The Regional Office Is Under Attack!

52

It felt good. Sarah could admit that it felt very good to lay waste in this way, her mechanical arm taking on a life of its own, taking over in the heat of the moment.

Felt good to let go.

For once, God, to really just let go.

Not that she wasn’t sad.

Seeing Mr. Niles there in his office, which was the first place she went once her arm had found her, seeing him ruined, cut in two, seeing him like that made her sad.

She’d give her sadness the time it deserved, but not now.

Right now it felt very very good to simply follow after her mechanical arm as it did things that amazed even her.

Finding her and reattaching itself to her shoulder for one. That was pretty fucking amazing.

Escaping its captors, and wending its way through the labyrinth of the Regional Office, all the while laying waste to any man, woman, or machine that stood in its way, only to seek her out as if it were some long-loved loyal pet traveling alone across the vast American landscape to find its master.

She certainly hadn’t thought her mechanical arm could have done that.

She punched her fist through the face of one of the goons. Clean through it.

She heard the peripheral sound of gunshots — with all the noise and commotion, every sound seemed peripheral — and had barely a chance to turn before her mechanical arm reacted — faster than she could have ever reacted — swiveling around with the man’s face still hanging from its wrist, swiveling and then moving herky-jerky style in what seemed a random pattern and she didn’t know what the arm was doing until it shook loose the poor man’s head and held up its open palm for her to see the bullets it had caught, to show her what it had done like a cat presenting her a mouse.

Then the mechanical fist closed and she pivoted and threw the bullets, threw them like she was an outfielder throwing from deep center, threw as hard as she could, which, because of her arm, was harder than what was humanly possible. She threw the bullets and four more men fell.

She grinned.

This is how it begins, she thought.

My life, my real life, she thought. It begins like this.

53

Inside the package that had been hot-glued to the inside of her door had been a letter, but if anyone were to ask her when it was all said and done, How did you know, what clued you in, what intel had you obtained? she would say, Chatter, a lot of chatter, or, A sense, I simply had a sense, or, Mr. Niles, Mr. Niles knew something big was coming and he had set me on this weeks ago, months ago, and even still, I figured it out only as it was happening. She would say this and not worry that anyone would discover otherwise because Mr. Niles would be dead by then, because Wendy, too, Wendy would be gone, and because the letter, which she had read so many times that she had memorized it, had been destroyed. By Sarah. Sarah had burned the letter in a metal bowl in her kitchen only just before she left to come to work that same morning.

54

Sarah hadn’t been prepared: for the bursting forth of power, for the connectedness. She hadn’t been prepared for the sense, though she wouldn’t ever tell anyone this, that there had been something emotional to this connection, that there had been something almost sentient.

She had felt an explosion of joy when her arm attached itself back to her shoulder. Joy that had come not just from herself but from the arm, too, but not just joy, not something just so simple as joy.

Anyone could feel joy.

She had felt another sense. She had felt something akin to completeness, or near completeness, or the promise of one day becoming complete.

A warm, almost liquid feeling had rushed over her. It began at her neck and shoulders and cascaded down like a blanket of warm, soapy water. And it had been too much. She’d admit that — to herself if no one else — that it was all a little too much. She’d doubled over, fallen into a sobbing, hiccupping fit, as if only when the arm had come back to her had she been able to understand just how ruined and alone and incomplete she’d been without it. In the middle of a pitched battle, in the middle of the destruction of the Regional Office, she had doubled over and wept.

And the arm had let her weep. It was as if the arm saw what she was experiencing, understood instinctively what she needed right at that moment, and told her, Go ahead.

Told her, Take a moment. That’s fine. Take your moment, get it all out of your system, let yourself go.

Told her, It’s okay. I’ve got this. It’s a-okay.

She couldn’t say what the arm did exactly while she was doubled over, sobbing into her shirt, but when she came to, she was surrounded by bodies, six of them, that hadn’t been there just a minute ago.

55

She grabbed a guy who might not even have been one of the guys, but by this point, did it matter? She grabbed this guy and threw him headfirst through a cubicle wall and maybe she heard his neck snap or maybe it was the wall that snapped, and then, it was over.

The assault on the Regional Office was over. There was no one left. He had been the last guy.

Or there were people left, but they were the women, the Operatives.

When did they get here? she wondered. Have they been here the whole time?

Later, she would learn that they’d been summoned. Someone (or something?) had summoned them all back home. They hadn’t known why until they’d arrived and realized what was going on and then took up the fight.

But for now, all she knew was that they were here. They were breathing hard and were bent over, catching their breath. Katie touched her left cheek, which had a long flap of skin flapping off it. They were torn up but they were professionals. She could say that much about them. They didn’t stand around in a daze, looking for someone to tell them it was over, the day had been saved. They figured it out, or they knew it instinctively, and then they started to clean up, attended to the hostages, attended to the Regional Office, or what was left of it.

Sarah told Jasmine about Mr. Niles. How she had arrived too late to save Mr. Niles. She didn’t tell her how she had wanted to cry at the sight of him, split in two, how she had wanted to cry, to slide to her knees in between the two halves of him and sob in her hands, how she had started to do this, in fact, had started falling forward, stricken at the sight of him, but that her knees wouldn’t bend her to the ground, no matter how hard she tried, she could only stand there, and that before she was ready, her body turned on its own, turned and began to run, run from his office and run to the floor where the fighting was going on, how her body had abandoned not just Mr. Niles there but also her own commands, had left them behind, had obeyed some other commands.

Instead, she asked Jasmine to go see to Mr. Niles, to cover him up, that at least.

She and Jasmine still did not always get on. Jasmine liked to ask questions, liked to question anything Sarah said, liked to make sure that Sarah and everyone else knew, even after all of these years, that Sarah was not her boss, liked to imply that, mechanical arm or no, right-hand man to Mr. Niles or whatever, she didn’t take orders from Sarah and only rarely took requests.

Sarah didn’t know what to expect, then, when she asked Jasmine to see to Mr. Niles.

But Jasmine didn’t ask questions. Didn’t argue or pout or roll her eyes. Didn’t move around like a robot behind Sarah’s back, which she had been known to do. Jasmine only nodded and placed her hand gently on Sarah’s arm, and didn’t say anything, and then left to see to Mr. Niles.

56

Dear Ms. O’Hara, the letter read.

We are writing to you out of respect, out of respect and out of a sense of some obligation, obligation to you, and maybe out of not a little guilt, guilt not for what we have done or what we are about to do, but for what we have — until now — failed to do, which is to tell you the truth about your employer, to tell you these truths, and then to offer you a way out, or not just out, because what good is it to you to simply have a way out, and so also a way forward.

We are offering you this: a way forward.

57

It was a confusing time, the two weeks following the assault.

Henry was still missing. The security director was dead — they found him in his apartment, executed by the looks of it. Oyemi’s compound had been burned practically to its foundation. It seemed safe to say that she was dead, the Oracles, too, whose charred remains had been discovered at the bottom of their now-empty pool, the heat and power of the fire having cleared the strange blue liquid from the basin.

One of the Operatives had found them when they went up to check on the Catskills compound and had called Sarah into the chamber where their pool had been. The bodies, burned beyond recognition, all looked the same. Sarah didn’t wonder which one of them had been her mother. Because of course she found the files, after all the dust settled and after she settled herself into Mr. Niles’s office and looked through his files. She found the records verifying what she had learned in the envelope taped to her door that night before the attack. She knew what had really happened to her mother, and of course she felt betrayed by it all. Oddly, though, she didn’t feel betrayed by Mr. Niles. She should have, on some level she knew she should have blamed him, but she didn’t. He’d been a young man, a foolish and young man, when that had all happened. He had been swayed by Oyemi, and what good would it do to hold a grudge against a dead man anyway?

No good. It would do no good.

And so the betrayal she felt was aimed at whoever sent her the envelope in the first place, and no matter, standing there in front of the charred corpses of the Oracles, she certainly didn’t try to imagine one of them with her mother’s face. Because why would she have? What would she have gained by doing anything so sentimental and ridiculous as gently touching each corpse on its charred forehead, by whispering I love you and I’m sorry to each one in turn, by trying to picture each body, not as it had been before the fire, because the Oracles had never looked like her mother, had always looked only like Oracles, bald and tinted by the light of the milky-blue water they were submerged in, but by trying to picture each with her mother’s face, her mother’s smile, her mother’s mousy, shoulder-length hair?

Would she have gotten her mother back?

Would the past seventeen years of her life have been any different?

“I’ve got it from here,” Sarah told the Operative, Jennifer or Jenny or Jenn, she couldn’t remember. The girl nodded and left Sarah to it and then Sarah stood there and stared at the dried-out pool and the blackened bodies, mostly skeletons now, and she waited for twenty minutes, for an hour, until finally Jasmine’s soft touch on her shoulder woke Sarah from whatever waking sleep she’d fallen into.

58

It was a confusing time and so no one really noticed, not the Operatives, not the remaining administrators, not the last recruitment specialist, not Sarah herself, that there was no one actually in charge of Regional anymore, or that quite by accident, being in charge of Regional had fallen to Sarah.

What do we do with Mr. Niles? Sarah had an answer.

How do we reboot the security system? Sarah knew that, too.

As the questions began to snowball, Sarah led. She put reasonable and simple plans into place. She closed the dormitory where the girls lived. “They might still be out there,” she said. “The people who did this to us, they might be out there just licking their chops, waiting to take our girls out all at once.” She put them in apartments spread out all over the city.

Sarah was the one who ordered biweekly check-in meetings. She brought the bagels and coffee and rugelach and juice until, after the second meeting, a woman named Jordan, who had been a low-level systems analyst before the assault, said she would bring the food for the next meeting, smiled at Sarah, and said, “You’ve got enough on your plate already.”

Not that the others weren’t helping out. Accounting gathered itself, counted its missing, and then budgeted repair costs, dug into offshore accounts, restored some financial order. Research, marketing, travel agency staff, who hadn’t known it before but knew now that they not only had been a cover for Regional but had also handled all the travel for the Operatives — all were up and running again in a matter of days.

Because they understood.

There were still operations to be completed, case files to be drawn up, distributed, and then filed once the mission had been completed.

Evil to be thwarted.

Wrongs to be righted.

Operatives handled their own filing and the research. They learned computer systems. They learned the recruitment software. Candace, a fairly new girl, an Operative for less than a month before the assault, found a girl in Toronto she wanted to bring in, and so recruitment began again. Jordan handled not just the systems analysis but security as well.

They all fell into line in a way that would have made Mr. Niles proud, but what Sarah didn’t see, not at first, not until it was pointed out to her, was that they all fell into line behind her.

And after some debate, after plenty of hand-wringing on Sarah’s part, and questions, mostly along the lines of, Are you sure about this? But really, really sure you want me? Sarah agreed to step in as head of the Regional Office. Legal drew up a contract. Then it was official.

Sarah was in charge.

Of everything.

~ ~ ~

From The Regional Office Is Under Attack:

Tracking the Rise and Fall of an American Institution

This study would be remiss and incomplete if it did not take a moment to delve into the two theories on how Henry managed to so effectively enact his plans against the Regional Office, theories that speak to the pivotal question of whether he worked alone and in secret, or did he have assistance?

Obviously, Henry was aided, there is no question in this matter, aided by his own team of Operatives. Of the women who worked for Henry, we know for sure there was Wendy, Colleen, Windsor, and Rose. But the question then is: Was there someone else, someone equal to Henry, planning and executing this assault?

The theory that he planned and executed this alone proceeds thusly:

Oyemi told Henry he would be the one to neutralize Emma, who the Oracles had determined was the threat. How she had decided on Emma, Henry didn’t know. Still, he talked Oyemi into giving him two weeks to finish the assignment. Two weeks to kill Emma.

Of course, when he first met Emma, Henry didn’t know he loved her or would love her or that she would love him.

But isn’t that always the case?

You toiled in your job for year after year, training stunningly beautiful and dangerous young women to fight the encroaching forces of evil, caught up in a work life that offered satisfaction on many deep levels but that precluded any sort of real chance at long-lasting relationships. You resigned yourself to a life as a bachelor, to keeping your feelings for these amazing and powerful women on the level of friendly or brotherly love, whichever it was they needed to make it through the day, and in the process of doing all of this, you reached a bottom-level sort of contentment in life because what choice did you have, really? This was the life you’d chosen, or maybe it had been chosen for you, but it was your life after all and you’d made your peace with that, had resigned yourself to all of that when one day, along came a woman of extraordinary grace and beauty, the kind of woman you couldn’t help but fall in love with, except you didn’t say anything or make any moves because you were a gentleman and you were fully aware of that old saw about your pen and the company ink, not to mention, deep down you had always been a chickenshit. But still, for the first time, you could imagine how, under different circumstances, you might have had a chance with one of these women, with this one woman in particular, that she might have found some way to love you back, and for the first time, too, you began feeling the stirrings of some real and long-ignored dissatisfaction with this life you’d built for yourself. So maybe you paid her a little more attention than you did the other Recruits, the other field Operatives, and maybe she noticed and offered you sly, under-the-radar smiles, and maybe you began to share inside jokes with each other, or you brushed past each other in the narrow (but not that narrow) hallways. Or maybe one day you found yourself in the break room looking for your lunch in the fridge and she came up behind you and placed her hand on your shoulder and with that light but comfortable and unhesitating touch sent an electric jolt through you down to your very bones. She bent into the fridge next to you to see what you were looking for and even as the thought itself entered your own head, she beat you to it — she always beat you to these things — by saying, You know what, why don’t we just go get lunch instead, you and me, and maybe a drink, too, or not a drink but a something else?

