Page 70 of Legacy Found

"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.