by J. N. Chaney
I had to give it back once I finished it, of course, but the story made me want to find the rest of the series. There was probably a store in the city that sold hard copies of books. I liked having the physical paper in my hands, reading over the printed letters. It felt more grounded and made it easier to immerse myself in what was happening.
Slipping into the comfort of the pages, I let the day pass me by. I missed lunch. I imagined being in the conflicts the heroine found herself in, sometimes even saying some of her cooler lines aloud.
Clementine thought I was crazy for doing that, but in the end, it was what made the book enjoyable to me. The ability to slip into someone else’s skin for a little while, and be able to escape my own troubles and live life on the gritty edge, where violence was glorious and always had some sort of deeper meaning.
The hours passed, and I even missed that the sun had set. I only had a few chapters left when Clementine returned. She had just come out of the shower from the looks of her wet hair, but her cheeks were flushed, and she had the distinct look of someone who had just finished a vigorous workout.
“Hey, Abby,” she said with a smile. “Have you been in here all day?”
“Yeah,” I answered, putting the book down and stretching. Had it really been all day?
“You need to get some exercise in, stretch those limbs. It’ll help the bruising heal a lot faster.”
I nodded, relaxing against the bed again and looking up at the ceiling. “I know. But with no classes or anything to get to, I just needed some time to myself.”
She looked at me, a confused smile on her face. “What for? We had our first successful job last night. We should be celebrating. I mean, we need to get paid first, but then we should celebrate, right?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. We killed people. I mean, the target was an asshole that deserved it, but what about those guards? Weren’t they just doing their jobs? Did they deserve to die too?”
Clem sat down on her bed, a thoughtful look on her face. “Well, it was them or us, wasn’t it? I mean, they were just doing their job, but they would have killed us, or worse, sent us to jail. Is that what you’d prefer?”
“Of course not,” I said, propping myself up on my elbow. “But it wasn’t them or us, was it? If you’d just used the canister like we’d planned, the wife wouldn’t have woken up until we were already gone, and none of them would’ve had to die.”
“You can’t know that,” she snapped, looking annoyed now. “What if the medicine didn’t work? He could have built up a resistance, or they might not have put the right concentration in the canister or something. With a knife…” She looked down, and I knew she imagined a knife in her hands right now. “With a knife, you can feel it. You just know. There’s no room for error.”
I shook my head and lay back down, staring up.
The researchers had done their jobs. They wouldn’t have suggested the gas if they weren’t sure, and Mulberry had advised us to use it too. It hadn’t been a matter of her doubting the gas’s effectiveness. It couldn’t have been. I knew that she trusted Mulberry well enough.
So why hadn’t she used it?
Clem’s face softened as she moved over to my bed and put a hand on my shoulder. “Look, you noticed how I was going on about what a good job I’d done to Mulberry on the way back?”
I looked at her, confused. “Yeah? What about it?”
She squeezed my shoulder gently. “Well, last night, I saw what you’re capable of. You’re an artist with that gun. It was amazing to watch. Hell, you saved my life when that big fucker had me by the throat. I was feeling insecure. Before then, I never realized how good you were, and well, I think I felt threatened. You were amazing last night. Like, proper godsdamn fantastic.”
I felt my face grow warm, and a small smile touched my lips. “You saved my life too.”
She grinned and brushed her fingers through my short hair. “See? This is what I’m talking about. We’ve got each other’s backs. We’re the future of this organization, and together, we’re damn near unstoppable.”
I placed my hand on her shoulder and grinned. “I certainly hope so.”
“Am I interrupting something?” I looked up to the door where Pearl was standing with an amused expression.
“Just talking about last night is all, Miss Pearl,” Clementine said in an upbeat voice.
“Good, because Mulberry wants to talk to you girls about what happened yesterday too. He wants to see the both of you in his office.”
I got up from the bed, groaning as the pain from the bruises intensified from my moving. I could feel my face throbbing. I pressed my hand up, cradling it gently, and we headed to Mulberry’s office for the second time in as many days.
When we arrived, Mulberry was waiting for us, and he quickly motioned for us to take our seats.
“How’re you two feeling?” he asked once we sat down.
“I need some ice,” I groaned. “And maybe a few painkillers.”
Mulberry grinned and leaned back in his seat. “We’ll get to that in a bit. For now, we’ll be looking over what happened last night.”
I nodded, feeling a lot more somber about it than Clem apparently did. She could barely keep a smile off her face as Mulberry skimmed over something on his pad.
It wasn’t hard to tell that Clem had clearly enjoyed herself last night and was looking forward to more. I, on the other hand, felt like I’d gone through a crucible. But it was a career that I had chosen for myself. I had no choice but to keep moving forward.
Mulberry glanced up at us. “Well, I heard back from the client. Even though things didn’t go as planned, we’re all chalking this up as a success. Even with the collateral damage, the target is down. There doesn’t seem to be anything leading back to the client or us. It wasn’t perfect, by any means, but it was still a win. Congratulations, you two. You both officially graduated.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Graduated?”
