The Setter and the Sender

• Chapter 1 Dynamic Starts
• Chapter 2 The Grumpy Setter
• Chapter 3 Chalk Dust and Flashy Shoes
• Chapter 4 Reading the Wall
• Chapter 5 Bad Beta
• Chapter 6 Off-Balance
• Chapter 7 Crimp and Hold
• Chapter 8 Late Night in the Gym
• Chapter 9 High Volume
• Chapter 10 The First Fall
• Chapter 11 Underclings and Tension
• Chapter 12 Route Specs
• Chapter 13 The Deadpoint
• Chapter 14 Slipping Grip
• Chapter 15 Unsent Projects
• Chapter 16 Overhangs
• Chapter 17 Heel Hook
• Chapter 18 Testing the Limits
• Chapter 19 Grounded
• Chapter 20 The Crux
• Chapter 21 Taking a Risk
• Chapter 22 Resetting
• Chapter 23 Trusting the Hold
• Chapter 24 Championship Beta
• Chapter 25 Final Dyno
• Chapter 26 Topping Out

The impact wrench buzzed like a furious hornet, rattling straight through Owen Vance’s forearm and setting up a familiar, dull throb behind his collarbone. He leaned out from the rungs of the scissor lift, four inches of steel lag bolt clamped between his teeth, his left hand holding a fiberglass macro hold that was roughly the size and shape of an upside-down kayak. It was bright yellow, slick from the factory mould, and heavy enough to crack a man’s skull if his grip slipped.

Owen didn’t slip. His fingers had spent fifteen years turning into cured leather and high-tensile wire. He wedged the lip of the hold against the 45-degree plywood wall, swapped the bolt into the pilot hole with his right hand, lined up the drill bit, and drove it home.

Thwack-thwack-thwack-screeech.

The screw sank flush into the washer. The fiberglass groaned, settled against the textured birch paneling, and went quiet.

Owen spat the second bolt into his palm, squinted through dust-coated eyelashes at the geometry of the route, and drove the second anchor in. Below him, the cavernous interior of Apex Bouldering Lab smelled of industrial solvent, pulverized magnesium carbonate, and cheap coffee. It was five o’clock on a Tuesday morning. The gym didn’t open to the public until ten, but the Pan-Continental Invitational qualifiers were three days out, and the east wall still looked like an unfinished mosaic of raw plywood and stripped T-nuts.

"Hey! Vance!"

Owen looked down over the padded guardrail of the lift. Standing on the dark blue crash pads twenty feet below was Marcus, the gym’s floor manager, holding a cardboard clipboard like a shield and looking entirely too frantic for dawn. Next to Marcus stood a rolling rack of stage lights, two roadies with headsets, and an unmistakable aura of disruption.

"What?" Owen yelled down, wiping his brow with the back of his forearm. It left a streak of gray grime across his forehead.

"They're unloading the media rig on wall B," Marcus shouted back, his voice echoing off the corrugated steel ceiling. "The producer says they need to set up the camera tracks before the athlete walkthrough at noon. You’re gonna have to clear your milk crates out of the safety zone."

Owen slowly lowered the impact wrench to the tool tray hanging off the lift’s basket. He reached into his canvas work vest, pulled out a rag, and methodically wiped the oil from his knuckles. "Wall B is stripped, Marcus. It doesn’t have problems on it. Unless they want twenty-five of the country's best climbers to come in here and stare at blank wood, I'm using the safety zone until nine."

"Owen, come on, man. Red Bull brought their own camera cranes. It’s in the contract."

"Then the contract can tell gravity to wait," Owen said. He thumbed the joystick on the lift’s control box. The hydraulic pump whined, and the scissor lift shuddered as it sank toward the floor with a rhythmic, mechanical beep. "A boulder problem isn't a billboard. If I don't test the swing on this dyno, somebody with seventy thousand internet followers is going to snap their collarbone on the down-climb volume, and then your sponsors can film the paramedics."

The lift hit the base with a soft hiss of pneumatic pressure. Owen unlatched the safety gate and stepped onto the high-density foam flooring. He was thirty-two years old, tall enough to make pure compression boulders irritating to set for himself, and built with the broad, utilitarian shoulders of someone who had spent his twenties living out of a dented Tacoma and hauling sixty-pound crash pads through the boulder fields of Hueco Tanks and the Buttermilks. His denim jeans were shredded at the cuffs, and his gray t-shirt bore the faint, faded imprint of an old competition in Salt Lake that nobody remembered anymore.

Marcus grimaced, tapping his pen against his thigh. "Look, just... play nice today. The headliners are flying in early. Some of them are already in the city doing press junkets. Julian Croft’s PR team called twice to ask if the wall textures were matte or semi-gloss for the live stream."

