Climax Street

“Again!” Mr. Nox snarled. “Colvin, a corpse could shoot better than that!”

For the twenty-first time that day, I had missed my target by a matter of twenty metres. The lightbulb I had shattered had landed upon the mountain of ceiling tiles that I had amassed on the floor. 

My heart was racing at light speed and the room was a vibrating blur of colours, yet I steadied my hands and fired the slender, black gun. 

The bullet ricochetted off of the back door, before embedding itself onto the far wall, a full ten metres from the silhouette. 

“Pathetic,” Mr. Nox muttered. “You will not leave this room until you make at least one decent shot at the target!”

“I’ve been trying for five hours!” I protested. “How is pressuring me going to do any difference?!”

“Just do it!” I wouldn’t have been surprised if lava erupted out of his eye sockets. 

“That will not be necessary,” a clipped voice corrected. 

We spun around, to find my mother, Esmeray Laverna, having materialised out of nowhere. Given the way Mr. Nox shrieked, I doubt I was the only one who Mom had nearly given a heart attack. 

Mom was the leader of the crime organisation EI, which stood for Evil Intelligence, although only five people on Earth, namely Mom, Dad, my sister Leta, Mr. Nox, the vice-director of EI, and I knew that. Most of the members of EI only knew Mom as “Commander S”. EI specialised in causing destruction, having employed more than a thousand double agents, corrupt governmental officials, professional assassins, and biochemists to follow Mom’s whims. EI was singularly responsible for the stepping down of nine presidents, the assassination of five ministers, and the corruption of most of the governmental agencies in the world. Its only significant rival was the organisation Holocene, led by Director Diomed, which had a trademark symbol of a skull crossed with a knife.

My father, Daegel Claec, was one of the world’s best assassins, with the alias of “The Heartstopper”. Currently, he had been hired by a shady government to assassinate a crucial political figure on a holiday in Papua New Guinea. 

While my mother, father, and sister were all exceptionally adept at firing weapons, those genes seemed to have avoided me. As remarked by Mr. Nox, I “shot like a diseased snail”. Unfortunately, I was supposed to become a seasoned criminal, which entitled me to more than a decade of tutoring from Mr. Nox. I constantly promised my mother that I would improve, but I never did. 

“Colvin will be deployed on his first mission today,” Mom announced flatly. 

“What?!” Mr. Nox and I shrieked simultaneously. 

“He will be activated today,” Mom repeated, her voice becoming an Arctic wind, “as part of Operation In the Dark. Effective immediately.”

Mr. Nox hung his head. “I understand.”

“Your role, Colvin, will be to infiltrate a private middle school in London in which the United State’s President Alexander Manfrid’s daughter Sasha is enrolled.”

“Why are you picking me to do this?!” I whined. 

“Because Leta is currently working on another part of the plan, and you need to have some field experience anyhow.”

“Why are you so interested in me getting close to Sasha Manfrid in the first place?” I demanded as the three of us headed towards the spiral staircase leading to the underground atrium of the headquarters of EI. 

Mom snorted. “Isn’t it obvious? We need the president to heed one of our demands. And don’t bother asking what the demand is, because that’s classified.”

“You’re not asking me to kidnap or assassinate her, are you?” I whimpered. 

Mr. Nox cackled. “You? You’d be lucky to hit a stationary elephant a centimetre in front of you, let alone a heavily protected and highly intelligent teenager.”

“Because of that,” Mom interrupted, “the objective of Operation In the Dark is not for you to assassinate or capture Sasha Manfrid. Instead, it is for you to obtain information about her. Or, more precisely, of her phone.”

“Her phone,” I repeated. 

“President Manfrid stores highly-classified data in an encrypted, centralised cloud, which will likely encompass what EI needs for Operation In the Dark. Frustratingly, we have not been able to hack into it. But, if you give us access to Sasha’s phone, which is an account linked to his cloud, we will be able to access highly classified data.”

“How am I supposed to do that?” I demanded. “Sasha will be surrounded by bodyguards at all times!”

“Not all the time,” Mr. Nox corrected. “That’s where Leta comes in. She will create a large distraction to draw out all three of her bodyguards, after which you will strike.”

“I’ll give you ten days to acclimatise yourself as a transfer student in Vorigner Preparatory School, and during that time, you are to grow closer to Sasha Manfrid.” Mom tossed a disgustingly starched uniform to me. “Get ready. You’re leaving at oh’ nine hundred.

