Nobody in the observation room was talking about the rankings anymore.
Every eye was on the forest projection. The Commandant had come back a few minutes earlier, and he stood beside Major Helena Stroud with his hands behind his back.
In the clearing, Owen Ferrers stood in front of the creature with his sword raised and burning.
Stroud knew him from the records, and from the grassland hours ago. Grand Duke Edmund’s younger son. Gareth Ferrers’s brother. Eighteen years old, and standing between that thing and three other candidates.
"Why is he still standing there?" someone said. "He should be running."
"He won’t outrun it," Stroud said. "Not through that forest."
The creature lunged. Ferrers was out of its way and cutting before its arm hit the tree, and for a moment, the room seemed to breathe again.
Then its claws tore open his arm.
Someone drew a sharp breath. A moment later, it threw him into a tree, and he didn’t get up.
Stroud’s hands tightened on the back of the chair in front of her.
"Ward," Pike said, as the boy with the shield threw himself in the way. Then, as the spear went in and the second girl came in low behind it, "Loxley. Harcourt."
"They’re protecting each other," the Commandant said quietly.
After that, nobody said much at all. They watched Ferrers get back up. They watched his bare forearm stop a blow that should have broken it, and his blade begin cracking bone that it had only stuck in before.
"Fire," an instructor muttered. "And whatever he did to that sword. And his arm. How many—"
The creature threw itself at Ferrers with both arms, and its arms went straight through him.
The room went completely silent.
Stroud barely noticed the others staring. What she noticed was that Ferrers didn’t stop to gape at what he had done. The moment he came back together, he was already cutting.
The creature ran.
Ferrers went after it, and made it barely to the trees before he had to stop and brace himself against a trunk, his arm hanging open. Stroud glanced at the countdown. Eleven minutes.
Then his sword vanished, and something else appeared in his hands.
It was long and narrow and metal, with a slim barrel and a fitted glass along the top. It was nothing like any weapon in the room.
"What," Pike said slowly, "is that?"
Nobody answered him.
The Commandant took one step closer to the projection, and said nothing at all.
* * *
Owen squeezed the trigger.
The rifle bucked into his shoulder, and the report cracked out across the woodland like the sky splitting open.
Behind him, Elias flinched so hard that his hand flew up toward his ear. Marianne yelped and clapped both hands over hers. Eveline jerked back a step as though something had struck her.
All around them, birds burst out of the trees. They went up through the canopy in a wild, beating mass, shrieking. The sound of the shot slammed off the rocks of the slope and rolled back, and back again, fainter each time, until finally it died away somewhere in the forest.
For a moment, Owen could hear almost nothing but the ringing in his ears.
Through the scope, he saw the bullet hit.
It went into the broken patch on the creature’s chest, through the gap in the bone, and the fire in it went with it. He saw the impact jolt through its whole body.
The creature jerked violently.
Its slashed leg gave way. It went down onto the rocks, its long arms flailing, and loose stones slid out from under it as it rolled awkwardly onto its side.
Then it stopped moving.
Owen kept the rifle up.
He watched it through the scope, waiting. If it twitched, if it so much as lifted a hand, he would fire again.
His left arm was shaking under the weight of the barrel. His ribs were burning, worse with every breath he took to steady himself, and he could feel fresh blood running down from the torn wound above his elbow and soaking into what was left of his sleeve.
He couldn’t hold this for long.
He held it anyway.
Footsteps came up beside him, uneven. Elias, still limping.
"Is it dead?" he asked. He was looking up at the slope.
Owen lowered the rifle a little. "I don’t know."
"You don’t know?"
"We need to make sure."
Elias looked at him, then at the slope. "Then I’m coming with you."
Marianne fell in a few steps behind them with her spear ready. Eveline stayed back at the edge of the clearing with the girl and the injured boy. There was no way he could have made it up that slope.
The creature wasn’t far. But the walk to it was miserable.
Every uneven step jarred straight through Owen’s ribs. His left arm hung stiff and heavy at his side whenever he wasn’t holding up the rifle, and the loose rock shifted under his boots no matter where he put them.
"Do you want a hand?" Elias asked.
"I can walk."
A stone rolled under his foot. He lurched.
Elias caught his good arm and steadied him, and then let go again as though nothing had happened.
Owen didn’t say anything. Neither did Elias.
Behind them, Marianne kept turning, watching the treeline on either side.
As they came closer, Owen began to see just how much damage they had done.
The creature lay sprawled across the rocks. Its long arms had fallen at awkward angles on either side of it, its twisted fingers half curled into the dirt, and its slashed leg was bent beneath its body. Patches of its skin had been blackened by his fire. Deep sword wounds crossed its torso, and the bone around its chest was broken apart, jagged fragments of it sticking out through the torn flesh.
High on its chest, where the bullet had gone in, there was a dark, wet hole surrounded by cracked bone.
Blood had pooled beneath it, running down between the stones.
The smell of burned flesh and blood hung thick in the air.
Owen stopped a few paces away.
Something moved.
He thought, at first, that it was just the body settling on the uneven ground.
Then he saw its chest rise.
It was still breathing.
Owen brought the rifle up again. Beside him, Elias went still. Marianne’s hands tightened on her spear.
But the creature didn’t try to get up.
Its breathing was weak and ragged, and each breath came out with a faint, wet rattle.
And there was something else.
Its eyes were open. They were looking at him.
There were tears running out of them.
Owen stared.
Through the whole fight, it had come at them without the slightest hesitation. There had been nothing in it at all, nothing he could reason with. Now it lay there on the rocks, not moving, looking up at him with an expression unlike anything he had seen on it.
It was just the injury, he told himself. Something the body was doing on its own as it died.
Then its lips moved.
Owen leaned in a little, despite himself, trying to hear.
It was trying to speak. He could see it straining, its ruined jaw working, its chest shuddering with the effort.
And then it managed two words. Weak, and cracked, and barely louder than a breath.
"Thank... you."
Its breathing caught.
For a moment, its eyes stayed fixed on Owen’s.
Then everything in it went still.
Owen didn’t move.
He stood there, staring down at it.
This thing had killed without reason. It had killed the girl’s friend, Tobin, and left him lying somewhere back in the forest. It had nearly killed him, and it had come close to killing all of them.
And the last thing it had done was thank him.
In a voice that had sounded completely, unmistakably human.
He thought of the old book in the Ferrers library, and the scholars who believed creatures like this had once been people. People who had tried to force their Awakening and been twisted into something else.
He had never thought much about that before. It had only ever been a line in a book.
Now he wasn’t so sure.
But it still made no sense. Why would something that had spent the whole fight trying to kill him thank him for killing it?
Beside him, Elias hadn’t said a word. Neither had Marianne. The wind moved over the rocks and stirred the grass between the stones, and somewhere down the slope, the birds were beginning to settle back into the trees.
The creature’s eyes were still open. They were still looking at him.
What the hell had he just seen?