Owen stopped in the middle of untangling a rat’s nest of orange extension cords. He looked at Marcus with flat, unblinking green eyes. "Julian Croft is here?"

"He landed last night. He’s probably awake right now eating organic açai bowls or doing finger yoga. Don’t look at me like that, Owen. He’s the reigning champion. His face is on the poster by the front desk."

"His face is on too many things," Owen muttered. He tossed the cord aside, snatched his chalk bag from a milk crate full of dual-texture slopers, and turned back toward the yellow wall. "Croft climbs like a gymnast who got lost in a climbing gym. All pop, zero tension."

"He flashes V14 outside, Owen."

"He flashes soft V14s that somebody else already brushed the chalk off of," Owen countered without turning around. "Tell your camera crew to stay behind the yellow tape. If I drop a wrench from twenty feet, I'm not aiming for the mat."

Marcus sighed, an exhausted sound that suggested he had lost this exact argument fifty times over the past four years, and retreated toward the glass-walled front lobby.

Owen ignored him. He walked to the center of the comp wall, kicked off his worn-out skate shoes, and slipped his feet into a pair of soft, heavily downturned climbing shoes that had holes worn through the rubber over both big toes. He didn't bother tying the laces; he just mashed his heels down over the backs like slippers and stood there with his arms crossed, staring up at the yellow problem.

Route setting was an invisible architecture. To the casual punter who paid thirty dollars for a day pass, a boulder was just a collection of plastic rocks bolted to a wall in an arbitrary line. But to Owen, it was an argument. It was a precise, physical thesis written in leverage, friction, and kinetic momentum.

This problem—Men’s Qualifier 4—was supposed to be a crowd-pleaser, but Owen didn't give a damn about crowds. He wanted to test absolute body control.

The start was compressed and low: two terrible, micro-incut crimps that forced the climber to sit in a deep, agonizing crouch on a slick fiberglass prism. From there, the climber had to generate pure lateral drive off nothing, slap a transition hold that was practically frictionless, and throw their entire body into the air toward the massive yellow kayak volume he had just bolted in. It was a massive dynamic move—a dyno—but it had a poison pill. If the climber threw their hips too far outward to gain distance, the backswing would peel their fingers clean off the finish jug. They had to catch it not with their arms, but with their core, hooking an aggressive left heel into an underside edge before momentum ripped them off.

It was technical. It was punishing. It didn't care how handsome you looked on an Instagram reel.

Owen stepped up to the wall. He reached down, dusted his fingertips in his chalk pot, and blew away the excess cloud. He didn't have a spotter, and he didn't have his shoes done up, but he needed to feel the swing.

He grabbed the twin starting crimps. Immediately, the skin on the tips of his fingers screamed under his body weight. The wood was cold. He pulled his hips tight to the board, loaded his hamstrings like coiled steel springs, and locked his eyes on the lip of the yellow kayak.

Three, two, one.

He launched.

Owen exploded upward and rightward in a single, fluid arc. His feet cut loose from the prism with a sharp squeak of rubber. The gym blurred around him—the lights, the banners, the empty floor. For a fraction of a second, he was entirely weightless, suspended in the cool, still air of the empty facility.

Then came the impact.

His right hand caught the rounded edge of the volume. The friction bit into his calluses, instantly tearing at the top layer of skin. He braced for the swing, reaching his left leg blindly backward to snag the stabilization hold beneath the lip.

His toe missed the heel-catch by a quarter of an inch.

The momentum was merciless. Owen felt his wrist roll, his fingers peeling off the fiberglass like wet tape. He didn't fight the inevitable; fighting a botched dyno was how you blew an A2 pulley or tore a rotator cuff. He released his grip, let the centrifugal force carry him outward, twisted his torso mid-air to spot his landing, and hit the twenty-inch foam mat with a heavy, rolling thud.

He bounced once, absorbed the shock with his knees, and came to rest on his back, staring up at the high ceiling beams.

"Late with the heel," Owen muttered to the skylights. "The transition hold is too far left. It pushes the trajectory two inches too wide."

"Actually, the trajectory is fine. Your hips were just lazy."

The voice didn't belong to Marcus. It was smooth, bright, infuriatingly relaxed, and possessed a light California lilt that made Owen’s jaw immediately clench.

Owen didn't move for three seconds. He simply closed his eyes, took a deep breath of chalk-laden air, and exhaled slowly through his teeth. Then he sat up, resting his elbows on his knees.

Standing on the edge of the mat, hands buried in the pockets of an immaculate, pastel-green down jacket that cost more than Owen’s entire vehicle, was Julian Croft.

