The Regional Office Is Under Attack!: A Novel (27 page)

The robot punched her, finally, but really punched her. And for the first time in her life, Rose thought, Oh, Jesus. I think I might lose.

She shot across the room and hit her back against the far wall, embedded herself there, the wind knocked out of her.

Even if she could have moved her head, she wouldn’t have looked down, wouldn’t have dared to look at the spot where the thing hit her, afraid there would be a hole there, a robot-fist-shaped hole passing right through her chest, where her heart should have been. That’s how it felt, anyway, as if the thing punched clean through her, everything else caving in around that spot, as if that spot had obtained the gravitational property of a tiny black hole.

“I expected you to be stronger,” the robot said.

“I expected you to be faster and smarter, too,” it said.

“I expected this to be much more difficult than it has been, honestly. Expected you to put up at least a little bit of a fight. To be clever. To find some way to try, at least.”

Rose couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t move. Then it grabbed her, lifted her up, a foot off the ground, maybe more, she couldn’t tell.
It turned her around, its hand wrapped tightly around her throat again. Its robot head was bent toward her ear.

It’s strange, she thought, that they gave a robot lips.

“I wanted this to be more interesting,” it said, and then it dropped her and she landed badly on her ankle and maybe that was broken now, too.

If she was going to be honest with herself, and what better fucking time to be honest with yourself than at the very goddamn end, it was less the fact that she never saw Emma again after the Regional Office job. That hurt, sure. She loved Emma. They all loved Emma. But she wasn’t surprised, and so maybe it hurt just a little bit less.

But that bastard Henry had told her he loved her (okay, so maybe in a best-friend, brotherly kind of way, but still, she was only eighteen, she was impressionable, and he should have known better), told her that he would come find her after the job was finished, that they would have some kind of adventure when it was all said and done (and maybe when he said
they
he meant all of they and not just him and her).

And it wasn’t like he was dead.

She knew for a fact that he wasn’t dead.

Colleen had told her he wasn’t dead.

She had run into Colleen once in Spain. Ibiza. Rose was in between jobs, hadn’t yet experienced her Mariana Trench epiphany, but it wasn’t far off, either.

They ran into each other in an open-air market. It was awkward, at first, and then they fell onto each other, hugging and sobbing. They spent the next two days with each other, sleeping at
each other’s hotel rooms, one waking early and buying coffee for the other, visiting tourist sites with each other, until finally Colleen insisted they simply stay in the same hotel, the same room, to save money, even though they both had money to burn. They didn’t talk about the camp, or Emma, or their assaults, or the attack, the things they had done, the people they had lost. Colleen had enrolled in cooking classes at the hotel. This was her third time through the class. She’d been there for months and had learned how to scuba dive, had parasailed, had learned spearfishing, had gone pearl diving, had exhausted and worn out the poor activity director, had seen the sights so many times that she had considered, jokingly, applying for a job as a tour guide. She paid for a long-term rental scooter. Rose didn’t have to ask her why she hadn’t simply bought a scooter or let out an apartment, for that matter. Colleen made paella and brought it back to the room one night. Another night she made diver scallops with a vanilla-champagne reduction, and Rose asked her what was Spanish about it and Colleen shrugged and said, “Saffron, I guess,” and the next morning, as they sat on the balcony of Colleen’s hotel room, which stunned Rose every time with its view of the Sant Antoni Bay, as they sat there silent but not comfortable in their silence, having run out of everything to talk about that wasn’t the operation, that wasn’t Emma or the Regional Office, Rose asked her if she’d heard from anyone else.

“Becka,” she said, “or anyone else, maybe? Henry, maybe?”

And maybe Colleen knew how important it was and pretended it wasn’t important at all to spare Rose’s feelings, or maybe she didn’t know anything at all when she said, “Henry was, well, you just missed him, not more than two weeks ago.” Then she said,
“I’m sure he’ll be in touch with you. You were always his favorite, you know. ‘The best we ever trained, blah, blah, blah.’ And, ‘What an amazing girl.’ You know how he was.”

