Chapter 3 - A Time That Did Not Match
Nora Ruiz waited beside a vending machine outside the candidate building, turning a sealed bottle of water between her palms.
"Don't tell me anything you aren't allowed to tell," Ava said.
"I'm not telling you about the master chief." Ruiz glanced down the hall. "I'm telling you about the buoy."
They had met at officer preparatory training and become friends through the reliable misery of early mornings. Ruiz was twenty-five, compact, and faster on land than Ava. In water she was patient and methodical, the first person to notice when equipment wasn't behaving as expected.
"Your recovery was complete," Ruiz said. "I was in the next lane. I heard the horn after you brought it inside the marker."
"The sheet says incomplete."
"Then somebody changed the description."
Ava resisted the immediate urge to reach for her phone. A candidate's accusation against an evaluator would mean more if it rested on contemporaneous records than on a friend willing to defend her. She asked Ruiz to write down what she remembered, including approximate times and what she couldn't see. Ruiz agreed, then added that Shaw had briefly stopped a different candidate's clock to fix a loose safety line earlier that morning.
"He called it a reset," Ruiz said. "I'm not saying that's wrong. I'm saying he knows when a reset is needed."
That night Ava placed the evaluation beside her own handwritten training notes. The failed entry gave her a recovery time of four minutes and fifty-two seconds. Her watch, which she'd used for running intervals but not as an official course timer, placed the end of the lane earlier. Neither was perfect evidence. She had learned enough about investigations from her father's case to know the danger of falling in love with one convenient number.
The official standard was published in a training instruction available to candidates. A successful recovery required the weighted training buoy to be brought inside the designated mark before the final signal. There was no requirement that a candidate look graceful doing it. Ava remembered the buoy sliding sideways when its strap caught on a rope. She had recovered it, dragged it across the line, and received the completion gesture from the safety observer.
She completed an informal written request for her records and delivered it to the training administration office. In it she challenged only the entry she could personally describe. She did not mention Patrick's letters or speculate about Shaw's motives.
The next morning, Navarro called her to the office. "Your request is received. A training officer not involved in the original grading will review it. Until then, you're still on the published schedule."
"Does that mean the fail is suspended?"
"No. It means no final adverse recommendation should rely solely on a contested entry before the review has considered your response. Those are different things."
Ava thanked her. She appreciated people who told her exactly what they could and could not do.
By lunchtime the whole class appeared to know about the complaint. Ben Larkin stopped sitting beside her. A candidate who'd once asked her to explain an equipment knot now stared through her in the hallway. Shaw continued training as if nothing had changed, which was more unsettling than another public argument.
During a supervised classroom block, Ava requested the opportunity to view the posted course timing sheet. The sheet showed sequential lane entries, each initialed by an evaluator. Her lane time matched Shaw's form. But the safety observer's column was blank. On every other line it contained initials.
"Was there no observer for my lane?" she asked Navarro later.
"There was. I remember assigning Petty Officer Chen."
"Why isn't the sheet initialed?"
Navarro rubbed the bridge of her nose. "I don't know."
The answer made Ava think of Patrick's letter, written fifteen years earlier: THE RADIO ORDER WAS LATE. An unverified field could be a simple oversight. It could also become the sentence everyone quoted once the people who knew better were gone.
That evening Shaw caught her outside the administrative building. No one else was close enough to hear his first words.
"You think you can drag up an old tragedy and make a new evaluation disappear?"
"I haven't mentioned my father's case in my request, sir."
"Your last name did that for you."
Ava remained at attention. "Did you access his casualty record?"
Shaw looked toward the windows. "You should spend less time investigating me and more time worrying about your classmates."
May you like
"What does that mean?"
He didn't answer. By the time she got to the candidate notice board, Ruiz's name had been moved to the next morning's hardest reassessment lane—with Ava assigned to observe.
