Page 68 of Legacy Elite

"There," she says.

"That's mud."

"It's a heel in mud, Jessica, and you've now stood in two of them." She crouches, gets her thumb about an inch off the ground and doesn't touch it. "Left foot. Coming down. Deeper on the outside edge, which means she was already favoring the other leg by the time she came through here."

I look at the mud.

I look at Freya.

I look at the mud again, and I would like to state for the record that it is mud.

"Behind me," Freya says. "All of you. Single file, and put your feet where I put mine."

Instructor Brann is about forty feet off to the side with her hands in her jacket pockets, saying nothing, which is what she's been doing for the last hour.

She gave us the briefing at the trailhead and then stopped helping.

Casualty exercise. Ines Dahl, fourth-year, volunteered for it. She walked in at eight-forty and she's been sitting somewhere in there ever since. You don't know where and you don't know what's wrong with her — she's carrying an injury card and she'll play it when you find her. You've got her jacket for scent, a map, a last known position at the fire road junction, and each other. Locate, assess, stabilize, extract. Three o'clock.

Then, in exactly the same voice:

The injury's simulated. The cold isn't. The terrain isn't. Her weight on a stretcher isn't, and neither is the ground you're carrying her over. She's been outside ninety minutes already. Bear that in mind when you're deciding how long to argue.

Renzo had asked whether she'd be helping.

No. If I have to step in, your exercise is over.

Which is why Freya's been running this since minute four.

"You've known how to do this the whole time?" Sophia says, picking her way along behind me.

"I was a ranger."

"I thought that meant trees."

"It does involve trees," Freya says.

"You never said—"

"You never asked. You asked me what my favorite tree was."

"That was a social overture—"

"Sophia," Declan says, from the back. "Voice."

And Sophia shuts up, which she has never once done for me.

Because that's the other thing that's happened this morning.

Declan Byrne, who spent all of last year folding himself into chairs and apologizing for existing, is running the back half of this operation like a man who has done it two hundred times. Which he has. He got the map off Renzo within ninety seconds of the briefing, marked our entry point and our fallback, made everyone say out loud what time it was, and told us — kindly, but not as a suggestion — that nobody goes anywhere alone and nobody crosses running water without saying so first.

Freya's reading the ground.

Declan's reading the emergency.

They're the two quietest people in our cohort and everybody's following them, and I keep catching myself grinning about it.

Twenty minutes later the ground changes, and Freya loses the trail in a stretch of leaf litter, and says the word we all knew was coming.