The Regional Office Is Under Attack!: A Novel (4 page)

At least she wasn’t just hanging there anymore, hanging in the middle of a ventilation shaft, pointless and bored.

There was that.

At least there was that.

Rose hip-checked the side of the shaft, tumbled ass over head and into the other side of the shaft. She scrambled to grab hold of the rope but had kicked it swinging and she couldn’t find it in the near dark. Her headlamp swung the light hither and yon, but she was still too high up to see any semblance of a bottom.

Assuming, of course, there was a bottom. Colleen had jokingly told her to be careful down that ventilation shaft, that she’d heard the woman who’d founded the Regional Office had magicks enough to have conjured a bottomless pit that enemies of the Regional Office were thrown into. What better place to hide a bottomless pit than in a ventilation shaft, right?

Hardy-fucking-har-har, Colleen.

Fucking fuck.

The impact. Assuming there would be an impact, she was worried about the impact, but only because it would hurt like a motherfucker. But besides that, she’d survive the fall, and whatever
parts of her didn’t immediately survive would start to stitch themselves back together soon enough.

Getting out. She was worried about what would happen after she was dropped at the bottom of a shaft that was well over a mile belowground, but not so worried about this, either, because, well, she’d find some way out, by stealth or by force. She knew she would.

But the mission. God, those assholes had drilled it into her good. The fucking mission, she was worried about that, about missing out. That’s what had her scrambling so hard to find the rope.

She closed her eyes and reached out blindly and grabbed hold of air and then grabbed hold of air again, and thought maybe she should just give up this plan, and then something glanced against her wrist, and she grabbed again and caught hold of the rope and held tight, for a second, for less than, jerked to a bounding halt, before her shoulder gave out as it jarred up against gravity, and she let go again, but flung herself this time, whipped herself with some small deliberation so she could land hard against the side of the shaft, so she might slide down it, maybe catch hold of a different ledge, first with her forehead and her chin and then, when that slipped off, her elbow, which didn’t hold on much better, until finally her knee and calf and shin and ankle and then her boot caught, thank God for that fucking boot with its zippers and straps, its nooks and crannies, and then she held, for long enough, anyway, to pull herself up and in, and once she was in, she collapsed.

Now what, newbie? Henry, fucking Henry, pestering her inside her head.

You don’t know where you are or how to get to the director’s office, so, now what?

She’d figure it out, okay? Jesus.

But now what? Henry asked again, smug asshole. He knew the answer, of course, always knew the answer. Why else would he ask the fucking questions?

Just give a girl one goddamn minute, okay, a fucking minute to pull herself together, to take a fucking break, Christ.

She took a breath. She closed her eyes. Then she passed out, was out cold for at least fifteen minutes.

Back in Henry’s truck, she offered him a cigarette, which he took even though she could tell by the way he held it that he didn’t smoke.

The lighter popped out of the dashboard. Rose took it and pressed her cigarette into it and then took a deep drag from it and then held the lighter out for him. He had been holding the cigarette in his left hand and took the lighter in his right, trying to manage some rigmarole with his elbows on the steering wheel so he could light his cigarette, but the road began to twist and bump, and he startled, swerved a bit, and managed to drop the cigarette into his lap and the lighter onto the floor.

“Christ in a basket,” he said, glancing down and up and down and up, one-handing the steering wheel while he scrambled, hunched over, for the lighter.

“No wonder you almost hit me,” Rose said. Then she said, “Here, relax.” She placed her hand high up on his thigh and bent down, her body twisting just enough to give her scrunching room below the gearshift on the steering column. She could feel her tank top riding up her back and wondered at the peep show she was giving Henry, and hung down there a second longer than she needed to, and then she sat back up, the lighter held in front of her as if it
were a diamond or some other gem she’d just pulled out of the earth. Then she said, “Here, gimme that,” and she reached into his lap and grabbed the cigarette, which had fallen in between his legs. She brushed the zipper of his jeans lightly and he jumped in his seat, sending the truck to the left before pulling it hard back to the right.

“Sorry,” he said.

