The Regional Office Is Under Attack!: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page B

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 acrossher, 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.

9.
    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 wouldhave 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