KNOCKOUT

IX: CANVAS

THE FLOOR OF A BOXING RING

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ZENON'S ORIGINAL PLAN WAS TO SPEND SPRING BREAK making up for two months of lost sleep, but instead, she finds herself cooped up in the attic, discussing how to steal from one of the most heavily guarded museums in the world.

By something short of a miracle (so probably, blackmail), the twins had managed to loop Hale and Irene into their little plot, as well. So instead of sleeping until noon, Zenon's sprawled out on an armchair, listening to her cousins and Hale bicker back and forth. It's not as boring as one would think—Irene's spewed out some pretty impressive insults so far. Someone hand her a bag of popcorn and she could do this all day.

"It's important!"

"It's insane! I knew you two shitheads were stupid, I just never realized how stupid."

The twins wanted to steal a Monet painting from The Pinnacle—a top-tier museum accompanied with top-tier security. The plan so far was to steal it during the Astro Gala. Unfortunately, that was the only part of the plan they've cooked up, so far.

"What's after this?" Irene asks sarcastically. "Want us to break into The Louvre? Steal the Mona Lisa? How about Fort Knox? I hear it's great this time of year."

"Well, now that you mention it, The Louvre has—Ow! Jesus!"

Irene had chucked her water bottle across the room and hit Doris square in the head.

Zenon coughs to hide her laugh.

Hale exhales loudly, running a hand through his hair. "Why do you guys want this painting, again?"

She gets up to inspect a forgery of the painting in question laid out on a table, in the middle of the room. The twins said they knew some guy from South Africa who specialized in replicas and got a fake shipped to the Nikephoros household this morning. Apparently, the same guy forged the van Gogh's Café Terrace at Night that's currently hanging on display at the Kroller-Muller Museum in the Netherlands—but that's a story for another time.

"We have our reasons." Dion and Doris exchange a cryptic look with each other. 

Zenon's still looking at the fake, but she can practically vision the steam rising from Irene's head as she hears her shout, "So you expect us to just risk our lives because you 'have reasons'?!"

Doris pretends to consider this seriously. Then he nods. "Pretty much, yeah."

Irene throws her hands up in the air in exasperation. "Unbelievable."

"Why can't you just take this one?" Zenon asks, nodding to the forgery. "It looks exactly like the original."

"Because, why settle for the fake, when you can have the real thing?" Dion crosses his arms. "Besides, we're going to swap the original with that one."

"So no one will notice it's gone," Doris finishes.

Hale and Irene groan loudly. "They'll notice," Hale insists. "You do know they conduct tests to check the quality of paint and stuff like that, to confirm if a painting's real or fake, right? So unless that"— he gestures towards the copy—"was painted two centuries ago, they're going to know."

Dion gives him a dry look, then as if Hale was a little four year-old child, "They're not going to check, if we don't give them a reason to."

"Plus, you realize this is actually, like, impossible right?" Hale stubbornly continues. "No one has ever stolen from The Pinnacle before."