She nodded. And then, because if she didn’t leave in the next few minutes, she would burn the hotel to the ground, Rose decided it was time to move on.

“I think it’s time I moved on,” she said.

Colleen sipped her coffee and nodded. “Okay,” she said.

And there was a moment, a soft, brief moment when it seemed one or both of them would start talking, would talk about what had happened at camp, what had happened after camp, what had happened to them since the assault on the Regional Office, what had made it so impossible for either of them to settle into any kind of new normal. But before one of them could crack, Colleen stood up, abruptly, too abruptly, knocking her knee into the table, sloshing Rose’s coffee out of its mug, and Colleen said, “Sorry,” and Rose shook her head and half-smiled and said, “It’s okay,” but not, I’m sorry, too, though she hoped it had been buried there, an I’m sorry, too, buried in the tone of her voice, maybe, or somewhere deep in the words she actually said. Then Colleen said she had to get ready for class and Rose said she’d probably be gone before she got back from class and Colleen nodded and said, “Okay, well, take care of yourself,” and not, I’ll see you soon, or, I’ll see you later, okay? but Rose thought she could hear that somewhere in her voice, too, and after Colleen went back inside the room, Rose finished her coffee, packed her bag, and then left while Colleen was still in the shower.

She hadn’t seen Colleen since, and hadn’t heard from Henry, not even once.

She shouldn’t be thinking of Henry at a time like this, she knew. She shouldn’t be thinking of Henry or Emma or Colleen or Windsor or Wendy or any of them. She should be thinking of herself, and aside from herself, she should be thinking of Jason, poor silly Jace. Or her sister, though her sister never thought of her. Or Gina or Patty or her asshole of a father.

But she wasn’t. She was thinking of Henry.

She wished she had seen Henry, if only one more time. One time before all of this, before the robot, before the end.

She opened her eyes to look at that robot and that was when she saw the sword and then she wasn’t thinking of Henry, either, and was, much to her dismay, thinking of the director and his glove and the sword and what happened with the sword.

Rose wondered where it could have come from, where the robot would have hidden it. There didn’t seem to be any hiding places on that robot. But there it was, long and thin, gleaming and cold and sharp, though, really, with as much force as the robot could bring to bear, that sword didn’t have to be sharp, just strong. And it was both, she knew it was both sharp and strong.

Sharp enough, strong enough, anyway, to split a man in two.

“Is this how you did it?” the robot said in its nonrobot voice.
“Did you toy with him? Did you throw him from place to place and toy with him like a doll?”

The robot didn’t have to say who the “him” was. It knew she knew. With that sword in its hand, the robot didn’t have to say anything at all, in fact, but it wouldn’t stop. “Did you beat him bloody in the very place he felt safest? You with all your strength and power, and him just a man. Did you do all of that and then with his own sword, did you cut him down?”

The robot stopped and held the sword down at its side. “Is that how it happened?” And maybe it was waiting for Rose to say something, but she couldn’t. She couldn’t think of what to say and knew it wouldn’t matter, though she did feel the desire to make note of the director’s rather powerful glove. It seemed all so very personal, Rose thought. Strange that something so personal might come out of a robot, and she looked at its face, really looked at the robot’s face, and wondered if it was even a robot at all.

No, she thought. That face, those eyes. That face is a woman’s face.

And then she knew.

Oh, she thought. It’s you. I always wondered about you.

Not that she spent nights awake wondering about the girl with the mechanical arm, just every so often she wondered what she looked like, if she had survived the assault, what her life must be like, what it would feel like to have a metal part of you swinging at your side. Now that she was face-to-face with the girl with the mechanical arm, she looked for that arm, but then caught herself because there wasn’t a mechanical arm anymore, or rather, all of her was mechanical arm now, or rather, mechanical everything,
and then she felt embarrassed for looking at her so nakedly and for a second, the only thing she wanted to do was tell her, I’m sorry. For the look, for what she’d done, for all of it, but that urge quickly passed.

The robot had the sword raised up again.

Rose wished she’d figured it out sooner.

