Chapter 64: After Dark

The selected students gathered at the edge of the training grounds after sunset, and the campus looked like a different place in the dark. The wooded sections beyond the fence had turned into a wall of shapes with no edges. Roxanne stood near the back of the group with her hands in her jacket pockets, listening to the wind move through the pines.

The instructor waited until everyone went quiet. He explained that each student would receive a tracking marker and cross the wooded grounds alone, locating three checkpoints and retrieving a marked object before the time limit ran out. There would be no partners and no assistance of any kind. "If you get lost, you solve the problem yourself," he said.

Roxanne liked that more than she expected to. After weeks of partner work, the idea of relying only on her own instincts felt like a relief, and she wanted to prove she could do it.

The students were released at staggered intervals. When her turn came she stepped past the fence and into the trees, and the noise of the group faded behind her almost at once. Her senses sharpened immediately. Every snapped twig and rustle of leaves arrived with equal weight, and the scents in the air tangled together until she couldn’t separate one from another.

She felt the old urge to rush and clamp down on everything. Instead she remembered what she had been taught about working with her wolf rather than suppressing it. She stopped at the base of a tree and breathed until the noise sorted itself into layers, then moved on at an even pace. It took her twenty minutes to find the first checkpoint, a marked stake half hidden in a bed of ferns, and the second came soon after. She was doing well, and she knew it.

Near the third checkpoint, the trail split in two. One scent line was strong and easy to follow along a game path, while the other was so faint she nearly missed it. Roxanne crouched between them and thought about the tracking exercise from weeks earlier, when the cleanest trail had been the trap. The strong one was almost certainly planted.

She took the faint trail, and it led her away from the marked route and deeper into the trees than she liked. Twice she nearly turned back. Then she noticed a fresh scratch on the bark of an oak, low and recent, the kind a pack strap might leave, and she realized another student had passed this way not long before. She followed the marks from tree to tree until she reached a fallen pine, and the third checkpoint sat behind it with the marked object beside it. She tucked the object into her pack, grinning to herself.

On the return route, she heard something off to her left. It sounded like ragged breathing and small, uncertain movements, and she assumed another student was struggling. She changed direction and found a boy sitting against a tree with his knees pulled up. He was clearly a first-year, wearing a school jacket and carrying no gear, and he had no business being anywhere near the restricted area.

Roxanne stood there for a moment. The finish line was still a good distance ahead, and every minute she spent here would cost her. But she didn’t hesitate the way she might have earlier in the term, and she crouched beside him, told him her name, and asked him to stand up so she could walk him out.

They had gone perhaps a hundred yards when something moved in the brush ahead. The boy grabbed her sleeve and gasped, and Roxanne’s wolf surged up through her like a dropped weight. Her senses opened all at once, far past anything she had felt before. She could hear the boy’s heartbeat and her own, and the quick pulse of small animals in the undergrowth. Footsteps she couldn’t place crossed the ground somewhere to the east, and beyond them, much farther away, something large shifted its weight against the earth.

It was overwhelming, and for a moment she couldn’t tell which sounds belonged near her. She forced herself to breathe in for four counts and out for four, the way she had practiced, and she pulled the wolf back behind her ribs. The sounds narrowed and settled until they were only what a person could reasonably hear. She told herself it was only concentration and nerves.

She steered him toward the lit road at the edge of the grounds and left him at the tree line, close enough to see the lamps. Then she ran for the finish.

She crossed the line well past the time limit. The head instructor stood waiting with his clipboard and asked why she was late. Roxanne told him about the first-year student who shouldn’t have been there. He was visibly annoyed that she had abandoned her route, and he opened his mouth to say so.

Before he could, a second instructor jogged up from the fence line and confirmed that a first-year had turned up at the dormitory gate, saying a girl in the woods had helped him out. The head instructor’s expression shifted slightly. He wrote something on his clipboard, and Roxanne caught the small movement of his pen and the way he paused before closing the page. He didn’t say what it was, and she didn’t ask.

Kai was waiting outside the training grounds, leaning against a fence post. He hadn’t been allowed to take part in this assessment, but he had stayed nearby anyway, and he straightened as soon as he saw her. "Did you finish?" he asked.

"I came in late," Roxanne said. Kai asked why, and she told him about the first-year and the restricted area while he listened without interrupting.

He wasn’t disappointed. "You helped someone," he said, as though it were the only part that mattered.

"I lost points," she said, and Kai shrugged. "You’ll get more points." That made her smile.

Then he tilted his head. "Did anything else happen?" he asked. Roxanne almost told him about the surge, the way the whole forest had opened up around her at once. But it had passed, and she had probably imagined half of it, so she shook her head. "Nothing important," she said.

Kai studied her a second longer than she liked. He didn’t push, and after a moment he took her pack from her shoulder and they started walking toward the dormitories.

Later that night, the instructor sat alone in his office and went through the students’ tracking results. Roxanne’s lay beside the others, and her score was good, better than good for someone who had lost so much time. Beneath it he had written a note: Sensory response exceeded expected range. He circled it twice, then moved her file to the top of the stack.