Chapter 62: Keep Up

The advanced class started with partner assignments, and the instructor read the names off a clipboard without looking up. He paired Roxanne with a boy named Elias, who had transferred in from a northern academy and carried himself like someone who had never needed to prove anything. He shook her hand politely and did not seem to care that she ran with the Moonstones or that half the academy had opinions about her.

Their first task was a tracking exercise through the wooded edge of campus. Each of them shouldered a weighted training pack and was given a single scent to follow, and Elias took the lead before the instructor finished explaining the rules. Roxanne let him, though the trail was strong and easy to hold, which was the first thing that bothered her.

They had walked nearly ten minutes when she stopped between two birches. Elias glanced back and asked what was wrong, his tone already halfway to impatient.

"This is too clean," she said. "Every other trail we’ve run had breaks in it. Somebody laid this one down on purpose, and they laid it heading away from where it should actually go."

He crouched and studied the ground again, and she watched his jaw shift as he saw it. "Which way, then?" he asked.

She pointed toward a drainage ditch on the left, where the real trail ran faintly under the smell of wet leaves. They took her route and reached the marker flag twenty minutes before anyone else. Elias dropped his pack and rolled his shoulder.

"You notice patterns quickly," he said, as though he were reading it off a report. He hadn’t bothered to hide that it surprised him.

"You don’t have to sound so surprised," Roxanne said. She was not entirely joking.

He almost smiled at that. It wasn’t friendliness, but it sat closer to respect than dislike.

The second exercise was worse. The instructor sent them into a fenced field rigged with speakers, strobing lights, and pockets of strong scent, and told them to finish an obstacle course while holding a partial shift. Roxanne handled the first few obstacles before the noise began layering on itself, a bell here, a burst of pepper smoke there.

By the fourth obstacle her breathing had gone ragged and her claws were half out. Elias, waiting on the far side of a wall, watched her come over it badly.

"Stop fighting every sensation," he said. "You’re spending more energy on the noise than on the course."

"I know how to control myself," she snapped. She hated how thin her voice sounded.

"Then stop trying to prove it," he said. He was already turning toward the next obstacle, as if the conversation were over.

The words landed harder than she wanted them to, because Kai had said nearly the same thing to her last spring. She stood still for a breath and let the sounds come in without chasing them. The wolf settled against her ribs instead of clawing at them, and she finished the course clean, earning a short, honest nod from Elias that she felt more than she expected to.

During the break, Roxanne noticed the Moonstones training on the far field, running drills in tight formation. Kai had stopped in the middle of a sequence, and even from that distance she could tell he was watching her and Elias.

Liam noticed within seconds. He nudged Kai’s arm and murmured something that made his grin widen, and Kai told him to focus on his own training without any heat.

"Leave him alone, Liam," Lucien said quietly. Liam actually did, though he kept smirking. Roshan said nothing, but his eyes moved from Kai to Roxanne to Elias and back. Kai finished the drill correctly, like a person who had just realized the ground was shifting under him and had decided to keep walking anyway.

At lunch, Elias sat across from Roxanne without asking, which she was beginning to understand was simply how he did things. He ate for a few minutes before he spoke.

"Most people ask me if I’m nervous around the Moonstones," he said. "I’d like to know why you aren’t."

She had braced for the usual questions, and this wasn’t one of them. "They’re my friends and my teammates," she said. "I don’t spend much time thinking about the rest of it."

"I heard a different version," he said. "That you only got your opportunities because they’re royal." He didn’t say it cruelly, only as information.

Roxanne set down her fork and did not raise her voice. "People can believe whatever they want. I still have to do the work."

He watched her for a moment, then went back to his food, but something in his posture had changed. She had passed a test she hadn’t known he was giving.

The surprise challenge came in the afternoon. The instructor led the pairs to the edge of a hedge maze and told them to retrieve a brass token from its center without speaking. Roxanne and Elias struggled from the first turn, because both of them tried to lead and both ended up blocking the other in narrow corridors.

Then Roxanne began paying attention to his hands instead of his face. He used short, precise signals, a flat palm for stop and two fingers for turn, and once she understood the pattern she started answering them. Elias noticed how she moved, always angling toward the wider gaps, and he began following her line rather than cutting across it. They reached the token together and were out of the maze before any other pair had cleared the second junction.

The instructor gave them the highest score of the day. Neither of them had carried the other, and Roxanne knew that was the reason. They had finally learned how to read each other.

After class she was gathering her things when Elias crossed the grass holding the training gloves she had left on the bench.

"You’re difficult to work with," he said, handing them over. His expression didn’t change at all.

She smiled, turning one glove in her hand. "You’re not exactly easy."

"Good," he said. Then he walked off toward the dormitories without looking back.

Roxanne watched him go, amused despite herself. Across the field, Kai stood with his bag over his shoulder, and she caught the moment he saw her smile. He didn’t call out or come over, and he only picked up the rest of his gear and headed the other way.

Before she left, the instructor pinned a sheet to the board by the door, and her stomach tightened as she read it. It said: ADVANCED PARTNER ASSESSMENT — ONE PARTNER WILL BE ELIMINATED.

She looked at Elias, who had stopped at the edge of the path and was reading the same words from a distance. Their competition had never had a real cost before, and now it did. By this time tomorrow, one of them could be out.