And maybe you should have known how it would end. Or Henry. Henry should have known.

Or maybe not known exactly how it would end.

Who would have known exactly how it would end?

The Oracles, maybe.

Not that he would have believed them. Even if they had told him, had sent him a message. One day he would fall in love (not likely) with a Recruit who would love him back (as if). One day, he would learn that the woman who had captured his heart was also the woman prophesied to betray the Regional Office and destroy Oyemi and Mr. Niles and everything they’d ever worked for. Told him that he would be assigned the task of killing her, this woman he had come to love. Told him that he would be forced to choose between Love and Loyalty, that he would choose Love over Loyalty, and then told him that it wouldn’t matter because while Love might be eternal and undying, Emma wasn’t either of those and would be killed anyway.

If they had told him all of this, he wouldn’t have believed them.

Not that the Oracles ever gave such explicit instructions on the future of this world. More, The one who loved will destroy that which was once loved. That was more their speed. That was the kind of ambiguous bullshit the Oracles yammered on about.

Of course, he was strapped for ideas on how to wrangle his way out of this plan of Oyemi’s but figured an extra two weeks was an extra two weeks. Except the first week and a half he wasted by trying to come up with a plan on his own. And then Emma cornered him in the parking garage, asked him, “What the fuck, Henry, you’ve been acting like an idiot the past week and a half,” and that was when he told her. About Oyemi. About the prophecy. About his job to do.

Emma didn’t get angry or upset, didn’t become unsettled or frightened. Her eyes didn’t widen or even grow colder, more calculating. She listened to what he said and then she nodded once, said, “Right,” and then told him an address and a time, told him to relax, act normal, placed her hand softly against his face, smiled, and then she turned and walked off.

Once she’d gone, he spent his day as if it were any normal day.

He filed reports. He read and reread case files of potential Recruits. He sat in on meetings with Sarah and her mechanical arm and Mr. Niles. He expressed serious and real concern about the news that Emma had failed to show up that day for her briefing. Then the day ended and he packed his things but no more of his things than he might normally pack, and then he drove home as he should normally have driven home. The point being: He did not once give away anything about what he’d done, what he planned to do, had not let slip his affections, his sudden and vivid daydreams, had not confided in anyone, not even (or especially not) Sarah, who seemed to him just so beholden, not just to the Regional Office, but to Mr. Niles, and therefore, someone he couldn’t trust.

So it should have been a surprise when he arrived at the address Emma gave him — an abandoned, foreclosed house in White Plains — that he found her, Emma, splayed out on the ground, a pool of blood pooling up beneath and around her, a lifeless look to her lifeless face, but it wasn’t. It wasn’t a surprise at all.

Because here was the thing about Oyemi: The thing about Oyemi was she was no fool. She wouldn’t have had Henry and only Henry on this job. She probably hadn’t had only him on the job at all, in fact. Who she’d had on the job had been professionals, men or women or both, who would’ve known what they were doing, wouldn’t have cared about the target, wouldn’t have flinched at the prospect of what they were supposed to do, who would’ve prepared for every contingency, even and especially the contingency of his trying to warn her. Which was why, just as he moved toward her, to check her for signs of life, to take one last look, to dumbly try to staunch the bleeding, a fire was set loose on him from all sides. Not an explosion, but simply a rising wave of flames.

The room flared up, began to melt. Henry didn’t care. He tried to reach Emma but the rooms, all of the rooms, had been rigged. He saw an opening, but it closed before he could take it, and he couldn’t see her through the flames, so many fucking flames, and then he saw another brief opening and took it, became trapped, barreled through, and at the last minute was blown clear of the house and, landing headfirst on the walkway outside, was knocked unconscious. When he woke, he woke up in the hospice wing of the Regional Office, and every day since had regretted taking that opening, escaping the fire, leaving her behind.

59

Rose hadn’t been told there’d be a robot.

That hadn’t been in any of the literature, hadn’t been part of any Assassin Training Camp seminars or lectures, hadn’t been part of any post — Regional Office debrief, not that she’d gotten any real post — Regional Office debriefing. Everyone had somehow failed to mention that one day, ten years into her future, ten years after the attack on the Regional Office, a robot would show up hell-bent on ruining her life — not to mention killing her — for all that Regional Office bullshit.

Ten fucking years.

Jesus, a long fucking time. They waited a long fucking time for revenge.

Not that she was bitter that no one had told her about there being a fucking robot.

Not that she cared that the men and women she had trained with those years ago, had assaulted the Regional Office with, had all but completely fallen off the face of the earth. But Jesus Christ, was it too much to expect a card at Christmas? A phone call on her birthday? Forwarding information and a new phone number just in case, oh, who knows, a fucking robot stomped into her fucking yarn and bead shoppe and started tearing shit all to hell?

It swung its robot arm at her. She pivoted, grabbed it by that same arm, heaved it through the wall, except that how that actually transpired went more like: It grabbed her by her face and smashed her head through the cash register.

Fucking robots.

60

Rose often pictured them coming in here, Henry and Emma.

Not right at that moment, though. God, what a fucking embarrassment that would have been if those two showed up just as she was getting her ass handed to her by some two-bit-looking robot that wasn’t even fully covered in synthetic skin.

No. If it were a choice between suffering a painful and brutal death at the hands of this crusher or suffering that kind of embarrassment in front of Henry or Emma? Rose would take the painful and brutal death every time, friend, and thank you very much.

Not that she hadn’t pictured that moment, though, that awkward and awful reunion.

The bell over the door would tinkle. She wouldn’t look up, not right away, even though she would know it was them, would sense it in her skin. Maybe Henry would clear his throat or Emma would say, “Hello, dear,” the way she did, and Rose would look up and smile at them, briefly, just so they knew that she knew they were there and that something was in store for them. She would offer them something to drink, some cookies, maybe, because for whatever fucking reason, whenever she pictured this moment, she pictured herself in it having just baked a batch of chocolate-chip cookies. They would catch up on what was new and relive old times, and then, just when they were comfortable, just when the last tattered shreds of awkwardness and discomfort had fallen away, bam, she’d pull out the banker box of files she kept in her storage closet, throw that shit on the table in between the two of them, and then yell at them: Ten, there are ten more fucking boxes just like this one.

Then she’d pull out a file, it wouldn’t matter which one, and open it up and read from the top:

Subject suffers violent and debilitating nightmares.

Subject often uses sex as a weapon.

Subject suffers from deep trust issues.

No shit, Sherlock, she would say. That’s the thing about being the subject who was abducted when you were fucking sixteen and trained to be a superpowered assassin with the promise that you’ll help save the world when really all you’re doing is settling a fucking score.

Subject is often violent to herself and others.

She wouldn’t show them the scars. She wouldn’t have to.

Subject often lies for no apparent reason.

She could go on.

She would go on. She would go on and on and on.

She kept all the receipts, too. Every therapist visit, every prescription filled, ever since the attack on the Regional Office. Just in case. She had the receipts taped to individual sheets of blank paper, all professional and shit, and then tabulated in a spreadsheet — a highlighted spreadsheet. She had all of this ready for the day that one of those assholes showed up, not that they ever would, but had it just the same, neatly organized, and then, stapled to the front, a fifteen-page itemized bill, and at the bottom of that bill, in all caps and in red, next to the line “Total Due,” she’d stamped: “YOU OWE ME MY LIFE BACK, YOU FUCKERS.”

She’d ordered that stamp specially made online.

She had pictured this moment often — the banker’s box, the invoice — but no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t make it feel as delicious a moment as she wanted it to be when she imagined it happening.

A failure of her weak imagination, perhaps, or maybe she just knew them too well, knew they wouldn’t care. They wouldn’t even fucking apologize. They weren’t the type. There’d be no, Sorry we took you from the life that you knew, from your family, from your friends, sorry we whisked you away and made promises, so many goddamn promises, all of which we failed to keep. No, Sorry we made you cut that one dude in half, that you still think of him from time to time, wonder about his family, whether he had one, what they might’ve been told about him, about how he died, sorry you can’t stop picturing the stunned look in his eye.

They would justify. That’s who they were.

She had wanted to leave the life she had been living, they would remind her.

She had wanted to get away from her dumb and neglectful father, her overbearing and angry mother, her pitiful and untempered sister.

She had hated her friends, hated her hometown.

She had hated her life.

She had told them so herself. They came for her just when she needed them most.

And what about those promises? What about what they gave her, the training, the powers they helped her discover within herself, helped her unleash and hone? The adventure, the thrills. Not to mention, she had been paid handsomely. She had been offered work after the Regional Office job. She had been offered a new life if she’d wanted it, an apartment in Biarritz, a new name, a new way forward, and she chose. She chose the life she chose. They had done everything they said they would. They molded her, taught her a craft, and then watched her become so very, very good at it. Could she give them that, at least?

And yes, she could give them that at least.

She was very good at what they trained her to be, but so what?

So what if she was good at this thing?

It wasn’t her life, wasn’t the life she had thought she’d wanted, wasn’t the life she was supposed to live.

Not to mention they broke her fucking heart.

61

She couldn’t help but think that the whole robot thing just seemed so dated.

The whole fucking enterprise just seemed so dated to her now. Coldhearted revenge, a comeuppance for crimes she’d committed in her past, etc., and so on.

Not that the robot looked dated. It looked sleek and ultramodern, and kind of feminine. Kind of like a girl.

Although every robot that wasn’t sheathed in some kind of humanlike skin — and this one wasn’t — reminded her of Robocop. Even the sleek, newer-looking ones. Maybe that was the new thing with robot design, though, some hipster kind of return to the retro. No more hiding the robot bits underneath synthetic skin and wigs and clothes. Less T-1000 from Terminator and more Maximilian from The Black Hole, or B-9 from Lost in Space. It was sad, really, she thought. This whole fucking thing would have been easier to swallow if Rutger Hauer were on the other end of this battle to the death.

Jesus. Rutger Hauer? Where the fuck was her head?

She couldn’t focus on one line of pop-cultural references, much less concentrate on not being smashed by a robotic fist.

Still. It was weird to think, wasn’t it, that there could be Rutger Hauer; bad sci-fi movies like Lost in Space; small, quaint bead and yarn shoppes in small, quaint Texas towns; and still be towering robots hell-bent on death and destruction. Or, rather, the other way around. The robot first and still all those other normal things. She’d spent these past few years caught in a limbo between constantly thinking about and completely forgetting about all that had happened to her, but had finally begun to edge, ever so slightly, in favor of forgetting, and now this fucking robot beast showed up.

It wouldn’t stop swinging at her, or throwing shit at her, or grabbing her by the shoulder or ankle or wrist and slamming her into things, for one. Then, to make matters worse, the fucking thing wouldn’t shut up. It just kept talking, and in a strange voice, strange for a robot, anyway. Not the kind of voice she’d have expected a robot to have. Rose would have expected something like the robot voice of Stephen Hawking, but this was just like a person, or not even just a person but maybe like a girl’s voice, and for a second, Rose wondered if the robot was a girl robot, and then if there was such a thing — a girl robot with girl robot parts — but then it wouldn’t shut up or stop swinging at her and whatever it was, it was just like anybody else, just as nonstop, just as goddamn annoying.

It kept saying things like, “Leave it to them to train you just enough to get you into trouble,” as it wrenched a bank of cabinets out of the floor and then hefted them over its head, finishing with, “but not enough to get you out,” as it heaved the whole thing at Rose, who saw this coming, but then the robot must have seen Rose see it coming and calibrated its throw in such a way that, even though Rose jumped out of the way, it clipped her hard in the shoulder and spun her in midair like a spinning coin.

And it said things like, “Was it worth it?” while holding up a skein of yarn. “All of this?” it asked. “Is all of this worth the things you did, the lives you ruined, the people you destroyed, the work you unraveled? For this?” Said that or something just like it before shoving the cabinet of alpaca yarn (Go Alpaca, You’ll Never Go Backa!) toppling to the floor. “This shitty little yarn shop in the middle of this shitty little town?”

