[Pinnacle Academy, Classroom 1-A]
[Thursday, 9:00 AM]
Kolek put a map on the wall and let us look at it for a full minute before he said anything.
It wasn't a shape I recognised, and that bothered me more than anything he said afterwards.
A long crooked landmass with a spine of mountains running through the middle of it and a bite taken out of the north coast where a river came out.
"Trial Site Six," he said.
"Verrek. Three hundred and forty square kilometres. The academy owns it, and all one thousand and forty-four of you are going onto it."
Somebody at the front asked where it was.
"Nowhere," Kolek said.
"It came up out of the sea during the Second Massive Dungeon Outbreak, same as a dozen others. It isn't on a shipping chart. It isn't on a rescue register. There is no coastguard, there is no nearest hospital, and there is no such thing as a passing boat."
The room got very quiet.
