The song ended, and there was a pause as the people around the fire started to switch gears and decide what to do next. Danielle stood up, faced building six, took a deep breath the way Heather had taught them, and started speaking in a much louder voice.

  “Thank you all for being respectful while we were praying,” she addressed the people on the building. “Our prayer meeting is over now, but since you’re all here, I want to share some information I got from the Rangers a few nights ago when they were here to heal someone that got attacked by a wild animal.”

  Danielle saw people who had been moving away from the railings return, frowning down at her with renewed focus. New faces came to the railing from deeper in the fire corners, or from spots sitting against the wall of the building. She suppressed a flash of panic – this was no time to choke up, everyone needed to know, and when would she have a better opportunity than this to share the warning?

  “The first and most important thing is a warning about how to prepare for going back Inside someday,” Danielle began. “You may remember that at breakfast the first day, the Rangers told us all that the real requirement for getting back inside is to get the tier 10 Skill or Trait called Aura Control. A lot of people seem to be thinking that if they can just get to level 10 really fast, they can get the Skill and get back Inside before winter. What the Rangers told me after the mana burst from the wildcat is that leveling really fast is dangerous, and might make it so you can’t go back Inside at all.

  “They said after someone levels, they need to wait a month before they level again, even if they have the mana for it sooner. If we don’t, we can get a kind of mana-mutation that could spread through the mana and affect other people’s families. If that happens, it’s not safe to ever go back Inside, so it’s very important not to level more than once a month. Obviously this is something everyone needs to know, so feel free to spread it around!

  “The Rangers said one way to know if it’s been long enough, is to go outside at night and look at the moon. As it changes shape, it will come back around to the same shape it was on the day you leveled when it’s been a month. They also said, if you have leveled and you’re in a situation where you’re worried an unexpected mana burst could level you again before your safety month is up, point your absorption to your Class. They even recommended taking a second Class just so you could have the extra spot to point your mana towards if you need it. Having more Careers can help too, because they help divert mana-burst mana away from your main absorption into new Skills."

  Danielle paused and got out a canteen to take a drink. She could hear low conversations breaking out all across the building in front of her. “You can just ask the System for new Careers, it turns out,” she continued. “The book called A Lost Boy’s Treatise on Finding Oneself could be a good read if you don’t know what kind of Career to try for; the Ranger Healer recommended it. I haven’t read it all yet, so there might be more details about the process in there too. What I do know is the basics: you prepare to do a lot of one thing for a week, and to not do much of whatever your current Career is. I know that part comes off kind of weird for a lot of us right now, but that’s what he said! After setting yourself up to do a lot of whatever you want the Career to be, you go to your System Status, and ask the System to re-evaluate your Career. You get a kind of meaningless message at first, but if you’re doing a lot of one thing, you should get a Career for that thing in the next couple of weeks.”

  The surrounding conversations were getting louder. Danielle had to admit, she was giving people a lot to talk about. “There was one more thing the Rangers told me that I think I should share around,” she said. “This one is a little less System-related. They said the reason the wildcat was so close to the Rooms is because wild animals like that will come to steal food out of our snares. If we don’t want wild cats and things wandering around our buildings, we need to check our snares often so we don’t leave food in them for other animals to snatch, and we need to put those snares further away from the buildings.

  “My own hunting party has started trying out a plan where we set the snares, then go looking for crafting materials or other foods or something, then we check them on the way home and untie them. Other times we put them up last thing, to work overnight, and come back first thing in the morning. We’re also alternating between snaring and fishing, and we usually don’t have the snares up on fishing days. I’m sure other people will have other ideas, but the general principle is not to have one place where a wild animal can always find food. There’s some stuff about this in the books that came with the rooms, but that’s the basics. Thank you for listening,” Danielle concluded.

  As she turned back to the fire and sat down, the volume of conversation in the vicinity doubled.

  “So much for not knowing who to tell, huh?” Lauren said, approaching the fire with the group that had gone to sit against the trees.

  Danielle gave her a lopsided smile. “I figured if that many people were going to get together and listen to us anyway, I shouldn’t waste the opportunity,” she said.

  “Public speaking is on the list of not-work now, huh?” Sadie asked.

