So what if she was good at this thing?
It wasn’t her life, wasn’t the life she had thought she’d wanted, wasn’t the life she was supposed to live.
Not to mention they broke her fucking heart.
61
She couldn’t help but think that the whole robot thing just seemed so dated.
The whole fucking enterprise just seemed so dated to her now. Coldhearted revenge, a comeuppance for crimes she’d committed in her past, etc., and so on.
Not that the robot looked dated. It looked sleek and ultramodern, and kind of feminine. Kind of like a girl.
Although every robot that wasn’t sheathed in some kind of humanlike skin — and this one wasn’t — reminded her of Robocop. Even the sleek, newer-looking ones. Maybe that was the new thing with robot design, though, some hipster kind of return to the retro. No more hiding the robot bits underneath synthetic skin and wigs and clothes. Less T-1000 from Terminator and more Maximilian from The Black Hole, or B-9 from Lost in Space. It was sad, really, she thought. This whole fucking thing would have been easier to swallow if Rutger Hauer were on the other end of this battle to the death.
Jesus. Rutger Hauer? Where the fuck was her head?
She couldn’t focus on one line of pop-cultural references, much less concentrate on not being smashed by a robotic fist.
Still. It was weird to think, wasn’t it, that there could be Rutger Hauer; bad sci-fi movies like Lost in Space; small, quaint bead and yarn shoppes in small, quaint Texas towns; and still be towering robots hell-bent on death and destruction. Or, rather, the other way around. The robot first and still all those other normal things. She’d spent these past few years caught in a limbo between constantly thinking about and completely forgetting about all that had happened to her, but had finally begun to edge, ever so slightly, in favor of forgetting, and now this fucking robot beast showed up.
It wouldn’t stop swinging at her, or throwing shit at her, or grabbing her by the shoulder or ankle or wrist and slamming her into things, for one. Then, to make matters worse, the fucking thing wouldn’t shut up. It just kept talking, and in a strange voice, strange for a robot, anyway. Not the kind of voice she’d have expected a robot to have. Rose would have expected something like the robot voice of Stephen Hawking, but this was just like a person, or not even just a person but maybe like a girl’s voice, and for a second, Rose wondered if the robot was a girl robot, and then if there was such a thing — a girl robot with girl robot parts — but then it wouldn’t shut up or stop swinging at her and whatever it was, it was just like anybody else, just as nonstop, just as goddamn annoying.
It kept saying things like, “Leave it to them to train you just enough to get you into trouble,” as it wrenched a bank of cabinets out of the floor and then hefted them over its head, finishing with, “but not enough to get you out,” as it heaved the whole thing at Rose, who saw this coming, but then the robot must have seen Rose see it coming and calibrated its throw in such a way that, even though Rose jumped out of the way, it clipped her hard in the shoulder and spun her in midair like a spinning coin.
And it said things like, “Was it worth it?” while holding up a skein of yarn. “All of this?” it asked. “Is all of this worth the things you did, the lives you ruined, the people you destroyed, the work you unraveled? For this?” Said that or something just like it before shoving the cabinet of alpaca yarn (Go Alpaca, You’ll Never Go Backa!) toppling to the floor. “This shitty little yarn shop in the middle of this shitty little town?”
62
It was a high-quality yarn shoppe, thank you very much, in a, yes, admittedly, shitty little town, but even still. That wasn’t her whole life. She had a dog, a big gray, lazy Great Dane named Birdie. And a boyfriend.
I have a boyfriend, now, too, Rose wanted to say, almost said, clamped her mouth shut just before saying.
Not that the fucking robot would want to know or care, but his name was Jason, thank you very much, and they’d begun dating just after her roof started leaking and she’d hired him to fix the leak, and sure, he kept trying to get people to call him Jace, despite all the times she told him to stop doing that, that he was making a fool of himself but also of her just by association, which she was beginning to suspect only made him want to try even harder. And sure, just this past weekend, right as shit started getting hot and heavy across the bench seat of his pickup, he’d screeched things to a halt by asking her, So, what is this, am I your boyfriend now, or what? and she’d curbed her serious desire to head-butt him and instead told him, Christ, grow a pair, would you? Not to mention: She’d known him way back in middle school when he’d had a total crush on her then, and, God, now that she was thinking about it, could he be more pathetic?
Jesus, if she got out of this mess with the robot (when, she corrected herself, when she got out of this mess with the robot), the first thing she would do would be to break up with Jason. That was the goddamn truth.
Except he was funny and really cute and a good fuck and, what’s worse, so Patty told her after she’d come back, he once cornered Akard after school — after Rose’d pulled her disappearing act — and beat the shit out of him when he heard Akard saying something the likes of how Rose had to skip town since she’d whored herself out to every man who’d take her in this town. And when it came right down to it, she couldn’t get enough of that boy, even just sitting together on his couch watching DIY shit on the TV and scarfing down fucking lime-chili Cheetos, or going at it like horny fucking teenagers every chance they got, and every minute of every day she worried he’d find out who or what she was (which was what, exactly?) and when he did, he’d be the one to leave her, and, God, she thought, what if he came over now?
What if he chose now to surprise her with lunch or cookies or just to say hi?
No, no, no, no, no.
The robot swung its fucking robot arm. Rose didn’t duck, didn’t leap, didn’t sway. She grabbed the thing and rolled back, absorbing its momentum, using it against itself, and pivoted at the last possible second, throwing it, the arm and the robot, head over ass, back into the wall.
Because fuck if this robot was going to ruin the one good thing she had.
And the robot smiled. It stood and turned and smiled, damn it.
“Well, well,” it said in its non — Stephen Hawking voice. “Look who finally woke up.”
63
Rose came back to her hometown on a whim. It wasn’t like her mother had died, there was a funeral to go to — though her mother had died, a few years before, and no one could find Rose to tell her. Her sister had set herself up in their old house and Rose couldn’t think of anywhere else to go and had grown tired of drifting, drifting, drifting.
She had assumed that once all the Regional Office stuff ended, she’d get this special kind of life with special kinds of friends. Even after she’d finished her assignment, even after all that had happened in the Regional Office, she thought this.
She’d taken care of the director — even that euphemism, taken care of, made her stomach turn, the thought of the look of him, cut in two — and she’d busted her way out as unglamorously as she’d busted her way in, and then she’d made her way to the rendezvous, but no one else was there. Not Emma, not Henry, none of the other girls. And sure, Emma and the other girls, they were taking care of their own assignments, could have been running late, but what had happened to Henry? His whole job was to wait at the safe house and keep it, well, safe. Only later did she begin to suspect that he’d never intended to go to the rendezvous, that maybe he and Emma had never really expected there to be anyone to rendezvous with.