Chapter 72: Wrong Signal

Nobody moved for a long moment after the third horn faded. Elias was the first to speak, asking whether the signal could have been part of the exercise, and Corin and Maren both shook their heads. The trial instructions had mentioned only the extraction horn, a single long note, and none of them had been told about anything else.

Roxanne scrambled up onto a boulder above the shelf and looked out over the forest. Faint lights were moving through the distant trees, small and scattered, the kind carried by students on foot. "Everyone heard it," she said when she climbed back down. Elias looked toward the dark treeline. "Then we’re supposed to follow it," he said. Roxanne shook her head. "Maybe," she said. "Or we’re supposed to think that." The answer made her cautious instead of reckless, and she told them they would move, but they would watch the ground while they did.

They followed the lights until they reached a wide clearing where several other teams had already gathered. The Moonstone brothers stood near the center, and Liam spotted her before she was fully out of the trees. He crossed the grass in a few long strides. "There you are," he said. Roxanne raised an eyebrow. "Were you looking for me?" she asked, and he grinned without any shame at all. "Obviously."

Kai said nothing, but his eyes moved over her quickly, checking her arms and her face and the way she stood. She noticed, and something warm settled in her chest even though the moment was hardly the time for it. Lucien was already organizing the arriving groups into rough lines, and Roshan stood a little apart with his head tilted, studying the direction the horns had come from as though he could read the echo.

It took a few minutes for the students to notice what was missing. An instructor should have been stationed at the clearing, along with monitoring equipment and the usual academy signal beacon. There was nobody at all, only an empty supply station with its crates half open and its lantern burned down to a puddle of wax. There were no instructions posted and no markers to tell them what came next. Jace crouched beside the crates and turned a canteen over in his hands, frowning. "This isn’t normal," he said.

Serena stared into the trees with her arms folded tightly. "It isn’t," she said. The mood in the clearing changed as the words settled over everyone. This was no longer a fun school challenge, and every student there could feel it.

Some of them wanted to follow the signal at once, while others insisted on staying exactly where they were, and within a minute the argument had grown loud. Roxanne watched the groups pull apart and felt her stomach tighten. If they split up, someone would get lost, and she knew it the way she knew her own pulse. She stepped forward and said they should stay together until they understood what the horns meant.

A senior student with a scar across his eyebrow turned on her. "And why exactly should we listen to you?" he asked. Roxanne didn’t argue. She pointed toward the forest instead. "Because whoever sounded those horns wanted every team in this clearing," she said. "Until we know why, walking straight into their plan seems stupid." Even Lucien gave her a short, approving look across the grass.

Lucien didn’t speak for her, though, and that mattered. He only turned to the senior student and said, "She’s right." Kai added, "We stay together," in the flat, steady voice he used when a decision was already made. Liam raised a hand. "Preferably somewhere with food," he said, and Roxanne rolled her eyes at him.

While they argued, Roshan had wandered to the edge of the abandoned station and gone still. He crouched and brushed the loose dirt with two fingers, and Roxanne joined him when she saw his face. There were fresh footprints in the soil, dozens of them, overlapping. "Someone was here recently," he said quietly, so only she could hear. "There are too many tracks to be the instructors." Roxanne looked toward the dark trees, and the skin on her arms prickled as she wondered who had stood in this clearing and why they had left so many prints behind.

A shout rose from the forest before either of them could say more, thin and distant and frightened. A student from another team had gone missing, and the instructors still hadn’t appeared. The group debated whether to search, and voices crossed over one another until Roxanne cut through them and volunteered. Kai stepped forward immediately. "I’m coming," he said. She looked at him. "I didn’t ask you to," she said, and he met her eyes without flinching. "I know," he said. He wasn’t ordering her or asking permission, and he wasn’t trying to take the search out of her hands. He had simply decided where he would stand, and she found she didn’t mind. They set out with Elias, Roshan, and a few of the steadier students.

They found the missing boy at the bottom of a narrow ravine, half sitting against a wall of rock with his leg twisted awkwardly beneath him. It was a bad fall and nothing more, at least on the surface. Roxanne took a breath and began organizing the rescue. Kai anchored the rope around a thick pine and braced his weight against it, Elias climbed down the rock face with quick, sure movements, and Roshan called directions from the ledge above. For a few minutes the four of them moved together almost by instinct, passing the rope and shifting their weight without needing to speak. Between them they lifted the boy out and laid him on the grass.

Roxanne knelt beside him and checked his leg, then stopped. His injuries didn’t match the fall, and there was mud on the opposite wall of the ravine, smeared and skidded, as though he had been running full speed before he went over. She looked up at his face. "What were you running from?" she asked.

The boy’s eyes were huge and unfocused. "I heard someone calling my name," he whispered. Everyone around him went quiet.

Before anyone could question him further, the three horns sounded again, and this time they were much closer. The sound rolled through the trees and shook the leaves overhead. Then a fourth sound answered from somewhere behind them, and it wasn’t a horn. It was a wolf’s howl, long and rising, unlike any Roxanne had ever heard.

She turned toward the trees, and Kai moved beside her until his shoulder touched hers. The forest was completely still. Then something moved between the trunks, tall and dark, and it was coming toward them.