The Regional Office Is Under Attack!

38

Sarah wasn’t actually asleep. She was only pretending to be asleep.

She had become quite good at pretending to be asleep. At pretending to be other things, too.

Unconscious, for instance.

Sobbing uncontrollably was also a thing she had become good at pretending to do.

Horrified into a state of catatonia by the constant reminder that someone had launched an assault on the Regional Office. Horrified that in the meantime, someone had also wrenched her mechanical arm from her body.

That.

She had become quite good at pretending to be that.

It helped — if helped was the right word — that they helped by repeatedly hitting her in the face or the back of the head or shocking her with electrodes and asking her if she was so tough now, now that she didn’t have her mechanical arm.

Hitting her without questioning her. Hitting her just to hit her.

That is to say: Some of the times she might not have been pretending.

But right now, she pretended to be asleep. She’d closed her eyes. She’d done her best to relax and deepen her breathing, make it regular. Her chin had fallen so that it just barely touched her chest. She was doing her best to convince the people who had her hostage that she was asleep, not because that might keep them from stomping up to her to wake her, hit her more, but because through the cracked office door she could hear their radios and she wanted to listen without their knowing she was listening because listening gave her hope, because what she could hear was not good, not good for them, not good for them at all.

There were shouts and screams and gun bursts of a violent but confused and frightened nature. Someone shouted out of the walkie-talkie something along the lines of, Blue Team! Blue Team! Report in! Report! with little success. Someone else suggested sending Emerald Team to go check in with Blue Team but before panic could take firm hold of these panicky mercenaries, Wendy — that asshole intern Wendy — told everyone to shut the fuck up and calm the fuck down because no one was going to check on Blue Team and don’t you idiots watch television, watch movies? Don’t you idiots know that sending team after team after team is like throwing good money after bad? Everyone sticks to the plan, she told them, and that’s that.

Sarah pretended she was sleeping but in her sleep, she smiled. Not a big smile, not a triumphant smile, but a sly and knowing, tiny, barely perceptible smile.

39

“No one respects me,” Sarah told Mr. Niles, shortly after he’d appointed her his right-hand man, no pun intended.

“They will,” he’d said. “Give it time,” he’d said. “Show them the you I know, and they will fall in line, and they will respect you,” he’d said.

Hearing this, she’d wondered, in the far back of her mind, But will they like me?

And slightly farther back than that she’d wondered, Who is the real me?

Because she didn’t know. Before, she’d been a certain kind of person — who went to college, whose childhood had been scarred by personal tragedy — and after that, she’d become a different sort of person, the kind of person who possessed a mechanical arm and had been given the opportunity to exact formidable vengeance on those who’d caused her childhood tragedy.

But now, and outside of that, who was she?

Not that it mattered. For all the efforts she made to be the kind of boss that would make them feel respect, or awe, or fearful regard, the people who worked for her, the people she was in charge of, didn’t fall in line, respect her, or like her.

Except Henry.

Henry seemed to like her, or to not dislike her, anyway. They acted like friends, or close acquaintances.

He listened to her, that is, when it seemed that Mr. Niles had stopped.

“No one respects me,” she would tell Henry over lunch or a drink. “No one likes me.”

And he would take a bite of salad or a sip of beer and say, “You’re kind of an asshole sometimes.” Or he would say, “You’re an easy target.”

“They act like I’m an office manager,” she would tell him. “They tell me when the copier needs new toner. Or when they need new Post-it notes. Or when the water cooler bottle needs to be changed. Or when the interns fuck up. They tell me these things and then walk away and then laugh, I can hear them laugh. All those nine-to-fivers, laughing at me.”

And inevitably, he’d say: “You’re not the office manager?” Or, “Wait, who is the office manager?”

And every time, even though she knew what he was doing, she’d say: “Carol. Carol’s the fucking office manager.”

And he’d laugh and he’d tell her, “See? You’re too sensitive,” or, “They know this pisses you off,” or, “You have to ignore it,” or, “You can’t let them get to you.”

Easy enough for Henry to say, though. People liked Henry. People waited for Henry to speak before offering their own opinions, which often closely mirrored Henry’s. They went to him for advice about things he knew nothing about and listened to him even more attentively when he claimed — truthfully — that he didn’t have the answers.

Henry never had to ignore the things she couldn’t ignore. These jokes and pranks and personal slights always got to her. And why shouldn’t they have? She’d laid waste to an entire secret black-ops organization that had been terrorizing the Western world for going on thirty years. When a few office drones called her into the break room because they couldn’t open a jar of pickles and they needed her with her mechanical arm to loosen the top up for them, except that the top had already been loosened, or manipulated in such a way that by giving it a good twist, the whole jar exploded, throwing pickle juice all over her and the floor and the walls and the ceiling, even though she’d used her nonmechanical arm against this very eventuality, when a thing like that happened, she couldn’t very well let them get away with that.

She had pickle juice in her hair for fuck’s sake.

Henry had told her to laugh it off, to let it go, that to address it only fueled it.

But as far as she could see, Henry wasn’t the one with pickle juice in his hair.

40

The truth of the matter was, Sarah wouldn’t have cared as much about the nine-to-fivers (“They know you call them that,” Henry had told her) if she’d had a better track record with the Operatives, who were, in her own mind, more closely aligned with her and her hybrid position at the office.

Sarah met her first Operative for the Regional Office a month after she recovered from obtaining a new arm. Before then, Mr. Niles had kept Sarah mostly to himself and to the doctor, whose leg was healing nicely. For most of a month, she spent her days in the lab or recovering in her room.

“Soon enough,” Mr. Niles told her, “you’ll meet everyone else. Henry, our Recruiter. The Operatives.”

“Is that what I am?” she asked. “An Operative?”

Mr. Niles laughed and said, “No, no, Sarah. You’re a client. We work for you. All of this,” he said, gesturing at her room, her mechanical arm, the file full of information about her mother’s disappearance, “is for you.”

The training, too, or so he explained it. Because she was not the type of woman to be satisfied to know others had avenged her mother on her behalf. No. Mr. Niles could tell. She would only be satisfied if the vengeance was hers. The arm, the training, the recon and support — these were offered to her by the Regional Office. All of that, and the wisdom and experience of the Regional Office’s own Operatives.

The first Operative she met was Jasmine, and she was tall and statuesque and dark-complected and the most striking woman Sarah had ever seen except that standing behind Jasmine, waiting for Jasmine’s cue, were four or five more of the most striking women Sarah had ever seen. She didn’t know the names of the others but she knew Jasmine’s name because Jasmine was the loudest and brashest of the Operatives she’d seen on campus since she’d arrived, since she’d begun her own training session. She laughed the loudest, often at her own jokes, and in the training room, she screamed the loudest when she attacked, loud enough that Sarah could hear her scream even through the sealed door, the protected viewing windows.

“Hi,” Sarah said, holding out her hand for Jasmine to shake. “I’m Sarah.”

Jasmine stared at the hand and then threw a brief glance back at the girls standing behind her.

“You’re Jasmine, right?” Sarah said, trying to keep any emotions out of her voice. She was wondering how long she would keep her hand held out like that, how long before Jasmine either took it or acknowledged it, or before Sarah let it drop back to her side.

“I don’t shake robot hands,” Jasmine said, the beginnings of a smirk creeping into her lips.

“It’s not,” Sarah began, about to share the secret of which hand was which, but then she remembered and shifted, seamlessly, she hoped. “A problem,” she finished, and brought her hand back down to her side and then put it inside her other hand, and then let it drop to her side again, feeling self-conscious suddenly about what to do with her hands.

