So she took the trains. The F train was murder. The 4 was worse. But the platforms and the cars, aside from the occasional drunk passed out on a bench, were empty, and she would see anything weird or out of sorts that might be coming for her.
Not to mention all the waiting, all the time she spent stewing, helped to clear her head, helped her relax.
Still.
What a drag.
Not what she’d had planned for her Tuesday morning. Or her Monday night.
She unlocked the first-floor office door and then punched in the elevator code, started the long descent.
No one else was in, at least. Even the cleaning crew had long since come and gone.
When she first started working for Mr. Niles, she came in early every morning, hoping (and failing) to impress him and the Operatives — Mr. Niles, if he even noticed, never said anything, hadn’t cared, and the Operatives hazed her for it, but back then there hadn’t been much that they hadn’t hazed her for. She would come in before sunrise and use her key to Mr. Niles’s office — which she had kept even after he had given her her own office — and sat at his desk and watched the sun rise over Manhattan through the three tall video screens that were built to look like windows, the pictures on them so vivid, so real, that there were moments when the rising sun would force her to shade her eyes, when sunlight seemed to stream into the room, when she almost forgot she was a mile, at least, belowground.
Those mornings, that sunrise, were the best things about working for the Regional Office those first few months. Better than all the fancy gewgaws and super-advanced technologies they used to find new Recruits, better than the training room with its hologram modules and Danger Room sessions, better than the advanced weaponry, better than Mr. Niles and what he’d done for her, and way better, so, so much way better than her mechanical arm made of a nearly impervious and unbreakable metal alloy and controlled by hyperadvanced nanorobots but disguised to look no different than her other, normal arm.
But back then, just about everything was better than that arm.
Not because she hadn’t wanted the arm, though in truth, she hadn’t asked for it, either, had been talked into it. The arm had been Mr. Niles’s idea — if she wanted to avenge her mother, she would need enhancement, etc. — and sure, she appreciated it now, couldn’t imagine her life without it now. But back then, she didn’t know how to use it, how to control it, or why she needed it. Back then, what she had wanted from the Regional Office were answers, and when she was given those answers, what she wanted were actions — of the vengeful sort, full of violent retribution — and Mr. Niles had insisted, had promised that revenge would come, but before she could have revenge, she would have to take the mechanical arm.
Now she rubbed the key to Mr. Niles’s office between her normal thumb and forefinger (she tried her best not to rub things between her mechanical fingers as that made her body twitch the way it twitched when she accidentally bit into a piece of tinfoil or handled those paper towels that were less paper and more towel). She thought hard about that sunrise, about setting herself up in that office in front of those big windows again, letting these newly arisen troubles take their own course. If she had known that Mr. Niles was already in there himself, had been there all night trying to figure out whether he should stay with the Regional Office or find some other thing to do with his life because he’d become tired, so tired of all the bullshit of working with Oyemi and her Oracles, she would have gone to him, and would have told him everything she’d learned reading that letter left on her door, and might have possibly changed the trajectory of not just this day but of her life, and not just her life, but the life of Mr. Niles, and maybe the life they might have had together, not as a couple, though maybe she wouldn’t have minded that, but more as a globe-trotting, world-saving duo. Rogue demon hunters, and the like. A thought, she wasn’t afraid to admit (to herself, horrified by the thought of admitting it to Mr. Niles or any other living soul), she’d pondered not a few times. But she didn’t know he was there, and instead she believed — correctly — that the Regional Office was going to come under attack, and believed — incorrectly — that this attack would come in the next few days, the next few weeks, and that she was going to be the one to save the Regional Office, and that to do so, she had to stay down here and work instead of watch for a rising sun.
If only she had known that the Regional Office was already under attack, had been under attack, in one subtle way or another, for the past two years… but she didn’t know, wouldn’t know until too late. Not too late to save the Regional Office, which, let’s face it, was done for, at least the way Mr. Niles and Oyemi had envisioned it. But too late to save herself.
And way too late to save Mr. Niles.
16
“My mother disappeared,” Sarah had told Mr. Niles at that first meeting, even though clearly he would have known this, since they had found her, they had invited her to their offices promising information on her mother’s disappearance.
Still. Sarah believed in coming right to the point. People could be so awkward the way they danced around the topic of her mother.
“She disappeared when I was eight.”
Mr. Niles had offered Sarah his hand and had led her off the elevator into an open office thrumming with activity. He’d introduced himself and hadn’t bothered with the unnecessary You must be Sarah that she had expected. He’d offered her something to drink, something to eat, and when she had refused both, had taken her to his office, and that was where they were talking now.
Mr. Niles, who had short black hair that would have been curly if he’d let it grow out, and a soft, round face, and very little chin to speak of, smiled at her and told her, almost gently, “I know.”
Sarah didn’t know what to say to that so she didn’t say anything. Mr. Niles tented his hands together and pressed the tips of his index fingers to the tip of his nose. He tilted back in his office chair and regarded Sarah with what Sarah took to be some skepticism.
“I know that she was abducted,” he said, finally, “and I know a lot more than that.” He dropped his hands into his lap and leaned forward in his chair and said, “What I don’t know is if you’re ready.”
“Ready?” she asked.
“For the truth. About your mother. And about you.”
She didn’t know what truth there would be for her to find out about herself, but she didn’t know why the Regional Office would have contacted her in the first place if Mr. Niles hadn’t thought she was ready to learn what they knew about her mother. That was the whole reason she had come.
It was strange, though, being here, telling Mr. Niles the small piece of her story, waiting to hear what he had to say. Strange because she had long ago stopped killing herself trying to puzzle out what had happened to her mother. After her mother had disappeared and she had gone to live with her aunt, Sarah hadn’t known what had happened to her mother, not even in the abstract. She only knew that her mother was gone, and that she missed her, and that she was sad because of this, but the other aspects of her life hadn’t changed very much. She still had to go to school, still had to wake up in the mornings and go to bed at night at the same specified times. She still liked the same foods — not many of them — and still had the same friends — again, not many of them. What it meant that her mother was gone wouldn’t occur to her until she was older, which was when she started to think seriously about the things that might’ve happened to her mother. And as a teenager, Sarah tortured herself — that’s how Sarah liked to think of it — with all the possibilities. From: Her mother took an honest look at what the next ten to twelve years held in store for her alone in the city with a daughter she didn’t fully understand and simply walked out, wiping her hands clean of that potential disaster, to: She was nabbed on the way home, forced to live in a basement in a building two doors down or the next block over, a sex slave, or worse. Sarah couldn’t imagine what worse would look like, could only imagine that there could be worse.