Manuel Gonzales - The Regional Office Is Under Attack!

Her hope had been to compress her life to make it seem like it had been one straight line from childhood to this moment in her late twenties, that there might arrive a day when she could step out of her yarn and bead shoppe and look at the small downtown square of her small Texas town and believe, deep inside herself, that everything else — Emma, the training camp, Henry, all the other girls, the assault on Regional, what she’d done in Spain and Morocco, all the things she had done — must have happened to somebody else, and maybe this hadn’t quite worked out as well as she’d hoped it would, but she’d been trying, damn it. She’d been trying really fucking hard. She hadn’t fucked Gina’s husband, had she? And she could have. Gina was as tight-assed as she had been when they were kids and she could tell that dude was itching for a good fuck, or, hell, any kind of fuck. But Rose didn’t, did she? And when the quilting shop on the other side of town kept stealing customers from her, undercutting her prices, offering knitting and quilting classes — that had been her fucking idea — she hadn’t burned that place to the fucking ground, had she? These were choices she made. Hard choices made deliberately. And look at how things were going with Jason. As much as it hurt her pride to think on it, she was in a fucking relationship with a guy who wanted to be called Jace.

That was growth. That was change.

So, yeah, this shitty life was the life she felt she deserved, a comeuppance of sorts, an off-her-high-horse sort of life, but it was life, still. She’d had plenty of opportunity to choose otherwise, but she had chosen shitty life over no life a long time ago, and damned if she was going to let some Robocop-looking robot take that away from her.

Except she couldn’t figure this robot out.

The robot, she decided, was fucking with her. Playing games with her. Hurting her, sure, beating the shit out of her, well, not quite, not yet.

But still.

It was a goddamn megarobot or whatever, so why wasn’t it beating the shit out of her? Why wasn’t it going in for the kill? It pained her to think this, but she thought it might have even been pulling its punches, giving it to her easy.

Rose had gotten in her shots, too. The antique, heavy register smashed down on its head. The knitting needle shoved into its ankle gear that, for a second, had made the robot limp, but then the needle was shoved out somehow, hard enough to stick into the wall, and the thing repaired itself right in front of her.

It was fast and it was smart and it was strong but she was learning, moment by moment, catching on to its rhythms, picking up on its tells. But. Rose had a sinking feeling that all of this was a game to the robot, that every punch she landed, every small bit of damage she inflicted on that thing, only made it stronger, as if whatever fueled it fed on the kinetic energy of each impact.

She stood up. The robot held bunches of yarn in its robot fists. It was saying something, she could tell by the movement of its nonrobot lips, but there was a ringing in her ear and she couldn’t hear much above that.

Maybe it was testing her.

God, she thought. This better not be another fucking test.

Her nose was bleeding. Her left eye was swelling up and soon she wouldn’t be able to see out of it, not well enough to fight, anyway.

If this is another test…, she thought, and for a second, at the idea of someone else throwing some unbeatable monster at her as a way to test her, she wanted to give up.

She was so done with being tested.

Henry and Emma and Jonathan and that guy for that job in Spain.

It would go like this: She would figure out some way to beat this robot or get past it, or there would be some kind of switch or mechanism and if she found that and threw it or clipped it or punched it, this robot would come to a shuddering halt and then some asshole in an expensive suit that on him would look incredibly cheap would step out from the shadows, slow-clapping or maybe not. Maybe instead of the slow clap of grudging respect, she’d get a snarky bit of, “I was beginning to worry you might not ever figure that one out.” But either way, there would be some dangerous job, some exorbitant payoff, some promises made. Promises, promises, promises. And her entire yarn and bead shoppe would have been crushed all to hell because some asshole with an outsized checkbook and a desire to rescue his dead wife from the bowels of hell, or who had called forth some demon horde and had lost control of them, wanted to a) test his toy out and b) make sure she was still up to the work.

Except she wasn’t. Any yahoo in the shadows watching this fight go down would be able to see pretty easily that she was not up to the test, much less the job, whatever it turned out to be. She’d been fighting, what, fifteen minutes and already she was tired. Tired and out of practice. She’d become a creature of habit. Her life had become easy and predictable — work all day in her yarn and bead shoppe, dinner with Jason, back to his house for a bottle of wine or a six-pack of beer, where they’d watch some trash on the Learning Channel or the Food Network with her dog, and then she’d drift off to sleep on the couch and he’d wake her with a soft kiss on her lips and then down her neck and then they’d move things to the bedroom, or else he’d fall asleep, too — and that was how she liked it, had been what she looked forward to, the regularity of this, the simplicity of this, seven days a week.

And now she had to muster herself up for this?

And then the robot had her by the neck.

“Says here you offer classes,” the robot said, loud enough she could hear it over the ringing in her ear.

It held her pressed up against the corkboard wall near the bathroom in the back. It pulled the flyer off the corkboard. Rose had been trying to get people to take her knitting classes for a year now, but all the people who would have been interested in knitting already knew how to knit, or else they signed up for classes at that quilting shop on the other side of town. “What do you think?” it said in its voice that was still not a robot voice. Then the robot held its free hand in front of Rose’s face, wiggled its thick, shiny robot fingers at her. “Are these knitting hands?”

The humor, too.

Rose didn’t quite understand the humor, wouldn’t have expected that from a robot. Yet here it was, making a joke, maybe making fun of her, even.

The grip around her neck was loose enough that she could say something if she wanted, and she had the uncanny sense that the robot was expecting her to say something. As if the robot had made a joke and she was supposed to look fear and death in the eye and say, Fuck it, and offer her own witty remark in return. She’d never been any good at that sort of thing, and she didn’t know what to say to the robot wiggling its fingers in her face, and so all she could resort to was what she knew.

“I have a number of different-sized knitting needles,” Rose told it. “I’m sure we can find something that would work.”

For a second, it looked like the robot was about to smile, and then it thrust her up with such force that she cracked her head against and then through the crappy drop-down ceiling tiles and she thought, not for the first time, about the original wood-beamed ceiling, and how she’d always wanted to tear away the tiles to expose those beams, and this reminded her of the director’s office and the nice beaming going on there.

Exposing those beams would have made this space so much nicer.

When she was ten, Rose’s daddy had taken her to the beach. It was strange. Even Rose knew at ten how strange it was. He shook her awake while it was still dark, held his finger up to his mouth to quiet her down, and then smiled a smile that usually meant he was drunk, but this morning she couldn’t smell any of the drink on him, which made his smile even more worrisome.