The hallway outside her room was dark and quiet. She assumed there would be video cameras monitoring the compound at night, but she figured that no one would be monitoring them actively. As she moved out of the wing of the building that contained the dorm rooms she realized that there might be guards standing at the gate. She hesitated, considered going back to her room, figuring out an actual plan, but she’d made her decision, and she’d have to either sneak past the guards or talk her way past them.
There weren’t many men she couldn’t talk her way around.
When she reached the guards, she didn’t have to sneak past them or talk her way around them. They—two of them—were crumpled on the floor, unconscious (or dead), a trickle of blood running down the forehead of one, and at the sight of them, Rose stopped.
She moved to the guards, to see if they were alive, but then she saw the security monitor behind the desk, showing screen after screen of television snow, and she went there instead. It took her less than a minute to find and remove the device that was interfering with the signal. She shifted the screens from one wing and training room to another. The dorm rooms, too, including her own. The cameras were everywhere apparently. The thought made her shudder. But she didn’t see anyone. In fact, she didn’t see anyone at all. The girls’ rooms showed screen after screen of empty rooms. Beds unmade, rooms left in disarray. They’d been taken. Each and every one of them had been taken, wasn’t anywhere inside the buildings. Someone had invaded the compound, had disabled the guards, had abducted the trainees, had done all of this making hardly a sound.
They had done all of this and had left her behind.
Son of a bitch, she thought.
Even the fucking bad guys, whoever they are, don’t know I’m here. Or maybe they knew and just didn’t give a shit because of how much I suck. God fucking damn it, she thought.
She kicked the security desk hard enough to punch a hole through it with her foot.
Then she grabbed her backpack and stormed out of the compound and went looking for the assholes who had left her behind.
It wasn’t an easy trail to pick up and follow, but she found it anyway and followed it almost ten miles. By the time she found the camp, it was after four in the morning.
She spotted three guards standing outside a large tent, and then another guard standing outside a smaller tent ten yards farther back. The large tent must have held the girls. She didn’t know what was inside the smaller tent, but at the moment she didn’t care. Then a fifth guard came strolling into the camp light.
They spoke, quickly and quietly. The boss was almost ready. The girls were secured. The truck was on its way. Fifteen, twenty minutes tops. Everything was moving on schedule, according to plan.
Only after the fact did she realize they were speaking Russian.
Well, fuck. She could speak Russian!
Rose looked behind her at the path she’d taken to get here, considered how long it would be before she could get back to the compound; find Henry, or anyone else; and bring that person, or whatever army she could muster, back to the campsite. Then she thought of what she’d packed with her. Her dress. A couple of language books. Her wedge sandals. A clicker pen she’d stolen from one of the near-empty offices. No weapons. No gear.
It shouldn’t have been left to her. Risking herself for these girls who hardly knew her, who could barely make the effort to smile at her anymore. This job should have been the job of someone else. Anyone else.
She sighed. She took a deep breath. Silently, she crept forward.
34.
The director’s office had seemed a lot bigger to Rose before he’d started shooting lightning bolts at her. Although the lightning bolts weren’t as bad as they could have been.
Not to say they weren’t bad. Not to say they didn’t singe and burn. Not to say they didn’t hurt like hell.
Just to say: They should’ve killed her, but they didn’t.
For one, she was quick. They barely grazed her—her calf, her shoulder, her boot—as she tumbled around trying to get herself closer to the director. Closer, that was where he had seemed most vulnerable.
And for two, she was protected. Of course she was protected. Emma and Henry, they wouldn’t have sent her on a suicide mission. Or, sure, maybe they would have sent her on a suicide mission, but they wouldn’t have done so without offering her some amount of protection.
They were assholes, but the kind of assholes who wanted to win this thing.
So. Runes, spells, counterspells. A little extra help in case her innate superstrength and superspeed and all the training they’d given her wasn’t quite enough. Not that she believed in it. The magicks, that is. Not that she didn’t believe in it, either. If there were women with superpowers and Oracles who could predict the future and a woman in a place called the Regional Office with a mechanical arm that looked like just any other arm, why couldn’t there be magicks and spells and runes? Just that they sprung this voodoo on her right before she left and for all she knew, someone back at base could have lit a Virgen de Guadalupe candle for her, too. Not to mention that the way she imagined it, when they cast these spells over her it would have felt like a shimmery dome, except, really, it was like nothing had happened. She had expected it to be like that game kids play where they crack an imaginary egg over your head and it feels real, like egg yolk is really dribbling down your face, but she didn’t get even that. Just, “So when are they going to cast these protective countermeasures?” and, “They already did. You’re good to go.”
Still. They weren’t doing nothing.
Not to mention this polyester-blend bullshit they called her assault uniform. Sure, it didn’t fit her right—too tight on the calves, because not everyone had the calves and ankles of a fucking gazelle like Windsor did, and too loose in her chest, because, well, she was seventeen (eighteen in two weeks) for Christ’s sake, and not the most developed seventeen-year-old—and it didn’t breathe at all, like, as soon as she put it on, she was cooking inside it, sweat dripping down her back and into her fucking panties, but as a flame and lightning and bullet and, who knows, a dragon-breath deterrent, it had its strong points.
