Chapter twenty-four
Jessica
They load us onto the buses before the sun is up.
Nobody talks. Two hundred freshmen, gray-faced in the dark, rattling deep into the restricted preserve — the enormous wilderness that wraps around Luftis Academy for tens of thousands of acres, the land we've been forbidden to set foot in all year.
The bus climbs for over an hour, past the last of the lit paths, into country that gets wilder with every mile, until it stops in the middle of nowhere and we understand that nowhere is the point.
There are dozens of drop points, spread far apart. I can just make out other buses unloading other students on distant ridgelines, tiny and alone. Whatever this is, we're not doing it together.
A staff member hands me a small pack as I step off. Inside: a map. A compass. A water bottle. And a single emergency flare, with an instruction I don't need repeated — firing it is automatic failure, unless your life is genuinely in danger.
The Chancellor's voice comes over the ridge from somewhere, amplified, everywhere and nowhere.
"Reach the finish before dawn tomorrow. Complete every station on your route. Skip nothing." A pause. "There will be no instructors at your side. No one is coming to help you. The Trial is yours, and yours alone."
And then, one by one, spaced out across a mountain, they release us into the slowly brightening dawn.
The first station is endurance, and it's the one part of this I'm actually built for.
It's a brutal obstacle course strung through a river valley as the sky goes gray — walls to haul myself over, mud pits to crawl through, rope climbs, balance beams slick with dew, long punishing stretches of running between.
And my body, my ridiculous strong hiker's body, just goes.
All those years of mountains, all those months on Luke's mat.
I clear the walls. I don't fall off the beams. I come off the far end of it filthy and gasping and — grinning, actually, because for the first time since the buses I think: okay. Okay. I can do this.
The second station undoes the grin.
It's a bridge. An old rope-and-plank suspension bridge slung across a gorge so deep I can't see the bottom, the far side lost in mist, the whole thing swaying and creaking in a wind that wants me off it.
No trick. No magic. Just a very high, very old bridge and the very long drop underneath it, and me.
I hate every single second. I go one plank at a time, white-knuckled on the ropes, not looking down, talking to myself the whole way in a voice that does not sound brave.
But I get across. I get across, and I sit down hard on solid ground on the other side and let my hands shake for exactly ten seconds before I make myself stand up.
The third station is navigation — checkpoints hidden through dense forest, findable only with the map and the compass and your own two feet — and this is where I hear, distantly, other students getting it wrong, crashing around, cursing.
Not me. I've been reading trail maps since I was a kid.
I've gotten lost on better mountains than this and found my way out.
I move checkpoint to checkpoint, steady, and somewhere in the trees I start to believe I might really make it.
I should have known better.
The fourth station is a clearing, and there's someone waiting in it.
An upperclassman — a tall guy, calm, unbothered, who watches me walk in with the bored competence of a person who's done this a hundred times. Behind him, a marker points on toward the finish, still miles off.
"Combat evaluation," he says. "This isn't about beating me. It's about showing me what you've learned. Ready when you are."
I've barely got my hands up when he shifts.
It's fast and smooth and huge, a trained wolf where a man stood, and my stomach drops, because this — this is the thing I've been dreading since the buses. Because everyone shifts here. That's the test. And I still can't.
So I do the only thing I can. I fight anyway.
And I'm good. That's the part that guts me later — I'm good.
Every hour Luke put into me shows. I don't flinch when the wolf comes at my head.
I slip it, I move, I use the footwork and the reads and the whole vocabulary he drilled into my body, and for a while I hold, I actually hold against a shifted wolf with nothing but two human hands.
But I'm one exhausted, unshifted freshman, and he's a trained wolf, and it can only go one way.
He takes me down. I get up. He takes me down again, harder. I get up slower. The mud and the bruises from the whole day are stacking up in my muscles and he is simply, patiently more than I am, and every exchange ends with me on the ground.
"Shift," the wolf's evaluator-voice isn't a voice, but the command is there, in how he circles, in how he waits.
I can't.
"Shift."
"I'm trying," I whisper. It comes out cracked, barely anything, to a wolf and an empty clearing and myself. "I'm trying."
Nothing comes. No wolf. No fire. Just Jessica, on her knees in the dirt, reaching for a thing that isn't there.
He comes harder then — testing it, pushing, giving me every reason a body could need — and I keep fighting, because quitting isn't in me, but there's no version of this I win. He puts me down one last time and I stay down, chest heaving, done.
