Page 161 of Legacy Elite

Low, along the ditch, up the right-hand side — the side they're all on — because every one of them is currently face-down in gravel and nobody is looking at a woman in a green coat.

Go girl.

Go, go, go.

I head up the road to meet the two in the beeches, because I'd rather they were dealing with me.

Voss has spent a year yelling at me about my back end, so I don't hit the treeline flat out. I lose the speed before the trees and come in through the gap at the bottom of the slope instead of forcing two trunks that are closer together than my hips.

The first one has a rifle up and never gets to use it, because he's braced for something huge and slow. I am not slow. He goes down under me and I'm not gentle about it.

The second drops his rifle and goes for his belt instead, and I'm on him before his hand gets there. His forearm ends up in my mouth.

I could take it off.

I let go and put him into a tree instead.

Somebody on the road shouts one word.

Then the net comes off the roof of the second van.

They fire it — it doesn't get thrown, it comes out of a tube with weights on the corners and opens about fifteen feet up and drops across my shoulders and my back and half my hindquarters. Same mesh. Same dark toothed lengths braided through it.

It's bigger than the last one. They went back and built a bigger one.

Two of them are already on the lines.

In the pines I pulled straight against it and the teeth went in, and it took Torres coming out of a ditch to give me any slack. This time I go sideways, shoulder down, driving across the slope with everything I have — and both men are set against a pull that never comes, and both of them go off their feet. One lets go. The other doesn't, and I drag him thirty feet before he changes his mind.

Something opens along my flank. I don't care.

I get my front end clear, drop my head, and pull until it tears at the corner where the mesh meets the weight. It comes off me in two pieces.

Somebody says, "Second."

An instruction, and nobody sounds surprised.

The first dart goes into my chest. It goes in, and a second later I turn hard and it tears back out, and I don't know whether that means I got all of it or none of it.

The second gets me in the flank, and that one stays.

I take the man who fired it. He's reloading at the front wheel of the second van and he doesn't get it done.

Then I go up the road.

Freya's clear. Cassel's behind a car. The gate is uphill and open and there's nobody between me and it.

The beeches go past like fence posts. Something goes into the road surface to my left and I don't care, because the barrier is right there and there's a man in the hut standing up—

And the road ahead is full of vehicles.

Two of them, nose to nose across the pavement between the trunks and the ditch. They weren't there on the way in. They've come out of a field entrance in the last minute and there are men getting out of both, and behind them there's another net.

They expected me to run for the gate.

I don't stop. I go left, down into the ditch and up the far bank into the field, because there's nothing out there but grass and I can run.

I get maybe forty-five yards.