The Rookie Ten

Chapter Two: The Wrong Bus

By 7:40, the forty of them had been fed, humiliated a second time over uneven boot-lacing, and herded toward a gravel lot where two white academy buses sat idling with their doors open like a dare.

"Two buses," Graves announced, standing between them with a clipboard he consulted with the theatrical reverence of a man reading last rites. "Bus One, Range Road site. Bus Two, obstacle facility. Board when your name is called. Do not," he added, in the tone of a man who had clearly lived through the alternative, "board the wrong bus."

Forty names got called into the cold in no particular order that anyone could discern, and forty recruits shuffled forward in the particular fog of people who'd been awake since before dawn and were now expected to also remember which bus corresponded to which syllable of their own last name. Somewhere in the scrum, someone's water bottle rolled under the wheel well and got crushed with a sound like a gunshot, which made at least six people flinch and Graves, notably, not react at all.

Danny Ferris boarded the wrong bus.

In fairness to him, both buses looked identical, both drivers looked equally uninterested in his existence, and his name — called somewhere in the first ten, he was fairly sure — had blurred into the general noise of forty last names being shouted into cold air. He climbed the steps of Bus One with the easy confidence of a man who had never once in his life double-checked anything, dropped into a seat, and was three minutes into a very satisfying nap before someone tapped his shoulder.

"You're on my range squad?"

Danny opened one eye. The man looking down at him had the build of someone who did not skip a single day at the gym, ever, for any reason, including holidays. "Depends. Are you asking because you're excited, or because something's wrong?"

"Something's wrong. You're supposed to be on Bus Two."

Danny sat up, processed this, and — instead of the mild panic a reasonable person might feel — grinned. "Well. This is a twist."

"Off," the driver said, not looking up from her phone.

Danny got off. He crossed the lot at a jog, past a cluster of recruits watching with the specific, hungry interest of people grateful the morning's disaster wasn't currently happening to them, and made it onto Bus Two just as the doors started to close, wedging himself sideways through the gap with the grace of a man who'd clearly done this exact maneuver at a subway station once and lived to brag about it.

"Made it," he announced to the bus at large, breathless, triumphant.

Nobody clapped. One person — a broad-shouldered guy near the back, forearms like he'd been carved out of a gym membership brochure — didn't even look up from stretching one leg across the aisle. Marcus Webb had claimed two seats the second he sat down, one for himself and one, apparently, for his own personal comfort, and showed no sign of relinquishing either on principle.

"Seat's taken," Marcus said, before Danny had even opened his mouth.

"By what? Your leg?"

"By my leg."

Danny considered arguing this on legal grounds, decided it wasn't worth the effort at 7:43 in the morning, and kept walking.

Three rows up, a slim guy with wire-rimmed glasses sat with the recruit handbook open on his lap, a highlighter capped between his teeth, already three pages further into the appendix than anyone had asked him to be. Ethan Cho had read the handbook twice before intake and was now on his third pass, this time cross-referencing statute numbers with a small stack of index cards he'd apparently made himself, at home, for fun, color-coded in a system that made sense to exactly one person on the bus.

"You know that's not on the test today," said the guy across the aisle from him — pressed collar, watch that cost more than the bus itself, currently examining the seat cushion with an expression suggesting it had personally offended him.

"Everything's on the test eventually," Ethan said, not looking up.

"Sure. Great. Good talk." Rich Calloway shifted his weight, glanced at the seat again, and made the executive decision to remain standing, one hand braced on the overhead rail, for the entire ride, rather than risk whatever the fabric had absorbed over the bus's service life. Nobody offered to trade him a better seat. Nobody, notably, offered him sympathy either, and by the fifteen-minute mark his arm had started to genuinely ache in a way his tailored jacket had clearly never been designed to accommodate. It occurred to him, distantly, that this was possibly the first physical discomfort he'd sat with, uncomplained-about, in recent memory, which was either a sign of growth or a sign that his shoulder was about to give out. He decided not to examine the question too closely.

Near the front, Jack had claimed a window seat with the efficient, unfussy movements of a man who did not consider seat selection a topic worth discussing, set his bag between his feet, and was three sentences into reviewing his own mental notes from the morning's briefing when a shadow fell over him.

"You're in my seat," Emma said.

Jack looked up. Looked around, pointedly, at the six empty rows behind them. Looked back at her. "There are approximately thirty other seats on this bus."

"This one has a view of the mirror. I like to know what's behind me."

"That's what the rest of the bus is for. Behind you."

"I don't trust things I can't see coming twice."

He held her gaze for a second, weighing whether this was an argument worth having, decided — against his better instincts — that it absolutely was, and did not move. "Then sit in the back and watch everyone. That's the whole bus, behind everyone."

"I already picked this one."

"I was already sitting in it."

"And now I'm sitting in it more."

There was, Jack reflected, no version of this conversation that ended with him winning, and he suspected she knew that too, which was somehow the most irritating part. He gathered his bag with exaggerated patience and stood, fully expecting her to slide over and let him take the aisle at minimum.

