She had asked the doctor about this, about how her normal arm managed to keep up with her mechanical arm, and jokingly had asked him if they had in fact given her two mechanical arms, and the look of horror that crossed his face was so horrific that she quickly laughed and assured him she was only kidding, that she knew he’d given her only the one arm.
Ever since she broke his femur, he had been touchy and a bit twitchy around her.
“I’m not sure,” he said, once he’d regained his composure. “Perhaps the hyperadvanced nanotechnology we used in the mechanical arm is sending signals to the rest of your body, has somehow found a way to boost, even just a little, your own strength and endurance?”
This idea struck her as both fascinating and a little unsettling, and so she’d brought it up to Mr. Niles, who shook his head and laughed and said, “He’s a kook, that old man. Hey, when he’s right, he’s right. I mean, look at your arm, look at the amazing work he did with your arm. But listen, the reason your body is stronger is because we’ve been strengthening it. Remember? You’ve been training every day for four months now. Of course the rest of you can keep up better for an hour, for two hours, and if you keep it up, maybe four or six hours, which is when you’ll be ready for the thing. But your body has limits. Your arm doesn’t. So don’t push it too hard.”
And so, an hour, sometimes an hour and a half, was all she would let herself swim at one time before giving herself a rest.
She stopped at the edge of the pool and held herself there, her eyes closed, her nose just below the surface, the waves rising and falling against her ears, so that the echo of them against the indoor pool became muffled and then clear and then muffled. Hanging there in the water, she felt she could swim across the Atlantic if she wanted.
When she pulled her head above water, she saw Jasmine standing at the edge of her lane and two others standing behind her. Jasmine squatted down and smiled at Sarah a mean kind of smile and then said, “Look. The robot knows how to swim.”
And Sarah didn’t know why that — more than anything else — set her off, but set her off it did, and there were words said and feelings felt, and Sarah climbed out of the water, and there were more words and more feelings, and, well, Jasmine threw the first punch, but still…
She threw it so fast no one saw it, not even Sarah, who only barely felt it, felt the wake of it, the soft touch of air against her cheek, her earlobe, the ripple of her hair. In the moment, or immediately after the moment, Sarah thought she must have moved out of the way of Jasmine’s punch, ever so slightly out of the way. Maybe her arm had given her a sixth sense about these things or maybe she was in possession of some kind of mystical property, had always been so, a power buried too deep for anyone to detect it, but protective and powerful enough to shift her an inch to the left just before she was punched, but no. In hindsight, Sarah would understand that Jasmine threw that punch so fast that no one could see it and so close that only Sarah could feel it, but missed all the same, on purpose. Namely, to make it look like Sarah threw the first punch — or kick, as it turned out — like Sarah was the instigator, and it worked.
Sarah was quicker than any of them expected her to be, she could tell by the looks on their faces and by the fact that she swept her leg under Jasmine’s to sweep Jasmine off her feet.
Jasmine recovered quickly enough, though, and was up and skipping behind Sarah even as Sarah landed her mechanical fist on the floor where Jasmine’s head had been. She cracked the deck and heard a small chorus of sarcastic oooohs.
Sarah was outmatched, of course.
Of course, Sarah was outmatched.
Jasmine had been around a long time. She’d outlived Gemini, who had been one of the first Recruits and legendarily strong. Chances were, she would outlive the entire crop of new Recruits, too, judging by the sorry looks of them. She wasn’t the strongest. That was Lucy. She wasn’t the fastest, that was clearly Celia, and Dominic was by far the smartest — the shit that girl knew baffled even Oyemi — but Jasmine was by far the shrewdest, the most observant, the best able to look for and then exploit even the tiniest movement, the smallest tell. Of all the Operatives — except for maybe Emma, who had just arrived and was still a bit of a mystery — Jasmine put the mystical properties of her existence to work best. Which was how she’d known exactly how close and how fast to punch. Which was how she’d known to skip behind Sarah on her right because she knew which arm was the strong arm and which arm was more than just strong. Which was how she knew that in two minutes Henry and Mr. Niles would arrive to break everything up. Which was how she knew that to kill this girl, this one-armed freak, all she’d have to do was slide up behind her, crack her neck — done! — and let her fall, not that she wanted to kill her, per se, just put her in her place. How she knew where to hit her — pop, pop, pop, kidney, kidney, lower back — and how hard — hard enough to make a point but just shy of leaving a deep mark. Which was how she knew she had ten seconds left to get in one more good punch, to the nose, nobody can ignore a broken nose, which she threw with maybe a little more juice on it because why not, one last good punch, why not give it more of the juice, but which — to her surprise — didn’t connect because the girl got lucky. The one-armed freak’s one arm caught the punch midpunch and wouldn’t let go, no matter how strongly Jasmine wrenched, no matter that she practically flung Sarah across the room. The arm — that fucking mechanical arm — wouldn’t let go of her arm. Who knows how long it would have held on if Mr. Niles and Henry hadn’t shown up, shut everything down, separated Jasmine and Sarah, pulled them away. Even Sarah didn’t know. The last Sarah heard from Jasmine, as Henry pulled her down the hall, was, “You got lucky, freak, but not next time. Not so lucky next time.”
But it wasn’t luck.
Watching the video of it all later while in bed, feeling sore and trampled, Sarah saw just how well Jasmine had set her up. She saw, or didn’t see, the punch that started it all, saw her own leg-sweep that came out of nowhere, seemingly unprovoked, saw how quick and fluid Jasmine was, and realized how much she’d underestimated these women.
All of this was secondary information, though, was background noise to what she couldn’t figure out no matter how many times she rewatched the video.
How had she caught that punch?
Jasmine had hit her three times, had thrown her forward onto her knees with those punches, and she had a clear shot at Sarah’s face, Sarah too dazed and winded and in pain to even think of defending herself, but despite what Jasmine thought or said, catching that punch had had nothing to do with luck, had had nothing to do with her, had had everything to do with her mechanical arm, which had moved on its own, had surprised Sarah as much as it had surprised Jasmine.
Had surprised her and, now that she had watched it happen again and again, frightened her, too.
Frightened her not a little bit.