Page 81 of Raven’s Fight

I blink to her. Pulse: there, strong, the rhythm of being unconscious and not the other thing. Breathing. Nothing opened that shouldn't be. Her pupils answer when I check them against the light.

She's going to have a terrible headache and a bruise the size of my hand. The medical staff will find her.

I blink away.

I don't engage. It isn't my fight. The Purge makes ordinary violence right alongside the particular violence it was built for this year, and stepping into the ordinary kind costs me ground and minutes I need for the other.

But I checked the pulse.

I'm not going to blink past somebody dying without checking.

The Purge is supposed to make them stronger. I've heard that from instructors and from the papers the institution keeps and from older students who talk about it as a rite of passage rather than a culling with rules around it. Stronger. Harder. More capable.

I think about the girl at the kitchen block wall, and I think: mostly it makes them harder. And I think about my first year running with the pack, about what made me fast and accurate and good at reading ground in a hurry, and I think: I wonder whether harder and stronger are the same thing.

I don't think they are.

I think you can go harder and weaker at once. Harder on the outside and more brittle underneath, the way overtired animals go, the way a person goes who has been through too many things that wanted the response swallowed rather than felt. I've seen that kind in pack work. I've seen what it makes of someone over years.

I don't think that's what Raven is building at Blackhaven.

I don't think the Purge, in her hands, is going to make what it usually makes.

This isn't the place to take that thought further. I blink back to my position on the eastern wall. I have work.

✦ ✦ ✦

The third fire drake isn't at the pinch.

I clock it at eighty-seven minutes. I've been running both of them every three or four minutes — positions confirmed, watching for movement, counting toward the window when Raven comes back through the eastern approach. First: holding in the shadow line, east end. Second: holding at the drainage blind spot, south. Stable.

The third isn't in either place, which I expected. He was never part of the pinch. The transfer was the one watching from the tower and Orpheus put him down at minute twelve, and the third has been somewhere else this entire morning doing something nobody has been able to name.

He should still be on these grounds, doing whatever he was told to do if the day went sideways.

I run the grid.

Twenty blinks, forty seconds, the whole grounds section by section in the overlapping sweep my pack uses for a search. I'm following heat — that burnt-metal trace fire drakes leave behind them, faint but there, the same thing Finlay named from the border samples and that I've spent six weeks learning to pick out from everything else that makes warmth in a stone building on a cold morning.

First: eastern wall shadow line. There.

Second: south building drainage. There.

Third—

South. And moving.

I follow it. Blink, catch it, blink, catch it. The trace is fresher than the others, laid down in the last four minutes instead of the last twenty, which tells me he's been moving recently and moving quickly. He isn't wandering. He's going somewhere, with the certainty of a man who was told exactly where.

I find him at eighty-nine minutes, near the south dormitory.

I put it together very fast. The third was never meant to fight. Whatever he's been doing all morning, this is what it was for.

The fallback, when you can't isolate the target, is the lever. The sibling who isn't the target but who is close enough to her that threatening them buys you the reaction you want. A fire drake in the south dormitory with one of her sisters cornered means the red flare goes up. The red flare pulls Raven off her ground, moving fast, reacting instead of working from the advantage she's spent the whole morning building.

And the way back from the south dormitory runs through the pinch.

It's a good plan. It's actually a very good plan. It allows for the corridor failing. It uses the one thing about Raven that was never tactical — what she becomes when somebody she loves is in danger.