“So. Normal,” he said.
“Pretty much,” she said, and he laughed, and after that he treated her with a more casual touch, seemed to need to protect her less than before, and once she realized this, she wished she had lied.
51
And then the door busted open and a flash of light broke through the darkness and something in the office caught fire and by the firelight Sarah could see the thing that had busted the door open, which was one of the guys who’d been holding everyone hostage, except not anymore because he was dead. Sarah couldn’t tell if he was dead because he’d been thrown hard enough into the door to bust it open, or if he had been dead even before he’d been thrown into the door.
But really, that wasn’t her biggest concern.
What the hell was going on was her biggest concern. When were they going to stop fooling around and just put her out of her misery was her biggest concern.
The dead guy, though. The dead guy through the door spoke to either the team’s commitment to this trick they were trying to play on her, or the more likely explanation, the explanation she’d been fighting against since the power had shut off in the first place, the one she was still fighting against now because once you had lost hope, once you had resigned yourself to things not going your way, you found yourself more than a little skeptical of the notion you’d been wrong and that things would in fact go your way, but still. The dead guy on the floor seemed to point to the notion that this was not a trick and that she was going to be saved.
Sarah closed her eyes. She opened her eyes again. The pile of papers was still on fire, though the fire was petering out. The dead guy was still dead on the floor.
She closed her eyes again. She grabbed a hunk of her cheek with her teeth, her jagged, no-longer-really-there teeth, and bit hard, and opened her eyes again, and again saw the fire, again the dead guy, and it all seemed unreal, this tableau broken occasionally by the flash of gunfire, the glow of another small fire in the distance. She stared at the guy on the floor and the fire and couldn’t stop staring.
Someone charged at her through the darkness and this brought her back into the moment. Someone with evil intent in his heart, she figured, or maybe Wendy, of whom Sarah now harbored a healthy fear.
The charging became louder and more urgent and then another body was thrown forward into the office, was thrown with great and terrible force, so that it wasn’t unlikely that the throw itself was the thing that killed the body that had been thrown.
But the throw wasn’t what killed the body.
What killed the body was still sticking out of the body’s back, which was what probably caused the blackout, too. She understood this now. The blackout, the screaming, the gunshots, the explosions, the chaos, the death and destruction of the teams who’d executed this assault on the Regional Office hadn’t been the handiwork of Mr. Niles or even Henry. All of that had been the handiwork, literally, of the thing that was currently sticking painfully and awkwardly out of the back of the new dead body on the ground in the office.
Which was a mechanical arm.
Which was, not to put too fine a point on it, her fucking mechanical arm. Which unmoored itself from the goon’s backside and surveyed the office and then saw — did it see? — then saw Sarah, saw her and locked itself, locked its seeing eye, wherever that might be, locked it dead onto Sarah.
And then it lunged. It lunged right for her.
~ ~ ~
From The Regional Office Is Under Attack:
Tracking the Rise and Fall of an American Institution
Then began a period of great success for the Regional Office. The first Oracle led Oyemi, within a week, to the next and then the third and final Oracle. The trio guided Oyemi to the first real Recruit — the young woman in Peoria did not pan out, though the record on why she did not pan out has been lost — a woman named Gemini (whose exploits, such as disrupting the Ring of Three and expanding her mouth into a vortex to swallow whole the swarm of bees set loose on Kansas by the warlock Harold Raines, and, ultimately, her death at the very hands of Harold Raines, can be read about to exhaustion in any number of other papers, as well as in the haphazard account of the Regional Office The Book of Gemini).
Soon after the recruitment of Gemini, the first full class of Recruits was brought in for training, resulting in a freshman class of Operatives that included Jasmine, the longest-standing field Operative in the history of the Regional Office. Shortly after, the Oracles led Mr. Niles to the discovery of Henry (already discussed at some length), after which Henry recruited his own class — the fifth and final class recruited under the umbrella of Oyemi and Mr. Niles — and found, hidden within that class, Emma.
By this point, the Regional Office had grown, had long since moved out of its humble offices in Queens to the building it occupied on the day of the attack in midtown Manhattan. Oyemi and Mr. Niles had enjoyed nearly unparalleled success with their venture. Certainly, the Regional Office was not the only organization of its kind. The city had long supported groups such as the Legion of Good, the Powerful Six, and Hammersmith’s Men, but nothing on the scale nor with the success of the Regional Office.
During this time, Jasmine came into her own, and while the most famous of the early Operatives, Gemini, had died, other formidable Operatives had joined the ranks of the Regional Office, most notably: Juneau, Robin Cueto, Kelly Shepherd. Together, these women saved the world from destruction, from self-annihilation, from the evil forces of darkness, from interdimensional war strikes, from alien forces. And standing out from this crowd of powerful women was Emma.
Of the ten missions most often attributed to the Golden Age of the Regional Office, Emma was responsible for the successful execution of six, including the retrieval of the Tremont Hotel from interdimensional, time-traveling assassins who intended to murder a future madame president by kidnapping and murdering her great-grandmother. (Granted, Jasmine played pivotal roles in all of these, but it is Jasmine’s sad fortune to have remained with the Regional Office through good and bad, and not planned for two years the destruction of Oyemi and the Regional Office, and far too often are her history and her contributions to the Regional Office overlooked.)
By this time, Oyemi had moved her side of the operations to her secret and remote compound in the Catskills and Mr. Niles had taken over as director of the Regional Office in Manhattan. The end of the world was thwarted time and again by the Regional Office over the course of this golden age, which lasted between five and five thousand years (the count varying depending on timelines and how one considers the actions of Operatives when those actions spanned space, time, and dimension). The forces of evil threatening at every turn the survival of the planet and the innocents living on it in blissful ignorance were often foiled multiple times in the span of one week. With the assistance of the Oracles, the trust fund left Oyemi by her great-uncle quadrupled, and soon after, the travel agency was formed and, much to everyone’s surprise, added its own profit to the accounts.