The Rookie Ten

Chapter Four: The Wall

Up close, it was taller than it looked from across the yard, which Jack decided was probably the point.

Six feet of solid brick-faced timber, no handholds, no visible seams, standing in the middle of a dirt lane like something had simply decided to interrupt the world there and nobody had argued with it. An instructor stood beside it with a clipboard and the specific boredom of a man who had watched several hundred people fail at this exact obstacle and had stopped finding it interesting somewhere around year three.

"Simple," Graves said, addressing the ten of them from a few feet back, hands clasped behind him. "Get over it. However you manage. I don't care if it's elegant. I care if it happens."

"Define 'however,'" Danny said.

"However," Graves repeated, in a tone that suggested this was the entire definition and no further elaboration would be forthcoming.

Marcus went first, because Marcus went first at most things, without waiting to be asked. He approached at a jog, planted one hand flat against the top edge, and was over in a single fluid motion that looked less like effort and more like the wall had simply agreed to let him pass. He landed on the other side, rolled his shoulders once, and looked back at the rest of them with an expression that wasn't quite smug — Marcus didn't do smug, exactly — but came close enough that Danny, still on this side of the wall, felt compelled to say something about it.

"Show-off."

"You're still over here," Marcus said, from over there, which was, unfortunately, an accurate observation.

Jack went next, and he went the way he did most things: efficiently, without flourish, form clean enough that the instructor with the clipboard actually glanced up from it for half a second. He cleared it, dropped into a controlled landing on the far side, and turned back in time to see Emma already approaching at a full run, which felt, somehow, less like a coincidence and more like a direct challenge.

She went over almost as clean as he had — a jump, a grab, a swing of momentum that carried her most of the way — but the landing came in wrong, her ankle catching an uneven patch of dirt at an angle that sent a sharp, immediate flare of pain up through her leg. She caught herself before it showed, weight shifting fast onto the other foot, jaw tight for exactly one second before she smoothed it into something that looked, from a distance, like nothing had happened at all.

"Not bad," she said to Jack, breathing a little harder than the climb alone should have accounted for.

"You landed short."

"I landed fine."

"You landed short," he said again, quieter this time, and something in the way he said it — not smug, not scoring a point, just stating a fact he'd clearly clocked without meaning to make a thing of it — made her want to argue less than she otherwise would have.

"It's nothing."

"Didn't say it was something."

"You were thinking it."

"I think a lot of things. Most of them I keep to myself." He held her gaze a beat longer, like he was deciding whether this was one of the ones worth saying out loud, and then, apparently, decided it wasn't — not yet — and looked back toward the wall instead, where the next attempt was already underway.

Ethan approached the wall the way he approached everything, which was to say: with a plan. He'd clearly spent the walk over mentally diagramming the optimal grip height and foot placement, and he executed it with the careful precision of someone following a set of instructions only he could see, clearing the wall on the second attempt after adjusting his angle mid-jump with an almost audible click of recalibration.

"You could've just jumped," Chloe said, watching from the sidelines, arms crossed.

"I did jump."

"You did geometry. There's a difference."

"The geometry is what made the jump work."

"Sure." She said it lightly enough that it landed more like teasing than argument, and Ethan, adjusting his glasses, seemed to genuinely consider whether she had a point before deciding, privately, that he'd allow it. Chloe went over next, quick and economical, no wasted motion, the kind of clean efficiency that suggested she'd done something physical before this — gymnastics, maybe, or years of getting places fast without being told how.

Sam cleared it without comment, without expression, without so much as a change in her breathing that anyone could detect from the ground, which somehow made the whole thing more unsettling to watch than if she'd struggled visibly. Olivia went next, fast and businesslike, over and done before anyone had really finished watching Sam's turn, landing lightly enough that Rich — still standing at the base of the wall, not yet attempting it — actually said something out loud for once.

"That was almost graceful."

"Almost?"

"High praise, coming from me."

"I didn't ask for your praise." But she said it without heat, glancing back at him from the far side of the wall with something that wasn't quite a smile, not yet, but wasn't nothing either.

Then there was Rich, still standing exactly where he'd been standing for the last four minutes, examining the wall the way a man might examine a large and unreasonable dog.

"That's — there's dirt on it," he said, to the instructor, to Graves, to anyone who might take up his cause. "That wall has dirt on it. And splinters, probably."

"Congratulations," Graves said. "You've identified a wall."

"I'm just saying, these shoes—"

"Are shoes. You'll survive them getting dirty. You may not survive standing there much longer, however." Graves' voice hadn't risen, which by now Jack understood was the more dangerous register. "Climb the wall, Calloway."

Rich climbed the wall. It was not elegant. It involved several false starts, one moment where his foot slid entirely off the ledge and he hung by both hands with an expression of pure betrayal, and, eventually, a final undignified scramble that got him over the top and dropped him into the dirt on the other side in a heap that did, in fact, ruin the shoes.

