The Regional Office Is Under Attack!: A Novel (9 page)

Sarah wasn’t going to give up.

That was what they wanted, of course. For her to give up.

Or, rather, what they wanted was for her to be captured and neutralized and, apparently, they wanted to take away her mechanical arm, all of which they—whoever They were—had achieved without much, or any, difficulty, and so her giving up might have been, in Their minds, a rather moot point.

In anyone’s mind, a moot point, actually, including hers. Especially hers.

Not giving up meant she was going to do what, specifically?

Scooch the chair inch by inch the five or so feet to the metal table where her mechanical arm now lay lifeless and possibly ruined? Fine, sure, okay, and then what was she planning to do?

Her arm. The skin—her skin—had been stripped from it in uneven patches. The circuitry showed through, sinewy and blood-smeared, and the joints and the skeleton made of steel, or rather, made of an alloy that was better than steel, unbreakable and nearly impervious.

So what if she could get to it? She didn’t even know if it still worked, and even if it did, who the hell was going to reattach it?

Her?

Tied tight in this chair and not a doctor or a surgeon or a robotics engineer or whatever the hell she would have to be to reattach a mechanical arm, to herself?

She jump-scooched her chair another inch closer. Her forehead and her neck began to sweat. She jump-scooched another inch, maybe even two inches, and then the pain in her regular arm and the pain where they had pulled off her mechanical arm and the pain in her face and skull from where Wendy—that fucking bitch Wendy—had sucker punched her were all homing in on her, waking up to her, but she didn’t care.

She jump-scooched.

She jump-scooched.

She jump-scooched.

Her foot, if her legs hadn’t been tied down to this chair, her ankles hadn’t been strapped to the legs, her foot could have touched the table now if she extended her leg all the way.

And now her ankle, she could have wrapped her ankle around the wheeled leg of the table and drawn it to her.

And now her shin, she could have touched her shin to the leg, and her leg, she could have kicked the table over by now, or better yet, she could have thrown her foot onto the tabletop itself and brought the whole thing crashing down to her if she wanted, if she’d been able.

Jump-scooch. Jump-scooch. Her knee tipped against the closest leg, shifted the table a hair. She could smell it now, her arm, the metal and the blood of her arm swirling together in a perfect storm of copper penny down her nose and into her throat.

She breathed in huffing gusts through her nose and her wide-
open mouth. She had drenched herself in so much sweat that the dried blood from Wendy’s punch had loosened, mixed, had run over her lips, onto her teeth and tongue.

But she didn’t care.

She had made it, goddamn it.

And now what?

She could close her eyes. She could let her body shudder to a halt. She could faint!

She could do practically nothing she wanted!

In truth, she had harbored the notion that making it would be enough, would be trial and sacrifice enough, that the universe or her arm would recognize her effort, would reward her for it somehow—That’s it, Sarah, you’ve done enough, you’ve done more than enough, let us take it from here—so she sat there huffing and sweating and wincing and concentrating, willing the arm to do some damn thing, waiting for the universe to right itself back in her favor, but nothing.

Not one damn thing.

She closed her eyes. She slumped her head—the rest of her, too, but the ropes wouldn’t slump with her—and she would have sobbed, would have started heaving and crying, but then the door opened, and two men came inside, and she pulled her shit together.

Mr. Niles and the doctor didn’t show her the arm they’d cut off after the operation.

Sarah wasn’t sure when or how she’d devised the notion that they would have, as if her now-detached arm were nothing more substantial than a pulled tooth, but she found herself asking about it, after the incident, after crushing the doctor’s leg, wrecking his lab and the operating room, after Mr. Niles led her quietly to her room, where she could heal and recover and come to some sort of grips with everything.

“Can I see it?” she asked when Mr. Niles, just before leaving, asked if there was anything else she needed.

“It?” he said, although, even then, even that early in their friendship, she could read him well enough to know he understood her question just fine.

“My arm,” she said. “The other one,” she said.

