She Will Persist

9

Adira

Blitz spat blood out the side of his mouth and onto the slick black mat.

He glared his blue eyes at me. "I swear to god, if you knock out a tooth—"

"You'll be a pissy, toothless English pirate," I shrugged. "Which personally I think you could pull off. Now try and hit me again." I smiled devilishly to prompt him.

He pulled a knife out from the sheath at his thigh and flipped it around his fingers. He swung at me with it, and I felt the air by my forehead shiver as I ducked. I knocked his arm off target and swung out with my opposite hand to punch him in the cheek.

He took a step backwards from the blow. "Bloody hell it's like 7 in the morning why do you have to draw blood?" His English accent was sharp and accusative at this hour.

I smiled sweetly at him. He came at me again with the hand that had his knife, aiming for my heart, but at the last second tossed it to his other hand to cut me near my jaw line.

He waggled the tip of the blade at me as I tried not to stagger. "Alright, you know the rule. Every time you get hit you've got to tell me something in French. Your test is today. Come on." His blue eyes stared expectantly at me.

Every few months there are language tests for agents in training. Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Dutch, Arabic, Norwegian, Mandarin, Chinese, Hindi, Danish, Japanese, German, Swahili, Korean, Swedish, Romanian, Greek, Danish, Bengali, Turkish, English, Sorani, Malay, Indonesian, Icelandic, Polish, Kashubian, Samoan, Bulgarian and Vietnamese are all taught at the agency. Along with a few more obscure ones. The Director picks which ones you learn as soon as you enter the system, so there's always an equal amount of agents who speak each language. The monthly French test was today and Blitz, James, Harrison and I had been in one of the training rooms since 5am practicing both sparring and French.

It was still early. Harrison and Blitz were sweating through their t-shirts, but James had a sweatshirt on and was huddled in a far corner fiddling with some communication device. Yesterday we'd done a similar thing, except it had been running on the track that was outside after training. The three of us ran for hours, while James sat in the middle of the track and added seconds to Harrison's times because of the brunet's failure to identify the seventh step in hacking phone lines.

In the past month I had learned a lot. James, Blitz and Harrison banded together to teach me everything they knew. We trained before and after regular day training, every day.

On Friday nights Flagg was slightly more lenient than usual, and agents were allowed to roam around the agency; usually betting on who could do the insane military obstacle course the quickest or who could throw knives from the longest distance or who could scale a building the fastest or playing knock out (literally, knock out).

Fucking boys. Idiots, really. They're weak too, I got the second best all-time record for the obstacle course my first try, knocking Owen out of the place he'd held for years. Oops, my bad. 

Blitz, Harrison, James and I usually hung out in the middle of the field that was in the inside of the track on Fridays though, talking or smoking the weed Harrison always seemed to have on him. I wished Axel was around to experience recreational agency life with. 

I fell asleep no problem each night with my muscles aching and mind humming with all the special spy equipment James excitedly explained how to use. I quickly learned he was a nerd like that. It was pretty funny the way his eyes would light up when I asked him what some tiny gadget did or how it was smuggled through security. The three boys became my teachers and my friends. They shared mission mishaps, successes, unorthodox adventures, and stories about their past lives.