Once they came out into the ruined town, Sadie announced, “All right, I have a brilliant plan to slow Danielle down! Danielle, you have to help me carry these drying racks, so all the tomatoes see the sunlight while we hike out to the fish trap.”

  Everyone laughed, but Sadie unfolded the two layers of tomatoes and Danielle realized it wasn’t just the awkwardness or the weight; the two racks were still connected by the twine Sadie didn’t want to cut. “OK, so this isn’t just about weighing me down, it’s about having to match your pace because I’m tethered,” Danielle said.

  “It’ll add almost three hours to how much sun they get today, though,” Sadie said seriously.

  “Two and a half, but all right. It’s probably worth it,” Danielle said, and took hold of one rack. “Over our heads, do you think?”

  “Oh, sure, if you think it won’t just make our arms super tired,” Sadie said.

  “It’ll make our arms stronger, probably,” Danielle said, “but it’ll also keep our shadows off the tomatoes and stuff.”

  “You just love being in pain, don’t you,” Heather joked.

  Danielle chuckled. “I’ll get that muscle recovery Trait eventually!” she joked back.

  Once they got out of town, Cassy and Heather took turns activating their Skills for finding edible plants. Heather’s Skill pointed out another patch of blueberries along the road to the old bridge; Cassy found a new patch of wild onions, and they paused to “thin the patch” as Heather put it, gathering easily three times as many onions as Cassy had found near the camp. As Cassy had said, they each released a “burst” of one mana when pulled. The string of one-point mana burst messages was honestly kind of annoying. It also seemed strange that pulling a plant whole killed it so fast. Examining one up close with Detect Mana Source, Danielle thought they had their source in their roots, and something was getting left behind when they were pulled.

  It left everyone with enough questions to dominate their conversation the rest of the way to the bridge, though they didn’t have anything but speculations to go on, in a spectrum from boringly mundane to unrealistically wild. Once they got to the bridge and turned north again, though, the conversation turned to their plans for the afternoon.

  “We know we want to cook when we get home tonight, so we can’t stay out super late,” Akari reminded everyone. “We should head back at five, so we’ll still have some daylight to start the fire and get things going, especially since we want to do something a little more complicated.”

  “Are we still going to pick more tomatoes?” Cassy asked hopefully. “We’ll need to leave earlier to have time for that, right?”

  “Let’s skip the tomatoes today, and concentrate on fishing,” Danielle said. “Get as many fish as possible in the coldbox – our box, but you’ll be in the shares with the fish, Cassy – and between that and the snare-meat, we’ll have meat settled for tomorrow and we can focus on tomatoes, mint, materials, and finding new stuff.”

  “Either way, our dinner will be so late,” Heather moaned. “I know we want to use the trap we already made, and I know it gets us well away from the Wolf Pack crazies, but it just takes so long to get out here!”

  “If we’re lucky, and we get a fish early, we can cook it on the fire right away and have a big lunch instead of a big dinner,” Danielle suggested. “That way we won’t be starving so bad when we get back tonight.”

  “That’s a good idea – a late dinner isn’t so bad after a late lunch,” Akari said. “If we’re going to dry some fish, though, we probably need to start it right away.”

  “Oh. Maybe we want to eat the last fish we catch, then? Have an early dinner tonight, but then cook anyway for tomorrow?” Danielle proposed.

  “Did we pack anything for lunch today?” Heather asked.

  “Water and tomatoes,” Akari said.

  “Would you all hate me if I pointed out I was starting to get tired of tomatoes?” Heather asked with a sigh.

  “Only if you point it out over and over,” Danielle joked. “Seriously, I know having tomatoes for every meal isn’t great, but what we’ve got is what we’ve got. I think we can all agree that we’d rather get bored of tomatoes this month than get bored of our winter rations this month.”

  “That’s true,” Heather agreed. “We’ve been really lucky, finding wild food so soon like that. I shouldn’t complain.”

