A deep one.
It was almost painful, this kiss, full of a force that Sarah couldn’t have said for certain was passion or anger or whether in that moment there was even a difference, but there it was, a kiss, unexpected and not altogether unpleasant but not exactly pleasant, either.
Then Jasmine broke the kiss and Sarah had a hitch in her chest, had to scramble to get herself breathing.
Jasmine butted her in the head and threw her backward and Sarah landed hard on her ass.
And then Jasmine was laughing, but Sarah couldn’t tell if it was real laughter, and she said, “Hey, okay, all right, okay, I get it, I get it, and maybe if you weren’t a robot, maybe something, maybe we could have had something here, but it can’t be. I’m sorry. It just can’t.” She turned and started walking away. “I mean, a girl and a robot who might also be a girl?” She turned down another hall but Sarah could still hear her. “Nobody would accept us, we’d have to live alone together in the woods, it would be too hard, just. Too. Damn. Hard.” And then either she stopped with her joke or she had finally walked far enough away that Sarah couldn’t hear her anymore.
But after that, Jasmine and the rest of them just kind of ignored her. They didn’t accept her, but they left her alone, and that was something, right?
49
Sarah had lost hope. After the assault, after her arm, after the hostages, after Wendy. What else could she do but let go of hope?
It was one thing to hold on to hope in the face of great danger and an uncertain future, but in the face of great danger and a fairly certain future? A fairly certain future and an already painful present?
In the face of all that, hope slipped away.
She wasn’t proud of herself, but she didn’t hold it against herself, either.
Her shoulders slumped, insofar as they could slump, the ropes having been tied around her pretty tightly so that even slumping seemed a restricted activity.
Her sigh was a resigned-to-her-fate kind of sigh.
She had lost. The Regional Office had lost. If Mr. Niles wasn’t yet dead, if Oyemi wasn’t found and murdered, she knew that they soon would be and that there was nothing she could do for any of them or about any of it.
It was sad, the thought. Sad that it took them less than a day, less than half a day, to break her down, but break her down they had, and kudos to them for knowing exactly how.
She would never rescue Mr. Niles from the clutches of evil.
She would never sit at his desk, handed control of the Regional Office, once he stepped down as director.
She would wait here in this chair, bound by these ropes, and that was about the end of that.
A small voice in her head yelled out one last gasping, I will get free from these ropes, you motherfuckers, but she tamped that voice down, shushed it, quieted it, gently stroked its forehead until it became calm and compliant, because she’d been beaten, and having been beaten, now all she wanted was for it to end, for all of it to end.
She was tired and weepy and afraid.
And then things went black. She wasn’t sure what it meant, but things going black seemed to implicate an end to things.
“Oh, good,” she said. “About time,” she said.
Except everything went black. Not just the office. She could see through the blinds and the cracks at the top of the blinds that the whole floor, maybe the entire building, had gone black, too.
It’s a trick, she thought.
Then the screaming. Then the screaming began.
But actually, there had been shouts before, shouts when the lights had shut off, when the power had gone down, but she had figured those shouts had been part of the game, part of the trick. One more way of fucking with poor one-armed Sarah! She tried to convince herself the same about the screaming, but the screaming seemed different.
The screaming sounded urgent and fearful and full of pain.
Fake, she thought. Fake fear. Fake urgency. Fake pain.
But the sound of pain, and Sarah could attest to this in a firsthand kind of way, the sound of pain was a sound that was difficult to adequately fake.
And for a second, Sarah considered maybe there was a chance, a small chance, a very small chance that something was happening. That whoever (Mr. Niles?) had been maneuvering through the building in a deadly and secret way had finally made his way to the real action, had dispensed with enough teams to make a play for a full-out rescue.
“I know this is a trick,” she yelled. She was beyond pretending that they weren’t getting to her.
“I know you fucking assholes are just trying to fucking trick me,” she yelled. “Stop trying to trick me,” she said, quieter now. Under her breath. The only one who could hear her over the shouts and gunshots and the screams and small explosions was her.
What was going on out there? she wondered.
50
“How was it for you growing up?” Mr. Niles asked. He said this as offhandedly as he could, as if he were asking her if she’d pass him some salt or the ketchup please, but she could tell he was tense, was listening intently for her answer.
They’d just finished a lunch meet: new Recruits, operations pipeline, department budgets, typical stuff.
“It was fine,” she said. But he wanted more, and she didn’t know what it was.
Before, when people found out about her mother, they wanted details, wanted to hear Sarah’s theories, wanted to tell her their own theories, wanted to feel part of but separate from what seemed to them an unfathomable childhood trauma. Sarah would never have accused them of being jealous of her, but there was a want there, a desire of some kind for a tragic history on that scale that they could call their own.
But that wouldn’t be what Mr. Niles was after. He already knew the details of her tragedy, had known them better than she had, nor was he the type to need or want a vicarious tragedy to live through, and even if he harbored such a desire, he had at his fingertips this very thing on a whole different level, as Sarah had discovered reading through Henry’s files on the Operatives.
Then, not sure if this was what he wanted to hear or not, she said, “Normal, really.”
He relaxed. “Normal?”
“Sure,” she said. “I mean, people always think of kids as super sensitive, or intuitive, or something like that, and they are, to a point, but also they’re still people. Like, once, I tried out for drill team, I was in ninth grade? And I didn’t make it, and all these friends of mine did, and I went home, and as soon as I saw my aunt, I started crying, just fell to pieces, and she tried to comfort me, told me what you tell people, you know, Sorry, I know you wanted this, you did your best, maybe next year, but then, you know, she was also like, It’ll be okay, it’s not the end of the world, and I took all of this in and blew up at her. She didn’t understand! What did she know about it! It was the worst day of my life! And she gave me a look. She didn’t say anything, just gave me this look, but I knew. I could tell what she was trying to say, and I told her, Yeah, worse than that day, and then I called her a bitch and locked myself in my bathroom, except it was the only bathroom, and I just stayed in there for hours, so long that my aunt had to go across the hall to use the neighbor’s bathroom.” She sighed. “So, yeah, just your typical teenage nightmare.”
“Maybe you were acting out, though,” he said.
“That’s what my aunt said, and I let her believe that because it made her go easy on me, but, no. I was just really upset about drill team — I mean, everybody was on drill team — and then I punished her for not being as upset as me.” Sarah shook her head and laughed. “My poor aunt. She didn’t want kids, mostly because she didn’t want teenagers, but she tried her best. I was in the bathroom for hours and I must have painted and repainted my toenails fifty times, and every time she knocked on that door, I’d pretend to sob even louder, but that was too much work after a while, so then I pretended I had fallen asleep in there.”