Chapter 6 The Climb
SIX
The Climb
RIOT
I’ve made a lot of questionable decisions in my life.
Joining the Army at eighteen. Marrying Carmen after six weeks.
Taking the Kandahar mission when everyone with half a brain said it was suicide.
Playing poker against a woman who has access to satellite surveillance and zero moral compunctions about using it.
Following a kindergarten teacher up a two-hundred-foot cliff face, however, might be the most questionable decision of all.
But here I am. Fifteen feet off the ground, fingers jammed into a crack I can barely see, the raw grit of the granite biting into the pads of my fingers.
My feet are smeared against rock that feels approximately as grippy as a greased cookie sheet, and the wind is starting to howl through the canyon, a low, predatory whistle that threatens to peel me right off the wall.
I'm watching Evie Sinclair climb like gravity is a suggestion she’s politely declined.
"You’re thinking too hard." Her voice floats down from somewhere above me. "I can hear it from here."
"I’m thinking about how I’m going to explain to my boss that I died because a kindergarten teacher told me to trust friction."
"You’re not going to die."
"Easy for you to say. You’re not the one fifteen feet below, watching you make this look easy."
She pauses, glances down. From this angle I have a view of exactly how much air is below me. It's clarifying.
"What were you going to say?"
"Nothing."
"Riot."
"I was going to make an inappropriate comment about the view from down here." The words come out before my brain can filter them. "But I'm a gentleman, so I didn't."
Her laughter echoes off the canyon walls—bright, surprised, real. "A gentleman who breaks into cabins and shoots people."
"A gentleman who breaks into cabins, shoots people, and doesn't comment on the assets of the woman saving his life." I find the next hold, haul myself up. Lactic acid is already pooling in my forearms, a hot, heavy burn that makes every inch feel like a mile. "I contain multitudes."
"So I'm learning."
She starts moving again, and I follow, trying to place my hands and feet exactly where hers were.
It's harder than it looks. Everything about climbing is harder than it looks.
The rock that seemed solid from below reveals itself as a maze of options—cracks, edges, bumps, textures—and I have no idea which ones will hold my weight and which ones will send me tumbling into the canyon.
Evie knows. She reads the rock like I read a tactical map—instinctively, fluently, her body making calculations her conscious mind doesn't need to supervise. Every movement is precise. Efficient. Beautiful, in a way I wasn't expecting.
I've watched a lot of people move under pressure.
Soldiers, operators, hostages. You learn to read competence in the body, see it in the way someone carries their weight, manages their fear.
Evie moves like the best of them. Like someone who has spent years learning exactly what her body can do and trusting it absolutely.
I’ve spent twelve years trusting my life to guys who can disassemble a rifle in the dark and walk through a minefield without blinking.
I have never—not once—put my existence in the hands of a civilian.
But as I watch her high-step onto a microscopic ledge, her balance perfect even as the wind tries to shove her sideways, I realize I’ve never been in safer hands.
This is not a woman who needs to be carried.
This is not a woman who needs to be saved.
"Rest ledge coming up." She pulls herself onto a small outcropping, maybe two feet wide, and turns to watch me finish the section. "Take your time."
"Take my time. Sure. I'll just hang out here and enjoy the scenery.
" My fingers are screaming, the tendons in my hands vibrating like overstretched guitar strings.
My shoulders are on fire. The canyon floor is now fifty feet below, which is fifty feet farther than I'd like. "Any other helpful advice?"
"Don't look down."
"Too late."
"Then don't think about looking down."
"Also, too late."
I reach the ledge, haul myself onto it, and press my back against the rock wall. My breath is coming harder than I want to admit. Evie's barely winded.
"You're doing great," she says.
"Liar."
"You're doing adequately." The corner of her mouth twitches. "For a beginner."
"Oh, I'm a beginner now? Five minutes ago, I was a gentleman."
"You can be both." She's checking the rock above us, planning the next section, but her eyes keep flicking back to me. Checking on me. Making sure I'm okay. "Most beginners don't make it this far without panicking."
"I'm panicking on the inside. Very quietly. In a dignified, manly way."
"I appreciate the restraint."
The wind cuts across the ledge, cold enough to make me shiver. Or that's the adrenaline crash. Or maybe it's the way Evie's looking at me—like she's seeing something she didn't expect, something that surprises her.
"Can I ask you something?" I manage between breaths.
"You just did."
"Funny. How did—" I gesture at the cliff, the canyon, the impossible situation we're in. "How did this happen? The climbing. You said it started three years ago."
Her expression shifts. Closes slightly, then opens again—a conscious choice to let me in. "I was in a bad relationship. The kind where you lose pieces of yourself so slowly you don't notice until you're almost gone."
I don't say anything. Just wait.
"When I finally left, I didn't know who I was anymore.
I'd spent so long being what he wanted—small, quiet, agreeable—that I'd forgotten what I wanted.
" She looks up at the cliff above us, and something in her face changes.
