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

separate groups:
    Those who believe this never happened and that Oyemi always possessed the powers she possessed, who believe that she used this story as a way to reveal and contextualize these powers; and,
    Those who believe she never possessed any mystical properties at all, possessed only the power to fool the powerful into following her lead.
    If one chooses, one can seek out these theories on one’s own, though the authors of this paper assure one that they offer little but speculation, biased and unfounded.
    Regardless, while Oyemi waited for Mr. Niles to return, she fashioned a plan. This plan became the foundation for an idea of what she could do now that she had changed. The possibilities opened up inside her even as her mind and the mystical properties of her expanded, even as she began to sense and see the power of the girls and women she would seek out and train to be her Oracles and her Operatives. The Oracles would find the Operatives. The Operatives would do what, she didn’t know, not at first. But while she waited and cooled, she began to think thoughts that became ideas that grew into what she and Mr. Niles would come to call the Regional Office.

SARAH

13.
    Sarah’s time with the Regional Office had trained her to harbor certain suspicions, take few risks, set in place specific precautions, and so it was more than a surprise that there was an envelope waiting for her when she got home. It had been taped to the inside of her door. The locks hadn’t been picked or forced. The small piece of black thread she set in the doorjamb every morning when she left for work hadn’t been disturbed.
    She’d once told Henry how she left her apartment every day before leaving for work—the thread, the locks—and he had laughed and he had told her she was too serious, that she worried too much, but see? She was right to be so cautious. Sure, her precautions hadn’t kept anyone from breaking into her apartment and taping an envelope to her door, but still. At least she’d had precautions set in place.
    In fact, she only saw the envelope when she turned to dead-bolt the door. In other words, she hadn’t even sensed that someone elsehad been in her apartment. She should have at least sensed something, right?
    Her name was written in black Sharpie across the front.
    She stared at it.
    Then she turned away and walked into her kitchen.
    Ten minutes later, with a cup of tea in one hand, a cookie in the other, she walked back to the door to see if the envelope was still there.
    It was.
    She put the cookie in her mouth to free her hand and she pulled the envelope off the door. It peeled right off. She’d assumed it had been taped there, which had annoyed her because it was her experience that, no matter how hard you tried, the tape goo just never came off, but it had been hot-glued.
    How considerate.
    And strange.
    She sat down at her breakfast table and opened it and slipped a file out of it and began to read what was inside.
    This was at midnight.
    It had been a long day. Mr. Niles had been acting strange. The Oracles had been unusually quiet. No one had seen Oyemi in almost a month. And Henry. Well. Henry had been acting a little strange ever since that last mission with Emma, the one that killed her. That had been two years ago now. She’d been covering for him, sure, because she was a friend, but still. They were going to have to have a chat. Enough was enough. They all missed Emma, but work was work. Sarah sighed. She stopped ranting in her head.She would skim through the file, see what kind of serious trouble it might mean, call the head of security and leave him a message, maybe call Mr. Niles, too, and then she’d be in bed by one, one thirty tops.
    Three hours later, her apartment was a shambles, or not a shambles, really, as the word itself—
shambles
—implies something with more charm and less total destruction to it. So let’s say more than a shambles but shy of totally wrecked. And so: Her apartment