He turned back to the forest, grunting his acquiesce. She was in.

They bolted, adrenaline lending wings to their feet and colour to their vision. The greens and browns and splashes of flower petals about them became so vivid that, were it not for the mild, dry air tugging raggedly through their lungs, Sabriel could have sworn they were back in the jungle. Now that she ran alongside Mace, a step behind and to his left, it seemed as though the trees parted for them. Twigs seemed to retreat into the earth, softening her footfalls. Whenever she looked ahead there was no clear path, yet they pounded along a trail of soil. She would never have admitted it aloud, but there was a magic here which rivalled even the Amazon.

There was little opportunity to wonder. Mace’s abrupt words, scattered between breaths and hurled around tree boughs over his shoulder, made the skin around the corners of Sabriel’s lips tighten. One of her primary responsibilities within the Alliance was the training of fresh recruits at Base Four. Probationers, or pansies as the unconventional team at Base Four preferred to call them, had to complete a minimum of a year’s training across at least four biomes before they could progress to specialised training. Sabriel’s team ran the rainforest base. As Mace spoke she imagined, briefly, a professional raid by blue-uniformed guards, tramping through the jungle with machetes and bayonet rifles. The pansies wouldn’t stand a chance.

Grimly, she put her head down and pumped her legs a little harder.

His question wasn’t unexpected, but it did prompt a flash of a grimace. There was a query which required a whole sit-down conversation.

“Call me a traditionalist,” she shot back, pausing briefly to leap over a fallen tree, “but I follow my captain’s orders.”

It was an empty, unsatisfactory answer: Mace had lost the title of captain when he’d abandoned both the castle and the Alliance. Sabriel was silent for a moment, dividing her attention between the route and a more serious answer to the question. The situation was too delicate and complex to condense into a breathless half-sentence while sprinting through a forest.

“Change of rules.” She shared after a moment. Then, as an afterthought, two words which would help to make sense of the situation: “Intervention. Mallos.”