The Regional Office Is Under Attack!: A Novel (29 page)

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.

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.

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.

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.