The Regional Office Is Under Attack!: A Novel (23 page)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.