Manuel Gonzales - The Regional Office Is Under Attack!

It was all too much, the things she wanted to say, and while she knew now the jumping and the strangling had all been part of some plan, some kind of test, it had scared the shit out of her and she felt torn between these two feelings — scared shitless by this guy and urgently attracted to him — and she felt that saying something, saying anything, might help even all of this out, but where did she start?

So. He handed her a folder and she took it and opened it and pretended to read it. Inside was a set of schedules and rules and guidelines. They were straightforward and basic but he went over them anyway, pointed out breakfast and lunch and dinner. Lights out at ten o’clock.

“Usually,” he said, “everyone’s up by five thirty for a quick five-mile run together, but…” He paused, ran his hand through his hair. “Considering how much catching up you’re going to have to do, uh, we’re going to have to skip the run. And the midmorning yoga class.” He said this as if he felt a little sorry for her, as if she were missing out on something, which, she would realize later, she was, missing out. Not on the yoga class. Not on the morning run.

Missing out on the team, on being a part of the team.

Then he said, “Well. Okay. That’s the nickel tour.” He said this as if it were time for him to leave her to herself, to organize her room, which didn’t need organizing, or gather her thoughts, which he must have known wouldn’t have been gathered any time soon. But then he didn’t leave. He stood there. She stood there. She rocked herself forward. She remembered to say, “Thanks. For the tour.”

He rocked himself back, just slightly back. “Training starts tomorrow,” he said. “You might notice people packing things away,” he said. “We’re moving into phase two and we’re shutting down this specific operation, and so we’re all a little distracted,” he said. “Don’t take it personally,” he said. “We’re really glad you’re here.” He said this, Rose knew, to make her feel better. She pretended, for his sake and for hers, that it worked.

She waited. He waited. Then he said, “About before,” and that was all she needed, it seemed, before she rushed into her own, I know, I know, I’m totally, well, not sorry, sorry isn’t, anyway, I’m just, I just wanted you, I didn’t want you to think, and she moved closer, and he moved farther back until he had the door open and had stepped out of the room, had crossed the threshold to the other side, and then he interrupted her.

“Look, Rose,” he said. “I just needed to tell you. I’m kind of in charge here. I mean, Emma and I. We’re in charge here. In charge of you and the others and your training and it’s not like we’re back in your hometown, right? Driving around checking out dead squirrels, right? It’s not like that here. So, about before, that’s not how it’s like here, is what I’m trying to tell you.”

“Oh,” Rose said, feeling less and less sorry for all those kicks. “Sure. I get it.”

“Do you understand?”

“I got it,” she said. “I just said how I got it.”

“Good.”

“Better than good,” she said. “Great. Perfect.”

“It’ll just make things easier.”

“I like easier,” she said, and then she closed the door on his face.

Rose hid herself away behind a fallen log, some overhanging trees. If she squinted, she could barely make out Wendy’s boots hanging from a tree branch in the distance. She listened for the sound of Colleen finding Wendy, though she knew Colleen wouldn’t make such a blatant mistake unless she was trying to trick Rose somehow. Rose had left three trails behind her. An obvious trail that Colleen would know was not the real trail but was a dummy trail with a booby trap set along some part of it, and a second, much less obvious, almost invisible trail that Colleen would assume was the real trail, but which was also a dummy trail with a booby trap set along some part of it, and a third untraceable trail, Rose was sure of it, that, just for shits and giggles, had a booby trap set along some part of it, too. The funny thing about that invisible trail was that if Colleen were to find and follow it, which she couldn’t, she would be able to follow it to a spot in the woods that was just out of view of the booby-trapped spots of the other two trails but where Rose could wait and watch for Colleen to come down one path or the other.

Rose hoped that Colleen would come down the obviously false trail, not because she didn’t think Colleen would be smart enough to know it was obviously false, but because she might outthink herself and decide the obviously fake trail was made obviously fake because it wasn’t fake at all, but also because the booby trap at the end of that trail wasn’t quite as harsh as the booby trap down the other, almost invisible fake trail she’d left, and she liked Colleen, who was maybe a bit too type A but who meant well and who had, a couple of weeks ago, tried to keep Rose from failing out of superpowered-assassin school.

After nearly a month, the training had not been going well. The martial arts instructor — not, to her disappointment, Henry — spent hour after hour sweeping her feet out from under her and throwing her over his shoulder and trying to explain to her poses and moves and countermoves that she didn’t understand at all and whose names she couldn’t remember. Lost Monkey, Wooden Monkey, the Broken Faucet. None of those meant the first goddamn thing to her.

She was a disaster at languages and couldn’t master even the simple phrases she was asked to learn — Where is the gun hidden, How do I get to the basement level of this building — and she was fairly confident that if she were dropped into the wilds of Alaska or some other equally feral place with nothing but a rope and a hunting knife, she could survive there for a sum total of five minutes for all that she’d learned in survival training. The one thing she could do, thanks more to her cousins and uncles who were minor-league pyromaniacs and owned more empty land than was good for them, was, in the parlance of her demolitions instructor, blow shit up, if only basic shit and in the crudest and most elemental of ways.

She trained all day, before breakfast and through lunch and then again after dinner, but she wasn’t making progress, wasn’t making any progress at all, it seemed, but not because she couldn’t learn this shit. She was good at learning but generally didn’t care enough about the shit she was supposed to learn in school — diagramming a sentence, proving geometrical shapes that had long ago been proved (of course it was a triangle, why in the fuck did she need to prove to anyone, let alone herself, that that was a triangle) — but here she was faced with truly interesting shit to learn and she’d hit a wall.

She told herself she didn’t know why, but she knew why.

She was lonely, and she didn’t like it here.

She’d met the other girls, if briefly. They nodded at her and smiled at her and shook her hand, firmly, too firmly, and welcomed her aboard, and maybe they gave each other looks, We do not have time for this bitch looks, or maybe that was her imagination. All of this happened a week after she arrived and in the five minutes in between when they had to leave for another extended field exercise and she had to leave for another unsuccessful martial arts training session, and after that, she saw them in passing, sometimes in the bathrooms, or in the hallway, usually as a group that seemed to have no room for one more. They were beautiful and older than her and looked very much like a unit, like a complete whole that functioned perfectly, thank you very much, without her.

Once, she ran into one of them on her own, the girl named Colleen, who often wore pink shorts and a yellow tank top and had a boyish haircut that made her look French, who, when she had first seen her, Rose had pegged as potential arch-nemesis material. Rose imagined her, Mean Girls —style, at the head of the posse of other girls, terrorizing and torturing and humiliating newcomers, who would have them all throw their worst at Rose, only for Rose to stand strong against their onslaught, to show first through her unwillingness to back down and then through her unfathomable skill that she was a natural leader, that she was the star of this moment, but Colleen hadn’t yet paid a lick of attention to her.