Page 65 of Legacy Found

And I get it, then — how much this means to him. That this was never just a good idea he had. It was the thing that reignited him, and we're the proof it worked, and there's a whole future of kids like us who'll come after because six strangers made it through a year.

Jon raises his glass one last time.

"There will be other latent cohorts," he says. "But there will only ever be one first."

We all lift our glasses, and it feels — genuinely, for a moment — like history.

Then Renzo, because he's Renzo, ruins it perfectly.

"So," he says, into the warm silence. "What exactly is the First Trial?"

The room goes still in a completely different way.

Jon smiles. "I can't tell you."

Everyone groans at once. Sophia throws both hands in the air. "You're kidding. We just qualified! We earned the answer!"

"You earned the chance to find out," Jon says, laughing now. "If I told you what it was, it wouldn't be much of a trial, would it?"

Which is, somehow, the least comforting sentence anyone has said all day. I watch it move through the room — the celebration draining slowly back into nerves, everyone suddenly very aware that qualifying wasn't the finish line. It was the door.

We spill out of his office still buzzing, and the theories start before we've even reached the stairs.

"It's going to be physical," Sophia says darkly. "We're going to have to wrestle wolves. Fully grown wolves. With our hands."

"They drop us in the middle of the Preserve with nothing," Renzo counters. "Mark my words. No food, no map, just hope and predators."

"It'll be a written exam," Declan says, gloomy. "An impossibly long one. Watch."

"You want it to be a written exam," Freya says.

"I want to live, Freya."

Torres just shrugs, hands in his pockets, easy. "Whatever it is," he says, "we'll get through it."

"That's it?" Renzo demands. "That's your whole strategy? 'We'll get through it'?"

"Worked so far." Torres nudges me. "Right?"

"A hundred and eight," I say, and I can't stop grinning about it, and Sophia loops her arm through mine, and the six of us head back across campus into the long gold afternoon light — arguing about wolves and wilderness and exams, no closer to knowing what's coming, and for once completely unbothered by not knowing.

Behind us, the Great Hall glows. Ahead of us, somewhere, waits the First Trial.

That's tomorrow's problem. Today we made it, all of us, and nobody's letting go of anybody's arm.

Chapter twenty-three

Jessica

The whole academy has lost its mind.

The Trial is tomorrow. That's all we've been told — when to report, where to stand. Not what it is, not how long it lasts, nothing. And into that vacuum the entire freshman class has poured every terrible rumor it can invent.

"Three days," Sophia announces at dinner, with the authority of a woman who heard it from someone who heard it from someone. "It lasts three days, and there are tunnels under Lufgard, and they make you go into the tunnels."

"They drop you in the mountains," Renzo counters. "No supplies. Just you and the wilderness."

"You fight an instructor," Declan says gloomily. "In wolf form."