by J. N. Chaney
I had been training for this for the past three years, and I knew that this part of the job was coming, but it still didn’t make it any easier. I moved over to the other side of the roof, away from Clementine’s questioning about the rifle and leaned on the ledge, looking out over the city.
I faced the docks now, with only a couple of smaller buildings between me and a fantastic view of the sun setting over the ocean. The wind flowed through my short hair, making me close my eyes and inhale the briny scent. It was relaxing, and for a moment, I could pretend that the hum of the city around me was actually the sound of waves crashing on a beach somewhere.
I had never been to a beach in real life, but a couple of the holos I’d seen gave me a decent idea of what it was like.
One day, I hoped to visit a real beach in person. I would have a book to read, and I’d enjoy the sun, wind, and the sound of the ocean, all without having to worry about training, killing, or hurting people.
“Target’s arrived,” Pearl said, snapping me out of my reverie.
I jogged over to where Pearl and Clem were waiting. Clem gave me a pair of binoculars, and I looked across the street. Nothing was happening.
“The target’s already in the underground parking garage,” Pearl said. “He should be moving toward the elevator now.” She peered into her scope. She counted softly under her breath as she looked through it.
“Which window are we looking at?” I asked, scanning the apartments in the building opposite us. Pearl pressed a button on her scope, and a highlight marker appeared in my binoculars, drawing my attention to a window on the twelfth floor, three windows to the left of the fire escape.
Pearl kept counting as we stared through the window, watching and waiting until a light came on. A man dressed only in a pair of briefs stepped into our line of vision. Despite the hour, it looked like he had just woken up. He was skeletally thin, to the point I could count his ribs, and he had massive dark rings under his eyes.
“Methamphetamines?” I asked. We’d learned about the various side effects of popular recreational drugs during our alternative lessons. Dunn’s uncle fit the textbook look of a meth head.
“Among other things,” Pearl muttered and went back to counting.
The semi-naked man reached the apartment’s door and examined the video feed to see who was outside. He clenched his fists and glanced around anxiously, almost like he was searching for somewhere to run. Finally, his shoulders slumped, defeated, and he unlocked the door. It was halfway open when Michael Dunn shoved it open the rest of the way and shouldered past his uncle.
Dunn wore an expensive three-piece suit, matching his file’s description to a tee except for a weak goatee on his chin.
Now that the target was in sight, Pearl stopped counting and readied the next round in the rifle, dragging the bolt back with a soft click. She used caseless ammunition, eliminating the need for cleanup. There were only the bullet and the propellant—the latter disappearing in a puff of smoke and the former going far away. They were expensive and illegal, but so was the business of killing.
I looked back at the apartment across the street, and another man walked through the door. While also dressed in a suit, his was cheaper looking, like a uniform. He wore sunglasses, and a black earpiece looped behind his ear.
“Looks like Dunn brought security,” Clementine said, adjusting her own binoculars slightly.
“Is that a problem?” I asked.
“Not really,” Pearl said. Her voice was distant like she wasn’t really there. “Possibly a complication but not a problem.”
I nodded, pretending I understood the difference between the two. I didn’t ask because Pearl was concentrating, and I didn’t want to distract her.
Dunn looked visibly angry, and his uncle groveled in front of him, cowering and skittish like a beaten dog. He probably needed a fix.
“Clem, you’re my spotter,” Pearl said, pressing the butt of the rifle up against her shoulder and taking a long, slow breath. “Give me the rundown.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Clementine answered, looking into her binoculars a bit more closely. “Target is sixty-five meters away, with a twelve-meter drop. Wind shows at three kilometers per hour, eastward.”
Clem seemed to be going over a mental checklist. When it came to calling a shot, the closer you were, the less this type of information mattered. A sixty-meter shot didn’t need to take into account air pressure and altitude.
Clem finally finished and leaned into her binoculars again. “Fire when ready.”
The arguing in the apartment had reached a fever pitch, with Dunn looking like he was going to blow a vein in his forehead. His face was red and furious. His uncle’s head hung low, and he made apologetic gestures with his hands. The security guy seemed intent on staring at the door for the entire conversation, his face expressionless.
He seemed collected and professional, but he missed the looming threat from the nearby rooftop. I wondered if it would cost him his life.
Pearl took a breath and released it. As soon as her lungs were empty, she squeezed the trigger. The kick was minimal. It wasn’t a powerful rifle. Pearl didn’t need heavy artillery for a shot at this distance. She was using sub-sonic rounds, and the suppressor that elongated the barrel by about twenty centimeters was allowed to do its job.
The noise still sounded distinctly like a gunshot, but it was quieter by about fifty decibels. The window shattering on the other side of the street was louder.
Dunn’s head snapped back, a red dot appearing between his eyes, and the wall behind him was suddenly sprayed with blood and brains. His body went limp, and he fell.
“Target down,” Clementine said, sounding excited.
Pearl adjusted the angle of the rifle on the tripod, picking out the uncle as a second target, and squeezed the trigger again.
Despite his ragged appearance, Dunn’s uncle was quick to get on the floor, ducking behind a sofa and crawling quickly out of sight.
