Page 136 of Legacy Elite

Corvin, sector four, with the Miller cohort, seven students. Halden crossing is impassable. Rerouting via the Elmscar track to the east fire road. Estimate forty minutes. One officer detached to the crossing, back with us inside ten.

The desk acknowledges.

We start walking.

The Elmscar track is a cut through the replanted forest.

Forty-year-old conifers in rows, planted close, dark underneath, a stony vehicle track up the middle and drainage ditches either side. The trees come right down to the ditch on both sides for about a kilometer and a half.

You can't get a stretcher through the trees. You can barely get a person through the trees.

You go up the middle. That's what the track's for.

We're a quarter mile in when Sophia says, "Guys."

"What?"

"Radio's dead."

Declan looks back. "Whose?"

"Mine. And Renzo's." She's got both of them out. "Not dead-dead. There's carrier. There's just nothing on it."

"Terrain," Renzo says.

"It's a forest. It's flat."

"Try the other channel."

She tries the other channel. Then the third. Then the emergency channel, which we're not supposed to touch, and which she touches anyway.

"Nothing," she says.

Corvin tries his, and I watch his face change.

"Everybody stop walking," he says.

We stop. Nobody says anything for a moment, and the pines don't help — rows of trees, a floor of needles, no wind in it at all. Renzo turns the map over in his hands twice for something to do with them.

Then Freya says, "The bridge bothered me."

Everybody looks at her.

"What about it?"

"The break." She's looking back down the track the way we came. "It didn't look right."

"Right how?"

"I don't know. That's the problem. It didn't look like something that fell down." She scrapes dried mud off the heel of her hand with her thumbnail. "But I'd have had to get in the water to see anything, and if I was wrong we'd have stood at that bridge for half an hour while I looked at it."

"You think somebody cut it," Corvin says.

"I think I don't know."

Corvin looks at his radio again. Then at the fourth-year on the stretcher, and then a long way back down the track.

"We're done," he says. "Exercise is over. We're not standing here and we're not walking back past that bridge."