The ones Brittany was worried about were sitting behind the water station on an overturned pallet, icing three different shoulders, and all three of them came off that pallet so fast when they saw who was walking over that one of them lost his ice pack into the gravel.
"Sit down," Kaiden said, and they sat down so hard the pallet complained.
He crouched in front of the middle one, a broad kid with a fresh purple bloom coming up under his collarbone, and turned the boy's arm at the elbow to see how far it would go before the wince came. It came early.
"You'll be in pain for two days and fine on the third." He let go. "Who put you down?"
"Ma'am did." The kid's eyes flicked to Brittany with open admiration. "Twice."
"Then say thank you to ma'am, because the thing that would have done this to you in a dungeon doesn't stop at the shoulder."
"Thank you, ma'am!" all three of them said, in unison, at a volume nobody had asked for.
