Chapter 2
Every man in the room turned.
I kept my hands on the wrist tape.
Mercer stood six feet from me with his shoulders wide and his jaw tight and his arms at his sides with the loose ownership of a man who has arranged the space before him in the way he preferred and is waiting to see whether the arrangement holds. He wore a training shirt dark at the collar. His expression had the specific quality of something rehearsed, the expression of a man who has done this before and knows what usually happens next.
"You walked into the wrong room," he said.
Behind him, four operators had found their positions with the easy instinct of people who have watched this kind of thing before and know where to stand. One near the pull-up rig. One on a bench with a towel. One at the squat rack. A fourth who raised his phone halfway and then lowered it, which told me something about the individual judgment in the room that would prove relevant later.
I finished wrapping my right wrist.
The silence lasted longer than they expected. Men like Mercer were accustomed to immediate response, either the retreat that confirmed their assessment or the anger that gave them something to manage. Silence did neither, and it made the room colder in a way they had not prepared for.
"Did you hear me?" Mercer asked.
I pulled the tape tight. "I heard you."
The man on the bench snorted. "SEAL isn't a place for weak people." He said it like a lesson being delivered to someone who needed one, and the men nearest him responded with the laughter of people who have been given permission to participate.
I picked up my other glove from the bench beside me and slipped it on.
Mercer took one step closer. It was the specific step of a man who has learned that forward motion produces backward motion in the other person, that physical proximity is a tool for managing the spatial confidence of someone he wants to diminish. He waited for me to move back.
I looked at his chest, then his eyes, and I stayed where I was.
"You got authorization to be here?" he asked.
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"I was told the gym opened at zero six."
He smiled without warmth. "You were told wrong."