She expected him to cough or lick his lips or fiddle with his tie or look to the left or the right, expected him to employ any number of stalling techniques that would give him time to figure out how to answer this delicate and weird and horrifying—even Sarah understood it was weird and horrifying—request, but he didn’t deliberate. He didn’t hem or haw. He said, “No, of course
not.” And then he nodded once and said, “Let me know if there’s anything else,” and then he was gone and she was alone with an arm that wasn’t hers, that wasn’t even human.

When it hung there at her side, her arm felt surprisingly just like any other arm. It didn’t feel heavy or deadened. Her shoulder, where the arm had been attached, felt numb, but only for the first hour or so after the operation.

Her room was bare. She had expected a dorm room or a hotel room of some kind, with a kitchenette and a living suite, but it was gray and quiet and, but for a twin bed attached to the wall and a sink and a closet for her clothes, empty. The mirror over the sink was small, square, and only just large enough for her to see her face, her hair, her shoulders, the very tops of her breasts if she were naked, and nothing else, but she found herself staring at the mirror every morning and every night for hours on end.

She stared at her shoulders and the tops of her arms, at her biceps, or what she could see of them if she let her arms hang at her sides, or what she could make of them—or the one, at first, her real bicep, which was the only one she could lift and squeeze into shape. A tiny white line of a scar wrapped itself around her shoulder where they’d attached the mechanical arm, and another identical scar wrapped around her other shoulder, and the two arms looked so much alike that there were days when she could convince herself that she couldn’t tell, either, which was which.

That first week and most of the second week, she couldn’t move it at all, not by thinking, not by trying. What had happened in the operating room, the way she had torn it apart, must have been a fluke, Mr. Niles told her. “Muscle memory, or a knee-jerk
reaction,” he told her. “Like a chicken running around with its head cut off,” he told her. Which didn’t make her feel better, nor did it make any sense to her.

“It’s a process,” the doctor, crutched and timid in her presence, told her. “The internal operating system is still working out the best way to communicate with your own neurological system. And then your muscles and your synapses all have to be retrained. But it will work itself out. Leave it to its business and it will work itself out.”

But she couldn’t just leave it to its business. It was her arm, damn it. She couldn’t not try. She tried the first moment Mr. Niles left her alone, even though he’d told her not to, not for a couple of days at least. She walked into her room and closed the door with her normal arm and then turned around and stared at the closed door in front of her and willed her mechanical arm to lift. She tensed muscles. She closed her eyes and imagined a reality. A reality that involved her mechanical arm lifting full of grace and fluidity to open the door. She pretended the arm wasn’t even there, or was nothing special, that the last thing she wanted or needed was for the arm to make some movement, operate some simple machine. She tried to trick herself into using it. She let herself fall forward, tried to sneak up on the arm, jolt it into the action of catching her as she fell. She tried this sort of thing for what must have been hours, but none of it worked, and she was tired and sore and ready for bed. She struggled one-handed with her clothes and her shoes. Everything about her hurt and wanted to sleep. She sat down at the edge of the bed, winded and unhappy, only to remember she hadn’t turned off the light. She debated lying back
on the bed and covering her eyes with her normal arm and sleeping with the light on but she hated sleeping with the light on. She sighed and leaned forward to give herself the momentum to stand back up, but leaning forward, something else happened: Her mechanical arm swung down of its own volition and grabbed her shoe, and before she knew it, her arm had thrown the shoe, hard, so very hard, at the light fixture over her head, hard enough to smash the fixture and the bulb and to stick her shoe firmly into the ceiling.

And after that, all she could do was stare at it, even in the dark, stare at that arm and wonder what, if anything, it might do next.

Their faces were masked. She could tell by the way they moved, by the way they walked and swung their arms and held their chests forward, she could tell by the look of them, they’d been trained by someone who had once worked for the Regional Office.

They stopped when they saw her, saw how close she was to the gurney, to her arm, and they looked at each other and then one of the men shrugged and the other shrugged back and then he glanced briefly down at the arm on the table, as if to make sure it was still there, that it hadn’t left, hadn’t sprouted legs and walked away on its own.

She didn’t say, Where am I?

She didn’t say, Who are you?

Didn’t say, What have you done with Mr. Niles?