62

It was a high-quality yarn shoppe, thank you very much, in a, yes, admittedly, shitty little town, but even still. That wasn’t her whole life. She had a dog, a big gray, lazy Great Dane named Birdie. And a boyfriend.

I have a boyfriend, now, too, Rose wanted to say, almost said, clamped her mouth shut just before saying.

Not that the fucking robot would want to know or care, but his name was Jason, thank you very much, and they’d begun dating just after her roof started leaking and she’d hired him to fix the leak, and sure, he kept trying to get people to call him Jace, despite all the times she told him to stop doing that, that he was making a fool of himself but also of her just by association, which she was beginning to suspect only made him want to try even harder. And sure, just this past weekend, right as shit started getting hot and heavy across the bench seat of his pickup, he’d screeched things to a halt by asking her, So, what is this, am I your boyfriend now, or what? and she’d curbed her serious desire to head-butt him and instead told him, Christ, grow a pair, would you? Not to mention: She’d known him way back in middle school when he’d had a total crush on her then, and, God, now that she was thinking about it, could he be more pathetic?

Jesus, if she got out of this mess with the robot (when, she corrected herself, when she got out of this mess with the robot), the first thing she would do would be to break up with Jason. That was the goddamn truth.

Except he was funny and really cute and a good fuck and, what’s worse, so Patty told her after she’d come back, he once cornered Akard after school — after Rose’d pulled her disappearing act — and beat the shit out of him when he heard Akard saying something the likes of how Rose had to skip town since she’d whored herself out to every man who’d take her in this town. And when it came right down to it, she couldn’t get enough of that boy, even just sitting together on his couch watching DIY shit on the TV and scarfing down fucking lime-chili Cheetos, or going at it like horny fucking teenagers every chance they got, and every minute of every day she worried he’d find out who or what she was (which was what, exactly?) and when he did, he’d be the one to leave her, and, God, she thought, what if he came over now?

What if he chose now to surprise her with lunch or cookies or just to say hi?

No, no, no, no, no.

The robot swung its fucking robot arm. Rose didn’t duck, didn’t leap, didn’t sway. She grabbed the thing and rolled back, absorbing its momentum, using it against itself, and pivoted at the last possible second, throwing it, the arm and the robot, head over ass, back into the wall.

Because fuck if this robot was going to ruin the one good thing she had.

And the robot smiled. It stood and turned and smiled, damn it.

“Well, well,” it said in its non — Stephen Hawking voice. “Look who finally woke up.”

63

Rose came back to her hometown on a whim. It wasn’t like her mother had died, there was a funeral to go to — though her mother had died, a few years before, and no one could find Rose to tell her. Her sister had set herself up in their old house and Rose couldn’t think of anywhere else to go and had grown tired of drifting, drifting, drifting.

She had assumed that once all the Regional Office stuff ended, she’d get this special kind of life with special kinds of friends. Even after she’d finished her assignment, even after all that had happened in the Regional Office, she thought this.

She’d taken care of the director — even that euphemism, taken care of, made her stomach turn, the thought of the look of him, cut in two — and she’d busted her way out as unglamorously as she’d busted her way in, and then she’d made her way to the rendezvous, but no one else was there. Not Emma, not Henry, none of the other girls. And sure, Emma and the other girls, they were taking care of their own assignments, could have been running late, but what had happened to Henry? His whole job was to wait at the safe house and keep it, well, safe. Only later did she begin to suspect that he’d never intended to go to the rendezvous, that maybe he and Emma had never really expected there to be anyone to rendezvous with.

But that suspicion wouldn’t come until much later. At first, rather than assume the others were having more trouble than she’d had, were injured or even dead, she thought back to training, to her unshakable feeling that she was on the outside of that group looking in, and began to wonder if she was still outside of it all, if she had been given different rendezvous instructions than everyone else, and if the others were all at some bar in Brooklyn eating pizza and drinking beer and having a good laugh at poor old Rose. But before this idea could take serious hold, the door crashed open, Colleen stumbled in looking roughed up — a cut across her eyebrow, her wrist held gently in her other hand looking decidedly unwristlike — and she said, “We have to go, we have to go now.”

“What happened to you?” Rose said, but before Colleen could answer, she said, “What about Henry, what about the others?”

Colleen shook her head. “Fuck Henry, man. If he’s not here, then we definitely shouldn’t be here either.”

Rose hesitated. She looked around the hotel suite, looked at the minibar she’d wanted to tear into but hadn’t because she wanted to share it with the others.

She’d imagined champagne toasts and a late night recounting all the shit that had gone down. She didn’t know where she’d gotten the idea there’d be champagne, but that was what she’d settled on.

“Come on, Rose,” Colleen said. “There’s a car downstairs. We need to go now.”

“What about your wrist?” Rose asked, but by then Colleen had already grabbed Rose’s go-bag and thrown it at her and then she was out the door and on her way to the elevator and Rose didn’t have much choice but to follow after her.

“What about the others?” Rose asked.

They were stuck on Canal Street waiting to slip into the Holland Tunnel and out of the city.

“Are we picking up any of the others?” she asked.

Colleen shook her head, honked at a truck trying to pull out in front of them. “What others?” she said. “As far as I know, you and me are what’s left, and that’s it.” She checked her blind spot before squeezing in behind a yellow cab. “I almost didn’t even go to the hotel.”

“Wendy?” Rose asked.

Colleen shook her head.

“Becka? Windsor, Jimmie?”

“Look, Rose, what do you want from me? I don’t know, I wasn’t with them.” She let go of the steering wheel and pressed her palms into her eyes even though the car continued to idle forward, listed to the left. Rose reached for the wheel, but Colleen beat her to it. “But Wendy,” she said. “Wendy’s gone, I know that much.”

And then they stopped talking about it and then they drove to Philadelphia.

“Why Philadelphia?” Rose asked.

“Who is going to look for us in Philadelphia?” Colleen answered.

Rose offered to drive but Colleen wouldn’t let her. She drove them to the airport, then parked in the long-term parking lot. Rose hadn’t asked her where she’d gotten the car. She’d just assumed Colleen had stolen it.

“Here we go,” Colleen said.

“What do you mean, here we go? What do we do now?”

Colleen handed her a thick manila envelope. “Everything you need is in here. Everything you need and half of everything Wendy needed.” She took a shaky breath. “Might as well, right?”

“But,” Rose said.

“Whatever you want. That’s what you do now. Just. Not with me.” Then she smiled and gave Rose a kiss on the cheek and whispered, “See you around, okay?”

“No you won’t,” Rose said, and she wasn’t going to cry, though no one would have blamed her for it — it had been a long day, a long two years — but she was very close to punching Colleen in her face, and Colleen probably wouldn’t have blamed her for that, either.

Colleen stepped back — maybe she could sense Rose’s body tense up — and laughed and said, “Probably not,” and she turned and started walking. Rose followed after, waiting for Colleen to stop, to turn around, to slap her straight, to tell her to grow up, to tell her to find her own way, to stop following her like some lost little puppy, to go find her own fucking life, but she didn’t. Colleen kept walking, and then, Rose didn’t know how, she lost herself in the crowd.

64

The envelope had money in it — cash, prepaid credit cards, securities set up in her name, or, rather, her fake name. A couple of burner phones, a new set of identification, a slip of paper with different contacts encoded on it — Mexican, European, South Asian, Australian. A few amulets and crystals — that would’ve been Windsor, who was all about protective amulets and shit — and a small jeweler’s pouch with a plastic spider ring inside it and a note attached with “Decoder Ring” written on it in Henry’s handwriting.

She slipped the spider ring on her finger just in case it had been magicked or imbued with some kind of power, but no. Just one of Henry’s jokes.

Hardy-fucking-har-har, Henry.

The idea of buying a plane ticket, of locking herself in a large metal tube as it hurtled across the country in the nighttime sky, made her queasy, so she took a bus instead from the airport to a Greyhound station. She bought a ticket to Chicago from there but stepped off the bus in Cleveland, and there boarded another bus headed to Houston, where she stole a car and drove it down to Brownsville, and then, early the next morning, among all the abuelitas walking across the river into work, she crossed the border into Matamoros and there slipped quietly out of sight.

A month later, she made contact with a guy in Monterrey and took a freelance gig rooting out narcoterrorists but she and the guy who’d hired her had irreconcilable differences that resulted in her fist connecting with his nut sack, and she left right after that for Cuba, where she heard a rumor of some supernatural flimflammery going on. This turned out to be a pack of werewolves, one of whom had been some kind of geneticist before and who was hard at work on not any kind of cure but a means for making the change permanent and maintaining his manly intelligence while wolfed out. But a couple of women from the new and improved Regional Office got there just as she did and Rose spent a week hiding out in an abandoned grocery store until they’d packed up and left.

Every once in a while she went hunting for anyone else from training camp and the assault, but they were either all dead or just plain better at low-profiling it than she was.

She took shit job after shit job working for some real assholes, not because she needed the money but because she didn’t know what to do with herself.

Twice she filled out college applications, and once she even went as far as to mail them off but had moved — three times, in fact — before the acceptances could find her.

Then she took a job with this guy Jonathan, a straightforward heist of some mystical artifacts, she didn’t know what they did or who they were stealing them for, and didn’t care, frankly. She was smarter, stronger, faster, and more powerful than Jonathan, but also she wanted to sleep with him, mostly because his girlfriend — who was running technical and mystical backup on the job — didn’t trust her, assumed she was some kind of physical and sexual threat, which made Rose want to be those things if only so she could shove it back in her face and tell her, Self-fulfilling prophecy, bitch. Anyway, the job was simple. Break in, grab the shit, break out again, and sure, it was a high-security place, but wasn’t she the one who broke into the Fortress of Living Flame, which, before she’d shown up, had been protected by eternal, magical flames for a millennium, if not longer? She could handle the security for a simple breaking-and-entering, except she’d been distracted, had overlooked a mystical rune or two, had walked right through a mystical barrier that dropped her into the bottom of the Mariana Trench, and she had just enough time to think to herself, Oh, shit, what a fucking loser way to fucking die, except really she got only so far as, O, before blacking out, and when she woke up, it was to the face and voice of the girlfriend, who dabbed her forehead gently with a warm, wet cloth, and who, when she saw Rose open her eyes, said, “I could have left you there, I just want you to remember that. I thought about it. I thought about leaving your ass down there. Don’t forget that,” and Rose didn’t.

In fact, that job was what drew the line for Rose, what broke the camel’s back, what eventually sent her back home.

After that job, the trajectory of her life weighed heavily on her.

After that little drop in the Mariana, after that little talk from Jonathan’s whiny girlfriend, Rose thought long and hard about her life choices before, during, and after her little (and unsatisfying) romp with Jonathan. She thought about it on the plane back to the States, and then on the bus from Dallas to her shitty little hometown. She thought about it every time she thought about killing her sister, who was putting her up for a little while until she found her own place, figured out the rest of her life, but who was fucking driving her insane every minute of every day. She thought about it whenever she ran into some yokel from her past who couldn’t think of her as anything more than Margaret’s youngest, the pretty one itching for trouble. She thought about it when she put the money down on this storefront and the inventory to stock it. She thought about it all the fucking time, if you really must know, and figured that thinking about it was enough, that thinking about it equaled change.

Her hope had been to compress her life to make it seem like it had been one straight line from childhood to this moment in her late twenties, that there might arrive a day when she could step out of her yarn and bead shoppe and look at the small downtown square of her small Texas town and believe, deep inside herself, that everything else — Emma, the training camp, Henry, all the other girls, the assault on Regional, what she’d done in Spain and Morocco, all the things she had done — must have happened to somebody else, and maybe this hadn’t quite worked out as well as she’d hoped it would, but she’d been trying, damn it. She’d been trying really fucking hard. She hadn’t fucked Gina’s husband, had she? And she could have. Gina was as tight-assed as she had been when they were kids and she could tell that dude was itching for a good fuck, or, hell, any kind of fuck. But Rose didn’t, did she? And when the quilting shop on the other side of town kept stealing customers from her, undercutting her prices, offering knitting and quilting classes — that had been her fucking idea — she hadn’t burned that place to the fucking ground, had she? These were choices she made. Hard choices made deliberately. And look at how things were going with Jason. As much as it hurt her pride to think on it, she was in a fucking relationship with a guy who wanted to be called Jace.

That was growth. That was change.

So, yeah, this shitty life was the life she felt she deserved, a comeuppance of sorts, an off-her-high-horse sort of life, but it was life, still. She’d had plenty of opportunity to choose otherwise, but she had chosen shitty life over no life a long time ago, and damned if she was going to let some Robocop-looking robot take that away from her.

65

Except she couldn’t figure this robot out.

The robot, she decided, was fucking with her. Playing games with her. Hurting her, sure, beating the shit out of her, well, not quite, not yet.

But still.

It was a goddamn megarobot or whatever, so why wasn’t it beating the shit out of her? Why wasn’t it going in for the kill? It pained her to think this, but she thought it might have even been pulling its punches, giving it to her easy.

