to save the day, but aimed right at the director’s head knowing full well that he would grab that fist, what else could he do, grab it with the Hand of Pains or whatever he’d called his glove, and he did and it burned — fuck it burned — but he could only grab one arm at a time, right?

No matter what else the glove could do, it couldn’t grab more than one part of her at a time.

So while he had her by her wrist, burning the shit out of it, and while the burning pain leapt up her wrist and her arm, like it was shimmying up through her veins, heading, she was sure of it, toward her head and her heart, she punched him good on the bridge of his nose with her other fist, punched him as hard as she could punch, which was pretty fucking hard, she knew, having once punched an old VW Beetle onto its side after a particularly unfun afternoon of Assassin Training Camp. A VW Beetle she had assumed was Windsor’s — because of course Windsor would drive a fucking canary-yellow classic Bug — except it wasn’t hers, it wasn’t any of the girls’ at camp, but regardless: Her punch was a mighty fucking punch.

With that mighty fucking punch, then, she knocked this guy on the bridge of his nose, came down on him like her fist was the Hammer of Thor.

The whole of him shuddered. His legs creaked. The gloved hand let go of her arm, and she fell, and he sat down hard on his ass.

Finally. Thank God. At least a punch worked, at least something.

She sagged down to the floor herself and closed her eyes a second, just a second. That crackling blue light was no joke, man. Wisps of smoke curled up off her arms and her shoulders; she could smell them. She took deep breaths. She willed her body to stitch itself back in place as best it could. She stood herself up and opened her eyes again only just in time to see the director’s gloved fist, or fisted fist, whatever, swinging right for her own face. She moved left. He clipped her ear, singed her hair, melted the earring she was wearing to her earlobe. She spun and kicked at him and maybe that punch had shuddered him enough to throw his head off play because he wasn’t soaring through the air this time and her boot connected with his gut. He oofed and flew backward across the room and smashed into the bookshelf against the far wall, and they swayed, and books fell from the shelves, and the shelves swayed some more and she was waiting, holding her breath, waiting for them to crash down on him, do her dirty work for her, or at least slow him down enough that she could do her own damn dirty work just a little easier, but the shelves settled and held and the director pulled himself back up.

And no more close-quarters hand-to-hand combat for him, no sir.

He flipped his wrist and lightning flashed.

31

Rose packed her bag — bag, not bags, despite her loud protests — and packed it quickly. No one was home, but she didn’t care — she didn’t think she cared — about saying good-bye. The Woman in Red and Henry waited for her in the kitchen. The three guys who’d ambushed her were out back smoking. With the Woman in Red in the house, everything looked impossibly dingier and grayer than ever before and all Rose wanted to do was leave.

After leaving her house, she had half-expected there to be a helicopter waiting for them but was too enthralled with the Woman in Red, with the idea of leaving behind her former self, to be disappointed that what they had waiting for them was, in fact, a rental car, an off-white Ford Taurus. She did her best to be not too disappointed again when where they whisked her off to turned out to be an abandoned office park just outside of Durham, and again when she discovered that not only were there other girls there, girls not much different from herself, but they had been here for months already, six girls, an even bunch, paired up as roommates, as training buddies, except for Rose, odd man out, who had a room all to herself. “Lucky you,” Henry said, as if he meant it.

There were two of everything in the room — two beds stuck out of opposite walls that could double as uncomfortable-looking couches, two sinks attached to the same wall on opposite sides of the door, two dressers and two closets next to those. In one of the dressers there were clothes for her, all the same black V-neck T-shirts, the same metal-gray cargo pants.

“Those are for training,” he told her. “You’ll get a uniform soon enough, and then when you’re not training, you can wear whatever you like.”

She didn’t have much else to wear. The Woman in Red hadn’t given her much time to pack. All she had with her, other than the clothes she’d been wearing when they’d come for her, was a yellow sundress — her favorite, though here, now, it seemed wildly out of place — and a pair of shorts and a T-shirt, her flip-flops, and a pair of wedge sandals.

Christ, what a spaz.

She pretended to look around the room. Henry handed her a folder.

It was strange being alone with him. She had been alone with him for an entire day, practically, and then he’d been truly a stranger, but that hadn’t felt strange at all. That had felt natural, and she wondered if he had been putting on some kind of act or if he had felt that, too. Later he would tell her, Both, and she would believe him. But now that she’d kissed him, and that he’d kissed her back, it seemed that neither of them knew what to do but to stand awkwardly in her small dorm room and talk about anything but what had happened before. He was focused on trying to make her feel special about the fact that she didn’t have a roommate and that she’d come there late, and she was focused on trying to figure out how to say something to him about that kiss, about the spur-of-the-moment quality of it, about the first-time-ever quality of it, and she was trying to figure out how to apologize for having done it but also make it clear that she wasn’t exactly sorry that it had happened and that she wouldn’t be opposed to a second, less spontaneous go-around, and how old was he anyway, and did he make it part of his business to kiss people almost immediately after jumping them and trying to strangle them to death, or was it just her, and sorry, too, about how she’d kicked him in the ribs all those times.