“You showed competence in the field, and the ability to improvise on the fly. You need to sharpen your skills a bit more, but that’s not going to happen here at the complex. From now on, you’re official members of our organization. That means you’ll be receiving new assignments, additional access to the armory, and clearance for certain levels of intelligence.” Mulberry smiled, but it wasn’t a happy smile. Closer to satisfied, but that wasn’t quite it either.
Clementine didn’t notice. She leaned forward in her chair. “So do we get our numbers now?”
“You do indeed,” Mulberry said, leaning forward in his seat and checking his pad. “Clementine, you are now Number Thirty-Six. Abigail, you’re Number Thirty-Seven.”
Clementine grinned. “Cool!”
“But that’s not all. Check your pads. You’ll find bank accounts set up in your names, with monthly deposits and additional bonuses when you complete your missions.”
I pulled my pad out, and sure enough, there was a bank account with a new transfer for two hundred credits. I checked Clem’s, and it said the same.
“Most of the pay went into the creation of your uniforms. But your next job won’t have the same expenses, and you can expect some hefty income soon, once you complete the next assignment. You’ll be traveling between the neighboring colonies and systems, depending on the job. It’s the best business in the world if you’ve got the stomach for it.”
“Thank you, Mr. Pryar!” Clementine said, rising from her chair.
“You can drop the formalities, kid. Just call me Mulberry.”
I rose as well but said nothing.
He dismissed us, and the moment the door closed behind us, Clementine punched me in the shoulder. “We did it! We did it!”
“Ow, ow, ow!” I said, genuinely in pain from the night before, but then I feigned a smile, trying to match her excitement. “Yeah, we did it. Great job, Miss Thirty-Six.”
“Hell yeah! Now, what do you say we blow our hard-earned cash in the most irresponsible way we can find, Miss Thirt
y-Seven?”
I tilted my head, still feeling rather unsettled, but I decided not to show it. Whatever had happened in that building, and whatever Clem’s reasons, I wasn’t sure I wanted to talk about them. “I could use some food,” I said, trying to shift the conversation. “Can we start there?”
13
I concentrated my eyes on the scope and pressed the rifle snugly against my shoulder.
My first instinct was always to close the eye that wasn’t on the scope, but Pearl advised me against it, saying it wasn’t a good habit. It takes focus to keep an eye closed, which takes away from the task at hand. With both of them open, you could better focus on things that mattered, such as breathing and aiming. I didn’t know if I entirely agreed, but even so, I trusted her judgment better than anyone’s, so I’d chosen to do as she told me. No loss in concentration, no difficulties aiming. Whether that was due to keeping my eye open or not didn’t really matter.
My job wasn’t to actually do any shooting today, but if the situation called for it, I was cleared to take out any security that Clementine ran into and couldn’t deal with on her own. For the most part, my job was to be her eyes from a distance, taking lives from afar.
This was our first job off-world, and I’d be damned if I was going to screw it up. Six months working for the organization, and the two of us hadn’t let Mulberry down yet. It was bound to happen, he’d told us, but so far, our record was clean. Everyone in the guild had been on a botched job at some point or another, but ours had yet to happen. I hoped to keep it that way for as long as possible.
And that included today.
“Thirty-Six, I’m seeing a pair patrolling about twenty meters to your left,” I said, training the scope over both of them. As the target reticule touched them, I sent a signal to the HUD of Clementine’s goggles, letting her know where they were.
“Roger that, Thirty-Seven,” she whispered back, shifting to her right. The property had a lot of wide openings. Clementine hugged the shadows and kept to where there were trees and bushes to hide her. Not the easiest method of entry, or the quietest, but we had to take what we had to work with. In this case, brush and foliage with a dash of security patrols.
Our target was a woman named Primrose Fantigue—by all accounts, one of the wealthiest female entrepreneurs on Epsy.
A closer look over her files showed she was one of the largest drug distributors on the planet, and more importantly, a rival to one of our own clients back on Osiris. That meant that it was only a matter of time before someone sent an assassin her way. We just happened to land the contract.
According to our reports, another squad had tried to kill her a few years ago, but they’d botched the job. Still, the attack had left her with an ugly scar across her cheek. She had more than doubled her security afterward, raising the detail from twelve to twenty-five. A wise decision, considering how many people wanted her dead.
This was a career-making job, or career-breaking if things went poorly. Success would solidify our reputations. Failure could mean exposure or death.
This was our biggest job to date. Before now, we’d been given low to mid-tier targets. No one of any significance, but they’d all been dangerous. Mulberry had told us that he’d give us increasingly difficult marks to force us to push past our limits and grow, and it seemed he wasn’t lying.
I shifted my view, guiding my scope up the path that Clementine would take. It would pass within five paces of an open-air pool with a small seating terrace. As Clementine approached it, I scanned the area.
“Hold it,” I whispered. “Someone is coming out.”
Clem froze behind a few bushes, highlighted in a blue silhouette on my scope. Lights shined over the terrace, but they would have a hard time getting any kind of reflection off Clem’s charcoal stealth uniform.
One of the glass doors opened, and a man stepped outside. He was in a security outfit, but his tie was loosened, and he had a cigarette in his hand. As soon as he was far enough away from the building, he pulled out a lighter.
