Page 44 of Legacy Elite

"He used a word."

"What word," Torres says, and his voice has dropped about an octave.

"He called me a mutt."

"It's in the minutes. Somebody made them write it down." I look at my hands. They've mostly stopped shaking. "I didn't say anything back. I just sat there."

"Bastard," Freya says.

I turn my head.

"You're a second-year. He's a Great House." She hasn't moved off the railing. "He just showed everyone his inner asshole.”

Chapter six

Jessica

"Shift."

I stand there.

"Shift," Voss says again.

The training ground is cold and half in shadow and I've been standing on this patch of it for eleven minutes, which I know because there's a clock on the equipment shed.

I close my eyes and reach for whatever happened in that clearing — reach hard, like there's a handle somewhere behind my ribs that I just have to grip properly.

Nothing.

Not no response. That would be last year, when there was nothing in there at all, when I could scream at my own body for an hour and it was like shouting into an empty house.

This is different. It's in there. I know it is — there's a weight low in my chest that wasn't there before April, a pressure like a held breath.

And I can't reach it.

"I'm doing it," I say.

"You are standing," Voss says.

"I'm doing it internally."

"Yes." He makes a note on the board he carries, which I have come to hate. "Again."

Twenty feet away, a group of third-years is doing shift drills, and one of them goes human to wolf and back four times in the space of a few minutes.

Human. Wolf. Human. Like changing shoes.

I hate her a little bit. She seems lovely. I hate her a little bit anyway.

"Professor Voss."

"Miss Miller."

"Can I ask why we're doing this?"

"Because you have one recorded shift and no ability to reproduce it."

"Right, but why does that matter—" I catch the look and rephrase. "I'm not being difficult. I'm asking what the actual problem is. Everyone's seen it. Nobody thinks I made it up."