It was all too much, the things she wanted to say, and while she knew now the jumping and the strangling had all been part of some plan, some kind of test, it had scared the shit out of her and she felt torn between these two feelings — scared shitless by this guy and urgently attracted to him — and she felt that saying something, saying anything, might help even all of this out, but where did she start?

So. He handed her a folder and she took it and opened it and pretended to read it. Inside was a set of schedules and rules and guidelines. They were straightforward and basic but he went over them anyway, pointed out breakfast and lunch and dinner. Lights out at ten o’clock.

“Usually,” he said, “everyone’s up by five thirty for a quick five-mile run together, but…” He paused, ran his hand through his hair. “Considering how much catching up you’re going to have to do, uh, we’re going to have to skip the run. And the midmorning yoga class.” He said this as if he felt a little sorry for her, as if she were missing out on something, which, she would realize later, she was, missing out. Not on the yoga class. Not on the morning run.

Missing out on the team, on being a part of the team.

Then he said, “Well. Okay. That’s the nickel tour.” He said this as if it were time for him to leave her to herself, to organize her room, which didn’t need organizing, or gather her thoughts, which he must have known wouldn’t have been gathered any time soon. But then he didn’t leave. He stood there. She stood there. She rocked herself forward. She remembered to say, “Thanks. For the tour.”

He rocked himself back, just slightly back. “Training starts tomorrow,” he said. “You might notice people packing things away,” he said. “We’re moving into phase two and we’re shutting down this specific operation, and so we’re all a little distracted,” he said. “Don’t take it personally,” he said. “We’re really glad you’re here.” He said this, Rose knew, to make her feel better. She pretended, for his sake and for hers, that it worked.

She waited. He waited. Then he said, “About before,” and that was all she needed, it seemed, before she rushed into her own, I know, I know, I’m totally, well, not sorry, sorry isn’t, anyway, I’m just, I just wanted you, I didn’t want you to think, and she moved closer, and he moved farther back until he had the door open and had stepped out of the room, had crossed the threshold to the other side, and then he interrupted her.

“Look, Rose,” he said. “I just needed to tell you. I’m kind of in charge here. I mean, Emma and I. We’re in charge here. In charge of you and the others and your training and it’s not like we’re back in your hometown, right? Driving around checking out dead squirrels, right? It’s not like that here. So, about before, that’s not how it’s like here, is what I’m trying to tell you.”

“Oh,” Rose said, feeling less and less sorry for all those kicks. “Sure. I get it.”

“Do you understand?”

“I got it,” she said. “I just said how I got it.”

“Good.”

“Better than good,” she said. “Great. Perfect.”

“It’ll just make things easier.”

“I like easier,” she said, and then she closed the door on his face.

32

Rose hid herself away behind a fallen log, some overhanging trees. If she squinted, she could barely make out Wendy’s boots hanging from a tree branch in the distance. She listened for the sound of Colleen finding Wendy, though she knew Colleen wouldn’t make such a blatant mistake unless she was trying to trick Rose somehow. Rose had left three trails behind her. An obvious trail that Colleen would know was not the real trail but was a dummy trail with a booby trap set along some part of it, and a second, much less obvious, almost invisible trail that Colleen would assume was the real trail, but which was also a dummy trail with a booby trap set along some part of it, and a third untraceable trail, Rose was sure of it, that, just for shits and giggles, had a booby trap set along some part of it, too. The funny thing about that invisible trail was that if Colleen were to find and follow it, which she couldn’t, she would be able to follow it to a spot in the woods that was just out of view of the booby-trapped spots of the other two trails but where Rose could wait and watch for Colleen to come down one path or the other.

Rose hoped that Colleen would come down the obviously false trail, not because she didn’t think Colleen would be smart enough to know it was obviously false, but because she might outthink herself and decide the obviously fake trail was made obviously fake because it wasn’t fake at all, but also because the booby trap at the end of that trail wasn’t quite as harsh as the booby trap down the other, almost invisible fake trail she’d left, and she liked Colleen, who was maybe a bit too type A but who meant well and who had, a couple of weeks ago, tried to keep Rose from failing out of superpowered-assassin school.

After nearly a month, the training had not been going well. The martial arts instructor — not, to her disappointment, Henry — spent hour after hour sweeping her feet out from under her and throwing her over his shoulder and trying to explain to her poses and moves and countermoves that she didn’t understand at all and whose names she couldn’t remember. Lost Monkey, Wooden Monkey, the Broken Faucet. None of those meant the first goddamn thing to her.

