9. Chapter 9
Chapter nine
J essica
"Stop stepping on the tracks."
I look down.
"What tracks?"
Freya closes her eyes for a moment, the way you do when you're deciding whether a friendship is worth the effort.
"There," she says.
"That's mud."
"It's a heel in mud, Jessica, and you've now stood in two of them." She crouches, gets her thumb about an inch off the ground and doesn't touch it. "Left foot. Coming down. Deeper on the outside edge, which means she was already favoring the other leg by the time she came through here."
I look at the mud.
I look at Freya.
I look at the mud again, and I would like to state for the record that it is mud.
"Behind me," Freya says. "All of you. Single file, and put your feet where I put mine."
Instructor Brann is about forty feet off to the side with her hands in her jacket pockets, saying nothing, which is what she's been doing for the last hour.
She gave us the briefing at the trailhead and then stopped helping.
Casualty exercise. Ines Dahl, fourth-year, volunteered for it.
She walked in at eight-forty and she's been sitting somewhere in there ever since.
You don't know where and you don't know what's wrong with her — she's carrying an injury card and she'll play it when you find her.
You've got her jacket for scent, a map, a last known position at the fire road junction, and each other.
Locate, assess, stabilize, extract. Three o'clock.
Then, in exactly the same voice:
The injury's simulated. The cold isn't. The terrain isn't. Her weight on a stretcher isn't, and neither is the ground you're carrying her over. She's been outside ninety minutes already. Bear that in mind when you're deciding how long to argue.
Renzo had asked whether she'd be helping.
No. If I have to step in, your exercise is over.
Which is why Freya's been running this since minute four.
"You've known how to do this the whole time?" Sophia says, picking her way along behind me.
"I was a ranger."
"I thought that meant trees."
"It does involve trees," Freya says.
"You never said—"
"You never asked. You asked me what my favorite tree was."
"That was a social overture—"
"Sophia," Declan says, from the back. "Voice."
And Sophia shuts up, which she has never once done for me.
Because that's the other thing that's happened this morning.
Declan Byrne, who spent all of last year folding himself into chairs and apologizing for existing, is running the back half of this operation like a man who has done it two hundred times.
Which he has. He got the map off Renzo within ninety seconds of the briefing, marked our entry point and our fallback, made everyone say out loud what time it was, and told us — kindly, but not as a suggestion — that nobody goes anywhere alone and nobody crosses running water without saying so first.
Freya's reading the ground.
Declan's reading the emergency.
They're the two quietest people in our cohort and everybody's following them, and I keep catching myself grinning about it.
Twenty minutes later the ground changes, and Freya loses the trail in a stretch of leaf litter, and says the word we all knew was coming.
"Shift."
Everyone starts pulling into wolf.
It's fast. It's stupidly fast. Torres goes first because Torres has been doing this since before any of us knew wolves existed, and then Renzo, and then Sophia with a little shake at the end like she's settling a coat, and Declan takes about four seconds because Declan is enormous.
And I stand there.
Being a person. In a forest. Again.
Here we go.
Because this is the part where I do what I've done in every training block since October — close my eyes and reach for something that isn't there and stand very still while the world goes on around me.
Freya's already moving out ahead as a wolf, nose down, cutting the slope.
There's a woman called Ines sitting on a rock somewhere with a bad leg. It's five degrees. She's been out here since twenty to nine and the ground ahead breaks up into scrub that's going to need noses, not hands.
And they need me.
That's all it is. Not I need to shift. Not everyone's watching.
They need me and I'm standing in a clearing being a person.
I don't close my eyes.
"Oh, fuck you," I say — not to Freya, to my own body — and I go after them.
And it comes.
It comes like a door opening. Heat rolls up under my skin, the base of my skull clamps tight, and then the world drops — down and impossibly loud, a thousand smells arriving at once and sorting themselves into things with names.
Wet stone. Deer. Sophia. Someone's soap.
And under all of it, thin and clear and unmistakably a person, a line of scent going away up the slope like a wire.
I've got four legs and I'm standing over a fallen log I remember having to climb.
Everybody stops.
Oh.
Sophia sits straight down on her back end, which I did not know wolves could do in a way that conveys emotion, and makes a noise.
