Manuel Gonzales - The Regional Office Is Under Attack!

All of which was only made more frustrating and disappointing when you woke up one day to find all that potential squandered by time and inaction and an inability to risk losing what you loved to gain something more.

In other words: When Sarah woke up, she woke up and her arm was gone.

Her mechanical arm, that is, and not gone, not entirely gone, just no longer attached to her. It had been a day full of strange uncertainties, but if anything was for absolute certain, it was that her mechanical arm was no longer attached to her. Instead, it was on a metal gurney not more than five feet in front of her.

Sarah was tied up in a chair and her other arm burned with not a small amount of burning pain, and when she finally got the chance to look at her other arm, which wouldn’t be until they pulled her out of that chair and carried her to where the other hostages were being kept, she would see the three-inch gash, down to what she’d think might be bone, and would think happily to herself, They couldn’t tell which was which, either.

Would think, Mr. Niles will be so pleased.

But at the moment she wasn’t thinking of her normal arm and hardly noticed the burning pain and was only barely aware of the idea of thinking of Mr. Niles or the Regional Office or what was going to happen to her next.

All she could think of was what was right in front of her. How she had wasted what was right in front of her and how all she could do now was simply sit and stare at it and let it all continue to go to waste.

Hell no.

She took a deep breath and jumped or did whatever that thing was when you were tied tight in an office chair to try to scooch it across the floor.

The back legs tilted but not by much and she didn’t feel the front legs do anything at all.

Leverage. She had the wrong kind of leverage.

If she had her arm, boy, these ropes and this chair and this office wall and even the concrete floor below her, boy, they wouldn’t stand a chance, and then the men outside, however many of them, the men scattered throughout the whole Regional Office, they’d get what was coming to them, too.

The real problem with having a mechanical arm that was etc., etc., ad infinitum, was that she never did: throw her metal fist through Jacob, the elevator panel, the glass wall of her office. It was her job, she thought, not just her job but her position, her responsibility, her role in the Regional Office, not to throw her fist around willy-nilly, mechanical or not, though now she understood that she had misunderstood her role in the organization, her value to Mr. Niles, and that she had held herself in check, had pulled everything back, had stilled herself — not just her mechanical arm but her regular arm, too, and not just that but everything — had stilled herself to the point of stillness by mistake and for the wrong reasons, and now the problem was she was going to be killed, was going to die at the office, not ever once having fully let herself go.

When Sarah woke up from the operation, she woke up standing in the middle of a wrecked lab and operating room, fairly unconcerned about her arm, about either of her arms.

She was breathing hard. Her chest heaved. Her hands were clenched into fists. A red light was pulsing and a small series of sparks lit up the heart-rate machine to her left and then the machine collapsed into a heap.

For a few seconds, Sarah didn’t know where she was, what had happened, how she had gotten there.

Faintly, Sarah remembered lying down on the operating table. She remembered a mask being placed over her mouth and nose. She remembered counting down from one hundred. She remembered becoming stuck on ninety-three. And that was all she remembered.

A heap of something in the corner of the operating room moaned and shifted.

The doctor. A heap of the doctor in the corner of the operating room moaned and shifted.

Then she heard Mr. Niles speaking to her, but his voice crunched and crackled, and it was too loud, everything was too loud, and she stuck her fingers into her ears, but carefully, she remembered, because one of the fingers might have been mechanical. She remembered that, she was beginning to remember that.

She looked around the operating room for Mr. Niles, but he wasn’t there, and then she realized he was speaking to her over an intercom.

“What?” she said. “What’s going on?” she said.

“We’re opening the door, Sarah,” Mr. Niles said. “It’s okay. Everything’s going to be okay. We’re opening the door. Nothing’s going to happen. Try not to hit anything or anyone.”

Someone else in the intercom room with Mr. Niles said, just loud enough for the microphone to pick up, “Anyone else, you mean.”

“What?” Sarah asked.

“Just rest your arm, okay? Just rest everything.” Mr. Niles paused. “I’m coming inside now.”

A hiss escaped the door and she realized she hadn’t known she’d been locked inside, that the doctor had been locked inside with her. The door pushed open and there was Mr. Niles. She had expected him to be dressed in scrubs or in a hazmat suit, or, judging by the state of the room, full body armor, but he was wearing his normal office clothes, minus the jacket, his sleeves rolled up, his tie pulled loose.

He smiled. “Well. That was unexpected.”

Two paramedics stepped cautiously into the room behind him and then crept over to the doctor heaped into the corner.

He stepped closer to her, closer than she felt comfortable with, considering. Considering what she must have done coming out of the operation, considering her own inability to remember any of it, considering the doctor, whose femur had been pulverized, according to the muted chatter she could hear from the paramedics.

Mr. Niles studied her, studied not just her arms, which would have been expected, but looked closely into her eyes, stepped around her in a slow circle. The paramedics lifted the doctor onto a stretcher. Mr. Niles came back around to look her in the face.

“Fantastic,” he said.

“Fantastic?”

“I’d certainly call this a success,” Mr. Niles said.

“A success?”

“You’re alive. I’m alive.” He looked around the room. “This is an easy cleanup, frankly. You should see what some of the other girls have done, the Operatives.” He took a deep breath and let it out and placed his hand on her shoulder, her normal shoulder. Then he smiled at her again and placed his hand on her other shoulder and shook his head and said, “Remarkable.” He took her by her hands and lifted them up and put her palms flat against his palms and her whole body shuddered, and she couldn’t tell if she was afraid and shuddering or thrilled and shuddering, but her breath caught in her throat when he intertwined her fingers with his.

Then the moment passed and he let her hands go and he took her by the arm — her normal arm — and started walking her out of the ruined lab.

“Yes,” he said, “yes, very much a success.” Then he said, “I want you to remember this, though.” He stopped and turned her to look at the wreckage. “Take a good look around you and remember this very clearly. Maybe back when you were just a normal girl, back when you were Sarah O’Hara, girl with two normal arms, this kind of outburst would have been okay. Uncivilized, of course, but otherwise harmless.” He swept his arm across the damage she had done. “But now. We must demonstrate a modicum of self-restraint, mustn’t we?”

She nodded. She opened her mouth to apologize, but he stopped her from saying she was sorry, that she didn’t know what she was doing, that she wasn’t in control of any of it.

“You’ll learn,” he said, shaking his head. “Soon enough, you’ll figure it out.”