The Regional Office Is Under Attack!: A Novel (8 page)

Sarah stood up and pushed by Wendy and then stopped in the doorway.

She knew she should have kept going, should have barreled down the hall and into that fray, should have put her mechanical arm to the good use it had been designed for, but she didn’t. She stopped instead. Not because she was afraid—she wasn’t—or because she didn’t think she’d do well in the fight—she would have—but because it wasn’t her instinct to barrel into anything.

She was careful—had always been careful, even and especially as a child, even and especially when situations required bold action. She was a thinker, a planner. She thought through everything, the possibilities, the action and reaction, the cause and effect, the consequences of
therefore
and
but
.

People were screaming—not just people, but coworkers—and hostages were being taken, therefore she should put an end to it all, and the Operatives were missing, therefore she was the strongest and most skilled defender on site, and she should get to work defending, but then what? she thought. She runs down the hall wielding her mechanical arm, disarms and neutralizes three men, or let’s be generous, let’s say five, if you give Sarah the element of surprise, five men, neutralized, or dead, but how many are there
in all? And so let’s hope for the best but prepare for the worst and say there are twenty, no, forty men with guns, now down to thirty-five, and now she has lost the element of surprise, and all that’s left to her is brute force, cunning, and speed, which she contains, not just in her mechanical arm, but contains in the all of her, but still, brute force and speed and cunning, set up against thirty-five men with guns and who knows what else. And Jesus—are there magicks involved? There would have to be magicks involved, otherwise how would they have conspired to push past security? How would they have managed to send all the Regional Office’s own defensive team of Operatives off on missions so that not one of them was on campus? So, yeah, sure, let’s throw magicks into the mix, too, and let’s take away complete surprise because they would have to know by now that she was not on board with their offer, with the package that she had found that night in her apartment, that she would be, in fact, lurking somewhere to join in on this fight, so maybe not total surprise. Add to that technological wizardry, because who would plan an attack against an organization equipped with a semi-cyborg (although Sarah didn’t love the word,
cyborg,
and liked to think of herself more as enhanced) and not come equipped with its own technology to counter? Which mostly takes away her brute force. Takes away brute force and leaves speed and cunning, which don’t come into play as much when running headlong into an uneven fight. Leaving her only one real option: to
Die Hard
it John McClane–style, but with Wendy working with her, the two of them squeezing through air ducts and lurking in stairwells and plotting in empty offices, picking off these bastards in small guerrilla groups.

So it was settled.

She had her plan, not just the only but also the very best plan, contrived in a matter of seconds while she stood there in the doorway.

Not bad, O’Hara. Not bad at all.

She turned to pull Wendy along with her, down the hall in the opposite direction to the back stairwell and from there to the upstairs break room, but when she saw Wendy, Wendy had changed.

Sarah couldn’t tell how. Not right away. Wendy looked at the clock and made a wincing smiling face and said, “They’re a little early.” And then she punched Sarah in the face. “But better early than late, right, boss?” And she punched her again, in the chest this time, so hard and so fast that Sarah couldn’t react, couldn’t think, could only fly backward, crashing through the glass wall of her office and into the cubicle right outside it—Wendy’s fucking cubicle—and then things went dark and she didn’t get up.

“We will give you a mechanical arm, Sarah,” Mr. Niles told her just before the men cut off her real arm.

“A mechanical arm so perfect,” he said, “that not even your own mother will know which arm is the real arm and which is the mechanical arm.”

He said, Not even your own mother, even though they both knew that her mother was dead, that she was killed by the very men whom Sarah had sworn to hunt down, with the help of Mr. Niles, and with the assistance of this mechanical arm. He said, Not even your own mother, but Sarah liked to think he meant, Not even the person closest to you, not even the person who might know you better than you know yourself, not even the person who reared you from infancy and has since gazed unflinchingly into the darkest depths of your soul and who, nonetheless, continues to love and admire and watch over you, not even this person will know which arm is the mechanical arm.

Of course, before he said any of this, before they prepped her for surgery, before she even knew about a potential for prepping for surgery, he sat her down in his office and passed a file folder across his desk. On the folder was a picture of her mother, and inside the folder a detailed account of what had happened to her after she
was taken, which included more photos, confusing photos, disturbing photos, disturbing because they were so confusing.

