The Regional Office Is Under Attack!: A Novel (6 page)

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

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

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

Her name was written in black Sharpie across the front.

She stared at it.

Then she turned away and walked into her kitchen.

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

It was.

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

How considerate.

And strange.

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

This was at midnight.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Still.

What a drag.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And way too late to save Mr. Niles.