I am on the ground before I know I am moving. Dean has me. The shot did not hit anything I can see and Dean is over me with the rifle in his other hand, and for one second neither of us knows where the round landed.
His free hand goes to my ribs. Then my hip. Then my thigh. Fast. Professional. He is checking me for entry wounds the way a man checks the body of a person who has just been near a round he did not see land. He finds nothing.
"Jen."
"I'm not hit."
He keeps his hand on me anyway for one more pass — ribs, hip, thigh — and only when he has confirmed it does he settle his palm and look up.
His eyes flick once to the bark of a fir six feet to his left where a small white dart is lodged.
"Trank," he says. Quiet, against my temple. "They're not shooting to kill, Jen. They're shooting to take."
My stomach drops. Of course they are. The folder. The chart. The eight-year project. They do not want me dead.
"They didn't shoot you."
"They shot near me. Warning. The next one will be at me. They want me down, not dead. They want all of us down so they can retrieve us all."
Across the gap, Thaw's voice cracks the air.
Then Daron's voice through the trees from above, also low, also carrying:Two on the south. Three on the east. I have eyes.
Then a sound from the ridge that is not Daron.
It is a growl.
Low. Long.
Fen.
The bond goes live. The hollow becomes full.Fen-is-now-on-this-mountain-and-paying-attention-to-the-people-who-want-to-take-his-matefull, and what is in the bond is his intent. He is going. He has eyes on his targets from the ridge. He is moving.
Fast.
He does not roar. He does not announce. He flows down off the ridge like Harek flowed off the porch the first morning of the run — smooth, silent, predatory — and he is in the trees with the south shooter before the south shooter has registered him as a person.
The sound the south shooter makes is short.
"Oh," Dean says, against my temple. Quiet.
There is a wet crack. A body falling. Then the spit of a second trank round, but this one is going up, not toward us — somebody is shooting at Fen and missing because Fen is no longer where he was when the trigger pulled — and then a second wet crack, and then a third.
The east side of the campground goes silent.
The forming thread to Daron is full. He is watching it happen too. He is on the ridge watching Fen demolish a Syndicate retrieval team.
A scream.
Human. Short. Cut off.
Then Daron's voice through Dean's radio — close enough now that I can hear it through Dean's shoulder — sharp in a way I have not heard him:
Fen. That one is down. Leave it. Leave it. Fen.
A pause. The forming thread carries Daron's adrenaline spike. Thengood. Good, Fen. Back off. Back off.
"Dean."
