Page 137 of Legacy Elite

"I'm all for that," the fourth-year says, already sitting up and reaching for his boots. "Card's in my pocket. I'm not being carried anywhere."

Renzo has the map open on his knee.

"Not back down there," he says. "If Freya's right about the bridge then whoever did it knows exactly where we came in."

"And if she's wrong?"

"Then we've had a long walk." He turns the sheet round. "North end's another half mile of this with trees both sides. I don't love that either."

"So what do you love?"

"Nothing." He points at the black gaps between the trunks on the east side. "But there's the drainage ditch and then forest. It's horrible, it's single file, it's about a hundred yards before the ground opens out. Nobody can drive it and nobody can see down it."

Corvin looks at the trees for about three seconds.

"Then that's where we're going."

We get about thirty feet.

Something goes past my head hard enough that I feel the air of it and hits a trunk behind me with a crack, and Corvin makes a noise and goes down on one knee in the ditch.

For a second nobody does anything at all.

Then Torres has me by the back of the pack and pulls, and we're both in the water, which is freezing and about a foot deep. Renzo runs — four steps toward the west side, which is unfortunately the direction it came from, before Declan gets a fist in his jacket and hauls him backwards behind the stack of cut timber hard enough to put them both on the ground. Sophia is still standing up in the middle of the track with both radios in her hands, and Freya comes off the dirt and takes her legs out from under her.

"Where are they?" Sophia's voice has gone high. "I can't— I can't see anybody, where are they—"

"West." Freya, flat, from the ground. "Movement west. That's all I've got."

"Corvin—"

"I'm all right." He isn't. There's something in his thigh and his voice has thinned out. "Stay down."

Declan's already moving.

He goes along the ditch on his elbows with the med kit, past me, past Torres, to where Corvin has slid into the water, and gets a hand on the wound and his weight behind it, his voice level the whole time.

"You. Fourth year. What's your name?"

"Osk—"

"Both hands. Here, where mine are. Press until I tell you to stop and don't get up for anything." He waits until the hands are there. "Sophia. Second kit. Not now. When I say."

And then there are men on the track.

Three of them at the top end, forty yards off, dark gray, faces covered. The one in front isn't carrying a rifle — it's something short and thick with a loop of cable on it. The two behind him are unrolling something across the width of the track.

A net.

And it's far too big.

I lie in a freezing ditch with my heart going like a bird and look at the width of that thing, and I know.

It's for me.

"Jess." Torres, right at my ear. "Look at me."

I look at him. His face is three inches from mine, there's blood on his cheek where the timber went, and he is absolutely terrified — I can feel every bit of it — and underneath that he is completely steady.