Manuel Gonzales - The Regional Office Is Under Attack!

Now she will spin and drop and roll and lunge and throw her own magicks at Oyemi, borrowed of course, these magicks. A dagger, its blade forged in an interdimensional fire; an amulet stolen from the Regional Office itself, stored within its underground vaults, its powers never tested, unknown. She will weave a spell stolen from one of Oyemi’s own books, filched by Henry when he reported back to Oyemi that Emma was dead.

She will bring these powers to bear, and these powers will fall short, and Oyemi will deflect them all, turning fire into ice, melting the tip of the blade even as it flies through the air toward her, raising a host of roots from the very earth her house stands on, but despite all of this, she will fall.

Maybe Jimmie recomposes herself, sets the fire that burns Oyemi’s compound to its foundation, and the flames licking at Oyemi’s heels distract her just enough. Or maybe one of the Oracles, seeing for the first time her own bleak future, the charred bodies of her brethren, tries to save herself from Oyemi’s fate, and this, the sight of her Oracle, struggling to pull herself free from her pool, from the house, from this timeline, distracts Oyemi. Or maybe Emma, maybe Emma is simply that fast, that good, slipping past the roots even as they reach up to grab her, trip her, pull her into the earth and strangle her there. She slips past and cartwheels about and lands, finally, face-to-face with Oyemi, moves too quick for Oyemi to react, twists her head from her neck, and this, maybe this is what catches the world on fire.

One can imagine. This, any of this, all of this, none of this, but all one knows for sure is:

Henry made a plan.

He was a Recruiter, was good at recruiting and training, and so that was where he began.

Wendy first, whom he quietly installed at the Regional Office as an intern, as a mole. And then Windsor and Jimmie and Colleen and Becka and Rose, finally Rose.

Emma had strong feelings about Rose but he wasn’t certain, put off recruiting her until it was almost too late, and then he met her, and then he saw what Emma sensed in her, which was a kernel of Emma herself, lodged somewhere deep inside Rose.

And then he trained them, with Emma at his side, and then he went to work. Figuring out the location of Oyemi’s compound took six months. He did other things, too, in those two years. He recruited more Operatives for the Regional Office. He organized and collected the office donations for the March of Dimes. He hired various teams of mercenaries, paid grunts, and put them under the charge of his team.

For two years, he planned, and when the day came, he walked away from the Regional Office for good.

Although, technically he didn’t go into work that day.

Nor did he go to Oyemi’s compound.

Burning the compound to the ground, destroying everything within it, had been Windsor and Jimmie’s job.

Instead, Henry spent part of the day in the city.

The Met by the Etruscan vases, the small custom-jewelry store where he and Emma almost, as a joke, bought each other matching rings after they’d spent the day walking through Park Slope pretending to be one of those new young couples recently transplanted from Manhattan, on that rooftop where they’d eaten Italian ices together, the roof they’d snuck onto on Mulberry. He went to a toy store. He and Emma had come there only once and only because it had been raining so hard that they’d ducked into the first open store they came upon. They browsed the toys, walked down the aisles while the rain came down outside.

“What do you think about kids?” he’d asked.

“Oh, I hate them,” she said, her eyes wide and her mouth just slightly open.

He smiled and nodded and said, “Me too.”

And they smiled and then they kissed.

“I do like toys, though,” she said.

And he said, “Me too!” exaggerating for effect because they’d gotten into the habit of exaggerating in a way that characters sometimes do in romantic comedies or sitcoms because to think of this thing that was happening between them, whatever this thing was or would become, as anything more serious than a romantic comedy made them both nervous.

They spent an hour browsing through the toy store, stayed long past the end of the rainstorm, holding hands and looking at the toys of their youth, and then separated when she became involved with the kaleidoscope selection, began reminiscing about the kaleidoscope her father had bought for her to take as a present for a birthday party, but then her parents were killed a few days before the party and so she’d kept it, kept it for eight or nine years and through a series of foster homes, kept it until she was fourteen, when one of the boys she was living with, when she wouldn’t give him a kiss, smashed it with his boot, so she smashed his jaw with her fist, and after that started sneaking out of the house, and after that started shoplifting, and then auto-thefting, and so on, so forth.

“Maybe things would’ve been different,” she said, “if I’d never lost that kaleidoscope.”

“Maybe,” he said.

He said this even though he knew better, knew that the Oracles would have plucked her out of a mansion dream house just as easily as they would have picked her out of juvenile detention — it had happened before — just that more often than not the places the Oracles plucked these girls from were of the detention or psych-ward type, though you couldn’t blame the girls for this. They’d been imbued with unchecked mystical strength and intelligence, and it seemed nitpicky to complain when that sometimes also led to deviant, violent, often troublesome behavior.

He had admired Oyemi for this ability to seek out these young women, troubled perhaps the way she had been troubled before she’d discovered her own powers. He admired her ability to take what everyone else saw as weaknesses, as difficulties, and transform them into cold, hard, sharp strengths. When it came right down to it, aside from the fact that she had asked him to kill the one woman he’d come to love, he had liked Oyemi.

Though, liked was maybe too strong a word.

After a while, he’d tired of each new kaleidoscope she picked up and gazed into and so drifted away to the models and toy engineering sets and there found a ridiculous piece of crap that he couldn’t help but fall in love with.

It was a building kit and on the cover of the box was a Tyrannosaurus rex made from winches and girders and struts and, where there should have been clawed feet, tank treads. He pulled the box down from the shelf and looked at it. He pictured its pieces spread out over the light-gray rug in his cold, sterile living room, and for a second, he considered buying it, and then Emma came up behind him and looked over his shoulder at the box in his hand and laughed and said, “Boys and their dinosaurs.”

“Damn right,” he said, and looked at her and asked, “Find a dolly or something?”

She smiled and sheepishly, but not really, held up a twirling baton. “Guilty,” she said. He laughed and she laughed and said, “No, but wait,” and then she spun it and twirled it and threw it and spun herself and caught it.

“I used to be good at this,” she said. “You know,” she said. “Before.”

She ran her small routine again. He wanted to clap but smiled instead.

“We should get these,” she said, gripping it like a cop with his baton and then swinging it forcefully down over her head, “but, like, for all of the girls. We could put together a routine — I’d choreograph it of course — and the monsters, they’d see the bunch of us with these batons about to bash their skulls in — the fucking monsters wouldn’t know what hit ’em.”

She twirled it in her fingers lazily and smiled shyly, but he caught a hint of real shyness in that shy smile this time, and she said, “Right?”