Croft looked like he had stepped directly out of an outdoor lifestyle catalog. He had unruly, honey-brown curls that fell across his forehead with calculated casualness, skin tanned by high-altitude sunshine, and bright, sharp hazel eyes that were currently fixed on the yellow volume twenty feet up. A polished silver chain glinted against his throat. Over one shoulder hung a sleek, custom-embroidered gear bag. He was twenty-four, at the absolute physical peak of his competitive life, and he was smiling with the quiet, effortless arrogance of someone who had never had to work an eight-hour shift on a scissor lift in his life.

"Gym’s closed," Owen said, his voice flat and gravelly. He pushed himself up from the floor, his joints popping in sequence. "Check the sign on the door. It’s got big letters. Even professional athletes are supposed to be able to read it."

Julian didn't look offended. If anything, the faint smirk tugging at the corner of his mouth widened. He stepped onto the mat, his clean, white designer trainers squeaking against the vinyl. "Front door was unlocked. Marcus said I could stretch out in the back before the film crew clogs up the floor."

"Marcus talks too much." Owen walked over to his tool bucket, picked up a T-handle wrench, and began aggressively tightening a foot-chip that didn't need tightening. "And your hips would have ripped off that hold just as fast. The swing is biased toward the outside."

"Only if you take the dyno straight on," Julian said. He took a couple of steps forward, tilting his head back to trace the route with his index finger. He moved with a feline, loose-limbed grace that made Owen want to throw a wrench at him. "The way you’ve got those two starter chips spaced, you’re forcing a square takeoff. But if you back-step the right edge and drive through the hip flexor instead of the quad, you don’t catch the lip flat. You meet it on an angle. It cancels the outward whip entirely."

Owen stopped turning the wrench. He stood up straight, towering half a head over the younger climber, his grease-stained forearms crossed over his chest.

"You haven't even touched the wood, Croft."

"I don't need to touch it to see it," Julian replied smoothly. He turned to look at Owen, his hazel eyes narrowing slightly with amusement. "You’re Vance, right? The chief setter. I remember you from the Portland Bouldering Comp back in... what, twenty-sixteen? You placed fourth. Took a bad spill on the volume jump in finals."

A cold, familiar spike of irritation hit Owen square in the gut. Portland had been the last major national comp he’d entered before his shoulder surgery sidelined him and forced him into full-time commercial setting. "I tore my labrum on that volume."

"Right. Because your hips were lazy then, too," Julian said cheerfully.

Before Owen could decide whether hitting an athlete with a five-millimeter Allen wrench was a career-ending offense or merely an occupational hazard, Julian shrugged off his expensive down jacket, dropped it casually onto a clean milk crate, and tossed his gear bag aside. Beneath the jacket, he was wearing a slim, charcoal-gray tank top that showed off shoulders cut like diamond facets.

"Show me," Owen challenged, the words leaving his mouth before his better judgment could intervene. He stepped back and pointed an oil-stained finger at the yellow problem. "Go on. Back-step the right edge. Show me how my geometry is wrong, golden boy."

Julian arched an eyebrow. "I don't have my shoes on."

"Then keep your mouth shut until you do."

Julian chuckled. He unzipped his bag, pulled out a pair of brand-new, ultra-aggressive downturned shoes—neon pink and lime green, custom-molded with his initials stamped into the heel cup—and pulled them on without a single grimace of discomfort. He didn't even use plastic bags to slip his heels in; his feet were already adapted to the torture of competitive rubber. He dipped his hands into a small, pristine chalk bag adorned with a sponsor's logo, clapped them together lightly, and stepped up to the base of Men’s Qualifier 4.

Owen stood with his arms folded tightly, his jaw set like concrete. Let him try, he thought. Let him take the start without warming up. The first move will lock his shoulders up so hard he'll spend the rest of the day with an ice pack.

Julian didn't rush. He stood before the wall for five slow seconds, his breathing rhythmic and steady. The playful, media-trained smarminess vanished from his face, replaced by an intense, laser-like focus that Owen recognized instantly. It was the look of a pure predator assessing terrain.

Julian crouched. He placed his hands on the razor-sharp starter crimps. He didn't flinch at the pain. He set his left toe on the slick fiberglass prism, but instead of squaring his chest to the wall as Owen had designed, he dropped his right knee inward, cocking his hip hard against the wood in a deep, contorted drop-knee.

Owen’s eyes narrowed. He’s going to blow his meniscus.

Julian didn't blow anything. With a sharp, explosive hiss of breath through his teeth, he fired.

He didn't jump outward. The extreme hip torque directed all of his momentum horizontally across the face of the board. He skimmed the transition hold with two fingers just to stabilize his line, flew diagonally through the empty air, and latched onto the yellow kayak volume with his right hand.

The backswing came instantly, violent and heavy.

Julian’s left foot whipped around. He didn't fish for the heel-catch Owen had intended. Instead, with absurd core strength, Julian brought his knee straight up to his chest and jammed the rubber toe-cap of his right shoe into the microscopic, two-millimeter gap between the volume and the wall—a bicycle squeeze that Owen hadn't even realized was physically possible.

