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

still leaning over her and then she felt Wendy stand up, step one or two steps back.
    Jasmine wasn’t there. On the schedule. That was what was wrong. She was on a mission. Sarah didn’t recognize the mission, but more surprising even than that—which was pretty damn surprising since Sarah approved and cleared every mission—was how no one else was on the schedule either. How every one of their girls was also on a mission. Against all protocol, every single Operative was gone, off-site, and in Jasmine’s case, off-dimension.
    “What the hell is going on?” Sarah said.
    A creeping, slow-moving sense of what was going on crept and slowly moved into the pit of Sarah, and she was about to say, Jesus, we’re too late, it’s today, but then the client elevator dinged and that ding was followed by voices, unfamiliar, gruff voices, and those voices were followed by screams, which were followed then by more voices and gunshots and then more screams, and so, really, Sarah was too late to say even that.

18.
    The day Sarah’s mother disappeared (was abducted), she forgot to pack Sarah a school lunch. She promised Sarah she’d bring it to school before lunch, that she’d bring it right away, and later Sarah wondered if her mother had been on her way to bring that lunch to school when she was taken, or if she’d simply forgotten about the lunch altogether, which had happened before. Sarah always hoped that her mother forgot about the lunch a second time and was tootling around in their apartment or somewhere in the city, doing something silly and unrelated to Sarah or Sarah’s school or Sarah’s well-being, when she was nabbed.
    Sarah would have been happy to know, for instance, that her mother had gotten sidetracked even on her way home from dropping Sarah off at school. That she had walked by a Duane Reade and remembered that her hair dryer had broken and that she wanted a new one, and that while in Duane Reade, she remembered other things she needed to get—makeup, a humidifier, Q-tips—and that she was grabbed as she was walking out of the store.
    Sarah loved her mother and loved it when her mother did things that were motherly, which she didn’t do too often, but Sarah would have preferred it if her mother had been taken awayfrom her while doing something frivolous or ordinary, and not in one of the rare moments she exhibited any kind of maternal instincts.
    Sarah’s mother never came back, in any case, and Sarah’s teacher shared some of her lunch with Sarah when it was clear there wouldn’t be a lunch. She ate half an apple and half a ham sandwich, drank half a Tab. The rest of the day was normal. The entire day, in fact, felt normal. Her mother’s forgetting her lunch—they were running late and her mother had almost forgotten her own shoes—the two of them running the last two blocks together, Sarah spacing out during most of the school day, running around the playground by herself, crossing two bars on the monkey bars before falling off, and her mother running late to pick her up from school. These all pointed to any ordinary day.
    But then her mother was really late.
    And then her mother was so late that the receptionist called the only other number on file, which was Sarah’s aunt’s number, because she’d already called Sarah’s house four times and the receptionist had kids of her own, you know, and couldn’t spend the whole night waiting there with Sarah.
    “I wonder what happened to that mother of yours,” her aunt said as they walked hand in hand to the subway. Sarah didn’t mind at the time. She didn’t suspect, in other words, that anything had gone wrong, and plus her mother never let her hold hands this long because it made their hands sweaty and Sarah’s mother didn’t like sweaty hands, so Sarah shrugged and squeezed her aunt’s hand quickly and her aunt squeezed back.
    They picked up pizza on the way to her aunt’s apartment. Heraunt let her watch television while she called