Manuel Gonzales - The Regional Office Is Under Attack!

And so, yes, maybe Sarah had made efforts to take Wendy “under her wing” so to speak, offered her special attention, commended her on a job well done when it had been a job well done and sometimes even when it had been a job done only so-so, had offered her advice and brown-bag lunch dates in her office, practiced writing her letters of recommendation.

In hindsight, Sarah felt foolish. Even Sarah, desperate-for-human-contact Sarah, should have seen how naked these machinations were. Making a connection with Wendy had been too easy, way too easy, and Sarah knew herself well enough to know that she didn’t make connections that easily. Even in college, even with other difficult-to-connect-with mathematicians and physicists, she didn’t make connections, and so, connecting as easily as she had with Wendy, Sarah should have realized the wrongness of the connection and should have stopped liking Wendy, stopped offering her praise for her work, stopped thinking of her as a protégé, a future friend.

Well, Sarah had stopped now.

Sarah kept her eyes closed. She continued to pretend to be asleep. This infuriated Wendy, Sarah knew it did.

She could hear it in Wendy’s sigh.

“I’ll just have someone come in here and cut your eyelids off,” she said, disgusted that it had come to such threats. “I mean, for Christ’s sake, we took your arm off. What’s a pair of eyelids?”

Sarah threw in a snuffle and a hitching half snore for good measure.

“Funny,” Wendy said.

Then she said, “We all thought it was fake, you know.”

Sarah imagined Wendy’s face as she said this. Imagined her pouty face, which, in Sarah’s mind, wouldn’t be so pouty when it was smashed with her mechanical arm.

If only she’d had her mechanical arm.

“Not that the real thing did you any good, I suppose,” she said. “But we had a pool going, did you know that? We all made bets and we all lost.”

Wendy knocked something hard against the office desk. “It’s heavier than I thought it’d be.”

Sarah knew she was lying, knew that no matter what, Wendy was a lying bitch who would never, ever, not in a million years, bring the mechanical arm with her to interrogate or harass her.

Sarah knew this. She’d have been a fool to think otherwise, and Sarah — despite what people might have thought or said — was no fool.

“Simpler on the inside, once we took off all the skin. Simpler than I imagined it would be.” She rapped it against the desk again. “Whoops,” she said. “Fragile, too.”

Sarah opened her eyes.

She was the biggest fool she knew.

Wendy was holding a broomstick in her hand, rapping it against the desk. She smiled.

“Made you look,” she said. She laughed at her own joke, despite how sad and lame and unfunny it was.

Or maybe it wasn’t the joke Wendy was laughing at.

Then Wendy’s face changed. Like a ripple, the face shifted into a serious, very serious, face, but not pouty serious, which was a kind of face Sarah was accustomed to seeing on Wendy, not that, but something else, a dangerous kind of serious, which was a look Sarah had seen a number of times but never on Wendy. Never on Wendy or Henry or Mr. Niles or the Oracles, either, who were generally blank faced or smiling in their bald, creepy oracular way.

No. Wendy had a face all of a sudden that she shouldn’t have had.

She had the face of an Operative, not one of their own Operatives, obviously, but the same kind of very dangerous face of one of the very dangerous Operatives.

“We gave you a choice,” she said. “We made a reasonable — a more than reasonable — offer to you,” she said. She said this softly and almost as much to herself as to Sarah. She was trying to make it seem like there was something regrettable in what had happened so far, what was about to happen. Sarah couldn’t tell with Wendy what was real and what was an act, not anymore.

Then the face, that look, was gone and the pouty serious face was back, but Sarah couldn’t get the other face out of her head and she knew that Wendy had just done something, something deliberate to frighten Sarah, and Sarah wished she could tell herself that it hadn’t worked, but it had.

“Okay,” Wendy said, in a way that might have been the way a head cheerleader said it when her other cheerleaders had been goofing off or talking for too long about boys or had been on a bathroom break and it was time to get back to the hard work of cheerleading again. “Fun time’s over.” Said it in that bright, chipper high school girlish way, and then she closed the office door and lowered the office blinds and she waded into the deep end of Sarah’s despair, waded in there and did her best to make it deeper.

Jasmine wore glasses and was only five feet three inches tall, and her right arm was slower than her left and she was dyslexic.

Corrine suffered from painful and unpredictable and lengthy periods, arbitrary and violent, lasting weeks at a time.

Joan refused to brush her teeth or visit the staff dentist and chewed gum incessantly.

Veronica spooned two bites of food into her mouth at every meal before drenching her plate in salt while no one was looking.

Maddie drank a bottle of whiskey each night after returning home from assignment.

Erin took pills. Every kind of pill.

Eden cut herself with whatever sharp piece of metal she could find, literally, carrying in her mouth a tiny blade stripped from a razor or a thumbtack swiped from the office or the coiled jagged spring from a ballpoint pen, worming it deeper and deeper into her cheek, her tongue, the soft tissue connecting her tongue to her jaw.

These girls, Sarah thought. These poor girls and their powers and what their powers did to them.

Teri bound herself into her bed. Thick, leather, medical, insane-asylum straps bound.

Ruby punched her fist through piles of cinder blocks after each assignment, punched until her knuckles bled.

Rebecca had killed herself.

Serena and Hazel and the other Rebecca and Camille and Alyssa and Hannah and Anne-Michelle died, died, died, died, were killed in action, were killed in the field long before the Regional Office, before Henry had a chance to figure out what secrets they hid, what instabilities they manifested.

Henry had given her more files, more folders for her to read, but she stopped. She just stopped.

After the pool incident, a final confrontation between her and Jasmine was bound to happen. Sarah knew. She’d seen enough movies, read enough Gossip Girl novels to know that sooner or later, she and Jasmine would lock horns again. And, well, she’d rather have had it happen on her own terms, by her own doing, and would rather have stopped feeling so tense and anxious about when it would happen. So Sarah made it happen on her own.

She watched Jasmine’s comings and goings, waited for a moment when she would be by herself, and then Sarah jumped her.

That had been ten minutes ago. Their fight had lasted now for ten full minutes. It wasn’t going well.

It wasn’t going as badly as anyone who was not Sarah might have expected, considering.

But it wasn’t going as well as Sarah had hoped it would.

Sarah pulled her fist back to punch or counterpunch — she’d lost track by then who was punching, who was countering — but Jasmine was too fast, always too fast, and she bobbed under Sarah’s punch and slipped in close and grabbed Sarah with both hands, trapping Sarah’s arms at her sides, and lifted her off her feet, but instead of throwing her or cracking her head into the ceiling tiles, Jasmine pulled her down and held her so they were eye to eye. A thin trickle of blood ran down Jasmine’s temple. Sarah’s breath was huffed and squeezed out of her. Jasmine grimaced and Sarah struggled against Jasmine’s grip, and Jasmine smiled, and Sarah winced her eyes closed, expected the worst. And Jasmine pulled her in for a kiss.