Sherri piled her tray high with food and sat down to eat as much of it as she could before they were called to form up for the next evolution.

Smitty and Jabrowski plunked their trays down at her table, and she looked up in surprise as all the Smurfs sat down with her. Son of a gun. She actually had to surreptitiously wipe away definitely not tears of gratitude as they talked and laughed, casually including her as if she was one of them.

“Where did you learn how to pass surf like that, Tate?” Smitty asked her.

She shrugged. “I’ve done something similar before. It’s physics, really. Boat’s got to be perfectly perpendicular to the wave to go over it and not get flipped.”

“What about when to paddle?” Jabrowski piped up.

“Paddles digging into the wave help the boat stick to the wave face and not flip,” she replied.

Jabrowski nodded. “Makes sense.” A pause. “I’m Mike.”

“Sherri. Although I also answer to Barbie.” The guys at the table laughed at the nickname the instructors favored for her.

“What the hell made you want to do something like this?” Smitty asked around a mouthful of meat loaf and mashed potatoes.

“It’s like climbing a mountain. It was there.” She added, “And I happen to like shooting things and blowing shit up.”

“Fucking A!” her teammates shouted.

She looked up to see Griffin and about six other instructors had just stepped into the dining hall. As one, they stopped and stared at the scene before them. Every jaw but Griffin’s tightened. He met her gaze and nodded infinitesimally in approval before turning away to sit with the other instructors.

Things got easier for her after that. She and the other Smurfs joked around and cheered each other on when the going got tough.

But as the days passed, the max run and swim times continued to come down, and Sherri watched nervously as those times crept steadily closer to her personal bests. She got more opportunity to swim here than she had in North Carolina, and she did improve her two-mile ocean swim times quite a bit. But still she worried.

The one thing the Reapers had not been able to simulate adequately at Camp Jarvis was the long-term toll this kind of training intensity took on a body. Her right shoulder ached most of the time. It felt like she’d irritated the rotator cuff. Nothing but rest would heal it, and that was the one thing she got none of around here.

Then when she tweaked a muscle in her back, Griffin insisted she go to one of the medical trainers, who performed a borderline miraculous deep tissue massage on it. While she slept that night, Griffin stayed up for hours, icing her back on and off.

By morning, most of the inflammation was gone and she felt human again. God bless Griffin.