(Jamie POV)

Jamie stood outside the training building with his bag on his shoulder and did not go in.

The badge was there on the wall by the doors, clean and lit, the same badge that was on the paper he had signed a week ago.

The morning air was still cold. Somewhere beyond the fence, balls were already being struck, that hard flat sound of a proper session, and boys in Tranmere kit walked past him toward it like the ground belonged to them.

His boots were too clean. His training top was too new. Everything about him said late arrival, and everyone who passed could read it.

He had fought for this. He had wanted the shirt more than he had wanted anything.

But the shirt did a thing he had not thought about until now.

It made him visible.

At the trial he had been the unknown, the one who could surprise people. Now he was signed, and signed meant judged. Nobody was going to be surprised by him anymore. They were going to measure him.

He shifted the bag on his shoulder and made himself walk to the doors.

You wanted this, he thought. So go and stand in it.

Inside, nobody made it a moment.

The kit man handed him his training gear off a rail without looking up twice, told him his peg, and moved on to the next thing. Practical. Busy. Like Jamie was a delivery, not a signing.

The changing room smelled of deodorant and damp towels and the wet-grass tang of studs that had already been out on the pitch that morning.

Jamie found his peg near the end. He put his bag down slow, the way you do when you are trying to look like you have done it a hundred times.

The other boys moved around him without stopping. Boots came out from under benches. Someone laughed too easily at something. A coach put his head in, called two names without repeating them, and was gone before either boy had finished answering.

The biggest day of Jamie’s life so far, and to the building it was a Tuesday.

That hit harder than any speech could have.

He pulled his new top over his head and, for half a second, let his thumb press against the badge on the chest.

Then he caught himself and dropped his hand, because the last thing he wanted was someone seeing how much it meant to him.

He was here to survive it, not to be caught staring at it.

He knew some of the faces from the trial, but the room was different now.

He was not visiting anymore. He was competing for a peg that had been empty, and everyone knew it.

Noah spotted him first and came over, easy about it.

"You made it, then," Noah said, and knocked his fist against Jamie’s shoulder. "Warm-up’s the same as trial week. Stay on my hip for the passing pattern till you’ve got it. Don’t overthink."

"Cheers," Jamie said, and meant it more than the word carried.

Finn dropped onto the bench beside him and started lacing his boots.

"So they signed the lad who made Liam score," Finn said, grinning. "He’s not forgiven you for that, by the way. Best week of his life and someone else set it up."

A couple of the boys laughed. The room loosened half a notch, and Jamie was grateful for it without showing it.

But not everyone was warm.

Across the room, a lean boy with a right-back’s build was pulling his socks up and watching Jamie without pretending not to. Ryan. Jamie had seen him in trial week, on the other side of the same position.

Ryan did not say anything unfriendly. He did not say anything at all. He just took Jamie in, the new kit, the coach’s attention, the empty peg that had been filled, and went back to his socks.

Jamie read it clearly enough.

He had friendly faces here. He did not have a place yet, and one of the people he had to take a place from was sitting eight feet away.

He kept his eyes moving while he laced up. The senior scholars by the far wall. The board with the squad names on it. The two coaches talking low by the door.

He said little, and he watched everything.

TWEET.

Training started, and Jamie was behind it from the first pattern.

Not physically. He could run with any of them. It was the routine. The ball moved quicker here because the boys already knew where the next pass was going before it arrived, and Jamie did not.

They worked defensive shape first, then a passing pattern down the right. Receive, set, overlap, deliver, recover.

The ball came to Jamie’s feet on the third go, and the safe thing was already in his head before he could stop it.

He played it back inside instead of forward. One pass too careful, because he was trying so hard not to give it away that he gave up the whole point of the move.

"Holt." Mercer’s voice, flat, from the middle. "Forward. That’s a free overlap and you played it backwards. Again."

That was all. No softening it, no rebuilding him. Mercer had already turned to watch the next group.

Jamie’s face went hot.

He jogged back to his cone and reset, and the embarrassment turned into something harder in his chest.

He understood it now, properly, the way he had not at the trial.

In the trial, one brilliant thing could make people notice him.

Here, one slow, safe, frightened touch could make them wonder why they had signed him.

The next time the ball came, he checked his shoulder early, took it on the half-turn, and drove the overlap. The delivery was not perfect, but it went forward, and Mercer did not say anything.

Not being corrected, Jamie realised, was the praise here.

The moment that mattered came in the small-sided game.

They went five against five in a tight grid, wide players live, and Jamie got put at the back on the right with a quick winger in front of him.

The first exchange, the winger did him.

He showed Jamie the outside, then snapped it inside off one touch, and for a second Jamie was on the wrong foot with the boy driving into the cutback zone and the goal opening up behind him.

A voice in his head that sounded like the old nerves said gone.

His legs said otherwise.

This was the thing Jamie had that the routine could not teach and the older boys could not buy. He turned and he ran, and his recovery pace ate the gap the winger had made.

THUD.

He got across the lane a stride before the cutback, stuck a leg in, and blocked it clean, the ball ricocheting off his shin and out for a throw. The dangerous ball never happened. He forced the whole thing wide and dead.

He did not celebrate. He got up, got back to his shape, and pointed the next man onto his marker.

Mercer saw it. He did not shout about it. He just gave a short nod, the kind that cost him nothing and meant a lot.

The boys saw it too, and that mattered more.

The winger who had beaten him blew his cheeks out and reset, and the next time he got the ball, he took the safe option instead of going at Jamie again.

They had learned the thing Jamie needed them to learn on day one.

Beating him once did not mean he stayed beaten.