As Oyemi instructed, he took photographs and built secret dossiers and case files for every working operative, for all the new Recruits.
He didn’t like the work.
Sure, he’d made his own secret personnel files on them all, but with the express intention of making him better at his job, as their trainer, their Recruiter.
He had made first contact with these women, had performed the collection of them from foster homes or juvenile detention centers, from in-the-middle-of-nowhere town squares and suburban McMansions, from trailer homes at the edge of swamps. He had overseen and led their training, and he felt connected to these women, who were, in turn, connected to him, or so he’d long believed.
Most saw him as a brother. They told him things. They cried in his arms, and only in his arms. To cry in anyone else’s arms would have risked discovery, risked the admission that inside them there still lived something frail and vulnerable and human. And so, while the betrayal of the Regional Office was as much a betrayal of him and his life’s work, to suspect any of these girls felt like an even worse betrayal of a friendship, a relationship.
Henry didn’t like sneaking about and taking photographs of them moving through their days just to pass this information on to Oyemi. After a few weeks, though, the new task felt like any other part of his job because that was how things worked no matter who you were, no matter what you did. Not to mention, none of what he’d done seemed to matter. He collected information and passed it on to a man working for Oyemi, but he never received any feedback, never heard anything about the files he put together, the photographs he took, and soon he forgot about the true nature of all he’d been doing.
Then, less than three months later, Henry walked into his office and found Oyemi there waiting for him, Oyemi who never came to the Manhattan office, who worked and lived in the secret compound upstate.
“You can put away your camera, Henry,” she said. “We’ve found her.”
BOOK IV
SARAH
52
It felt good. Sarah could admit that it felt very good to lay waste in this way, her mechanical arm taking on a life of its own, taking over in the heat of the moment.
Felt good to let go.
For once, God, to really just let go.
Not that she wasn’t sad.
Seeing Mr. Niles there in his office, which was the first place she went once her arm had found her, seeing him ruined, cut in two, seeing him like that made her sad.
She’d give her sadness the time it deserved, but not now.
Right now it felt very very good to simply follow after her mechanical arm as it did things that amazed even her.
Finding her and reattaching itself to her shoulder for one. That was pretty fucking amazing.
Escaping its captors, and wending its way through the labyrinth of the Regional Office, all the while laying waste to any man, woman, or machine that stood in its way, only to seek her out as if it were some long-loved loyal pet traveling alone across the vast American landscape to find its master.
She certainly hadn’t thought her mechanical arm could have done that.
She punched her fist through the face of one of the goons. Clean through it.
She heard the peripheral sound of gunshots — with all the noise and commotion, every sound seemed peripheral — and had barely a chance to turn before her mechanical arm reacted — faster than she could have ever reacted — swiveling around with the man’s face still hanging from its wrist, swiveling and then moving herky-jerky style in what seemed a random pattern and she didn’t know what the arm was doing until it shook loose the poor man’s head and held up its open palm for her to see the bullets it had caught, to show her what it had done like a cat presenting her a mouse.
Then the mechanical fist closed and she pivoted and threw the bullets, threw them like she was an outfielder throwing from deep center, threw as hard as she could, which, because of her arm, was harder than what was humanly possible. She threw the bullets and four more men fell.
She grinned.
This is how it begins, she thought.
My life, my real life, she thought. It begins like this.
53
Inside the package that had been hot-glued to the inside of her door had been a letter, but if anyone were to ask her when it was all said and done, How did you know, what clued you in, what intel had you obtained? she would say, Chatter, a lot of chatter, or, A sense, I simply had a sense, or, Mr. Niles, Mr. Niles knew something big was coming and he had set me on this weeks ago, months ago, and even still, I figured it out only as it was happening. She would say this and not worry that anyone would discover otherwise because Mr. Niles would be dead by then, because Wendy, too, Wendy would be gone, and because the letter, which she had read so many times that she had memorized it, had been destroyed. By Sarah. Sarah had burned the letter in a metal bowl in her kitchen only just before she left to come to work that same morning.
54
Sarah hadn’t been prepared: for the bursting forth of power, for the connectedness. She hadn’t been prepared for the sense, though she wouldn’t ever tell anyone this, that there had been something emotional to this connection, that there had been something almost sentient.
She had felt an explosion of joy when her arm attached itself back to her shoulder. Joy that had come not just from herself but from the arm, too, but not just joy, not something just so simple as joy.
Anyone could feel joy.
She had felt another sense. She had felt something akin to completeness, or near completeness, or the promise of one day becoming complete.
A warm, almost liquid feeling had rushed over her. It began at her neck and shoulders and cascaded down like a blanket of warm, soapy water. And it had been too much. She’d admit that — to herself if no one else — that it was all a little too much. She’d doubled over, fallen into a sobbing, hiccupping fit, as if only when the arm had come back to her had she been able to understand just how ruined and alone and incomplete she’d been without it. In the middle of a pitched battle, in the middle of the destruction of the Regional Office, she had doubled over and wept.
And the arm had let her weep. It was as if the arm saw what she was experiencing, understood instinctively what she needed right at that moment, and told her, Go ahead.
Told her, Take a moment. That’s fine. Take your moment, get it all out of your system, let yourself go.
Told her, It’s okay. I’ve got this. It’s a-okay.
She couldn’t say what the arm did exactly while she was doubled over, sobbing into her shirt, but when she came to, she was surrounded by bodies, six of them, that hadn’t been there just a minute ago.
55
She grabbed a guy who might not even have been one of the guys, but by this point, did it matter? She grabbed this guy and threw him headfirst through a cubicle wall and maybe she heard his neck snap or maybe it was the wall that snapped, and then, it was over.
The assault on the Regional Office was over. There was no one left. He had been the last guy.
Or there were people left, but they were the women, the Operatives.
When did they get here? she wondered. Have they been here the whole time?