“I’m supposed to train with you guys this morning,” she said. Jasmine shook her head and frowned and turned and started walking, the others falling in step behind her. Sarah hated herself for doing this, but she did a half-jog to keep up with Jasmine, who must have been at least seven feet tall. Sarah smiled up at Jasmine as if any of this behavior were normal behavior and continued, “I’ve been doing a lot of one-on-one work with Robert, martial arts Robert? You know, Robert? Of course you know Robert.” She could feel all of the words, every single word ever, tumbling out of her mouth and she couldn’t stop them. “I mean, you know, a lot of hand-to-hand combat training, which has been great, but Mr. Niles? He wants me to get in some group training, too.”

Jasmine stopped and Sarah turned and saw they were standing at the door to the training room, which Sarah couldn’t help but think of as the Danger Room, even though she made sure not to say this out loud for fear of being made fun of. Ever since she’d arrived, she’d been afraid of being made fun of, or being pitied, or being ignored, and something about Jasmine, about her posture, about her eyes, made Sarah feel like all three were happening simultaneously.

“After you,” Jasmine said, opening the door.

Sarah stepped inside and then Jasmine closed the door behind her and sealed it shut. Then Jasmine’s voice came through the intercom speaker. “But first, let’s see what you’ve learned so far.”

Sarah had hoped this would happen, had daydreamed it a number of times in the cafeteria, eating by herself, and in her dorm room, had pictured herself somehow trapped in the Danger Room alone or even with a few others, but with the attention on her, on her mechanical arm, the scenario thrown into high alert, attacks and obstacles coming at her too fast to see, too fast, even, for the Operatives. But not too fast for her, for her arm, her beautiful mechanical arm. And then the scenario would run its course, and the smoke and rubble and haze would clear as the room righted itself, and standing there in the middle of it all, not even breathing heavily, would be Sarah, untouched, unscathed, triumphant.

Which wasn’t exactly how everything happened when Jasmine locked her in the training room by herself.

More, what happened was this:

The floor shifted under her, unexpectedly. She slipped, she scrambled to keep herself up, and so distracted by the shifting flooring, she failed to notice the swinging, padded mallets that lowered down from the ceiling. Not just those, but also the small gun turrets firing paint balls that slid out from openings in the walls. She failed to notice these too, and the tackling dummies running along rails in zigzagging patterns around the room. Watching the video repeatedly and in slow motion after the system was shut down by Mr. Niles, who had happened by to check in on everyone, Sarah could barely make out that it was the paint ball that first tagged her in her left shoulder, throwing her back in anger and surprise and right into one of the swinging mallets that clipped her right ear, that spun her around into a tackling dummy, which carried her for a few yards before another mallet knocked her out from the dummy’s tenuous grasp, by which time the guns had locked her position pretty well and set up a barrage of paint pellets at her.

Less than two minutes had passed and she was curled up on the floor trying her best to cover her ears, her face, pelted by paint balls, covered in so much paint it had all run together and turned brown, her arm useless except to protect her head.

41

Waiting, held hostage in the Regional Office, beaten and ridiculed, Sarah curbed her despair with a theory. One that explained the screaming and shouting going on over the radios, the loss of Blue Team and, if she wasn’t mistaken, Emerald Team, too.

Someone had slipped through. When these assholes had stormed inside, rounded everyone up, someone had slipped through the cracks and was mounting a counteroffensive, not unlike the counteroffensive she had planned.

She wondered who it was.

She had someone in mind but still, she liked to play the game of wondering who it was out there in the building wreaking havoc on Blue Team and Emerald Team and whatever other goddamn teams were out there. Worming his way through the air ducts and back stairwells and through empty offices, laying waste to everyone in his path, John McClane — style.

From what she could tell, the girls, their girls, seemed to be off on a mission — she didn’t know how but these bastards had tapped into the Regional Office protocols, had sent them all on bogus missions all across the globe. And if what she had seen was accurate, they’d sent Jasmine, their best, to a whole different, alternate universe. And the Recruits? Where were they? Trapped, probably, inside their dorm on the Upper West Side. Trapped and fighting their own fight. She didn’t know for sure.

Which told her two things: Whoever was behind this wasn’t after the girls, or rather, might have been after the girls but not to destroy them, and whoever was out there playing Die Hard, in the stairwells and air ducts, wasn’t one of the girls, either.

And it sure as hell wasn’t one of the hostages, any of her dumb regular colleagues.

She’d had enough experience with the hostages, was full of enough pain and bruising and blood and broken bits of her, that she could attest for certain that it wasn’t any one of the goddamn hostages, frightened little sheep who had just sat idly by while those goddamn mercenaries kicked her ass and who couldn’t follow a simple plan, not even to save their own lives.

She hadn’t seen the first sign of the security director all day and was beginning to suspect he’d been behind the security breach and also probably the protocol breach that sent the girls away, and even if he wasn’t, even if he wasn’t one of “them” and he had somehow managed to slip into work unnoticed by her or the bastards mounting this assault on the Regional Office, that didn’t change the fact that the security director was a fat-fuck computer jockey who in no uncertain terms would have been unable to sneak around the building via the moderately sized air ducts or effect any change in this situation whatsoever.

In her mind, that left one person.

Well. Two people. That left two people.

It could be Henry. Sure. Henry was a possibility. Logic pointed to Henry. Field trained. Smart, capable.

If someone were to have asked her: Say an assault is mounted on the Regional Office and you’re taken out of the equation and the Operatives are taken out of the equation too, and one rogue agent is maneuvering through the building slowly decimating the ranks of mercenaries who’ve attempted this assault, who do you think that rogue agent might be? Of course, she would have said, Henry.

Henry would have been that rogue agent. Everyone would know the answer would have been Henry, which was why it couldn’t be Henry. Aside from the simple fact that she knew too much about Henry’s crisis of faith, it couldn’t be Henry because the people mounting this assault would have also known the answer would’ve been Henry. They would’ve known just as well as she did that if anyone were to become a rogue agent operating to save Regional, it would’ve had to have been Henry, and so they would’ve done one of two things before the assault even started: bring Henry on board, or kill him.

So it couldn’t be Henry out there John McClane — style because Henry was dead. And if he wasn’t dead, he was one of them, in which case he was still dead, and he simply didn’t know it yet because she would be the one to kill him.

And so, by sound, logical reasoning, that left only one man in all of the Regional Office capable of all of this.

If her hunch was right, that left only Mr. Niles.

Not that her hunches had been right, or even close to right, so far that day, but if it’s any consolation to Sarah — which it probably isn’t — she would have been just as wrong thinking it was Henry.

42

Two months into her training, Sarah came out of hand-to-hand combat class and a man of entirely average-sized good looks, aside from a nose a touch too wide for his face and curly hair that had grown too long, was standing outside waiting for her. Or so it seemed by the casual way he leaned against the wall, by the way he perked up and smiled and pushed off the wall when he saw her come out of the gym. She’d seen him around but hadn’t met him and didn’t know his name yet. He opened his mouth to say something but then was distracted by a group of Operatives, or maybe they were trainees, it was hard for Sarah to tell the difference. They all held themselves up with the same sort of haughty self-confidence, even the new ones.

“Hi, Henry,” the gaggle of them said, and though none of them giggled, there was a hint of giggle in their voices. He smiled at them and gave them a little wave and as they were turning the corner, one of them looked at Sarah and said in a Stephen Hawking kind of voice, “Hi. Ro-bot.” And this made the others laugh and then they were gone, but she could hear them laughing still.

She felt her face flush and she clenched her fists at her sides, then remembered herself and remembered the man standing in front of her, and she closed her eyes and relaxed her arms, both of them.

“Don’t let them get to you,” he said once she had opened her eyes and looked at him again. Then he smiled and said, “Man, that sounded pretty dumb. It always sounds better in a movie or something, doesn’t it.” He smiled again and held out his hand and said, “Henry. My name is Henry. Heard you’ve had a rough go of it.”