The outward swing stopped dead. Julian hung from the yellow macro, suspended effortlessly fifteen feet above the mat, completely stable.

He didn't finish the boulder. He didn't need to. He had solved the beta in four seconds flat.

Julian hung there for a heartbeat, looked down over his shoulder at Owen, and flashed a wide, blinding grin. "Told you. You don't need the heel."

Then he let go.

He dropped out of the sky, landing lightly on the blue pads with a soft, cat-like absorption of his knees, completely unstrained. He stood up, brushed a dusting of white chalk from his shorts, and looked up at the hold he had just conquered.

"It’s a fun move, Vance," Julian said, his breathing barely elevated. "A little predictable, maybe. Feels very... twenty-fifteen. But the crowd’s going to eat it up when I do it on Saturday."

Owen felt the blood rushing to his ears. It wasn't just that the kid had broken his sequence; it was that he had done it cold, in front of him, with an effortless, showboating flair that made a mockery of the forty-five minutes Owen had spent calculating the angles with an impact driver and a level.

"The beta was designed for a standard field, Croft," Owen said, keeping his voice dangerously low. "Not everybody has a sixty-eight-inch ape index and rubber knees."

"Then they shouldn't be in the invitational," Julian replied breezily. He kicked off his neon shoes, walking across the mat in his socks to retrieve his jacket. "It’s a championship, Owen. You’re not setting for the weekend warriors who come in here to drink kombucha and flail on V4. You’re setting for me."

"I am setting for the integrity of the sport," Owen snapped, closing the distance between them. "Which used to mean more than seeing how hard you can pop your hips for the livestream feed."

Julian stopped. He slowly turned around, his down jacket dangling from one hand. The easy, teasing smile was gone, replaced by a cold, appraising stare that was far older than his twenty-four years.

"The sport changed while you were holding an impact wrench, Vance," Julian said quietly. "Nobody cares how much suffering you can endure on an eight-millimeter edge anymore. They want to see movement. They want to see speed, creativity, and power. You think I’m just a face on a poster? On Saturday night, I'm taking home that trophy. And I'm going to do it on your routes."

The two men stood barely two feet apart in the quiet, cavernous hall. Between them, the chalk dust drifted lazily through the single beam of morning sunlight cutting through the skylight above. Owen could smell the citrus scent of the kid's hair wax mixed with the sharp tang of sweat and rosin.

Owen didn't back down an inch. He took a slow step forward, looking down into the younger climber’s eyes.

"You haven't seen the final problem yet, Croft," Owen whispered. "By Saturday night, I'm going to set a boulder that your pretty-boy dynamic tricks won't save you from. You're going to have to climb it with your teeth, or you’re going to spend the evening staring at the rafters."

Julian’s eyes flickered. For a second, the confident veneer cracked, revealing something raw, fierce, and entirely unyielding underneath. His chest rose and fell in a sharp breath. He didn't look away. If anything, he leaned into the space between them, his hazel eyes locking onto Owen’s with an intensity that sent an unexpected, electric jolt straight through Owen’s midsection.

"Is that a promise, Chief?" Julian murmured, the cocky smirk creeping back onto the edges of his lips like a dare.

"It’s an itinerary," Owen growled.

"Good." Julian threw his jacket over his shoulder and backed away, never taking his eyes off Owen’s face. "Make it hard, Vance. I hate being bored."

He turned on his heel and strolled toward the front desk, his socks padding silently across the vinyl mats.

Owen stood completely still in the middle of the empty gym, his hands clenched into tight, chalk-white fists at his sides. His heart was hammering against his ribs—not from the dyno, not from the fall, but from the sudden, sharp, infuriating realization that the next four days were going to be an absolute living hell.

He turned back to the yellow kayak volume.

Without a word, Owen picked up his impact driver, climbed the ladder of the scissor lift, and prepared to tear the entire damn problem apart.

The screech of the impact driver backing out a rusted five-inch structural screw was loud enough to vibrate in Owen’s teeth, but it did nothing to quiet his thoughts. He tore the yellow kayak volume off the plywood, dropped it three feet into the padded tray of the scissor lift with a hollow thump, and stared at the exposed wall. The blank gray panels looked like an accusation. Two stripped T-nuts and a pale shadow of pulverized chalk marked the spot where Julian Croft had executed his absurd, insolent toe-jam bicycle move.

Owen wiped a bead of sweat from the tip of his nose with his sleeve. It came away streaked with black rubber residue and polyurethane dust.

