Kiana Cruise

by Jody Studdard

  In the meantime, she and James formally changed their names and the USIA sent them their new documents, including birth certificates, driver’s licenses (from the state of Washington, since they would be moving there soon), and passports. As such, Amanda officially became Kiana Danielle Cruise and James officially became Michael Alexander Cruise. He picked the name Michael since he had always liked it and he let Amanda pick his middle name. She chose the name Alexander since it had been her grandfather’s name (Michael’s dad). He had passed away when Amanda had been five but she remembered him fondly, and he was the only grandparent she had ever known since the other three had passed away before her birth.

  Switching to the new names wasn’t as easy as they thought, however. More than once, Michael (formerly James) called out “Kiana” and she didn’t even realize he was talking to her. And a few times he messed up and called her Amanda, and that was where she actually had a slightly easier time than he did since she still got to refer to him as ‘Dad.’ Regardless, they slowly got used to their new names and before long it seemed like they had had them forever.

  The most difficult part of Kiana’s life those two months, however, was the loss of her friends. She didn’t get to see any of them again, since she was technically already dead, and she didn’t get to say goodbye to any of them, including the friends she had known seemingly forever (some of them were girls she had met in kindergarten and others had been her softball teammates all the way back in Little League). Some nights, when she got done with her physical therapy and got bored, she would fire up her laptop, kick back on the couch in their apartment’s living room, and go onto her friends’ Facebook and Twitter pages to see how and what they were doing. It was actually quite difficult to keep herself from adding comments or ‘liking’ their comments. One night her friends went to dinner at an Italian restaurant called Dante’s, which was one of Kiana’s favorites, and they posted photos of their night, and Kiana would have killed to have been there with them. She could picture them all sitting around a table eating and drinking and laughing, and talking about boys (of course), which was one of their favorite pastimes, and she longed for the days when she had been with them. At one point she got so nostalgic she almost started to cry. But the worst part, however, was when she looked at her friend Veronica’s Facebook page (Veronica and Kiana had been teammates since the first grade) and saw Veronica had posted a photo of the two of them together in their uniforms after a game, and below the photo was a caption that Veronica had written that said, “I will never forget you, Amanda. We’re BFFs forever. RIP.”

  Kiana wiped a tear from her cheek, turned off her computer, and went to bed.

  Chapter 7

  Moving to Seattle wasn’t nearly as bad as Kiana had originally thought. Granted, it rained non-stop the first week they were there, and at one point Kiana thought she was never going to see the sun again, but overall she had to admit it was a nice place. Everything was lush and green (no doubt the result of the incessant rain). Their new house was in a small city called Mill Creek, which was about twenty minutes north of downtown Seattle, right off of Interstate 5. Mill Creek was contemporary and nice and Michael told her it was one of the most affluent areas in Snohomish County.

  “Snohomish?” she asked. “What kind of word is that?”

  “I’m not really certain. I think it’s Native American but don’t quote me on that.”

  “I thought Seattle was in King County.”

  “It is, but Mill Creek is in Snohomish County, which is the next county to the north.”

  They spent a couple of minutes driving around Mill Creek’s downtown area, which was really just a series of fancy shopping centers, strip malls, and office buildings. The largest and nicest was called the Mill Creek Town Center and Kiana was immediately impressed. In many ways, it reminded her of southern California, with cute cafés, workout centers, tanning salons, restaurants, and even a trendy Yoga bar.

  But one thing amused her more than anything else. The number of Starbucks stores. She had never seen so many Starbucks stores in her entire life. On their way from the airport to Mill Creek, which was roughly a thirty minute drive, she had counted no less than ten different Starbucks.

  “Wait ‘til you see downtown Seattle,” Michael said. “There’s a Starbucks on every corner. People in the Pacific Northwest love their coffee.”

  After strolling around the Town Center for a while, they stopped at a restaurant for lunch, then drove north and took a look at the school Kiana would be attending in the fall. It was in a wooded, residential area and Kiana liked it from the start. It was called Henry M. Jackson High School, and it was a series of large, brick buildings with a bunch of athletic fields directly to the east: soccer, baseball, track and field, and (of most interest to Kiana) softball. There were actually two softball fields sitting adjacent to one another, with a small building in between (later, Kiana learned the building was for storage, restrooms, and a concession stand). The field that was furthest from the road had long, covered dugouts and a digital scoreboard, so she assumed it must be the varsity field, and the other was probably for the JV team. Either that or the one field was for games and the other for practices. Either way, she would find out soon enough.

  “What do you think?” Michael asked. “About 220?”

  She glanced over, saw he was looking at the outfield fence, and knew instantly what he was inquiring about. He wanted to know the distance from home plate to the outfield fence.

  She nodded. It looked like it was about 220 feet to her, and it might have been even less. It was a nice field, there was no doubt about that, but it wasn’t very big.

  “You’re going to tear it up here,” Michael said. “You can hit 220 in your sleep.”