She was a disaster at languages and couldn’t master even the simple phrases she was asked to learn — Where is the gun hidden, How do I get to the basement level of this building — and she was fairly confident that if she were dropped into the wilds of Alaska or some other equally feral place with nothing but a rope and a hunting knife, she could survive there for a sum total of five minutes for all that she’d learned in survival training. The one thing she could do, thanks more to her cousins and uncles who were minor-league pyromaniacs and owned more empty land than was good for them, was, in the parlance of her demolitions instructor, blow shit up, if only basic shit and in the crudest and most elemental of ways.

She trained all day, before breakfast and through lunch and then again after dinner, but she wasn’t making progress, wasn’t making any progress at all, it seemed, but not because she couldn’t learn this shit. She was good at learning but generally didn’t care enough about the shit she was supposed to learn in school — diagramming a sentence, proving geometrical shapes that had long ago been proved (of course it was a triangle, why in the fuck did she need to prove to anyone, let alone herself, that that was a triangle) — but here she was faced with truly interesting shit to learn and she’d hit a wall.

She told herself she didn’t know why, but she knew why.

She was lonely, and she didn’t like it here.

She’d met the other girls, if briefly. They nodded at her and smiled at her and shook her hand, firmly, too firmly, and welcomed her aboard, and maybe they gave each other looks, We do not have time for this bitch looks, or maybe that was her imagination. All of this happened a week after she arrived and in the five minutes in between when they had to leave for another extended field exercise and she had to leave for another unsuccessful martial arts training session, and after that, she saw them in passing, sometimes in the bathrooms, or in the hallway, usually as a group that seemed to have no room for one more. They were beautiful and older than her and looked very much like a unit, like a complete whole that functioned perfectly, thank you very much, without her.

Once, she ran into one of them on her own, the girl named Colleen, who often wore pink shorts and a yellow tank top and had a boyish haircut that made her look French, who, when she had first seen her, Rose had pegged as potential arch-nemesis material. Rose imagined her, Mean Girls—style, at the head of the posse of other girls, terrorizing and torturing and humiliating newcomers, who would have them all throw their worst at Rose, only for Rose to stand strong against their onslaught, to show first through her unwillingness to back down and then through her unfathomable skill that she was a natural leader, that she was the star of this moment, but Colleen hadn’t yet paid a lick of attention to her.

Rose ran into her in the weapons training module. Her weapons instructor had set up extra training time for her because she couldn’t shoot for shit, which made no sense, none at all. Rose had grown up around hunting rifles, and the occasional crossbow (her uncle Artie), and while she’d never taken to hunting herself, she’d always been a decent shot and had never shied away from guns. But every time she held a sidearm, a rifle, a shotgun, a semiautomatic in front of her weapons instructor, she choked. She just, she didn’t know, flinched, pulled left, thought too much about what she was doing. And out of the corner of her eye she could see the weapons specialist roll his eyes. She could sense him mentally counting down the seconds until lunch.

It was her time in the module but Colleen was in there already, shooting away. Colleen didn’t seem to have noticed her coming in, didn’t look like she would finish any time soon, but Rose didn’t care, not really, and she was going to offer to let Colleen work with her, if she wanted, because it would have been nice to have the company, nice to talk to someone who wasn’t yelling at her for forgetting the Chinese character for “dead in the bathroom stall,” but as soon as Colleen saw Rose waiting outside, she shut her module down and packed her things and left, with barely a nod as she walked by.

The short of it was this: Rose was lonely, and it was affecting her work, and soon they were going to kick her out of assassin school, she knew it, and it was completely fucking stupid of her.

So she didn’t have friends. So she hadn’t seen the Woman in Red since the day she was brought here. So Henry turned and walked the other way whenever she saw him. So what? So what if the story the Woman in Red had told her had prepared Rose for something very different from all of this, had included words like leader and hero and saving the world and fighting the Good Fight?

She was a silly little girl, she told herself. She was a silly little girl and she should just toughen up. She should toughen up and stop thinking about home and her momma and daddy and sister, mean old Gina and dumb old Patty. She should stop missing the way she had thought of herself when the Woman in Red first pulled her aside, first told her all about what she could become.

She should stop all of this, but she couldn’t.

33

Rose was sitting on her bed thinking about this — again — when someone knocked on the door of her room. The entire time she’d been at this school, this place, no one had knocked on her door.

“Who is it?” Rose asked, hopeful and suspicious all at once. She didn’t honestly care who it was, except in the back of her mind she did worry it might be someone come to make her go back home.

Colleen opened the door and poked her head inside and said, “Decent?”

“I guess,” Rose said, and then, feeling a little put off by this girl, who had not only opened her door but who was now standing inside the room without an invitation, she said, “I guess they don’t teach you to knock first in assassin school.”

“I did knock,” Colleen said.

“Well, I guess they don’t teach you to wait for the hostess to invite you in at, oh, fuck it,” Rose said. “What do you want?” She didn’t mean to sound this way, pissy and upset and on the verge of tears, real fucking tears, but she couldn’t help herself. Someone had come to see her in her room for the first time in nearly five weeks and she was fucking the whole thing sideways, she could tell, and she couldn’t stop herself. “I thought I locked the door. What, did you just break into my dorm room?”

