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.
10.
There were three guys waiting for her in her mom’s living room, and they grabbed her and she screamed and one of them clamped his hand over her mouth and she bit, and then he screamed and let go, and she kicked back with her right leg and felt it contact something—his knee, maybe—felt something crunch, heard someone fall. She stomped another’s foot, hard, and then yanked her arm out of his grasp, but the third one grabbed her free arm and pulled her to him by both her wrists and smashed his forehead into her face, and she saw stars, actual stars, little motes of light that swirled around in front of her eyes. And she heard him chuckle and say, “Jesus, guys, this was too easy,” and then she kicked him in the balls and he crumpled and let go of her wrists, and she grabbed him by his shirt, and then fell backward, pulling him forward on top of her, and in one swift hard kick, she threw him over her head so that he landed hard on his partner, knocking them both down.
How she’d done this, she had no fucking clue.
The closest she’d come to a fight was when she’d kicked Akard in his balls.
She scrambled up, looked around, and found Henry leaning against the door, his lips pursed, his eyes regarding her coolly. He nodded.
“That was pretty good,” he said.
Then he said, “These guys, they weren’t amateurs.”
Then he looked around the room at them and said, “But they did underestimate you, didn’t they?”
Said, “People always underestimate you, Rose. Isn’t that right?”
She didn’t ask him how he’d gotten inside, didn’t ask him what he was doing there, what he wanted, who those guys were, didn’t waste her time screaming, had let go of the hitch in her voice, that or had let it grow into something else, and instead she focused her energy on charging straight at that fucker, and then, as she was charging, then she yelled.
He watched her as she charged him and smiled and said, “But not me,” though that could’ve been her imagination since it didn’t feel like she could hear much of anything.
He stepped to the side and he grabbed her by her arm, pulled her in close like they were ballroom dancers, trapping her strong arm against her side, and then grabbed her by her neck with his other hand, so tight she couldn’t breathe, and then his leg swept her off her feet and she landed hard on her back against the hard, thin carpet that reeked of her mother’s Pall Malls, her free arm suddenly trapped under her own body weight and his weight as he bore down on her, and she could see his eyes, calm, blue eyes, and she could see his lips moving, but she couldn’t hear him, there was too much noise already banging around in her head.
Then, as he choked her, as he tried to choke the life from her, she swung her leg, she didn’t know how, but she swung it high and hard and kicked Henry in the side of the head, hard enough to throw him off her, hard enough to make him stumble, and she hand-sprung onto her feet and before anything else could happen, anyone else could pop out of the darkness and surprise her, she ran straight to Henry, ran at him as he got himself to his knees, though to her last dying day some part of her will always wonder why she didn’t just run the other way, didn’t just do what any sane person would have done, why she didn’t push her way out and run like hell. She ran at Henry instead and delivered a swift kick to his side, and then another, and then she realized there were more parts to him to be kicked or scratched or punched and she was aiming her next kick for his face, his not-ugly, not-handsome face, when the lights in the house shut off and everything went dark, darker than normal when the lights were shut off, and Rose couldn’t see anything, and a woman’s voice called out, “Enough. That’s quite enough.”
11.
Training. Remember your goddamn training.
So the receptionist isn’t here. So this is a trap. So what? She’s been in traps before.
She jumps up—straight up like fucking Luke Skywalker in Empire when Vader tries to freeze his ass in carbonite—and then flips herself around to a) get a good look at the shit gunning—literally gunning�
�for her and b) push herself off the ceiling, which isn’t that drop-tile bullshit but nice wooden planking, thank God for egotistical directors of demonic organizations and their urgent need for evil-lair trimmings of the fancy, Nate Berkus sort.
What she sees before throwing herself into the fray:
1. Gun turrets, five of them, already out and targeting her since probably as soon as her hand grabbed the door handle.
2. Some real Last Crusade or Dr. No shit, by way of blades, half as tall as she was, spinning vertically and horizontally across the room.
3. Strange-as-shit whirling-dervish-type miniature robots spinning round and round like some kind of hybrid of the gun turrets and the spinning blades, in that they’re shooting out lasers (pell-mell enough that, in the nanosecond she took to get her lay of the land, one accidentally took out a gun turret) and have spinning blades spinning out of their tiny torsos and thin robot arms, Maximilian style. (The Black Hole, Henry. Please do try to keep up.)
And last but not least:
4. Gas pouring into the room out of secret cubbies.
Jesus Christ, this Niles guy sure is a nervous fuck.
Take a deep, deep, deep breath and hold it.
Don’t think about what kind of mess is waiting for you in his actual office if this is what he has lined up for anyone who dares approach his receptionist.
Don’t think at all.
Pivot.
Shove.
Handspring.
Land.
In between handspring and land, of course, grab one of the whirligig ones by the top of its whirligiggly head and throw it slicing into one of the big spinning slicers, the side-to-sider, not the up-and-downer, to cut the dervish clean in two, but which won’t quite stop the whirling, which will keep the laser-gunning head going long enough to knock out another gun turret (that’s two, three more to go) and the bottom going just long enough to mangle one of the other dervishes.
She doesn’t see this, not in real life, anyway, can only picture it in her head before she leaps.
Land.
Throw.
Double back handspring.
Super jump with a backflip.
Land again with a kick to disable the other spinning-blade number, stop it cold, and turn it vertical to act like a shield against two of the gun turrets on her weak side.
Another kick to knock it off its spinny hinge-arm doohickey.
Henry would know the name of this shit. Hell, so would everyone else, but she could never bring herself to give a fuck.
Knock it off its hinge, catch it by its center before it sinks into the floor, and discus that bitch at two more gun turrets.
