Page 86 of Legacy Elite

I keep my hand exactly where it is, and my voice exactly where it is, and I say, "Under my hand. That's your back. Now find the front."

Jessica faces the trees again.

"Right," she says, and her voice is nearly normal. "Yes. Fine."

I take my hand away. Not because I want to.

Torres would not have taken his hand away.

That's the thing about Torres that I keep coming back to, and I don't especially enjoy where it leads. He has less standing than anyone in this equation — no House, no name, raised by whatever raised him — and he's the only one of us who simply walked forward. No calculation. No staged retreat. He has nothing to lose and he behaves as though he has everything, which I'm beginning to suspect is the actual order of operations.

Draeven accepted it and thought that was the end of the work. It wasn't. He's been quiet for a fortnight and short with people, which in Luke means he has run into a problem he cannot talk his way around, and I know precisely which problem, because she's standing two feet in front of me refusing to be positioned.

And Ander—

Ander is doing the thing where you refuse to name something and call it discipline.

It isn't. I've watched him do it since April and it's getting worse, not better. He thinks that if he never says the word, the word doesn't apply to him. That's not control. Control is knowing exactly what you're holding and choosing how long to hold it.

I have been denying this for months.

I've been telling myself that's not the same thing.

"Okay," Jessica says. "Again."

She stands facing the trees with her hand on her chest.

Nothing chasing her. Nobody hurt. No rope, no bank, no woman under a rock shelf. Just a field, and the cold, and a woman who has been told for a year and a half what she is by people who see her as a problem that needs solving.

I watch her shoulders drop. She breathes out.

And then she doesn't hesitate at all — there's no bracing, no windup, nothing I can see on her except a decision — and the air changes.

The shift takes her about four seconds, which is slow.

I don't care that it's slow.

Because I am standing feet from a direwolf.

I've seen her once before, at a distance across the training ground. It didn't prepare me for this.

The scale is the first thing and it isn't the important thing. She's tall at the shoulder and heavy through the chest in a way no wolf I have ever fought is heavy — it isn't fat, it's structure, the frame of an animal built for something the rest of us have been scaled down from. Long in the leg. Broad through the skull. The coat is dark and denser than it looks.

Every account I've read of the direwolves is written by someone frightened. I understand the accounts better now.

And then she looks at me. And it's her.

Completely. Entirely. The head comes round and the eyes find me and it is Jessica Miller in there, unmistakably, with an expression I have seen on her human face approximately four hundred times, and it says: did you see that.

The history is impossible to miss.

So is she.

"You chose it," I say.

Her ears go forward.

And she is so pleased with herself that she forgets what she now weighs.