Sarah had hoped this would happen, had daydreamed it a number of times in the cafeteria, eating by herself, and in her dorm room, had pictured herself somehow trapped in the Danger Room alone or even with a few others, but with the attention on her, on her mechanical arm, the scenario thrown into high alert, attacks and obstacles coming at her too fast to see, too fast, even, for the Operatives. But not too fast for her, for her arm, her beautiful mechanical arm. And then the scenario would run its course, and the smoke and rubble and haze would clear as the room righted itself, and standing there in the middle of it all, not even breathing heavily, would be Sarah, untouched, unscathed, triumphant.
Which wasn’t exactly how everything happened when Jasmine locked her in the training room by herself.
More, what happened was this:
The floor shifted under her, unexpectedly. She slipped, she scrambled to keep herself up, and so distracted by the shifting flooring, she failed to notice the swinging, padded mallets that lowered down from the ceiling. Not just those, but also the small gun turrets firing paint balls that slid out from openings in the walls. She failed to notice these too, and the tackling dummies running along rails in zigzagging patterns around the room. Watching the video repeatedly and in slow motion after the system was shut down by Mr. Niles, who had happened by to check in on everyone, Sarah could barely make out that it was the paint ball that first tagged her in her left shoulder, throwing her back in anger and surprise and right into one of the swinging mallets that clipped her right ear, that spun her around into a tackling dummy, which carried her for a few yards before another mallet knocked her out from the dummy’s tenuous grasp, by which time the guns had locked her position pretty well and set up a barrage of paint pellets at her.
Less than two minutes had passed and she was curled up on the floor trying her best to cover her ears, her face, pelted by paint balls, covered in so much paint it had all run together and turned brown, her arm useless except to protect her head.
41
Waiting, held hostage in the Regional Office, beaten and ridiculed, Sarah curbed her despair with a theory. One that explained the screaming and shouting going on over the radios, the loss of Blue Team and, if she wasn’t mistaken, Emerald Team, too.
Someone had slipped through. When these assholes had stormed inside, rounded everyone up, someone had slipped through the cracks and was mounting a counteroffensive, not unlike the counteroffensive she had planned.
She wondered who it was.
She had someone in mind but still, she liked to play the game of wondering who it was out there in the building wreaking havoc on Blue Team and Emerald Team and whatever other goddamn teams were out there. Worming his way through the air ducts and back stairwells and through empty offices, laying waste to everyone in his path, John McClane — style.
From what she could tell, the girls, their girls, seemed to be off on a mission — she didn’t know how but these bastards had tapped into the Regional Office protocols, had sent them all on bogus missions all across the globe. And if what she had seen was accurate, they’d sent Jasmine, their best, to a whole different, alternate universe. And the Recruits? Where were they? Trapped, probably, inside their dorm on the Upper West Side. Trapped and fighting their own fight. She didn’t know for sure.
Which told her two things: Whoever was behind this wasn’t after the girls, or rather, might have been after the girls but not to destroy them, and whoever was out there playing Die Hard, in the stairwells and air ducts, wasn’t one of the girls, either.
And it sure as hell wasn’t one of the hostages, any of her dumb regular colleagues.
She’d had enough experience with the hostages, was full of enough pain and bruising and blood and broken bits of her, that she could attest for certain that it wasn’t any one of the goddamn hostages, frightened little sheep who had just sat idly by while those goddamn mercenaries kicked her ass and who couldn’t follow a simple plan, not even to save their own lives.
She hadn’t seen the first sign of the security director all day and was beginning to suspect he’d been behind the security breach and also probably the protocol breach that sent the girls away, and even if he wasn’t, even if he wasn’t one of “them” and he had somehow managed to slip into work unnoticed by her or the bastards mounting this assault on the Regional Office, that didn’t change the fact that the security director was a fat-fuck computer jockey who in no uncertain terms would have been unable to sneak around the building via the moderately sized air ducts or effect any change in this situation whatsoever.
In her mind, that left one person.
Well. Two people. That left two people.
It could be Henry. Sure. Henry was a possibility. Logic pointed to Henry. Field trained. Smart, capable.
If someone were to have asked her: Say an assault is mounted on the Regional Office and you’re taken out of the equation and the Operatives are taken out of the equation too, and one rogue agent is maneuvering through the building slowly decimating the ranks of mercenaries who’ve attempted this assault, who do you think that rogue agent might be? Of course, she would have said, Henry.
Henry would have been that rogue agent. Everyone would know the answer would have been Henry, which was why it couldn’t be Henry. Aside from the simple fact that she knew too much about Henry’s crisis of faith, it couldn’t be Henry because the people mounting this assault would have also known the answer would’ve been Henry. They would’ve known just as well as she did that if anyone were to become a rogue agent operating to save Regional, it would’ve had to have been Henry, and so they would’ve done one of two things before the assault even started: bring Henry on board, or kill him.
So it couldn’t be Henry out there John McClane — style because Henry was dead. And if he wasn’t dead, he was one of them, in which case he was still dead, and he simply didn’t know it yet because she would be the one to kill him.
And so, by sound, logical reasoning, that left only one man in all of the Regional Office capable of all of this.
If her hunch was right, that left only Mr. Niles.
Not that her hunches had been right, or even close to right, so far that day, but if it’s any consolation to Sarah — which it probably isn’t — she would have been just as wrong thinking it was Henry.
42
Two months into her training, Sarah came out of hand-to-hand combat class and a man of entirely average-sized good looks, aside from a nose a touch too wide for his face and curly hair that had grown too long, was standing outside waiting for her. Or so it seemed by the casual way he leaned against the wall, by the way he perked up and smiled and pushed off the wall when he saw her come out of the gym. She’d seen him around but hadn’t met him and didn’t know his name yet. He opened his mouth to say something but then was distracted by a group of Operatives, or maybe they were trainees, it was hard for Sarah to tell the difference. They all held themselves up with the same sort of haughty self-confidence, even the new ones.
“Hi, Henry,” the gaggle of them said, and though none of them giggled, there was a hint of giggle in their voices. He smiled at them and gave them a little wave and as they were turning the corner, one of them looked at Sarah and said in a Stephen Hawking kind of voice, “Hi. Ro-bot.” And this made the others laugh and then they were gone, but she could hear them laughing still.
She felt her face flush and she clenched her fists at her sides, then remembered herself and remembered the man standing in front of her, and she closed her eyes and relaxed her arms, both of them.