Mr Holt had called us out to assemble on the rural side of the Blue Gulf again for a training session. I was early, so I stood on the cliff edge looking across the width of the gulf to the lower side where the city gleamed in the sun.
On that side, narrow stairs carved into the rocks made precarious paths with wooden rails down to the tiny sandy or rocky beaches at the foot of the tall cliffs. At the moment, the beaches below were hidden by the morning fog. The cliff on the city side had more grey and blue rock compared to the dry dirt or sedimentary rock of the cliff on which I was standing on this side of the Gulf.
Below the cliff, morning fog swirled, blocking from view any of the many caves in the cliff wall. From where I stood, the constant roar of the sea water crashing against the cliff face could be barely heard. The sea wind whipped my hair up momentarily and then died down slowly, allowing my hair to drift back down into a mess.
I heard the soft sound of someone breathing out of time with the cool breeze whipping my hair about my face. There was the faint sound of clothes rustling and soft footsteps on crackling dry grass and shifting pebbles. He was obviously trying to sneak up on me. From the pattern of movement, the rhythm of his breathing and the weight of his footfall, I could tell who it was.
"Sarden," I greeted without turning around.
"You're always early," complained my classmate and colleague, Sarsen Bird. It wasn't his real name. None of us knew each other's real names, but because of how forgetful and frustrating this fatuous flop could be, we called him Sarden Fish. Just a catch a whiff of his presence and it was like the smell of the fish market at the end of a hot day. You didn't want to go near him. "No matter how early I try to be, you always arrive for meetings and training first. It's not fair. And then, you have the gall to refuse to let me creep up and scare you."
"You're too noisy," I replied and so informing him that he wouldn't be able to creep up to scare me this time while I looked down at the shining big shopping centre complex called The Edge, on the other side of the cliff. Nobody but those in the know would ever have realised that The Edge was not just the biggest shopping centre in the city. It was also our organisation's headquarters.
From here, it looked so far away. I wasn't perfect at measuring distances with my eyes yet, but I was improving. My estimates were becoming more accurate. At this narrower part of the gulf, the other side was only about forty to sixty metres away. The narrowest section of the gulf was about thirty-three metres before the pointy end of the gulf more than seventy kilometres further inland. The narrowest section was where the suspension bridge and chair lift were located. Several hundred metres away from where I was standing.
The widest part of the gulf was further seaward and was wide enough for four container ships to be able to sit longways, end to end. It made sense that the Docklands was built at the wider part of the Gulf rather than these more scenic narrower sections.
"Shut it," Sarden sounded like he was pouting, but not stopping his slow creep in my direction. "No need to rub it in. I'll definitely be able to scare you next time. Last time, I made you jump an all time high. I reckon it must've been two metres."
"You shut it yourself. You dropped a baby hugger slime down my neck. It was cold and it ate holes in my clothes before I could get it out."
"Yeah. Good times," Sarden coughed a laugh. "I should do it again."
"Try it and see whether I don't knock you down."
"You can try," Sarden sing-songed at me. "We might be fellow barrel scrapers, but I at least have the glory of remaining undefeated by you on the mats."
That hurt. Our poor competence was our sore spot when we were desperately trying to do everything we could to keep our jobs. It troubled me that I couldn't even tackle this loser one rank above me onto the mats.
"There's always a first time," I muttered, hearing him step closer, likely because he had not yet given up his plan to scare me and pretend to push me down because I hadn't turned around to look at him.
"In your dreams."
I tossed my head to get my hair out of my face to glance at him standing with his arms reaching out behind me in his purple and black windbreaker. The dull material had a slight sheen to it when the light hit it at certain angles.
"Nice jacket," I commented, stepping away from both him and the tufty edge of the crumbly cliff edge toward safety, making him drop his arms with a sigh and retreat from the cliff edge with me. Unlike the city side of the gulf, the rural side was more dangerous. The cliff edge often crumbled and fell down without warning. It wasn't safe to have a scuffle there. "Is it new?"
"Yeah. Look. It's reversible." He flapped the jacket open so that I could see the army green underside. "There's a new shop in The Edge called Parapet. They've got some nice designs there. You should check it out. You're always wearing the same clothes. It's on level three in the West Wing near Wattled Jeans."
Sarden patted my shoulder with a grin, while I half-heartedly batted his hand away.
My compliment seemed to have brightened his mood enough so that he wouldn't try to hurt or prank me just to amuse himself. He only ever played mean pranks on me when his mood was low and he was trying to distract himself from his problems. The two of us were companions with the same struggles, on almost the same level and footing. Having no one to talk to during the day made life difficult when we were upset with each other, so it was important to not go too far in provoking the other person.
"Thanks," I rolled my eyes at his jab at my thriftiness. "I'll check it out some time."