The security guy jumped into action, drawing a weapon of his own and aiming it at the window. His mouth was moving, apparently calling the situation into whoever was on the other end of his comm.
“We should go,” Pearl said, pulling the rifle away from the ledge before the man could see it. She spread the red blanket on the rooftop and placed the gun on it. She took it apart in quick, practiced motions. Clementine and I ducked behind the ledge, too.
“That was amazing,” Clem said with a broad grin.
“It wasn’t that difficult,” Pearl said, meaning the shot.
Dunn’s uncle called for help. His voice carried over to our rooftop perch through the ruined window. I heard other people screaming. I assumed they were neighbors who’d heard the gunshots. Law enforcement or peacekeepers were probably on their way, and I wondered how a drug cartel might react to that.
Pearl stowed the rifle parts away and shut the case, clicking it closed and locking it. She turned to us, already headed for the door to the stairwell.
“A quick escape is always essential,” she said as she walked. “Whenever you’re on a job like this, it always pays to have at least three escape routes planned beforehand. In our case, it won’t take the security guy long to figure out where the shots came from, and he’ll be sending officers our way any minute. If we’re lucky.”
“And if we’re not?” Clem asked, something like giddy excitement in her voice as we reached the stairs.
“He’ll be sending whoever hired him to run security for a high-ranking member of a drug cartel.” Pearl turned to us as we started heading down the stairs. “I think you can imagine which is worse.”
I could. I had seen pictures of what cartels did to people when they wanted to send a message. Things got ugly when they had a reason to get violent.
I’d take six months in a corrections cell, personally.
Twelve flights of stairs were easier going down than up, and we reached the bottom in minutes. As we exited the building, police vehicle sirens alerte
d us that they were on their way. They were still at least six blocks away, though, since I couldn’t see any flashing lights. The dread of being caught made me sick to my stomach, but to my relief, Pearl didn’t let us have much time to think about it.
Her pace looked natural, but Clem and I almost had to jog to keep up with her as we walked away from the building that would be swarming with cops and other questionable characters in a few minutes. Pearl didn’t look too worried.
She looked more relaxed than she had since we started. She turned quickly into an alleyway off the street. Once we were out of sight, she started jogging, heading deeper into the alley.
She found a door at the back of the alley and unlocked it. It opened without the creaking that I would have expected from a rusty old door.
We entered a department store storage area, full of hundreds of clothes racks, mostly still wrapped in plastic. Pearl stripped off her jacket and gloves in a hurry, keeping only her jumpsuit and boots as she pulled a new jacket from one of the racks. Once she tore the plastic off and put it on, she pulled a couple more off their hooks and handed them to us.
“Always be prepared,” she said with a wink. “I had these dropped here last night.”
I tore the bag open, slipping on a dark blue shirt with a skull on it, along with some black pants. There was also a jacket and a pair of winter gloves, along with a beanie to cover my hair. This was something I never would have worn, but I supposed that was the point.
Once we changed, we followed Pearl to the other side of the room. It opened up into a parking area where the shuttle was waiting, not far from the door.
Less than ten minutes after pulling the trigger, Pearl had us in the air, accelerating towards the other side of town.
Nine
Over the next few days, Clementine was almost impossible to keep up with.
She was full of a manic energy that allowed her to train at a frenzied pace. I knew why she was so driven all of a sudden. Clem had a dream, and our little excursion with Miss Pearl had been a solid step toward realizing it.
She wanted to be the best, most feared assassin in the known universe. I wasn’t ashamed to admit that the thought terrified me a little. I hadn’t taken this path to be a killer. I just wanted to stay at my sister’s side.
Sparring with her was now difficult. Clem dialed up the intensity of our matches and had overcome her previous limits for all of our exercises. Her focus on our regular studies had slightly waned, replaced with a desperate hunger for other forms of knowledge, such as strangulations, poisons, stealth, and geopolitics, not to mention the various criminal organizations where nearly all of our hits came from. She was mostly interested in knives and close-range attacks. I ended up in our room alone most nights, reading my books as she spent more and more time in the gym.
“It’s necessary,” she told me as we took a break from rock-climbing one afternoon. One of the walls in the gym had been converted into a revolving cliff-face, perfect for full body movement exercises. “If I want to be the best, sacrifices must be made. I have to focus on training, which means that I don’t have time for things like math and history. That’s how it works.”
I furrowed my brow as I patted my hands with chalk powder. “I don’t know. I think if you work hard at everything, you can be more well-rounded. The fact that you won’t be the best at one doesn’t matter because it gives you a wider range of options. Having options makes you less likely to end up in a vulnerable situation. A generalist instead of a specialist.”
Clem shrugged, rolling her shoulders as she took a drink of water. “We’re assassins. We’ve got one thing to worry about. Killing. There’s no room in my head for pointless garbage like those stories you’ve been reading.”
I blinked, surprised by that. “I—”
“What? You didn’t think I noticed you doing that when the lights were out? I knew you weren’t studying trigonometry. I’m not stupid.” She shook her head. “And I’m not saying you can’t read what you want. I’m doing this, so you can have that. It’s not for me.”
I said nothing.
