Manuel Gonzales - The Regional Office Is Under Attack!

Maybe he’d wanted something from her but had gotten cold feet and decided not to ask, or maybe he had some lingering sense of obligation to her as her father, but either way, she never saw him again after that.

Her father hadn’t been the only one to fail to ask her what had happened to her so long ago. No one seemed to know that she had gone, had been whisked away so many years ago, or they had known she’d gone somewhere but had assumed she’d gone to some normal kind of place in the normal kind of way. College or junior college or to a slightly larger town, maybe, to find a slightly better kind of life. No one who saw her as she maneuvered again through her small hometown, which had changed so little, could even muster surprise that she had come back, but instead made automatic assumptions that she had gotten married and came back to raise her family, or that she’d come back looking to get married before it was too late, or that she’d gotten a job teaching at the elementary school, or was going to be working at the courthouse as a paralegal or an assistant. How they formed such specific ideas about why she was back and what she was doing, she didn’t know, but nobody seemed surprised, and when she told them she hadn’t decided what she was going to do yet, they gave her a sweet, poor-thing look and patted her gently on her arm and told her, “You’ll find something, I’m sure.” And then they’d ask her about church and make sure to invite her to theirs.

Even Stacey hadn’t been that surprised when Rose knocked on the door. Rose sat on the couch and waited for fifteen, twenty minutes, listened to Stacey complain about the house; about their mother’s death and all the hassle that accompanied it; about their father, who had shown up not even two days after the funeral trying to make some kind of sinister claim on this house; listened to her go on about all of this before Stacey finally, sighing heavily, asked, “So what’s been up with you?

“We just figured you went off to live with Dad,” she said when Rose asked if they hadn’t gone looking for her, hadn’t even noticed that she’d gone.

“But I didn’t,” Rose said. “Did you even ask Dad?”

Stacey shrugged.

“I went away. I was taken away,” Rose said. Kidnapped, she almost said. Changed.

Stacey shrugged her heavy shoulders again. “And now you’re back, so what? You look fine.”

“Honestly,” her old friend Patty said when she saw her, “at first we kind of assumed that you’d been raped and murdered by that guy, what was his name? And we were about to say something about it, but then your sister told us your mom kicked you out of the house and sent you to live with your daddy.”

She had met Patty for lunch near the end of her first week back home, when she was just beginning to think about staying. Patty hadn’t stopped growing until long after Rose had left, had grown into a tall, broad-shouldered woman who wore her shiny black hair in a shoulder-length bob with bangs.

“You should definitely go see Gina,” Patty had said. “It would kill her to see you, still so thin.” And then, after hardly any time at all, they ran out of things to say and ate their lunches quietly but for the soft grunting sounds Patty made while she ate, and then it was time for Patty to go, shopping to do, dinner to make, laundry to fold, and she gave Rose a hug and told her how nice it was to see her again, and then she was gone, and for the first time, standing outside on the square watching the tall, hulking frame of Patty lumber down the street, for the first time in what seemed like a very long time, Rose knew what she wanted to do.

Or maybe want was too strong a word, or the wrong word altogether. She knew what she needed to do.

She needed to come back home. She’d left too soon, left before she’d been ready, and since leaving home, her life had gone off the rails. She’d cut a man in half, for Christ’s sake. And had done other things, sure, but there’s not much left after having done that. And she felt on the run, always unsettled and on the move. But coming home. Starting over. That would fix everything.

The robot punched her, finally, but really punched her. And for the first time in her life, Rose thought, Oh, Jesus. I think I might lose.

She shot across the room and hit her back against the far wall, embedded herself there, the wind knocked out of her.

Even if she could have moved her head, she wouldn’t have looked down, wouldn’t have dared to look at the spot where the thing hit her, afraid there would be a hole there, a robot-fist-shaped hole passing right through her chest, where her heart should have been. That’s how it felt, anyway, as if the thing punched clean through her, everything else caving in around that spot, as if that spot had obtained the gravitational property of a tiny black hole.

“I expected you to be stronger,” the robot said.

“I expected you to be faster and smarter, too,” it said.

“I expected this to be much more difficult than it has been, honestly. Expected you to put up at least a little bit of a fight. To be clever. To find some way to try, at least.”

Rose couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t move. Then it grabbed her, lifted her up, a foot off the ground, maybe more, she couldn’t tell. It turned her around, its hand wrapped tightly around her throat again. Its robot head was bent toward her ear.

It’s strange, she thought, that they gave a robot lips.

“I wanted this to be more interesting,” it said, and then it dropped her and she landed badly on her ankle and maybe that was broken now, too.

If she was going to be honest with herself, and what better fucking time to be honest with yourself than at the very goddamn end, it was less the fact that she never saw Emma again after the Regional Office job. That hurt, sure. She loved Emma. They all loved Emma. But she wasn’t surprised, and so maybe it hurt just a little bit less.

But that bastard Henry had told her he loved her (okay, so maybe in a best-friend, brotherly kind of way, but still, she was only eighteen, she was impressionable, and he should have known better), told her that he would come find her after the job was finished, that they would have some kind of adventure when it was all said and done (and maybe when he said they he meant all of they and not just him and her).

And it wasn’t like he was dead.

She knew for a fact that he wasn’t dead.

Colleen had told her he wasn’t dead.

She had run into Colleen once in Spain. Ibiza. Rose was in between jobs, hadn’t yet experienced her Mariana Trench epiphany, but it wasn’t far off, either.

They ran into each other in an open-air market. It was awkward, at first, and then they fell onto each other, hugging and sobbing. They spent the next two days with each other, sleeping at each other’s hotel rooms, one waking early and buying coffee for the other, visiting tourist sites with each other, until finally Colleen insisted they simply stay in the same hotel, the same room, to save money, even though they both had money to burn. They didn’t talk about the camp, or Emma, or their assaults, or the attack, the things they had done, the people they had lost. Colleen had enrolled in cooking classes at the hotel. This was her third time through the class. She’d been there for months and had learned how to scuba dive, had parasailed, had learned spearfishing, had gone pearl diving, had exhausted and worn out the poor activity director, had seen the sights so many times that she had considered, jokingly, applying for a job as a tour guide. She paid for a long-term rental scooter. Rose didn’t have to ask her why she hadn’t simply bought a scooter or let out an apartment, for that matter. Colleen made paella and brought it back to the room one night. Another night she made diver scallops with a vanilla-champagne reduction, and Rose asked her what was Spanish about it and Colleen shrugged and said, “Saffron, I guess,” and the next morning, as they sat on the balcony of Colleen’s hotel room, which stunned Rose every time with its view of the Sant Antoni Bay, as they sat there silent but not comfortable in their silence, having run out of everything to talk about that wasn’t the operation, that wasn’t Emma or the Regional Office, Rose asked her if she’d heard from anyone else.