Manuel Gonzales - The Regional Office Is Under Attack!

Rose ran into her in the weapons training module. Her weapons instructor had set up extra training time for her because she couldn’t shoot for shit, which made no sense, none at all. Rose had grown up around hunting rifles, and the occasional crossbow (her uncle Artie), and while she’d never taken to hunting herself, she’d always been a decent shot and had never shied away from guns. But every time she held a sidearm, a rifle, a shotgun, a semiautomatic in front of her weapons instructor, she choked. She just, she didn’t know, flinched, pulled left, thought too much about what she was doing. And out of the corner of her eye she could see the weapons specialist roll his eyes. She could sense him mentally counting down the seconds until lunch.

It was her time in the module but Colleen was in there already, shooting away. Colleen didn’t seem to have noticed her coming in, didn’t look like she would finish any time soon, but Rose didn’t care, not really, and she was going to offer to let Colleen work with her, if she wanted, because it would have been nice to have the company, nice to talk to someone who wasn’t yelling at her for forgetting the Chinese character for “dead in the bathroom stall,” but as soon as Colleen saw Rose waiting outside, she shut her module down and packed her things and left, with barely a nod as she walked by.

The short of it was this: Rose was lonely, and it was affecting her work, and soon they were going to kick her out of assassin school, she knew it, and it was completely fucking stupid of her.

So she didn’t have friends. So she hadn’t seen the Woman in Red since the day she was brought here. So Henry turned and walked the other way whenever she saw him. So what? So what if the story the Woman in Red had told her had prepared Rose for something very different from all of this, had included words like leader and hero and saving the world and fighting the Good Fight ?

She was a silly little girl, she told herself. She was a silly little girl and she should just toughen up. She should toughen up and stop thinking about home and her momma and daddy and sister, mean old Gina and dumb old Patty. She should stop missing the way she had thought of herself when the Woman in Red first pulled her aside, first told her all about what she could become.

She should stop all of this, but she couldn’t.

Rose was sitting on her bed thinking about this — again — when someone knocked on the door of her room. The entire time she’d been at this school, this place, no one had knocked on her door.

“Who is it?” Rose asked, hopeful and suspicious all at once. She didn’t honestly care who it was, except in the back of her mind she did worry it might be someone come to make her go back home.

Colleen opened the door and poked her head inside and said, “Decent?”

“I guess,” Rose said, and then, feeling a little put off by this girl, who had not only opened her door but who was now standing inside the room without an invitation, she said, “I guess they don’t teach you to knock first in assassin school.”

“I did knock,” Colleen said.

“Well, I guess they don’t teach you to wait for the hostess to invite you in at, oh, fuck it,” Rose said. “What do you want?” She didn’t mean to sound this way, pissy and upset and on the verge of tears, real fucking tears, but she couldn’t help herself. Someone had come to see her in her room for the first time in nearly five weeks and she was fucking the whole thing sideways, she could tell, and she couldn’t stop herself. “I thought I locked the door. What, did you just break into my dorm room?”

“The doors don’t lock,” Colleen said. “House rules.”

“My bad. I must have misplaced my assassin school handbook.”

“That’s not what this is, you know.”

“Whatever. They’re going to kick me out anyway. Tomorrow maybe.”

“Maybe,” Colleen said. “It’s possible. You wouldn’t be the first.” Rose, who had been looking at the dirt under her fingernails, looked up. “There were twenty to start,” Colleen said when she knew she had Rose’s attention. “In fact, it’s kind of amazing that they brought you here at all. As far along as we are, that is.”

“Yeah, it’s been a fucking blast. I’m sure they’re as happy about it as I am.”

“Well. Maybe,” Colleen said. “Look. I know we’re not friends and you probably don’t care what I think, but you’re overthinking it. I’ve been watching you. You’re trying too hard. You’ve got natural ability, or they wouldn’t have brought you here. You’ve got it inside you but you’re not letting it out and soon, you’re right, soon they’re going to send you home. If they don’t think you can cut it, they’re going to send you back. Soon, like, maybe tomorrow.”

Rose turned to look away. Colleen opened the door again. Rose stood up and sighed and said, “You’re right.” Then she said, “We’re not friends and I don’t care what you think. So, thanks.”

Colleen smiled. “Stick around and we will be friends. Trust me.”

And then she left before Rose could say, “Doubt it,” so she yelled it as loud as she could at the closed door.

Rose decided she’d be long gone before either of those could happen. Becoming friends with Colleen or being kicked out.

She knew, she could tell by the way they looked at her — her instructors, everyone — that maybe she’d been holding on by a thread but that that thread had snapped and any minute someone — that fucker Henry — was going to show up at her door and tell her to pack her things and then take her back home. So. That night, she packed her backpack and left her room. She’d never tried to leave her room after lights-out before, which was weird since she’d been sneaking out of her momma’s house every night for the past three years, her mom’s Pall Malls stuffed into her shorts, the whole shitty town her playground, though mostly she just walked around the quiet, gaslit downtown and smoked cigarettes and kicked rocks and enjoyed not being at home.

The hallway outside her room was dark and quiet. She assumed there would be video cameras monitoring the compound at night, but she figured that no one would be monitoring them actively. As she moved out of the wing of the building that contained the dorm rooms she realized that there might be guards standing at the gate. She hesitated, considered going back to her room, figuring out an actual plan, but she’d made her decision, and she’d have to either sneak past the guards or talk her way past them.

There weren’t many men she couldn’t talk her way around.

When she reached the guards, she didn’t have to sneak past them or talk her way around them. They — two of them — were crumpled on the floor, unconscious (or dead), a trickle of blood running down the forehead of one, and at the sight of them, Rose stopped.

She moved to the guards, to see if they were alive, but then she saw the security monitor behind the desk, showing screen after screen of television snow, and she went there instead. It took her less than a minute to find and remove the device that was interfering with the signal. She shifted the screens from one wing and training room to another. The dorm rooms, too, including her own. The cameras were everywhere apparently. The thought made her shudder. But she didn’t see anyone. In fact, she didn’t see anyone at all. The girls’ rooms showed screen after screen of empty rooms. Beds unmade, rooms left in disarray. They’d been taken. Each and every one of them had been taken, wasn’t anywhere inside the buildings. Someone had invaded the compound, had disabled the guards, had abducted the trainees, had done all of this making hardly a sound.