Round-off.
Spin-kick the head free from the last whirling-dervish bot and into the last gun turret and the body into the glass partition separating the hallway outside from the receptionist’s office inside, cracking it open enough, anyway, for Rose to stick her head through and let a breath out and take one more big gulp of nontoxic air before twirling herself in and out and about and around the last three spinning slicers, which aren’t so much to tackle once there aren’t any more guns or spinning robots targeting you, and then she’s at the door.
Shove yourself through, and there he is.
The director himself.
Mr. Niles.
And he’s all alone and there are no whirligigs swarming around him in some sort of protective shell, and he’s standing back against his desk, and there’s a look in his eyes, a look that for a moment she mistakes for the kind of look you give when you’re done, when you’re finished with all of this, when you’re ready to go home, or to cross over to the last frontier or whatever the fuck you want to call it. But then he grins and pulls around his left hand and it’s covered in something she can’t make out at first but that looks, well, his hand looks like it’s covered in another hand, not a glove but a different kind of hand, and his grin grows wider and wider, and then Rose realizes, no, it’s that he’s coming closer and closer, and almost but not quite too late, she realizes he’s coming right at her.
12.
The lights came back on, brighter somehow, and there was a woman sitting on Rose’s mother’s couch, a woman dressed all in red, sitting there not bored exactly but like she wasn’t as interested as she actually was.
Then she stood up.
She stood up and up and seemed just so damn tall, beautiful and tall.
Rose didn’t know who she was, didn’t know her name, and only later would she learn about her connection to the Regional Office or what the Regional Office was, and about the personal war she was about to wage against it.
But that would be later.
At that moment, Rose only knew that here was this woman, stunning and calm and powerful, and that simply looking at her made that hitch in her voice come back.
The Woman in Red stepped up close to Rose and touched her finger gently to Rose’s forehead, where there would be a nasty bruise soon enough, and in that touch Rose felt some living, pulsing, twitching memory shiver under her own skin, a thing that started at the touch, coursed through her down to her feet and into the earth, and then rose up from the ground all over again, up her legs and through her whole body to rush tingling up the back of her neck—she could feel it, could trace the shiver’s path—up her neck and over and through her skull, where it landed, finally, on that spot, touched her the way she’d been desperate to be touched, and her body went limp. After everything that had happened that day, her body decided now was the time to give out, and she felt herself start to fall, and she hoped—deeply hoped—that the Woman in Red would reach out and grab hold of her, but she didn’t.
Henry—where he’d come from she didn’t know—Henry caught her, instead, and she looked up at his not-unhandsome face, and the feeling continued to move through her and seemed to grow out of her, seemed to want to envelop him, too.
She didn’t push him away or struggle out of his grasp. She let him hold her and despite everything, she moved in, instead, for a kiss.
Her first.
Despite what she’d told Patty and Gina, despite all the things assholes like Akard and Schroeder said about her, her very first kiss.
When she’s older, when she’s back in this small town, when she’s drunk and half-asleep in her car, having pulled herself over because even in this state she knows she shouldn’t be on the road, and before the police pull up behind her with their bright flashing lights, and before she mouths off to them, before she tells them to go fuck themselves because for Christ’s sake she’s doing the right thing and not driving back home shit-faced unlike most people she knows, and before she resists arrest and struggles so strongly against the handcuffs that for the next week her wrists will be red and swollen, before she head-butts the window of the police car and cracks the window, and then tries but fails to smash the foot of one of the officers with her booted heel, before any of this happens, she’ll be thinking about this kiss, which wasn’t a great kiss, by no means was it a great or sexy or even sensual kiss, but it was her first real kiss, which made it memorable in and of itself, but also because of how she likes to joke with herself about that kiss and how fireworks lit the sky, right as they kissed, likes to joke with herself about how all hell broke loose with that kiss.
Which, in a way, it did.
Then the kiss broke and the room and her momma’s house and the people in it and the Woman in Red all came back into focus.
Judging by the look on Henry’s face and the sound of the woman’s laughter, the kiss was unexpected. Henry stood her up.
“Are you all right?” the Woman in Red asked.
Before Rose could answer, Henry shook his head. “Nothing that won’t heal.”
The Woman in Red smiled. “That wasn’t what I meant.” Then she looked at Rose and then back to Henry. “Well? Your assessment.”
H
enry shook his head again. “You saw it all for yourself,” he said. He paused and pressed his palm gingerly to his side. “She’s strong.” He looked at Rose. “Angry,” he said. He didn’t touch his fingertips to his lips but Rose will always imagine that he did when he said, “Passionate.”
The woman smiled again, the look on her face so genuine and welcoming that Rose couldn’t help but smile back and feel, for whatever reason, relief.
“Still,” Henry said, and the smile on the woman’s face wavered.
“Yes?” the Woman in Red asked.
“I think she’s too young.”
Rose thought she saw the Woman in Red roll her eyes. Then she took Rose by the hand and squeezed Rose’s fingers slightly, playfully, and said, “She’s ready.” Then, to Rose, she asked, “Are you ready?”
“Ready?” Rose asked, surprised to find her voice there, just waiting for her but sounding not like herself at all. “Ready for what?”
She pulled Rose closer to her, close enough that Rose could smell what she thought was a light, citrusy perfume, but what she would later come to find was just the woman’s natural smell, and the Woman in Red said, “Come with me.”
She smiled her smile again and said, “I’m going to tell you a story.”
From The Regional Office Is Under Attack:
Tracking the Rise and Fall of an American Institution
The Regional Office Is Under Attack!: A Novel Page 4
