1
Or it would be, shortly.
In ten minutes, more or less.
Rose wished it would be less.
Less would be, Christ, less would be amazing.
Mostly because Rose was ready to get this thing started, but also because she was sitting quiet on forty well-trained and slightly antsy mercs in full combat gear who were also ready. Ready to storm out of their unmarked gray vans, their fake delivery trucks, their ATM vestibules, ready to invade and then take over this plain, unremarkable office building, ready to force their way a mile belowground and into the heart of the Regional Office and wage their full assault on it. Then, soon after that, if all went according to plan, ready to level the place, make the whole thing shudder to the ground.
Metaphorically speaking, that is, what with the Regional Office already located mostly underground and all.
Rose was ready for it to begin because she was seventeen and impatient and she was sitting on all of these men who were amped up on testosterone and protein power shakes. Superpowered, highly trained supergirl or not, Rose felt her control over these grunts slipping, ever so slightly.
And she had to pee.
But she had her orders. They couldn’t move until seven forty-five. She didn’t know why, but those were her orders. Hold the men until seven forty-five.
Rose checked her watch. In five minutes, the assault was a go.
She’d been practicing.
Like, in front of her mirror for almost an hour last night, practiced that fucking move. Twirled her hand in the air in that military circle fist-pump thing that she’d seen before plenty of times in movies but had always assumed was made up. Anyway, she was totally ready to do that thing, whatever it was called, and then, Jesus, finally, these assholes could rush out and go and the hired help would be out of her goddamn hands and on their way to the assault and she could get on with her own business, which involved ghosting her way a mile belowground, without an elevator, thank you very much, in search of the director, who, if these grunts did their job the right way, wouldn’t know what the hell was happening until it was too late.
Not that she wasn’t, deep down, feeling some small sense of pride in the fact that she had been given command of the mercenaries and put in charge of starting the entire assault. She was the youngest one on the team — didn’t hit eighteen for another two weeks — and hadn’t been what anyone would have called a model student at Assassin Training Camp or whatever the hell they wanted to call it. She’d almost quit after just a couple of weeks because she’d been a total spaz, so, sure, what a surprise that she would have risen in the ranks, etc., that this responsibility would have been bestowed, etc., it was an honor and a thrill, etc., etc., but really, if she were going to be totally honest about it, about leading the charge of forty grunts who were actually — no shit — grunting, like, all the time, she’d rather they’d just given her her job to do and not this management position because what a pain in the ass managing people was turning out to be.
She’d already had to separate, like, two of them because they got into a shoving match about a fucking seat in the fucking unmarked gray van, and she’d had to yell at them, like, Are you fucking kidding me, are you goddamned third-graders? and then shove them both apart, almost knocking them both unconscious.
And she could tell, as she was yelling at these two assholes, she could totally see Colleen covering her mouth to keep herself from laughing, which only confirmed what she’d suspected all along: She’d only been put in charge of these assholes because being put in charge of anything was a shit job.
She checked her watch, again.
One minute. Jesus Christ, one more whole other minute.
Fuck it, she thought. Close enough.
She gave the signal.
2
When Henry and Emma had first found her, Rose was running from a couple of assholes — Akard and Schroeder — who were in hot pursuit of her on their four-wheelers because they’d walked up on her pouring eye drops into the water bowls of their mangy yellow country dogs.
It was their own fault — Akard’s and Schroeder’s, not the dogs’—for spreading lies about her all over school after Akard cornered her late one night near the courthouse down on the square and told her to suck him off and she told him she’d rather do one of his sorry dogs before she did him, then she kicked him hard in his nut sack. She ran, then, too, pushed forward on adrenaline and an electric kind of fear, her heart boundboundbounding inside her head. She was surprised not at what Akard had done — word was he’d been making the rounds of all the freshman and sophomore girls — but that she’d been able to think of something smart and mean to say in the heat of the moment, which she never had been good at really, and then for kicking Akard in his balls.
For a short time after, she mistook herself for the kind of girl who could take any shit dished out, and she sure as hell wasn’t the kind of girl who’d let an asswipe like Akard go besmirching her good name, but just now, as Akard and Schroeder caught her eye-dropping their dogs and started coming for her, Rose had seen in their eyes a serious and unsettling look of anger, and worse, a kind of glee at the prospects of what they might do to her. This got her to running, fast and hard but not as fast or hard as she could’ve because her feet were hitting the pavement weird because of how, even in late September, it still felt like summer, and the pavement was hot and she had lost her flip-flops and the roads in her shitty town were, well, shitty and full of rocks and divots and cracks.
Not that running in the grass would’ve been better since there wasn’t much grass, just more rocks and dirt, and the little grass that was there was sick with stickers and fire-ant hills.
She’d slowed Akard and Schroeder down with a couple of rolled trash cans and then by cutting through the Hunts’ backyard, but she could hear them behind her and now she was heading out of the neighborhood and around the next bend into open country — baseball fields, mostly — where she was pretty sure they’d have no problem catching up to her.
As she rounded the bend, she looked over her shoulder to see if she could see them yet, and turned her head back around just in time to see a pickup truck headed right for her.
If she’d had more time, she would have screamed, something along the lines of “Holy shit,” or “Jesus fuck,” but she didn’t have time and so she dove to the right hoping the truck, if it swerved, would swerve to the left.
There was honking and squealing and swerving (left, thank God) and the truck came to a stop on the narrow, rocky shoulder, its front wheel almost tipped into the rain ditch. When the dust had cleared a little, the man driving — if you could call him a man, since he seemed just a few years older than Rose herself — rolled down his window, about to say something, probably along the lines of Are you okay? but Rose got there first.
“Why don’t you watch where the fuck you’re going!” she yelled.
“Me? You’re yelling at me? What the hell, kid? Why the hell are you running down the middle of the goddamn road?”
Except by the time he’d finished asking his questions, she’d walked herself to the passenger side of the truck, opened the door, and slid herself inside. Then she gave him her best smile — which was a good smile, she’d always had a good smile — and said, taking a deep breath, “About that.”
She told him, briefly, sort of what she’d been doing and why and then she told him how it had been harmless fun and anyway they were assholes and they both got what was coming.