“The doors don’t lock,” Colleen said. “House rules.”

“My bad. I must have misplaced my assassin school handbook.”

“That’s not what this is, you know.”

“Whatever. They’re going to kick me out anyway. Tomorrow maybe.”

“Maybe,” Colleen said. “It’s possible. You wouldn’t be the first.” Rose, who had been looking at the dirt under her fingernails, looked up. “There were twenty to start,” Colleen said when she knew she had Rose’s attention. “In fact, it’s kind of amazing that they brought you here at all. As far along as we are, that is.”

“Yeah, it’s been a fucking blast. I’m sure they’re as happy about it as I am.”

“Well. Maybe,” Colleen said. “Look. I know we’re not friends and you probably don’t care what I think, but you’re overthinking it. I’ve been watching you. You’re trying too hard. You’ve got natural ability, or they wouldn’t have brought you here. You’ve got it inside you but you’re not letting it out and soon, you’re right, soon they’re going to send you home. If they don’t think you can cut it, they’re going to send you back. Soon, like, maybe tomorrow.”

Rose turned to look away. Colleen opened the door again. Rose stood up and sighed and said, “You’re right.” Then she said, “We’re not friends and I don’t care what you think. So, thanks.”

Colleen smiled. “Stick around and we will be friends. Trust me.”

And then she left before Rose could say, “Doubt it,” so she yelled it as loud as she could at the closed door.

Rose decided she’d be long gone before either of those could happen. Becoming friends with Colleen or being kicked out.

She knew, she could tell by the way they looked at her — her instructors, everyone — that maybe she’d been holding on by a thread but that that thread had snapped and any minute someone — that fucker Henry — was going to show up at her door and tell her to pack her things and then take her back home. So. That night, she packed her backpack and left her room. She’d never tried to leave her room after lights-out before, which was weird since she’d been sneaking out of her momma’s house every night for the past three years, her mom’s Pall Malls stuffed into her shorts, the whole shitty town her playground, though mostly she just walked around the quiet, gaslit downtown and smoked cigarettes and kicked rocks and enjoyed not being at home.

The hallway outside her room was dark and quiet. She assumed there would be video cameras monitoring the compound at night, but she figured that no one would be monitoring them actively. As she moved out of the wing of the building that contained the dorm rooms she realized that there might be guards standing at the gate. She hesitated, considered going back to her room, figuring out an actual plan, but she’d made her decision, and she’d have to either sneak past the guards or talk her way past them.

There weren’t many men she couldn’t talk her way around.

When she reached the guards, she didn’t have to sneak past them or talk her way around them. They — two of them — were crumpled on the floor, unconscious (or dead), a trickle of blood running down the forehead of one, and at the sight of them, Rose stopped.

She moved to the guards, to see if they were alive, but then she saw the security monitor behind the desk, showing screen after screen of television snow, and she went there instead. It took her less than a minute to find and remove the device that was interfering with the signal. She shifted the screens from one wing and training room to another. The dorm rooms, too, including her own. The cameras were everywhere apparently. The thought made her shudder. But she didn’t see anyone. In fact, she didn’t see anyone at all. The girls’ rooms showed screen after screen of empty rooms. Beds unmade, rooms left in disarray. They’d been taken. Each and every one of them had been taken, wasn’t anywhere inside the buildings. Someone had invaded the compound, had disabled the guards, had abducted the trainees, had done all of this making hardly a sound.

They had done all of this and had left her behind.

Son of a bitch, she thought.

Even the fucking bad guys, whoever they are, don’t know I’m here. Or maybe they knew and just didn’t give a shit because of how much I suck. God fucking damn it, she thought.

She kicked the security desk hard enough to punch a hole through it with her foot.

Then she grabbed her backpack and stormed out of the compound and went looking for the assholes who had left her behind.

It wasn’t an easy trail to pick up and follow, but she found it anyway and followed it almost ten miles. By the time she found the camp, it was after four in the morning.

She spotted three guards standing outside a large tent, and then another guard standing outside a smaller tent ten yards farther back. The large tent must have held the girls. She didn’t know what was inside the smaller tent, but at the moment she didn’t care. Then a fifth guard came strolling into the camp light.

They spoke, quickly and quietly. The boss was almost ready. The girls were secured. The truck was on its way. Fifteen, twenty minutes tops. Everything was moving on schedule, according to plan.

Only after the fact did she realize they were speaking Russian.

Well, fuck. She could speak Russian!

Rose looked behind her at the path she’d taken to get here, considered how long it would be before she could get back to the compound; find Henry, or anyone else; and bring that person, or whatever army she could muster, back to the campsite. Then she thought of what she’d packed with her. Her dress. A couple of language books. Her wedge sandals. A clicker pen she’d stolen from one of the near-empty offices. No weapons. No gear.