  They hiked in silence for a few minutes, before Sadie said, “When we were in the field, right after the Dome, a lot of people were saying how they were going to be back inside by winter for sure. I think I always knew they weren’t being very realistic, but after what the Rangers told us last night – about not leveling more than once a month, or you might get locked out by mutations – I dunno. Someone should have told us that at the field, don’t you think? Or before we even got there. Or it should be in the books at the very least! People are trying to get back Inside by doing something they don’t even know will get them permanently kicked out. It’s not right, and they definitely need to know that skipping winter isn’t an option. Even if they hunted all the things and leveled up as efficiently as is possibly safe, they can’t possibly get back inside before April. How are they going to plan ahead if they don’t know that’s, you know, required?”

  “Maybe it is in the books,” Akari said. “It’s not like we’ve read any of them cover-to-cover. Maybe they figure, anybody they’d want back will have plenty of time to read and find out? I mean, Danielle leveled mostly because she had to defend Heather from the nutjob; and Lauren, from the other party, she leveled killing the wildcat, but it’s not like she did it alone – that arrow they put in its side before we even got there had to be slowing it down. I feel like, normally more people would be attacking something like that? The rest of us, though, we’re not in danger of leveling any time soon – at least, not that soon. We’ve got a couple of weeks to read and see what’s up.”

  “If it’s a way of filtering out murderers from people who can return, that’s pretty cold,” Danielle said. “Two people had to die for me to level up this fast, and I think it’d take at least three more people to get to level 3 – so that guy who may already be a mutant has to have killed five people before it started showing. Seems like a lot of people to sacrifice for an excuse to full-exile someone that maybe wouldn’t even kill five people in the first place if he knew it would get him fully exiled.”

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  “It might just be another ‘if you were high school graduates you’d already know this’ thing,” Cassy said glumly. “Even Insiders need to know more about leveling than we knew. I bet they teach them stuff like how much mana it is to level up and how dangerous it is to go too fast and how you can make it safer by alternating levels between your base and your Class. It’s probably part of graduation-year health education or something.”

  “Because we’re not supposed to even be able to do anything to increase our level before then,” Heather said. “Normal Sent come out and get Advanced about the same time they’d normally get Advanced even if they stayed Inside, you know? Twelfth grade phys-ed is when they’d teach it to normal kids that get to stay Inside, too.”

  “Didn’t your parents tell you anything about it?” Danielle asked Cassy.

  “They told me not to push for fast levels because going too fast could be more dangerous than spending more time Outside, and that I should keep my Class up with my base level as much as possible,” Cassy said. “That was pretty much it, though; they told me I’d be able to figure out leveling numbers as I went along, but only if I survived the first month or two to begin with, so we were going to focus on early-days survival. They figured memorizing the sling pattern so I could make my own, helping me make good Necessities Store picks, and stuff like that, was all more important than telling me a bunch of stuff I’d be finding out on my own regardless.”

  “That thing about keeping your Class level even with your base would mean you were alternating anyway,” Danielle said. “They probably figured if you already knew to alternate and not push it, that would keep you just as safe as telling you not to level twice in a month, without having to get into all the explanations of why.”

  “Yeah. You’ve actually been involved in four big mana bursts, basically, right?” Cassy said. “I’m pretty sure that’s not normal.”

  “That’s why they should tell us all, though!” Akari burst out. “Danielle got into a potentially dangerous situation by helping people! I could easily have done the same thing, in slightly different circumstances – because I would defend people too, you know? I was defending people, with the wildcat.”

  “Maybe the actual plan is for the Rangers to tell the people who need to know?” Cassy said. “They have a death count they seem pretty sure of. They might be scrying on us or something, keeping an eye on who’s pushing things.”

  “Ranger Flo was talking like they didn’t know for sure if there was really a level 3 Wolf Pack guy or not, though,” Danielle said, “so if they are, there must be some significant limits. I mean, limits to the scrying; the limits to how they’re allowed to interact with us Sent are a whole other thing. The Rangers only seem to talk to us because we’re involved in emergency stuff.”

  “That’s true,” said Heather. “They pretty much said straight out that they could only buy tokens from Danielle because they were doing emergency debriefs.”

  “When are you going to start making those for us?” Akari asked, half-joking.

  “As soon as you can afford the mana I need to make it, and have the level to use it,” Danielle replied.