The wolf steps back. Shifts to a man. And he looks at me on the ground with an expression I'll feel for the rest of my life:
Disappointment.
"You may continue," he says.
I blink up at him. "...What?"
"The station's complete. You can continue to the finish." He's already turning away.
I don't understand. I lost. I lost completely, I never shifted, I did the one thing everyone said I'd have to do and I couldn't — and I'm being waved on anyway, like it doesn't matter, like I've already failed and finishing is just a formality now.
I get up. My legs barely hold me. And I start walking toward the finish, miles of forest ahead of me, and I have never in my life felt so much like I don't belong somewhere.
You may continue. Sure. Continue to the finish so they can tell me officially what I already know.
I got all the way here. And I failed anyway.
I'm maybe a quarter mile past the clearing when the forest goes silent.
It's the birds first, that dead hush that means something big is moving. Then a sound behind me, back toward the station, that isn't any Trial sound. A crash. A snarl that's too deep, too wet, wrong. And then a human shout, cut horribly short.
I freeze.
The evaluator's voice — the man who just beat me, the only other person for miles — I hear him yell, sharp and afraid, and then I hear him scream, and it is the worst sound I have ever heard, and then it stops.
Through the trees comes the thing that made it stop.
A bear. Enormous, brown, and wrong — foam at its jaws, its movements jerking and rabid, eyes fixed on nothing and everything.
Sick. Aberrant. Not a wolf, not part of the Trial, not anything anyone planned for.
Just a mountain of diseased muscle that already killed the one person out here who could have helped me and is now swinging its ruined head toward the next warm thing.
Me.
I don't decide to move — I just do. My hand rips the flare out of my pack and I fire it straight up on instinct, the emergency, the genuine emergency, red light screaming into the gray dawn — life in danger, this counts, please, help me — and I know even as I do it that help is miles away and miles of forest are slow and I do not have miles of time.
The bear charges.
I run. I run the way I've never run, and it doesn't matter, because a bear is faster than anything and this one is beyond pain and beyond fear.
I go off the path, through brush, and it comes through the brush like the brush isn't there.
A swipe catches my back and knocks me flat and tears fire across my shoulder, and I roll, and I scramble up, and I keep going because stopping is dying — and then there's a rock face at my back and nowhere left to go.
Cornered. Bleeding. Everything in me spent — the obstacle course, the bridge, the fight I lost, the whole endless day. Nothing left. And a rabid bear filling the whole world in front of me.
And underneath the terror, I feel them.
Luke and Torres, flaring down the bond, miles and miles away — I can feel them, both of them, catching my fear across all that distance, their panic slamming into mine, straining toward me, coming, and too far, so far, they can't reach me, no one can reach me —
Come back, Luke said.
I'm not going to. That's the thought, cold and clear, as the bear rears up over me. I'm not going to come back. I'm going to die on a mountain, alone, having failed the Trial and failed to shift and failed to keep the one promise that mattered —
No.
Something in me refuses. Not my mind—my mind's already given up. This comes from deeper. Older. A part of me that's been sleeping my whole life hears you're going to die and answers with a snarl.
Human isn't enough anymore.
And it breaks loose.
There's no time to describe it because it doesn't take any time — one instant I'm a bleeding girl against a rock, and the next my body simply comes apart and remakes itself, bone and fire and a roar of sensation I have no words for, the world dropping and sharpening and flooding with a thousand smells at once, and where a cornered woman was, there is suddenly —
Me. Still me. On four legs I've never had, with teeth I've never had, with a body that finally, finally is enough.
The bear hesitates. Just a second. Just long enough for something ancient and furious to take the wheel.
I don't remember deciding to move. I only know I hit it — all that new weight and speed and instinct, everything the day tried to teach me and everything I never had to learn, coming out at once.
It's fast and it's terrible and it is entirely, wholly mine, nobody's command, nobody's permission, nobody here at all —
and then it's over, and the bear isn't moving, and I'm standing over it, sides heaving, blood in my mouth that isn't mine, on four legs that are.
The tree line explodes.
Wolves pour into the clearing — instructors, staff, half a dozen of them, drawn by the screams and the flare, crashing in at a dead run — and they skid to a stop, all of them, at the sight in front of them.
A dead, rabid bear.
And me.