Rose had gotten in her shots, too. The antique, heavy register smashed down on its head. The knitting needle shoved into its ankle gear that, for a second, had made the robot limp, but then the needle was shoved out somehow, hard enough to stick into the wall, and the thing repaired itself right in front of her.

It was fast and it was smart and it was strong but she was learning, moment by moment, catching on to its rhythms, picking up on its tells. But. Rose had a sinking feeling that all of this was a game to the robot, that every punch she landed, every small bit of damage she inflicted on that thing, only made it stronger, as if whatever fueled it fed on the kinetic energy of each impact.

She stood up. The robot held bunches of yarn in its robot fists. It was saying something, she could tell by the movement of its nonrobot lips, but there was a ringing in her ear and she couldn’t hear much above that.

Maybe it was testing her.

God, she thought. This better not be another fucking test.

Her nose was bleeding. Her left eye was swelling up and soon she wouldn’t be able to see out of it, not well enough to fight, anyway.

If this is another test…, she thought, and for a second, at the idea of someone else throwing some unbeatable monster at her as a way to test her, she wanted to give up.

She was so done with being tested.

Henry and Emma and Jonathan and that guy for that job in Spain.

It would go like this: She would figure out some way to beat this robot or get past it, or there would be some kind of switch or mechanism and if she found that and threw it or clipped it or punched it, this robot would come to a shuddering halt and then some asshole in an expensive suit that on him would look incredibly cheap would step out from the shadows, slow-clapping or maybe not. Maybe instead of the slow clap of grudging respect, she’d get a snarky bit of, “I was beginning to worry you might not ever figure that one out.” But either way, there would be some dangerous job, some exorbitant payoff, some promises made. Promises, promises, promises. And her entire yarn and bead shoppe would have been crushed all to hell because some asshole with an outsized checkbook and a desire to rescue his dead wife from the bowels of hell, or who had called forth some demon horde and had lost control of them, wanted to a) test his toy out and b) make sure she was still up to the work.

Except she wasn’t. Any yahoo in the shadows watching this fight go down would be able to see pretty easily that she was not up to the test, much less the job, whatever it turned out to be. She’d been fighting, what, fifteen minutes and already she was tired. Tired and out of practice. She’d become a creature of habit. Her life had become easy and predictable — work all day in her yarn and bead shoppe, dinner with Jason, back to his house for a bottle of wine or a six-pack of beer, where they’d watch some trash on the Learning Channel or the Food Network with her dog, and then she’d drift off to sleep on the couch and he’d wake her with a soft kiss on her lips and then down her neck and then they’d move things to the bedroom, or else he’d fall asleep, too — and that was how she liked it, had been what she looked forward to, the regularity of this, the simplicity of this, seven days a week.

And now she had to muster herself up for this?

66

And then the robot had her by the neck.

“Says here you offer classes,” the robot said, loud enough she could hear it over the ringing in her ear.

It held her pressed up against the corkboard wall near the bathroom in the back. It pulled the flyer off the corkboard. Rose had been trying to get people to take her knitting classes for a year now, but all the people who would have been interested in knitting already knew how to knit, or else they signed up for classes at that quilting shop on the other side of town. “What do you think?” it said in its voice that was still not a robot voice. Then the robot held its free hand in front of Rose’s face, wiggled its thick, shiny robot fingers at her. “Are these knitting hands?”

The humor, too.

Rose didn’t quite understand the humor, wouldn’t have expected that from a robot. Yet here it was, making a joke, maybe making fun of her, even.

The grip around her neck was loose enough that she could say something if she wanted, and she had the uncanny sense that the robot was expecting her to say something. As if the robot had made a joke and she was supposed to look fear and death in the eye and say, Fuck it, and offer her own witty remark in return. She’d never been any good at that sort of thing, and she didn’t know what to say to the robot wiggling its fingers in her face, and so all she could resort to was what she knew.

“I have a number of different-sized knitting needles,” Rose told it. “I’m sure we can find something that would work.”

For a second, it looked like the robot was about to smile, and then it thrust her up with such force that she cracked her head against and then through the crappy drop-down ceiling tiles and she thought, not for the first time, about the original wood-beamed ceiling, and how she’d always wanted to tear away the tiles to expose those beams, and this reminded her of the director’s office and the nice beaming going on there.

Exposing those beams would have made this space so much nicer.

67

When she was ten, Rose’s daddy had taken her to the beach. It was strange. Even Rose knew at ten how strange it was. He shook her awake while it was still dark, held his finger up to his mouth to quiet her down, and then smiled a smile that usually meant he was drunk, but this morning she couldn’t smell any of the drink on him, which made his smile even more worrisome.

He wrapped his arms underneath her and started lifting her out of bed, but she was too big for him to lift out of bed that way and her legs tangled up in the covers. He struggled for a second and then he dropped her halfway out of the bed, and she landed half-assed on the side of the bed, the rest of her ass sliding off her mattress and landing hard on the hard floor, along with her wrist and ankle and everything else. She twisted her ankle but didn’t sprain it. Her wrist stung. Tears welled up in her eyes, but her daddy didn’t notice, had started into a fit of giggling that he was working to tamp down, clamping his mouth shut with his left hand and waving at her with his right, as if she were about to burst out into giggles, too. Then he wiped his laughing tears and then he wiped her pained tears without asking her if she was all right, and then he stood her up on her feet and grabbed her hand and pulled her out front and loaded her into the car, all without saying a word, and not until they’d passed the 7-Eleven, and then the Coca-Cola bottling plant, did he say, as if she already knew where he was taking her, as if they’d had this little trip planned for weeks: “You excited for the beach, sweet pea?”

When they got to the beach and he pulled out the bag he’d packed for the day, she half-expected him to have brought her old bathing suit, the one that didn’t fit her anymore, or to have forgotten to bring a bathing suit for her at all. The other half of her, though, didn’t so much as expect but hope that maybe he’d bought her a brand-new bathing suit, like the bikini she’d seen in Target a few weekends ago, the aqua-blue one with the white piping and the ruffly top.

She should have known which half was going to be the right half.

“You’re just a kid,” he said. “No one cares if you’re out in the water in just your clothes.”

What he had brought with him were a couple of inner tubes, a big, thick black one for him, and a smaller light-blue one for her. His plan was for them to sit in their respective inner tubes and let the surf and the waves do all the work. Tubing down the coast, he called it. More exciting than tubing down the river.

“Let those other chumps fight against the waves by swimming, or sit on the sand and bake in the sun,” he said.

“Let those other chumps bore themselves to death inching down a swampy river,” he said.

Except there weren’t any other chumps. Not on the beach or in the surf. She doubted there were any chumps floating down the river, either, wherever the river was. It was October in Texas, and the beach was empty and the water cold and choppy. If she squinted, Rose thought she could see a squall forming out over the gulf in the distance.

We’re the chumps, she wanted to say.

You’re the chump, she really wanted to say.

Then, as she took the inner tube he held out for her, she sighed. I’m the chump.

They were supposed to anchor the tubes to the shore with a thick length of rope tied to a tree or shrub or the front bumper of the car, which her daddy would park right up at the edge of the shoreline, otherwise the current would draw them farther and farther down the coast. When she asked him about the rope, she saw in his eyes a flicker, the briefest look of Ah, shit, I forgot the rope, but he recovered quick enough and said, “You’re old enough. I thought you’d like to try it the big-girl way.”

He handed her a pair of goggles, to keep the salt spray out of her eyes, and a snorkel, just in case. In case of what, she didn’t want to consider. He threw a diver’s mask over his own face, and then a Houston Astros pith helmet on his head, the kind with the cup holders and straws meant for cans of beer, but instead of beer, her father had sloshy, melting frozen margaritas he’d poured into old Bud Light cans, the idea being that salt water, which would ruin a beer, only made a frozen margarita taste better.

At first, she was surprised to find herself having fun. The waves pulled her out and threw her back to the shore like they were rough-and-tumble friends. Sometimes she was swooped to shore under a bubbling, ruffling breaker, and sometimes she was lifted high on the crest of a wave, felt her tummy flop in on itself. The water was cold but even in October the air was hot and humid and the contrast felt warm and shivery, and against her better judgment, she found herself screaming and laughing and giggling with her father, who had finished the first set of margaritas-in-a-can and was working on finishing his second set. Where he kept them, she didn’t know and never found out.

It was unexpected fun, which made it somehow even more fun, the kind of fun you had when you got away with something, but then the storm she’d seen in the distance fell onto them in a rush, and the waves, already heavy and forceful and on the verge of mean, crashed over them with real purpose. Rose became anxious. Gallons of salt water sloshed into her nose and mouth. They had moved farther and farther down the shoreline so that she couldn’t see where they’d parked the car anymore. She tried to catch her daddy’s attention, but he didn’t care about the heavy rain, the rough waters. He thought it was all hilarious good fun, and he was drunk. Then a wave picked her up and then threw her down on the beach, where she landed face-first, cutting her skin just under her right eye against the blunt plastic of her goggles. Her cheek felt bruised and her whole body hurt and she stood up shakily and watched her daddy waving at her, yelling, “You’re all right, pumpkin. I’ll meet you back at the car.” Except the car was locked and the rain was coming down hard and fast and she sat behind the car, leaned against the back bumper, where the wind and rain didn’t hit her as hard, though they still hit her, and still pretty hard. Her father didn’t come back for another hour, deep into his drunk and missing his own inner tube and pith helmet. He didn’t see her, maybe, or had forgotten all about her, had jostled the driver’s-side door open and jumped into the seat and started the car all before she could even stand herself up — cold and tired and sore. It took minutes of her pounding on the passenger window before he realized she was still there, the doors were still locked. She refused to speak to him the whole way home, but he was too drunk to notice or care. Typically him: sober enough to drive home, too drunk to notice his daughter. By the time he dropped her off at her mother’s, the storm had passed and he blew her a kiss and gave her a smile and a wave as if they’d just finished a picture-perfect daddy-daughter day, and then he was gone.

After she’d come back to this town, after Morocco, after Spain, her father had found out and came back into town and made her sit down for lunch with him. Her mother had been dead for a few years by then, and her sister, Stacey, had become a sorry excuse, living in that old house of their mother’s, the place unchanged down to the goose-themed wallpaper in the kitchen. Their father had moved off some thirty miles north where he’d found a woman who liked him enough to not care just how little he did. He looked old and haggard and small, which at once pleased and depressed her. He didn’t ask where she’d been, what she had done to herself, why or how she’d left, or where she’d gone. He told her that someone — maybe someone she had known back in high school — once stopped him on his way out of the post office to tell him she’d seen Rose pole dancing at a strip club in Oklahoma, which made him laugh and say, “My Rose? With a job? I think you’re mistaken.” He laughed telling her this. And then when the bill came, he waited for her to pay for lunch, didn’t even pretend to reach for his wallet, and then they shook hands, and even before she’d grabbed her purse, he’d gone.

Maybe he’d wanted something from her but had gotten cold feet and decided not to ask, or maybe he had some lingering sense of obligation to her as her father, but either way, she never saw him again after that.

68

Her father hadn’t been the only one to fail to ask her what had happened to her so long ago. No one seemed to know that she had gone, had been whisked away so many years ago, or they had known she’d gone somewhere but had assumed she’d gone to some normal kind of place in the normal kind of way. College or junior college or to a slightly larger town, maybe, to find a slightly better kind of life. No one who saw her as she maneuvered again through her small hometown, which had changed so little, could even muster surprise that she had come back, but instead made automatic assumptions that she had gotten married and came back to raise her family, or that she’d come back looking to get married before it was too late, or that she’d gotten a job teaching at the elementary school, or was going to be working at the courthouse as a paralegal or an assistant. How they formed such specific ideas about why she was back and what she was doing, she didn’t know, but nobody seemed surprised, and when she told them she hadn’t decided what she was going to do yet, they gave her a sweet, poor-thing look and patted her gently on her arm and told her, “You’ll find something, I’m sure.” And then they’d ask her about church and make sure to invite her to theirs.

Even Stacey hadn’t been that surprised when Rose knocked on the door. Rose sat on the couch and waited for fifteen, twenty minutes, listened to Stacey complain about the house; about their mother’s death and all the hassle that accompanied it; about their father, who had shown up not even two days after the funeral trying to make some kind of sinister claim on this house; listened to her go on about all of this before Stacey finally, sighing heavily, asked, “So what’s been up with you?

“We just figured you went off to live with Dad,” she said when Rose asked if they hadn’t gone looking for her, hadn’t even noticed that she’d gone.

“But I didn’t,” Rose said. “Did you even ask Dad?”

Stacey shrugged.

“I went away. I was taken away,” Rose said. Kidnapped, she almost said. Changed.

Stacey shrugged her heavy shoulders again. “And now you’re back, so what? You look fine.”