  When they got to the fish trap, Danielle and Sadie set down the drying tomatoes on the rocks with considerable relief. Then Akari took off her boots, pulled out a piece of the jerky they’d set aside as bait, and waded out to check the trap for damage and put the bait in it. Sadie watched from shore with her bow out, while Danielle, Heather, and Cassy went to the tree line with their hatchets to get some firewood.

  “There’s a fish!” Akari shouted.

  “What?” The firewood crew turned back towards the river at Sadie’s exclamation.

  “There’s already a fish in here!” Akari said excitedly, stabbing into the trap with her knife. “How did you guys do this, Sadie?”

  “We trapped it against the sticks with a frying pan and got it half out of the water where it couldn’t move much,” Sadie called out to her.

  “Oh no you don’t!” Akari shouted, suddenly drawing her sword and stabbing it into the river. “The fish gate is closed!” Leaving her sword in the water, she waded urgently back toward shore. “I need a frying pan!”

  “What was that about?” Heather called over to her.

  “It almost figured out where the exit was while I was chasing it with the knife, so I blocked it with my sword,” Akari said. “It’s a little guy, but I aim to save the jerky-bait for later and make this one fish into a lot more fish by the end of the day!”

  Sadie helped her get up the bank quickly, and Akari put away the jerky and went back out with a frying pan and a determined expression. It took her several minutes of chasing the fish around the trap with the pan, but eventually she gave a loud “Ha!” and took the pan to the bank of the island. She spent a few minutes there, working on the fish in the pan with her knife, before she returned to the trap and scraped something from it back into the trap. Then she recovered her sword and waded back to shore with the pan. “I left the head and tail in the trap for other fish to nibble on,” she told everyone. “That’s the bait taken care of!”

  “I guess we better light a fire under this making a fire stuff,” Danielle joked.

  “Boo, that was lame,” Heather said.

  “Heh, fine, I get it, less punning more chopping,” Danielle said. “Let’s chop down this one with the vines all over it, and take the vines too.”

  “It’s definitely not poison ivy or anything, right?” Cassy asked, walking over to join her.

  “I didn’t know that was a thing,” Danielle said uncertainly. “How would I tell?”

  “The leaves go in clusters of three, and – oh. Never mind, I’m pretty sure this is clematis, my parents taught me to find this stuff and make baskets out of it. We used to make a new basket every time we went camping, and float it down the river when we went back Inside.” Cassy looked up towards the top of the tree. “The thinner vines at the top are great, because you can use them for cordage practically as-is, and you need some of that for baskets.”

  “OK, I’ll start chopping then,” Danielle said.

  She was just winding up to swing her hatchet when Heather asked, “It’s definitely not a vine monster again, right?”

  Danielle suppressed a spike of irritation and activated Sense Mana Source. “It’s definitely not the same kind, anyway,” she reported a moment later. “And its source isn’t nearly as bright, so it can’t be as strong. I think it’s probably just a regular plant.”

  “OK, good.” Heather said. “N-not that we wouldn’t still want to chop it down if it was a monster, just, if it seemed dangerous, we’d want everyone else to be prepared.”

  “Yeah, I’m glad you brought it up,” Danielle said, even though she was still trying to suppress her impatience. “I mean, no big deal this time, but I should be remembering to check this stuff, right? So, thanks.”

  Heather nodded, and Danielle glanced around at everyone to make sure there were no other objections. Sadie was standing guard over the tomatoes now, while Akari seemed to be looking for something in the river. Cassy and Heather were standing by watching her. She drew her arms back, paused once more to be sure there weren’t any final objection, then swung at the base of the trunk. It was a relatively young tree, the main trunk only perhaps 4 inches in diameter, and struggling to reach the canopy formed by the larger trees around it. The vines made the base seem thicker, but Danielle went around and chopped each of them first, before picking one direction and chopping away at the tree itself. It still took half an hour to get through with her little hatchet (and, she admitted to herself, her little strength) but eventually the tree came down.

  Bizarrely, the vines produced little “bursts” of one mana each when chopped, but the tree’s small mana burst took nearly ten minutes after the trunk actually parted. It seemed to be a difference between plants that kept their source in their roots, and trees with their source in their bark.

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