Manuel Gonzales - The Regional Office Is Under Attack!

And after that, all she could do was stare at it, even in the dark, stare at that arm and wonder what, if anything, it might do next.

Their faces were masked. She could tell by the way they moved, by the way they walked and swung their arms and held their chests forward, she could tell by the look of them, they’d been trained by someone who had once worked for the Regional Office.

They stopped when they saw her, saw how close she was to the gurney, to her arm, and they looked at each other and then one of the men shrugged and the other shrugged back and then he glanced briefly down at the arm on the table, as if to make sure it was still there, that it hadn’t left, hadn’t sprouted legs and walked away on its own.

She didn’t say, Where am I?

She didn’t say, Who are you?

Didn’t say, What have you done with Mr. Niles?

She didn’t say anything except for with her eyes, which said, quite clearly and pointedly, I am going to kill you, to the man who’d looked down at her mechanical arm, but he didn’t flinch or take on a concerned look or falter in his step or step backward in fear as she had hoped he might. Instead, he smiled at her and then looked at the other man and nodded at him and they laughed as if they’d just shared a joke, and she wondered if they were talking to each other, if they’d been talking all along but in a secret way, in a way that she couldn’t hear. Telepathically, maybe.

The two men untied her and moved to lift her out of the chair. They weren’t rough with her, and the one trying to pick her up by the armpit that wasn’t an armpit anymore because it was a stump shied away a little bit at first, uncertain where to lift from. The other one had forgotten his gloves and was barehanded. He had soft, gentle hands. They concerted their efforts and lifted her up, and she saw the gash on her other arm, and thought, They didn’t know! and she ignored the burning, ignored the sight of her own bone, and she thought of Mr. Niles, and she did not panic.

She didn’t panic at all.

She made a silent vow to Mr. Niles that she would not panic, that she would find some way out of this mess, a mess she imagined was of her own devising, and that she would find him, find him at least to apologize to him, and in her mind, she clenched her fist. She imagined herself standing in front of everyone who might stand in her way, and in her mind, she clenched her mechanical fist, ready to wreak havoc on all of the enemies of Mr. Niles and the Regional Office. As the two men walked her past the table where her mechanical arm lay useless and lifeless, and just before they yanked her out of the room, she looked at it and imagined her mechanical fist tightly clenched and full of its unimaginable power.

And that’s when she saw the fingers twitch and jerk and then swiftly close, her mechanical hand, swiftly close into a powerful fist, and she felt a gasp rising in her throat, but then they hit her in the back of the head with something heavy and blocky, and everything went blurry, and they hit her again, and things went black.

Once in a while, Sarah would get a call from Mr. Niles. He would bring her into his office. He would sit her down in the chair across from his desk. He would sigh. He would lean forward and smile and ask about her, ask about her arm, about the apartment he’d found for her, ask about her aunt, who he knew lived in Queens now and was very important to Sarah.

He did this every time, and every time, this ritual made her feel anxious. Or not anxious, but antsy.

She appreciated his attention but because she was barely twenty and had a mechanical arm and was desperately seeking vengeance, she really just wanted him to get to the point, which she knew would come only after she’d answered his questions, refused his offer for water and then for coffee, assured him that she was doing fine, thank you, and that she was ready, she was ready to see whatever he’d called her in to show her.

Namely, she was ready for the file on his desk, the name inside that file, the photograph, the last known whereabouts.

“We found another one,” he would say. He would start to slide the folder to her. “I won’t bore you with the details of how we found him,” he would say. But then he would. He would bore her with the details. He told her how these men and women had changed their faces through major surgeries, had hidden themselves away in the farther reaches of Nepal, had quietly joined religious cults in western Colorado, had faked their own deaths in airplane tragedies, train derailments, house fires, suicides.

And she would wait, growing ever more impatient for him to finish and to give her the damn file, which he finally would after one last, “Are you sure you want this, want to continue this work?”

At which point she knew she was allowed to simply take the file, that she was almost expected to do so, that for whatever reason Mr. Niles preferred not to give her these things, preferred that they be taken from him almost but not quite against his will.

Then she would sit back in her chair and open the folder and look at the photograph, study it, study the face, study the other photos that might be in the file, and then she would read from cover to cover and then from cover to cover again. And then, having lost track of all time, she would look back up for Mr. Niles, who would have left his own office, left her to it so she could study the file alone, and find the room almost dark, the sun nearly set, and on the desk in front of her, a ham and cheese sandwich and a diet orange Fanta, which she would take — the sandwich in a few bites, the Fanta in two or three swallows — before she returned to the file, committing it to memory, all of it to memory.

What she didn’t expect was how good she would be at tracking down and killing the men and women who had abducted and, ultimately, murdered her mother.

Although, really, if she was being honest with herself, she had proved to be good at so many other things that, in hindsight, she wasn’t entirely surprised. Hunting down targets and eliminating them in secret simply happened to be just one more thing she had taken to, no different, really, than nanophysiology, or artificial subconscious dichotomy, which was what she had been studying in college before she dropped out in pursuit of the truth about her mother.

Not to mention that the Regional Office itself had done most of the heavy lifting. Less seek-out-and-destroy and more just destroy on her part.

Then one day she arrived in Mr. Niles’s office expecting to pick up another file, go after another man or woman responsible for her mother’s death, only to find Mr. Niles standing behind his desk empty-handed.

“That was the last one,” he told her. He held his hands up, spread his fingers wide, and then clapped them together and smiled. “There’s not one of them left.”

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“I mean, you should be proud of yourself. You took care of every last one of them.”

She didn’t like this. “You should have told me,” she said.

“I just did,” he said, still smiling.

“Before. You should have told me before. I thought there would be more. There aren’t more?”

“There was,” he said. “There was one more, but there was an accident.”

“An accident?”

“He got wind of our man following his trail, tried to run, stole a car, wasn’t the best driver.” He picked up a small envelope full of photographs. A car wreck. An oil-slick road. Burned wreckage.

“We checked it out,” Mr. Niles said before she could say anything. “It’s real. He’s dead.” He paused and leaned heavily against his desk. “And he was the last one.”