“Oh, and Colvin? You better improve your marksmanship. You will need it someday.” She didn’t bother to wait for my response as I clicked my gun into a hidden holster built into the uniform. 

***

Daffodil, one of the EI agents dedicated to smuggling weapons with a face as stoic as a boulder, drove me towards the cold dormitory that I was to stay at for around two weeks. As the black car inched towards Vorigner Prep., I carefully cataloged the surrounding roads, streets, and alleys in case I had to flee the academy at a moment’s notice. 

Daffodil slammed the brakes down on an abandoned road called Climax Street. “Vorigner Prep. is just up that hill,” she announced, pointing at the narrow passageway that wound up a hill. “Do you remember your alias?”

I nodded. I was to be posing as Winton Bartone, an enthusiastic mathematician. Mr. Nox had spun a few threads with the academy’s administration to permit my entry (“transfer from a school in Spain”, I mean) on such short notice. I was likely going to be the centre of attention at the school, so Mr. Nox advised me to lie low for the first ten days. 

“Leta will be staying across the street, in the Hammersmith Hotel,” Daffodil continued. “At precisely eighteen hundred on December 31, Leta will set off a large explosion somewhere on Climax Street. Everyone will be in a state of panic during the explosion, and you are to use that to your advantage to pickpocket Sasha Manfrid’s mobile phone. Afterward, you will clandestinely slip off of campus, head to the rendezvous point to meet up with Leta, and I will pick you up there at nineteen hundred. Understand?”

“Yes,” I replied curtly and slipped on my backpack. 

I had no idea what would occur in the next ten days. 

***

For the next ten days, I was fortunate enough to experience the anguish following the alienation from society. Almost everyone completely ignored, scoffed at, and glared at me. I could feel the eyes of my “fellow students” on me wherever I went, and the residual effects of their suspicion and hatred poisoned my dreams. 

Ironically, the only person who wasn’t acidic towards me was Sasha Manfrid, who had platinum-blond hair and golden eyes, and whose three bodyguards did all of the gawking and glaring for her. Mr. Nox had engineered for me to be in seventy-five percent of Sasha’s classes every day, which did little to assuage my nerves–and, unfortunately, the bodyguards’ suspicions of me. The only time I established any sort of contact with Sasha was when she momentarily locked eyes with me and smiled, before being swallowed up by the three walls of pure muscle. 

I had no idea how I was going to get into a ten-metre radius of Sasha, let alone procure her phone for EI without getting caught by the three bodyguards or anyone else at the academy and getting pummelled to a pulp. The closest I had gotten to pickpocketing her phone was when I saw a glimpse of the purple glitter stitched onto her phone case from across the room.

The more I thought about it, the more I began to doubt EI’s ingenious plan. How was I ever going to succeed? My training could only go so far without the ruthlessness of being able to fire a gunshot, and a slime mold had better shooting skills than me. 

The decaying grandfather clock locked into the central foyer suddenly struck six in the night, resonating in four ominously deep vibrations that tickled my cochlea. Only then did I realize that it was the last day of the year. 

Five seconds later, an explosion rocketed the foyer, sending the grandfather clock and cheap, plastic chairs flying in all directions. The windows facing Climax Street shattered, while a brick flew out of nowhere and nailed one of Sasha’s bodyguards in the head. Alarms blared all across campus, while the gruff voice of the principal alerted everyone to head into their classrooms immediately. 

Everyone on campus had turned a shade of green, ranging from mildly lime to the colour of pond scum. Everyone, that is, except for one person other than me. 

Sasha Manfrid cast a fleeting glance at her two conscious bodyguards (both of whom were distracted), before slipping out towards the gates leading down to Climax Street with her purple phone clutched in her hand tightly. 

After chancing a glance at the pandemonium Leta caused, I followed her. 

***

The rendezvous point that EI had arranged was at the bottom of Climax Street, tucked between two abandoned retail shops. Indeed, I could make out Leta’s raven-black hair near the base of the hill, along with the totalled landscape around her. Although all of the buildings had been abandoned on Climax Street, it was still unnerving to see the dark ashes rising from the rubble. 

Leta appeared to be gesticulating at me to speed up. Until she wasn’t. 

Sasha jumped into the rendezvous point, and they both disappeared. 

