The air fills with voices now that all the windows are broken, and the soundproofing has been shattered. There is screaming and shouting mixed in with the ringing sounds of gunfire, it is horrifying.
Marcus, Hugo, and Sarah jump up from our hiding spot and start sprinting towards the cabin with Sarah shouting at me to follow. I get up and race after them, adrenaline rushing through my system.
Hugo and Marcus ram open the front door and charge inside with Sarah following close behind and I stumble in panting after. When I walk through the front door, I step into a literal murder scene. The hostiles are lying on the floor, surrounded by crimson red.
"Hostiles immobilised." Someone in the room says.
A few of the hostages have sustained minor injuries, a few looking bloody and bruised from taking a battering, and one has a bullet wound to the shoulder that they are staunching by tying their jumper tightly over the wound, but from what I can see everyone else is miraculously okay. I, however, am not.
The sight of the dead attackers, and the metallic smell of blood, the taste in the air – it is too much. I turn and run out of the cabin, where I promptly throw up on the grass.
Once I've thrown up the entire contents of my stomach, I take a deep breath and steel myself. When I finally feel ready, I step back inside. Sarah and Hugo are searching the bodies with some other people who I presume are other candidates, and Marcus is talking to Agent Hartley who has a grim look on his face and is rubbing the red marks that are raw on his wrists from where he was tied up.
I walk over to them gingerly, taking care to not step in the blood which covers the floor. Agent Hartley notices me and gives me a brief, tight smile. "I hear you almost got blown up on your first day, welcome to MI6."
"Gee, thanks," I mumble, "So who are these people? What did they want?"
"That's what we're trying to find out, we ideally would have kept some of them alive but when they realised that they were outnumbered they used the old cyanide in the fake tooth trick and killed themselves before we could ask." Hartley answers, glancing at a couple of dead hostiles that still have froth bubbling from their mouth. "They seemed to be messing around, stalling for time – they were waiting on someone. Did any of you see anyone else around the camp?" He asks as Hugo and Sarah move over to join us.
We all shake our heads. "No, Sarah and Patience were on lookout while Hugo and I took out some of the hostiles, and we basically travelled across the whole camp, there was no one... Except the time we heard movement when we were heading through the woods south of this cabin, but I believe they got here ahead of us rather than were heading elsewhere." Marcus responds, frowning.
Hartley returns the frown. "We will have to look into this – they overpowered us too easily, knew that we do the morning drill so that the squads wouldn't put up a fight until it was too late. There was more of them, a lot more, but a group of around twenty of them left about an hour before you arrived and haven't returned, none of them seemed to be the leader." He glances at Marcus, "That means we will be calling the director to camp."
Marcus sighs. "I know." Is all he says.
Hartley sends out multiple groups of soldiers to scour the camp for the other group of hostiles, and another group to retrieve vehicles to drive us all back to the cabins at camp. The group with the cars arrives back after an hour, everyone on high alert but there is no sign of any of the other hostiles. The other groups report back to Hartley via the car radios that the camp is empty – the hostiles have managed to disappear without a trace.
Hartley sends our squad first with the injured, telling us to go back to the cabin and have the rest of the day free. He informs us before we leave that we will have to further discuss the events of today, tomorrow, when the director, Marcus's father, arrives at camp. Luckily, this means no siren and no big drills. They need everyone focused on finding out exactly what the hell happened and how a military camp – especially one commandeered by MI6 – could be infiltrated. He also assures me that training – the basic kind – will begin for me tomorrow, a hostage situation isn't going to postpone that.
Yippee.
We arrive back at the cabin twenty minutes later to find it ransacked. We all go straight to our rooms without tidying up after Hugo replaces the lock on the cabin door. I am exhausted even though it's only early afternoon. I am yet to eat, but all I want to do is sleep this nightmarish morning away. So, I kick off my boots and burrow under the duvet without changing, falling asleep the moment my head touches the pillow.
I wake up a few hours later to Sarah gently shaking me awake, telling me that Hugo is making dinner again if I can stomach eating, or eating his food as she put it. I thank her and tell her I will be out once I am cleaned up, but when I reluctantly roll out of bed and go to the wardrobe to pull out new clothes, I open the door to an empty space. I stare at it for a few seconds until I finally look at the mess around me and find that my clothes are in fact in a corner of the room ripped to shreds, even the ones I brought from home had been emptied from my bag and dumped and shredded. I guess the hostiles weren't too pleased when they found the wardrobe empty of people.
I sigh. The clothes I'm still wearing have tears dotted all over them, along with dried blood from the land mine explosion, which I know I shouldn't have slept in considering I should have cleaned my cuts to avoid infection, but my body and mind were drained and demanded sleep. It isn't as if I have ever witnessed a killing before, nor a dead person. The images are rolling through my mind on replay as they had done in my sleep, and all I want to do is talk to my parents, but I can't.
I wander out into the hall and go to find Sarah, walking into the kitchen only to see Hugo humming while chopping some vegetables on a chopping board. He looks up when he hears me enter the room and says with a grin, "Aren't you a pretty sight."