But it didn’t much matter—outside of keeping her alive—because she didn’t know how long all this shit would stand up to the guy with the glove that had once been a hand, and the director wasn’t letting her get close. He let loose with a barrage of lightning bolts and a whooshing of gale-force winds, and she wondered if all this glove could do was X-Men Storm-style shenanigans, or if there were more deadly uses that the director just wasn’t smart enough or skilled enough to have figured out yet.
She also wondered what the hell happened if you cut that shit off his hand.
Like, would he be consumed by the blue flame of the glove’s power latching on to the closest warm body as that power was released from the glove itself?
Or would he just be in a lot of fucking pain because she’d cut off his hand?
Was it even attached to him or was he just kind of wearing it?
Either way, it was bound to be a better situation than one in which he still had the glove and his hand.
Normally, the thought of cutting off his hand wouldn’t have crossed her mind. Not like she was carrying a couple of ancient Japanese swords with her. They were all expected to wade into this fray weaponless—well, they were the weapons, right?—that was what all that training had been about. Well. Training had also been about the use of all the various weapons one could use—rifles, pistols, silencers, brass knuckles, swords, knives, garroting wires. The usual. But still, their whole philosophy being: Train the person to be a weapon and they won’t need to carry extra weapons with them, with a secondary philosophy in: Don’t be above using whatever potential weapon might be at hand if you want. And she’d seen it—when the bookshelf began rocking—she’d noticed an ornamental kind of sword on a stand on the very top shelf. It
looked like some Ren Faire knockoff, but any thinnish piece of metal with enough of a blade coupled with the power of her mighty fucking punch should do the trick.
Let’s be honest: If she couldn’t cut a sword—even the cheapest of swords—clean through a guy’s wrist, she should just turn in her Trained Assassin Badge and Assassin Gear and open up a quilting shoppe.
Tired of this tumbling-around bullshit and with the beginnings of an idea for a plan in mind, she charged right at him, hoping to get close enough to him to a) get by him and to the sword, and then b) cut off his fucking hand.
He lit into her with some fierce blue crackling power shit. She spun into and then out of it and stumbled straight into him, tripping on half a desk drawer on her way. She grabbed for him as she fell forward, snagged the cuff of the glove—the wrist of the former hand?—and then, falling, falling, she yanked it clean off.
35.
Rose crept for a hundred or so feet toward the camp where they were holding the girls, then paused long enough to pick up a medium-sized branch and throw it in a high arc over the heads of the guards and over the large tent, waiting for it to crash into something on the other side, grab the guards’ attention just long enough so that she could skitter across the flat, bright expanse separating her from the guards and the tent.
She had three of them off their feet and flat on their backs—the Spindletop move—before the fourth knew she was even there. He lunged, she slipped through his lunge—that one was Thread the Needle—caught him in his solar plexus with her knee as she passed by him, an afterthought really, then, pivoting, threw her weight, in the form of her elbow, onto his back, heard the cough, the whoof escape his mouth, but heard, too, the charge coming from her blind side, shifted her weight right, spun low—the Revolving Door (Crouching)—and swept the fifth guard off his feet, heard the action of a semiautomatic, from behind her again (next time, she would make sure there weren’t so many different angles to attack her from), and without thinking performed a zigzagging series of back handsprings, aerials, and flips, suddenly so fast, so much faster than she thought she could be, that when she stopped and realized she was standing just inches away from the guard with the gun, she swooned a little from the head rush, but not so much she couldn’t grab the rifle by its butt and shove it hard into the guy’s nose and then take it from him.
She spun around with the rifle ready to fire some too-close-for-comfort warning shots at the others, but they were gone.
Well.
Two of them were gone, the other three were on the ground, breathing but knocked out. The last one, the one with the now-broken nose and no longer the rifle in his hands, stood up behind her, his right hand cupping the blood coming out of his nose, his left hand raised as if he were giving up, but she couldn’t trust him, Rose decided, so she brained him again with the butt of the rifle.
All in all, she figured it’d taken her five minutes.
She looked around the campsite. Looked at the four men knocked out and on the ground at her feet. She looked at the rifle in her hands.
Then she fainted.
36.
It had been a test, of course. Everything with these people was all about tests. Project-based learning, the other girls told her. All the rage in Europe.
“How did they know?” Rose asked. “How did they know I’d try to leave tonight?”
Colleen shrugged. “They know,” she said. “They know just about everything.”
She had passed, of course. With flying colors, in fact. Better than anyone had expected, in fact. When she came to, Colleen had been there, picking pine needles and dirt from her hair. “Don’t worry,” Colleen had said. “They don’t deduct points for fainting at the end.” Then she smiled and then she laughed and explained the test, the fact that they were given strict orders to keep their distance until she passed, that for whatever ineffable Emma reason, this had been all part of Rose’s training.
