Page 70 of Legacy Elite

I make it about sixty yards up the slope before it occurs to me that nobody is behind me.

Freya is standing at the bottom, watching.

I come back.

She looks at me for a long second, then turns forty degrees left, puts her nose down, and picks up another trail within a minute.

Oh.

Apparently finding a person and finding our person are two different skills.

If a wolf could say stop helping, that's what her entire body just said.

Fine.

It's Declan who finds her, in the end, and he does it without any tracking at all.

Freya gets us to a bowl of ground below a rock shelf and loses the trail again on the scree, and stands there with her nose working, and Declan comes up beside her and shifts back to human and just — looks.

Looks at the shelf. At the wind. At the way the ground falls.

Then he points.

"There. She'd have gone in under the overhang."

Freya's head comes up.

"You can't see anything from here," Renzo says. He's shifted back too, and he's got the map out, thumbing our position. "There's no sign at all."

"There wouldn't be. She's not moving." Declan's already going. "She's cold, she's hurt, and she's been sitting for two hours. You get out of the wind. Everybody does. Every single time."

He's right.

She's under the overhang.

Ines is a fourth-year with a shock of dark hair and about four layers on, and she's got her boot off and her ankle wrapped in something she's clearly done herself, and she has been sitting in a hollow in the rock reading a paperback.

"About time," she says.

"Two hours nine," Declan says, dropping to a knee beside her. "That's not bad for a first placement."

"That's what everyone says."

"How's the leg?"

"Left tib-fib. That's what my card says." She waves it. "I'm also to go shocky and mildly uncooperative from about now, so brace yourselves."

And then she sees me.

Because I'm still a direwolf.

Ines looks at me for a long moment.

"Right," she says. "Yes. I'd heard."

Sophia sits down next to her and starts talking, and does not stop for the next twenty minutes, and I will be honest — I thought that was Sophia being Sophia. It isn't. She keeps up a completely unbroken stream of absolute rubbish about the dining hall and her community rotation and a boy in her Monday seminar, and while she does it, Ines stops watching Declan handle her leg. She just — stops. She's listening to Sophia complain about a bake sale instead.

That's the job. Nobody taught Sophia that. She's just built that way.