"Shut up." I reply, rolling my eyes. "All of my clothes were destroyed by those stupid soldiers so these are all I have left; I was looking for Sarah to borrow some of hers until I can get new ones."
Hugo laughs. "She's in her room, probably sharpening her knives in distraught since she didn't get to take part in the fun at the end of the day." Hugo says, giving me a frightening image, "She's the door furthest on the right." He adds without looking at me, a smirk threatening the edges of his mouth.
"Thanks, I guess." I walk out of the room and Hugo resumes his humming, which is sounding considerably upbeat despite the day's events.
I walk to the end of the corridor and knock on the door. There is no answer, so I push the door open and peek my head in to see that she isn't in her room, so I walk in hesitantly to hear the shower running in an ensuite at the other side of the room. Where the hell is my ensuite bathroom?
"Uh, Sarah?" I call to no reply.
I look around the room, it is spotless despite the rest of the cabin still being a mess. There are no clothes strewn about the place, the bed is neatly made but the curtains are still drawn. The only thing that tarnishes the neatness of the room is a book that is carelessly placed on a bedside table. I walk over to the book and pick it up. A Midsummer Night's Dream. Shakespeare.
I didn't really take Sarah as much of a reader, never mind of Shakespeare.
"What the hell are you doing?"
I jump, dropping the book, and spin around.
Before me is not Sarah, but the tall muscular body of Marcus draped in nothing but a towel. Tattoos cover his body; his arms, his chest, his torso – all covered in thick black ink. His hair is wet, and water runs in rivulets down his body, tracing the defined lines of his muscles. I watch a droplet of water travel from his chest, down through his abs, and disappearing under his towel—
"Hey, Freak." Marcus waves his hand in front of my face, "Why the fuck are you in my room?" My eyes snap up, my face glowing crimson, to meet the eyes of Marcus who is glaring at me with a look of annoyance and contempt.
"Oh, uh, Hugo told me this was Sarah's room." I stammer, willing myself to keep my eyes on his face.
"Well, it's not as you can see, so get the hell out." He snaps.
"Going." I run out of the room and slam the door shut behind me. I storm down the hall to the kitchen where Hugo stands with Sarah and shout, "HUGO I'M GONNA FREAKING KILL YOU!"
Hugo looks up and bursts out laughing, "Hey, look, I found Sarah!" He says, pulling Sarah in front of him.
"Hugo?" I say, closing my eyes.
"Yes, my sweet Patience?" He responds with a wink.
"Run." I tell him, and then I grab a boot that is lying on the floor and throw it at Hugo's head, Sarah ducking just in time, and it misses him by mere millimetres.
"What was that, Marcus? Coming darling!" Hugo grins, shouting to nobody and slips out of the room.
"Ugh!" I groan in frustration.
Sarah raises her eyebrows at me. "What was that all about?"
"That shithead told me that Marcus's room was your room so when I walked in, I was met by a mostly naked Marcus just out of the shower!" I ramble. "I'm so mortified!"
Sarah begins laughing.
"This isn't funny!" I protest.
"It kinda is." Sarah says, wiping the corner of her eye unable to stop laughing.
"Can you stop laughing, please?!" I say, exasperated.
"Okay, okay." Sarah says, trying to contain her grin. "So why were you looking for me?"
"Because all of my clothes have been destroyed, and I was wondering if I could please borrow some of yours until I can get new ones?" I ask as politely as I can muster after my embarrassment.
"First, you shower, then you get my clothes." She says crossing her arms.
"Deal." I agree.
While Sarah goes to find some clothes that might fit me, I go to the bathroom and turn on the shower. I turn the temperature up so that clouds of steam are puffing from the water, and I strip off my ruined clothes, throwing them into a pile on the floor.
I walk into the shower, gasping at the scorching water and let it rinse off the reminders of the day, scrubbing at my cuts to get them clean. I can't believe that in the space of three days I've gone from a normal teenage gymnast to a recruit in a government spy organisation and have been chased, almost blown up, and witnessed a massacre.
I am surprised by how calmly I am taking things, I really thought I'd be freaking out, but I feel somehow numb to the crazy, probably just in shock and what I saw hasn't fully settled in yet, but also as though I'm finally where I belong despite the circumstances of the day. I'm excited to learn the basics tomorrow, being thrown in the deep end was not my ideal first day, and I didn't really do anything but now I am going to learn to prove my worth.
Sarah drops the fresh clothes into the bathroom as I near the end of my shower and I step out when she closes the door and dry off with a towel. I pick up the clothes Sarah left and pull them on. They are the same as every other piece of clothing in this camp, but I have to roll up the ankles of the trousers and Sarah has given me a thick woollen jumper, of which I push the sleeves up to my elbows. I towel dry my hair, brushing out all the tangles and pull it up into a tight ponytail on the top of my head.
I wipe the fog from the small mirror that is nailed to the wall and examine myself. I have a small cut on my forehead and a split lip where the debris has hit me from the explosion, but apart from that I look like me. There is only one major change that I see as I stare directly into the eyes of the person staring back at me in the mirror.
They are the eyes of someone filled with sheer determination to prove anyone who thinks of them as weak, wrong, and has the full confidence to do it.