Often, it is at this point in the story of the Regional Office that people ask the question: Was Mr. Niles in love with Oyemi?
No one knows the definitive answer to this question. Mr. Niles left no diary or journal, no hoard of love letters he had received from Oyemi, nor letters written but never sent on his own part. Might he once have loved Oyemi, might he once have adored her, might she once have been his first true love, might he have been love-struck in the third grade, when they first met? Certainly any of this is possible, and it is possible he continued to love her, to be in love with her, even after she suffered the accident that should have killed her but didn’t.
The far more interesting question, however, and the question no one can answer but for oneself, is this: Is love enough? Was love enough to justify or explain what happened next and then after that and then after that and then again until the end?
Mr. Niles turned. He rushed back upstairs. By the time he burst back through the office doors, everything had finished, and Oyemi’s office door was open, and standing in the doorway was the girl, not Oyemi.
To those who ask, Where is your evidence? Your proof that Mr. Niles harbored doubts, that Mr. Niles left at all, that any of this happened the way you say it happened?
We say: How else could it have happened? Mr. Niles waiting patiently in the front office while Oyemi performed her administrations on the young woman, Nell? Mr. Niles with a newspaper or a magazine, or looking over the business strategic planning report for the Regional Office while whatever horrifying sounds might have been emitted by either Oyemi or the girl, or both of them, filled the small office? Mr. Niles brewing a pot of coffee because maybe it would be a long night ahead?
The authors of this paper leave it up to the reader to decide which scenario is most reasonable.
The girl looked fine, in any case, which surprised Mr. Niles. It is not difficult to imagine what he might have expected outside of fine. Ever since the accident that should have killed Oyemi but instead imbued her with mystical powers, a lot of things had been less and less right with Oyemi. The way she moved. Books could be penned simply about the way Oyemi walked after the accident, the fluid look of her as she stood up from a couch. The way she twitched. Her odd manner of speaking, the faraway look in her eyes, her smile, which grew ever more toothy. She flared her nostrils in the days after her accident, wider and wider. An affinity for raw meats, the nosebleeds, an ability to predict things five minutes into the future. It is not unreasonable, then, to assume that what he expected to find were the remains of the girl, her skin-covering perhaps, crumpled in the corner of Oyemi’s office, the rest of her, the whole of her, sucked out of her skin by Oyemi, who would, after having feasted on the girl’s immortal soul and whatnot, reemerge as a creature vibrant and shiny-new. At the very least, he must have expected the girl to be frightened or confused or beaten up, that the whites of her eyes would not be white anymore. Yet she looked so untroubled, so at ease, that it took a moment for Mr. Niles to see the one thing that had changed about her, which was her hair, which had been shoulder-length and a dull brown color, and now was entirely gone.
Not shaved, not as if it had been shaved off, but as if it had never been there to begin with.
Mr. Niles said something to her like, “Is everything all right?” but she didn’t say anything back. She smiled serenely, not at him but through him, and then made her way to the window, where she stared out at the traffic and the other windows across the street from them.
Oyemi, stumbling out of the office behind Nell, looked the way Niles had maybe expected Nell to look. Scooped out. Pale, sweaty, exhausted, red-eyed. A smell wafted off her that made Mr. Niles self-conscious and uncomfortable. Oyemi struggled to get to a chair and then sat heavily down in it, and then she sighed, and then she smiled.
“Whatever you do, don’t call her by her name,” she said. “Her former name.”
She closed her eyes and let her heavy head fall heavily into her shaking hands.
“She’s in. She’s agreed to come on board, to be part of our plans,” she said.
With great effort, Oyemi pulled her head back up to look at the girl or maybe to look past her. Maybe she was looking at what Nell represented, the future that was even then being laid out before her because of this girl, or maybe she was looking at the same thing the girl was looking at, which seemed to be nothing and everything, and then she let out a long, ragged breath.
“She’s the first,” Oyemi said. “The first Oracle.”
And then she collapsed.
BOOK II
ROSE
27
Something — electricity, blue magicks? — crackled out of the director’s hand, the one that looked like it was covered by another hand, crackled in a way that reached out for Rose, for her face, for her neck. Like, there was this crackling fucking energy shooting out of the glove or hand or whatever and usually when you saw that shit in a movie or on a TV show, you knew, whoa, that crackling blue thing must be hot with some real fucking power, and sure there was some power there, she could feel it, but that wasn’t the whole story with that crackling blue energy, she could tell.
That crackling blue energy was a living thing.
It had a hunger she could sense. It had its own goddamn desires. To touch her face, to wrap itself around her pretty neck. Like, the energy was whispering shit into her ear, trying to bring her closer so it could caress her cheek, tickle the sensitive, ticklish parts of her.
It knew all about her.
It was seducing her.
It was mesmerizing and pretty fucking convincing, say what you will about its being the inanimate blue energy of a severed hand.
And it almost grabbed her.
But then training and her own instincts shook through, and she ducked, rolled under the director’s swinging arm, rolled out of the reach of the glove and its crackling blue wants, and was up on her feet behind the director.
Then before any more of that weird energy and its hocus-pocus let-me-nibble-your-ear shit could happen, she’d sweep the legs out from under the director, shove him forward, stand on his neck just hard enough and at just the right angle to snap it, and then leave for the rendezvous spot, and somehow, even with the delays, even with all that bullshit in the ventilation shaft and even with having to defeat spinning, twirling robots, she would find the rendezvous (and Henry) before Windsor did and fuck, why the hell not, she would grab Henry roughly by the collar of his shirt and pull him close to her face and whisper, “You guys suck at intel,” and then give him a kiss, a real kiss, Jesus, finally a real kiss.
Except that when she swept the director’s legs out from under him, he wasn’t there to be swept.
He was in the air, flipping up and over her in a long, lazy arc, graceful, like he’d just dismounted the uneven bars.
Where the fuck was the intel on this? That’s what Rose wanted to know.
The magicks in the ventilation shaft? All that shit waiting for her outside the director’s office? And now this?
“What the fuck?” she said.
And then he kicked her in the face.
28
Rose knew it was a drill, just a field exercise at Assassin Training Camp, but still, she couldn’t help but feel nervous. Nervous and sweaty. Although the sweat bit of it had less to do with her nerves and more to do with the uniform — a cotton and polyester blend that didn’t breathe for shit.