Free Legacy of the Claw by C. R. Grey

final classes of the day, and together they cut across the common lawn and past the classroom buildings to the Scavage field.
    â€œIf I don’t try out for the Scavage team,” Hal reasoned for about the fourth time that day, “Taylor will just make fun of me for the rest of my life.” Hal squinted as he took off his glasses to clean them. “But then again, if I do go, he’ll still make fun of me, because I know I’ll be terrible.”
    Hal had spent the last hour in Biology and the Bond. But since Bailey didn’t have an Animas, he’d been placed in a low-level History course taught by a Professor Nillow. Bailey had borrowed a spare copy of the Biology and the Bond textbook from the library, however, and had spent most of Nillow’s lecture on the birth of Parliament flipping carefully through its pages, and admiring the detailed diagrams of both human and animal energy systems.
    â€œDo you really think it’ll be that bad?” Bailey asked, glad to be out in the fresh air. “You never know, you might be”—he looked Hal up and down: his thick glasses, without which he couldn’t see a brick wall in broad daylight; his skinny arms and legs—“um  …  good.”
    â€œHa-ha,” Hal said, pulling a face. “I’m just glad you’re coming with me. You’re going to try out too, right?”
    â€œWhat?” Bailey had a sudden vision of Taylor running him down and pelting him with Flicks as sharp as arrows. “Are you insane?”
    â€œCome on, I bet you’d actually be good at it!” Hal said. “What about that throw you made yesterday? You’d be wonderful! I mean”—he lowered his voice—“who cares if you don’t have an Animas if you’re on the Scavage team?”
    â€œNo, Hal,” Bailey said firmly. “I don’t need to draw any more attention to myself.” He was too small to make the team, he was sure, and he knew that Scavage involved plenty of human–kin communication. Even
trying
to play might make his Absence obvious to the older students.
    Hal stopped walking. They’d reached the top of a sloping hill. Behind them, the marble classroom buildings loomed, but in front of them was a cheery stadium with wooden stands built around a sprawl of forested terrain. Hal turned to Bailey.
    â€œListen,” he said, his eyes wide behind his glasses, “maybe—just hear me out—maybe your Animas didn’t exist in the Lowlands. But maybe it’s here somewhere, and if you give yourself the chance, out on the Scavage field, it will
find
you. Who cares about the other students? You came here to push yourself, right? This is as good a chance as any.”
    Bailey still wasn’t sure, but Hal’s confidence moved him. Maybe he was right; Bailey, like Hal, was afraid of looking like an idiot out on the field, but he
had
come here to push himself.
    â€œOkay,” he said slowly. “But we get beaten to a pulp, it’s on you.”
    Hal sighed deeply. “Thank you,” he said. “I owe you one.”
    The Scavage field wasn’t just a field. The playing ground was a solid quarter-mile of Fairmount land that contained everything from open grassy space to dense woods covered in undergrowth. The farthest edge of the playing field bordered a set of low rocky cliffs, nearly hidden by the trees. The stadium seating that extended around three sides of the field was high enough so most spectators could watch all the action. People seated in the lower rungs could hear a play-by-play called out during each game by three different announcers who perched in dangerously tall nest-like lookout points arranged on three sides of the field.
    Bailey began to feel nervous as soon as he saw the crowd of students gathered by the gates to try out—and, even worse, people who had come to cheer on their friends and get a look at the new hopefuls.