Torres comes and puts his shoulder against my chest and stands there for a second, which is the only thing anybody does about it, and it's exactly enough.
Freya, from thirty feet ahead, does something with her head that means are we continuing.
We continue.
Here is what nobody tells you about being enormous.
It's inconvenient.
I can smell everything, which turns out to be the least useful thing that's ever happened to me, because I have no idea which of the four hundred things I'm smelling matters.
Freya knows. Freya is moving in a way that says she has one thread and is following it.
I have four hundred threads and no hands.
I'm faster than all of them, which means I keep arriving places before I've decided to and then having to come back.
I'm louder than all of them. Substantially louder. Freya moves through this forest like a ninja. I move through it like a wardrobe falling downstairs.
And then I find a person.
At least, I'm pretty sure I do. Human scent cuts through everything else, clear enough that I finally understand what Freya's been following, and I put my head down and go.
I make it about sixty yards up the slope before it occurs to me that nobody is behind me.
Freya is standing at the bottom, watching.
I come back.
She looks at me for a long second, then turns forty degrees left, puts her nose down, and picks up another trail within a minute.
Oh.
Apparently finding a person and finding our person are two different skills.
If a wolf could say stop helping , that's what her entire body just said.
Fine.
It's Declan who finds her, in the end, and he does it without any tracking at all.
Freya gets us to a bowl of ground below a rock shelf and loses the trail again on the scree, and stands there with her nose working, and Declan comes up beside her and shifts back to human and just — looks.
Looks at the shelf. At the wind. At the way the ground falls.
Then he points.
"There. She'd have gone in under the overhang."
Freya's head comes up.
"You can't see anything from here," Renzo says. He's shifted back too, and he's got the map out, thumbing our position. "There's no sign at all."
"There wouldn't be. She's not moving." Declan's already going. "She's cold, she's hurt, and she's been sitting for two hours. You get out of the wind. Everybody does. Every single time."
He's right.
She's under the overhang.
Ines is a fourth-year with a shock of dark hair and about four layers on, and she's got her boot off and her ankle wrapped in something she's clearly done herself, and she has been sitting in a hollow in the rock reading a paperback.
"About time," she says.
"Two hours nine," Declan says, dropping to a knee beside her. "That's not bad for a first placement."
"That's what everyone says."
"How's the leg?"
"Left tib-fib. That's what my card says." She waves it. "I'm also to go shocky and mildly uncooperative from about now, so brace yourselves."
And then she sees me.
Because I'm still a direwolf.
Ines looks at me for a long moment.
"Right," she says. "Yes. I'd heard."
Sophia sits down next to her and starts talking, and does not stop for the next twenty minutes, and I will be honest — I thought that was Sophia being Sophia.
It isn't. She keeps up a completely unbroken stream of absolute rubbish about the dining hall and her community rotation and a boy in her Monday seminar, and while she does it, Ines stops watching Declan handle her leg.
She just — stops. She's listening to Sophia complain about a bake sale instead.
That's the job. Nobody taught Sophia that. She's just built that way.
Declan splints it properly. Renzo and Torres get the stretcher rigged from the kit. Freya walks the ground and comes back with a route.
And that's where it goes wrong.
"We can't take her back the way we came," Freya says. "There's the gully crossing at the fire road and the bank's gone. It was soft on the way up. With four of you carrying a stretcher it isn't happening."
"How far round?"
"Forty minutes. Maybe fifty." Freya turns the map. "North side of the ridge, then down through the old forestry tract and out to the road further along."
Renzo checks his watch. "That's most of what we've got left."
"Then we lose most of what we've got left." Declan doesn't even take his eyes off the splint. "Brann said extract her. She didn't say win."
"We'll be marked down."
"We'll be marked down for dropping her a lot harder."
Nobody argues.
Which is how we end up in a part of the Preserve nobody had any reason to send us into.
It's older forest on the north side. Nothing dramatic — just closer, and darker, and quieter, with less undergrowth and more moss, and a floor that swallows sound.
There's no path. Freya's picking a line and Declan's calling the pace and the stretcher is going slowly, and I'm shifted back to human because you need hands for this and it turns out shifting back is significantly easier than the other way, which strikes me as unfair.