A twitch in her heart.
~ ~ ~
From The Regional Office Is Under Attack:
Tracking the Rise and Fall of an American Institution
One can imagine, in light of the not-unfathomable notion that Emma and Henry had conspired to fake her death and enact revenge on the Regional Office, that it would have been Emma leading the team that burned Oyemi’s complex to the ground. No records can place Emma at that scene, though in all truth, any records placing any of this anywhere are difficult if not impossible to find.
But Emma — if she lived — Emma especially was a ghost at this point.
Even had Oyemi suspected Henry’s actions, she would not have expected anything from the realm of Emma. And the Oracles? As far as they were concerned, Oyemi had already been duly warned of both Emma and Henry. In light of this, one can imagine the warning system that Oyemi had come to rely on almost completely — the Oracles — failing her when she needed them most.
Imagine: Emma with Windsor and maybe another of Henry’s personal Recruits — Jimmie or Becka — on the Amtrak out of Penn Station. The two (or three) of them sitting in the dining car, not hashing or rehashing out their plans, because they know them by now so intimately, so completely, that to go over them even one more time might tip the scales in the other direction, might cause one or more of them to overthink and slip up.
The lot of them jumping off the train as it slows to round a curve.
The cover of darkness. Their stealth, aided by their mystical properties.
Imagine the quiet deliberation as Windsor unmoors the locks — physical and magickal — that Oyemi had set in place to protect herself, her Oracles.
Windsor’s soft, quiet, consistent breaths, the care with which she works her magick — both literally and figuratively — and the softly tingling buzzing feeling this gives Emma, just under her ears, where her jawbone connects to her skull, how much this relaxes her, how much her own relaxation sets Windsor at ease.
Dogs roaming the compound that never know the three of them have slipped through the fence and are making their way to the house on the hill.
The house itself smaller than they imagined, modest, even.
The small kernel of doubt lodged deep within Emma, unretrievable and not wholly ignorable, that maybe the best course, the smartest course, would be to abort the mission, to find Henry, to set these girls free before it’s too late for them, to jet off with Henry to Finland, maybe, or New Zealand, to let bygones be bygones.
Oyemi there on the porch, her eyes wild with fire and power, her hair lifted not by wind but by the electromagnetics swirling around her.
Because she knows.
It is too late, but she has seen the necessary and pointless five minutes of her future, knows they have come for her, that the prophecy has come for her, that she read it all wrong.
Windsor falling first, struck by a fireball, incinerated before she hits the ground. Jimmie screaming, her urgent need to leap out of the way rendered inert by fear, by the sudden reality of death and magick and power and the realization that, truly, she has none, or next to none, in the face of Oyemi.
Emma uncaring. Or caring, but not yet, not now.
Emma will remember to cower in fear later. The fear will make her temporarily deaf and mute. She will cower and shake just on the other side of the fence from the still-burning compound. She will scream and scream until she is hoarse, but she won’t hear herself over the crackling and violence of the fire, but she won’t hear that, either. She will shiver until her whole body aches, but not yet, not now.
Now she will spin and drop and roll and lunge and throw her own magicks at Oyemi, borrowed of course, these magicks. A dagger, its blade forged in an interdimensional fire; an amulet stolen from the Regional Office itself, stored within its underground vaults, its powers never tested, unknown. She will weave a spell stolen from one of Oyemi’s own books, filched by Henry when he reported back to Oyemi that Emma was dead.
She will bring these powers to bear, and these powers will fall short, and Oyemi will deflect them all, turning fire into ice, melting the tip of the blade even as it flies through the air toward her, raising a host of roots from the very earth her house stands on, but despite all of this, she will fall.
Maybe Jimmie recomposes herself, sets the fire that burns Oyemi’s compound to its foundation, and the flames licking at Oyemi’s heels distract her just enough. Or maybe one of the Oracles, seeing for the first time her own bleak future, the charred bodies of her brethren, tries to save herself from Oyemi’s fate, and this, the sight of her Oracle, struggling to pull herself free from her pool, from the house, from this timeline, distracts Oyemi. Or maybe Emma, maybe Emma is simply that fast, that good, slipping past the roots even as they reach up to grab her, trip her, pull her into the earth and strangle her there. She slips past and cartwheels about and lands, finally, face-to-face with Oyemi, moves too quick for Oyemi to react, twists her head from her neck, and this, maybe this is what catches the world on fire.
One can imagine. This, any of this, all of this, none of this, but all one knows for sure is:
Henry made a plan.
He was a Recruiter, was good at recruiting and training, and so that was where he began.
Wendy first, whom he quietly installed at the Regional Office as an intern, as a mole. And then Windsor and Jimmie and Colleen and Becka and Rose, finally Rose.
Emma had strong feelings about Rose but he wasn’t certain, put off recruiting her until it was almost too late, and then he met her, and then he saw what Emma sensed in her, which was a kernel of Emma herself, lodged somewhere deep inside Rose.
And then he trained them, with Emma at his side, and then he went to work. Figuring out the location of Oyemi’s compound took six months. He did other things, too, in those two years. He recruited more Operatives for the Regional Office. He organized and collected the office donations for the March of Dimes. He hired various teams of mercenaries, paid grunts, and put them under the charge of his team.
For two years, he planned, and when the day came, he walked away from the Regional Office for good.
Although, technically he didn’t go into work that day.
Nor did he go to Oyemi’s compound.
Burning the compound to the ground, destroying everything within it, had been Windsor and Jimmie’s job.
Instead, Henry spent part of the day in the city.
The Met by the Etruscan vases, the small custom-jewelry store where he and Emma almost, as a joke, bought each other matching rings after they’d spent the day walking through Park Slope pretending to be one of those new young couples recently transplanted from Manhattan, on that rooftop where they’d eaten Italian ices together, the roof they’d snuck onto on Mulberry. He went to a toy store. He and Emma had come there only once and only because it had been raining so hard that they’d ducked into the first open store they came upon. They browsed the toys, walked down the aisles while the rain came down outside.
“What do you think about kids?” he’d asked.
“Oh, I hate them,” she said, her eyes wide and her mouth just slightly open.
He smiled and nodded and said, “Me too.”
And they smiled and then they kissed.
“I do like toys, though,” she said.
And he said, “Me too!” exaggerating for effect because they’d gotten into the habit of exaggerating in a way that characters sometimes do in romantic comedies or sitcoms because to think of this thing that was happening between them, whatever this thing was or would become, as anything more serious than a romantic comedy made them both nervous.