It shouldn’t have been left to her. Risking herself for these girls who hardly knew her, who could barely make the effort to smile at her anymore. This job should have been the job of someone else. Anyone else.

She sighed. She took a deep breath. Silently, she crept forward.

34

The director’s office had seemed a lot bigger to Rose before he’d started shooting lightning bolts at her. Although the lightning bolts weren’t as bad as they could have been.

Not to say they weren’t bad. Not to say they didn’t singe and burn. Not to say they didn’t hurt like hell.

Just to say: They should’ve killed her, but they didn’t.

For one, she was quick. They barely grazed her — her calf, her shoulder, her boot — as she tumbled around trying to get herself closer to the director. Closer, that was where he had seemed most vulnerable.

And for two, she was protected. Of course she was protected. Emma and Henry, they wouldn’t have sent her on a suicide mission. Or, sure, maybe they would have sent her on a suicide mission, but they wouldn’t have done so without offering her some amount of protection.

They were assholes, but the kind of assholes who wanted to win this thing.

So. Runes, spells, counterspells. A little extra help in case her innate superstrength and superspeed and all the training they’d given her wasn’t quite enough. Not that she believed in it. The magicks, that is. Not that she didn’t believe in it, either. If there were women with superpowers and Oracles who could predict the future and a woman in a place called the Regional Office with a mechanical arm that looked like just any other arm, why couldn’t there be magicks and spells and runes? Just that they sprung this voodoo on her right before she left and for all she knew, someone back at base could have lit a Virgen de Guadalupe candle for her, too. Not to mention that the way she imagined it, when they cast these spells over her it would have felt like a shimmery dome, except, really, it was like nothing had happened. She had expected it to be like that game kids play where they crack an imaginary egg over your head and it feels real, like egg yolk is really dribbling down your face, but she didn’t get even that. Just, “So when are they going to cast these protective countermeasures?” and, “They already did. You’re good to go.”

Still. They weren’t doing nothing.

Not to mention this polyester-blend bullshit they called her assault uniform. Sure, it didn’t fit her right — too tight on the calves, because not everyone had the calves and ankles of a fucking gazelle like Windsor did, and too loose in her chest, because, well, she was seventeen (eighteen in two weeks) for Christ’s sake, and not the most developed seventeen-year-old — and it didn’t breathe at all, like, as soon as she put it on, she was cooking inside it, sweat dripping down her back and into her fucking panties, but as a flame and lightning and bullet and, who knows, a dragon-breath deterrent, it had its strong points.

But it didn’t much matter — outside of keeping her alive — because she didn’t know how long all this shit would stand up to the guy with the glove that had once been a hand, and the director wasn’t letting her get close. He let loose with a barrage of lightning bolts and a whooshing of gale-force winds, and she wondered if all this glove could do was X-Men Storm-style shenanigans, or if there were more deadly uses that the director just wasn’t smart enough or skilled enough to have figured out yet.

She also wondered what the hell happened if you cut that shit off his hand.

Like, would he be consumed by the blue flame of the glove’s power latching on to the closest warm body as that power was released from the glove itself?

Or would he just be in a lot of fucking pain because she’d cut off his hand?

Was it even attached to him or was he just kind of wearing it?

Either way, it was bound to be a better situation than one in which he still had the glove and his hand.

Normally, the thought of cutting off his hand wouldn’t have crossed her mind. Not like she was carrying a couple of ancient Japanese swords with her. They were all expected to wade into this fray weaponless — well, they were the weapons, right? — that was what all that training had been about. Well. Training had also been about the use of all the various weapons one could use — rifles, pistols, silencers, brass knuckles, swords, knives, garroting wires. The usual. But still, their whole philosophy being: Train the person to be a weapon and they won’t need to carry extra weapons with them, with a secondary philosophy in: Don’t be above using whatever potential weapon might be at hand if you want. And she’d seen it — when the bookshelf began rocking — she’d noticed an ornamental kind of sword on a stand on the very top shelf. It looked like some Ren Faire knockoff, but any thinnish piece of metal with enough of a blade coupled with the power of her mighty fucking punch should do the trick.

Let’s be honest: If she couldn’t cut a sword — even the cheapest of swords — clean through a guy’s wrist, she should just turn in her Trained Assassin Badge and Assassin Gear and open up a quilting shoppe.

Tired of this tumbling-around bullshit and with the beginnings of an idea for a plan in mind, she charged right at him, hoping to get close enough to him to a) get by him and to the sword, and then b) cut off his fucking hand.

He lit into her with some fierce blue crackling power shit. She spun into and then out of it and stumbled straight into him, tripping on half a desk drawer on her way. She grabbed for him as she fell forward, snagged the cuff of the glove — the wrist of the former hand? — and then, falling, falling, she yanked it clean off.

