Manuel Gonzales - The Regional Office Is Under Attack!

They had done all of this and had left her behind.

Son of a bitch, she thought.

Even the fucking bad guys, whoever they are, don’t know I’m here. Or maybe they knew and just didn’t give a shit because of how much I suck. God fucking damn it, she thought.

She kicked the security desk hard enough to punch a hole through it with her foot.

Then she grabbed her backpack and stormed out of the compound and went looking for the assholes who had left her behind.

It wasn’t an easy trail to pick up and follow, but she found it anyway and followed it almost ten miles. By the time she found the camp, it was after four in the morning.

She spotted three guards standing outside a large tent, and then another guard standing outside a smaller tent ten yards farther back. The large tent must have held the girls. She didn’t know what was inside the smaller tent, but at the moment she didn’t care. Then a fifth guard came strolling into the camp light.

They spoke, quickly and quietly. The boss was almost ready. The girls were secured. The truck was on its way. Fifteen, twenty minutes tops. Everything was moving on schedule, according to plan.

Only after the fact did she realize they were speaking Russian.

Well, fuck. She could speak Russian!

Rose looked behind her at the path she’d taken to get here, considered how long it would be before she could get back to the compound; find Henry, or anyone else; and bring that person, or whatever army she could muster, back to the campsite. Then she thought of what she’d packed with her. Her dress. A couple of language books. Her wedge sandals. A clicker pen she’d stolen from one of the near-empty offices. No weapons. No gear.

It shouldn’t have been left to her. Risking herself for these girls who hardly knew her, who could barely make the effort to smile at her anymore. This job should have been the job of someone else. Anyone else.

She sighed. She took a deep breath. Silently, she crept forward.

The director’s office had seemed a lot bigger to Rose before he’d started shooting lightning bolts at her. Although the lightning bolts weren’t as bad as they could have been.

Not to say they weren’t bad. Not to say they didn’t singe and burn. Not to say they didn’t hurt like hell.

Just to say: They should’ve killed her, but they didn’t.

For one, she was quick. They barely grazed her — her calf, her shoulder, her boot — as she tumbled around trying to get herself closer to the director. Closer, that was where he had seemed most vulnerable.

And for two, she was protected. Of course she was protected. Emma and Henry, they wouldn’t have sent her on a suicide mission. Or, sure, maybe they would have sent her on a suicide mission, but they wouldn’t have done so without offering her some amount of protection.

They were assholes, but the kind of assholes who wanted to win this thing.

So. Runes, spells, counterspells. A little extra help in case her innate superstrength and superspeed and all the training they’d given her wasn’t quite enough. Not that she believed in it. The magicks, that is. Not that she didn’t believe in it, either. If there were women with superpowers and Oracles who could predict the future and a woman in a place called the Regional Office with a mechanical arm that looked like just any other arm, why couldn’t there be magicks and spells and runes? Just that they sprung this voodoo on her right before she left and for all she knew, someone back at base could have lit a Virgen de Guadalupe candle for her, too. Not to mention that the way she imagined it, when they cast these spells over her it would have felt like a shimmery dome, except, really, it was like nothing had happened. She had expected it to be like that game kids play where they crack an imaginary egg over your head and it feels real, like egg yolk is really dribbling down your face, but she didn’t get even that. Just, “So when are they going to cast these protective countermeasures?” and, “They already did. You’re good to go.”

Still. They weren’t doing nothing.

Not to mention this polyester-blend bullshit they called her assault uniform. Sure, it didn’t fit her right — too tight on the calves, because not everyone had the calves and ankles of a fucking gazelle like Windsor did, and too loose in her chest, because, well, she was seventeen (eighteen in two weeks) for Christ’s sake, and not the most developed seventeen-year-old — and it didn’t breathe at all, like, as soon as she put it on, she was cooking inside it, sweat dripping down her back and into her fucking panties, but as a flame and lightning and bullet and, who knows, a dragon-breath deterrent, it had its strong points.

But it didn’t much matter — outside of keeping her alive — because she didn’t know how long all this shit would stand up to the guy with the glove that had once been a hand, and the director wasn’t letting her get close. He let loose with a barrage of lightning bolts and a whooshing of gale-force winds, and she wondered if all this glove could do was X-Men Storm-style shenanigans, or if there were more deadly uses that the director just wasn’t smart enough or skilled enough to have figured out yet.

She also wondered what the hell happened if you cut that shit off his hand.

Like, would he be consumed by the blue flame of the glove’s power latching on to the closest warm body as that power was released from the glove itself?

Or would he just be in a lot of fucking pain because she’d cut off his hand?

Was it even attached to him or was he just kind of wearing it?

Either way, it was bound to be a better situation than one in which he still had the glove and his hand.

Normally, the thought of cutting off his hand wouldn’t have crossed her mind. Not like she was carrying a couple of ancient Japanese swords with her. They were all expected to wade into this fray weaponless — well, they were the weapons, right? — that was what all that training had been about. Well. Training had also been about the use of all the various weapons one could use — rifles, pistols, silencers, brass knuckles, swords, knives, garroting wires. The usual. But still, their whole philosophy being: Train the person to be a weapon and they won’t need to carry extra weapons with them, with a secondary philosophy in: Don’t be above using whatever potential weapon might be at hand if you want. And she’d seen it — when the bookshelf began rocking — she’d noticed an ornamental kind of sword on a stand on the very top shelf. It looked like some Ren Faire knockoff, but any thinnish piece of metal with enough of a blade coupled with the power of her mighty fucking punch should do the trick.

Let’s be honest: If she couldn’t cut a sword — even the cheapest of swords — clean through a guy’s wrist, she should just turn in her Trained Assassin Badge and Assassin Gear and open up a quilting shoppe.

Tired of this tumbling-around bullshit and with the beginnings of an idea for a plan in mind, she charged right at him, hoping to get close enough to him to a) get by him and to the sword, and then b) cut off his fucking hand.

He lit into her with some fierce blue crackling power shit. She spun into and then out of it and stumbled straight into him, tripping on half a desk drawer on her way. She grabbed for him as she fell forward, snagged the cuff of the glove — the wrist of the former hand? — and then, falling, falling, she yanked it clean off.

Rose crept for a hundred or so feet toward the camp where they were holding the girls, then paused long enough to pick up a medium-sized branch and throw it in a high arc over the heads of the guards and over the large tent, waiting for it to crash into something on the other side, grab the guards’ attention just long enough so that she could skitter across the flat, bright expanse separating her from the guards and the tent.