Page 138 of Legacy Elite

"Do you want to run or do you want to fight?"

Nobody else in my life would have asked me that.

"We're in a ditch with a man bleeding," I say.

"Yeah."

"And I'm the only one of us bigger than they are."

"Yeah."

"Then get everyone off the track, because I'm about to make it very loud up here."

I put my hand flat against my sternum and do what I've been doing in an empty field twice a week since October.

This time it goes.

It goes fast — faster than the field, faster than the mountain — and the world drops and widens and gets enormously loud, and the ditch isn't deep enough to hold me any more, and I come up out of it onto the track.

Somebody screams. Not one of mine.

I'm halfway up the track before the man on the left gets the launcher onto his shoulder, and I can see it happening in his hands — he swings it and I'm already past where he's pointing. They got my size right. Nobody told him about the speed.

I hit him with my shoulder at a dead run. He goes off the track into the ditch and stops making any noise, and I'm past him and turning before the sound of it finishes.

Somebody in the trees shouts and doesn't shoot, because there are two of his own people on that track and I'm standing in the middle of them.

Then the net comes.

I don't see it. I feel it, heavy over my back and hindquarters, and then it pulls and my back legs go out from under me and I'm down in the stones with the whole weight of it dragging. There's something braided through the mesh that isn't rope. It bites every time I move.

Two of them hauling. A third behind me with the cable.

I pull. It bites. I pull again and get nowhere.

"JESSICA—"

Torres is on the track, shifted, running straight at the man on the near line.

He takes him off his feet, and the tension goes out of that side by maybe a third.

A third is enough. One shoulder up, then the other. Something opens along my flank where the mesh drags and it hurts in a way I don't have time for, and then my front end's clear, and I twist, and the whole thing comes off my hips.

The man with the cable takes one look at me and backs up.

Then Freya, out of the trees, completely flat: "Jessica — there's one on the ground on your left."

I don't go left.

I go right, up the track, and the man with the cable drops it and runs.

I could catch him. Sixty feet, easy.

I turn around instead, because Corvin is bleeding into a ditch with a fourth-year's hands on his leg, and I am not the entire team.

Sophia gets a signal out at one twenty, and she does it by climbing a tree.

She goes a hundred yards down the drainage line, up the bank, and about twenty feet up a pine with a handset in her teeth. Tries it. Nothing. Goes higher and tries it again.