Read The Regional Office Is Under Attack!: A Novel for Free Online

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 toweed 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?).
    But who the fuck cared because whatever it was, hologram or magicks, what it also was was a trap, most definitely a trap.

10.
    There were three guys waiting for her in her mom’s living room, and they grabbed her and she screamed and one of them clamped his hand over her mouth and she bit, and then he screamed and let go, and she kicked back with her right leg and felt it contact something—his knee, maybe—felt something crunch, heard someone fall. She stomped another’s foot, hard, and then yanked her arm out of his grasp, but the third one grabbed her free arm and pulled her to him by both her wrists and smashed his forehead into her face, and she saw stars, actual stars, little motes of light