Down on the floor, the gym was no longer empty. It was eight in the morning, and the setting crew had arrived in full force, accompanied by the chaotic hum of a commercial facility prepping for a televised continental showcase. Buckets of Allen keys clattered. A pressure washer hissed out back in the wash bay where hundreds of plastic crimps were being scrubbed free of old skin and sweat. Over near the south prow, a twenty-two-year-old apprentice setter named Priya was dragging an industrial fan across the pads while balancing a clipboard and a lukewarm soy latte.

"You look like you're about to murder a piece of wood, boss," Priya called up to the lift. Her dark braids were pinned back with two carabiners, and her canvas work pants were held up by a strip of tubular webbing. "Did the volume owe you money?"

Owen leaned his forearms against the safety rail of the cage. "The volume gave away twenty degrees of unearned leverage. It’s too positive on the top rail."

Priya squinted upward, shading her eyes against the glare of the newly mounted metal-halide arena lights. "That was Men’s Four, right? The crowd-pleaser dyno? You spent two hours yesterday dialling that jump."

"It’s broken," Owen said bluntly. "The beta is trivial."

"Trivial? You set an eighteen-inch blind heel-catch off an outward paddle-dyno. Who flashed that, a gibbon?"

"A pest," Owen muttered, thumbing the joystick to bring the lift down. "Someone with zero discipline, bad footwork, and too much confidence in his ACLs."

Priya followed the descending platform with an amused smirk. As the steel rails aligned with the floor and Owen kicked open the squeaking gate, she took a deliberate sip of her coffee. "So Croft stopped by, then."

Owen froze, his hand still on the latch. He glared at her under heavy, dust-caked brows. "How do you know that?"

"Marcus was in the breakroom ten minutes ago having a minor coronary because the reigning champion told him the gym smelled like damp dog and that the chief setter was 'delightfully prehistoric.' Marcus thought you were going to resign on the spot."

"I am not resigning," Owen growled, hefting a forty-pound crate of charcoal-gray slopers out of the lift tray and slamming it onto the safety mat. "I am going to strip the entire east prow down to the studs and force every single prima donna in the lineup to crawl through three feet of pure compression until their thumbs fall off."

"Love the enthusiasm. Really healthy, modern approach to athletic choreography," Priya said dryly. She pulled a tape measure from her tool belt and snapped it out three feet before letting it hiss back into its casing. "One small logistical hiccup: the chief judge wants the boulders for the Men’s and Women’s qualifiers signed off by five o'clock today. The technical delegates need to inspect the safety zones before the five-thirty press conference."

Owen grabbed an eighty-millimeter socket and a torque wrench from his canvas bucket. "They’ll be signed off."

"You have five boulders to finish on Wall B, Owen. Plus the Women’s slab on Wall C that you said was 'conceptually offensive' yesterday and promised to completely re-sequence."

"The slab was conceptually offensive. Putting a four-finger pocket on a vertical face in a comp final is an insult to everyone who ever learned how to smear on flat fiberglass."

"It’s a qualifier, not the final," Priya reminded him, falling into step beside him as he hauled his milk crates toward the center of the comp sector. "And you can't just set thirty boulders that all feel like a cold morning in the Peak District in 1994. The federation wants dynos, Owen. They want running starts, double-clutches, paddle moves, and paddle catches. They have six slow-motion cameras mounted on cranes. If an athlete doesn't do a full-body horizontal leap at least once every three minutes, the network producer starts texting Marcus in all caps."

"The network producer doesn't know the difference between a drop-knee and a dropped tray of donuts," Owen said.

He dumped the crate of slopers onto the floor. The heavy, abrasive plastic shapes tumbled out, clattering loudly across the vinyl. They were dark, matte, and designed to offer almost zero mechanical purchase. To hold them, a climber couldn't simply rely on bone lock or crimp strength; they had to squeeze them between flat palms like trying to hold onto a greased watermelon, generating every fraction of friction from their core, their lats, and the microscopic friction of their skin against the dual-texture grit.

"Look at this," Owen said, picking up a massive hemispherical hold with a smooth, glossy ring around its perimeter and a thin, rough strip down its center. "This requires patience. It requires deliberate, agonizing tension. You can't jump past this. If you throw your momentum into this hold without your center of gravity squarely underneath it, you skate off and slide down the wall like wet paper."

Priya tilted her head, tapping her lower lip with her pen. "Yeah. It’s beautiful, Owen. It’s also going to produce sixteen dry-fires and exactly zero tops in the first round. The crowd is going to think the athletes are trying to climb bowling balls."

"Good. Then the people who actually know how to climb will watch, and the idiots looking for acrobatics can change the channel to American Ninja Warrior."

Priya sighed, but there was a faint, familiar affection in the roll of her eyes. She had apprenticed under Owen for eighteen months. She knew that behind the gravel-toned voice, the fraying canvas shirts, and the chronic scowl was the sharpest spatial mind in the sport. Other setters worked by trial and error, bolting plastic to the wall and climbing it repeatedly until it felt passably difficult. Owen worked like a stonecutter or an engineer; he could look at a blank expanse of plywood, measure the angle of the panels against the ceiling joists with his eye, and calculate within half an inch where an athlete’s hip would swing when their right toe sheared off an eight-millimeter foothold.

