She didn’t raise her voice or try to pull herself out of the pool. She simply sat there, halfway out of the water, halfway turned to look at him, connected in her unsettling way to the computers and printers and who knew what else, and spoke her plea to him with soft, unending persistence: Please, please let me see her, let me go to her, let me see her, please, just to see her, just to hold her, please, let me go, can’t I go see her, can’t I go be with her.
He opened the door, stepped out of the room, and closed the door. Oyemi had done something to the doors and the walls because it seemed as if he had stepped into a vacuum. All the sound from the other room cut off, and the sudden silence made him nervous. He pressed his ear to the door to listen, to see if the Oracle had stopped pleading with him when the door had closed, but he couldn’t tell. He couldn’t hear anything at all but his own shallow, labored breath. His neck hurt and his shoulders felt sluggish and sore. He needed to sit down, to sit and catch his breath, let his body, which wouldn’t stop shaking, recover, but he couldn’t stand to be there, afraid she might try to disconnect herself and come tumbling after him from the pool, wet and naked.
He went home. He waited up all night. He couldn’t sleep, couldn’t get her voice out of his head, but mostly couldn’t stop thinking of what ramifications this might have, what consequences he might suffer at Oyemi’s hands if he’d somehow damaged the Oracle, broken her, made her unusable.
She might kill him when she found out. Kill him or worse.
When Oyemi called him the next morning, though, it was simply to tell him about a lead on a girl outside of Chicago. She acted as if they hadn’t just lost two months between them. She didn’t ask him what he’d been doing all this time, didn’t yell or guilt-trip or threaten or beg. And when he asked her about this later, Oyemi confided in him: She had known. The Oracle had told her that very first day they’d brought her back to the office, had told her that Mr. Niles would seem to be lost, but that he would return, that she should let him be lost for a while, confident that he would return.
That morning, though, she only told him the Oracle was already hard at work, had already found a girl. “She’s in Peoria,” Oyemi told him. “I’ve got the details on her at the office. Pick them up on your way to the airport. I’ve got you on the ten forty-five out of Newark.”
After that night, Nell faded away. Maybe, Niles thought, that night had been her last gasp. For a while, he worried that she might resurface, might ask him again about her daughter, but she never did. From that moment forward, she was an Oracle and nothing else, and was soon joined by the others, and there were days when Niles forgot entirely who she had once been.
As for Sarah, she grew older. She moved effortlessly from elementary school to middle school, excelled in science and math, was accepted into Bronx Science, the prestigious magnet school. She played volleyball and ran track. She made the National Honor Society and won a small prize for a robotics competition when she was fifteen, and by the time she entered her senior year of high school, she’d been accepted at Caltech. The very real possibility that she would leave the city, would leave Mr. Niles’s sphere of influence, loomed over him and frightened and saddened him. This was when he first tried to work her into the list of credible Recruits for the Regional Office. When that didn’t work, he came up with the idea of feeding her information about her mother’s disappearance. He varied this just slightly from the truth, namely in that in his new version, Nell was abducted by someone else and was eventually killed. Then he left Sarah a trail to follow that led her, finally, and just as she turned twenty, back to him.
He took her in. He made her promises. He made her strong and powerful and tied her to him. He gave her a mechanical arm. It was the only way he could think of to bring her into the fold, to make her as much like the Operatives as possible, to give her power and control over her own life. He trained her in deadly arts. He entrusted his organization to her and convinced her to entrust her future to him, and when her mother and the two other Oracles made their prophecies, he and Oyemi paid attention.
When the Oracles singled out a girl imbued with latent mystical properties that, when honed, when unleashed, would make her powerful, they paid attention. Every single time, every single girl, he and Oyemi paid attention.
When the Oracles pointed them to Henry, living in Buffalo, working as an underpaid, overworked bike courier, they paid attention. They collected him, brought him to the Regional Office, though they had no idea what they were supposed to do with him. (They gave him a job in the mail room, where he stayed for almost a year, underworked and overpaid, and Mr. Niles and Oyemi remained in the dark about what to do with him until one day Mr. Niles discovered him sitting in the stairwell sharing a cigarette with one of the new Recruits. The new Recruit showed great promise, according to the Oracles, but Mr. Niles had made little headway in her training. She abused the other Recruits and belittled the martial arts trainer and no one liked her and she lied and cheated and stole from the other girls, even the other Operatives. And until Mr. Niles found her sitting in the stairwell with Henry, he and Oyemi had assumed she hated everyone in the entire office. Her name was Jasmine. Afterward, Mr. Niles found Henry and asked him what they had been talking about and Henry told him, “Not much, really, just stuff.” Then Mr. Niles watched Henry and Jasmine more closely under the suspicion that Henry was hoping to become romantically involved with Jasmine. Instead, what he found was a remarkably improved Jasmine: in her training, in her attitudes. What he also found was that Henry spent time chatting with all of the Recruits, and the Operatives, too. But. They came to him. They found him. In the mail room or in the break room or as he was getting out of his car or as he was riding the elevator down to B4. They found him and talked to him and asked his advice and showed him what they had learned and he showed them how to do what they had learned even better. “Do you have experience with martial arts or weapons training?” Mr. Niles asked him, and Henry shook his head and said, “Not really, no,” and he took Henry to meet Oyemi, and Oyemi, who had never been as strong when reading men as she was when reading women, shook her head, too, and shrugged her shoulders, and said, afterward, “If you think it’s the best move, Mr. Niles, then, by all means, take it.” And so Mr. Niles did, and the next day, Henry was moved out of the mail room and into an office, and that afternoon, he flew with Mr. Niles to Shreveport, where Mr. Niles was to collect a new Recruit, a girl who knew nothing of the latent powers within her, knew nothing of the evil forces of darkness surrounding her, and at the last moment, he turned to Henry and said, “You take it from here,” said, “All you need to do is get her to the Regional Office,” and Henry shrugged and said, “Sure,” and he said, “Any words of advice?” and Mr. Niles said, “Try not to scare her,” and Henry laughed and said, “Me? I don’t scare anyone,” and within ten minutes, they were back in the rental car on their way to the airport on their way back to the Regional Office, the girl sitting close to Henry in the backseat, the two of them joking as if they’d been best friends since preschool. It had been the smoothest recruitment Mr. Niles had ever witnessed, and after that, Henry was given control of recruitment and outreach.)
When the Oracles sent message after message to Mr. Niles and Oyemi leading them time and time again to a building on Park and Fifty-Seventh, they paid attention, and moved their offices to that very spot.
When the Oracles offered cryptic messages concerning a dark power rising in Budapest or Akron or Cape Town, they paid attention.