“He’s alone,” Clem whispered softly. “I can take him.”
I agreed. I could take him too. The rifle I had picked out allowed for the 600 meters I needed if we could get the target out in the open. It wasn’t suppressed, though. Even if it were, the sound would still be loud enough to alert the others. I was only to fire in emergencies.
“Make it quick,” I whispered.
She pinged me an affirmative, slipping through the underbrush until she was near the smoking guard. Once she broke cover, she stayed in a crouched position, hiding behind a cabana and a statue of a naked woman as she moved closer, coming up behind him. She was still shorter than I was, and a good head shorter than the guard, but that didn’t really matter. She could kill a man twice her size, and he’d never see it coming.
Through the scope, I saw her wrap a gloved hand around the man’s mouth, causing him to drop the smoking cigarette while striking the knife into his back. Two strikes to deflate the lungs and potentially pierce the heart.
They were deep cuts, and he dropped to his knees, instinct taking over as he reached for his wounds instead of a radio or a weapon. He gasped, surprised and desperate, but it was too late.
Clementine held him in place then ran her knife along his neck, letting the blood drain out like a butchered animal, holding his mouth until he went limp. When he finally stopped struggling, she dropped the corpse and stood up.
“This is getting too easy,” Clem whispered. I couldn’t see her face, but I could tell from her voice that she was smirking.
I sighed. “I think you’re enjoying this a little too much.”
She shrugged. “So? It’s good to enjoy what you do for a living. The important thing is to be good at it, and I—” She paused as she tried the glass door that the guard had come through. It opened. “Well, I’m the best at what I do.”
I rolled my eyes, leaving the rifle on the ground as I stood. We would come back to pick it up when we were finished. In the meantime, the scope would relay direct video feed to my visor, giving me a continuous bird’s eye view of the facility. If the patrols changed or one of them decided to go take a piss, I’d know about it.
“You’re clear,” Clem said through the comms. “You have about eight minutes to get here before they come back around. You’d better get moving.”
“Come on,” I said, breaking into a jog. “I can make a hundred and twenty meters in forty seconds.”
“It’s not a sprint, Thirty-Seven,” Clem said, slipping inside the house to get out of sight. “You still need to sneak across the same path that I did.”
“Your confidence is heart-warming, Thirty-Six,” I said sarcastically, quickly reaching the rope that Clem left for me on the perimeter wall. “Seriously, I’m tearing up over here.”
I vaulted the wall, smoothly reached the top, and pulled up the rope. From there, I rolled under the electrically charged fence before dropping to the grass. I kept to a crouch, scrambling for the bushes that flanked a path leading right to the pool terrace where Clem entered the building. I kept to the same route she’d taken.
We had a map of the various motion sensors, but they were mostly in the front of the property. The rear was known to have birds and other animals sneaking in from the wild area outside the walls. After too many false alarms, our target removed them. Bad move on their part.
It did result in heavier security, but thanks to a simple payoff, we had the schedule and turnover times. By paying off two of the guards, they could show up for their shift change, then leave before anyone noticed. That ten-minute window was all we needed to slip in undetected.
I reached the spot where Clem had left the body in less than two minutes and then moved stealthily across the terrace, where Clem had opened the door for me.
“Lucky we had a smoker to get the door for us, eh?” she whispered as I slipped inside.
I pulled my goggles up. “Yeah. Lucky. Let’s keep our guard up. We’re not finished with
this yet.”
I pulled my pistol out, chambering a round before nodding at Clem, telling her to lead the way. We moved quietly through the palatial house, going from the gaming room where we had entered into a gallery and then a study.
Most of the place wasn’t used during the evenings. Honestly, I would have trouble finding a reason for this much space. I understood needing to have a property where one could host parties and social gatherings, but living here alone? I just couldn’t wrap my head around it. Besides, security for a place this big had to be expensive. We’d just demonstrated how it lowered their effectiveness too.
Fantigue’s voice carried as we entered her workspace, and it sounded like an angry one-sided conversation. I motioned for Clem to come forward, since the target had her back to us. She was leaning over her desk, occasionally bringing her hand down, speaking through her comm.
“I’m not going to calm down, you useless fucking weasel,” she said. “That last shipment was short. If the shipments—No, you listen to me. I don’t care how you feel about it. This has happened twice! Am I supposed to let you keep fucking me over, Ray? Is that what you want, you piece of shit? I’m starting to think it might be time for me to find another supplier.” She paused a few seconds. “I don’t give a damn about that! If the next shipment isn’t exactly what we ordered, we’re going to find somebody else! No, scratch that. If the next shipment doesn’t cover what went missing from the last two, you can be sure that I’ll hunt you down and take it out of your fucking corpse!” She slammed her comm down, ending the connection.
The very picture of cool-headedness, this woman. I shifted my grip on my weapon as we cautiously approached her.
I had taken the kill last time, so unless the circumstances demanded it, it was Clem’s turn.
Fantigue spun around, looking like she was about to storm off, but stopped cold when she saw us. To her credit, she didn’t look panicked like most other targets did. She looked angry.