Being thrifty was a virtue but such virtues were no longer considered virtuous in today's materialistic world. Besides, I had to save money wherever I could. I wasn't as well off as Sarden.
I sat down on a rock.
"What were you doing just now?" Sarden asked with curiosity, playing with gun grass seed heads, making them burst with a pop between his fingers, pointing them at me to make the seeds scatter on my coat with a sound like a burst of little raindrops. "Don't tell me you suddenly upgraded your abilities and were wondering whether you can jump across the Gulf?"
I laughed and didn't reply, stepping out of range of his grass seed bullets. Jumping across the Gulf was exactly what I had been considering, but if I admitted to it, Sarden would freak out and tell the rest of our team when they turned up. Then they'd start discussing why and whether I was contemplating suicide. It was an impossible jump. Everyone knew that.
Everyone except for me.
Everyone in the team had been chosen out of relative mediocrity. We had all originally been ordinary people of some sort, but someone somewhere had noticed us for our hidden talents or abilities. We'd been pulled out from our ordinary, everyday lives and trained. Our talents were honed.
My talent was jumping and leaping long distances. Although most of my results weren't that much better than the average elite athlete's so far, I was working on it. I had the feeling that with a bit more practice, I would soon be able to make the superhuman leaps expected of me more consistently and actually make myself useful.
I barely scraped past any of the other tests, beating Sarden by one or two points most of the time. But even with all the hard work I put in, I could barely defend myself in a fight, which was why he still ranked above me. So if I wanted to improve my poor ranking scores, being able to consistently make high or long and accurate leaps and jumps were my only hope.
Sarden was my fellow barrel scraper. His ability was meant to be able to glide short distances in the air. Meant to. Like me, his ability to perform was erratic. It didn't help that he had a slight fear of heights.
Even in our new fledgling team, the two of us rarely played active roles, needing to be protected more often than not. We barely even played support roles because we weren't really tech savvy either. I didn't know why we hadn't yet been dismissed back to our boring normal lives. That is, if retired or failed agents were allowed to go back to ordinary life. I didn't know if they did. I'd never heard of it. Why had they chosen such boring and ordinary people as ourselves who had barely responded to their training?
I was a slow learner and a dreamer who hated having to leave the dorm to face the world with all its inconsistency and unpredictability. Not that anyone in the dorm ever talked to me. I was too far beneath them. I didn't dare talk to them either. Besides, the people in my dorm changed so frequently that I had lost track of who they were and who was living with me now. When I did leave the shared staff dorm room, I was a competitive high achiever that had never achieved any heights beyond the lower end of average. Then again, standing out in this society wasn't necessarily a good thing. Being considered competent in this team didn't mean acceptance.
I mean, look at Mary Belle. She was competent. She was pretty, but no one in the team liked her. Probably because of her nasty mouth and tendency to backstab people. Both literally and figuratively.
Flint could be considered competent too, but nobody liked a prankster who was always playing mean pranks and bullying helpless people like me until they wanted to cry to make himself feel better. There was a reason women everywhere avoided him like the plague despite his near desperation to find someone to share his bed, if only for a night.
Who could trust him? We didn't know when his words could be trusted and even if we should trust his words. We couldn't trust him because his reliability track record was bad. His positioning was often off because he'd been too busy ogling other women and so caused us to lose the criminal and have to chase them for another half day.
Big Brother was competent and reliable, if a bit cold as if he were a robot. He was the most likeable, experienced and the senior of our fractured fledgling group of newbies not so fresh out of the Academy. I liked him. He was calm, controlled and prevented the others from bullying me. The only problem was that when he punished them, I would still be included. He said if there was disunity in the team, it was the whole team's responsibility and therefore the whole team must be punished. He was our team's voice, speaking for us most of the time. We all listened and obeyed him because he was so much better and stronger than the four of us combined. If only he didn't hide the bullying from our leader and mentor, my teacher, Mr Holt, then I might think he was the perfect agent.
A pity he was such a cold automaton like man who had the compulsion to do everything by the book.
People had their own rules and ways of thinking. I couldn't always understand them. The human mind was an unfathomable mystery.
Competency wasn't the be all and end all for an agent. At least, I didn't think so. I felt that a person's character was extremely important too, but perhaps those in management disagreed with me. Or we were just a bunch of flawed individuals who had been grouped into this flawed team with a flawed performance.
Trainers and instructors had told me not to give up. Not to stop working hard in my own private training so that I could at least keep up with everyone else. They said that with enough effort on my part, I might one day rise from the ranks of the barrel scrapers to reach the lofty heights of the lower end of mediocre.
So I had been training hard on my own in my own time. I felt that my recent individual training might just allow me to jump in a way that would make me look like I was flying. Coupled with my tendency to stay unnoticed and fly under people's radar, I felt it was very possible that I could now leap the distance from this side of the gulf to the other.