Manuel Gonzales - The Regional Office Is Under Attack!

Pull yourself together.

“How old are you?” he asked again, catching her off guard, pulling her out of her head.

“Sixteen,” she said, forgetting she’d wanted to keep that a secret from him. “Well, next week. I turn sixteen next week.”

He sighed and in that sigh she thought she heard him mutter, “Too young,” but she couldn’t be sure. Then he didn’t say anything and neither did she and then he turned onto Church Street and turned to look at Rose and smiled at her and said, “Just about there.”

Only later — too late, in fact — would she realize how strange it was, what he said, when he said it.

Just about there.

They were, though. They were only a couple of blocks from her momma’s house, and so she didn’t think about it too much at the time, didn’t let it register that she’d never told him where she lived, hadn’t given him directions or an address. And then later still she would think how strange it was that he would have said that at all, said anything, in fact, to tip her off, to let her get her guard up, even if she hadn’t.

Gotten her guard up, that is.

They pulled up to her house. She tried to open the truck door but it wouldn’t open. “Hey,” she said, just as he was reaching across her, maybe a little uncomfortably so, to fiddle with the lock, the handle, saying, “Sorry about that, it gets funny.” He couldn’t open it and something inside her hitched again. Then he opened his own and got out and she turned herself to climb over and he said, “No, no, stay there, I’ll get it,” and he closed his door and trotted around the other side and opened her door from the outside.

“I need to get that fixed,” he said when he held out his hand to help her down from the truck.

“Yeah,” she said. “Well, thanks, anyway, for the ride.” She tried to let go of his hand.

“Here,” he said, the flat of his other hand resting lightly against her back between her shoulder blades. “Let me walk you to the door, make sure someone’s home for you.”

She didn’t say, There’s no one home, which there wasn’t, or that she had a key, which she did, or that it wouldn’t matter on account of how her mother never locked the door anyway. Her chest fluttered but in no good kind of way and her palms started to sweat, and little unwelcome shivers shot out of her skin where his hand was pressed against her.

Well, hell, she thought.

What she would do would be simple enough, Henry behind her or not. Shove the door open, just enough to slip inside, and then shove it shut and lock it behind her.

Which she did, in one smooth motion, as much of a surprise to her as it was to Henry just how well that had worked. Henry yelled after her, “Hey, wait.” He pounded on the door and she shook her head and thought, Fucking creep. And then she turned and stepped into the house and was ambushed.

When Rose came to, she didn’t know how far behind schedule she was. It took a second or two to figure out that she had made it across the shaft and into the next set of tubing.

The fall had shattered her piece-of-shit shatterproof watch, and don’t think Henry wasn’t going to get an earful from her about being such a cheap-ass on accessories.

She was enough behind schedule anyway (she could just feel it) that she said, Fuck it. Fuck the pain, fuck her weak legs, fuck her torn arm, and she jumped across the ventilation shaft to an opening just across from and above the opening she’d landed in. Don’t think there wasn’t a shitload of scrambling for some kind of hold, a lot of embarrassing kicking with her feet and grunting as she became frightened and then desperate to push through all that pain from the fall and grabbing the rope so she could pull herself up, because there was. That, and a heavy desire to go right back into unconsciousness that she almost didn’t resist. But then she pushed her way blindly out of the shaft into what turned out to be an office, dark and unoccupied. She kicked the computer onto the floor while scrambling onto the desk from the ceiling, and then she hopped down after it.

She closed her eyes, took some deep, deep breaths (who would have thought all that meditation crap from Assassin Training Camp would have come in so useful), then recalled her map.

Two floors down, half a wing across from where she needed to be.

She snuck into the hallway and she ran.

The halls were empty. A good sign, she supposed. The rest of the plan must have been moving along smoothly enough. And sure, great, that was good to know, of course, but also that meant that if there was a wrench in this mechanism, she was it.

She found the stairwell, jimmied open the door, took the stairs three and four at a time.

Surprise. The whole point of this exercise had been surprise. Which, fuck that. No way the director of this operation didn’t know that his world was caving in all around his ears by now. At worst, he’d found some way to sneak out of the fray. At best, he was sitting tight, arming the defenses in his office. And neither scenario was any good for her.

Wendy, their woman on the inside, the one who’d undone the main security system, had briefed them all. “I can’t touch the director’s office, sorry, it’s on its own system, and he’s the only one who controls it. But catch him off guard,” Wendy had said, “and Mr. Niles won’t have enough time to cue it all up.”

At the time, Rose had wished Wendy would stop using the guy’s name, would stick to the script and say director .

“Mr. Niles,” Wendy continued, “from what I’ve been told, he’s real twitchy about this sort of thing, didn’t want any defenses in the first place, because he’s always worried the system will screw up, won’t recognize him one day, will decide it’s time to weed him out, so to speak, and so he keeps it dark, the whole system, unless he knows he needs it. So if you do it right, you do it quick.” She shrugged.

Right and quick. That was all it took.

Henry and Emma probably shouldn’t have assigned the “right and quick” job to her then, the fucking spaz.

Two floors up, she kicked open the stairwell door, not even pretending to be subtle anymore. Subtle hadn’t ever been one of her strengths, anyway. She flew down the empty hall and slid to a stop just outside the glass door that opened to the receptionist’s desk and the receptionist who stood careful guard over the director and who was right then — Rose couldn’t believe her fucking luck — working some kind of crossword or Sudoku bullshit on her computer. Caught completely unawares.

Rose ducked out of sight. She pulled herself together. She counted down from ten.

Then, at seven, she charged.

Or, she didn’t exactly charge. She threw her momentum into this nifty slide across the tile, still out of the line of sight of the crossword genius, and didn’t pop herself out of it until the very last moment, like she was sliding into third base, like she was one of those real fast base stealers who can pop back up to standing after a wicked slide but like they didn’t stop, didn’t even pause to think about stopping, and that was how she slid: At the last second, she lit herself up onto her feet and grabbed the door handle and shoved herself inside, and before the receptionist could even register what kind of hell was barreling down on her, Rose had her by the throat.

Or should have.

She should have had her by the throat. Or, rather, by the whole fucking head and neck, if you were going to be technical about it, her arm wrapped around from behind, squeezing the receptionist’s windpipe shut, knocking her out cold, except that the receptionist wasn’t even fucking there.

Nothing was there.

Not the computer, not the Sudoku, not even the goddamn desk, all of it some image or hologram, probably the same make as the image or hologram that dropped her down that fucking bottomless pit (yeah, now that she was out and away from it, bottomless, why the hell not?).