The Regional Office Is Under Attack!: A Novel by Manuel Gonzales Page B

more?”
    “There was,” he said. “There was one more, but there was an accident.”
    “An accident?”
    “He got wind of our man following his trail, tried to run, stolea car, wasn’t the best driver.” He picked up a small envelope full of photographs. A car wreck. An oil-slick road. Burned wreckage.
    “We checked it out,” Mr. Niles said before she could say anything. “It’s real. He’s dead.” He paused and leaned heavily against his desk. “And he was the last one.”
    Sarah held on to the photos and flipped through them but had stopped looking at them.
    “And now what?” she asked.
    Mr. Niles sat in his chair and shrugged and looked up at her and said, “Now you have your whole life, your whole life in front of you. Whatever you want.” He looked down at the paperwork on his desk, began reading through memos. “You could go back to school, I don’t know. The apartment is yours as long as you like it.” He looked up at her again. “Don’t feel in a rush to leave, in other words.” Then he turned back to his work.
    Sarah, having avenged her mother’s kidnapping and murder at the hands of an anarchist splinter group, and not sure what else to do, and a little stunned, turned to leave his office.
    “Oh, Sarah?” he said before she got to his door. She turned back to him, expectant, though she couldn’t have said what she was expecting. To be offered a position, maybe. To be told she had proven herself the equal of any one of the Operatives. To be told how far she had surpassed anyone’s small expectations of her and her mechanical arm. And later, she would learn from Mr. Niles himself that he had wanted to offer just that—a position as an Operative, his unfettered praise—but that Oyemi had very clearly said, “No, not Sarah. Operatives are Operatives, Oraclesare Oracles, and everyone else is everyone else.” He had cajoled, he had begged, and finally he had threatened to leave the Regional Office altogether, and had only been brought back from the brink—why, she would wonder, would he care so much about someone he knew so little about?—by Oyemi’s promise that Sarah would come back, that the Oracles had made their prediction, and that he wouldn’t lose her. But Sarah wouldn’t know any of this for some few years yet, and so when she turned expectantly and he said, “I’m going to need those photos back, please,” and shook his head, and said, “Record keeping, filing. You know how it is,” and she handed the photos back to him, a troubling feeling of anger and disappointment welled up inside her.
    “Don’t be a stranger,” he said then, as he went back to the work on his desk.
    And she left, without so much as saying good-bye, and she stayed away for two days, until she couldn’t stay away any longer. On the third day, she stormed back into the travel agency and down the elevator. She shoved her way into Mr. Niles’s office, ready to yell, ready to rant, ready to throw her anger and frustration and confusion behind her mechanical fist and maybe tear his office apart, and maybe Mr. Niles himself apart, too, except that when he looked up from the papers on his desk, he looked so happy to see her, and said so casually, as if she hadn’t left in the first place, “Oh, good, I was just thinking about you,” that she forgot all about how angry she had been.
    He handed her a file folder and said, “Take a look at that, tell me what you think. Serious threat? Think Jasmine could pull it off herself, or do we need a team?”
    She took the folder and sat in the chair across from his desk and read the report. Together they argued out a plan of attack, the logistics, the fail-safes, and an hour later, Mr. Niles stood up, stretched, said, “Nice work, Sarah.” Said, “I’ll be in my office if you need anything,” and then he patted her gently on the shoulder and he left, and it wasn’t until then that she noticed the nameplate on the desk, and then outside the office, the