  She chuckled. The comment was so predictable of him. There was nothing he liked more than watching her play softball, and hitting out-of-the-park home runs was his all-time favorite. She liked it too, since he gave her $100 every time she did it.

  Overall, Kiana was happy with Jackson High. Everything, including the buildings and fields, was very modern, and Michael said the school was only about twenty years old which was amazing because Anaheim High had been much, much older. Jackson High was named after a popular senator from Snohomish County, its colors were black and green, and its mascot was a Timberwolf.

  “I did a little research,” Michael said. “The athletic teams at Jackson are all good, but the softball team is the cream of the crop. They’ve won the league title eight years in a row, the district title the past two years, and they finished third in state last year. As such, you should fit in nicely.”

  Kiana smiled. When it came to softball, Michael was unstoppable. She wouldn’t have been surprised if he had originally looked at other schools but had picked this one solely because it had the best softball team.

  But the highlight of the day, however, wasn’t Jackson High. It was their new house. It was just a few blocks west of the school, almost within walking distance of it, in a nice housing development called Heatherwood. It was gray and white, with a small, fenced yard that was filled with dark red maple trees. It had three bedrooms, all on the upper floor, a kitchen, dining room, and sunken living room on the middle floor, and a family room, garage, and laundry room on the bottom floor. Kiana loved it the minute she saw it. It was twice as big as their house in Anaheim and much, much newer. She ran from one room to another, checking everything out, and it all seemed so exciting. The refrigerator even had a water and crushed ice dispenser built into its door.

  “I get the master bedroom,” Michael said, “but you can have the other two. I thought you might use one for your bed, and the other for whatever. Or we could use it as a guest bedroom. It’s up to you.”

  Kiana ran upstairs and took a look around. Michael’s bedroom took up one side of the floor, the one facing the back yard, and the other two bedrooms took up the opposite side facing the front yard and driveway. The smaller bedrooms were divided by a bathroom that had wall-to-w
all mirrors on one side and a large whirlpool bath on the other. The bedrooms themselves were exact copies of one another, and each had a large window and a walk-in closet. The only difference between them, as far as Kiana could tell, was one was painted beige, the other light brown. Kiana liked beige better so she chose it as her bedroom, and she decided she would wait and decide the other bedroom’s fate at a later date.

  The only problem with the house, however, was its current state. It was completely empty.

  “When does our furniture arrive?”

  Their belongings were being shipped by a moving company and, unfortunately, were still in transit.

  “Should be here first thing in the morning,” Michael said. He was downstairs, taking a look at the garage.

  Good, Kiana thought. She couldn’t wait to start unpacking and make the place her own. In the meantime, however, she decided she was going to go and give that whirlpool bath a try, and much to her delight she had her favorite bubble bath with her, since she had packed it in her suitcase with the rest of her toiletries.

  She had never really wanted to move to Seattle, but at the same time, she was going to make the most of it.

  Chapter 8

  Unfortunately, Kiana did not get to enjoy their new house in Mill Creek for long. Instead, she was shipped off for training, which was a three month program, and her superiors at the USIA wanted her to do it during the summer so she would have it completed by the time school resumed in the fall. She was more than a little apprehensive, especially at first, because it meant she would be away from Michael the entire time and she had never been away from him for that long before.

  He tried to make her feel a little better by saying they would communicate daily via the internet (she was allowed to take her laptop with her), but it really didn’t do much to comfort her. Regardless, there was nothing she could do, as the training was required of all new agents, and as such she was flown to the USIA’s western training facility (later, she learned there was another, called the eastern training facility, somewhere on the east coast). It was in Nevada, in a completely isolated area in the middle of the desert, and it was an old military base that had been converted for USIA use. Kiana’s plane landed on a small airstrip that was on the base’s eastern side and she was greeted by a man named Ulysses Harrington. Harrington was an older man, in his mid to late sixties, and apparently he was the training facility’s ‘chief of operations,’ whatever that meant. He was a tall, lean man and was in great shape, especially for someone his age, and he did his best to make Kiana feel at home.

  “I think you’ll enjoy your time here. Our training program is pretty intensive so it’ll be a lot of work, but word is you’re a real go-getter so you should fit right in. The program is a combination of classwork and physical training. Most of our students are adults, in the normal program, but we currently have three other applicants for the teen program so you’ll have a few partners in crime, so to speak.”

  At that, he led her to where she would be staying, which was a small building, a barracks of some type, filled with metal bunks. Already within the building were the other three students Harrington had referred to, and they had made themselves at home throughout the building. Harrington introduced Kiana to each of them and they all seemed friendly enough. The first was a tall, lanky boy from Texas named Daniel Smith. He had long, shaggy blond hair, blue eyes, and a thick, Southern accent.

  “Everyone calls me Smitty.”

  The second student was a shorter, heavier boy from Montana named Jamie Logan. He said he was from a city called Bozeman but Kiana had never heard of it. He had dark, brown hair and eyes to match.

  The third student was a girl named Jennie Osterman, and she was from San Francisco. She was about Kiana’s height but was a little heavier. She had long, black hair and straight bangs that hung to the middle of her forehead.

