Manuel Gonzales - The Regional Office Is Under Attack!

Except her arms weren’t tired, and her legs weren’t tired. Nothing was tired. And she was fifteen, maybe twenty minutes ahead of schedule, so why the rush, right? Let’s figure this shit out. Let’s use the Force, Luke, and all that other seeking-deep-within-ourselves-for-the-True-Answer bullshit she had been fed at Assassin Training Camp.

She let go of the ledge, held on to the rope, pushed herself off the wall into a gentle bit of pendulumming. She closed her eyes and went deep, went real fucking deep inside herself.

And here’s what she saw:

A map, in her head, a detailed motherfucker of a map, not just of the ventilation shaft but of the whole ordeal: travel agency, director’s office, training rooms, employee break rooms. Each girl had this same map stuck inside her head. Hell, if she wanted, she could pull up the secret compound in upstate New York, too. So.

Where was she?

A pinprick of light glowing hotly in the ventilation shaft.

Okay. Where was she supposed to be?

Same fucking light.

Good. All good, except, it wasn’t right. She could feel it. Something was still wrong, with her or her map or the fucking shaft.

She felt this overwhelming urge to open her eyes, to just look around and see, Hey, there’s the opening I need, but she wouldn’t let herself. Whatever it was that was wrong, her eyes were in on it, she was sure. Her body — fingers, legs — in on it, too.

Devil’s advocate: Security had been fixed by their woman on the inside, or that’s what she had told Henry and Emma, had told all of them, and Rose had made it this far — the others, too — without sounding off any alarms, so the intel seemed good enough. The opening was dead-to-rights right in front of her. She’d been on this rope for ages and was on a strict schedule. So what was her hesitation?

Counterargument: That she was hesitating at all was her goddamn hesitation. She’d never been one for thoughtful consideration of action and consequence, had been a headfirst, why-the-hell-not kind of a girl, and if anything made her pause even a little, well, fuck, that seemed suddenly enough to make her pause a lot.

Time ticked by.

She opened her eyes. The rope dropped out of sight and into the darkness below her. It stretched out of sight above her. She’d stopped swinging ages ago. Everything was pointless. She closed her eyes again, frustrated.

She had to do something. She couldn’t just hang there.

Okay, just playing devil’s advocate one more time: What if the whole thing is a setup? What if the whole point of this is to stop me in my fucking tracks? What if it all only feels wrong just to make me hang here, immobile and useless, until it’s too late and the whole shebang is finished and I’ve fucked up the whole operation?

Counterargument: Fine. Fuck it.

She opened her eyes. The opening looked as real as it ever had. She swung her legs back and forth to get some momentum and then grabbed, finally, hold of the ledge. It felt as real as it had just five minutes ago. So far so good. She let go of the rope with her other hand and grabbed fully on to the ledge. And then everything she was looking at, everything she was holding on to, flickered like a hinky picture on a shitty cell phone, and then it was gone and she was holding on to the smooth, purchaseless side of the ventilation shaft, or, rather, not holding on to it, not holding on to anything, and she fell.

The wind from the truck window caught hold of Rose’s hair, pulling it out of Henry’s truck. Henry wasn’t doing much talking and she didn’t feel like talking much, either. She watched the landscape pass by, familiar and dull, and only half listened to whatever was on the radio in the background.

“Those your friends?” Henry asked.

She had been biding her time, she realized. The last few weeks of summer, these first few weeks of school, sure, but even before that. These past few years. Maybe her whole life. Biding her time. She understood that now, and that here, even in Henry’s truck, she was still biding her time.

“Not really, no,” she said.

How was what she had been doing different from what Gina and Patty had been doing with their lives? she wondered.

They were biding their time, too. They just didn’t know it. That was what was different. They would finish out high school, Gina still a virgin, Rose was sure of it, and then each go off to college, with maybe a stop-off at the junior college for a couple of years first, and then, degrees in hand or not, they would wind their way back to this dump of a town, their eyes set on Randall Thomas (Gina) or Clem Buchanan (Patty), or boys of their ilk, inheritors of their daddies’ body repair shops or small-town construction firms. They might work for a couple of years, teaching kindergarten or managing one of the antique shops on the square, and then quit working once it was time to start pushing kids out of their nethers. It was an oppressive and frightening thought, picturing the two of them not much different from their bitter, hard-smoking mothers. But it was a thought she kept close to the surface, a reminder, a sort of anti-goal she’d set for herself, alongside, Don’t wind up stuck here like your loser parents did, or, more simply, Don’t turn into your loser parents, her dad a shiftless asshole who hadn’t worked an honest day in his life (according to her mother), her mother a nagging, thickheaded harpy who couldn’t see a man’s potential, couldn’t see past the tip of her blunted nose (according to her dad).

Henry turned the truck into the Stop-N-Go and she came out of her head.

“What are we doing here?”

Henry smiled his strange, uncomfortable smile. “I need to get some gas, remember?”

“Oh. Right.”

“Won’t take a sec.”

She opened her door and slid out of the truck. “Since we’re here,” she said casually, tossing the words over her shoulder as she crossed the parking lot.

“Hey, wait,” Henry said, but she wasn’t listening.

She might as well get something good out of this shitty day.

Ian Honsinger had told her he’d be working the Stop-N-Go, and if she came by and she was nice to him, he’d get her some cigarettes. Whatever being nice meant. That she had wound up here, by fate or accident, made her feel better about heading out with Henry. Plus she could use a cigarette.

Honsinger was at the counter, like he’d said he’d be, but seeing him, and his leering smile, and his cheap haircut, she wasn’t sure the cigarettes were worth the effort it would take to flirt with him.

“Hi, Rosie,” he said, stretching out the “e.” Then he looked past her and at Henry, and his eyes squinted and his mouth turned. “Who’s that you’re with?”

She looked casually over her shoulder, even though she knew Henry was the only other person at the gas pump. “Some guy. Henry, I guess.”

Ian stepped out from behind the counter and there was something puffed up and threatening about him now. She noticed, then, how he hadn’t stopped giving Henry the stink eye. “I don’t know him.” He looked down at her for a second. “I’ve never seen him before.”

She wanted to get a pack of cigarettes and a Coke and then get back into Henry’s truck, or maybe not that, either, maybe just the cigarettes and the drink and out of this gas station, which smelled strongly of Ian’s body spray now that he’d started moving around, casting the scent of himself into the farthest corners of this tiny little place.

Why was everything in this fucking town so damn tiny?

“Whatever,” she said. “Like you know everyone.” Then she poked him in the chest. “You gonna get me those cigarettes like you promised or what?”

He stopped staring down Henry, who hadn’t noticed anyway, and looked at Rose, then grabbed her poking finger in that thick palm of his. “I don’t know,” he said, smiling his stupid smile again. “What are you going to give me for them?”