“Well,” Sarah began, reaching for his hand.

“Is it your left?” Henry interrupted. “Arm, that is. I’ve got a guy who bet me it was your right arm, but that seems just way too obvious.” She pulled her hand back. He laughed an awkward but disarming laugh and said, “I’m kidding. I don’t have a guy, or a bet. It’s just easier for me to get the awkward thing out right away because I’m going to say it eventually. I know I am. But this way, I say it, and there’s a weird moment, and then it’s over, and then I’m not spending the whole conversation thinking about when I’m going to accidentally say the thing I’m not supposed to say.” He held his hand out for a moment longer, then pulled it back, too. He shrugged and frowned. “It’s a quirk. Now. How’s training going? Pretty shitty, huh?”

“It can only go up from here, right?” Sarah said, and she felt like crying. She’d managed to contain all of the emotions that she should have been feeling about her arm, about being in the city and not with her aunt, about discovering the truth about her mother, about the way the other women had been treating her, and would have kept them all in check so long as no one asked her about any of it. But as soon as anyone said the first nice thing to her, all of it threatened to come out.

“Let’s go get a drink,” he said, doing a fine job of ignoring the tears welling in her eyes, which gave her a moment to wipe them away and shove the feelings that caused them back deep down inside herself. “Because, frankly, there’s still down. Sorry to be the one to tell you this, but… Things can always go down.

“Your problem,” Henry said, “and it’s not just your problem, but your problem is you have this sense about you that there’s something different about you.”

Henry had taken her to a hotel bar not far from the travel agency. It wasn’t yet two in the afternoon. They’d taken the elevator back up to the travel agency, had walked through the travel agency, had crossed Park and walked a few blocks, had come into this bar, and not once had Henry stopped talking. Henry hadn’t given her time to change out of her training outfit and Sarah felt self-conscious, or she would have if anyone had been in the bar but the two of them and the bartender.

“There is something different about me,” Sarah said, almost frustrated by how much she needed to talk to someone about all of this.

“Right. I know. Trust me, we all know. But there’s something different about all of the women here. All the Operatives and trainee Recruits, anyway. They’re all different from the rest of us, and from each other. But the difference between their difference and your difference — do you want to know the difference between their difference and your difference?” he asked. He knew she did, otherwise why would they be here talking about any of this? He liked to hear himself talk, Sarah could tell, and since he was the first person not Mr. Niles she’d found any sort of connection with, she humored him. She nodded and even went so far as to say, “What’s the difference between their difference and my difference?”

He nodded back at her and took another drink of his beer, his third, but Sarah was trying not to judge him by it. “The difference,” he said, “is how they carry that difference. Even the Recruits, even before they’re recruited, even before we’ve sought them out, they carry what makes them different in an open and, I don’t know, kind of loud way. You’ve seen them around the office, you can’t not see them around the office. They’re bigger than life, these women.”

“But they are bigger,” Sarah said, interrupting him. “Jesus, have you seen Jasmine? She’s like a hundred feet tall.”

Henry shook his head and paused to take another drink and then dropped his empty glass too heavily onto the table and said, “No, no she’s not. You know how tall Jasmine is? It’s in her file. I measured her myself.”

“You measured Jasmine?”

“S’my job. Stop interrupting. I measured her myself and I kid you not. Five feet three inches.”

“No she isn’t.”

“S’true. I’m going to get another drink. You want another drink? It’s entirely true. You’re what? Five four? Five five? You’re taller than Jasmine. But. It’s part of her power, or the mystical property of her. Or who knows what the fuck it’s about, I just find them and train them. I’m no expert. But! I’ve watched them, I’ve observed them all, and they each have different strengths and different — but not many — weaknesses, and they all have this one thing in common. Every. Single. One of them.”

Henry picked up his empty glass and tried to take a drink from it and looked a little perplexed and said, “I drank that one way too fast.”

Sarah considered telling him that he’d never gotten his next drink but thought better of it.

“What?” she asked. “What do they have in common?”

Henry rubbed his face and his eyes and then looked at her and said, “Haven’t you been listening to anything I’ve said?” He waited for her to say something and when she didn’t he sighed. “They carry their difference, the way they carry their difference. They have differences, see, they each are very different from the rest of us, and the way they carry this difference, well, it’s like their difference, they carry it with a sense of pride. Like it makes them better. And it does. It makes them stronger and faster and smarter and more powerful. They know it and they make sure everyone else knows it, too. That’s the difference between their difference and your difference.”

“That their difference makes them better than my difference?”

“Christ,” he said. “You’re smarter than this, you know.” He took her hand and squeezed it tightly, his fingers pulsing against her fingers and her palm with every syllable, and said, “No. They act like it makes them better. You don’t.”

“But,” she began, and he let go of her hand and grabbed her other hand.

“But nothing,” he said. “You’ve got a mechanical fucking arm, right? That’s not nothing, right? A mechanical fucking arm that — Jesus, which one is it?” He held up her hand and pressed his fingers deep into her own and pulsed them again and studied it through squinted eyes. “I mean, it’s remarkable, isn’t it? Your hands. Exactly the same.” He dropped her hand and sighed and said, “I can’t tell. Weird. I thought I’d be able to tell.” Then he looked at his watch. “Ah well, we should get back to work. I’ve got a Recruits meeting in twenty.”

He paid. Sarah was surprised walking out of the dark bar into the bright afternoon sun. They didn’t say much of anything else walking back to the travel agency and riding down the elevator to the Regional Office, even though she wanted to say more. As they stepped off the elevator, he told her, “I’m around, you know. If you want to chat or get another drink.”

“Thanks,” she said.

“It’ll get better,” he said. “I mean, first, it’ll probably get worse, but then it will get better. If you remember what I told you, that is.” Then he turned and then, walking to the men’s room, he said, “Or not.”

43

Jasmine threw the first punch.

But before that, Sarah had been swimming for almost an hour. She’d had the pool all to herself. None of the others thought swimming offered enough impact. The Operatives and the Recruits were all about impact. Sarah liked the smooth motion of herself through the water. She had been a decent swimmer before, but since coming to the Regional Office and the new arm and really getting it together generally, she had become sleek and natural in the water, slipping through with almost no effort. She had assumed that with her mechanical arm, she would feel lopsided, not necessarily because of the weight of it, though the weight of it had entered her mind, but because of its strength and her normal arm’s lack thereof, but somehow her body had adjusted and her strokes were even and strong and while her normal arm did eventually tire out, she had found herself able to swim at a strong pace for hours on end before that happened.

She had asked the doctor about this, about how her normal arm managed to keep up with her mechanical arm, and jokingly had asked him if they had in fact given her two mechanical arms, and the look of horror that crossed his face was so horrific that she quickly laughed and assured him she was only kidding, that she knew he’d given her only the one arm.

Ever since she broke his femur, he had been touchy and a bit twitchy around her.

“I’m not sure,” he said, once he’d regained his composure. “Perhaps the hyperadvanced nanotechnology we used in the mechanical arm is sending signals to the rest of your body, has somehow found a way to boost, even just a little, your own strength and endurance?”

This idea struck her as both fascinating and a little unsettling, and so she’d brought it up to Mr. Niles, who shook his head and laughed and said, “He’s a kook, that old man. Hey, when he’s right, he’s right. I mean, look at your arm, look at the amazing work he did with your arm. But listen, the reason your body is stronger is because we’ve been strengthening it. Remember? You’ve been training every day for four months now. Of course the rest of you can keep up better for an hour, for two hours, and if you keep it up, maybe four or six hours, which is when you’ll be ready for the thing. But your body has limits. Your arm doesn’t. So don’t push it too hard.”

