Page 28 of Legacy Found

Good. I need it to stay that way until I understand what I'm going to do about it.

I carry her through the academy myself, and I don't let anyone take her.

Students freeze in the corridors as we pass — a Draeven, jaw set, carrying an unconscious scholarship girl through the heart of Luftis — and the whispers detonate behind us, and I don't care. I discover that I genuinely, completely do not care, which is its own alarming new data point, because caring about how a room reads me is roughly ninety percent of my personality.

The healer takes her from my arms in the medical wing, and I make myself let go, and it's worse than I expect. The second her weight leaves me something in my chest pulls taut and aches, a low insistent wrongness. I ignore it.

"Concussion," the healer says, after a moment, examining her. "A bad one. She'll be sore and furious, but she'll be fine. Who did this?"

"It's being handled," I say, which is true, in the sense that I put the person who did it into the floor.

She stirs then — a small sound, a flutter, her brow creasing, surfacing. Good. She's coming back.

I turn and walk out before her eyes can open.

Because if she wakes and finds me standing over her, she'll ask why I was there, and I will have to answer, and I do not have an answer that I'm willing to say out loud. Not to her. Not to anyone. Not yet. I can't explain to a healer or a room or my own father why I skipped a morning's obligations to sit in a bleacher, and I certainly cannot explain it to the girl herself.

Because the answer, I now know, is that I couldn't not.

I find Soren and Ander in the upperclass gallery, and Ander takes one look at my face and stops mid-sentence.

They know me. They've known me since we were pups. They know every mask I own, and they can see, instantly, that I'm not wearing one, which never happens, and Ander goes still and Soren sets down the book he isn't really reading.

"What happened," Soren says. Not a question. Soren doesn't ask questions so much as require answers.

I don't ease into it. There's no elegant way, and for once in my life I don't have the appetite to find one.

"The scholarship girl," I say.

Ander's jaw tightens — he had his own strange morning with her, in a classroom, I heard about it within the hour. "What about her."

"There was an incident in the freshman assessment. She went down. I—" I stop. Start again, because they need it in the right order. "I touched her."

Neither of them understands why that's worth the look on my face. Soren's brow lowers a fraction. Ander waits.

"Another scholarship kid was touching her too," I say. "At the same time."

I hesitate — Ander's the first to catch it, because Ander was raised on tradition, on the old stories, and I watch the color start to change in his face.

"Her wrist," I say.

I have to make myself say the rest. I, who have never in my life been at a loss for the perfectly chosen sentence.

"It was a mate mark. It flared — bright, unmistakable, right there on the sand. The other guy fell on his ass. I felt it go straight through me." I hear my own voice, and it's steadier than I am. "And then it faded, and nobody else saw, and I carried her to the medical wing and walked out before she woke up."

The room goes completely still.

Nobody speaks.

Chapter twelve

Jessica

The healer clears me the next morning with a warning to take it easy, and I walk back into academy life with a spectacular headache and the distinct sense that being knocked unconscious on day one was not the strong first impression I was going for.

"On the bright side," Sophia says at lunch, patting my hand with deep sympathy, "everyone definitely knows your name now."

"They knew it at breakfast yesterday," Renzo points out. "She'd already peaked. This was just an encore."