Page 1 of Legacy Elite

Chapter one

Jessica

The sweatshirt isn't mine.

Mine's in a bag somewhere with a hole torn through the shoulder and most of a bear on it, so I'm sitting in Professor Matthias's armchair in my own Trial pants and somebody else's gray sweatshirt. Many sizes too big. It smells like cedar and coffee. I take a deep inhale and the scent calms me a little.

My hands won't stop shaking and everything hurts. My shoulder, where the bear opened it up, is bandaged and throbbing in time with my pulse. My hips ache.

My jaw aches.

I shove that away and focus on the actual emergency. I am so hungry it's making me stupid. Hungry like I’m actually contemplating the pinecones on the side table like they might have food-adjacent properties.

They're decorative. I know they're decorative. I'm still thinking about it.

Pickles has no opinion on any of this.

He's sitting on my lap where I put him twenty minutes ago, when we got in and I couldn't make my mouth say anything except can I have Pickles, and Jon grabbed him without asking me a single question about why.

He's warm from the lamp. He's about the length of my hand and he weighs nothing and every so often his tongue comes out to taste the air.

Yesterday I was a girl who couldn't shift. Now half the faculty of Luftis Academy backed away from me because I turn into something scary.

Pickles blinks at me. Slowly. One eye, then the other.

Behind him, taking up most of a small bedroom, is the reason I still can't quite look at this room straight.

I brought my lizard from England in a plastic tub with a sticker of a cartoon shark on the lid, because I told them flat out I wasn't getting on the plane without him, and dorms don't allow pets, and Jon said I'll take him like it was nothing. Then I came to visit a few weeks later and found — that. Cork bark and stacked slate and a proper heat gradient with a hide and multiple branches all for Pickles.

My lizard lives better than I do.

The door opens.

Jon comes in on a gust of cold pine air, coat still on, and stops when he sees me. His hands are red from the walk.

"You're still awake."

"I'm too hungry to sleep." I glance at my lap. "Also, Pickles is resting."

Jon looks at Pickles. Pickles looks back.

"He'll stay there until you move," Jon says. He shrugs out of his coat and hangs it over the back of a chair, next to another coat already there, and goes into the kitchen without asking me anything else. Cabinets. A drawer. The scrape of a pot.

He comes back with bread and butter and a wedge of cheese and half a cold roast chicken on a cutting board, sets it on the table beside me, and says, "Eat all of it."

"All of it?"

"Jessica. You finished a Trial, fought an evaluator, were mauled by a bear, and shifted for the first time in your life." He hands me a plate, and lifts Pickles off me with the absent competence of a man who has done it a thousand times. "Eat."

I mean to be polite about it, but I’m too hungry to care much.

The chicken's cold and it is still the best thing I have ever put in my mouth. I take the bird apart with my fingers and eat like I've been at sea, and I get butter on the sleeve, and Jon doesn't comment. He fills the kettle and gets down a mug and I find myself watching him do it.

Halfway through the bread, my brain comes back online.

"Okay," I say. "What happened?"

Jon leans against the counter. "After you shifted back?"