“Jesus, Henry,” she said, laughing. “Settle down, will you?”

Then she tipped the cigarette between her lips and lit it and then she took a drag off it, her own still lit in her left hand. She blew the smoke out of the side of her mouth and then leaned over and said, “Open,” and then put it in his mouth, where he held it for a moment, not smoking, but breathing out of his nose and the side of his mouth, until he remembered his hands on the steering wheel, one of which he freed to pull the cigarette out of his mouth and hold out the open window.

“So. Which store am I taking you to?” he asked.

“I lied,” she said. “I don’t need to go to the store.”

Then she took a breath and looked at him and said, “It’s been kind of a weird day.”

“Where are we going, then?” he said.

“I don’t know. Home, I guess?”

He looked at her. He’d dropped the cigarette out of the window. “So, weird, huh?”

“A little, yeah.” She didn’t know why but she felt her voice hitch. Voice hitching wasn’t a normal thing for her. Her sister, sure. That girl’s voice hitched at the drop of a pin. At the first sign of trouble—the house was out of milk, their mother’s cat had been sleeping on the kitchen table, Rose had borrowed her
favorite sweater—you could count on that one for a tremble of the lip, a hitch of the voice. But Rose liked to think she was made of stronger stuff than her sister, and sure, she’d seen some strange look in Tyler Akard’s eyes when he came chasing after her, and sure, the sight of that squirrel might’ve troubled her a touch, and maybe almost getting hit by a truck earlier in the day, etc., but Jesus Christ.

Pull yourself together.

“How old are you?” he asked again, catching her off guard, pulling her out of her head.

“Sixteen,” she said, forgetting she’d wanted to keep that a secret from him. “Well, next week. I turn sixteen next week.”

He sighed and in that sigh she thought she heard him mutter, “Too young,” but she couldn’t be sure. Then he didn’t say anything and neither did she and then he turned onto Church Street and turned to look at Rose and smiled at her and said, “Just about there.”

Only later—too late, in fact—would she realize how strange it was, what he said, when he said it.

Just about there.

They were, though. They were only a couple of blocks from her momma’s house, and so she didn’t think about it too much at the time, didn’t let it register that she’d never told him where she lived, hadn’t given him directions or an address. And then later still she would think how strange it was that he would have said that at all, said anything, in fact, to tip her off, to let her get her guard up, even if she hadn’t.

Gotten her guard up, that is.

They pulled up to her house. She tried to open the truck door but it wouldn’t open. “Hey,” she said, just as he was reaching across
her, maybe a little uncomfortably so, to fiddle with the lock, the handle, saying, “Sorry about that, it gets funny.” He couldn’t open it and something inside her hitched again. Then he opened his own and got out and she turned herself to climb over and he said, “No, no, stay there, I’ll get it,” and he closed his door and trotted around the other side and opened her door from the outside.

“I need to get that fixed,” he said when he held out his hand to help her down from the truck.

“Yeah,” she said. “Well, thanks, anyway, for the ride.” She tried to let go of his hand.

“Here,” he said, the flat of his other hand resting lightly against her back between her shoulder blades. “Let me walk you to the door, make sure someone’s home for you.”

She didn’t say, There’s no one home, which there wasn’t, or that she had a key, which she did, or that it wouldn’t matter on account of how her mother never locked the door anyway. Her chest fluttered but in no good kind of way and her palms started to sweat, and little unwelcome shivers shot out of her skin where his hand was pressed against her.

Well, hell, she thought.

What she would do would be simple enough, Henry behind her or not. Shove the door open, just enough to slip inside, and then shove it shut and lock it behind her.

Which she did, in one smooth motion, as much of a surprise to her as it was to Henry just how well that had worked. Henry yelled after her, “Hey, wait.” He pounded on the door and she shook her head and thought, Fucking creep. And then she turned and stepped into the house and was ambushed.

When Rose came to, she didn’t know how far behind schedule she was. It took a second or two to figure out that she had made it across the shaft and into the next set of tubing.

The fall had shattered her piece-of-shit shatterproof watch, and don’t think Henry wasn’t going to get an earful from her about being such a cheap-ass on accessories.