And so, an hour, sometimes an hour and a half, was all she would let herself swim at one time before giving herself a rest.

She stopped at the edge of the pool and held herself there, her eyes closed, her nose just below the surface, the waves rising and falling against her ears, so that the echo of them against the indoor pool became muffled and then clear and then muffled. Hanging there in the water, she felt she could swim across the Atlantic if she wanted.

When she pulled her head above water, she saw Jasmine standing at the edge of her lane and two others standing behind her. Jasmine squatted down and smiled at Sarah a mean kind of smile and then said, “Look. The robot knows how to swim.”

And Sarah didn’t know why that — more than anything else — set her off, but set her off it did, and there were words said and feelings felt, and Sarah climbed out of the water, and there were more words and more feelings, and, well, Jasmine threw the first punch, but still…

She threw it so fast no one saw it, not even Sarah, who only barely felt it, felt the wake of it, the soft touch of air against her cheek, her earlobe, the ripple of her hair. In the moment, or immediately after the moment, Sarah thought she must have moved out of the way of Jasmine’s punch, ever so slightly out of the way. Maybe her arm had given her a sixth sense about these things or maybe she was in possession of some kind of mystical property, had always been so, a power buried too deep for anyone to detect it, but protective and powerful enough to shift her an inch to the left just before she was punched, but no. In hindsight, Sarah would understand that Jasmine threw that punch so fast that no one could see it and so close that only Sarah could feel it, but missed all the same, on purpose. Namely, to make it look like Sarah threw the first punch — or kick, as it turned out — like Sarah was the instigator, and it worked.

Sarah was quicker than any of them expected her to be, she could tell by the looks on their faces and by the fact that she swept her leg under Jasmine’s to sweep Jasmine off her feet.

Jasmine recovered quickly enough, though, and was up and skipping behind Sarah even as Sarah landed her mechanical fist on the floor where Jasmine’s head had been. She cracked the deck and heard a small chorus of sarcastic oooohs.

Sarah was outmatched, of course.

Of course, Sarah was outmatched.

Jasmine had been around a long time. She’d outlived Gemini, who had been one of the first Recruits and legendarily strong. Chances were, she would outlive the entire crop of new Recruits, too, judging by the sorry looks of them. She wasn’t the strongest. That was Lucy. She wasn’t the fastest, that was clearly Celia, and Dominic was by far the smartest — the shit that girl knew baffled even Oyemi — but Jasmine was by far the shrewdest, the most observant, the best able to look for and then exploit even the tiniest movement, the smallest tell. Of all the Operatives — except for maybe Emma, who had just arrived and was still a bit of a mystery — Jasmine put the mystical properties of her existence to work best. Which was how she’d known exactly how close and how fast to punch. Which was how she’d known to skip behind Sarah on her right because she knew which arm was the strong arm and which arm was more than just strong. Which was how she knew that in two minutes Henry and Mr. Niles would arrive to break everything up. Which was how she knew that to kill this girl, this one-armed freak, all she’d have to do was slide up behind her, crack her neck — done! — and let her fall, not that she wanted to kill her, per se, just put her in her place. How she knew where to hit her — pop, pop, pop, kidney, kidney, lower back — and how hard — hard enough to make a point but just shy of leaving a deep mark. Which was how she knew she had ten seconds left to get in one more good punch, to the nose, nobody can ignore a broken nose, which she threw with maybe a little more juice on it because why not, one last good punch, why not give it more of the juice, but which — to her surprise — didn’t connect because the girl got lucky. The one-armed freak’s one arm caught the punch midpunch and wouldn’t let go, no matter how strongly Jasmine wrenched, no matter that she practically flung Sarah across the room. The arm — that fucking mechanical arm — wouldn’t let go of her arm. Who knows how long it would have held on if Mr. Niles and Henry hadn’t shown up, shut everything down, separated Jasmine and Sarah, pulled them away. Even Sarah didn’t know. The last Sarah heard from Jasmine, as Henry pulled her down the hall, was, “You got lucky, freak, but not next time. Not so lucky next time.”

But it wasn’t luck.

Watching the video of it all later while in bed, feeling sore and trampled, Sarah saw just how well Jasmine had set her up. She saw, or didn’t see, the punch that started it all, saw her own leg-sweep that came out of nowhere, seemingly unprovoked, saw how quick and fluid Jasmine was, and realized how much she’d underestimated these women.

All of this was secondary information, though, was background noise to what she couldn’t figure out no matter how many times she rewatched the video.

How had she caught that punch?

Jasmine had hit her three times, had thrown her forward onto her knees with those punches, and she had a clear shot at Sarah’s face, Sarah too dazed and winded and in pain to even think of defending herself, but despite what Jasmine thought or said, catching that punch had had nothing to do with luck, had had nothing to do with her, had had everything to do with her mechanical arm, which had moved on its own, had surprised Sarah as much as it had surprised Jasmine.

Had surprised her and, now that she had watched it happen again and again, frightened her, too.

Frightened her not a little bit.

44

Sarah waited for something to happen, for anything to happen. For Mr. Niles to bust in and save her. For Wendy to come in and ridicule her. Anything would have been better than sitting tied up in this chair, with all these men with guns outside the door, and wondering just how many bones of hers were broken. A lot of bones. A lot of things must have been broken about her, she thought, for her to feel the way she felt, which was not good.

She wondered what they planned to do with her. She wondered why they hadn’t simply killed her yet. Any hope that they’d be able to use her to their own ends or that they’d be able to turn her to their side should have been well done away with by now.

What with the hostage situation and how she had handled all of that.

What with how she had screamed out over and over again as they dragged her away that she would find who was behind all of this and destroy that person and then find every single last one of them, too, find them no matter where they hid, no matter what they tried to do to escape, that she would have her vengeance on their very souls if necessary.

She had screamed a lot of things. None of them very pleasant.

She wondered when they’d come back in here and whether it would be the small quiet one who came in here, who was methodical and almost tender about his painful administrations, or the loud, big one, who was brash energy and uncaring force. She wondered what it meant that she was trying to decide between the two of them, which one she liked more (the big one).

If she had her mechanical arm, she thought, she would be out of these ropes in seconds, in nanoseconds.

If she were one of the girls, one of the Operatives, she thought.

But this thought, futile as it was, was interrupted when Wendy stepped into the office.

Fucking Wendy, the fucking intern.

45

A week after the fight with Jasmine, Henry stopped Sarah in the hallway, took her gently but firmly by the elbow. Her body was still sore from her scrape with Jasmine and she flinched at his touch and he let her go, an apology in his eyes.

“I know what you’re going to say,” Sarah said.

“I doubt it,” Henry said.

“It wasn’t me. I didn’t start that fight.”

Henry gave her scoffing eyes. “Of course you didn’t.” He shook his head. “The flip of your hair, the look in your eyes. Not to mention, Jasmine fights dirty. It’s what she’s good at and everyone knows it.”

“I didn’t.”

Henry shrugged. Shrugging seemed to be his default reaction to just about anything Sarah said. “Come with me,” he said.

“Where are we going?” she said, and when he didn’t answer and didn’t let go of her arm, she said, “Where are you taking me?”

“Out,” Henry said. “It’s the end of the road, you’re off the team, kid.”

Sarah stopped; Henry reached for her wrist; she yanked her arm free from Henry’s grip. “What?” she said. “You’re joking. I’m off the team?”

“Christ, O’Hara,” he said, and then turned and kept walking. “Where’s your sense of humor?” He stopped and turned and said, “Well? You coming or not?”

“Tell me where we’re going.”

He shrugged. “My office. Is that acceptable? Can we go? Can you walk a little faster?” And when he turned again, she jogged to catch up.

Henry’s office looked like the office of a crazy person.

“This isn’t your office,” Sarah said.