35

Rose crept for a hundred or so feet toward the camp where they were holding the girls, then paused long enough to pick up a medium-sized branch and throw it in a high arc over the heads of the guards and over the large tent, waiting for it to crash into something on the other side, grab the guards’ attention just long enough so that she could skitter across the flat, bright expanse separating her from the guards and the tent.

She had three of them off their feet and flat on their backs — the Spindletop move — before the fourth knew she was even there. He lunged, she slipped through his lunge — that one was Thread the Needle — caught him in his solar plexus with her knee as she passed by him, an afterthought really, then, pivoting, threw her weight, in the form of her elbow, onto his back, heard the cough, the whoof escape his mouth, but heard, too, the charge coming from her blind side, shifted her weight right, spun low — the Revolving Door (Crouching) — and swept the fifth guard off his feet, heard the action of a semiautomatic, from behind her again (next time, she would make sure there weren’t so many different angles to attack her from), and without thinking performed a zigzagging series of back handsprings, aerials, and flips, suddenly so fast, so much faster than she thought she could be, that when she stopped and realized she was standing just inches away from the guard with the gun, she swooned a little from the head rush, but not so much she couldn’t grab the rifle by its butt and shove it hard into the guy’s nose and then take it from him.

She spun around with the rifle ready to fire some too-close-for-comfort warning shots at the others, but they were gone.

Well.

Two of them were gone, the other three were on the ground, breathing but knocked out. The last one, the one with the now-broken nose and no longer the rifle in his hands, stood up behind her, his right hand cupping the blood coming out of his nose, his left hand raised as if he were giving up, but she couldn’t trust him, Rose decided, so she brained him again with the butt of the rifle.

All in all, she figured it’d taken her five minutes.

She looked around the campsite. Looked at the four men knocked out and on the ground at her feet. She looked at the rifle in her hands.

Then she fainted.

36

It had been a test, of course. Everything with these people was all about tests. Project-based learning, the other girls told her. All the rage in Europe.

“How did they know?” Rose asked. “How did they know I’d try to leave tonight?”

Colleen shrugged. “They know,” she said. “They know just about everything.”

She had passed, of course. With flying colors, in fact. Better than anyone had expected, in fact. When she came to, Colleen had been there, picking pine needles and dirt from her hair. “Don’t worry,” Colleen had said. “They don’t deduct points for fainting at the end.” Then she smiled and then she laughed and explained the test, the fact that they were given strict orders to keep their distance until she passed, that for whatever ineffable Emma reason, this had been all part of Rose’s training.

“I mean,” Colleen said, “we all had to pass this test, but we did it as a team and with more training under our belts. None of us had to do what you just did, all alone.”

Then Emma and Henry stepped into view and Emma helped Rose to her feet and told her how impressed she’d been, and for a long time, the whole thing made Rose so fucking mad that she could barely speak. Even when she could speak and she could smile at it and laugh it off and pretend that none of it bothered her, the thought of the whole thing pissed her off all over again whenever it came up.

But now. Now she was part of the team. She was an integral part of the team. She knew fuck-all about what they were going to be doing as a team, but that could wait. She didn’t care about that now that she was a piece of a whole, and not just any whole, but a superpowered, kick-ass, girl-team whole. And now, all she cared about was which fake trail Colleen came down and how awesome it was going to be that she beat them.

Except, Colleen should have found at least one of the trails by now. First Wendy and then one of the trails, maybe both of the trails, but certainly not all three of the trails. But where was she?

Rose’s instinct was to rabbit, but she tamped that down. Her trails, her booby traps, were good, very good. So good, in fact, that she wished it was Henry on her trail and not Colleen. And then she would watch him as the net tripped him up and yanked him into the trees overhead or as the trip wire loosed the branches and covering below his feet, sent him falling into the deep ditch she’d found and made deeper earlier that morning. Then she would climb up or down and help get him free, or maybe, if he fell into the ditch, she would just stay down there with him. She wouldn’t lord it over him all triumphantly because that seemed unbecoming, even to her, but she would make him admit to her that she’d done good, better than he’d have expected, that she’d gotten to him. Once he’d admitted all of that, she’d admit that he’d gotten to her. She’d hit him, gently but firmly in the shoulder or the chest, and call him a dumbass, tell him his stupid fucking plan to stay away from her didn’t work, that all it had done was make her think about him more, and that he was an idiot. He’d say, I know, or maybe he’d say, I was a fool, and then they’d kiss again. The hole was deep enough to keep prying eyes out of it all, whatever happened in her booby trap, and she’d kiss him but for real this time, and then? Who the fuck cared about And then? And then would take care of its own damn self.

But it wasn’t Henry on her trail. It was Colleen, who hadn’t found the dummy trail or the fake dummy trail, who had, in fact, found Rose’s third trail, and who had crouched herself down behind Rose — how? how had she crept up on her so fucking quietly? — and whispered, finally, into Rose’s ear, “Nice work, kid. You almost had me fooled.” Then she said, “Wendy’s going to kill you for those boots, you know.”