Softens. "I came to Yosemite because I needed to be somewhere that didn't know my name.
Somewhere I could be anyone. And I found this. "
"Climbing."
"Freedom." The word comes out fiercely. "When I'm on the rock, I'm not performing. I'm not managing anyone's expectations or making myself smaller so someone else can feel bigger. I'm just... me. The real me. The one I hid for so long, I almost forgot she existed."
The real her. I'm looking at her right now—hair escaping its ponytail, cheeks flushed from exertion, eyes bright with something that isn't fear.
This is the woman who threw a rock at an armed soldier.
Who kept pace through a mile of hostile terrain without complaint.
Who looked at a two-hundred-foot cliff and saw not an obstacle but a homecoming.
This is the real Evie. And she's magnificent.
"He was an idiot," I hear myself say.
"What?"
"The guy." I hold her gaze. "Anyone who made you feel like you needed to be smaller wasn't paying attention. He missed the whole thing."
Her breath catches. Just slightly, just for a second, but I see it. Feel it.
"You don't know me," she says. "Not really."
"I know enough." The words come out rougher than I intended.
"I know you spent five days in a cage without breaking.
I know you trusted your gut when everything told you not to.
I know you threw a rock at a man with an automatic weapon because you thought it might help.
" I pause. "And I know you're currently saving my life by leading me up a cliff I'd never have the balls to attempt alone. "
"That's not—"
"It is." I cut her off because she needs to hear this, because someone should have said it years ago. "You're not too much, Evie. You're not too intense, too wild, or too anything. You're exactly enough. And anyone who told you differently was wrong."
Silence. The wind. The distant sound of engines somewhere below, searching for us.
Evie's eyes are bright—not tears, not quite, but something close. Something raw, vulnerable, and painfully human.
"We should keep moving," she says. But her voice is thick, and she doesn't look away from me.
"Yeah." I don't look away either. "We should."
Neither of us moves.
The space between us is charged. I want to reach out to her.
I don't.
"The crevice is seventy feet up. That's where the crux is."
"The hard part."
"The hardest part." She turns back to the rock. "Stay close. Watch my feet. And Riot?"
"Yeah?"
She glances back, and there's something new in her expression. The beginning of something.
"When we get to the top, you can tell me more about the view from down here."
Then she's climbing, and I'm following, and my forearms are screaming.
I don't know how long we run—no, we're climbing.
Time stops meaning anything when your world narrows to the next footfall, the next breath, the next crack to jam your fingers into.
The granite is slick with sweat and mountain mist, and once, the rubber of my boot screeches as it slips on a sloper, my heart leaping into my throat before I catch myself.
Eventually, the angle steepens. The granite turns from gray to a sun-bleached white that hurts to look at. My lungs burn. The air is thinning, sharp with the scent of pine and old stone.
"You're handling this better than most people would.” The words feel heavy, like they're fighting the altitude.
She doesn't slow down. "I told you. I've had practice."
The next seventy feet are the longest of my life.
The rock gets steeper, the holds get smaller, and Evie moves through it like water flowing uphill—impossible, inevitable, beautiful.
I grit my teeth and follow, jamming my fingers into cracks that seem designed to tear skin, smearing my feet on surfaces that offer nothing but faith.
"Left hand up, there's a pocket." Her voice guides me, calm and steady. "No, higher. There. Now flag your right foot out for balance."
"Flag my—what?"
"Stick your leg out. Counterweight."
I do it. It works. My body finds a position that shouldn't be stable but somehow is.
"Good." The approval in her voice warms something in my chest. "Now the hard part."
"That wasn't the hard part?"
"That was the warm-up."
The crux is exactly as bad as she described—ten feet of vertical granite with holds that barely qualify as holds.
Crimps, she called them. Little edges of rock, just enough to hang fingertips from if you're willing to trust your body weight to something the size of a matchbook. My blood thuds in my ears, jockeying with the roar of the wind that’s trying to shake me loose like a dead leaf.
Evie flows through it. Makes it look easy. Makes it look like dancing, if dancing involved defying gravity and certain death.
I make it look like a man trying very hard not to die. My fingers are raw, the skin peeling back as I claw for traction, and my boots chatter against the stone as I fight for every inch of height.
"You're almost there." Her voice comes from above. I don't look up—can't look up, can't spare the attention—but I can hear the beginning of something in it. "Three more moves."
Three more moves. I can do three more moves.
The first one nearly kills me. The second one actually peels two fingernails back. The third one—
The third one puts me on a ledge I didn't know was there, gasping, shaking, and absolutely certain I've never worked this hard for anything in my life.
"Welcome to the crevice." Evie's face appears above me, haloed by sky, grinning like she just watched me run a marathon. "You made it."
"I made it." The words come out between ragged breaths. "I actually made it."
"You did." She reaches down and offers me her hand. "Come on. We should get out of sight before they start looking up."
I take her hand. Let her pull me into the crevice—a gap in the rock face, invisible from below, just wide enough for two bodies pressed close together.