“I mean,” Colleen said, “we all had to pass this test, but we did it as a team and with more training under our belts. None of us had to do what you just did, all alone.”
Then Emma and Henry stepped into view and Emma helped Rose to her feet and told her how impressed she’d been, and for a long time, the whole thing made Rose so fucking mad that she could barely speak. Even when she could speak and she could smile at it and laugh it off and pretend that none of it bothered her, the thought of the whole thing pissed her off all over again whenever it came up.
But now. Now she was part of the team. She was an integral part of the team. She knew fuck-all about what they were going to be doing as a team, but that could wait. She didn’t care about that now that she was a piece of a whole, and not just any whole, but a superpowered, kick-ass, girl-team whole. And now, all she cared about was which fake trail Colleen came down and how awesome it was going to be that she beat them.
Except, Colleen should have found at least one of the trails by now. First Wendy and then one of the trails, maybe both of the trails, but certainly not all three of the trails. But where was she?
Rose’s instinct was to rabbit, but she tamped that down. Her trails, her booby traps, were good, very good. So good, in fact, that she wished it was Henry on her trail and not Colleen. And then she would watch him as the net tripped him up and yanked him into the trees overhead or as the trip wire loosed the branches and covering below his feet, sent him falling into the deep ditch she’d found and made deeper earlier that morning. Then she would climb up or down and help get him free, or maybe, if he fell into the ditch, she would just stay down there with him. She wouldn’t lord it over him all triumphantly because that seemed unbecoming, even to her, but she would make him admit to her that she’d done good, better than he’d have expected, that she’d gotten to him. Once he’d admitted all of that, she’d admit that he’d gotten to her. She’d hit him, gently but firmly in the shoulder or the chest, and call him a dumbass, tell him his stupid fucking plan to stay away from her didn’t work, that all it had done was make her think about him more, and that he was an idiot. He’d say, I know, or maybe he’d say, I was a fool, and then they’d kiss again. The hole was deep enough to keep prying eyes out of it all, whatever happened in her booby trap, and she’d kiss him but for real this time, and then? Who the fuck cared about And then? And then would take care of its own damn self.
But it wasn’t Henry on her trail. It was Colleen, who hadn’t found the dummy trail or the fake dummy trail, who had, in fact, found Rose’s third trail, and who had crouched herself down behind Rose—how? how had she crept up on her so fucking quietly?—and whispered, finally, into Rose’s ear, “Nice work, kid. You almost had me fooled.” Then she said, “Wendy’s going to kill you for those boots, you know.”
And then, grabbing Colleen swiftly by her weak-side arm, Rose flipped her up and over and onto her backside. “Yeah, maybe,” Rose said, “but she’s going to have to find me first.” And then she ran, laughing as she disappeared back into the woods.
37.
The director shoved Rose back and scrambled to grab the glove, which she had flung across the room. She grabbed him by the ankle and tripped him to his face. He kicked wildly to make her let go and somersaulted himself closer to the glove and onto his feet. She kicked the bookshelf hard enough to drop the sword into her lap.
It was sharper and finer wrought than she’d expected.
She stood and held it loose at her side.
Sweaty and his shirt untucked and his own shirtsleeve scorched from the glove or from her pulling off the glove, the director looked almost as worse for wear as she felt.
Not that it mattered. He’d grabbed the glove. He stood up with it and turned to look at her and he sighed a heavy sigh and looked almost sad.
Maybe he hadn’t had a chance before to really see her, to see how young she was, to see how much she resembled the very women he had brought to the Regional Office and helped to train, the women
(and girls) he had guided and loved, or maybe he was feeling sad about what was to come—cleaning up the mess of this assault, checking in on the families of those who’d been lost today, picking up the pieces and moving forward. She didn’t know. All she knew was that he must have been feeling pretty fucking confident to already be looking sad about what he was going to have to do to her, how he was going to have to move forward with all of this.
But then he wasn’t putting on the glove and then she looked at the glove, looked more closely, saw that it had ripped—or she had ripped it—from the bottom of its wrist/cuff to the point where the middle finger met the palm, and it hung there limp and unnerving but powerless, even she could sense its powerlessness.
He dropped the glove. He closed his eyes. The fight had all come to an end so quickly Rose wasn’t sure what she should do next.
According to the protocol, she was supposed to tell him Emma sends her best, but Jesus, that seemed just cruel at this point, after all that had happened. As far as Rose could tell, he believed his own friend and partner had sent her to kill him, and so she couldn’t say whether it would be better to die with the wrong understanding of why, but also she didn’t think Emma was the kind of person you could lie to about a thing you hadn’t done.
She lifted the sword. She said, not too loud but loud enough: “Emma sends her best.”
He opened his eyes. “Wait, what? Who?”
The Regional Office Is Under Attack!: A Novel Page 12