Chapter 4: Thursday, 0600

At six on Thursday morning the training ground was grey, and the frost on the gravel crunched under Wanning's old trainers.

Forty recruits stood in rows in the cold, and every one of them was pretending not to look at her.

Captain Ji stood beside the obstacle wall with a whistle on a cord.

"You wanted to know how a body feels at the end of a patrol," he said. "Run the course."

"All of it?"

"As far as you can."

Luo stood at the back of the line, mouthing something encouraging with a lot of eyebrows.

She ran the sand pit, the low net and the rope.

Her lungs burned. She had written eleven episodes of men crawling through mud, and she had never once been out of breath for any of them.

Then she reached the wall.

It was two metres of weathered wood with a rope hanging down the front.

"Over, not through," the captain said from somewhere behind her. "Feet on the plank, hands on the rope."

She got her foot on the plank and pulled.

Her trainer slid on the frost.

For one terrible second she was falling backwards with the rope burning through her palm.

A hand closed around her wrist.

It was big and warm and it did not shake, and it pulled her up and in against the wall.

She hung there with her cheek against the cold wood, breathing hard.

"Steady?" Captain Ji said.

"Yes."

He did not let go.

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