Page 139 of Legacy Elite

The second time somebody answers.

Elmscar track. Ambush. Officer down. Miller cohort. Send everyone.

They break off a few minutes later. The two in the trees go first — Freya sees them pull back north and then they're gone — and the one Torres put down gets up and limps after them. Nobody chases, because Corvin has gone gray and Declan says nobody moves in a voice I have never heard out of him before.

The one I put in the ditch doesn't get up. He's alive and he's breathing and his shoulder is a shape a shoulder shouldn't be.

Then it's quiet in the horrible way, and I'm standing on a vehicle track as a direwolf with blood down my side and pieces of net around my back legs, listening to the academy come up the fire road.

Voss reaches us first. He comes out of the trees at a flat run with four people behind him and stops when he sees the track.

A year ago I stood in a clearing in a body I didn't understand while every adult in the world backed away from me.

Voss doesn't back up.

"Miller. Anyone dead?"

I shake my head, which works fine on four legs.

"Then shift back and let somebody look at that flank," he says, and goes straight past me to Corvin.

They get Corvin out on a real stretcher with real people carrying it, and Declan goes with him and doesn't stop talking to him the whole way down the fire road.

Abe turns up at one thirty, furious and completely fine. He'd got to the bridge, found nothing at the crossing, and gone down the bank to look at the water. The ridge path was clear when he went down. When he came back up there was a tree across it. He spent half an hour getting round it with a dead radio.

Somebody takes my boots off and bandages my flank. It's long and shallow and it stings and it is the least interesting injury on this hill.

Sophia has taken the skin off both palms on that tree and is showing three security officers how big the net was, holding her arms out and then giving up and using the track. Renzo is sitting on the timber stack shaking and pretending he isn't, and Freya is sitting next to him not mentioning it. Torres hasn't been more than four feet from me since he shifted back.

They find Corvin's spare handset at four o'clock, in the water under the bridge, forty yards downstream of where we put our packs down.

It takes two hours before anybody tells us anything, and they only do that because I stand in front of Falken and refuse to move.

"The bridge was cut," Voss says. "Underneath, where you'd have to be in the water to see it. Enough timber left to hold until weight went over."

"So Freya was right."

"Freya was right."

"And the radios?"

"There was a device in a hollow west of the track. My people are still on it." He isn't going to give me more than that; I can hear it in how flat he says it. "It isn't something you buy in a shop."

"Corvin's handset—"

"Was in the water under that bridge, which means somebody got close enough to your packs to put a hand in one." He straightens up. "That's as far as I'm going today. Everything past it belongs to the Chancellor and the Council and about six people above me, and it'll take them weeks."

"They didn't get lucky."

"No," Voss says. "They didn't."

Then he steps back off the tarp so I can see what's laid out on it.

The net's spread flat, weighted lines pulled straight, mesh open, with the thin dark toothed lengths braided through it that are the reason my flank is bandaged. There are two security officers standing on either side of it, and next to them it's the wrong size for anything.

Beside it, the short thick thing with the cable. And beside that, a plastic case opened out on its hinge with a foam insert in the bottom. Six recesses. Two of them still have darts in.

"Somebody said bear," Voss says. "That's the first thing anybody said when we got the lid off."