The robot had the sword raised up again.
Rose wished she’d figured it out sooner.
Not that she hadn’t known this thing had come for her from the Regional Office. Of course this thing had come from the Regional Office. Where else would it have come from?
Not that figuring it out sooner would have mattered very much. This thing wasn’t like anything she’d ever faced, wasn’t like anything she had been trained to face by Emma or Henry at the compound. This wasn’t some superpowered girl like herself, or an office slouch like most of the people at Regional. Even now, she couldn’t think of a move or countermove or strategy that might have disabled the thing or gotten her past it and now that goddamn sword.
But maybe — if she had known sooner, if she had figured it out sooner — maybe she would have fought differently. Fighting a thing simply on a mission is different than fighting a thing on a Mission. She would’ve fought differently, or maybe just harder.
From the very beginning, she would have fought harder.
But here she was, at what was most likely the very end, doing the only thing she could think of to do. Forget about the pain. Forget about the bones, broken if slowly mending. Forget about everything else and charge straight at that motherfucker, even if it would be the very last thing she’d ever do.
Which was what she did.
~ ~ ~
From The Regional Office Is Under Attack:
Tracking the Rise and Fall of an American Institution
The second theory on how Henry managed to so effectively enact his plans against the Regional Office proceeds in almost the exact same way as the first theory, except for the small but significant difference that Emma was not killed, that her death had been entirely faked.
SARAH
72
The doctor wasn’t sure how Sarah’s shoulder and mechanical arm had come back together. He studied her, where the arm reattached itself.
“It’s not a perfect fit,” he said. She almost yelled at him when he said this. Nothing could have been more perfect than this fit. “I mean,” he said, warily catching a look in her eye, “it’s perfect now. But it’s not where we put it originally. Not how we put it originally.”
He was skeptical of the story she’d told him, she could tell. He thought maybe she’d had help reattaching the arm, but that seemed unlikely. Or maybe the stress of the situation, the pain and stress and instability of it all, maybe coupled with some pharmaceuticals and some neurological suggestive therapy…
“Maybe what?” Sarah asked.
Maybe they hadn’t ever taken it off to begin with. Maybe they’d tried to take it off — hence the queer way it didn’t quite line up with how it had once lined up — but failing that, they’d done their best (and had succeeded) to convince her that it had been removed.
“What better way,” he said, “to neutralize the largest threat than to convince the threat that it had been neutralized?”
He floated this idea out there as if it were a bubble, hesitant and fragile. She popped it, almost violently, emphatically, jabbing her mechanical finger into his very soft and pliable chest, because she had wondered much the same thing herself, had tried to think back to the moment when she’d seen it on the gurney in front of her.
And it was a thought she would rather not think.
But what if? What if her mechanical arm had been there the entire time?
“No matter,” he said, and there was something frightened in his voice and she tried to think calm thoughts, tried to remember Mr. Niles waving his arm at the destruction she had wreaked right after he had given her this mechanical arm. She smiled uncomfortably.
My, how they must have laughed at her. They must have laughed and laughed and laughed. She never even suspected, they would have said. She never even considered she might still have both her arms, they would have said. And then they would have howled. The thought of their laughing at her made her wish they were all still alive so she could kill them all again, and to settle her thoughts down, she thought of Wendy, of dead, frightened-eyed Wendy, and this made her feel better.
“The arm is in place and is still functional,” he said. “That’s great news.”
He scheduled her for another appointment, asked her to clear her schedule so they could cover it again. They didn’t have enough of her own skin to use but he could create a synthetic that would match almost perfectly. But at first she said no. She didn’t know why she said no but it felt necessary to say no to covering up the mechanical arm.
Then she said, “I’m sorry. You’re right. We have to cover it.”
And a week later, it was covered, and for days, she couldn’t pass by a mirror without staring at the mechanical arm and admiring once more how much it looked like just any normal arm would look.
For a couple of days, after she returned to the office with her new skin, people stopped and admired her arm. Just like new, they said. Or, It looks perfect. Or, Soon, we won’t remember which one was the mechanical one at all. But this she knew was a lie. How could it not be a lie? They remembered, all of them remembered, and would always remember, she thought, and that was a shame.
73
She was in Mr. Niles’s office and his mother was cutting his hair and he was talking about the business of Regional and she couldn’t stop hopping from foot to foot. Mr. Niles was about to raise his eyebrows at her and say something about this, she knew, but then he was sliding into his car in the parking garage, which was only strange in that he usually had someone drive him, but he was sliding into his car and she was there holding the door for him and she was apologizing to him for a report he’d asked for that she hadn’t delivered yet and he didn’t care, didn’t care at all, and she was still shifting from her left foot to her right, left to right, right to left, and he was smiling and shaking his head and saying, Don’t worry about it, it’s fine, and she was still apologizing even as he closed the door and started the engine and she waited and watched as he pulled out of the garage and then, ending there, the dream would have been really no different than any number of other anxiety dreams she’d had about Regional, but it didn’t stop there because she turned and started to walk back to her office but tripped, stubbed her toe or her whole foot on the curb and tripped, and there was suddenly a sharp and burning pain in her foot, but in her real foot, too, and she woke up.
She stumbled to the bathroom. In the light, she couldn’t see anything wrong with her foot, but it hurt like holy hell, and she gritted her teeth and squeezed her mechanical fist. Then she squeezed her normal fist. She took some ibuprofen and then more and then the bottle was empty and she was in her bed and the pain was such that breathing made it worse.
Blinking. Blinking also made it worse.
The pumping of blood through her veins. That, too.
Everything. Everything made it worse.
74
In the fall of 1993, the letter continued, your mother was abducted.
This is not something you do not already know. This is not something we need to remind you of, yet while you know a story about the abduction and disappearance and ultimate fate of your mother, you do not yet know the full and accurate story.