Page 49 of Legacy Elite

"It worked."

"I didn't shift."

"You almost did."

"Almost isn't—" I stop, because I've just looked at him properly.

He isn't smiling. But his eyes look softer.

"Don't look so smug," I say.

"I'm not."

"You absolutely are."

"I'm not," Soren says, and goes to talk to Voss.

Ander's still there.

He's twenty feet away and he hasn't moved, and when I catch him he doesn't do the decent thing and pretend he wasn't looking.

"What?" I say.

"Nothing."

"You have a very expressive nothing."

His eyes go past me — to Soren, over by the shed with Voss, sleeves still shoved up — and then come back to me.

"Nothing," Ander says again, and walks off toward the residence.

Fine. Great. Cool.

The rest of them are packing up. The third-years are heading in, somebody's arguing about dinner, the light's going that color it goes in October at about four thirty.

I put the water bottle down.

I shut my eyes — and then open them again, because that's the part I've been doing wrong. Eyes open. Nobody's giving me anything. Nobody has anything to give.

I don't reach for the clearing. I don't reach for the bear.

I reach for the place I was sixty seconds ago, going backward off the edge of a mat with all of Soren coming down on me and my entire body deciding, without consulting me, that it had had enough of this.

Heat.

It's small and it's fast and it's gone almost before I've registered it — a flicker under the skin, the base of my skull tightening for half a second and letting go.

Still human. But it's there.

"Again," I say.

Voss stops, halfway across the training ground. He turns around.

Soren does too. I roll my shoulders.

"Again."

By nine o'clock I have taken the world's longest shower and discovered eleven separate places that hurt.