Another night passed, and then it was Saturday and there was no school, and her aunt said, “Hey, do you want to go to Coney Island today?” and Sarah said, “Sure,” even though what she really wanted was to go home and for her mother to come back. But she didn’t want to upset her aunt, who seemed more than upset enough, and she didn’t want to say what was on her own mind, either, as she would only upset herself by saying out loud the thing she wanted to do but couldn’t do. And so, fine, she would go to Coney Island with her aunt, except her aunt stayed home and Sarah went with a friend of her aunt’s who also had kids, three of them, the oldest four years younger than Sarah, and for most of the day, Sarah watched her aunt’s friend yell at her kids or caught her aunt’s friend staring at her with a strange, sad, pitying look in her eye.
On Sunday, her aunt bought cookies and pizzas and cake and popcorn and closed the blinds and turned her apartment as dark as she could and ran movie after movie after movie, Sarah’s favorites, which weren’t many and which were mostly her favorites because they were the ones she had at home—Labyrinth and Top Gun and Time Bandits. When they ran out of movies, Sarah’s aunt kept the apartment dark and the popcorn popped and they sat and watched whatever was on TV, and then, on Monday, the police came over. After that, a man and a woman from CPS came to her aunt’s house, and after that, Sarah’s aunt took her back to her mom’s apartment, where they packed her clothes and her toys up, and Sarah asked her aunt if they couldn’t just stay there. Sarah’s aunt told her, “Maybe, maybe we will, maybe we’ll come back here and stay until your mother comes back,” but they never did. One day while she was at school, her aunt moved what she could from Sarah’s old apartment and sold the rest and what she didn’t sell was left on the curb. And then time passed and Sarah changed and while she didn’t know it, her mother changed, too, which was why when Sarah was older and she saw her mother week after week, year after year, she never once knew they’d been brought back together.
19
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.
20
“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.