And then, grabbing Colleen swiftly by her weak-side arm, Rose flipped her up and over and onto her backside. “Yeah, maybe,” Rose said, “but she’s going to have to find me first.” And then she ran, laughing as she disappeared back into the woods.

37

The director shoved Rose back and scrambled to grab the glove, which she had flung across the room. She grabbed him by the ankle and tripped him to his face. He kicked wildly to make her let go and somersaulted himself closer to the glove and onto his feet. She kicked the bookshelf hard enough to drop the sword into her lap.

It was sharper and finer wrought than she’d expected.

She stood and held it loose at her side.

Sweaty and his shirt untucked and his own shirtsleeve scorched from the glove or from her pulling off the glove, the director looked almost as worse for wear as she felt.

Not that it mattered. He’d grabbed the glove. He stood up with it and turned to look at her and he sighed a heavy sigh and looked almost sad.

Maybe he hadn’t had a chance before to really see her, to see how young she was, to see how much she resembled the very women he had brought to the Regional Office and helped to train, the women (and girls) he had guided and loved, or maybe he was feeling sad about what was to come — cleaning up the mess of this assault, checking in on the families of those who’d been lost today, picking up the pieces and moving forward. She didn’t know. All she knew was that he must have been feeling pretty fucking confident to already be looking sad about what he was going to have to do to her, how he was going to have to move forward with all of this.

But then he wasn’t putting on the glove and then she looked at the glove, looked more closely, saw that it had ripped — or she had ripped it — from the bottom of its wrist/cuff to the point where the middle finger met the palm, and it hung there limp and unnerving but powerless, even she could sense its powerlessness.

He dropped the glove. He closed his eyes. The fight had all come to an end so quickly Rose wasn’t sure what she should do next.

According to the protocol, she was supposed to tell him Emma sends her best, but Jesus, that seemed just cruel at this point, after all that had happened. As far as Rose could tell, he believed his own friend and partner had sent her to kill him, and so she couldn’t say whether it would be better to die with the wrong understanding of why, but also she didn’t think Emma was the kind of person you could lie to about a thing you hadn’t done.

She lifted the sword. She said, not too loud but loud enough: “Emma sends her best.”

He opened his eyes. “Wait, what? Who?”

“You heard me,” she said, and then felt bad about how short her tone had been. “Emma. She sends her best.”

“Emma? Emma’s dead.”

“Apparently not dead enough,” she said, and then she lunged at him, lunged past him, lunged as hard as she could lunge, the sword held in both hands and flush with the horizon, and before he could say anything else, before he could even know for certain he was dead, the top half of him toppled one way, and a second later, the bottom half fell the other.

~ ~ ~

From The Regional Office Is Under Attack:

Tracking the Rise and Fall of an American Institution

While what is known about Oyemi, both before and after her transformation, is limited, often obfuscated by competing accounts and flimsy theories, many of them posited or spread by Oyemi herself, the life of Mr. Niles is much more accessible. Books could be written on the life and times of Mr. Niles, though this paper will only account for what is germane to the purpose of offering a brief history of the rise and fall of the Regional Office, the events that brought Mr. Niles and Oyemi together, what worked to break them apart, and how these events conspired to destroy the thing they’d worked so hard to build.

Once he and Oyemi abducted the woman named Nell, it stands to reason that Mr. Niles became nervous, apprehensive. Stands to reason that he paced the office more than usual, even for him. That he woke often throughout the night — sensitive to every sound from the street below, every creak on the stairway above — woke so often that he might as well have not slept at all. He had involved himself in a kidnapping. Anyone not a sociopath and not Oyemi would have become nervous and apprehensive once the act of kidnapping happened.

Let us first clarify: The future Operative Recruits were never kidnapped. Oyemi and Mr. Niles, and later, Henry, made each Recruit an offer: remain in this quotidian life or train to fight the forces of darkness.

Not so the Oracles.

Nell and the other two (whose names have been lost to history) were not made offers, were not given choices, were simply kidnapped and then altered.

It stands to reason that this unnerved Mr. Niles.

In college, he had majored in economics. Before that, sure, he had dropped out of high school and engaged in some small-time robberies to get by. Nonetheless, nothing in his life had prepared him for this, for aiding and abetting the physical and mental and supernatural transformation of strangers, young women no less. And, to be perfectly honest, there is extensive evidence that Mr. Niles never cared for nor wanted to involve oracles, or soothsayers, or palm readers, or fortune-tellers of any stripe, in his plans for the Regional Office.

Mr. Niles, in fact, harbored strong feelings against the desire for foreknowledge of this sort. Mr. Niles, in fact, very much did not want to believe in oracles, a desire made more difficult to fulfill if Oyemi planned to surround herself — and him — with them.

