By practically every metric conceivable, the Regional Office had arrived, its Operatives had never been stronger, its missions never more dangerous, and the whole thing could not be stopped.
And then, almost without warning, it all came to an end.
The beginning of the end of the Regional Office can be summed up thusly:
A man fell in love with a woman.
The same can be said of almost any iconic tragedy—The Aeneid, The Iliad, Romeo and Juliet.
The fall of the Regional Office.
More specifically:
Henry fell in love with Emma.
Then Emma was marked for death by Oyemi via the predictions of the Oracles.
And Oyemi, either through ignorance or a cold sense of fate, told Henry to kill Emma.
More specifically stilclass="underline"
One day, Henry slipped into his car to drive home at the end of a normal day. He turned the key in the ignition. He switched off his stereo because sometimes he just wanted the sound of the wheels on the road, the bumps and skips of the tires rolling across the uneven pavement. He checked his rearview mirror. He shifted down to reverse, and then he passed out.
He came to in a chair in an office with a mineral water in his hand.
“Hello, Henry,” Oyemi said, her voice coming from behind him. “I hope water is okay. If not, I can get you something else.”
He paused, but for just a second, and then said, “Water’s fine,” because it was the only concrete thing he could land on. Of course he’d met Oyemi. She’d been there when Mr. Niles had hired him, and he had seen her a few other times, but those meetings had all been brief, officious, and not nearly as unsettling as this one.
Oyemi walked around and sat against the desk in front of him.
“Usually,” she said, “I like to play a little game.” She nodded at the water in his hand. “Make the person in that chair think they’ve been here for a while, have been discussing important things with me all this time, and only just woke up at the very end.”
Henry looked at her but didn’t know what to say or that there was anything he should say.
“You know,” she said. “You’re in the chair, you’ve got a drink in your hand, you wake up, and I’m sitting or standing across from you, saying something like”—she waved her hand and shrugged her shoulders—“‘I hope you understand, the fate of the agency rests on your shoulders now.’ Or, ‘I’m glad we agree on this,’ or, if I’m in a mood, I might say something like, ‘I’m sorry to hear that’s how you feel.’ Something like that.”
“Ah,” Henry said.
“I know,” she said, and sighed. “It loses something in translation. It’s funny. Trust me.” Then she said, “You ruined it, though. You woke up too soon.”
“Sorry,” he said, because whatever he might not have known about Oyemi, he was fairly certain that you didn’t want to ruin anything for her.
She waved off his apology. “Just me, wasting time.” She paused. “Avoiding bad news, too. That’s part of it. I hate giving people bad news.”
Henry cleared his throat. The glass in his hand seemed heavier all of a sudden. “News?”
“And then, too, this game, this trick, it lets me say something true, something real, and then pass it off as a joke, you know, like, ‘Fate of the agency rests in your hands,’ and so on, and then it feels less serious when I tell someone, ‘No, in fact, what I said was true.’”
“I’m sorry,” Henry said. “I’m a little lost.”
She smiled. People who said Oyemi had an unsettling smile didn’t know from unsettling smiles.
“The fate of the agency,” she said, still smiling.
Her smile was predatory and ever widening. She contained in her mouth, as far as he could tell from various furtive glances, the normal amount of teeth, but after every meeting with her, he came away with the sense that her mouth had been full of teeth, rows and rows of teeth, sharp and blunt alike, but too many.
“The fate of the entire Regional Office and all it stands for and all it does, in fact, depends on you.” Oyemi looked at her hands, now folded in front of her. “On you, Henry.” Then she looked up at him and smiled again and he wished she would stop smiling. Then she said, “And here’s why.”
Henry knew little about the Oracles, their origin, their design, how accurate their predictions were. They’d been moved out of the city and to Oyemi’s compound shortly after he’d been hired. Their messages were cryptic, delivered from the Oracles to a team of analysts — the channelers — who ran analytics, cross-checked predictions and world events on various spreadsheets. It was a mystery to him but he hadn’t ever cared how it — or the entire system — worked. He received assignments by way of a channeler from the Oracles. Girls to pick up. The wheres and whens but little else.
By whatever means, assignments landed in his inbox and that was all that mattered to him.
“They do more than just hand down your recruiting assignments,” Oyemi explained. “Their first order of business, in fact, is to scan through all time and all reality for threats to the Regional Office. They’re our first line of defense,” she said. “And they’ve singled out a threat,” she said. Then she paused and leaned in closer. “And that threat is right here. In the agency. Even as we speak.”
Henry gauged the distance between him and Oyemi, between him and the door, tried to predict how many guards were outside this office — maybe none, Oyemi being what she was — tried to calculate the possibility and probability of the various bad scenarios laid out before him — punch Oyemi in the neck and then run for it, or just run for it, or just punch Oyemi in the neck and then try to kill her — but finally, he exhausted the options, decided none of them were good, that none of them would save him, and so he stayed in his seat.
Oyemi watched him through all of this — no more than a second or two — and then smiled when she saw him relax, resign himself, and then laughed and said, “Not you, Henry.” Then she frowned and looked at her hands, her fingers. “Worse,” she said. Then she looked back up at him. “One of the girls,” she said. “One of our girls.”
“The girls?” he asked. He stared at her for a minute, tried to picture one of his Recruits betraying the Regional Office but couldn’t. “No,” he said. “No.” Then: “Which one?”
She knelt in front of him and placed her hands on his knees and looked earnestly into his eyes and said, “I’m glad you asked.”
She didn’t know. She had received some flimflam from the Oracles — it would take Henry some time to uncover exactly what the Oracles had told Oyemi, namely: The one who once loved will one day destroy that which was once loved, and so on — and from this, from this small ambiguous prediction, he was supposed to single out the Operative poised to destroy Oyemi and the Regional Office. That was now his job. He was supposed to help Oyemi find the girl who would betray Regional.
“How?” he asked. “How am I supposed to do that?”
“Get close to them,” she told him, and he thought of Emma, and he thought, I am, I am close to them. “Learn what they’re up to, their secrets, their desires.”
Maybe she saw his look, a skeptical look, because she said, “You won’t be alone. We’ll be here to help,” she said. “The Oracles. Me. Make new files for each girl. Photos, dossiers. Pass them to one of my men, and I will work with the Oracles and we will figure this out together. I promise. We will.”
Only in hindsight did Henry realize there had been something pleading to her voice, her argument, as if she needed him, specifically, and as if he had any choice but to say yes.