“And by the way,” Henry said, ignoring her. “You’re not on the team. You’re a client.”

Henry barely glanced at her as he stepped over and around piles and stacks of papers and files, empty printer boxes, pieces of gray Styrofoam, an old tube TV set with a VCR embedded in the front of it, to get to the only free chair, which might have been behind the desk or on the other side of the desk, Sarah couldn’t tell, because she wasn’t even sure it was a desk.

“This is the office of a crazy person,” she said.

“No arguments there.” He reached under his desk and lifted — with some effort — a battered and heavily taped cardboard box labeled “Lamps, Kitchen Supplies, Plunger,” and set it, tilting to the left, on top of the stacks of paper and files and photographs on his desk.

“Has anyone else seen this office?” Sarah said. “I mean, like, Mr. Niles? He doesn’t mind that this is an office?”

Henry opened the box and nodded at it. “Well,” he said. “There you go. Have a look, go ahead, take your time.”

Sarah stood in the doorway, mostly because she didn’t see many places she could go.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, just move shit around,” he said.

Sarah scanned the area right in front of her but couldn’t see what was movable and what should be left in place.

“Jesus,” Henry said. Then he shoved his desk forward and there followed a chain reaction of shifting masses that toppled piles left and right, a slip-slide of paper off chairs and the desk. Sarah thought of domino chains cascading down but then reconsidered. Domino chains are exacting and deliberate, are meticulous, which Henry’s office was anything but. Instead, she thought of a mudslide, like the kind that threatened Los Angeles, everything full of sensitive and unpredictable threat.

Somehow, he cleared a patch of floor in front of his desk and then tipped one of the other chairs — which she hadn’t seen the first time around — back just enough to let the folders and books slide off it, and he dropped that chair in the almost cleared spot, its two back legs wobbly on a half-empty box of Pendaflex folders, and then he patted the seat and said, “There.”

Then he stood up to better look inside his box and flipped through folders, pulling them out and tossing them into Sarah’s lap once she had sat down.

“This isn’t all of them, but you don’t need all of them.”

“What are they?”

He sighed, stopped, looked up at her. “Don’t ask me questions you can easily answer for yourself. You’re smarter than that.” Then he went back to his box.

Sarah opened the folder on top and then held it above her lap, since Henry hadn’t stopped tossing new folders onto the pile growing there.

On the first folder was a name — Jasmine — followed by: “Weaknesses & Threats.”

46

Even with her eyes closed, even pretending to sleep, Sarah could tell it was Wendy by her perfume. Not that she knew what kind of perfume Wendy wore but by the simple fact that there was perfume and that it was so strong.

“We know you’re awake,” Wendy said in the voice she had once reserved for intern Jacob. “You can stop pretending because we know.”

Sarah wasn’t surprised it had been Wendy when it turned out to be Wendy.

Okay, so maybe she had been very surprised, but she shouldn’t have been, and that was just as close, right?

The thing was, she had liked Wendy.

Sarah wished she hadn’t liked Wendy, who had tried so hard to be Sarah’s friend, had tried to get into her good graces. And maybe Sarah shouldn’t have fallen for this kind of thing, maybe she had let herself believe that Wendy wanted her as a mentor and potentially, long-term speaking, a friend. Maybe Mr. Niles had been less attentive, less present, and maybe Henry had been acting weird since Emma was killed in the field, and maybe Sarah had been tired of being left out by the other girls. Nobody could blame her for being susceptible to the flattery and attentions of a pretty, intelligent, hardworking intern who, sure, maybe wanted a leg up in the hiring process after her internship, but that hadn’t meant she wasn’t also sincere in her desire to be Sarah’s friend.

And so, yes, maybe Sarah had made efforts to take Wendy “under her wing” so to speak, offered her special attention, commended her on a job well done when it had been a job well done and sometimes even when it had been a job done only so-so, had offered her advice and brown-bag lunch dates in her office, practiced writing her letters of recommendation.

In hindsight, Sarah felt foolish. Even Sarah, desperate-for-human-contact Sarah, should have seen how naked these machinations were. Making a connection with Wendy had been too easy, way too easy, and Sarah knew herself well enough to know that she didn’t make connections that easily. Even in college, even with other difficult-to-connect-with mathematicians and physicists, she didn’t make connections, and so, connecting as easily as she had with Wendy, Sarah should have realized the wrongness of the connection and should have stopped liking Wendy, stopped offering her praise for her work, stopped thinking of her as a protégé, a future friend.

Well, Sarah had stopped now.

Sarah kept her eyes closed. She continued to pretend to be asleep. This infuriated Wendy, Sarah knew it did.

She could hear it in Wendy’s sigh.

“I’ll just have someone come in here and cut your eyelids off,” she said, disgusted that it had come to such threats. “I mean, for Christ’s sake, we took your arm off. What’s a pair of eyelids?”

Sarah threw in a snuffle and a hitching half snore for good measure.

“Funny,” Wendy said.

Then she said, “We all thought it was fake, you know.”

Sarah imagined Wendy’s face as she said this. Imagined her pouty face, which, in Sarah’s mind, wouldn’t be so pouty when it was smashed with her mechanical arm.

If only she’d had her mechanical arm.

“Not that the real thing did you any good, I suppose,” she said. “But we had a pool going, did you know that? We all made bets and we all lost.”

Wendy knocked something hard against the office desk. “It’s heavier than I thought it’d be.”

Sarah knew she was lying, knew that no matter what, Wendy was a lying bitch who would never, ever, not in a million years, bring the mechanical arm with her to interrogate or harass her.

Sarah knew this. She’d have been a fool to think otherwise, and Sarah — despite what people might have thought or said — was no fool.

“Simpler on the inside, once we took off all the skin. Simpler than I imagined it would be.” She rapped it against the desk again. “Whoops,” she said. “Fragile, too.”

Sarah opened her eyes.

She was the biggest fool she knew.

Wendy was holding a broomstick in her hand, rapping it against the desk. She smiled.

“Made you look,” she said. She laughed at her own joke, despite how sad and lame and unfunny it was.

Or maybe it wasn’t the joke Wendy was laughing at.

Then Wendy’s face changed. Like a ripple, the face shifted into a serious, very serious, face, but not pouty serious, which was a kind of face Sarah was accustomed to seeing on Wendy, not that, but something else, a dangerous kind of serious, which was a look Sarah had seen a number of times but never on Wendy. Never on Wendy or Henry or Mr. Niles or the Oracles, either, who were generally blank faced or smiling in their bald, creepy oracular way.

No. Wendy had a face all of a sudden that she shouldn’t have had.

She had the face of an Operative, not one of their own Operatives, obviously, but the same kind of very dangerous face of one of the very dangerous Operatives.

“We gave you a choice,” she said. “We made a reasonable — a more than reasonable — offer to you,” she said. She said this softly and almost as much to herself as to Sarah. She was trying to make it seem like there was something regrettable in what had happened so far, what was about to happen. Sarah couldn’t tell with Wendy what was real and what was an act, not anymore.

Then the face, that look, was gone and the pouty serious face was back, but Sarah couldn’t get the other face out of her head and she knew that Wendy had just done something, something deliberate to frighten Sarah, and Sarah wished she could tell herself that it hadn’t worked, but it had.

“Okay,” Wendy said, in a way that might have been the way a head cheerleader said it when her other cheerleaders had been goofing off or talking for too long about boys or had been on a bathroom break and it was time to get back to the hard work of cheerleading again. “Fun time’s over.” Said it in that bright, chipper high school girlish way, and then she closed the office door and lowered the office blinds and she waded into the deep end of Sarah’s despair, waded in there and did her best to make it deeper.

47

Jasmine wore glasses and was only five feet three inches tall, and her right arm was slower than her left and she was dyslexic.