"Ten more," Graves said, before Rich had even fully stood up.

"Ten more what—"

"Climbs. You'll do this ten more times, and each time you'll do it faster than the last, and if your shoes survive that's a bonus you didn't earn. Go."

Rich went. It did not get more elegant with repetition, though by the fourth climb he'd stopped commenting on the dirt, which Jack noted was, in its own small way, progress.

That left Grace and Danny, still on the near side, watching the wall with two very different flavors of dread.

"Okay," Grace said, mostly to herself, flipping through some mental checklist only she had access to. "Okay. Momentum, grip, pull. I've watched everyone. I know the mechanics."

"Knowing the mechanics and doing the mechanics are historically pretty different things," Danny said, unhelpfully.

"Thank you, that's very reassuring."

"I'm just saying. I once knew the mechanics of parallel parking for three years before I could actually do it."

"That is not the pep talk I needed."

She ran at the wall anyway, jumped, got both hands over the top edge — and stopped there, hanging, feet scrabbling uselessly against smooth timber, unable to generate the last bit of momentum to haul the rest of herself over. She hung there a full three seconds, arms shaking, before her grip gave out and she dropped back into the dirt, hard, letting out a sound that was half frustration and half genuine pain.

"Okay," Danny said, jogging over. "Okay, let me help—"

"I don't need—"

"You very clearly need. Here." He crouched, laced his fingers together at knee height in a makeshift step. "Foot, here, and I'll boost, and you just—"

What was supposed to happen was Grace stepping into his hands and getting the extra height she needed to clear the wall clean. What actually happened was her foot landing at an angle Danny hadn't quite braced for, his balance going sideways at the exact moment he tried to compensate, and both of them ending up in a tangled heap in the dirt, Grace half on top of him, both of them staring up at the wall that remained, infuriatingly, exactly as tall as it had been thirty seconds ago.

For a second, neither of them moved.

"This is," Grace said, into the general direction of the sky, "not going in the group chat."

"Everything's going in the group chat. You made the group chat. I've seen your commitment to documentation."

"I will remove you from the group chat."

"You can't. I'm the funniest one in it. It'd lose forty percent of its value overnight."

Despite herself — despite the dirt, the wall, the audience of Graves and the clipboard instructor watching with matching expressions of professional patience running thin — Grace laughed, short and surprised, like it had escaped before she could stop it. Danny grinned up at her from the dirt, delighted, like he'd won something considerably larger than a bad joke landing.

"Again," Graves called, not unkindly, which for him counted as encouragement. "Both of you. This time, actually clear it."

They tried again. It went better. Not clean — Grace's landing was still rough enough to draw a wince, and Danny cleared the wall a half-second behind her with significantly less grace than the name implied — but they made it, both of them, dropping onto the far side within moments of each other, breathing hard, grinning in the specific, giddy way of people who'd just survived something together.

Across the yard, Jack watched Emma test her weight on the ankle again when she thought no one was looking, saw the small flinch she immediately covered, and made a decision he didn't examine too closely before walking over.

"Sit," he said.

"I'm fine."

"Sit anyway."

She looked like she was building an argument, weighing whether the fight was worth having, and then — for reasons she'd have denied under oath — sat down on the low retaining wall at the edge of the lane without further protest. Jack crouched in front of her, nothing careful about the movement, purely practical, and pressed two fingers gently around her ankle bone, checking for swelling with the brisk efficiency of someone who'd clearly done first aid training before this morning.

"It's not broken," he said, after a moment.

"I could've told you that."

"You could've. You didn't. You told me it was nothing, which is different." He straightened up, offering a hand she didn't immediately take. "Ice it tonight. Don't push another climb on it today if you can help it."

"Since when do you care what happens to my ankle?"

He considered the question longer than she expected him to, like it deserved an actual answer rather than something glib. "Since it's my problem too, apparently. We're a squad. Squad Four. Somebody said that this morning, I think it was you, mocking me for taking it seriously."

"I remember that."

"Then you remember why I'm asking you to sit down instead of pretending your ankle isn't hurting."

She didn't have a comeback for that one — not a real one, not one with any teeth — and settled instead for taking his offered hand, letting him pull her up, testing her weight more carefully this time with him standing close enough to catch her if the ankle buckled, which it didn't, quite.

"Thank you," she said, and it came out quieter than she meant it to, stripped of the sharp edges she usually kept loaded and ready.

"Don't get used to it," Jack said, but there was something almost like warmth underneath the words, and when Emma glanced up at him, she caught, for just a second, an expression on his face that looked a great deal less like disapproval than it had twenty-four hours ago.

Neither of them mentioned it again. Both of them thought about it for the rest of the afternoon.