Manuel Gonzales - The Regional Office Is Under Attack!

“Definitely,” he said, and he bought her the baton, and now, since he couldn’t find here what he’d really hoped to find here, what he hoped to find everywhere he looked, he wanted to buy himself that damn Tyrannosaurus rex, but the store had changed. It was still a toy store, if you could call it that, but full of European toys, promising education and not a whit of fun.

He picked up yet another blocky, handmade wooden toy car and placed it back in disgust and then left.

He had a plane to catch.

Though by all accounts, he missed that plane, checked in, obtained an electronic boarding pass, but never boarded, and perhaps he purchased two tickets, boarded under an alias, but it is also easy enough to imagine a slightly different scenario.

Easy enough to imagine him stealing a car instead. Taking this car up the Hudson and across the George Washington Bridge and out of Manhattan and north.

Maybe he drove north, through Paramus and past Mahwah, north along the Hudson River. Maybe he took I-87 for nearly two hours north and then turned off toward Hunter but didn’t stop in Hunter, but turned onto an unmarked, little-used road and followed it for another twenty minutes, and turned off it onto a private driveway that wound for another two miles, but even before he wound his way up the drive, maybe he felt, even if he couldn’t see, the smoke in the air, thick plumes of it billowing up and out, black enough that the presence of it was palpable even against the black, moonless night, and when he arrived, maybe he wasn’t surprised to find the compound ablaze, and if there was one piece of it not on fire, he could not tell by looking at what was in front of him.

And once there, maybe he waited. Waited for the fire to jump through the tall metal gate and catch hold of the woods surrounding the compound. Or waited for something else. Perhaps he sat in his car and watched the flames burn hot for as long as he could, until the smoke became too much for the car’s filter. And while there, he hoped, what? To see some sign of Emma, perhaps. Some sign from her? She was dead (or if not dead, if her death was faked, they had already established their rendezvous plans). But still. Maybe this is where he had come, why he missed his first flight out of the city.

And maybe he caught a glimpse of something out of the corner of his eye. A movement, a shadow cast by the flames, he was sure, but for a second, maybe he thought it was Emma. He could picture her stepping out of the woods, mystically untouched by the flames that raged only on the other side of the gate, stepping out and rapping her knuckles on the passenger window to get him to unlock the door.

He would have liked to have had her with him then. If she were around to console him in this moment, he wouldn’t need consoling in the first place. But still. Maybe he wanted to be there with someone. He wanted to have someone there to hear him say, What happened to it all? He wanted someone to hear him say, There was something special here. We had something real. The Regional Office was something real. Say, What went wrong? He wanted someone there to acknowledge that something great and singular and brilliant and wonderful was going away, had already gone, in fact. Even now, as he watched Oyemi’s compound burn, he wanted there to be at least one other person watching with him who knew what was happening, one other person to be sad about it with him, to regret, not the fact that he was instrumental in its demise, but that the Regional Office had become a place where demise, where violent upheaval and near-total annihilation, seemed inevitable. Seemed the only option left.

He would have sighed. The smoke and heat would finally have been too much. He would have thrown his car in reverse, turned the thing around. He’d have checked his rearview mirror, the sky lit by the false sunset of Oyemi’s compound burning out of existence, and he’d have wondered at how quiet it was, at how the road in front of him was nothing but peace and quiet and calm. Even as he drove, he would have thought about Emma, looked for her out in the woods on either side of the road. He would have wished she were there beside him, and at once, the idea that she had slipped into the trunk of his car while he was distracted by the flames would have become for a second so real that he pulled over, stepped out of the car, and opened the trunk, but, of course, she wouldn’t have been there.

Maybe, then, he looked around, took a deep breath. And maybe, then, he got back into his car and kept driving, drove back into the city, back to the airport, where he should have gone to begin with.

But whatever the case: He missed his flight, and he scheduled another.

At the airport, he clutched his boarding pass and placed his shoes and his coat on the conveyor belt and walked through the detector. Something about this simple act released a tension that had been building inside of him since he left a dead Emma in a burning house, since he left the Regional Office.

It had been so long since he’d flown out of any airport but the Regional Office airport, so long since he’d had to stand in line, wait for a ticket, pass through security, wait for the boarding call, that he felt suddenly like a boy again, as if he were on some grand and mysterious adventure.

Feeling adventurous and boyish, he walked into a place called the Fuel Bar and found a seat and ordered a cocktail — a peach concoction called the High Dive — and then he leaned back in his chair and smiled.

He looked at the time.

He tried to think of what he’d be doing right now if he were at the office. He closed his eyes and tried to remember what he’d put on his calendar for the day. Meetings, meetings, a lunch meeting, and then meetings. In between all of that? Filing something, probably, or training a Recruit. But then he thought about what had actually happened at the Regional Office after he left, what might be happening still. Now that he had left in such a spectacular fashion.

How mad would Sarah be?

If she were still alive, that was.

He had let them know that he would prefer it if she didn’t die, but he also let them know that ultimately it was up to them how they handled Sarah if she didn’t accept their offer, their way out, their way forward.

If they hadn’t killed her, then, how mad would she be?

He took a sip of his High Dive. It came in a heavy and fluted glass. It was too sweet and he should have ordered a beer or ordered nothing at all, but he didn’t care.

Today was a good day.

Today was the first good day, the first good day he’d had.

Today was the first of many good, good days.

The last good day had been some time ago.

Had been the time Emma stayed with him for two weeks in his apartment. Somehow she had fooled the Oracles, fooled Sarah and Mr. Niles, had made it seem like she was on assignment in Rio when in fact she was hiding out in his apartment, reading his books, listening to his records, eating his food, and sleeping in his bed. Sleeping in his bed with him.

Since that day. Well. He could argue there had been other productive days, days where he felt he’d done some good if the days themselves hadn’t been good.

The day he’d tapped into the Oracle’s network — a surprisingly simple task that, in its simplicity, made Henry wonder just how complacent Oyemi and her people had become — and then, shortly after, when he’d tracked down Wendy, who’d been living in Minneapolis.

He had felt good about all of that, or not good.

Good wasn’t what he’d felt.

Proud, perhaps.

Or not even proud.

As if he had accomplished a thing he needed to even if it was a thing he didn’t relish or really want to do. That was how he’d felt. How he’d been feeling the past few days. The past few years.