Corrine suffered from painful and unpredictable and lengthy periods, arbitrary and violent, lasting weeks at a time.

Joan refused to brush her teeth or visit the staff dentist and chewed gum incessantly.

Veronica spooned two bites of food into her mouth at every meal before drenching her plate in salt while no one was looking.

Maddie drank a bottle of whiskey each night after returning home from assignment.

Erin took pills. Every kind of pill.

Eden cut herself with whatever sharp piece of metal she could find, literally, carrying in her mouth a tiny blade stripped from a razor or a thumbtack swiped from the office or the coiled jagged spring from a ballpoint pen, worming it deeper and deeper into her cheek, her tongue, the soft tissue connecting her tongue to her jaw.

These girls, Sarah thought. These poor girls and their powers and what their powers did to them.

Teri bound herself into her bed. Thick, leather, medical, insane-asylum straps bound.

Ruby punched her fist through piles of cinder blocks after each assignment, punched until her knuckles bled.

Rebecca had killed herself.

Serena and Hazel and the other Rebecca and Camille and Alyssa and Hannah and Anne-Michelle died, died, died, died, were killed in action, were killed in the field long before the Regional Office, before Henry had a chance to figure out what secrets they hid, what instabilities they manifested.

Henry had given her more files, more folders for her to read, but she stopped. She just stopped.

48

After the pool incident, a final confrontation between her and Jasmine was bound to happen. Sarah knew. She’d seen enough movies, read enough Gossip Girl novels to know that sooner or later, she and Jasmine would lock horns again. And, well, she’d rather have had it happen on her own terms, by her own doing, and would rather have stopped feeling so tense and anxious about when it would happen. So Sarah made it happen on her own.

She watched Jasmine’s comings and goings, waited for a moment when she would be by herself, and then Sarah jumped her.

That had been ten minutes ago. Their fight had lasted now for ten full minutes. It wasn’t going well.

It wasn’t going as badly as anyone who was not Sarah might have expected, considering.

But it wasn’t going as well as Sarah had hoped it would.

Sarah pulled her fist back to punch or counterpunch — she’d lost track by then who was punching, who was countering — but Jasmine was too fast, always too fast, and she bobbed under Sarah’s punch and slipped in close and grabbed Sarah with both hands, trapping Sarah’s arms at her sides, and lifted her off her feet, but instead of throwing her or cracking her head into the ceiling tiles, Jasmine pulled her down and held her so they were eye to eye. A thin trickle of blood ran down Jasmine’s temple. Sarah’s breath was huffed and squeezed out of her. Jasmine grimaced and Sarah struggled against Jasmine’s grip, and Jasmine smiled, and Sarah winced her eyes closed, expected the worst. And Jasmine pulled her in for a kiss.

A deep one.

It was almost painful, this kiss, full of a force that Sarah couldn’t have said for certain was passion or anger or whether in that moment there was even a difference, but there it was, a kiss, unexpected and not altogether unpleasant but not exactly pleasant, either.

Then Jasmine broke the kiss and Sarah had a hitch in her chest, had to scramble to get herself breathing.

Jasmine butted her in the head and threw her backward and Sarah landed hard on her ass.

And then Jasmine was laughing, but Sarah couldn’t tell if it was real laughter, and she said, “Hey, okay, all right, okay, I get it, I get it, and maybe if you weren’t a robot, maybe something, maybe we could have had something here, but it can’t be. I’m sorry. It just can’t.” She turned and started walking away. “I mean, a girl and a robot who might also be a girl?” She turned down another hall but Sarah could still hear her. “Nobody would accept us, we’d have to live alone together in the woods, it would be too hard, just. Too. Damn. Hard.” And then either she stopped with her joke or she had finally walked far enough away that Sarah couldn’t hear her anymore.

But after that, Jasmine and the rest of them just kind of ignored her. They didn’t accept her, but they left her alone, and that was something, right?

49

Sarah had lost hope. After the assault, after her arm, after the hostages, after Wendy. What else could she do but let go of hope?

It was one thing to hold on to hope in the face of great danger and an uncertain future, but in the face of great danger and a fairly certain future? A fairly certain future and an already painful present?

In the face of all that, hope slipped away.

She wasn’t proud of herself, but she didn’t hold it against herself, either.

Her shoulders slumped, insofar as they could slump, the ropes having been tied around her pretty tightly so that even slumping seemed a restricted activity.

Her sigh was a resigned-to-her-fate kind of sigh.

She had lost. The Regional Office had lost. If Mr. Niles wasn’t yet dead, if Oyemi wasn’t found and murdered, she knew that they soon would be and that there was nothing she could do for any of them or about any of it.

It was sad, the thought. Sad that it took them less than a day, less than half a day, to break her down, but break her down they had, and kudos to them for knowing exactly how.

She would never rescue Mr. Niles from the clutches of evil.

She would never sit at his desk, handed control of the Regional Office, once he stepped down as director.

She would wait here in this chair, bound by these ropes, and that was about the end of that.

A small voice in her head yelled out one last gasping, I will get free from these ropes, you motherfuckers, but she tamped that voice down, shushed it, quieted it, gently stroked its forehead until it became calm and compliant, because she’d been beaten, and having been beaten, now all she wanted was for it to end, for all of it to end.

She was tired and weepy and afraid.

And then things went black. She wasn’t sure what it meant, but things going black seemed to implicate an end to things.

“Oh, good,” she said. “About time,” she said.

Except everything went black. Not just the office. She could see through the blinds and the cracks at the top of the blinds that the whole floor, maybe the entire building, had gone black, too.

It’s a trick, she thought.

Then the screaming. Then the screaming began.

But actually, there had been shouts before, shouts when the lights had shut off, when the power had gone down, but she had figured those shouts had been part of the game, part of the trick. One more way of fucking with poor one-armed Sarah! She tried to convince herself the same about the screaming, but the screaming seemed different.

The screaming sounded urgent and fearful and full of pain.

Fake, she thought. Fake fear. Fake urgency. Fake pain.

But the sound of pain, and Sarah could attest to this in a firsthand kind of way, the sound of pain was a sound that was difficult to adequately fake.

And for a second, Sarah considered maybe there was a chance, a small chance, a very small chance that something was happening. That whoever (Mr. Niles?) had been maneuvering through the building in a deadly and secret way had finally made his way to the real action, had dispensed with enough teams to make a play for a full-out rescue.

“I know this is a trick,” she yelled. She was beyond pretending that they weren’t getting to her.

“I know you fucking assholes are just trying to fucking trick me,” she yelled. “Stop trying to trick me,” she said, quieter now. Under her breath. The only one who could hear her over the shouts and gunshots and the screams and small explosions was her.

What was going on out there? she wondered.

50

“How was it for you growing up?” Mr. Niles asked. He said this as offhandedly as he could, as if he were asking her if she’d pass him some salt or the ketchup please, but she could tell he was tense, was listening intently for her answer.

They’d just finished a lunch meet: new Recruits, operations pipeline, department budgets, typical stuff.

“It was fine,” she said. But he wanted more, and she didn’t know what it was.

Before, when people found out about her mother, they wanted details, wanted to hear Sarah’s theories, wanted to tell her their own theories, wanted to feel part of but separate from what seemed to them an unfathomable childhood trauma. Sarah would never have accused them of being jealous of her, but there was a want there, a desire of some kind for a tragic history on that scale that they could call their own.

But that wouldn’t be what Mr. Niles was after. He already knew the details of her tragedy, had known them better than she had, nor was he the type to need or want a vicarious tragedy to live through, and even if he harbored such a desire, he had at his fingertips this very thing on a whole different level, as Sarah had discovered reading through Henry’s files on the Operatives.