His father believed in oracles, specifically in a prophecy that his life would be cut short by a fire, something he learned, no doubt, from some sideshow carny. But his father was devoted to this prophecy; it was his favorite story to tell, the story of his future demise. Mr. Niles would listen to his father and his father would tell him how he was going to die and Mr. Niles would ask his father how he knew this and his father would claim that it was all in the prophecy, clear as day, that it was straight from the oracle’s mouth. Mr. Niles would ask his father why he simply didn’t do something about this prophecy to prevent it from coming true, and his father told him, “Well, son, I’ve thought about it, I have, but that’s what the Greeks did, you know.”

His father said, “You know the Greeks, son? Great people, the Greeks. But the ancient Greeks, not like that Greek son of a bitch who runs the gas station.”

He said, “Smart people, the Greeks. Inventors of the wheel and time, but dumb about prophecies.

“Take Oedipus, for example,” he said. “The king heard a prophecy that his son would murder him and marry his wife and so the king, he tried to get smart, he tried to fix things so the prophecy wouldn’t come true, like leave his firstborn son on a hilltop to die, or in the woods to be eaten by wolves, or something like that, it doesn’t matter what, because in the end, whatever he did, this king, it didn’t matter.”

He said, “Whatever they fixed, the Greeks? It only worked to make the prophecy come true. No matter what you do, a prophecy is a prophecy is a prophecy, and you can’t do anything to change it that won’t make it happen.”

“So what are you going to do?” Mr. Niles asked his father.

“Nothing, son,” he said. He smiled at his own brilliance. “Don’t you get it? You do nothing and the prophecy doesn’t even matter. Do nothing and you’ve beaten the system.”

“Does that mean you’re not going to die in a fire, then?” Mr. Niles asked.

“Nah,” his father said. “It’s just a theory. I’ll probably die just like the oracle said I would.”

All of which confused Mr. Niles, made him feel a heavy sadness when he was a boy, and then pity for his father as he grew older. But the idea of prophecies and fate’s hand controlling a person’s life wormed its way into his head, and soon he came to the decision that someone or something held the knowledge of his future, too, and that there was nothing he could do to change any of it. It was all preordained, whether he’d been told about it or not, and no matter what he did, the secretly held prophecy about his own life couldn’t be altered. And this led him from one bad decision to another, so that by the time he was supposed to be graduating from high school he was instead spending his nights standing outside in the dark parking lot of a twenty-four-hour grocery store mugging people.

Mr. Niles tried to be fair about the muggings.

Mr. Niles had always believed in fairness.

By his own admission, he targeted the beer-bellied middle-aged bachelors who shopped early in the morning, at two or three a.m., approached them as they were walking out with two grocery carts full of cereal boxes and Top Ramen and dollar bags of moldy apples. These were men, he thought, who could have avoided the whole mess — being robbed, that is — if only they’d have gotten married, settled down, made a few kids, and started shopping at the normal hours of the day when normal people shopped.

He waited outside until a guy came out of the store, until he walked through the parking lot in between his two shopping carts, until he was just reaching his car. And that was when Mr. Niles would step out of the shadows with a gun he’d found in his father’s locked file cabinet, moving so quickly that by the time he had his gun pressed up to the guy’s fleshy stomach, pressed into all of that fat until the tip of the barrel was right under the guy’s rib cage, pressed hard so that the guy would know he wasn’t fooling around, the guy was too surprised to do much else but what Mr. Niles told him to do, which was usually to lie down in the trunk.

He thought about his father whenever he shut the trunk on the guy and took the keys out and dropped them into his own pocket. He thought about his father and the Greeks. He placed his ear to the trunk and listened for whimpering or heavy breathing or all-out sobbing. He wondered whether the guy had once heard a prophecy about how one night he would find himself locked inside a trunk and if then he had taken steps to remove all trunks from his life. Like Sleeping Beauty with all the spinning wheels. And then if the guy, forgetting there was a trunk attached to his car, thought he had fixed it by removing all trunks and all possibilities of trunks from his life. By avoiding all flea markets or specialty import stores or antique shops. Thinking the whole time he had fixed it, tricked the prophecy, won the game, but instead he had somehow led himself to this moment. Instead, he had led himself to the parking lot of this grocery store, to a life that was loveless, childless, and that necessitated shopping at odd hours of the night only to wind up, finally, locked inside his own trunk.

“You should’ve not done anything,” the young Mr. Niles would yell through the hood of the trunk. He’d bang real hard on the top of the car. “You should’ve just left it well enough alone,” he would yell, louder, banging even more, banging to punctuate each word.

After a while, when Mr. Niles became tired of robbing these men, and when the date of his father’s prophesied death came and went, leaving his father still very much alive, he gave up on oracles and the preordained nature of life. He tested for his GED and enrolled in a junior college; transferred, at Oyemi’s insistence, to Rutgers; and then left New Jersey after graduation and moved to the city. By then, the stirrings of the Regional Office were stirred and then they kidnapped the woman named Nell, transformed her, and held her captive.