If she was going to be honest with herself, and what better fucking time to be honest with yourself than at the very goddamn end, it was less the fact that she never saw Emma again after the Regional Office job. That hurt, sure. She loved Emma. They all loved Emma. But she wasn’t surprised, and so maybe it hurt just a little bit less.
But that bastard Henry had told her he loved her (okay, so maybe in a best-friend, brotherly kind of way, but still, she was only eighteen, she was impressionable, and he should have known better), told her that he would come find her after the job was finished, that they would have some kind of adventure when it was all said and done (and maybe when he said they he meant all of they and not just him and her).
And it wasn’t like he was dead.
She knew for a fact that he wasn’t dead.
Colleen had told her he wasn’t dead.
She had run into Colleen once in Spain. Ibiza. Rose was in between jobs, hadn’t yet experienced her Mariana Trench epiphany, but it wasn’t far off, either.
They ran into each other in an open-air market. It was awkward, at first, and then they fell onto each other, hugging and sobbing. They spent the next two days with each other, sleeping at each other’s hotel rooms, one waking early and buying coffee for the other, visiting tourist sites with each other, until finally Colleen insisted they simply stay in the same hotel, the same room, to save money, even though they both had money to burn. They didn’t talk about the camp, or Emma, or their assaults, or the attack, the things they had done, the people they had lost. Colleen had enrolled in cooking classes at the hotel. This was her third time through the class. She’d been there for months and had learned how to scuba dive, had parasailed, had learned spearfishing, had gone pearl diving, had exhausted and worn out the poor activity director, had seen the sights so many times that she had considered, jokingly, applying for a job as a tour guide. She paid for a long-term rental scooter. Rose didn’t have to ask her why she hadn’t simply bought a scooter or let out an apartment, for that matter. Colleen made paella and brought it back to the room one night. Another night she made diver scallops with a vanilla-champagne reduction, and Rose asked her what was Spanish about it and Colleen shrugged and said, “Saffron, I guess,” and the next morning, as they sat on the balcony of Colleen’s hotel room, which stunned Rose every time with its view of the Sant Antoni Bay, as they sat there silent but not comfortable in their silence, having run out of everything to talk about that wasn’t the operation, that wasn’t Emma or the Regional Office, Rose asked her if she’d heard from anyone else.
“Becka,” she said, “or anyone else, maybe? Henry, maybe?”
And maybe Colleen knew how important it was and pretended it wasn’t important at all to spare Rose’s feelings, or maybe she didn’t know anything at all when she said, “Henry was, well, you just missed him, not more than two weeks ago.” Then she said, “I’m sure he’ll be in touch with you. You were always his favorite, you know. ‘The best we ever trained, blah, blah, blah.’ And, ‘What an amazing girl.’ You know how he was.”
She nodded. And then, because if she didn’t leave in the next few minutes, she would burn the hotel to the ground, Rose decided it was time to move on.
“I think it’s time I moved on,” she said.
Colleen sipped her coffee and nodded. “Okay,” she said.
And there was a moment, a soft, brief moment when it seemed one or both of them would start talking, would talk about what had happened at camp, what had happened after camp, what had happened to them since the assault on the Regional Office, what had made it so impossible for either of them to settle into any kind of new normal. But before one of them could crack, Colleen stood up, abruptly, too abruptly, knocking her knee into the table, sloshing Rose’s coffee out of its mug, and Colleen said, “Sorry,” and Rose shook her head and half-smiled and said, “It’s okay,” but not, I’m sorry, too, though she hoped it had been buried there, an I’m sorry, too, buried in the tone of her voice, maybe, or somewhere deep in the words she actually said. Then Colleen said she had to get ready for class and Rose said she’d probably be gone before she got back from class and Colleen nodded and said, “Okay, well, take care of yourself,” and not, I’ll see you soon, or, I’ll see you later, okay? but Rose thought she could hear that somewhere in her voice, too, and after Colleen went back inside the room, Rose finished her coffee, packed her bag, and then left while Colleen was still in the shower.
She hadn’t seen Colleen since, and hadn’t heard from Henry, not even once.
71
She shouldn’t be thinking of Henry at a time like this, she knew. She shouldn’t be thinking of Henry or Emma or Colleen or Windsor or Wendy or any of them. She should be thinking of herself, and aside from herself, she should be thinking of Jason, poor silly Jace. Or her sister, though her sister never thought of her. Or Gina or Patty or her asshole of a father.
But she wasn’t. She was thinking of Henry.
She wished she had seen Henry, if only one more time. One time before all of this, before the robot, before the end.
She opened her eyes to look at that robot and that was when she saw the sword and then she wasn’t thinking of Henry, either, and was, much to her dismay, thinking of the director and his glove and the sword and what happened with the sword.
Rose wondered where it could have come from, where the robot would have hidden it. There didn’t seem to be any hiding places on that robot. But there it was, long and thin, gleaming and cold and sharp, though, really, with as much force as the robot could bring to bear, that sword didn’t have to be sharp, just strong. And it was both, she knew it was both sharp and strong.
Sharp enough, strong enough, anyway, to split a man in two.
“Is this how you did it?” the robot said in its nonrobot voice. “Did you toy with him? Did you throw him from place to place and toy with him like a doll?”
The robot didn’t have to say who the “him” was. It knew she knew. With that sword in its hand, the robot didn’t have to say anything at all, in fact, but it wouldn’t stop. “Did you beat him bloody in the very place he felt safest? You with all your strength and power, and him just a man. Did you do all of that and then with his own sword, did you cut him down?”
The robot stopped and held the sword down at its side. “Is that how it happened?” And maybe it was waiting for Rose to say something, but she couldn’t. She couldn’t think of what to say and knew it wouldn’t matter, though she did feel the desire to make note of the director’s rather powerful glove. It seemed all so very personal, Rose thought. Strange that something so personal might come out of a robot, and she looked at its face, really looked at the robot’s face, and wondered if it was even a robot at all.
No, she thought. That face, those eyes. That face is a woman’s face.
And then she knew.
Oh, she thought. It’s you. I always wondered about you.
Not that she spent nights awake wondering about the girl with the mechanical arm, just every so often she wondered what she looked like, if she had survived the assault, what her life must be like, what it would feel like to have a metal part of you swinging at your side. Now that she was face-to-face with the girl with the mechanical arm, she looked for that arm, but then caught herself because there wasn’t a mechanical arm anymore, or rather, all of her was mechanical arm now, or rather, mechanical everything, and then she felt embarrassed for looking at her so nakedly and for a second, the only thing she wanted to do was tell her, I’m sorry. For the look, for what she’d done, for all of it, but that urge quickly passed.