He was also, undeniably, the most stubborn human being ever to own an impact driver.

"Fine," Priya said, consulting her clipboard. "Do what you want with Four. But if the chief delegate complains that the qualifiers are running forty minutes over schedule because everyone is timing out on the sloper compression, I'm telling them it was your mid-life crisis."

"I am thirty-two," Owen said.

"Which is about eighty-five in comp climbing years, old man. Now get up there and bolt something down before Marcus brings the Red Bull reps back in here."

Owen grunted, grabbed his wrench, and walked toward the hydraulic controls of the scissor lift.

For the next four hours, the gym descended into that peculiar, rhythmic madness that belonged entirely to professional setting days. The air grew thick with chalk, exhaust from the pressure washer, and the high-pitched whine of dozens of drivers. Owen didn't take a break. He didn't check his phone, which sat vibrating against the metal base of the lift with increasingly frantic emails from the event organizers.

Instead, he worked. He stripped Men’s Four down to the raw wood, wiped away the chalk marks with an industrial bristle brush, and rebuilt the problem from the ground up.

He kept the dynamic start—he wasn't entirely deaf to the requirements of the brief—but he removed the large fiberglass prism that Croft had used to torque his knee. In its place, he installed a micro-foothold: an agonizingly sharp, two-millimeter sliver of aluminum-reinforced polyurethane that demanded total, uncompromising commitment. If a climber tried to drop their knee on it, their toe would slip instantly, slicing open the rubber of their shoe. To move off it, they would have to trust pure friction, sinking their weight entirely into their heel, dropping their center of gravity to the floor, and launching not with a flashy, horizontal skip, but with a raw, vertical deadpoint that terminated on an obtuse, sloping rib.

He bolted the rib in place, torqued the lag bolts until the washers groaned, and climbed onto the ladder of the lift to sight the line.

"Owen!"

The voice belonged to Marcus. Owen didn't look down; he kept his eyes on the transition between the rib and the final matching volume.

"Owen, down here! Please! For the love of God, stop drilling for five seconds!"

Owen clicked the reverse toggle on his wrench, slipped it into his belt holster, and stepped over to the rail.

Marcus was standing at the edge of the mat, flanked by two people who looked entirely out of place amidst the rubber shavings and milk crates. One was a tall, severe-looking woman in an impeccably tailored navy pantsuit with an all-access security laminate swinging from her neck. The other was Julian Croft.

Croft had changed out of his morning training kit. He was now wearing clean, oversized skate trousers, an immaculate cream-colored waffle-knit pullover, and a pair of retro sneakers that had clearly never seen a speck of dirt. His hair was damp and loosely pushed back from his forehead, smelling distinctly of cedar and high-end bergamot from fifteen feet up. He had an iced Americano in one hand, held casually between two taped fingers, and his hazel eyes were locked directly on the gray slopers Owen had just mounted.

"Owen," Marcus said, his voice carrying the thin, strained pitch of a middle manager on the verge of tears. "This is Elena Vance—no relation, obviously—the technical delegate from the Continental Climbing Council. And, uh, Julian, who you already met."

"Briefly," Julian said, offering a slow, languid smile that showed just a hint of teeth. "He was showing me his historical archives."

Owen didn't return the smile. He reached down, turned the key on the lift’s console, and let the cage slowly descend. "Marcus. We have three hours before athlete inspection. The mat is supposed to be clear of non-setting personnel."

"Julian isn't here as an athlete right now," Marcus said quickly, glancing nervously at the woman in the suit. "He's here in his capacity as the Athlete Representative for the IFSC Continental Working Group."

Owen stepped off the lift, wiping his palms against his thighs. He stopped six feet from the group, his broad frame coated in gray plywood sawdust, his work vest stained with oil, looking like an ironworker who had accidentally wandered onto a runway. "He’s an active competitor in the event."

"Which gives him the right under Rule 4.2.b to inspect the structural clearances and athlete fall zones prior to final route sign-off," Elena Vance stated briskly. Her voice was pure administrative steel. She didn't look at the problems on the wall; she looked at her tablet, her stylus hovering over a digital checklist. "There were concerns raised this morning about overhead clearance on Wall B regarding the crane mounts."

"The crane mounts are twelve feet clear of the maximum swing trajectory," Owen said flatly. "I calculated the radius myself."

"And the floor padding?" Julian asked, taking a quiet sip of his coffee. He gestured with the straw toward the base of Men’s Four. "You’ve got a primary fall line dropping directly onto the seam between the vinyl segments there. If somebody blows the deadpoint off that new gray sloper—the one you just put up to replace the kayak—they're going to come down hard on their tailbone right where the two pads meet."