Her mother with an AK-47. Her mother bent over what looked like a dirty bomb, her face turned to the camera, her eyes wide and full of mirth. Her mother in full camo, lined up with a group of similarly aged men and women also outfitted in camouflage, holding what looked like grenades over their heads, grenades as if they were flutes of champagne. Her mother in an apron leaned over a stockpot at an old white stove, the kind Sarah always pictured when imagining a life out in the country with a mom and a dad and land. Her mother looking in that photo more motherly than Sarah had ever remembered her looking, and to the right of her, a table of bearded men and limp-haired women, one looking at the camera, the others looking at a map or a roll of papers in front of them.

“A terrorist cell of anarchists working out of Damascus took your mother. They thought your mother had been imbued with gifts,” Mr. Niles said as she flipped through the file folder, “gifted with special abilities, powers, you might say, and maybe she had been, and maybe not, that we cannot say, but that’s why they took her.” He sighed. “Why they brainwashed her, why they trained her.”

Then he sat back in his chair and let a silence settle into his office as Sarah turned slowly, carefully through all of the pages in the file folder, and not until she looked up at him did he lean forward again and say, “I’d like to offer you the services of this office. I’d like to offer you a deal.”

The problem with having a mechanical arm nearly impervious and super fast and super strong, comprised of hyperadvanced nanorobot technology and looking no different than her regular arm, was that people always assumed just because Sarah had the ability to crush metal with her armored grip that, when faced with a situation not to her liking, her first reaction would be to crush something with her mechanical fist.

Or if crushing weren’t possible, smashing.

The elevator control panel, for instance. People seemed to always be waiting for that moment when, impatient with the often glitchy elevator, she would throw her fist into the elevator control panel, or the glass wall of her office, or through one of the interns.

A number of people seemed to be waiting for her to throw her fist through an intern.

Jacob, perhaps.

Not many people in the office would have blamed her for throwing her fist through intern Jacob.

All of which was only made more frustrating and disappointing when you woke up one day to find all that potential
squandered by time and inaction and an inability to risk losing what you loved to gain something more.

In other words: When Sarah woke up, she woke up and her arm was gone.

Her mechanical arm, that is, and not gone, not entirely gone, just no longer attached to her. It had been a day full of strange uncertainties, but if anything was for absolute certain, it was that her mechanical arm was no longer attached to her. Instead, it was on a metal gurney not more than five feet in front of her.

Sarah was tied up in a chair and her other arm burned with not a small amount of burning pain, and when she finally got the chance to look at her other arm, which wouldn’t be until they pulled her out of that chair and carried her to where the other hostages were being kept, she would see the three-inch gash, down to what she’d think might be bone, and would think happily to herself, They couldn’t tell which was which, either.

Would think, Mr. Niles will be so pleased.

But at the moment she wasn’t thinking of her normal arm and hardly noticed the burning pain and was only barely aware of the idea of thinking of Mr. Niles or the Regional Office or what was going to happen to her next.

All she could think of was what was right in front of her. How she had wasted what was right in front of her and how all she could do now was simply sit and stare at it and let it all continue to go to waste.

Hell no.

She took a deep breath and jumped or did whatever that thing
was when you were tied tight in an office chair to try to scooch it across the floor.

The back legs tilted but not by much and she didn’t feel the front legs do anything at all.

Leverage. She had the wrong kind of leverage.

If she had her arm, boy, these ropes and this chair and this office wall and even the concrete floor below her, boy, they wouldn’t stand a chance, and then the men outside, however many of them, the men scattered throughout the whole Regional Office, they’d get what was coming to them, too.

The real problem with having a mechanical arm that was etc., etc., ad infinitum, was that she never did: throw her metal fist through Jacob, the elevator panel, the glass wall of her office. It was her job, she thought, not just her job but her position, her responsibility, her role in the Regional Office, not to throw her fist around willy-nilly, mechanical or not, though now she understood that she had misunderstood her role in the organization, her value to Mr. Niles, and that she had held herself in check, had pulled everything back, had stilled herself—not just her mechanical arm but her regular arm, too, and not just that but everything—had stilled herself to the point of stillness by mistake and for the wrong reasons, and now the problem was she was going to be killed, was going to die at the office, not ever once having fully let herself go.