She didn’t say anything except for with her eyes, which said, quite clearly and pointedly,
I am going to kill you,
to the man who’d looked down at her mechanical arm, but he didn’t flinch or take on a concerned look or falter in his step or step backward in fear as she had hoped he might. Instead, he smiled at her and then looked at the other man and nodded at him and they laughed as if they’d just shared a joke, and she wondered if they were talking
to each other, if they’d been talking all along but in a secret way, in a way that she couldn’t hear. Telepathically, maybe.

The two men untied her and moved to lift her out of the chair. They weren’t rough with her, and the one trying to pick her up by the armpit that wasn’t an armpit anymore because it was a stump shied away a little bit at first, uncertain where to lift from. The other one had forgotten his gloves and was barehanded. He had soft, gentle hands. They concerted their efforts and lifted her up, and she saw the gash on her other arm, and thought, They didn’t know!, and she ignored the burning, ignored the sight of her own bone, and she thought of Mr. Niles, and she did not panic.

She didn’t panic at all.

She made a silent vow to Mr. Niles that she would not panic, that she would find some way out of this mess, a mess she imagined was of her own devising, and that she would find him, find him at least to apologize to him, and in her mind, she clenched her fist. She imagined herself standing in front of everyone who might stand in her way, and in her mind, she clenched her mechanical fist, ready to wreak havoc on all of the enemies of Mr. Niles and the Regional Office. As the two men walked her past the table where her mechanical arm lay useless and lifeless, and just before they yanked her out of the room, she looked at it and imagined her mechanical fist tightly clenched and full of its unimaginable power.

And that’s when she saw the fingers twitch and jerk and then swiftly close, her mechanical hand, swiftly close into a powerful fist, and she felt a gasp rising in her throat, but then they hit her in the back of the head with something heavy and blocky, and everything went blurry, and they hit her again, and things went black.

Once in a while, Sarah would get a call from Mr. Niles. He would bring her into his office. He would sit her down in the chair across from his desk. He would sigh. He would lean forward and smile and ask about her, ask about her arm, about the apartment he’d found for her, ask about her aunt, who he knew lived in Queens now and was very important to Sarah.

He did this every time, and every time, this ritual made her feel anxious. Or not anxious, but antsy.

She appreciated his attention but because she was barely twenty and had a mechanical arm and was desperately seeking vengeance, she really just wanted him to get to the point, which she knew would come only after she’d answered his questions, refused his offer for water and then for coffee, assured him that she was doing fine, thank you, and that she was ready, she was ready to see whatever he’d called her in to show her.

Namely, she was ready for the file on his desk, the name inside that file, the photograph, the last known whereabouts.

“We found another one,” he would say. He would start to slide the folder to her. “I won’t bore you with the details of how we found him,” he would say. But then he would. He would bore her with the details. He told her how these men and women had
changed their faces through major surgeries, had hidden themselves away in the farther reaches of Nepal, had quietly joined religious cults in western Colorado, had faked their own deaths in airplane tragedies, train derailments, house fires, suicides.

And she would wait, growing ever more impatient for him to finish and to give her the damn file, which he finally would after one last, “Are you sure you want this, want to continue this work?”

At which point she knew she was allowed to simply take the file, that she was almost expected to do so, that for whatever reason Mr. Niles preferred not to give her these things, preferred that they be taken from him almost but not quite against his will.

Then she would sit back in her chair and open the folder and look at the photograph, study it, study the face, study the other photos that might be in the file, and then she would read from cover to cover and then from cover to cover again. And then, having lost track of all time, she would look back up for Mr. Niles, who would have left his own office, left her to it so she could study the file alone, and find the room almost dark, the sun nearly set, and on the desk in front of her, a ham and cheese sandwich and a diet orange Fanta, which she would take—the sandwich in a few bites, the Fanta in two or three swallows—before she returned to the file, committing it to memory, all of it to memory.

What she didn’t expect was how good she would be at tracking down and killing the men and women who had abducted and, ultimately, murdered her mother.

Although, really, if she was being honest with herself, she had proved to be good at so many other things that, in hindsight, she
wasn’t entirely surprised. Hunting down targets and eliminating them in secret simply happened to be just one more thing she had taken to, no different, really, than nanophysiology, or artificial subconscious dichotomy, which was what she had been studying in college before she dropped out in pursuit of the truth about her mother.