Owen’s eyes narrowed until they were almost invisible behind his lashes. "The pads are velcro-seamed with six-inch overlapping ballistic nylon, Croft. They don't separate."

"They don't separate when a hundred-and-forty-pound climber falls flat on their back," Julian replied smoothly. He stepped onto the blue vinyl, the foam giving way slightly under his shoes, and pointed an index finger at the floor directly beneath the sloper. "But when someone six-foot-one like you comes down sideways because they lost tension on a sixty-degree compression squeeze, the seam rolls. I saw an athlete blow an ankle on this exact make of mat in Innsbruck two seasons ago. Same setup. Same chief setter mentality: 'The math works on paper, so gravity will follow the rules.'"

The room went uncomfortably quiet. Priya, who was sorting hex keys twenty feet away, slowly paused what she was doing and looked over. Marcus looked as though he wanted to dissolve into a puddle on the vinyl.

Owen walked straight toward Julian, not stopping until he was standing well inside the younger man's personal space.

Julian didn't flinch. He didn't step back. He tilted his chin up slightly to maintain eye contact, the faintest trace of amusement dancing behind his sharp, hazel gaze. Close up, Owen could see the faint dusting of freckles across the bridge of Julian’s nose, and the small, pale scar slicing through his left eyebrow—the remnant of an aggressive outdoor project somewhere sharp and unforgiving.

"I have set seventy-four continental and national championship rounds over the past eight years, Croft," Owen said, his voice dropping into a low, gravelly register that didn't carry across the gym, but landed like lead between them. "I have had exactly zero structural injuries on my mats. Not one torn ligament. Not one broken bone. Because I test the fall lines myself. I don't need a kid who spends three hours a day picking the filter for his TikTok clips to tell me how high-density foam reacts to a dynamic drop."

Julian let out a short, quiet breath that was almost a laugh, though his eyes didn't waver. "You really hate that people watch, don't you?"

"I hate that people perform instead of climbing."

"It’s the same thing, Vance," Julian whispered. He took half a step closer, close enough that Owen could feel the warmth radiating from the waffle-knit sweater. "If nobody is watching, you’re just a guy pulling on plastic in a dark room. You want this sport to stay your little private monastery of suffering, where everyone stays miserable and climbs on ugly gray holds that rip their fingernails off. But the world moved on. People want drama. They want brilliance."

"Brilliance without foundation is just falling with style," Owen said.

"Then let me test it."

Owen blinked. "What?"

"Let me test the fall line," Julian said, gesturing toward Men’s Four with his coffee cup. "Right now. We’ll see if the seam holds. We’ll see if your new sequence is as bulletproof as your ego."

"Absolutely not," Elena Vance interrupted sharply, her stylus finally pausing on her tablet screen. "Rule 5.1 clearly prohibits any competitor registered in the field from making dynamic contact with the competition surface prior to the official isolation period. Doing so results in immediate disqualification from the event."

Julian didn't look at her. His eyes remained fixed on Owen’s face, challenging, mocking, and intensely alive. "Elena’s right. It would be totally against the rules. Such a shame."

"You wouldn't get three feet off the ground on that start anyway," Owen growled, his jaw tight. "The micro-chip requires body tension, Croft. Not bounce."

Julian smiled—a slow, brilliant, utterly infuriating flash of white teeth that made something deep in Owen’s chest twist with a fierce, hot irritability. "Keep telling yourself that, Vance. I guess we’ll find out on Friday night during the semi-finals. Assuming you actually manage to finish the wall before Elena pulls your certification."

Julian turned on his heel, offering a crisp, two-fingered salute over his shoulder to the technical delegate. "Pads look borderline to me, Elena, but I'll defer to the chief setter’s immense... historical wisdom. See you at the technical meeting, Marcus. Don't forget my oat milk."

Without waiting for a response, he strolled toward the glass doors leading to the gym's main atrium, his stride long, confident, and loose.

Elena sighed, tapped her tablet twice, and looked up at Owen with an expression of profound, administrative fatigue. "Are the safety margins within the standard six-foot radius of Wall B, Mr. Vance?"

Owen took a slow, deep breath through his nose, forcing his fists to uncoil from his sides. "Yes."

"And the seam tape is reinforced?"

"I’ll double-tape it myself before noon."

"Very well. I expect the route cards signed and submitted by five o'clock sharp. If you’re late, I will report a failure of route compliance to the federation, and the regional director will appoint an outside supervisor for the final rounds." She gave him a curt nod that was entirely devoid of warmth. "Have a productive morning."

She clicked away across the rubber floor, her heels making a sharp, rhythmic sound that was completely alien to the setting hall.

