Chapter Four_The Hunt Begins

Neris POV

The flare is gone.

I know it the second my hand goes into the side pocket and closes on nothing. No cylinder. No safety pin. Just the rough seam where it should be sitting.

Night has already come down. The Pursuit has started. All around me first-year teams fold into the tree line in fours, voices low, flashlight beams cutting short and white through the dark. Laughter drifts back from somewhere left of me. Someone tells their partner to keep up. A girl at the supply table is still arguing for a second water flask.

I'm standing at the edge of the western forest by myself. Ysolde is nowhere.

I turn a slow circle. Check the ground. Check the pack again. Check inside my jacket, then the dirt at my feet, as though a metal cylinder could have quietly buried itself. It was in that pocket after the final equipment check this afternoon. Somebody took it, and somebody knew exactly which minute I'd stop paying attention.

"Looking for this?"

I spin. One of the boys who has been circling Ysolde since orientation stands by the last supply table, my flare held up between two fingers, smiling like he's been saving this all week.

"Must have gotten mixed in with our team gear." He shrugs. "Shame. No swaps once you're past the boundary. Rules."

He tosses it. His teammate catches it one-handed, and the two of them walk into the trees still laughing.

I don't go after them. The boundary is already behind me. I step into the forest alone.

The first hour is almost ordinary. The path is marked with faint silver lines that glow just enough to keep anyone from wandering into the restricted zones early. Other teams move through the undergrowth around me. Whispers. A soft curse. A branch going under somebody's boot. Somewhere east, an argument.

"We're supposed to hold near the ridge."

"The ridge is the first place they'll send the constructs. Think."

"I'm not failing because you want to be clever."

Their voices thin out as they go deeper. I keep to the edge of the marked path, careful with my feet, careful with my breathing. The pack sits too light on my shoulders. Every few minutes my hand goes back to the empty pocket like it might have changed its mind.

Then the quiet starts.

It doesn't fall. It settles, slowly, one layer at a time. The night birds stop calling. The small things in the leaf litter stop moving. Even the low constant hum of other wolves in the dark, a thing so ordinary I've never once had to notice it, thins out and disappears, until all that's left is my own footsteps and my own heart going too loud in my ears.

I stop walking.

The forest is wrong. Too still. Too heavy. The trees have the held-breath feeling of a room where an argument just stopped.

I move off the path a few steps and crouch. My boot has scraped over something rough. I brush the leaves and loose dirt away.

Claw marks.

Not the clean parallel gouges an ordinary wolf leaves, and nothing like the tidy damage the training constructs do. These are enormous, deep enough to score the stone under the soil, wide enough that my whole hand drops into one groove without touching either side. Whatever cut them was moving fast and had no interest in being quiet. The edges are still sharp.

Fresh.

I straighten up slowly.

"That's not part of the exercise," I say, to nobody.

Nobody answers.

The strange quiet carries sound the way still water does, and my hearing does the rest. Voices reach me from somewhere deep to the west, so clear they might be standing ten feet away instead of half a forest off.

Cassian, clipped and controlled, exactly as he sounded through the strategy room door. "It's spreading faster than the outer sensors are reporting. West ridge, then the old seal line. We split. Cover ground before it reaches the student zones."

Evren, and he sounds delighted. "Finally. I was resigning myself to another survival walk. You two take the high ground. I'll go down into the ravine."

"The academy thinks tonight is under control." Lucien, quieter. "They're only watching the outer perimeter. Whatever is waking is underneath those sensors. The seals were never built to be tested from below."

"Then we stop waiting for permission," Cassian says. "Move."

Their voices separate and fade. They're treating this forest like a problem to be solved rather than a trial to be survived, already well ahead of the instructors.

They're still wrong about one thing, and I don't know how I know it.

Nothing out here is under anyone's control.

The first scream comes from the north. High, short, stripped of everything but terror. Then a second. Then several at once, overlapping, moving fast through the trees.

I go still.

Students start crashing through the undergrowth with no attempt at stealth left in them. Beams of light swing wild. Someone shouts a name over and over. Someone screams for a flare. A girl sprints past close enough that I feel the air move, her eyes wide and empty of anything but running.

"What is it?"

She doesn't slow. "I don't know. Just go. Don't look back."

More come behind her. Some are half shifted, eyes catching what little light there is. One boy has a cut across his shoulder that has opened far too deep for a construct. Another hauls a teammate who can't carry his own weight, both of them breathing in short, ragged bursts.

"Did you see it?" the hurt one keeps asking. "Did anybody see it?"

"Keep moving. Just keep moving."

Nobody stops. Nobody seems to know what they're running from.

I put my back against a thick trunk and let the worst of it pass. My wolf is fully awake now, pushing hard at every wall I've built around it, and every instinct I have says what the running students already worked out.

Something is hunting out here.

Once the rush thins I make myself move again, low and quiet, using the trees the way I used to use the shadows in the Virek house. The claw marks come more often now, some fresh enough that dirt still crumbles off the edges under my fingers. Whatever cut them is heavy, and it's working its way toward the paths the students were told to stay on.

A branch snaps behind me.

I spin, half crouched, heart hammering. Nothing. Only dark, and the same weight of quiet.

I start walking again, faster. The silver markers are gone. I've drifted further than I meant to, working around the panicked groups, and the trees out here are older and thicker, roots rising out of the ground like the spines of buried animals. The air has changed too. Metallic. Cold. Like stone that has been wet for centuries and has only just been opened to the sky.

The ground shudders.

Small, the first time. Easy enough to blame on nerves. Then again, harder. Dirt slides. Leaves scatter across the forest floor. From somewhere far below comes a low grinding sound, rock being forced apart after a very long time holding still.

I turn.

Behind me the ground splits with a sound like wet cloth tearing. Roots snap. Stone cracks open. A wave of cold stale air rolls up out of the dark and breaks over me, carrying dust and old blood and something underneath both of those that I have no word for.

The roar hits the trees hard enough to bring down a rain of needles and dead leaves. Birds that have been silent all night blow out of the canopy in every direction at once.

I stagger back and nearly lose my footing on ground that won't hold still.

Something is coming up out of the broken earth. Shoulders first, broad and plated in what looks like blackened bone. Then the head, long and angular, the jaw opening wider than a jaw should be able to. Claws the length of my forearm sink into the soil and drag the rest of it free, every movement slow, deliberate, entirely unhurried. The way a thing moves when it knows nothing here can stop it.

The rest of the forest goes away.

Then its eyes open, and they find me.