“Honestly,” her old friend Patty said when she saw her, “at first we kind of assumed that you’d been raped and murdered by that guy, what was his name? And we were about to say something about it, but then your sister told us your mom kicked you out of the house and sent you to live with your daddy.”

She had met Patty for lunch near the end of her first week back home, when she was just beginning to think about staying. Patty hadn’t stopped growing until long after Rose had left, had grown into a tall, broad-shouldered woman who wore her shiny black hair in a shoulder-length bob with bangs.

“You should definitely go see Gina,” Patty had said. “It would kill her to see you, still so thin.” And then, after hardly any time at all, they ran out of things to say and ate their lunches quietly but for the soft grunting sounds Patty made while she ate, and then it was time for Patty to go, shopping to do, dinner to make, laundry to fold, and she gave Rose a hug and told her how nice it was to see her again, and then she was gone, and for the first time, standing outside on the square watching the tall, hulking frame of Patty lumber down the street, for the first time in what seemed like a very long time, Rose knew what she wanted to do.

Or maybe want was too strong a word, or the wrong word altogether. She knew what she needed to do.

She needed to come back home. She’d left too soon, left before she’d been ready, and since leaving home, her life had gone off the rails. She’d cut a man in half, for Christ’s sake. And had done other things, sure, but there’s not much left after having done that. And she felt on the run, always unsettled and on the move. But coming home. Starting over. That would fix everything.

69

The robot punched her, finally, but really punched her. And for the first time in her life, Rose thought, Oh, Jesus. I think I might lose.

She shot across the room and hit her back against the far wall, embedded herself there, the wind knocked out of her.

Even if she could have moved her head, she wouldn’t have looked down, wouldn’t have dared to look at the spot where the thing hit her, afraid there would be a hole there, a robot-fist-shaped hole passing right through her chest, where her heart should have been. That’s how it felt, anyway, as if the thing punched clean through her, everything else caving in around that spot, as if that spot had obtained the gravitational property of a tiny black hole.

“I expected you to be stronger,” the robot said.

“I expected you to be faster and smarter, too,” it said.

“I expected this to be much more difficult than it has been, honestly. Expected you to put up at least a little bit of a fight. To be clever. To find some way to try, at least.”

Rose couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t move. Then it grabbed her, lifted her up, a foot off the ground, maybe more, she couldn’t tell. It turned her around, its hand wrapped tightly around her throat again. Its robot head was bent toward her ear.

It’s strange, she thought, that they gave a robot lips.

“I wanted this to be more interesting,” it said, and then it dropped her and she landed badly on her ankle and maybe that was broken now, too.

70

If she was going to be honest with herself, and what better fucking time to be honest with yourself than at the very goddamn end, it was less the fact that she never saw Emma again after the Regional Office job. That hurt, sure. She loved Emma. They all loved Emma. But she wasn’t surprised, and so maybe it hurt just a little bit less.

But that bastard Henry had told her he loved her (okay, so maybe in a best-friend, brotherly kind of way, but still, she was only eighteen, she was impressionable, and he should have known better), told her that he would come find her after the job was finished, that they would have some kind of adventure when it was all said and done (and maybe when he said they he meant all of they and not just him and her).

And it wasn’t like he was dead.

She knew for a fact that he wasn’t dead.

Colleen had told her he wasn’t dead.

She had run into Colleen once in Spain. Ibiza. Rose was in between jobs, hadn’t yet experienced her Mariana Trench epiphany, but it wasn’t far off, either.

They ran into each other in an open-air market. It was awkward, at first, and then they fell onto each other, hugging and sobbing. They spent the next two days with each other, sleeping at each other’s hotel rooms, one waking early and buying coffee for the other, visiting tourist sites with each other, until finally Colleen insisted they simply stay in the same hotel, the same room, to save money, even though they both had money to burn. They didn’t talk about the camp, or Emma, or their assaults, or the attack, the things they had done, the people they had lost. Colleen had enrolled in cooking classes at the hotel. This was her third time through the class. She’d been there for months and had learned how to scuba dive, had parasailed, had learned spearfishing, had gone pearl diving, had exhausted and worn out the poor activity director, had seen the sights so many times that she had considered, jokingly, applying for a job as a tour guide. She paid for a long-term rental scooter. Rose didn’t have to ask her why she hadn’t simply bought a scooter or let out an apartment, for that matter. Colleen made paella and brought it back to the room one night. Another night she made diver scallops with a vanilla-champagne reduction, and Rose asked her what was Spanish about it and Colleen shrugged and said, “Saffron, I guess,” and the next morning, as they sat on the balcony of Colleen’s hotel room, which stunned Rose every time with its view of the Sant Antoni Bay, as they sat there silent but not comfortable in their silence, having run out of everything to talk about that wasn’t the operation, that wasn’t Emma or the Regional Office, Rose asked her if she’d heard from anyone else.

“Becka,” she said, “or anyone else, maybe? Henry, maybe?”

And maybe Colleen knew how important it was and pretended it wasn’t important at all to spare Rose’s feelings, or maybe she didn’t know anything at all when she said, “Henry was, well, you just missed him, not more than two weeks ago.” Then she said, “I’m sure he’ll be in touch with you. You were always his favorite, you know. ‘The best we ever trained, blah, blah, blah.’ And, ‘What an amazing girl.’ You know how he was.”

She nodded. And then, because if she didn’t leave in the next few minutes, she would burn the hotel to the ground, Rose decided it was time to move on.

“I think it’s time I moved on,” she said.

Colleen sipped her coffee and nodded. “Okay,” she said.

And there was a moment, a soft, brief moment when it seemed one or both of them would start talking, would talk about what had happened at camp, what had happened after camp, what had happened to them since the assault on the Regional Office, what had made it so impossible for either of them to settle into any kind of new normal. But before one of them could crack, Colleen stood up, abruptly, too abruptly, knocking her knee into the table, sloshing Rose’s coffee out of its mug, and Colleen said, “Sorry,” and Rose shook her head and half-smiled and said, “It’s okay,” but not, I’m sorry, too, though she hoped it had been buried there, an I’m sorry, too, buried in the tone of her voice, maybe, or somewhere deep in the words she actually said. Then Colleen said she had to get ready for class and Rose said she’d probably be gone before she got back from class and Colleen nodded and said, “Okay, well, take care of yourself,” and not, I’ll see you soon, or, I’ll see you later, okay? but Rose thought she could hear that somewhere in her voice, too, and after Colleen went back inside the room, Rose finished her coffee, packed her bag, and then left while Colleen was still in the shower.

She hadn’t seen Colleen since, and hadn’t heard from Henry, not even once.

71

She shouldn’t be thinking of Henry at a time like this, she knew. She shouldn’t be thinking of Henry or Emma or Colleen or Windsor or Wendy or any of them. She should be thinking of herself, and aside from herself, she should be thinking of Jason, poor silly Jace. Or her sister, though her sister never thought of her. Or Gina or Patty or her asshole of a father.

But she wasn’t. She was thinking of Henry.

She wished she had seen Henry, if only one more time. One time before all of this, before the robot, before the end.

She opened her eyes to look at that robot and that was when she saw the sword and then she wasn’t thinking of Henry, either, and was, much to her dismay, thinking of the director and his glove and the sword and what happened with the sword.

Rose wondered where it could have come from, where the robot would have hidden it. There didn’t seem to be any hiding places on that robot. But there it was, long and thin, gleaming and cold and sharp, though, really, with as much force as the robot could bring to bear, that sword didn’t have to be sharp, just strong. And it was both, she knew it was both sharp and strong.

Sharp enough, strong enough, anyway, to split a man in two.

“Is this how you did it?” the robot said in its nonrobot voice. “Did you toy with him? Did you throw him from place to place and toy with him like a doll?”

The robot didn’t have to say who the “him” was. It knew she knew. With that sword in its hand, the robot didn’t have to say anything at all, in fact, but it wouldn’t stop. “Did you beat him bloody in the very place he felt safest? You with all your strength and power, and him just a man. Did you do all of that and then with his own sword, did you cut him down?”

The robot stopped and held the sword down at its side. “Is that how it happened?” And maybe it was waiting for Rose to say something, but she couldn’t. She couldn’t think of what to say and knew it wouldn’t matter, though she did feel the desire to make note of the director’s rather powerful glove. It seemed all so very personal, Rose thought. Strange that something so personal might come out of a robot, and she looked at its face, really looked at the robot’s face, and wondered if it was even a robot at all.

No, she thought. That face, those eyes. That face is a woman’s face.

And then she knew.

Oh, she thought. It’s you. I always wondered about you.

Not that she spent nights awake wondering about the girl with the mechanical arm, just every so often she wondered what she looked like, if she had survived the assault, what her life must be like, what it would feel like to have a metal part of you swinging at your side. Now that she was face-to-face with the girl with the mechanical arm, she looked for that arm, but then caught herself because there wasn’t a mechanical arm anymore, or rather, all of her was mechanical arm now, or rather, mechanical everything, and then she felt embarrassed for looking at her so nakedly and for a second, the only thing she wanted to do was tell her, I’m sorry. For the look, for what she’d done, for all of it, but that urge quickly passed.

The robot had the sword raised up again.

Rose wished she’d figured it out sooner.

Not that she hadn’t known this thing had come for her from the Regional Office. Of course this thing had come from the Regional Office. Where else would it have come from?

Not that figuring it out sooner would have mattered very much. This thing wasn’t like anything she’d ever faced, wasn’t like anything she had been trained to face by Emma or Henry at the compound. This wasn’t some superpowered girl like herself, or an office slouch like most of the people at Regional. Even now, she couldn’t think of a move or countermove or strategy that might have disabled the thing or gotten her past it and now that goddamn sword.

But maybe — if she had known sooner, if she had figured it out sooner — maybe she would have fought differently. Fighting a thing simply on a mission is different than fighting a thing on a Mission. She would’ve fought differently, or maybe just harder.

From the very beginning, she would have fought harder.

But here she was, at what was most likely the very end, doing the only thing she could think of to do. Forget about the pain. Forget about the bones, broken if slowly mending. Forget about everything else and charge straight at that motherfucker, even if it would be the very last thing she’d ever do.

Which was what she did.

~ ~ ~

From The Regional Office Is Under Attack:

Tracking the Rise and Fall of an American Institution

The second theory on how Henry managed to so effectively enact his plans against the Regional Office proceeds in almost the exact same way as the first theory, except for the small but significant difference that Emma was not killed, that her death had been entirely faked.

72

The doctor wasn’t sure how Sarah’s shoulder and mechanical arm had come back together. He studied her, where the arm reattached itself.

“It’s not a perfect fit,” he said. She almost yelled at him when he said this. Nothing could have been more perfect than this fit. “I mean,” he said, warily catching a look in her eye, “it’s perfect now. But it’s not where we put it originally. Not how we put it originally.”

He was skeptical of the story she’d told him, she could tell. He thought maybe she’d had help reattaching the arm, but that seemed unlikely. Or maybe the stress of the situation, the pain and stress and instability of it all, maybe coupled with some pharmaceuticals and some neurological suggestive therapy…

“Maybe what?” Sarah asked.

Maybe they hadn’t ever taken it off to begin with. Maybe they’d tried to take it off — hence the queer way it didn’t quite line up with how it had once lined up — but failing that, they’d done their best (and had succeeded) to convince her that it had been removed.

“What better way,” he said, “to neutralize the largest threat than to convince the threat that it had been neutralized?”

He floated this idea out there as if it were a bubble, hesitant and fragile. She popped it, almost violently, emphatically, jabbing her mechanical finger into his very soft and pliable chest, because she had wondered much the same thing herself, had tried to think back to the moment when she’d seen it on the gurney in front of her.

And it was a thought she would rather not think.

But what if? What if her mechanical arm had been there the entire time?

“No matter,” he said, and there was something frightened in his voice and she tried to think calm thoughts, tried to remember Mr. Niles waving his arm at the destruction she had wreaked right after he had given her this mechanical arm. She smiled uncomfortably.

My, how they must have laughed at her. They must have laughed and laughed and laughed. She never even suspected, they would have said. She never even considered she might still have both her arms, they would have said. And then they would have howled. The thought of their laughing at her made her wish they were all still alive so she could kill them all again, and to settle her thoughts down, she thought of Wendy, of dead, frightened-eyed Wendy, and this made her feel better.

“The arm is in place and is still functional,” he said. “That’s great news.”

He scheduled her for another appointment, asked her to clear her schedule so they could cover it again. They didn’t have enough of her own skin to use but he could create a synthetic that would match almost perfectly. But at first she said no. She didn’t know why she said no but it felt necessary to say no to covering up the mechanical arm.

Then she said, “I’m sorry. You’re right. We have to cover it.”

And a week later, it was covered, and for days, she couldn’t pass by a mirror without staring at the mechanical arm and admiring once more how much it looked like just any normal arm would look.

