Page 71 of Legacy Elite

Declan splints it properly. Renzo and Torres get the stretcher rigged from the kit. Freya walks the ground and comes back with a route.

And that's where it goes wrong.

"We can't take her back the way we came," Freya says. "There's the gully crossing at the fire road and the bank's gone. It was soft on the way up. With four of you carrying a stretcher it isn't happening."

"How far round?"

"Forty minutes. Maybe fifty." Freya turns the map. "North side of the ridge, then down through the old forestry tract and out to the road further along."

Renzo checks his watch. "That's most of what we've got left."

"Then we lose most of what we've got left." Declan doesn't even take his eyes off the splint. "Brann said extract her. She didn't say win."

"We'll be marked down."

"We'll be marked down for dropping her a lot harder."

Nobody argues.

Which is how we end up in a part of the Preserve nobody had any reason to send us into.

It's older forest on the north side. Nothing dramatic — just closer, and darker, and quieter, with less undergrowth and more moss, and a floor that swallows sound. There's no path. Freya's picking a line and Declan's calling the pace and the stretcher is going slowly, and I'm shifted back to human because you need hands for this and it turns out shifting back is significantly easier than the other way, which strikes me as unfair.

Then the ground drops into a cut with a stream in the bottom of it, and the far bank is a mess of loose earth and fallen timber and about a fifteen-foot climb.

Everybody looks at it.

"Nope," says Renzo.

"We'd have to go another mile east," Freya says.

"She's been out here four hours," Declan says.

And then all five of them turn around and look at me.

"What?" I say.

Which is how — after standing in the mud for the better part of a minute deliberately not trying, getting it wrong twice, and finally giving up on the whole enterprise and just going, which apparently remains the only method that works — I end up on the far bank as a direwolf with a rope harness across my chest, hauling a stretcher and four adults up fifteen feet of wet earth while Declan calls it out step by step from below.

Slow. Slower. Hold. Hold. Now.

And I can do it.

Not easily. My back legs go out from under me twice and Declan has to brace the stretcher. But I can do it, and nothing about it hurts, and when we get to the top Torres puts a hand flat on my shoulder and says, "Good girl."

I can't answer, because wolf. But I would like to state that I'm going to bring that up again.

I don't know how to track. I don't know how to read terrain or splint a leg or find someone under a rock shelf.

But when Freya and Declan tell me what they need, I can do it.

That'll do.

We're maybe six minutes past the top of the bank when I stop.

Sophia walks into the back of my leg.

"Ow— Jessica—"