15
The rest of the day had the paradoxical effect of both dragging on and flying by. Inspector Glass gave them all a talk on the standards that Full Striding expected of graduates from its program, which nearly made Mick laugh, remembering the whole Inspector Longwaite thing. He didn’t much care about this part of the talk, anyway. You couldn’t pay him enough coins to move away from his beloved Sunhampton. No, that wasn’t for him. Leave the grime of the city to folks who liked getting dirty. Even when Mick was a fully-classed sleuth, he’d still live in Sunhampton.
Finished preaching about standards, Glass warned them again that half the folks here wouldn’t get a place on the program. Despite her repeated cautions, it looked to Mick like some of the people here didn’t seem worried. Like they had a reason to be sure they’d pass. Maybe he was being paranoid, though.
With that done, Inspector Glass led them outside, where six Striding guard carts were waiting. The would-be sleuths rode in the back, where the criminals would usually be, and took a trip to a field just outside of the city that was owned by the city council and leased out to the guards for training exercises.
Away from Striding’s tall buildings and mazes of brickwork, Mick felt like he could breathe again. His heart needed greenery. It needed fields where ryegrass blew in the wind. Heck, it needed Sunhampton and all the pastures that surrounded it. Even the stone cobbles of Coiner’s Way had their charm, not like the dull bricks that Striding masons built everything with. This field wasn’t quite any of those things, but it’d do.
Once everyone had climbed off their carts and gathered in an informal group, Glass and the other inspectors, who seemed like they were loving spending a day away from the station, made the recruits run rings around a track marked with white paint. This was an endurance thing, apparently. Seeing how many of the recruits could keep going through exhaustion, how many couldn’t manage more than a few laps.
Mick almost laughed with surprise. They couldn’t have picked an easier task for him unless they designed the whole damn thing around him and named it, ‘The Mick Mulroon Sleuth Exam’. He could have stayed running until sunset. He ran until he was the only person not sitting down, and then he completed another lap for good measure just to show off. Inspector Glass caught Mick’s gaze as he finished his final lap, giving him the slightest of nods.
Next came a test of speed, where they were separated into groups and had to run short races against each other. Mick felt a tinge of nerves now, but it wasn’t too bad. Not like the time he was best man at Pik Flitter’s wedding and had to give a speech. Still, this next task promised to be a toughie. Endurance? Great. Speed? He wasn’t the fastest runner out there, and besides, all the others were younger than him.
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Time, you crafty son of an axe. You’re stabbing me in the back again.
Lee Hunter, one of Mick’s best friends, had a theory about aging. He didn’t like how nature gave the best fruits to the people who hadn’t even grown them. How was it fair, Lee asked Mick over a beer in the King’s Head, that when you were younger and hadn’t done anything worthwhile, you were stronger, faster, and more agile than you’d ever be? Then, as you collected life experience and maybe accomplished things and did a good deed here and there, you got punished for it by getting lashed by the whip of time. How was that right?
What Lee proposed to Mick that afternoon in the King’s Head beer garden was that they switched things around. The older you got, the stronger and fitter your body became. Mick told him it’d be interesting to see in principle. You know, at least give it an airing out and see how it went. But how exactly did Lee propose to do it? His pal couldn’t answer that.
It wasn’t Mick’s style to complain, though, and he wouldn’t do it now. I only have to place in the top half, he thought to himself as he limbered up.
Later, after they finished their races and Mick placed third in his group, they headed back to the station. There, they were marched back to the same meeting room they’d been in that morning. The other guards and inspectors in Elmshore station whooped and whistled at them as they walked past, their faces perfect pictures of mockery. It reminded Mick once again that the idea he’d built up in his head about professional standards and a sense of pride were pure horsecrap. This place was more like a damned zoo. He wouldn’t be like them, he vowed. When he got his class token, he’d take it seriously.
In the meeting room, where a bunch of desks had now been set up, Mick and the others submitted to three separate written exams. The first was a narrative of a fictional burglary, and he had to write down his deductions.
The next exam involved reading the transcript of an interview – Mick assumed it was also fictional – and trying to figure out the truth from the bullcrap.
Finally, there was a paper with a bunch of questions relating to morals and ethical values. This one was a toughie. To Mick, ethics was one of the most important things about being a sleuth. If there was any exam he wanted to score well on most of all, it was this.
With twenty minutes remaining he agonized over each question, reading the whole paper three times over before he committed to even a single answer. There are just so many ways you can answer each one, he thought. Too many gray areas.
Finally, he decided to just answer each in a way that felt true. If he failed because he was true to himself, that would sting just a little bit less. Question by question he worked his way down the paper, and he was rechecking his answers for the third time when the supervising inspector spoke.
“Pencils down, please, ladies and gents.”