She jumped up to the first handhold, gripping it firmly as her feet found their place on the rocks, helping her to grip the next and begin the climb. “You coming?” she asked, looking down at me.
“O-oh, sorry,” I said, quickly. I took a deep breath and exhaled, then gripped the nearest rock and sprang up.
I was sweating hard once I’d reached the ten-meter mark. I could feel my forearms and shoulders burning from the exertion five meters higher. The sweat dripped down my back, making it difficult to focus as the handholds were getting harder and harder to reach.
Suddenly, as I reached for the last one before the peak, my feet lost their grip, and I dropped from my perch. I only fell a meter before the slack in the rope on my harness caught me.
“You’ll get it next time,” Clem said with a grin. She waved at me, her hand coated in white powder.
I watched her move easily from hold to hold, and I shook my head in wonder. It all came so naturally to her.
I kept an eye on her harness as she climbed the moving wall, each of the holds continuously moving down. There was no end goal to this, no place you had to reach before it was over. This was an endurance test, and Clem had always outlasted me.
“She’s making good time up there,” I heard a voice behind me say. I jumped, startled. It was Pearl, chuckling softly at my surprise as she moved over to the wall. “My best time up this wall is twenty-three minutes, forty-seven seconds. Galion is the best at it. I remember his time was something like forty-eight minutes and change.”
I’d met Galion a few times. He was a shorter man with dusky skin, black hair, and almond-shaped eyes. He had been our hand-to-hand combat instructor when Pearl left for two weeks, off on some mission. He was agile, quick, and powerful. It wasn’t hard to believe that he’d be able to last so long on this wall.
I looked up to see Clem still moving, a wide grin on her face as she leaped to a hold that was difficult to reach.
I grinned back but couldn’t help a twinge of jealousy as I watched her there, twenty meters in the air, acting like it hadn’t even been that hard. I supposed for her, it probably wasn’t.
“What was my time?” she asked when she was back on the ground.
“Eight minutes, thirty-seven seconds,” Pearl said with a smile. “That’s a minute longer than the last time. Not bad.”
“You beat your best time!” I exclaimed with a smile. “At that rate, you’ll be leaving Pearl in the dust in no time.”
Pearl chuckled. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”
I stepped in about to take the strap from Clem to have another try myself, but Pearl stopped me. “We’re doing something new today. Follow me.”
We both frowned but didn’t argue.
She led us through a series of hallways, guiding us into a far spot of the building that was previously off limits to us.
When we entered through the door, Pearl gave us each a pair of protective glasses and earpieces in a gray prep room. She pulled two cases from a shelf, and we followed her to the main room. It was pretty massive, although not quite as wide as the training area we’d just come from, but certainly much longer, like a giant rectangle.
For the moment, we had the whole place to ourselves. Pearl walked us toward the edge of the room and then placed the two cases on separate benches before turning towards us.
“You recognize these, don’t you?” she asked, pointing to them.
Clem nodded. “They’re what you used to carry your rifle in.” She paused. “For our job.”
“My job,” Pearl corrected in a playful tone, but her eyes told me that she wasn’t entirely kidding. “Yes, these are the cases that carry disassembled rifles that we use on many of our operations. The casing is meant to be as nonchalant as possible, but I’m sure you’re both smart enough to guess that.”
She opened each case, revealing the pieces inside, all neatly arranged an
d ready for assembly. On one side of the case, a red felt blanket was folded up.
“So cool,” Clementine said, her eyes gleaming as she studied the disassembled rifle in front of her. “So, are we doing target practice?”
Pearl smirked. “That depends. You’ll find manuals inside for how to assemble the rifles. Pay close attention. Eventually, you’ll need to learn to put them together and take them apart quickly while in the field, but for now, it’s important to learn how to assemble them correctly, so have patience and take your time.” She motioned toward the cases. “Begin.”
I pulled the blanket out and laid it on the bench like I remembered Pearl doing a couple days ago on a roof. No wrinkles, completely flat across the surface. There were smaller pieces to this puzzle, and I didn’t want any of them getting lost.
I pulled out the manual, studying it closely before starting to piece it together. The scope, firing pin, muzzle, and so on. Everything had its place. Still, even with instructions, learning how to build something took time to master, but the more I did this, the faster I would become. It was like any other skill.
After a few moments, I snapped the empty magazine into the rifle, then stood and looked at Pearl. “Done.”
Clementine and Pearl both seemed surprised. “You are?” asked Clem.
I nodded. “Think so.”
Pearl took the gun and examined it, checking every piece to make certain, and then nodded. “Very good, Abigail.” Her eyes drifted to Clem, who was still watching us with a slack jawed expression. “Are you done, too?”
Clementine stiffened and dropped her focus back to her weapon. “Not yet! Almost!”
Pearl handed the weapon back to me. “Take it apart and do it again. You were fast for your first time, but still slow compared to the rest of us. We’ll keep doing this until you can both do this in under thirty seconds.”
Clem and I sat there assembling and disassembling our weapons for the better part of an hour, trying our best to get faster and more precise. I wasn’t sure why, but I actually found myself enjoying this. There was something about the way the pieces came together, something about the smell and the feel of the metal.