She did not slide over. She dropped into the window seat he'd just vacated, made herself comfortable, and looked up at him with an expression of pure, uncomplicated satisfaction.

"That seat's the aisle now," she said. "You're welcome."

"That's not — you can't just—"

"I can. I did. Sit down, you're blocking the aisle."

He was, in fact, blocking the aisle, a fact underscored by the recruit behind him clearing his throat pointedly. Jack sat, jaw tight, staring straight ahead at the seat in front of him rather than give her the satisfaction of a reaction, and lost that battle within four seconds when he glanced sideways anyway.

She was already looking out the window like nothing had happened, like she hadn't just executed a small, deliberate act of chaos for no reason he could identify except that she'd apparently decided it would be funny.

In truth, it wasn't entirely about the view of the mirror, though she'd have set herself on fire before admitting that to the guy currently radiating disapproval one seat over. It was that somebody, at some point in her life, had taught her that the safest seat in any room was the one you'd chosen yourself, on your own terms, before anyone could hand you a worse one and call it a favor. She'd had eighteen years of people deciding where she'd sit — which school, which future, which version of her own last name she was supposed to be grateful for. A bus seat was small. It was also, in its small way, hers, and she wasn't giving it up because a stranger with a jaw like a filing cabinet corner thought there was a system to defend.

"You do that a lot," he said. "Take things that aren't yours."

"I prefer 'redistribute.'"

"That's not a real distinction."

"It's real enough for me."

"Some of us like having a system. Rules exist so forty strangers on a bus don't turn into forty strangers fighting over window seats."

"And yet." She gestured, vaguely, at the two of them. "Here we are."

He didn't have an answer for that one either, which was becoming, he noted grimly, something of a pattern less than twenty-four hours into knowing her.

The argument might have escalated from there — Jack had at least two more points queued up, filed and ready, and Emma looked entirely prepared to knock each one down as it arrived — but the bus driver's voice cut through the cabin with the flat, weary authority of a woman who had clearly transported worse than forty aspiring police officers in her time.

"Both of you. Enough. I've got forty more minutes of road and I will pull this bus over."

Emma raised both hands in mock surrender. Jack settled back into the aisle seat with the stiff posture of a man conceding a battle purely on procedural grounds, not because he'd lost the argument, which — he told himself — he hadn't.

Behind them, Danny leaned across the aisle toward Marcus's blockaded double-seat with the delighted expression of a man who had just witnessed something worth remembering for later. "Did you see that? That was incredible. That's not chemistry, that's a crime scene."

"Not interested," Marcus said, eyes closed.

"You will be. Mark my words. By week three, someone's writing a report about those two."

"Not interested in writing it either."

Danny considered this a personal challenge rather than a rejection, which was, on the whole, how Danny tended to process most information directed at him. He settled into the narrow strip of seat Marcus's leg hadn't yet colonized, bounced his knee twice, and glanced around the bus with the restless energy of a man who found silence slightly offensive on principle.

"You ever notice," he said, to nobody and everybody, "how everybody on this bus is already exactly who they're going to be for the next six months? Like, that guy's going to read the handbook until the pages fall out. That guy's going to stand the entire ride rather than sit on a seat cushion. Those two up front are going to hate each other so hard they fall in love by Christmas. It's like a nature documentary and we're already thirty seconds into the narration."

"You've known these people for a day," Marcus said, without opening his eyes.

"A day's plenty. I peaked early in life figuring people out fast. It's the one thing I'm actually good at."

Marcus didn't answer that, which Danny chose to interpret, generously, as agreement.

The bus rattled on, engine grinding up a slight grade, and somewhere behind Rich's designated standing spot, a folder slid off someone's lap and spilled across the floor — training assignments, apparently handed out at intake and mostly ignored since, given that most of the recruits had spent the walk to the buses more concerned with their boots than their paperwork.

It was Ethan, ever the one already three steps ahead of a task nobody had assigned him, who bent to gather the scattered pages and happened to glance at the header printed across the top of each one before handing them back.

Training Squad 4 — Assigned Personnel.

His own name was on it. So was Danny's, two lines down. So, when he scanned further, was Marcus's, Rich's, Emma's, and — third from the bottom, in a font that suddenly felt a great deal more significant than it had thirty seconds ago — Jack's.

"Huh," Ethan said, to no one in particular, and did not immediately share what he'd found, because half the fun of information, he'd learned early in life, was choosing exactly when to spend it.

He read it through twice more, just to be sure, tracing each name with the tip of his pen the way he'd once traced case citations for a law class he'd taken purely for enjoyment. Ten names. One squad. The same ten people who'd spent the last twenty minutes proving, with impressive efficiency, exactly how badly they got on each other's nerves — all of them about to be issued to one another for the next six months like equipment nobody had been consulted about.

He slid the folder shut, tucked it under his arm, and looked out the window at the training facility rising up out of the trees ahead, feeling the particular, quiet satisfaction of a man holding a piece of information that was about to make everyone else's morning considerably more interesting.

They were, according to the sheet in his hands, about to have a great deal more time together than any of them currently understood.