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.
16.
“My mother disappeared,” Sarah had told Mr. Niles at that first meeting, even though clearly he would have known this, since they had found her, they had invited her to their offices promising information on her mother’s disappearance.
Still. Sarah believed in coming right to the point. People could be so awkward the way they danced around the topic of her mother.
“She disappeared when I was eight.”
Mr. Niles had offered Sarah his hand and had led her off the elevator into an open office thrumming with activity. He’d introduced himself and hadn’t bothered with the unnecessary You must be Sarah that she had expected. He’d offered her something to drink, something to eat, and when she had refused both, had taken her to his office, and that was where they were talking now.
Mr. Niles, who had short black hair that would have been curly if he’d let it grow out, and a soft, round face, and very little chin to speak of, smiled at her and told her, almost gently, “I know.”
Sarah didn’t know what to say to that so she didn’t say anything. Mr. Niles tented his hands together and pressed the tips of his index fingers to the tip of his nose. He tilted back in his office chair and regarded Sarah with what Sarah took to be some skepticism.
“I know that she was abducted,” he said, finally, “and I know a lot more than that.” He dropped his hands into his lap and leaned forward in his chair and said, “What I don’t know is if you’re ready.”
“Ready?” she asked.
“For the truth. About your mother. And about you.”
She didn’t know what truth there would be for her to find out about herself, but she didn’t know why the Regional Office would have contacted her in the first place if Mr. Niles hadn’t thought she was ready to learn what they knew about her mother. That was the whole reason she had come.
It was strange, though, being here, telling Mr. Niles the small piece of her story, waiting to hear what he had to say. Strange because she had long ago stopped killing herself trying to puzzle out what had happened to her mother. After her mother had disappeared and she had gone to live with her aunt, Sarah hadn’t known what had happened to her mother, not even in the abstract. She only knew that her mother was gone, and that she missed her, and that she was sad because of this, but the other aspects of her life hadn’t changed very much. She still had to go to school, still had to wake up in the mornings and go to bed at night at the same specified times. She still liked the same foods—not many of them—and still had the same friends—again, not many of them. What it meant that her mother was gone wouldn’t occur to her until she was older, which was when she started to think seriously about the things that might’ve happened to her mother. And as a teenager, Sarah tortured herself—that’s how Sarah liked to think of it—with all the possibilities. From: Her mother took an honest look at what the next ten to twelve years held in store for her alone in the city with a daughter she didn’t fully understand and simply walked out, wiping her hands clean of that potential disaster, to: She was nabbed on the way home, forced to live in a basement in a building two doors down or the next block over, a sex slave, or worse. Sarah couldn’t imagine what worse would look like, could only imagine that there could be worse.
There could always be worse.
She didn’t know what Mr. Niles would tell her, or what would happen after that, but what she knew was that she was ready.
Ready for something, ready for anything, ready to move on, ready for the truth.
“I’m ready,” she said. “I’m as ready as I’ll ever be,” she said, and this made Mr. Niles smile, maybe because he admired her confidence or maybe because he knew she was wrong.
17.
Sarah brewed a pot of coffee.
It was nice being in the office before anyone else. It was quiet, true, but that wasn’t what was so nice about it. Late at night, after everyone else had gone home, it was quiet then, too. No. This was different. Desks were still cluttered and the mail room was still a mess and someone had left a dirty coffee mug and plate in the kitchen sink, but still, there seemed to be something fresh and untouched about the office. This early and as empty as it was, the office contained a well, or a bubble, a fragile bubble of potential for great work to be done, grand and fantastic deeds to be accomplished. That was it. That was the difference. By the end of any day, of every day, it seemed, all the day’s potential had been undone by phone calls and meetings, e-mails and paperwork.
Plus, this early, with no one around, she could get to work without everyone scrambling to her with their problems, most of which weren’t even her responsibility. She wa
sn’t the office manager or the intern coordinator or the director of outreach or assistant to the regional manager. She worked directly for Mr. Niles, was his go-to, had been so almost from her first day working here, but without fail, every single day someone would come to her with some stupid question about toner cartridges or to complain about that idiot intern Jacob, or to hand her a list of supplies the office had run out of. But whatever. Let those nitwits send her e-mails about resetting their voice mail passwords; she didn’t care. Not today. Today and in the coming weeks, she would be too busy saving their goddamn asses, so thank God no one else was around.
