Page 71 of Legacy Found

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.