For a couple of days, after she returned to the office with her new skin, people stopped and admired her arm. Just like new, they said. Or, It looks perfect. Or, Soon, we won’t remember which one was the mechanical one at all. But this she knew was a lie. How could it not be a lie? They remembered, all of them remembered, and would always remember, she thought, and that was a shame.

73

She was in Mr. Niles’s office and his mother was cutting his hair and he was talking about the business of Regional and she couldn’t stop hopping from foot to foot. Mr. Niles was about to raise his eyebrows at her and say something about this, she knew, but then he was sliding into his car in the parking garage, which was only strange in that he usually had someone drive him, but he was sliding into his car and she was there holding the door for him and she was apologizing to him for a report he’d asked for that she hadn’t delivered yet and he didn’t care, didn’t care at all, and she was still shifting from her left foot to her right, left to right, right to left, and he was smiling and shaking his head and saying, Don’t worry about it, it’s fine, and she was still apologizing even as he closed the door and started the engine and she waited and watched as he pulled out of the garage and then, ending there, the dream would have been really no different than any number of other anxiety dreams she’d had about Regional, but it didn’t stop there because she turned and started to walk back to her office but tripped, stubbed her toe or her whole foot on the curb and tripped, and there was suddenly a sharp and burning pain in her foot, but in her real foot, too, and she woke up.

She stumbled to the bathroom. In the light, she couldn’t see anything wrong with her foot, but it hurt like holy hell, and she gritted her teeth and squeezed her mechanical fist. Then she squeezed her normal fist. She took some ibuprofen and then more and then the bottle was empty and she was in her bed and the pain was such that breathing made it worse.

Blinking. Blinking also made it worse.

The pumping of blood through her veins. That, too.

Everything. Everything made it worse.

74

In the fall of 1993, the letter continued, your mother was abducted.

This is not something you do not already know. This is not something we need to remind you of, yet while you know a story about the abduction and disappearance and ultimate fate of your mother, you do not yet know the full and accurate story.

Let us begin, then, with the fall of 1993. Your mother had dropped you off at school that morning and had, on her way back to your apartment, stopped at a Duane Reade. Let us say she needed to buy a new hair dryer. Really, does it matter? In the grand scheme of things, no it does not, but let us say that we know for sure that what she bought was a hair dryer, a small pack of Band-Aids, and Tylenol PM.

It is important to us that you understand just what and how much we know about your mother and about the man and woman who abducted her, and about you.

Your mother was taken just as she left the store.

You have been led to believe that the man and woman who took your mother were the anarchists Manuel Guzman and Nadja Prcic, that she was abducted by these two and returned to a secret location in Queens, where she was brainwashed, such that she forgot who she was, who you were, or that you were even a you to be forgotten about. After which, she was moved in secret to Houston, then to Managua, where she was trained to be a freedom fighter, and then, from there, was snuck across the Atlantic into West Africa, where she was given further instruction and deeper brainwashing. Then, during an operation — the attempted (and foiled) detonation of a bomb in the London Underground — your mother was killed.

You have seen the photographs.

You have read the dossiers.

You know the reports.

As far as you are aware, you have killed everyone involved in the operation but for one man who killed himself.

It is our unfortunate responsibility to inform you that in all of this, however, you are wrong, though only because you have been misled.

As of this moment — as we are penning this letter to you — your mother is still alive.

75

By the end of the assault it had been a minor miracle that she was standing still, much less fighting. Much less crushing skulls with her bare hand.

Even she had known that the arm had managed all the heavy lifting, had pulled her along, had made all of the decisions, moving her left or right, punching or not punching, crushing or not crushing, according to its own mysterious rubric.

And she hadn’t cared. Let the arm do what it wanted to do.

But when it was all over, she could barely stand, much less walk. Her arm held her up, propped her against one of the few remaining cubicle walls.

The doctor declared her unfit for anything but the emergency room and then stitched her up as best he could. Her busted lip. The bulging, purpling bruises on her cheek and over her eye. The cauliflower of her ear, which had been boxed again and again. He applied cream, a salve of some sort, to the places where they had placed the electrodes and the hot pokers.

Her ribs, three of them, had been broken. He couldn’t do much for those.

Internal bleeding he handled as soon as he could get her into the operating room.

Then there’d been the shock of losing her arm, and then of the arm’s return, the emotional and mental rigmarole that had gone hand in hand with all of that, but she kept that for herself. She could have handed that to the doctor, too, and maybe he would have handed her something back — a tranquilizer, maybe, or a hug. But that, the emotional thing that had happened back there, the weeping and sobbing into her shirt, the liquid feeling of feeling whole again — that she kept for herself.

But despite all of this, despite the pain of torture and hastily performed field surgery to remove her arm and despite the fighting and the reattachment, despite all of this, nothing had happened to her foot.

Her foot — both her feet — should have been fine.

76

By the time the doctor saw her the next morning, she couldn’t walk unassisted. She hobbled into the examination room using a crutch. Her breath rasped; her skin had paled. She had a fine, pungent sheen of sweat clamming to her face and neck and chest.

Not a few times during the night had she considered cutting off the foot herself, cutting it off just below the calf.

After an examination and X-ray, the doctor told her there was nothing wrong with her foot, and she considered punching him through his face.

Lately, she had been considering punching people through their faces a not-inconsiderable number of times.

So much did she want to punch him through his face, her mechanical arm had come up to punch-through-the-face level. Her fist was a closed and ready-to-punch fist.

She forced it down. She exerted a great deal of force of will to make it go down. When it did, it grabbed hold of the edge of the table in a serious and life-threatening way.

“Check,” she said. “Again.” She gritted her teeth. Her fist gripped the table hard enough to crumple the edge of it. She didn’t care. All she could do was grit her teeth or crush the table with her fist or crush the doctor’s skull.

He checked again. He didn’t know what was wrong. He gave her something to take for the pain. She looked at the bottle he handed her and shoved it back at him and in the same fluid motion grabbed him by his collar, her fist cocked and ready to punch again.

He gave her something much stronger.

By the afternoon, her foot was green. The entire foot from the tip of her toe to the top of her ankle.

Not a deep green, not a green you would call forest or sea turtle or even just green, not yet, but it wasn’t yellow either.

It was beyond yellow and was moving confidently into the green family of colors.

The sight of the green foot made the doctor blanch, made him stutter. He rubbed his hand through his thin hair and pulled it down tightly over his face. She grabbed him again and pulled him close and he smelled like sick, or sick and sweat, and she was desperate now.

People had to fucking carry her there, and she was now desperate.

“Cut it off,” she said. “Cut the fucking thing off and do it now.”

77

Not only is your mother still alive, but you have seen her and she has seen you innumerable times. It is possible that you and your mother have seen each other on a near-weekly basis now for the past seven years that you have been working for the Regional Office, working for Mr. Niles and Oyemi, working for the very people who took your mother from you.

Manuel Guzman and Nadja Prcic, while not the best of people, while guilty of a number of crimes and sins, and not exactly undeserving of being hunted down and smote by your lovely mechanical arm, had nothing to do with the abduction of your mother but were simply offered up by Mr. Niles — along with the other men and women you stalked and killed, men and women the Regional Office would have gotten around to dealing with eventually if not for you, so do not blame yourself for their deaths, which were hastened, surely, but not by much. Mr. Niles has, for this long time, been working to control you and your movements, all in an attempt to hide from you the very information you came looking for.

Your mother is much changed from how you would remember her. Have you figured it out? Have you guessed yet where your mother is, who your mother has become?

It is not our intention to be coy or to throw puzzles at you like obstacles in a training course, but it is simply our hope that if you can come to the conclusion on your own, if you can take the small pieces of this we have given you and pull together a full picture of what wrongs have been committed — against you, against your mother — then you will more likely believe this truth than the one you were fed by Mr. Niles.

It is not an easy choice we are asking you to make, we understand how hard this choice must be, the choice between a story you have told yourself again and again, that you have done right by your mother, by her spirit, have taken righteous vengeance against the men and women who stole her from you, and the story that you have done very little at all, have done less than very little in fact, have worked to advance the goals and livelihoods of the two people who deserved your vengeance most.

We navigate through this life with the good-faith hope that we are doing our best, that we are aimed in the right directions, that we are helping the helpless. Maybe we slip, maybe we mess up, maybe from time to time we do things that are less the right thing. Or we cut corners, or we make choices that serve our interests over the interests of those who depend on us, or we hide the consequences of the decisions we have made with the hope that those consequences will never be seen despite how often we make those same decisions. We go back to the ones we love when clearly they do not love us, or do not know how to love us, or show us their love in a way easily mistaken for hate. We are weak in the face of the hard work it sometimes takes to be strong. We convince ourselves (incorrectly) that silence is not a form of consent. We let good people die and sometimes we kill them ourselves and we hide and we hide and we hide and soon hiding becomes the thing we are best at doing, but it is time, Sarah.

It is time to stop hiding, Sarah O’Hara.

It is time to stop peeking out from behind the coattails of Mr. Niles, the flaring nostrils of Oyemi, the long reach of the Regional Office, to stop peeking out from behind your mechanical arm, to stop hiding behind your aunt and the tragedy of your childhood, time to stop hiding from what is real and painful and frustrating and all of the other emotions we find it so easy to hide from, and time to admit that you know, have known, have always known since the first time you saw her, bald and trembling and half-submerged in the milky-blue water of Oyemi’s Oracle Pool with her “sisters,” time to see your mother, time to stop pretending it’s not her.

78

The relief she felt when she came out of the surgery, when she came out of the haze-inducing anesthetics, was an ecstasy kind of relief.

The relief in having this part of her removed was almost as strong, in fact, as the relief she felt when she’d had that other part of her reattached.

It lasted for a day, for almost two days, and she wondered how strong the anesthetic had been. She didn’t take any of the painkillers the doctor had given her. She didn’t need them, she felt so fucking good all of the time now. She should have cut the other foot off, too, for good measure.

The lab was working on a new foot for her. The doctor had asked her to wait two weeks, three weeks, and then the foot would’ve been finished and they could’ve removed the bad foot and replaced it all in one operation, but she couldn’t wait. She wouldn’t wait. She would have cut it off herself if he hadn’t done it for her.

For now, it was disguised. They didn’t have the prosthetic on hand, and so it was disguised with wrapping and a boot, the kind people wore when they broke their foot. She had a story to tell in which she was a klutz. People liked to hear about when you were a klutz, she decided.

But in all honesty, she didn’t care what people liked to hear about or what people thought about when they saw her with her boot and her wrap because all she could think about was how good she felt now that the foot was gone.

This feeling was a fleeting feeling, however. This feeling lasted not even two full days before it was gone and was replaced first by an itch at the base of her leg, around the place where her foot would have started if her foot had still been there, and was followed, not long after, by a sharp, but not as sharp as before, kind of pain.

At first, it was like she was being touched by a sharp piece of ice. And then it was like she was being jabbed by that piece of ice, or as if the sharp piece of ice were being worked into her skin, were working to gouge out some essential part of her there in that new and raw stump.

Or, and this was what she decided, it was like the sharp piece of ice was not on the outside working its way in, but was instead on the inside trying to dig itself out.

She unclipped the boot and unraveled the wrap and looked at the place where there had been a foot, but she couldn’t see what might have been going on.

She placed her fingers gently on the part of her that was still wrapped in gauze but couldn’t feel anything through the gauze and so she unwrapped the gauze, too, and tested the skin, the nerves, with the soft pad of her index finger and then with the rest of her fingers, and there she felt them.

She couldn’t see what they were, not yet, but she could feel them. With her fingertips, she could feel them pushing their way out of her stump, and they were sharp and cold and not ice but not unlike ice, either.

Not ice, no. Metal.

79

Everyone was scared of her now. The interns, the jerks in accounting, the office staff, the travel agency staff. Even the Operatives. Oh, boy, were they scared of her now.

They were more scared of her now than she could have ever hoped or wished for. They were the kind of scared of her that surpassed even the kind of scared they had been of Oyemi.

It helped, if helped was the right word, that the skin they’d grafted onto her mechanical arm to redisguise it had sloughed off, simply died and peeled off, leaving the shiny interior exposed.

The doctor, who was maybe the most scared of her, had no explanation for this, didn’t even correct her when she said it had just died and fallen away. The skin was synthetic. There had been nothing in it to die.

If they’d known about the other part of this, if they’d known about the way in which her own body seemed to be systematically targeted by the nanotechnologies in her arm, targeted for replacement and improvement, if they’d known about her foot, which she’d covered up with a shoe, if they’d known about any of this, they would have been the kind of scared of her that would have bled into a dangerous kind of scared.

The kind of scared that would have led them to draw up plans, perhaps. Execution and elimination plans, maybe. Dissection and examination and for-the-betterment-of-science plans, perhaps.

And she didn’t know that such plans hadn’t already been drawn up, did she?