  Harrington told them they had orientation first thing in the morning and said he would stop by at 8:00 am to get them, then left them alone for the remainder of the night. Kiana chose a bunk near the far wall and unpacked her things (she had only been allowed to bring one suitcase of clothing, a bag of toiletries, and her laptop computer, so it didn’t take long), and spent the rest of the evening getting to know the other students. Like her, they all had parents who were USIA agents, and like her they were all sixteen (Smitty’s birthday was just a few weeks away so he was almost seventeen).

  The next morning, their training officially began. Harrington gave them a brief orientation which included a tour of the training facility, which was actually quite a bit bigger than Kiana had originally thought. She and the other students watched as a bunch of adult trainees ran by, and if she hadn’t known any better, she would have thought the place was a military boot camp, not an intelligence agency’s training facility. There was a shooting range and a long, complex obstacle course. They all laughed as an adult trainee, a man wearing baggy, gray sweat pants, slipped from a rope near the middle of the obstacle course and fell headfirst into a mud pit.

  Shortly after their tour concluded, they were sent to a building filled with small rooms and their “classwork” officially began. They had multiple classes per day with several different teachers, and the classes covered a broad range of topics that apparently were useful for agents who did work in the field. Apparently, there were some USIA agents who were primarily office workers or laboratory technicians, but the four of them were being trained specifically for field work. After three classes, they were given a brief lunch break in the training facility’s cafeteria and they quickly learned the food there was awful. The vegetables tasted like rubber, and the chicken was so dry they all had to drink a glass of water to wash it down. After lunch, they reported to the training facility’s gymnasium where they were to begin their fitness and combat training. For the first few days they did little more than weight lifting, running, and an assortment of other types of workouts, including a few trips through the obstacle course they had seen on their orientation tour. Kiana, who was athletic by nature, always did well and finished quickly, but the other students struggled and one time Smitty ended up flat on his back in the mud.

  As far as Kiana was concerned, however, her real training didn’t begin until the fifth day. The four of them were in the gymnasium, working with an instructor named Charles O’Reilly on self-defense and other basic combat techniques. O’Reilly had clearly spent a lot of time in the military and he acted more like a drill sergeant than an instructor. He ran them through a series of basic drills, barking at them most of the time, and most of the drills were just simple defensive moves designed to fend off potential assailants or muggers. Everyone did fine but Kiana, who had practiced taekwondo since she had been five, found it terribly boring and unchallenging, and she finally decided to do something to liven things up a little.

  “Pretend you’re walking down an alley,” O’Reilly said. “And I’m a mugger. I come at you with a knife. What would you do?”

  He pulled a small, plastic knife from his pocket and held it in front of him as though he meant to attack her.

  Kiana shrugged. “How about this?”

  As fast as lightning she kicked the knife out of his hand, then followed with a second kick to his chest that knocked the wind from his lungs, then followed with a third kick that swept his feet out from under him and sent him tumbling face first onto the floor. They were standing on mats so he wasn’t injured by the fall, but even so it took him several seconds to recover and climb back to his feet.

  In the meantime, another instructor, a small man who had been working with a group of adult trainees a few feet away, rushed over. He had seen what had happened and his eyes had grown large with interest. He walked up to Kiana and addressed her.

  “That was impressive, young lady.” He had a deep voice, especially for a man his size, and a thick, Korean accent. “What did you do?”

  “It was taekwondo.”

  The man smiled. “I know it was taekwondo. What were the move
s?”

  “Nothing fancy. Two snap kicks followed by a sweep.”

  He nodded. “How long have you been practicing?”

  “Over ten years. I started when I was five.”

  “What school?”

  “ATA Anaheim.”

  “Your rank?”

  “Black belt. Fourth degree.”

  His eyes lit up the minute she said it. In many ways, he looked like a child who had just been given a present on Christmas day.

  “Finally. After all of these years they have sent me a student worthy of my time. Do you have your dobok here with you?”

  A dobok was the traditional uniform worn by taekwondo practitioners. Typically, it was loose fitting, with a white jacket and matching pants.

  “I do. It’s in my suitcase back in the barracks.”

  “Put it on and join me on the far side of the gymnasium. My name is Gwon Ji-hoon. You will refer to me as Master Gwon and from now on you will do your physical training with me and me alone. Understood?”

  At the time, Kiana didn’t really know what to think and she didn’t really know what was happening since she didn’t know who the man was (other than his name) but even so she did as told. She ran back to the barracks, dug her dobok from her suitcase (she almost hadn’t brought it since she hadn’t been certain she would need it), and changed into it. As soon as she had it on, she ran back to the gym, to the spot on its far side where Master Gwon had told her to meet him.

  And then she stopped in her tracks. He, too, had changed, and like her he was wearing a dobok. Unlike hers, however, his was solid black. But the thing that caught her eye wasn’t his dobok or its color. It was his belt. He wore a solid black belt that had nine stripes on it.