Marcus lingered for three seconds, looking at Owen like a man trying to gauge whether an unexploded bomb was ticking. "Owen, I..."

"Get out, Marcus."

"Right. Leaving. Great job so far. Really loving the gray." Marcus practically bolted toward the exit, his cardboard clipboard clutched to his chest like a life preserver.

The gym went quiet again, save for the hum of the ventilation fans and the distant, rhythmic squeak of Priya’s tape measure.

Owen stood motionless in the center of the comp sector for a full minute, staring at the empty space where Julian had been standing. His chest felt constricted, as though someone had strapped a sixty-pound weight vest across his ribs and told him to climb a roof. It wasn't just anger; it was the sharp, unsettling realization that Julian Croft wasn't just an arrogant media darling with good marketing.

The kid saw the wall.

He had looked at Men’s Four—a problem Owen had spent an hour modifying specifically to neutralize Julian’s style—and within thirty seconds, without even touching the plastic, he had identified the exact mechanical flaw in the landing trajectory. Julian had known, with terrifying, instinctual clarity, that if an athlete lost their grip on the second compression hold, their body wouldn't swing flat; the angle of the wall would twist their pelvis forty-five degrees to the left, throwing their heels straight into the one structural seam on the mat that hadn't been taped yet.

He had disguised it as a technical challenge, but it had been a diagnosis.

"Well," Priya said, strolling over with her hands tucked into her tool belt. She looked down at the seam in the mat, then looked up at Owen. "He’s kind of a bastard, isn't he?"

"He’s an arrogant child," Owen said, his voice flat.

"True. Extremely arrogant," Priya agreed cheerfully. "Also kind of right about the landing, wasn't he?"

Owen didn't answer. He turned on his heel, walked over to the supply cart, and snatched an industrial roll of two-inch gray vinyl seam tape. He dropped to his knees right at the seam, tore off a four-foot strip with his teeth, and smoothed it over the joint with the heel of his hand, pressing down with enough force to turn his knuckles white.

"You're going to give yourself a hernia before the week is over," Priya said softly, leaning against the ladder of the scissor lift. "Why do you let him get under your skin like that? You’ve dealt with comp divas before. Half the kids coming out of the youth circuit act like they invented climbing."

Owen didn't look up from the floor. He pressed the tape flat, working out every microscopic air bubble with the edge of his thumb. "They act like it’s a game."

"It is a game, Owen. It’s literally a game. There are scores, there are buzzers, there are shiny plastic trophies, and occasionally someone gets a giant cardboard check from an energy drink company."

"No," Owen said, his voice dropping into that quiet, absolute conviction that had made him both revered and impossible to work with across the entire circuit. "The comp is a game. The climbing is not. You’re on a piece of rock, or a wall, fifteen feet off the deck with nothing but your own body holding you against gravity. It doesn't care who your sponsors are. It doesn't care how many people are screaming your name. It only cares if you are honest with your weight."

He stood up, tearing off another strip of tape with a sharp, violent snap of his wrists.

"Croft doesn't climb because he wants to find out what he's made of," Owen continued, staring down at the pristine tape line. "He climbs because he wants people to tell him he's beautiful. He treats the wall like a mirror."

Priya watched him for a long moment, her dark eyes thoughtful. "Maybe," she said quietly. "Or maybe he just climbs because it’s the only place where he doesn't have to pretend he's anything else."

Owen paused, the tape half-unrolled in his hands. He frowned at her. "What does that mean?"

"It means you read too much into people, Vance," she said, tapping her clipboard against his forearm. "And you spend too much time worrying about whether someone else’s climbing is 'pure' enough for your high church of suffering. Now, are we going to finish the Women’s slab, or are you going to keep romancing that roll of tape until Elena Vance comes back with a pink slip?"

Owen snorted, shaking his head. He tossed the remaining roll of tape into Priya’s hands, wiped his dusty palms on his denim jeans, and picked up his impact wrench from the tool tray.

"Get the bucket of dual-tex edges," he ordered, his voice returning to its normal, gravel-edged command. "The ones from Cheeta. The yellow ones with the five-degree slope."

"The ones that feel like frozen butter?"

"Those are the ones."

Priya grinned. "You really are a sadist."

"I am an educator," Owen said without cracking a smile. "Now move your feet. We have six boulders to set, four hours of inspection left, and twenty-five athletes who need to learn how to stand on their toes."

He turned back toward the comp wall, his eyes sweeping across the massive, geometric expanse of wood and steel. High above, through the glass skylights, the morning sun was climbing higher into the gray city sky, casting long, sharp shadows across the floor.

Owen raised the wrench, stepped onto the lift, and drove the basket upward toward the empty rafters, trying very hard—and completely failing—not to picture the insolent, hazel-eyed grin of the boy who was waiting to tear it all down.