When Sarah woke up from the operation, she woke up standing in the middle of a wrecked lab and operating room, fairly unconcerned about her arm, about either of her arms.

She was breathing hard. Her chest heaved. Her hands were clenched into fists. A red light was pulsing and a small series of sparks lit up the heart-rate machine to her left and then the machine collapsed into a heap.

For a few seconds, Sarah didn’t know where she was, what had happened, how she had gotten there.

Faintly, Sarah remembered lying down on the operating table. She remembered a mask being placed over her mouth and nose. She remembered counting down from one hundred. She remembered becoming stuck on ninety-three. And that was all she remembered.

A heap of something in the corner of the operating room moaned and shifted.

The doctor. A heap of the doctor in the corner of the operating room moaned and shifted.

Then she heard Mr. Niles speaking to her, but his voice crunched and crackled, and it was too loud, everything was too loud, and she stuck her fingers into her ears, but carefully, she remembered,
because one of the fingers might have been mechanical. She remembered that, she was beginning to remember that.

She looked around the operating room for Mr. Niles, but he wasn’t there, and then she realized he was speaking to her over an intercom.

“What?” she said. “What’s going on?” she said.

“We’re opening the door, Sarah,” Mr. Niles said. “It’s okay. Everything’s going to be okay. We’re opening the door. Nothing’s going to happen. Try not to hit anything or anyone.”

Someone else in the intercom room with Mr. Niles said, just loud enough for the microphone to pick up, “Anyone else, you mean.”

“What?” Sarah asked.

“Just rest your arm, okay? Just rest everything.” Mr. Niles paused. “I’m coming inside now.”

A hiss escaped the door and she realized she hadn’t known she’d been locked inside, that the doctor had been locked inside with her. The door pushed open and there was Mr. Niles. She had expected him to be dressed in scrubs or in a hazmat suit, or, judging by the state of the room, full body armor, but he was wearing his normal office clothes, minus the jacket, his sleeves rolled up, his tie pulled loose.

He smiled. “Well. That was unexpected.”

Two paramedics stepped cautiously into the room behind him and then crept over to the doctor heaped into the corner.

He stepped closer to her, closer than she felt comfortable with, considering. Considering what she must have done coming out of the operation, considering her own inability to remember any of it,
considering the doctor, whose femur had been pulverized, according to the muted chatter she could hear from the paramedics.

Mr. Niles studied her, studied not just her arms, which would have been expected, but looked closely into her eyes, stepped around her in a slow circle. The paramedics lifted the doctor onto a stretcher. Mr. Niles came back around to look her in the face.

“Fantastic,” he said.

“Fantastic?”

“I’d certainly call this a success,” Mr. Niles said.

“A success?”

“You’re alive. I’m alive.” He looked around the room. “This is an easy cleanup, frankly. You should see what some of the other girls have done, the Operatives.” He took a deep breath and let it out and placed his hand on her shoulder, her normal shoulder. Then he smiled at her again and placed his hand on her other shoulder and shook his head and said, “Remarkable.” He took her by her hands and lifted them up and put her palms flat against his palms and her whole body shuddered, and she couldn’t tell if she was afraid and shuddering or thrilled and shuddering, but her breath caught in her throat when he intertwined her fingers with his.

Then the moment passed and he let her hands go and he took her by the arm—her normal arm—and started walking her out of the ruined lab.

“Yes,” he said, “yes, very much a success.” Then he said, “I want you to remember this, though.” He stopped and turned her to look at the wreckage. “Take a good look around you and remember this very clearly. Maybe back when you were just a normal
girl, back when you were Sarah O’Hara, girl with two normal arms, this kind of outburst would have been okay. Uncivilized, of course, but otherwise harmless.” He swept his arm across the damage she had done. “But now. We must demonstrate a modicum of self-restraint, mustn’t we?”

She nodded. She opened her mouth to apologize, but he stopped her from saying she was sorry, that she didn’t know what she was doing, that she wasn’t in control of any of it.

“You’ll learn,” he said, shaking his head. “Soon enough, you’ll figure it out.”