Not to mention that the Regional Office itself had done most of the heavy lifting. Less seek-out-and-destroy and more just destroy on her part.

Then one day she arrived in Mr. Niles’s office expecting to pick up another file, go after another man or woman responsible for her mother’s death, only to find Mr. Niles standing behind his desk empty-handed.

“That was the last one,” he told her. He held his hands up, spread his fingers wide, and then clapped them together and smiled. “There’s not one of them left.”

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“I mean, you should be proud of yourself. You took care of every last one of them.”

She didn’t like this. “You should have told me,” she said.

“I just did,” he said, still smiling.

“Before. You should have told me before. I thought there would be more. There aren’t more?”

“There was,” he said. “There was one more, but there was an accident.”

“An accident?”

“He got wind of our man following his trail, tried to run, stole
a car, wasn’t the best driver.” He picked up a small envelope full of photographs. A car wreck. An oil-slick road. Burned wreckage.

“We checked it out,” Mr. Niles said before she could say anything. “It’s real. He’s dead.” He paused and leaned heavily against his desk. “And he was the last one.”

Sarah held on to the photos and flipped through them but had stopped looking at them.

“And now what?” she asked.

Mr. Niles sat in his chair and shrugged and looked up at her and said, “Now you have your whole life, your whole life in front of you. Whatever you want.” He looked down at the paperwork on his desk, began reading through memos. “You could go back to school, I don’t know. The apartment is yours as long as you like it.” He looked up at her again. “Don’t feel in a rush to leave, in other words.” Then he turned back to his work.

Sarah, having avenged her mother’s kidnapping and murder at the hands of an anarchist splinter group, and not sure what else to do, and a little stunned, turned to leave his office.

“Oh, Sarah?” he said before she got to his door. She turned back to him, expectant, though she couldn’t have said what she was expecting. To be offered a position, maybe. To be told she had proven herself the equal of any one of the Operatives. To be told how far she had surpassed anyone’s small expectations of her and her mechanical arm. And later, she would learn from Mr. Niles himself that he had wanted to offer just that—a position as an Operative, his unfettered praise—but that Oyemi had very clearly said, “No, not Sarah. Operatives are Operatives, Oracles
are Oracles, and everyone else is everyone else.” He had cajoled, he had begged, and finally he had threatened to leave the Regional Office altogether, and had only been brought back from the brink—why, she would wonder, would he care so much about someone he knew so little about?—by Oyemi’s promise that Sarah would come back, that the Oracles had made their prediction, and that he wouldn’t lose her. But Sarah wouldn’t know any of this for some few years yet, and so when she turned expectantly and he said, “I’m going to need those photos back, please,” and shook his head, and said, “Record keeping, filing. You know how it is,” and she handed the photos back to him, a troubling feeling of anger and disappointment welled up inside her.

“Don’t be a stranger,” he said then, as he went back to the work on his desk.

And she left, without so much as saying good-bye, and she stayed away for two days, until she couldn’t stay away any longer. On the third day, she stormed back into the travel agency and down the elevator. She shoved her way into Mr. Niles’s office, ready to yell, ready to rant, ready to throw her anger and frustration and confusion behind her mechanical fist and maybe tear his office apart, and maybe Mr. Niles himself apart, too, except that when he looked up from the papers on his desk, he looked so happy to see her, and said so casually, as if she hadn’t left in the first place, “Oh, good, I was just thinking about you,” that she forgot all about how angry she had been.

He handed her a file folder and said, “Take a look at that, tell me what you think. Serious threat? Think Jasmine could pull it off herself, or do we need a team?”

She took the folder and sat in the chair across from his desk and read the report. Together they argued out a plan of attack, the logistics, the fail-safes, and an hour later, Mr. Niles stood up, stretched, said, “Nice work, Sarah.” Said, “I’ll be in my office if you need anything,” and then he patted her gently on the shoulder and he left, and it wasn’t until then that she noticed the nameplate on the desk, and then outside the office, the newly stenciled name next to the door—both of which read
SARAH O’HARA
—and she had been there, for the Regional Office, for Mr. Niles, ever since.