Then, not sure if this was what he wanted to hear or not, she said, “Normal, really.”

He relaxed. “Normal?”

“Sure,” she said. “I mean, people always think of kids as super sensitive, or intuitive, or something like that, and they are, to a point, but also they’re still people. Like, once, I tried out for drill team, I was in ninth grade? And I didn’t make it, and all these friends of mine did, and I went home, and as soon as I saw my aunt, I started crying, just fell to pieces, and she tried to comfort me, told me what you tell people, you know, Sorry, I know you wanted this, you did your best, maybe next year, but then, you know, she was also like, It’ll be okay, it’s not the end of the world, and I took all of this in and blew up at her. She didn’t understand! What did she know about it! It was the worst day of my life! And she gave me a look. She didn’t say anything, just gave me this look, but I knew. I could tell what she was trying to say, and I told her, Yeah, worse than that day, and then I called her a bitch and locked myself in my bathroom, except it was the only bathroom, and I just stayed in there for hours, so long that my aunt had to go across the hall to use the neighbor’s bathroom.” She sighed. “So, yeah, just your typical teenage nightmare.”

“Maybe you were acting out, though,” he said.

“That’s what my aunt said, and I let her believe that because it made her go easy on me, but, no. I was just really upset about drill team — I mean, everybody was on drill team — and then I punished her for not being as upset as me.” Sarah shook her head and laughed. “My poor aunt. She didn’t want kids, mostly because she didn’t want teenagers, but she tried her best. I was in the bathroom for hours and I must have painted and repainted my toenails fifty times, and every time she knocked on that door, I’d pretend to sob even louder, but that was too much work after a while, so then I pretended I had fallen asleep in there.”

“So. Normal,” he said.

“Pretty much,” she said, and he laughed, and after that he treated her with a more casual touch, seemed to need to protect her less than before, and once she realized this, she wished she had lied.

51

And then the door busted open and a flash of light broke through the darkness and something in the office caught fire and by the firelight Sarah could see the thing that had busted the door open, which was one of the guys who’d been holding everyone hostage, except not anymore because he was dead. Sarah couldn’t tell if he was dead because he’d been thrown hard enough into the door to bust it open, or if he had been dead even before he’d been thrown into the door.

But really, that wasn’t her biggest concern.

What the hell was going on was her biggest concern. When were they going to stop fooling around and just put her out of her misery was her biggest concern.

The dead guy, though. The dead guy through the door spoke to either the team’s commitment to this trick they were trying to play on her, or the more likely explanation, the explanation she’d been fighting against since the power had shut off in the first place, the one she was still fighting against now because once you had lost hope, once you had resigned yourself to things not going your way, you found yourself more than a little skeptical of the notion you’d been wrong and that things would in fact go your way, but still. The dead guy on the floor seemed to point to the notion that this was not a trick and that she was going to be saved.

Sarah closed her eyes. She opened her eyes again. The pile of papers was still on fire, though the fire was petering out. The dead guy was still dead on the floor.

She closed her eyes again. She grabbed a hunk of her cheek with her teeth, her jagged, no-longer-really-there teeth, and bit hard, and opened her eyes again, and again saw the fire, again the dead guy, and it all seemed unreal, this tableau broken occasionally by the flash of gunfire, the glow of another small fire in the distance. She stared at the guy on the floor and the fire and couldn’t stop staring.

Someone charged at her through the darkness and this brought her back into the moment. Someone with evil intent in his heart, she figured, or maybe Wendy, of whom Sarah now harbored a healthy fear.

The charging became louder and more urgent and then another body was thrown forward into the office, was thrown with great and terrible force, so that it wasn’t unlikely that the throw itself was the thing that killed the body that had been thrown.

But the throw wasn’t what killed the body.

What killed the body was still sticking out of the body’s back, which was what probably caused the blackout, too. She understood this now. The blackout, the screaming, the gunshots, the explosions, the chaos, the death and destruction of the teams who’d executed this assault on the Regional Office hadn’t been the handiwork of Mr. Niles or even Henry. All of that had been the handiwork, literally, of the thing that was currently sticking painfully and awkwardly out of the back of the new dead body on the ground in the office.

Which was a mechanical arm.

Which was, not to put too fine a point on it, her fucking mechanical arm. Which unmoored itself from the goon’s backside and surveyed the office and then saw — did it see? — then saw Sarah, saw her and locked itself, locked its seeing eye, wherever that might be, locked it dead onto Sarah.

And then it lunged. It lunged right for her.

~ ~ ~

From The Regional Office Is Under Attack:

Tracking the Rise and Fall of an American Institution

Then began a period of great success for the Regional Office. The first Oracle led Oyemi, within a week, to the next and then the third and final Oracle. The trio guided Oyemi to the first real Recruit — the young woman in Peoria did not pan out, though the record on why she did not pan out has been lost — a woman named Gemini (whose exploits, such as disrupting the Ring of Three and expanding her mouth into a vortex to swallow whole the swarm of bees set loose on Kansas by the warlock Harold Raines, and, ultimately, her death at the very hands of Harold Raines, can be read about to exhaustion in any number of other papers, as well as in the haphazard account of the Regional Office The Book of Gemini).

Soon after the recruitment of Gemini, the first full class of Recruits was brought in for training, resulting in a freshman class of Operatives that included Jasmine, the longest-standing field Operative in the history of the Regional Office. Shortly after, the Oracles led Mr. Niles to the discovery of Henry (already discussed at some length), after which Henry recruited his own class — the fifth and final class recruited under the umbrella of Oyemi and Mr. Niles — and found, hidden within that class, Emma.

By this point, the Regional Office had grown, had long since moved out of its humble offices in Queens to the building it occupied on the day of the attack in midtown Manhattan. Oyemi and Mr. Niles had enjoyed nearly unparalleled success with their venture. Certainly, the Regional Office was not the only organization of its kind. The city had long supported groups such as the Legion of Good, the Powerful Six, and Hammersmith’s Men, but nothing on the scale nor with the success of the Regional Office.

During this time, Jasmine came into her own, and while the most famous of the early Operatives, Gemini, had died, other formidable Operatives had joined the ranks of the Regional Office, most notably: Juneau, Robin Cueto, Kelly Shepherd. Together, these women saved the world from destruction, from self-annihilation, from the evil forces of darkness, from interdimensional war strikes, from alien forces. And standing out from this crowd of powerful women was Emma.

Of the ten missions most often attributed to the Golden Age of the Regional Office, Emma was responsible for the successful execution of six, including the retrieval of the Tremont Hotel from interdimensional, time-traveling assassins who intended to murder a future madame president by kidnapping and murdering her great-grandmother. (Granted, Jasmine played pivotal roles in all of these, but it is Jasmine’s sad fortune to have remained with the Regional Office through good and bad, and not planned for two years the destruction of Oyemi and the Regional Office, and far too often are her history and her contributions to the Regional Office overlooked.)

By this time, Oyemi had moved her side of the operations to her secret and remote compound in the Catskills and Mr. Niles had taken over as director of the Regional Office in Manhattan. The end of the world was thwarted time and again by the Regional Office over the course of this golden age, which lasted between five and five thousand years (the count varying depending on timelines and how one considers the actions of Operatives when those actions spanned space, time, and dimension). The forces of evil threatening at every turn the survival of the planet and the innocents living on it in blissful ignorance were often foiled multiple times in the span of one week. With the assistance of the Oracles, the trust fund left Oyemi by her great-uncle quadrupled, and soon after, the travel agency was formed and, much to everyone’s surprise, added its own profit to the accounts.

By practically every metric conceivable, the Regional Office had arrived, its Operatives had never been stronger, its missions never more dangerous, and the whole thing could not be stopped.

And then, almost without warning, it all came to an end.