“Leta!” I shrieked and ignoring the flares of pain that erupted from my leg, I ran at light speed to the bottom of the hill. 

Leta was slumped up against the brick wall that ended the narrow alleyway with a sedation dart stuck to her arm, while Sasha was looming over her like a vulture, with a slender dart gun in her hands. 

“Get away from my sister,” I growled. 

Sasha turned around, narrowing her golden eyes at me. “Hello, Colvin Claec.”

My heart stopped. “How do you know me?”

Sasha smoothed her hair. “There are many things you do not know about me, Colvin. I understand that your mother, Esmeray Laverna, has initiated Operation In the Dark in an attempt to gain control of the entire United States’ electrical grid?”

Electrical grid? I wondered. 

Sasha’s eerie smile lowered the temperature around us. “The leader of Evil Intelligence needs to work on communicating her plans to her members. But yes, that is what your mother is aiming to attack, and she needs my phone to trace back my father’s digital account to hack into his highly-classified cloud. But, needless to say, she picked the wrong child to do it.”

The world began to turn red, but I forced myself to suppress my anger. “How do you know so much about EI?”

“Is it not obvious?” She tapped her finger against a symbol on the gun that I hadn’t noticed before: a skull crossed with a knife. 

“The Holocene,” I whispered. 

“Correct. I am one of the best agents of the Holocene. The Holocene is far more conniving than the EI thinks. We have everyone at EI doing everything to our whim!” Sasha cackled, which sounded more like an earsplitting wail. “Director Esmeray activated you as the primary agent of the mission! You! To get close to me!”

“Why are you even a member of the Holocene?” I demanded. 

Sasha sighed. “Because the modern world has many glittering cracks, and none of the leading political parties anywhere can solve them. The Holocene is the best bet to achieving a global resolution to the plethora of problems that humanity is facing. EI is only interested in short-term benefits and personal gains, not in the myriad of modern problems. Which means that EI has to be eliminated.”

Sasha raised the dart gun so that it was level with my head. 

“You do not have the ruthlessness to fight back, Colvin. In five minutes, a police force will come to investigate the ruins of Climax Street. You and your sister will take the fall for that.”

Before she pulled the trigger, however, a primal instinct that I didn’t know I possessed took hold of me. I leapt out of the way, grabbing onto a low-hanging pipe. Sasha’s next shot missed me by a millimetre and nailed the pipe instead. 

“Ugh, stay still, will you?!” Sasha snapped as she fired another dart at me. 

I dove into a trash can, which smelt and sounded far worse than it sounded. I hurtled a bag of trash at Sasha’s head. 

Sasha fired a dart at the bag, which detonated upon impact. A shower of rotten apples and yellowed tissue papers rained in torrents down on Sasha. In the ensuing trash storm, Sasha dislocated her dart gun, while I tentatively walked toward her. 

Sasha recovered from the detritus shower faster than I anticipated, however, and leapt towards Leta with a glinting knife in her hand. She fixed me with a frozen glare. 

“I am running out of patience with you, Colvin,” Sasha warned, brandishing the knife blade. “If you do not surrender yourself, I will be forced to terminate Agent Leta.”

A frosted thought took hold of my mind as I aimed a colder glare at Sasha. “I don’t think you will do that,” I countered. 

I unclipped my hidden gun, and, with shaky hands, aimed it at Sasha. 

Sasha’s eyes narrowed. “Colvin, you lack the necessary willpower to aim a gun, much less fire it. It’s one of the many flaws of Operation In the Dark. Now, last chance, Colvin. Submit to the Holocene’s rules or be sisterless.”

A guttural growl escaped from my lips. “I think, Sasha Manfrid, you underestimate me too much. Today, you–and the rest of the world–will see how much necessary willpower and ruthlessness I truly have.”

I pulled the trigger six times. 

***

“What happened?” Mom demanded as I dragged the unconscious form of Leta, my emptied gun, and the purple phone to the EI headquarters, with Daffodil following close by. “Did you initiate the first phase of Operation In the Dark correctly?”

I didn’t answer. 

Mom tilted her head to study me. “I can see that something has changed in you, Colvin.”

“I did it,” I murmured. “I improved my marksmanship.”

I dumped my emptied gun and the phone onto Mom’s desk. 

That night, the headline of the New York Times was: PRESIDENT MANFRID’S DAUGHTER HAS BEEN MURDERED ON CLIMAX STREET.