Page 48 of Legacy Elite

And it feels like he punched me.

Because they're all doing it. Wren in the Council chamber. Faris in a classroom. Falken with a housing form. Everybody deciding what I am while I wait for somebody to hand me the answer.

I'm doing it out here too. Standing on a training ground with my eyes shut, politely requesting a wolf.

"Maybe the bear was better motivation," Soren says.

I look at him.

"Fuck you."

"There," he says.

"There what—"

He comes at me.

And I don't think about my shoulder or my stance or whether anything is happening in my chest, because I am no longer available for that; I am entirely occupied with the fact that I would like, very sincerely, to put Evren Soren on the ground.

I get inside his reach. I get a hand on his collar. He turns it, because of course he does, and I go back and my heel hits the edge of the mat and I'm going down with all of Soren coming down on me —

— and it's there.

Heat comes up under my skin like someone opened a door. The base of my skull goes tight. The whole world jumps a step closer and I can suddenly smell the cut grass at the far fence, the oil on the equipment rack, the sweat on the man above me, all of it at once, layered and enormous, and it is exactly what happened in the clearing, precisely and unmistakably that —

I reach for it.

And it's gone.

The world drops back to its usual size. My skin is only my skin. I'm lying on a mat in the cold with my hair stuck to my face, being a person.

"Fuck."

Soren is off me and back on his heels. He's not saying anything. He's watching me with an expression I can't read at all.

"Fuck!" I slam my palm into the mat and get up and kick the edge of it, which achieves nothing except hurting my foot. "It was right there. It was right there, I had it—"

"Good," Voss says.

I round on him.

"Which part of that looked good to you?"

"The part where you nearly shifted."

"I didn't shift. That's the entire—" I gesture at all of me. "Still this! Still exactly this!"

"Yesterday," Voss says, "you were not nearly shifting."

He writes something on his board, and tucks it under his arm, and starts walking toward the shed like a man whose afternoon has gone broadly to plan.

I stand there breathing.

Soren picks up my water bottle from where it went sometime in the last twenty minutes and holds it out.

I take it. Drink about half of it. Try to make my hands stop shaking.

"Your teaching style is terrible," I say.