‘We’ve got nets,’ Kevin said, starting to walk towards the third platform. This involved crossing a series of wooden planks and leaping over gaps between them. ‘Maybe I’ll break a few bones. Well so what? Why do you care, bully boy?’
‘Come down now,’ James screamed. ‘I’m ordering you.’
James couldn’t look as Kevin leapt a metre and a half between the ends of two planks.
‘If you want me, come and get me!’
James thought about Bruce screaming his head off in the medical centre the night before and the sight of his horribly twisted leg. It had freaked James out, but had apparently had the opposite effect on Kevin.
James considered staying on the ground, but he was worried that Kevin might freak out or slip and need help, so he reluctantly began clambering through the netting, until he reached the dangling rope.
By the time James got to the platform, Kevin had made a series of jumps and was more than thirty metres ahead of him. He was shocked to see that the planks were slippery with frost and ice, broken only by Kevin’s boot prints.
James didn’t fancy it one bit, but he’d come this far. He made the first two jumps easily enough, but the third was on to a plank that was slightly offset and he felt his boot skid alarmingly as he landed. With more luck than skill, James managed to stay on by grabbing hold of an overhanging branch and countered his sliding boot by leaning in the opposite direction. James had been through so much on missions that it wasn’t the most frightening moment of his life, but it ran the leading contenders pretty close.
‘Careful, old timer,’ Kevin shouted cockily, from his position on a square platform at the end of the jumps.
James steamed along the next plank and made a simple jump on to the platform. He adopted a bullying tone. ‘What do you think you’re doing, you nutter? It’s like a skating rink up here.’
‘I want my grey T-shirt,’ Kevin yelled. ‘I want to get through basic training and become an agent more than anything else in the world.’
James crouched down and felt under the platform. He was relieved to find an escape rope, identical to the one he’d climbed up. He was still shaken from his skid and couldn’t manage to keep up his training instructor persona.
‘We can come back tomorrow, Kev. It’s great that your confidence has built up so quickly, but—’
‘I’m going heel to toe,’ Kevin said, referring to the final section of the course.
When James first went over the height obstacle three years earlier, it had ended with a sheer drop on to a large gym mat. But the tree that supported the final platform had rotted and Mr Large had used the repair work as an opportunity to design a much scarier final section.
It now involved walking down a steeply sloping plank that was narrower than a CHERUB combat boot, before whizzing down a rope slide to the ground. Just to make life even more difficult, a large pond had been dug and you had to jump off the swing while you were still several metres off the ground. Jump too soon and you’d break your legs, jump too late and you got a soaking. And to make sure that the soaking didn’t appeal on a hot day, the pond had been stocked with glutinous brown algae that smelled like rotting meat.
‘You can’t go down the ramp in this weather,’ James said, grabbing Kevin by his sleeve. ‘It’s lethal.’
But Kevin twisted and broke free. Like everyone who’d been at CHERUB for a few years, Kevin had spent hundreds of hours in the dojo learning combat skills. James towered over the ten-year-old and was probably double his weight, but he still didn’t fancy tussling with him on an icy wooden platform thirty metres above the ground.
‘Sod you then,’ James snarled. ‘Ignore me. Show me how brave you are. Just don’t blame me if you get tangled in a net and end up like Bruce.’
‘I’m not brave,’ Kevin shouted, somehow managing to sound sad and defiant at the same time. ‘I’ve never been so scared in my life. But I want to be a cherub. If I can get over here when it’s all iced up, any other time is gonna be a piece of cake.’
‘I wash my hands,’ James said, as he theatrically rubbed them together. ‘There’s not much I can do short of punching you out and lowering you down on