“Look, Rose,” he said. “I just needed to tell you. I’m kind of in charge here. I mean, Emma and I. We’re in charge here. In charge of you and the others and your training and it’s not like we’re back in your hometown, right? Driving around checking out dead squirrels, right? It’s not like that here. So, about before, that’s not how it’s like here, is what I’m trying to tell you.”
“Oh,” Rose said, feeling less and less sorry for all those kicks. “Sure. I get it.”
“Do you understand?”
“I got it,” she said. “I just said how I got it.”
“Good.”
“Better than good,” she said. “Great. Perfect.”
“It’ll just make things easier.”
“I like easier,” she said, and then she closed the door on his face.
32
Rose hid herself away behind a fallen log, some overhanging trees. If she squinted, she could barely make out Wendy’s boots hanging from a tree branch in the distance. She listened for the sound of Colleen finding Wendy, though she knew Colleen wouldn’t make such a blatant mistake unless she was trying to trick Rose somehow. Rose had left three trails behind her. An obvious trail that Colleen would know was not the real trail but was a dummy trail with a booby trap set along some part of it, and a second, much less obvious, almost invisible trail that Colleen would assume was the real trail, but which was also a dummy trail with a booby trap set along some part of it, and a third untraceable trail, Rose was sure of it, that, just for shits and giggles, had a booby trap set along some part of it, too. The funny thing about that invisible trail was that if Colleen were to find and follow it, which she couldn’t, she would be able to follow it to a spot in the woods that was just out of view of the booby-trapped spots of the other two trails but where Rose could wait and watch for Colleen to come down one path or the other.
Rose hoped that Colleen would come down the obviously false trail, not because she didn’t think Colleen would be smart enough to know it was obviously false, but because she might outthink herself and decide the obviously fake trail was made obviously fake because it wasn’t fake at all, but also because the booby trap at the end of that trail wasn’t quite as harsh as the booby trap down the other, almost invisible fake trail she’d left, and she liked Colleen, who was maybe a bit too type A but who meant well and who had, a couple of weeks ago, tried to keep Rose from failing out of superpowered-assassin school.
After nearly a month, the training had not been going well. The martial arts instructor — not, to her disappointment, Henry — spent hour after hour sweeping her feet out from under her and throwing her over his shoulder and trying to explain to her poses and moves and countermoves that she didn’t understand at all and whose names she couldn’t remember. Lost Monkey, Wooden Monkey, the Broken Faucet. None of those meant the first goddamn thing to her.
She was a disaster at languages and couldn’t master even the simple phrases she was asked to learn — Where is the gun hidden, How do I get to the basement level of this building — and she was fairly confident that if she were dropped into the wilds of Alaska or some other equally feral place with nothing but a rope and a hunting knife, she could survive there for a sum total of five minutes for all that she’d learned in survival training. The one thing she could do, thanks more to her cousins and uncles who were minor-league pyromaniacs and owned more empty land than was good for them, was, in the parlance of her demolitions instructor, blow shit up, if only basic shit and in the crudest and most elemental of ways.
She trained all day, before breakfast and through lunch and then again after dinner, but she wasn’t making progress, wasn’t making any progress at all, it seemed, but not because she couldn’t learn this shit. She was good at learning but generally didn’t care enough about the shit she was supposed to learn in school — diagramming a sentence, proving geometrical shapes that had long ago been proved (of course it was a triangle, why in the fuck did she need to prove to anyone, let alone herself, that that was a triangle) — but here she was faced with truly interesting shit to learn and she’d hit a wall.
She told herself she didn’t know why, but she knew why.
She was lonely, and she didn’t like it here.
She’d met the other girls, if briefly. They nodded at her and smiled at her and shook her hand, firmly, too firmly, and welcomed her aboard, and maybe they gave each other looks, We do not have time for this bitch looks, or maybe that was her imagination. All of this happened a week after she arrived and in the five minutes in between when they had to leave for another extended field exercise and she had to leave for another unsuccessful martial arts training session, and after that, she saw them in passing, sometimes in the bathrooms, or in the hallway, usually as a group that seemed to have no room for one more. They were beautiful and older than her and looked very much like a unit, like a complete whole that functioned perfectly, thank you very much, without her.
Once, she ran into one of them on her own, the girl named Colleen, who often wore pink shorts and a yellow tank top and had a boyish haircut that made her look French, who, when she had first seen her, Rose had pegged as potential arch-nemesis material. Rose imagined her, Mean Girls—style, at the head of the posse of other girls, terrorizing and torturing and humiliating newcomers, who would have them all throw their worst at Rose, only for Rose to stand strong against their onslaught, to show first through her unwillingness to back down and then through her unfathomable skill that she was a natural leader, that she was the star of this moment, but Colleen hadn’t yet paid a lick of attention to her.
Rose ran into her in the weapons training module. Her weapons instructor had set up extra training time for her because she couldn’t shoot for shit, which made no sense, none at all. Rose had grown up around hunting rifles, and the occasional crossbow (her uncle Artie), and while she’d never taken to hunting herself, she’d always been a decent shot and had never shied away from guns. But every time she held a sidearm, a rifle, a shotgun, a semiautomatic in front of her weapons instructor, she choked. She just, she didn’t know, flinched, pulled left, thought too much about what she was doing. And out of the corner of her eye she could see the weapons specialist roll his eyes. She could sense him mentally counting down the seconds until lunch.
It was her time in the module but Colleen was in there already, shooting away. Colleen didn’t seem to have noticed her coming in, didn’t look like she would finish any time soon, but Rose didn’t care, not really, and she was going to offer to let Colleen work with her, if she wanted, because it would have been nice to have the company, nice to talk to someone who wasn’t yelling at her for forgetting the Chinese character for “dead in the bathroom stall,” but as soon as Colleen saw Rose waiting outside, she shut her module down and packed her things and left, with barely a nod as she walked by.
The short of it was this: Rose was lonely, and it was affecting her work, and soon they were going to kick her out of assassin school, she knew it, and it was completely fucking stupid of her.
So she didn’t have friends. So she hadn’t seen the Woman in Red since the day she was brought here. So Henry turned and walked the other way whenever she saw him. So what? So what if the story the Woman in Red had told her had prepared Rose for something very different from all of this, had included words like leader and hero and saving the world and fighting the Good Fight?
She was a silly little girl, she told herself. She was a silly little girl and she should just toughen up. She should toughen up and stop thinking about home and her momma and daddy and sister, mean old Gina and dumb old Patty. She should stop missing the way she had thought of herself when the Woman in Red first pulled her aside, first told her all about what she could become.