“Who’s got a stopwatch?” I said.

Tiny raised his phone, open to the stopwatch setting.

It wasn’t a perfect plan, of course. But I just needed to do something. Anything.

The rookie and I took our places.

I’d been practicing as inconspicuously as possible. I worked on elements of the course when the guys weren’t looking, mostly because I never wanted them to see me do anything I wasn’t good at. Twice a year, the captain had said, we’d run it together, and I didn’t want to be embarrassed. More than that, I wanted to kick ass.

So now, suddenly, it was that day.

Time to see if all that on-the-sly practice and self-taught parkour would do the trick.

Necessity, as always, was the mother of invention.

I’d watched the guys do the course before. When they jumped to grab the bar, they grasped with their hands and hoisted up against gravity. But I didn’t have the option of jumping for the bar. The only way for somebody my size to grab it was to do a wall run up the pole, then a turn vault.

It was the only way for me—but also a better way.

The momentum would do most of the work for me. I wasn’t crawling up over the bar so much as grabbing it as I went by. The guys started with their heads below it, but using the pole as a kind of springboard helped me grab the bar with my head already above—then it was just a little farther to pop up into a hip catch, and then I could spin over it and drop.

I used some version of a wall run to approach every tall structure on the course, using it to shift my momentum from forward to upward. I used the cat leap to get myself over that eight-foot wall. I used the thief vault and the lazy vault to sail over most of the log hurdles, adding a pop vault for the tall ones. Who says hours watching YouTube are wasted?

I also used the lache technique to swing across the eight parallel bars. Of them all, this one probably saved me the most time. The guys would hang from the bars, reaching forward to grab the next bar before letting go of the first one. I didn’t have that option because my arms were not long enough to touch both bars at once. I had to propel myself forward, using legs and momentum, and “fly” from bar to bar. If you get the rhythm right, you never slow down, just zip along under the bars, arms pumping. The guys never had to trust themselves to fly.

Even my landings were better. The guys would drop, absorbing a little impact with their knees, and then keep lumbering forward. I would land like a cat and spring back up, catching that momentum to propel myself ahead.

So I felt pretty confident standing there, about to start. Owen was the youngest, and probably the fittest, of the guys.

But I could still beat him.

* * *

CASE CLANGED A metal pipe against another as our starting gun.

“Go!” he shouted, and we were off.

I didn’t even look at Owen, I just launched—hoisting and spinning, vaulting and leaping into a massive lead over him before we were even halfway done.

I worked the course like a pro. It was more like ballet choreography than anything else. I skimmed under the monkey bars, vaulted over all the logs without ever breaking stride, and scaled the eight-foot wall without faltering.

At the top of the wall, with only the rope climb left to go, I had a good one-minute lead on the rookie.

But then I landed wrong.

Maybe I had too much momentum. Maybe I was distracted by all the guys watching, but when I hit the ground on the other side of the climbing wall, rather than shifting straight into a parkour roll, I caught the side of my foot and felt it bend under me.

I heard a crack.

I felt the pain sear up to my brain and then reverberate back down—and I’ll admit, it threw me off. I made a quick self-assessment. Definitely sprained. Possibly fractured. I heard a clonk to my right and looked up to see Owen hook over the top of his wall and drop down. I took off running, limping badly, and he scrambled after me.

One final thing: the rope climb. Parkour couldn’t help me too much with this one. It just called for the standard technique of wrapping the rope in a J-hook around one foot. I’d done it before, but this time my injured ankle wasn’t quite working right.

I’d tell it to push, and it would just kind of disobey.

The rookie had a real advantage over me here. Not only did he have two working ankles, he also had big guy shoulders. I was strong for a woman, but his shoulders were twice the size of mine. There really was no way I could beat him up the rope. But I wasn’t giving up.

The rookie and I were neck and neck when I gave up on my legs and just started climbing arms only, hand over hand, letting everything else dangle below me. It was harder, and slower, but it was my only option, and the truth is he beat me to the top. But then, in his haste to drop back to the ground and head for the finish line, he dropped too fast. He hit the ground hard and fell on his side. I dropped fast, too—rope-burning my palms as I went—but I never lost control. I landed on one foot, just as he was getting back up, and I took off running, ignoring the searing pain shooting from my ankle all the way to my hip, and crossing the finish line a good two seconds before him.

Here was the weirdest thing about winning that race. There was no cheering, no hugs, no high fives. There was just me, and my throbbing, angry ankle, as I collapsed on the ground, and a whole crew of firefighters surrounded me in disbelief, admiration, and maybe even a little respect.

“Does it hurt?” Six-Pack asked.

It hurt like hell. “Nope,” I said.

“We’re going to need a medic,” Case called out, and all the guys raised their hands to volunteer.

“Let me guess,” I said. “You’re going to make the rookie do it.”

They did.

Six-Pack and Case lifted my arms around their shoulders and helped me limp back to the station. Tiny went off to find me a set of crutches.

Had I solved all my stalker problems?

Maybe not.

But I’d impressed the guys. I’d maimed myself to do it, but I’d impressed them.

And even better: Nobody had been willing to bet against me.

It felt pretty good to hear that.

“You wouldn’t really have resigned, would you?” Case called out.

“I would have,” I said, dead serious.

“I wouldn’t have accepted it,” the captain said.

“Maybe not this week,” I said, reminding him of the choice he still had to make.

Back inside, the guys were back to their rowdy selves, already retelling the tale, and imagining how it would have gone if Case had been my competition, hooting wildly at the idea of his round body trying to hoist its way over the hurdles.

Owen tended to my ankle.

As the guys got louder, my little corner with Owen seemed to get quieter.

I watched his hands wrapping cold packs around my ankle. They were pretty scraped up.

“You okay?” I asked.

“Fine,” he said. “You okay?”

“Totally fine,” I said.

The rookie smiled. “That was unbelievably amazing, by the way. How did you learn to do all that?”

I shrugged. “YouTube.”

As I watched him work, my brain kept circling back to one moment during the course. The moment when he’d fallen at the bottom of the rope. Something about the way he’d fallen seemed strange to me.

“Why did you fall at the bottom of the rope?” I asked then, quietly.