The beginning of the end of the Regional Office can be summed up thusly:

A man fell in love with a woman.

The same can be said of almost any iconic tragedy—The Aeneid, The Iliad, Romeo and Juliet.

The fall of the Regional Office.

More specifically:

Henry fell in love with Emma.

Then Emma was marked for death by Oyemi via the predictions of the Oracles.

And Oyemi, either through ignorance or a cold sense of fate, told Henry to kill Emma.

More specifically still:

One day, Henry slipped into his car to drive home at the end of a normal day. He turned the key in the ignition. He switched off his stereo because sometimes he just wanted the sound of the wheels on the road, the bumps and skips of the tires rolling across the uneven pavement. He checked his rearview mirror. He shifted down to reverse, and then he passed out.

He came to in a chair in an office with a mineral water in his hand.

“Hello, Henry,” Oyemi said, her voice coming from behind him. “I hope water is okay. If not, I can get you something else.”

He paused, but for just a second, and then said, “Water’s fine,” because it was the only concrete thing he could land on. Of course he’d met Oyemi. She’d been there when Mr. Niles had hired him, and he had seen her a few other times, but those meetings had all been brief, officious, and not nearly as unsettling as this one.

Oyemi walked around and sat against the desk in front of him.

“Usually,” she said, “I like to play a little game.” She nodded at the water in his hand. “Make the person in that chair think they’ve been here for a while, have been discussing important things with me all this time, and only just woke up at the very end.”

Henry looked at her but didn’t know what to say or that there was anything he should say.

“You know,” she said. “You’re in the chair, you’ve got a drink in your hand, you wake up, and I’m sitting or standing across from you, saying something like”—she waved her hand and shrugged her shoulders—“‘I hope you understand, the fate of the agency rests on your shoulders now.’ Or, ‘I’m glad we agree on this,’ or, if I’m in a mood, I might say something like, ‘I’m sorry to hear that’s how you feel.’ Something like that.”

“Ah,” Henry said.

“I know,” she said, and sighed. “It loses something in translation. It’s funny. Trust me.” Then she said, “You ruined it, though. You woke up too soon.”

“Sorry,” he said, because whatever he might not have known about Oyemi, he was fairly certain that you didn’t want to ruin anything for her.

She waved off his apology. “Just me, wasting time.” She paused. “Avoiding bad news, too. That’s part of it. I hate giving people bad news.”

Henry cleared his throat. The glass in his hand seemed heavier all of a sudden. “News?”

“And then, too, this game, this trick, it lets me say something true, something real, and then pass it off as a joke, you know, like, ‘Fate of the agency rests in your hands,’ and so on, and then it feels less serious when I tell someone, ‘No, in fact, what I said was true.’”

“I’m sorry,” Henry said. “I’m a little lost.”

She smiled. People who said Oyemi had an unsettling smile didn’t know from unsettling smiles.

“The fate of the agency,” she said, still smiling.

Her smile was predatory and ever widening. She contained in her mouth, as far as he could tell from various furtive glances, the normal amount of teeth, but after every meeting with her, he came away with the sense that her mouth had been full of teeth, rows and rows of teeth, sharp and blunt alike, but too many.

“The fate of the entire Regional Office and all it stands for and all it does, in fact, depends on you.” Oyemi looked at her hands, now folded in front of her. “On you, Henry.” Then she looked up at him and smiled again and he wished she would stop smiling. Then she said, “And here’s why.”

Henry knew little about the Oracles, their origin, their design, how accurate their predictions were. They’d been moved out of the city and to Oyemi’s compound shortly after he’d been hired. Their messages were cryptic, delivered from the Oracles to a team of analysts — the channelers — who ran analytics, cross-checked predictions and world events on various spreadsheets. It was a mystery to him but he hadn’t ever cared how it — or the entire system — worked. He received assignments by way of a channeler from the Oracles. Girls to pick up. The wheres and whens but little else.

By whatever means, assignments landed in his inbox and that was all that mattered to him.

“They do more than just hand down your recruiting assignments,” Oyemi explained. “Their first order of business, in fact, is to scan through all time and all reality for threats to the Regional Office. They’re our first line of defense,” she said. “And they’ve singled out a threat,” she said. Then she paused and leaned in closer. “And that threat is right here. In the agency. Even as we speak.”

Henry gauged the distance between him and Oyemi, between him and the door, tried to predict how many guards were outside this office — maybe none, Oyemi being what she was — tried to calculate the possibility and probability of the various bad scenarios laid out before him — punch Oyemi in the neck and then run for it, or just run for it, or just punch Oyemi in the neck and then try to kill her — but finally, he exhausted the options, decided none of them were good, that none of them would save him, and so he stayed in his seat.

Oyemi watched him through all of this — no more than a second or two — and then smiled when she saw him relax, resign himself, and then laughed and said, “Not you, Henry.” Then she frowned and looked at her hands, her fingers. “Worse,” she said. Then she looked back up at him. “One of the girls,” she said. “One of our girls.”

“The girls?” he asked. He stared at her for a minute, tried to picture one of his Recruits betraying the Regional Office but couldn’t. “No,” he said. “No.” Then: “Which one?”

She knelt in front of him and placed her hands on his knees and looked earnestly into his eyes and said, “I’m glad you asked.”

She didn’t know. She had received some flimflam from the Oracles — it would take Henry some time to uncover exactly what the Oracles had told Oyemi, namely: The one who once loved will one day destroy that which was once loved, and so on — and from this, from this small ambiguous prediction, he was supposed to single out the Operative poised to destroy Oyemi and the Regional Office. That was now his job. He was supposed to help Oyemi find the girl who would betray Regional.

“How?” he asked. “How am I supposed to do that?”

“Get close to them,” she told him, and he thought of Emma, and he thought, I am, I am close to them. “Learn what they’re up to, their secrets, their desires.”

Maybe she saw his look, a skeptical look, because she said, “You won’t be alone. We’ll be here to help,” she said. “The Oracles. Me. Make new files for each girl. Photos, dossiers. Pass them to one of my men, and I will work with the Oracles and we will figure this out together. I promise. We will.”

Only in hindsight did Henry realize there had been something pleading to her voice, her argument, as if she needed him, specifically, and as if he had any choice but to say yes.

As Oyemi instructed, he took photographs and built secret dossiers and case files for every working operative, for all the new Recruits.

He didn’t like the work.

Sure, he’d made his own secret personnel files on them all, but with the express intention of making him better at his job, as their trainer, their Recruiter.

He had made first contact with these women, had performed the collection of them from foster homes or juvenile detention centers, from in-the-middle-of-nowhere town squares and suburban McMansions, from trailer homes at the edge of swamps. He had overseen and led their training, and he felt connected to these women, who were, in turn, connected to him, or so he’d long believed.

Most saw him as a brother. They told him things. They cried in his arms, and only in his arms. To cry in anyone else’s arms would have risked discovery, risked the admission that inside them there still lived something frail and vulnerable and human. And so, while the betrayal of the Regional Office was as much a betrayal of him and his life’s work, to suspect any of these girls felt like an even worse betrayal of a friendship, a relationship.

Henry didn’t like sneaking about and taking photographs of them moving through their days just to pass this information on to Oyemi. After a few weeks, though, the new task felt like any other part of his job because that was how things worked no matter who you were, no matter what you did. Not to mention, none of what he’d done seemed to matter. He collected information and passed it on to a man working for Oyemi, but he never received any feedback, never heard anything about the files he put together, the photographs he took, and soon he forgot about the true nature of all he’d been doing.

Then, less than three months later, Henry walked into his office and found Oyemi there waiting for him, Oyemi who never came to the Manhattan office, who worked and lived in the secret compound upstate.

“You can put away your camera, Henry,” she said. “We’ve found her.”