She poured milk into her coffee and looked out over the empty cubicles and told herself she would make a habit of this again—once this attack was thwarted—of coming in early, maybe not every day, but often.
Often enough.
But for now: the attack.
It wasn’t explicit, the warning she had received, if that was what it had been.
The envelope had contained a letter, an offer letter of sorts. Someone trying to lure her away from the Regional Office. Not sent, though, from any kind of headhunter firm—not that there were many headhunter firms trafficking in the world inhabited by organizations like the Regional Office, but there were a few, and this hadn’t been sent from any of them. This had been sent, or delivered, rather, from the organization itself. She didn’t know which. Whoever had sent the offer hadn’t specified.
And there was information, about the Regional Office, about Mr. Niles, about her arm. Information that had made her mad, violently and destructively mad. Information clearly, blatantly false. Damning and cruel, intended, she was sure, to turn her against the people she had come to think so highly of, to work so hard for, trust with her life and, quite literally, her limb.
Not that her anger had passed but had been refocused. She had curbed her impulses and trained her anger on making whoever left her that envelope pay and pay dearly.
The question she had to answer, then, was: who?
By the time anyone else showed up at the office, Sarah had narrowed the list of suspects down to six. Six organizations or conglomerations or evil confederations or anarchist splinter groups with a) any vested interest in the total destruction of the Regional Office, b) the logistical and mystical support and backing and training and time to carry out such an attack, and c) as her aunt would have dubbed it, the brass fucking balls to even think of such an attack.
Six of them. On a spreadsheet. Leadership outlined, strengths and weaknesses enumerated, potential readiness for such an assault, earliest timeline for such an attack. That’s as far as Sarah had gotten when she heard, “Wow, you’re here early.”
It was Wendy. Thank God it was Wendy and not that idiot Jacob.
If she was going to deal with one of the interns this morning of all mornings, better it be Wendy.
She could not handle Jacob right now.
“Check your tablet, I sent you a spreadsheet just a minute—”
“Yeah, I got it, just now,” Wendy said, scrolling through the names. “This year’s Christmas card list?”
Sarah was scanning the building schematics for the Regional Office on her computer, looking for weak points, points of entry, defense positions, and, frankly, she didn’t have time for jokes. She shook her head. “The Regional Office is under attack,” she said. “Or will be, soon, quite possibly very soon, so, if you don’t mind.”
Wendy smiled and then just as quickly stopped smiling. “Wait, what? Are you kidding?” Sarah stopped scrolling through the schematics to pause long enough to throw Wendy a look. “I mean, right, you’re not the jokiest person I know, but, really? We’re under attack? Guns a-blazing attack?”
“Minus the guns, yes, we’re under attack, or I’m pretty sure we will be.” She paused. “Actually, there might be guns.”
“Cool,” Wendy said, and then so she wouldn’t get a second look or worse, said, “I mean, not cool as in ‘awesome,’ but.” She paused. “How very interesting.” She paused again. “So, is this new intel from one of the Ops?” she asked. “Or something from the Oracles?”
“Look at the list, will you?” Sarah said, ignoring her questions, not yet ready to mention to anyone else the letter on her door, the information inside it. “Keep it between you and me for now. I would prefer not to have people in a panic all day, and maybe if we work real hard at it, we can stop it before it becomes too interesting. Hmm?”
“Oh. Stop it?”
Sarah sighed, spun in her chair to look at Wendy, to make sure it was Wendy and not, who knew, Jacob in a Wendy outfit. “I’m sorry, but are you feeling okay? Yeah, I think we can all agree that we should stop the attack. Right? Stop it?”
“Oh, yeah, sorry, it’s just that, well, you said we were under attack and I thought you meant, like, right now, that we were in the middle of it, that’s all.” Wendy cleared her throat. “Stop it, definitely. Stop the attack before it happens. That’s definitely what we should do.”
“Great. Glad we’re all caught up. The names, please?” Sarah went back to the drawings. What was she missing, what had she missed, where were the flaws? She wanted it all narrowed down, the attack scenario and her counterattack options worked up and presentable before the end of the day, but there was something missing. She couldn’t pinpoint what, but there was something. She could sense it.
Wendy hadn’t moved. Sarah stopped and took a deep breath and rubbed one of her eyes with her thumb. “What, Wendy?”
“Should we tell Mr. Niles?”
“How do you know I haven’t told him already?”