Not that she hadn’t known this thing had come for her from the Regional Office. Of course this thing had come from the Regional Office. Where else would it have come from?

Not that figuring it out sooner would have mattered very much. This thing wasn’t like anything she’d ever faced, wasn’t like anything she had been trained to face by Emma or Henry at the compound. This wasn’t some superpowered girl like herself, or an office slouch like most of the people at Regional. Even now, she couldn’t think of a move or countermove or strategy that might have disabled the thing or gotten her past it and now that goddamn sword.

But maybe—if she had known sooner, if she had figured it out sooner—maybe she would have fought differently. Fighting a thing simply on a mission is different than fighting a thing on a Mission. She would’ve fought differently, or maybe just harder.

From the very beginning, she would have fought harder.

But here she was, at what was most likely the very end, doing the only thing she could think of to do. Forget about the pain. Forget about the bones, broken if slowly mending. Forget about everything else and charge straight at that motherfucker, even if it would be the very last thing she’d ever do.

Which was what she did.

From
The Regional Office Is Under Attack:
Tracking the Rise and Fall of an American Institution

The second theory on how Henry managed to so effectively enact his plans against the Regional Office proceeds in almost the exact same way as the first theory, except for the small but significant difference that Emma was not killed, that her death had been entirely faked.

The doctor wasn’t sure how Sarah’s shoulder and mechanical arm had come back together. He studied her, where the arm reattached itself.

“It’s not a perfect fit,” he said. She almost yelled at him when he said this. Nothing could have been more perfect than this fit. “I mean,” he said, warily catching a look in her eye, “it’s perfect now. But it’s not where we put it originally. Not how we put it originally.”

He was skeptical of the story she’d told him, she could tell. He thought maybe she’d had help reattaching the arm, but that seemed unlikely. Or maybe the stress of the situation, the pain and stress and instability of it all, maybe coupled with some pharmaceuticals and some neurological suggestive therapy . . .

“Maybe what?” Sarah asked.

Maybe they hadn’t ever taken it off to begin with. Maybe they’d tried to take it off—hence the queer way it didn’t quite line up with how it had once lined up—but failing that, they’d done
their best (and had succeeded) to convince her that it had been removed.

“What better way,” he said, “to neutralize the largest threat than to convince the threat that it had been neutralized?”

He floated this idea out there as if it were a bubble, hesitant and fragile. She popped it, almost violently, emphatically, jabbing her mechanical finger into his very soft and pliable chest, because she had wondered much the same thing herself, had tried to think back to the moment when she’d seen it on the gurney in front of her.

And it was a thought she would rather not think.

But what if? What if her mechanical arm had been there the entire time?

“No matter,” he said, and there was something frightened in his voice and she tried to think calm thoughts, tried to remember Mr. Niles waving his arm at the destruction she had wreaked right after he had given her this mechanical arm. She smiled uncomfortably.

My, how they must have laughed at her. They must have laughed and laughed and laughed. She never even suspected, they would have said. She never even considered she might still have both her arms, they would have said. And then they would have howled. The thought of their laughing at her made her wish they were all still alive so she could kill them all again, and to settle her thoughts down, she thought of Wendy, of dead, frightened-eyed Wendy, and this made her feel better.

“The arm is in place and is still functional,” he said. “That’s great news.”

He scheduled her for another appointment, asked her to clear her schedule so they could cover it again. They didn’t have enough of her own skin to use but he could create a synthetic that would match almost perfectly. But at first she said no. She didn’t know why she said no but it felt necessary to say no to covering up the mechanical arm.

Then she said, “I’m sorry. You’re right. We have to cover it.”

And a week later, it was covered, and for days, she couldn’t pass by a mirror without staring at the mechanical arm and admiring once more how much it looked like just any normal arm would look.

For a couple of days, after she returned to the office with her new skin, people stopped and admired her arm. Just like new, they said. Or, It looks perfect. Or, Soon, we won’t remember which one was the mechanical one at all. But this she knew was a lie. How could it not be a lie? They remembered, all of them remembered, and would always remember, she thought, and that was a shame.