No. She did not.

It had taken less than forty-eight hours for her body to grow a new foot, except that wasn’t right, considering the foot was mechanical, and her body couldn’t “grow” mechanical things, but there it was, a new foot for her. It had been painful, but only in the beginning. Less than forty-eight hours, but already other pieces of her were beginning to wither and die and would need to be replaced by machine. She could tell.

The decay wasn’t visible, but the post-decay replacements were. More of her than just her foot and her arm was beginning to feel inorganic. Her ankle, the lower edge of her calf. The toes on her other foot, four of them, including her big toe, were skinless and had a metallic shine to them. They smelled like pennies or nickels or maybe they just smelled like mechanical toes. When she touched them — and she couldn’t stop worrying at them as if they were loose teeth — they were cold and smooth and hard.

Her shoulder.

She’d felt none of this, though. There’d been no pain since the foot. This was a thing she was grateful for but also she couldn’t be sure how grateful she was or should have been. She didn’t like pain. She wasn’t the kind of person who sought out pain and suffering. But without the pain, what then?

Without the pain, would she wake up one day and find herself replaced, entirely replaced?

Regardless, though, the nanotechnologies — that was her only guess as to what was causing all of this — seemed to be learning, seemed to be engaged in some kind of trial-and-error process. After her foot, this — whatever this was — had developed a new process of find and replace, something less painful or intrusive or physically stressful.

She had no idea what happened to the organic material once it died. She had no idea what happened to the pieces of her that had been her and had since been replaced.

She half expected to find a bevy of toes or other patches of herself gathered at the foot of her bed, tangled in the sheets and duvet like socks kicked off during sleep, but there was never anything there.

80

She showed the doctor her homegrown foot but didn’t show him anything that came after. It was a shame, really. Before all of this, he had finally become a little more comfortable around her. Had apparently forgiven her for crushing his leg so long ago, for destroying his lab. Now he avoided looking right at her, and she felt each day more strongly this need to have him removed — from his position, from the Regional Office entirely.

He had been there almost from the beginning. Mr. Niles had brought him in on their second meeting together. Mr. Niles had told her, I can help you with your problem, but you’ll have to be willing to help us out with ours, too, and when she had offered to pay whatever price he would charge, he had waved that away and told her, That’s not exactly the kind of help we need right now. Then he’d called the doctor into the office, introduced the two of them, described for her the work the doctor had been doing — cutting-edge nanotechnologies, beyond joint or bone replacement — and then explained to her that she would have access to the entire Regional Office if she would be willing to act as a test subject for a new mechanical arm the doctor had devised.

“You won’t be able to tell a thing,” he’d told her. “No one will be able to tell.” Then he’d held up the doctor’s hand, held it by the wrist, and said, “See this, see this hand? Mechanical, the whole thing.” She’d been shocked, amazed. She had seen high levels of robotic technology on campus, some of the highest, but nothing had ever pointed to something so advanced as this. She asked if she could touch it. Mr. Niles offered it to her, the doctor standing there like a living doll, and it felt warm and pliant and so very real.

“Okay,” she’d said. “Yes, okay, yes, I will do this.”

Only later, long after her own surgery, after being given her own mechanical arm, had the doctor told her, in whispering, confiding tones, that his hand wasn’t mechanical at all. He waved his hand in front of her. Shook it, really. Told her, “Blood, bone, nerves.” Then he chuckled and she barked out a chuckle of her own, and then he laughed a loud and only-barely-on-the-edges-of-sanity laugh, and she laughed with him because it was too late, by then it was way too late, and they’d been right. Mr. Niles and the doctor had taken a risk with her and her arm but it had paid off because you couldn’t tell. You looked at one arm and then the other and they looked the same, exactly the same.

She hadn’t always liked him, the doctor, but she had always respected him, and now she was going to have to kill him.

81

She is the one who first brought you here. Did you know that? Your mother? She brought Mr. Niles to you when you were still a girl and he brought you to the Regional Office, but it might as well have been her leading you there by your hand. Might as well have been her opening the door to Mr. Niles’s office for you, moving Mr. Niles’s mouth as he offered to change your life forever.

And she brought us to you.

So here we are.

We are at your door and we are not empty-handed. We are offering you a way out, and once out, a way forward. They have lied to you and manipulated you and for too long we have stood by silently and watched this play out, but now we are here, speaking out, reaching out to you, to tell you this:

Stay home. For a week, for two weeks, for a month or six. Or better yet, leave. Cape Town or Nova Scotia or Taipei. That is your way out. And when it is time, we will find you, and we will show you your way forward.

82

Sarah didn’t, though. She didn’t kill the doctor.

He killed himself. He left a note but it didn’t say much but that he was sorry, but not what he was sorry for.

It didn’t matter anyhow. Her plan to kill him had centered around her plan of keeping her transformation a secret, but now so much of her was inorganic or some strange mix that there was no way for her to hide the mechanical parts of her anymore.

It had been six months, almost seven months now, since the assault. Oyemi had not been found, and when she was honest with herself about this, Sarah would admit that Oyemi was probably dead, or had been so compromised that she might as well have been dead. No matter. The Regional Office was operating again, not at 100 percent, but not far from it, either.

And no one had asked her to step down or to begin the search for her own replacement, not even now that she was in the middle of her own replacement of sorts.

She missed Henry, would find herself some mornings seeking him out in his office or the break room, and then would wonder what had happened to him, how his cards had fallen, but she found she missed Mr. Niles most of all, and most mornings, when she came into work and made her way to his office, she forgot he was dead, that the office was hers now.

She was thinking about him now, in fact, sitting at his desk, now her desk. She couldn’t make herself comfortable sitting there, so she stood up and walked around the room and then made her way to the bathroom. She turned on the light. She looked at herself in his bathroom mirror, at the two mechanical arms, at how obviously mechanical they were, and then thought about how sad that would have made him.

She pushed against the soft parts of her, but this didn’t satisfy her, whatever it was she was trying to satisfy.

Pushing against the soft, organic parts of her with a mechanical forefinger, all she felt was the cold metal against her warm, squishy skin. Something inside the mechanical finger, some bit of sentient technology, sent a reading to her still-organic brain that determined for her, almost as quickly as if that finger had still been a human finger, that she had touched living skin.

A readout scrolled through her mind in a strange and unsettling way. Her brain was still her brain, but everything came in as a readout now.

Looking in the mirror, she wanted to cry because it was all so beautiful, the thing that the thing had created, the thing that the thing had made her into, all shining chromes and swooping tubes and artificial ligaments, so beautiful and flexible and powerful that if she’d seen it in a tech conference showroom, she’d have wept at the beauty of it. She wanted to cry, too, because it was her, not some showroom prototype, and she was afraid and she didn’t know when it would stop.

She didn’t know if it would stop.

How long? she thought. How long will this go on?

Which piece? she thought. Her very next thought: Which piece of me will go next?

She thought this thought, or rather this thought popped unbidden and unwanted into her head, and before she could whisk it away, before she could bury it deep in the darkest recesses of her mind, she felt it, she felt a soft but urgent pressure in her chest.

A twitch in her heart.

~ ~ ~

From The Regional Office Is Under Attack:

Tracking the Rise and Fall of an American Institution

One can imagine, in light of the not-unfathomable notion that Emma and Henry had conspired to fake her death and enact revenge on the Regional Office, that it would have been Emma leading the team that burned Oyemi’s complex to the ground. No records can place Emma at that scene, though in all truth, any records placing any of this anywhere are difficult if not impossible to find.

But Emma — if she lived — Emma especially was a ghost at this point.

Even had Oyemi suspected Henry’s actions, she would not have expected anything from the realm of Emma. And the Oracles? As far as they were concerned, Oyemi had already been duly warned of both Emma and Henry. In light of this, one can imagine the warning system that Oyemi had come to rely on almost completely — the Oracles — failing her when she needed them most.

Imagine: Emma with Windsor and maybe another of Henry’s personal Recruits — Jimmie or Becka — on the Amtrak out of Penn Station. The two (or three) of them sitting in the dining car, not hashing or rehashing out their plans, because they know them by now so intimately, so completely, that to go over them even one more time might tip the scales in the other direction, might cause one or more of them to overthink and slip up.

The lot of them jumping off the train as it slows to round a curve.

The cover of darkness. Their stealth, aided by their mystical properties.

Imagine the quiet deliberation as Windsor unmoors the locks — physical and magickal — that Oyemi had set in place to protect herself, her Oracles.

Windsor’s soft, quiet, consistent breaths, the care with which she works her magick — both literally and figuratively — and the softly tingling buzzing feeling this gives Emma, just under her ears, where her jawbone connects to her skull, how much this relaxes her, how much her own relaxation sets Windsor at ease.

Dogs roaming the compound that never know the three of them have slipped through the fence and are making their way to the house on the hill.

The house itself smaller than they imagined, modest, even.

The small kernel of doubt lodged deep within Emma, unretrievable and not wholly ignorable, that maybe the best course, the smartest course, would be to abort the mission, to find Henry, to set these girls free before it’s too late for them, to jet off with Henry to Finland, maybe, or New Zealand, to let bygones be bygones.

Oyemi there on the porch, her eyes wild with fire and power, her hair lifted not by wind but by the electromagnetics swirling around her.

Because she knows.

It is too late, but she has seen the necessary and pointless five minutes of her future, knows they have come for her, that the prophecy has come for her, that she read it all wrong.

Windsor falling first, struck by a fireball, incinerated before she hits the ground. Jimmie screaming, her urgent need to leap out of the way rendered inert by fear, by the sudden reality of death and magick and power and the realization that, truly, she has none, or next to none, in the face of Oyemi.

Emma uncaring. Or caring, but not yet, not now.

Emma will remember to cower in fear later. The fear will make her temporarily deaf and mute. She will cower and shake just on the other side of the fence from the still-burning compound. She will scream and scream until she is hoarse, but she won’t hear herself over the crackling and violence of the fire, but she won’t hear that, either. She will shiver until her whole body aches, but not yet, not now.

Now she will spin and drop and roll and lunge and throw her own magicks at Oyemi, borrowed of course, these magicks. A dagger, its blade forged in an interdimensional fire; an amulet stolen from the Regional Office itself, stored within its underground vaults, its powers never tested, unknown. She will weave a spell stolen from one of Oyemi’s own books, filched by Henry when he reported back to Oyemi that Emma was dead.

She will bring these powers to bear, and these powers will fall short, and Oyemi will deflect them all, turning fire into ice, melting the tip of the blade even as it flies through the air toward her, raising a host of roots from the very earth her house stands on, but despite all of this, she will fall.

Maybe Jimmie recomposes herself, sets the fire that burns Oyemi’s compound to its foundation, and the flames licking at Oyemi’s heels distract her just enough. Or maybe one of the Oracles, seeing for the first time her own bleak future, the charred bodies of her brethren, tries to save herself from Oyemi’s fate, and this, the sight of her Oracle, struggling to pull herself free from her pool, from the house, from this timeline, distracts Oyemi. Or maybe Emma, maybe Emma is simply that fast, that good, slipping past the roots even as they reach up to grab her, trip her, pull her into the earth and strangle her there. She slips past and cartwheels about and lands, finally, face-to-face with Oyemi, moves too quick for Oyemi to react, twists her head from her neck, and this, maybe this is what catches the world on fire.

One can imagine. This, any of this, all of this, none of this, but all one knows for sure is:

Henry made a plan.

He was a Recruiter, was good at recruiting and training, and so that was where he began.

Wendy first, whom he quietly installed at the Regional Office as an intern, as a mole. And then Windsor and Jimmie and Colleen and Becka and Rose, finally Rose.

Emma had strong feelings about Rose but he wasn’t certain, put off recruiting her until it was almost too late, and then he met her, and then he saw what Emma sensed in her, which was a kernel of Emma herself, lodged somewhere deep inside Rose.

And then he trained them, with Emma at his side, and then he went to work. Figuring out the location of Oyemi’s compound took six months. He did other things, too, in those two years. He recruited more Operatives for the Regional Office. He organized and collected the office donations for the March of Dimes. He hired various teams of mercenaries, paid grunts, and put them under the charge of his team.

For two years, he planned, and when the day came, he walked away from the Regional Office for good.

Although, technically he didn’t go into work that day.

Nor did he go to Oyemi’s compound.

Burning the compound to the ground, destroying everything within it, had been Windsor and Jimmie’s job.

Instead, Henry spent part of the day in the city.

The Met by the Etruscan vases, the small custom-jewelry store where he and Emma almost, as a joke, bought each other matching rings after they’d spent the day walking through Park Slope pretending to be one of those new young couples recently transplanted from Manhattan, on that rooftop where they’d eaten Italian ices together, the roof they’d snuck onto on Mulberry. He went to a toy store. He and Emma had come there only once and only because it had been raining so hard that they’d ducked into the first open store they came upon. They browsed the toys, walked down the aisles while the rain came down outside.

