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.”
23
Sarah wasn’t going to give up.
That was what they wanted, of course. For her to give up.
Or, rather, what they wanted was for her to be captured and neutralized and, apparently, they wanted to take away her mechanical arm, all of which they — whoever They were — had achieved without much, or any, difficulty, and so her giving up might have been, in Their minds, a rather moot point.
In anyone’s mind, a moot point, actually, including hers. Especially hers.
Not giving up meant she was going to do what, specifically?
Scooch the chair inch by inch the five or so feet to the metal table where her mechanical arm now lay lifeless and possibly ruined? Fine, sure, okay, and then what was she planning to do?
Her arm. The skin — her skin — had been stripped from it in uneven patches. The circuitry showed through, sinewy and blood-smeared, and the joints and the skeleton made of steel, or rather, made of an alloy that was better than steel, unbreakable and nearly impervious.
So what if she could get to it? She didn’t even know if it still worked, and even if it did, who the hell was going to reattach it?
Her?
Tied tight in this chair and not a doctor or a surgeon or a robotics engineer or whatever the hell she would have to be to reattach a mechanical arm, to herself?
She jump-scooched her chair another inch closer. Her forehead and her neck began to sweat. She jump-scooched another inch, maybe even two inches, and then the pain in her regular arm and the pain where they had pulled off her mechanical arm and the pain in her face and skull from where Wendy — that fucking bitch Wendy — had sucker punched her were all homing in on her, waking up to her, but she didn’t care.
She jump-scooched.
She jump-scooched.
She jump-scooched.
Her foot, if her legs hadn’t been tied down to this chair, her ankles hadn’t been strapped to the legs, her foot could have touched the table now if she extended her leg all the way.
And now her ankle, she could have wrapped her ankle around the wheeled leg of the table and drawn it to her.
And now her shin, she could have touched her shin to the leg, and her leg, she could have kicked the table over by now, or better yet, she could have thrown her foot onto the tabletop itself and brought the whole thing crashing down to her if she wanted, if she’d been able.
Jump-scooch. Jump-scooch. Her knee tipped against the closest leg, shifted the table a hair. She could smell it now, her arm, the metal and the blood of her arm swirling together in a perfect storm of copper penny down her nose and into her throat.
She breathed in huffing gusts through her nose and her wide-open mouth. She had drenched herself in so much sweat that the dried blood from Wendy’s punch had loosened, mixed, had run over her lips, onto her teeth and tongue.
But she didn’t care.
She had made it, goddamn it.
And now what?
She could close her eyes. She could let her body shudder to a halt. She could faint!
She could do practically nothing she wanted!
In truth, she had harbored the notion that making it would be enough, would be trial and sacrifice enough, that the universe or her arm would recognize her effort, would reward her for it somehow — That’s it, Sarah, you’ve done enough, you’ve done more than enough, let us take it from here — so she sat there huffing and sweating and wincing and concentrating, willing the arm to do some damn thing, waiting for the universe to right itself back in her favor, but nothing.
Not one damn thing.
She closed her eyes. She slumped her head — the rest of her, too, but the ropes wouldn’t slump with her — and she would have sobbed, would have started heaving and crying, but then the door opened, and two men came inside, and she pulled her shit together.
24
Mr. Niles and the doctor didn’t show her the arm they’d cut off after the operation.
Sarah wasn’t sure when or how she’d devised the notion that they would have, as if her now-detached arm were nothing more substantial than a pulled tooth, but she found herself asking about it, after the incident, after crushing the doctor’s leg, wrecking his lab and the operating room, after Mr. Niles led her quietly to her room, where she could heal and recover and come to some sort of grips with everything.
“Can I see it?” she asked when Mr. Niles, just before leaving, asked if there was anything else she needed.
“It?” he said, although, even then, even that early in their friendship, she could read him well enough to know he understood her question just fine.
“My arm,” she said. “The other one,” she said.
She expected him to cough or lick his lips or fiddle with his tie or look to the left or the right, expected him to employ any number of stalling techniques that would give him time to figure out how to answer this delicate and weird and horrifying — even Sarah understood it was weird and horrifying — request, but he didn’t deliberate. He didn’t hem or haw. He said, “No, of course not.” And then he nodded once and said, “Let me know if there’s anything else,” and then he was gone and she was alone with an arm that wasn’t hers, that wasn’t even human.
When it hung there at her side, her arm felt surprisingly just like any other arm. It didn’t feel heavy or deadened. Her shoulder, where the arm had been attached, felt numb, but only for the first hour or so after the operation.