She was enough behind schedule anyway (she could just feel it) that she said, Fuck it. Fuck the pain, fuck her weak legs, fuck her torn arm, and she jumped across the ventilation shaft to an opening just across from and above the opening she’d landed in. Don’t think there wasn’t a shitload of scrambling for some kind of hold, a lot of embarrassing kicking with her feet and grunting as she became frightened and then desperate to push through all that pain from the fall and grabbing the rope so she could pull herself up, because there was. That, and a heavy desire to go right back into unconsciousness that she almost didn’t resist. But then she pushed her way blindly out of the shaft into what turned out to be an office, dark and unoccupied. She kicked the computer onto the floor while scrambling onto the desk from the ceiling, and then she hopped down after it.

She closed her eyes, took some deep, deep breaths (who would
have thought all that meditation crap from Assassin Training Camp would have come in so useful), then recalled her map.

Two floors down, half a wing across from where she needed to be.

She snuck into the hallway and she ran.

The halls were empty. A good sign, she supposed. The rest of the plan must have been moving along smoothly enough. And sure, great, that was good to know, of course, but also that meant that if there was a wrench in this mechanism, she was it.

She found the stairwell, jimmied open the door, took the stairs three and four at a time.

Surprise. The whole point of this exercise had been surprise. Which, fuck that. No way the director of this operation didn’t know that his world was caving in all around his ears by now. At worst, he’d found some way to sneak out of the fray. At best, he was sitting tight, arming the defenses in his office. And neither scenario was any good for her.

Wendy, their woman on the inside, the one who’d undone the main security system, had briefed them all. “I can’t touch the director’s office, sorry, it’s on its own system, and he’s the only one who controls it. But catch him off guard,” Wendy had said, “and Mr. Niles won’t have enough time to cue it all up.”

At the time, Rose had wished Wendy would stop using the guy’s name, would stick to the script and say
director
.

“Mr. Niles,” Wendy continued, “from what I’ve been told, he’s real twitchy about this sort of thing, didn’t want any defenses in the first place, because he’s always worried the system will screw up, won’t recognize him one day, will decide it’s time to
weed him out, so to speak, and so he keeps it dark, the whole system, unless he knows he needs it. So if you do it right, you do it quick.” She shrugged.

Right and quick. That was all it took.

Henry and Emma probably shouldn’t have assigned the “right and quick” job to her then, the fucking spaz.

Two floors up, she kicked open the stairwell door, not even pretending to be subtle anymore. Subtle hadn’t ever been one of her strengths, anyway. She flew down the empty hall and slid to a stop just outside the glass door that opened to the receptionist’s desk and the receptionist who stood careful guard over the director and who was right then—Rose couldn’t believe her fucking luck—working some kind of crossword or Sudoku bullshit on her computer. Caught completely unawares.

Rose ducked out of sight. She pulled herself together. She counted down from ten.

Then, at seven, she charged.

Or, she didn’t exactly charge. She threw her momentum into this nifty slide across the tile, still out of the line of sight of the crossword genius, and didn’t pop herself out of it until the very last moment, like she was sliding into third base, like she was one of those real fast base stealers who can pop back up to standing after a wicked slide but like they didn’t stop, didn’t even pause to think about stopping, and that was how she slid: At the last second, she lit herself up onto her feet and grabbed the door handle and shoved herself inside, and before the receptionist could even register what kind of hell was barreling down on her, Rose had her by the throat.

Or should have.

She should have had her by the throat. Or, rather, by the whole fucking head and neck, if you were going to be technical about it, her arm wrapped around from behind, squeezing the receptionist’s windpipe shut, knocking her out cold, except that the receptionist wasn’t even fucking there.

Nothing was there.

Not the computer, not the Sudoku, not even the goddamn desk, all of it some image or hologram, probably the same make as the image or hologram that dropped her down that fucking bottomless pit (yeah, now that she was out and away from it, bottomless, why the hell not?).

But who the fuck cared because whatever it was, hologram or magicks, what it also was was a trap, most definitely a trap.