“Maurice sometimes doubts they’d notice if the Fleet of the Chosen steamed up the river and began shelling them,” John said lightly.
“Dad’s a pessimist. C’mon, let’s get back to the dorm, shower, and grab a hamburger. Maybe Doreen will take pity on me.”
* * *
“Teamwork, teamwork, you morons!” Gerta Hosten gasped, hearing the others stumble. “Johan, your turn on point.”
The jungle trail was narrow and slick with mud. The improvised stretcher of poles and vines was awkward, would have been awkward even without the mumbling, tossing form of the boy strapped to it. His leg was splinted with branches; the lianas that bound it to the wood were half-buried in swollen-purple flesh.
Gerta dug her heels in and waited until the stretcher came level, then sheathed her knife and took the left front pole. The man she was relieving worked his fingers for a moment, drew his bowie and plunged forward to slash a way for his comrades. She took the left front pole, Heinrich carried both rear poles, and Elke Tirnwitz was on the right front. Johan Kloster moved farther ahead, chopping his way through the vines. Etkar Summeldorf was getting the free ride; he’d broken a leg spearing a crocodile that tried to snack on them while they forded a river yesterday.
They’d eaten a fair bit of the croc. You got nothing supplied in the team-endurance event that concluded the Test of Life. Well, almost nothing: a pair of shorts, a pair of sandals, a cloth halter if you were a girl, and a bowie knife. Then they dropped you and four teammates down a sliderope from a dirigible into the Kopenrung Mountains along the north side of the Land, and you made the best time you could to the pickup station. Nobody told you exactly where that was, either. The Chosen of the Land didn’t need to have their hands held. If you couldn’t make it, the Chosen didn’t need you—and you had better all make it. The Chosen didn’t need selfish grandstanders, either.
“Leave me,” Etkar mumbled. “Leave me. Go.”
“We can’t leave you, you stupid git,” Elke said in a voice hoarse with worry and fatigue—they were an item, and besides, Etkar had probably saved their lives at the river. “This is a team event. We’d all drop a hundred points if we left you behind.”
They’d all saved each other’s lives.
It was hot: thirty-eight degrees, at least, and steambath humid. Bad even by the Land’s standards. The Kopenrungs were in the far north, nearest to the equator. That was one reason they’d never been intensively developed, that and the constant steep slopes and the lateritic soils. And the leeches, the mosquitoes, the wild boar and wild buffalo and leopards and constant thunderstorms and tornadoes.
Sweat trickled down her skin, adding to the greasy film already there and stinging in the insect bites and budding jungle sores. The rough wood pulled at her arm and abraded the calluses on her palm. Muscles in her lower back complained as she leaned back against the weight of the stretcher and the slope. Branches and leaves swatted at her face.
“Heinrich, min brueder,” Gerta said, pacing the words to the muscular effort. “Tell me again how wonderful it is to be Chosen.”
Elke made a sharp hissing sound with her teeth. The Fourth Bureau was unlikely to be listening, but you never knew. Heinrich grunted a chuckle.
“Shays,” Johan swore. “Shit.” There was wonder in his tone.
“What is it?” Gerta asked. She couldn’t see more than a few paces through the undergrowth; this section of hillside had burned off a while ago, and the second growth was rank.
“We made it.”
“What?” in three strong young voices.
“We made it! That was the clearing we saw back on the crest!”
None of them spoke; they didn’t slow down, either. Gerta managed a sweat-blurred glimpse at the mist-shrouded, jungle-covered mountains ahead. They looked precisely like the mist-shrouded, jungle-clad mountains she’d been staring at for the entire past week.
When they broke out of the cover onto the little bench-plateau they broke into a trot by sheer reflex. There were pavilions ahead, and a crowd of people—officers, officials, Protégé servants. A doctor ran forward at the sight of the stretcher.