“Right, sorry. What did Mr. Niles say?”
Sarah’s shoulders slumped. She couldn’t feel the weight of her mechanical arm, that’s how it had been designed, but this morning, she could feel the weight of it pulling her down, she swore she could.
“We’ll tell him when we have something more concrete, how about that? We don’t . . . storm into his office with six possible attackers and a probable attack.” Wendy was nodding. “The list, Wendy? Can you focus on the list, please, and help me figure this out?”
“Right, boss,” Wendy said. “I’ll run probability reports for each name, create three—no, five—possible counterstrategies for each, get them to you by . . . what time is it now?”
Sarah checked the clock. It was almost eight. How had it gotten to be almost eight? Sarah stared at the clock.
“Whatever,” Wendy said. “I’ll have it all to you before ten?”
Relieved that Wendy was acting like Wendy again, Sarah smiled. “Perfect, thanks.” Wendy smiled back, was about to leave when Sarah said, “Oh, and”—she sighed, God, why couldn’t she stop sighing—“I should probably bring Jasmine in on this. What time does she come in today?”
Wendy cocked her head not unlike a spaniel. “Oh, nine I guess?” she said.
“Never mind. I’ll look it up,” Sarah said. Wendy was usually on top of this shit, and Sarah didn’t really have time or patience for her to come down with a case of the “interns,” but whatever. She’d figure it out herself.
Wendy moved closer to Sarah, reached over her shoulder for Sarah’s tablet. “Here,” she said. “You’re super busy. I can look it up for you, put her on your schedule.”
Sarah held her tablet firm. “It’s fine, Wendy, Jesus. I can take care of it.”
She scrolled through the schedule. It took her a moment to realize something was wrong and another moment for her to recognize what that something wrong was. Wendy was still leaning over her and then she felt Wendy stand up, step one or two steps back.
Jasmine wasn’t there. On the schedule. That was what was wrong. She was on a mission. Sarah didn’t recognize the mission, but more surprising even than that—which was pretty damn surprising since Sarah approved and cleared every mission—was how no one else was on the schedule either. How every one of their girl
s was also on a mission. Against all protocol, every single Operative was gone, off-site, and in Jasmine’s case, off-dimension.
“What the hell is going on?” Sarah said.
A creeping, slow-moving sense of what was going on crept and slowly moved into the pit of Sarah, and she was about to say, Jesus, we’re too late, it’s today, but then the client elevator dinged and that ding was followed by voices, unfamiliar, gruff voices, and those voices were followed by screams, which were followed then by more voices and gunshots and then more screams, and so, really, Sarah was too late to say even that.
18.
The day Sarah’s mother disappeared (was abducted), she forgot to pack Sarah a school lunch. She promised Sarah she’d bring it to school before lunch, that she’d bring it right away, and later Sarah wondered if her mother had been on her way to bring that lunch to school when she was taken, or if she’d simply forgotten about the lunch altogether, which had happened before. Sarah always hoped that her mother forgot about the lunch a second time and was tootling around in their apartment or somewhere in the city, doing something silly and unrelated to Sarah or Sarah’s school or Sarah’s well-being, when she was nabbed.
Sarah would have been happy to know, for instance, that her mother had gotten sidetracked even on her way home from dropping Sarah off at school. That she had walked by a Duane Reade and remembered that her hair dryer had broken and that she wanted a new one, and that while in Duane Reade, she remembered other things she needed to get—makeup, a humidifier, Q-tips—and that she was grabbed as she was walking out of the store.
Sarah loved her mother and loved it when her mother did things that were motherly, which she didn’t do too often, but Sarah would have preferred it if her mother had been taken away from her while doing something frivolous or ordinary, and not in one of the rare moments she exhibited any kind of maternal instincts.
Sarah’s mother never came back, in any case, and Sarah’s teacher shared some of her lunch with Sarah when it was clear there wouldn’t be a lunch. She ate half an apple and half a ham sandwich, drank half a Tab. The rest of the day was normal. The entire day, in fact, felt normal. Her mother’s forgetting her lunch—they were running late and her mother had almost forgotten her own shoes—the two of them running the last two blocks together, Sarah spacing out during most of the school day, running around the playground by herself, crossing two bars on the monkey bars before falling off, and her mother running late to pick her up from school. These all pointed to any ordinary day.
The Regional Office Is Under Attack!: A Novel Page 6