Manuel Gonzales - The Regional Office Is Under Attack!

She had three of them off their feet and flat on their backs — the Spindletop move — before the fourth knew she was even there. He lunged, she slipped through his lunge — that one was Thread the Needle — caught him in his solar plexus with her knee as she passed by him, an afterthought really, then, pivoting, threw her weight, in the form of her elbow, onto his back, heard the cough, the whoof escape his mouth, but heard, too, the charge coming from her blind side, shifted her weight right, spun low — the Revolving Door (Crouching) — and swept the fifth guard off his feet, heard the action of a semiautomatic, from behind her again (next time, she would make sure there weren’t so many different angles to attack her from), and without thinking performed a zigzagging series of back handsprings, aerials, and flips, suddenly so fast, so much faster than she thought she could be, that when she stopped and realized she was standing just inches away from the guard with the gun, she swooned a little from the head rush, but not so much she couldn’t grab the rifle by its butt and shove it hard into the guy’s nose and then take it from him.

She spun around with the rifle ready to fire some too-close-for-comfort warning shots at the others, but they were gone.

Well.

Two of them were gone, the other three were on the ground, breathing but knocked out. The last one, the one with the now-broken nose and no longer the rifle in his hands, stood up behind her, his right hand cupping the blood coming out of his nose, his left hand raised as if he were giving up, but she couldn’t trust him, Rose decided, so she brained him again with the butt of the rifle.

All in all, she figured it’d taken her five minutes.

She looked around the campsite. Looked at the four men knocked out and on the ground at her feet. She looked at the rifle in her hands.

Then she fainted.

It had been a test, of course. Everything with these people was all about tests. Project-based learning, the other girls told her. All the rage in Europe.

“How did they know?” Rose asked. “How did they know I’d try to leave tonight?”

Colleen shrugged. “They know,” she said. “They know just about everything.”

She had passed, of course. With flying colors, in fact. Better than anyone had expected, in fact. When she came to, Colleen had been there, picking pine needles and dirt from her hair. “Don’t worry,” Colleen had said. “They don’t deduct points for fainting at the end.” Then she smiled and then she laughed and explained the test, the fact that they were given strict orders to keep their distance until she passed, that for whatever ineffable Emma reason, this had been all part of Rose’s training.

“I mean,” Colleen said, “we all had to pass this test, but we did it as a team and with more training under our belts. None of us had to do what you just did, all alone.”

Then Emma and Henry stepped into view and Emma helped Rose to her feet and told her how impressed she’d been, and for a long time, the whole thing made Rose so fucking mad that she could barely speak. Even when she could speak and she could smile at it and laugh it off and pretend that none of it bothered her, the thought of the whole thing pissed her off all over again whenever it came up.

But now. Now she was part of the team. She was an integral part of the team. She knew fuck-all about what they were going to be doing as a team, but that could wait. She didn’t care about that now that she was a piece of a whole, and not just any whole, but a superpowered, kick-ass, girl-team whole. And now, all she cared about was which fake trail Colleen came down and how awesome it was going to be that she beat them.

Except, Colleen should have found at least one of the trails by now. First Wendy and then one of the trails, maybe both of the trails, but certainly not all three of the trails. But where was she?

Rose’s instinct was to rabbit, but she tamped that down. Her trails, her booby traps, were good, very good. So good, in fact, that she wished it was Henry on her trail and not Colleen. And then she would watch him as the net tripped him up and yanked him into the trees overhead or as the trip wire loosed the branches and covering below his feet, sent him falling into the deep ditch she’d found and made deeper earlier that morning. Then she would climb up or down and help get him free, or maybe, if he fell into the ditch, she would just stay down there with him. She wouldn’t lord it over him all triumphantly because that seemed unbecoming, even to her, but she would make him admit to her that she’d done good, better than he’d have expected, that she’d gotten to him. Once he’d admitted all of that, she’d admit that he’d gotten to her. She’d hit him, gently but firmly in the shoulder or the chest, and call him a dumbass, tell him his stupid fucking plan to stay away from her didn’t work, that all it had done was make her think about him more, and that he was an idiot. He’d say, I know, or maybe he’d say, I was a fool, and then they’d kiss again. The hole was deep enough to keep prying eyes out of it all, whatever happened in her booby trap, and she’d kiss him but for real this time, and then? Who the fuck cared about And then? And then would take care of its own damn self.

But it wasn’t Henry on her trail. It was Colleen, who hadn’t found the dummy trail or the fake dummy trail, who had, in fact, found Rose’s third trail, and who had crouched herself down behind Rose — how? how had she crept up on her so fucking quietly? — and whispered, finally, into Rose’s ear, “Nice work, kid. You almost had me fooled.” Then she said, “Wendy’s going to kill you for those boots, you know.”

And then, grabbing Colleen swiftly by her weak-side arm, Rose flipped her up and over and onto her backside. “Yeah, maybe,” Rose said, “but she’s going to have to find me first.” And then she ran, laughing as she disappeared back into the woods.

The director shoved Rose back and scrambled to grab the glove, which she had flung across the room. She grabbed him by the ankle and tripped him to his face. He kicked wildly to make her let go and somersaulted himself closer to the glove and onto his feet. She kicked the bookshelf hard enough to drop the sword into her lap.

It was sharper and finer wrought than she’d expected.

She stood and held it loose at her side.

Sweaty and his shirt untucked and his own shirtsleeve scorched from the glove or from her pulling off the glove, the director looked almost as worse for wear as she felt.

Not that it mattered. He’d grabbed the glove. He stood up with it and turned to look at her and he sighed a heavy sigh and looked almost sad.

Maybe he hadn’t had a chance before to really see her, to see how young she was, to see how much she resembled the very women he had brought to the Regional Office and helped to train, the women (and girls) he had guided and loved, or maybe he was feeling sad about what was to come — cleaning up the mess of this assault, checking in on the families of those who’d been lost today, picking up the pieces and moving forward. She didn’t know. All she knew was that he must have been feeling pretty fucking confident to already be looking sad about what he was going to have to do to her, how he was going to have to move forward with all of this.

But then he wasn’t putting on the glove and then she looked at the glove, looked more closely, saw that it had ripped — or she had ripped it — from the bottom of its wrist/cuff to the point where the middle finger met the palm, and it hung there limp and unnerving but powerless, even she could sense its powerlessness.

He dropped the glove. He closed his eyes. The fight had all come to an end so quickly Rose wasn’t sure what she should do next.