“What do you think about kids?” he’d asked.

“Oh, I hate them,” she said, her eyes wide and her mouth just slightly open.

He smiled and nodded and said, “Me too.”

And they smiled and then they kissed.

“I do like toys, though,” she said.

And he said, “Me too!” exaggerating for effect because they’d gotten into the habit of exaggerating in a way that characters sometimes do in romantic comedies or sitcoms because to think of this thing that was happening between them, whatever this thing was or would become, as anything more serious than a romantic comedy made them both nervous.

They spent an hour browsing through the toy store, stayed long past the end of the rainstorm, holding hands and looking at the toys of their youth, and then separated when she became involved with the kaleidoscope selection, began reminiscing about the kaleidoscope her father had bought for her to take as a present for a birthday party, but then her parents were killed a few days before the party and so she’d kept it, kept it for eight or nine years and through a series of foster homes, kept it until she was fourteen, when one of the boys she was living with, when she wouldn’t give him a kiss, smashed it with his boot, so she smashed his jaw with her fist, and after that started sneaking out of the house, and after that started shoplifting, and then auto-thefting, and so on, so forth.

“Maybe things would’ve been different,” she said, “if I’d never lost that kaleidoscope.”

“Maybe,” he said.

He said this even though he knew better, knew that the Oracles would have plucked her out of a mansion dream house just as easily as they would have picked her out of juvenile detention — it had happened before — just that more often than not the places the Oracles plucked these girls from were of the detention or psych-ward type, though you couldn’t blame the girls for this. They’d been imbued with unchecked mystical strength and intelligence, and it seemed nitpicky to complain when that sometimes also led to deviant, violent, often troublesome behavior.

He had admired Oyemi for this ability to seek out these young women, troubled perhaps the way she had been troubled before she’d discovered her own powers. He admired her ability to take what everyone else saw as weaknesses, as difficulties, and transform them into cold, hard, sharp strengths. When it came right down to it, aside from the fact that she had asked him to kill the one woman he’d come to love, he had liked Oyemi.

Though, liked was maybe too strong a word.

After a while, he’d tired of each new kaleidoscope she picked up and gazed into and so drifted away to the models and toy engineering sets and there found a ridiculous piece of crap that he couldn’t help but fall in love with.

It was a building kit and on the cover of the box was a Tyrannosaurus rex made from winches and girders and struts and, where there should have been clawed feet, tank treads. He pulled the box down from the shelf and looked at it. He pictured its pieces spread out over the light-gray rug in his cold, sterile living room, and for a second, he considered buying it, and then Emma came up behind him and looked over his shoulder at the box in his hand and laughed and said, “Boys and their dinosaurs.”

“Damn right,” he said, and looked at her and asked, “Find a dolly or something?”

She smiled and sheepishly, but not really, held up a twirling baton. “Guilty,” she said. He laughed and she laughed and said, “No, but wait,” and then she spun it and twirled it and threw it and spun herself and caught it.

“I used to be good at this,” she said. “You know,” she said. “Before.”

She ran her small routine again. He wanted to clap but smiled instead.

“We should get these,” she said, gripping it like a cop with his baton and then swinging it forcefully down over her head, “but, like, for all of the girls. We could put together a routine — I’d choreograph it of course — and the monsters, they’d see the bunch of us with these batons about to bash their skulls in — the fucking monsters wouldn’t know what hit ’em.”

She twirled it in her fingers lazily and smiled shyly, but he caught a hint of real shyness in that shy smile this time, and she said, “Right?”

“Definitely,” he said, and he bought her the baton, and now, since he couldn’t find here what he’d really hoped to find here, what he hoped to find everywhere he looked, he wanted to buy himself that damn Tyrannosaurus rex, but the store had changed. It was still a toy store, if you could call it that, but full of European toys, promising education and not a whit of fun.

He picked up yet another blocky, handmade wooden toy car and placed it back in disgust and then left.

He had a plane to catch.

Though by all accounts, he missed that plane, checked in, obtained an electronic boarding pass, but never boarded, and perhaps he purchased two tickets, boarded under an alias, but it is also easy enough to imagine a slightly different scenario.

Easy enough to imagine him stealing a car instead. Taking this car up the Hudson and across the George Washington Bridge and out of Manhattan and north.

Maybe he drove north, through Paramus and past Mahwah, north along the Hudson River. Maybe he took I-87 for nearly two hours north and then turned off toward Hunter but didn’t stop in Hunter, but turned onto an unmarked, little-used road and followed it for another twenty minutes, and turned off it onto a private driveway that wound for another two miles, but even before he wound his way up the drive, maybe he felt, even if he couldn’t see, the smoke in the air, thick plumes of it billowing up and out, black enough that the presence of it was palpable even against the black, moonless night, and when he arrived, maybe he wasn’t surprised to find the compound ablaze, and if there was one piece of it not on fire, he could not tell by looking at what was in front of him.

And once there, maybe he waited. Waited for the fire to jump through the tall metal gate and catch hold of the woods surrounding the compound. Or waited for something else. Perhaps he sat in his car and watched the flames burn hot for as long as he could, until the smoke became too much for the car’s filter. And while there, he hoped, what? To see some sign of Emma, perhaps. Some sign from her? She was dead (or if not dead, if her death was faked, they had already established their rendezvous plans). But still. Maybe this is where he had come, why he missed his first flight out of the city.

And maybe he caught a glimpse of something out of the corner of his eye. A movement, a shadow cast by the flames, he was sure, but for a second, maybe he thought it was Emma. He could picture her stepping out of the woods, mystically untouched by the flames that raged only on the other side of the gate, stepping out and rapping her knuckles on the passenger window to get him to unlock the door.

He would have liked to have had her with him then. If she were around to console him in this moment, he wouldn’t need consoling in the first place. But still. Maybe he wanted to be there with someone. He wanted to have someone there to hear him say, What happened to it all? He wanted someone to hear him say, There was something special here. We had something real. The Regional Office was something real. Say, What went wrong? He wanted someone there to acknowledge that something great and singular and brilliant and wonderful was going away, had already gone, in fact. Even now, as he watched Oyemi’s compound burn, he wanted there to be at least one other person watching with him who knew what was happening, one other person to be sad about it with him, to regret, not the fact that he was instrumental in its demise, but that the Regional Office had become a place where demise, where violent upheaval and near-total annihilation, seemed inevitable. Seemed the only option left.

He would have sighed. The smoke and heat would finally have been too much. He would have thrown his car in reverse, turned the thing around. He’d have checked his rearview mirror, the sky lit by the false sunset of Oyemi’s compound burning out of existence, and he’d have wondered at how quiet it was, at how the road in front of him was nothing but peace and quiet and calm. Even as he drove, he would have thought about Emma, looked for her out in the woods on either side of the road. He would have wished she were there beside him, and at once, the idea that she had slipped into the trunk of his car while he was distracted by the flames would have become for a second so real that he pulled over, stepped out of the car, and opened the trunk, but, of course, she wouldn’t have been there.

Maybe, then, he looked around, took a deep breath. And maybe, then, he got back into his car and kept driving, drove back into the city, back to the airport, where he should have gone to begin with.

But whatever the case: He missed his flight, and he scheduled another.

At the airport, he clutched his boarding pass and placed his shoes and his coat on the conveyor belt and walked through the detector. Something about this simple act released a tension that had been building inside of him since he left a dead Emma in a burning house, since he left the Regional Office.

It had been so long since he’d flown out of any airport but the Regional Office airport, so long since he’d had to stand in line, wait for a ticket, pass through security, wait for the boarding call, that he felt suddenly like a boy again, as if he were on some grand and mysterious adventure.

Feeling adventurous and boyish, he walked into a place called the Fuel Bar and found a seat and ordered a cocktail — a peach concoction called the High Dive — and then he leaned back in his chair and smiled.

He looked at the time.

He tried to think of what he’d be doing right now if he were at the office. He closed his eyes and tried to remember what he’d put on his calendar for the day. Meetings, meetings, a lunch meeting, and then meetings. In between all of that? Filing something, probably, or training a Recruit. But then he thought about what had actually happened at the Regional Office after he left, what might be happening still. Now that he had left in such a spectacular fashion.

How mad would Sarah be?

If she were still alive, that was.

He had let them know that he would prefer it if she didn’t die, but he also let them know that ultimately it was up to them how they handled Sarah if she didn’t accept their offer, their way out, their way forward.

If they hadn’t killed her, then, how mad would she be?

He took a sip of his High Dive. It came in a heavy and fluted glass. It was too sweet and he should have ordered a beer or ordered nothing at all, but he didn’t care.

Today was a good day.

Today was the first good day, the first good day he’d had.

Today was the first of many good, good days.

The last good day had been some time ago.

Had been the time Emma stayed with him for two weeks in his apartment. Somehow she had fooled the Oracles, fooled Sarah and Mr. Niles, had made it seem like she was on assignment in Rio when in fact she was hiding out in his apartment, reading his books, listening to his records, eating his food, and sleeping in his bed. Sleeping in his bed with him.

Since that day. Well. He could argue there had been other productive days, days where he felt he’d done some good if the days themselves hadn’t been good.

The day he’d tapped into the Oracle’s network — a surprisingly simple task that, in its simplicity, made Henry wonder just how complacent Oyemi and her people had become — and then, shortly after, when he’d tracked down Wendy, who’d been living in Minneapolis.

He had felt good about all of that, or not good.

Good wasn’t what he’d felt.

Proud, perhaps.

Or not even proud.

As if he had accomplished a thing he needed to even if it was a thing he didn’t relish or really want to do. That was how he’d felt. How he’d been feeling the past few days. The past few years.

In ten years, of course, they’ll find him — Henry. They’ll come for him while he is getting a shave.

He will be leaned back in the chair with a hot, steamed towel wrapped around his face, will be breathing in the slight, medicinal, clean, soapy smell of the towel, waiting to be lathered up, will be thinking of little more than what he should do for dinner after the shave when they, or rather she, will come up to him and lift the towel off his face, drop it in his lap, and say, “Hello, stranger.”

At first, he won’t recognize her.

His first thought, seeing her, will be, Why did they send a robot?

His second thought will be, When did they start using robots?

But it won’t be a robot. It’ll be Sarah, who will, by that time, only look like a robot.

By this time, he won’t have seen Emma in ten years. She will have missed their rendezvous point. He will have gone searching for her in the rubble of Oyemi’s compound. He won’t have found her or any sign of her, or Oyemi or any sign of Oyemi. He will have placed cryptic ads in the Missed Connections sections of hundreds of weeklies across the country, will have looked for her abroad and at home. He will have come home every day expecting to find her in his apartment the same way he’d found her all those years ago, wearing one of his shirts, reading one of his books, listening to one of his records, but he never will have. In all this time, he will never have once suspected that she is dead. And then he will see Sarah, and then he’ll know, or think he knows.

As soon as he figures out that Sarah herself has come for him, that she has probably already found all the others (perhaps even Emma), he will hide his feelings, or do his best to hide them, and will focus on the fact that she is part — or mostly — robot. He will glance at her arm, her left arm, which has always been the arm he’s suspected is the mechanical arm, and he will think to himself, Aha! I was right! Because there it will be, her mechanical arm, naked and metallic and exposed and full of a strange, almost organic beauty, but then he will look at her other arm, her right arm, and it will be the same, almost exactly the same, and so he won’t be able to say which one was the original mechanical arm. For some reason, the fact that he will continue to live his life holding on to this mystery — even if not for very much longer — will sadden him even more than the fact that he has been found out, has been caught by surprise, and that his uncertain future now seems certain to come to a short and violent end.

Although to be completely honest about it, what will upset him most of all will be that he won’t be getting the massage that comes complimentary with every shave, and for a second, he will consider asking her, Can you wait, can you give me just ten minutes, can you wait ten minutes, please?

But that wouldn’t be for another ten years.

A lot could happen in ten years. Almost an entire life could be lived in ten years.

And as far as Henry knew, that life started right then, at JFK International.

Or better yet, that life would start when he and Emma met, which they would do. Not right away — situations had to cool down, everything had to pass them by — but soon.

He forgot how sweet his drink was and took another sip and then grimaced and then leaned back in his chair to wait and to think or to not think at all about anything, about any of it. He didn’t think about the future, and did his best to stop thinking, finally, about the past, and he worked hard to concentrate on just this moment, this moment right now, here in this airport, the freedom he felt or should have felt sitting there with the knowledge that things had gone not the way he’d wanted them to go — he’d never wanted things to go this way — but how he’d planned them to go.

He took a deep breath and looked around him at the crowds moving here and there to catch flights or grab luggage or a taxi and all he saw before him was a bright, uncluttered, simple future. A future that was spread out before him, that was waiting for him in Durham or Cape Town or Helsinki, but was waiting for him all the same.