Page 52 of Fourth Wing

“You all right?” I ask her in a whisper.

She swallows and nods, one of her auburn ringlet curls bouncing against her forehead.

“What if we can’t make it up?” Luca asks from my right, securing her long hair in a loose braid, her usual haughtiness not so in-your-face today. “What’s the alternative route?”

“There’s no alternative. If you don’t make it, you can’t get to Presentation, can you? Take your position, Sawyer,” Professor Emetterio orders, and Sawyer moves to the beginning of the course. “After he makes it past the final obstacle, so everyone can learn from this cadet completing the course, the rest of you will start every sixty seconds. And…go!”

Sawyer is off like a shot. He easily runs the fifteen feet across the single log spinning parallel with the cliff face and then the raised pillars, but it takes him three rotations inside the wheel before he jumps through the lone opening, but other than that, I don’t see a single misstep in the first ascent. Not. One.

He turns and rushes toward a series of giant hanging balls that makes up the second ascent, jumping and hugging one after another. His feet back on the ground, he turns again and heads up the third ascent, which is divided into two sections. The first part has giant metal rods hanging parallel to the cliff wall, and he easily swings arm over arm, using his body’s weight and momentum to swing the bar forward and reach the next bar hanging half a foot higher than the previous as he climbs the side of the cliff. From the last bar, he jumps onto a series of shaking pillars that make up the second half of this ascent before finally leaping back onto the gravel path.

By the time he reaches the fourth ascent, the spinning logs Aurelie’s brother warned us about, Sawyer’s made it all look like child’s play, and I start to feel a bubble of hope that maybe the course isn’t as difficult as it looks from the ground.

But then he faces a giant chimney formation rising high above him at a twenty-degree angle and pauses.

“You got this!” Rhiannon yells from my side.

As though he heard, he sprints toward the leaning chimney and flings himself upward, grabbing onto the sides by forming an X with his body, then starts hopping up the conduit until he reaches the end and drops down in front of the final obstacle, a massive ramp that reaches up to the top of the cliff’s edge at a nearly vertical climb.

My breath catches in my throat as Sawyer sprints toward the ramp, using his speed and momentum to carry him two-thirds of the way up the ramp. Just before he starts to fall, he reaches up with one arm and grasps the lip of the ramp and hauls himself over the edge.

Rhiannon and I scream and cheer for him. He made it. In an almost flawless approach.

“Perfect technique!” Professor Emetterio calls out. “That’s exactly what you should all be doing.”

“Perfect, and yet he was still passed over at Threshing,” Luca snarks. “Guess the dragons have some sense of taste.”

“Give it a rest, Luca,” Rhi says.

How could someone as smart and athletic as Sawyer not bond? And ifhedidn’t, what the hell kind of hope is there for the rest of us?

“I’m too short for the ramp,” I whisper to Rhi.

She glances over at me, and then back to the obstacle. “You’re wicked fast. If you get your speed up, I bet the momentum will take you to the top.”

Pryor—the shy cadet from the Krovlan border region—struggles on the swinging steel rods in the third ascent due to some rather predictable hesitation on his part, but he makes it just as Trina nearly falls at the shaking pillars, reaching for a rope. I can only make out the flash of red from her hair when she starts the rotating stair steps, but I hear her scream all the way to my toes as that particular rope sways near the ground.

“You can do it!” Sawyer shouts down from the top.

“They go in opposite directions!” Aurelie calls up.

“Tynan, start,” Professor Emetterio orders, watching his pocket watch and not the course.

My heart thuds in my ears when Trina makes it past the steps, and the drumming doesn’t let up as Rhiannon is called to start. She passes the first ascent with the grace I’ve come to expect from her before coming to a halt.

Tynan hangs from the second of five buoy balls on the second ascent, right where the ground drops out. If he falls, he’s got a minuscule chance of hitting the single spinning log from the first ascent and overwhelming odds of dropping thirty feet to the ground below.

“You have to keep moving, Tynan!” I shout, though it’s doubtful he can hear me from here. He might be a gullible ass, but he’s still my squadmate.

He shrieks, his arms wrapped around the swinging ball. It’s impossible for him to reach his hands completely around—that’s the point, and he’s slipping.

“He’s going to screw her time,” Aurelie says, blowing out a bored sigh.

“Good thing this is only practice, then,” Ridoc says, then bellows up at Tynan. “What’s the matter, Tynan? Scared of heights? Who’s the liability now?”

“Stop.” I elbow Ridoc in the side. He’s not quite as lean now. The last seven weeks have put some muscle on him. “Just because he’s a dick doesn’t mean you have to be.”

“But he’s giving me so much material to work with,” Ridoc replies, a corner of his mouth lifting into a smirk as he backs away, heading toward the starting position.

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