  “Sadie, for this? It counts as emergency services,” Danielle said with some asperity.

  Several people around her chuckled, but Peter and the CYC girl that seemed to be used to leading came over looking very serious.

  “Hi, I didn’t introduce myself before,” the girl said. “I’m Lucy. Um, that stuff you said at the end, how did you hear about that?”

  “My hunting party has a Healer, and last Sunday night there was a Ranger going around yelling for a Healer and we ended up going with her,” Danielle explained. “It was a bad situation – Heather healed one guy, but another one died, and I tried to bandage up the third one but he went crazy and long story short, I have a Deadly Defender now. Um, but the thing was, the Ranger Healer came, she just started off a lot further away than we did, so she got there late. She and the other Rangers talked to us afterward, and after that, the Rangers knew about us, right?

  “So then a few days ago, a different hunting party got attacked by this giant cat, the Rangers called it a cougar. One of their people – the hunting party, I mean – she came running out of the woods yelling for help, so I got my party and another party that had a Healer, and we all went out together to protect the Healers while they tried to rescue the people. The cougar wasn’t dead yet, though, so we ended up in a circle around the injured people and the Healers, shooting arrows at the cougar until it died. We lost one of the patients there, too – it was kind of eerily similar in some ways, one person died, one person healed by us, one person too injured for our level 1 Healers but bandaged up enough to wait on the Rangers. Fortunately, that one didn’t go crazy, and the Ranger Healers got there and fixed him up, so he survived; but we killed the cat – the cougar, I mean – and it was not level 1. Or, um, tier 1, or whatever animals have; what I’m saying is, it was a big mana burst.” Danielle paused to take a deep, steadying breath, pushing back against memories of faces that were too pale and pools of blood that were too large and the yowl of the wildcat.

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  “Yikes,” Lucy said, sounding sympathetic. She looked more confused than anything, though.

  “It’s been a rough week,” Danielle said. “Especially for me and Heather – that’s my party’s Healer. Anyway. The point is, when the Ranger Healers came to help with the cougar attack, the Healer from before was there and also another Healer, and one of the other Rangers that we’d met before, and a fourth guy; so now we’re up to, um,” she paused to count on her fingers, “at least six Rangers who know us as those girls who keep showing up in emergency healing situations, right? And Ranger Flo for sure knew that I’d been there for four big mana bursts.”

  “Four?? How did that get up to four?” Peter asked.

  “There was the guy who was too bled-out for us to do anything last Sunday, and the one that went crazy,” Danielle said, holding up a finger as she counted them off, “and I got the killing blow on the crazy guy, even if it was by accident. Um, that he died, not that I hit him – he was trying to attack Heather, and I tried to knock him down – anyway, then there was the guy the cougar killed, I didn’t get so much mana from that one but I was there when he died, and I was one of the people who wounded the cougar before it died so I got a chunk from that mana burst. Four big bursts in, what, four days? In pairs, obviously, not one every day, but still.”

  “So you’re actually close to levelling? Or wait, you said the cat was a higher tier – oh. You already have leveled, haven’t you?” Peter said. “In less than a week, no less.”

  “Yeah. Heather isn’t so badly off that way, because she wasn’t a participant in any of the fights, as far as the System measures it,” Danielle said. “There was some real concern about me, though, because on top of leveling my first week, I also might have knocked around a member of that Wolf Pack gang.”

  “WHAT?” Lucy shrieked, then looked embarrassed as a number of people turned their way. “Ah, ahem. I mean, why on earth would you pick a fight with a Wolf?”

  “Who says I picked a fight?” Danielle asked testily. “It was when I was going to get the other Healer; he caught us standing outside a room at building seven and came at me, and I knocked him down with my staff and flung his sword over the edge of the balcony. He stayed down, so then the Healer came out and we got moving, because people were bleeding out in the woods. Um, but the other night, we caught someone hanging out in the trees close to our room – someone who set of my roommate’s Hostility Sense Skill; and I saw someone watching us around a corner of the building the next day too. So, the point is, it’s not impossible I’m going to have to defend myself again, and if it goes deadly again – which isn’t completely in my control, right? I mean, I wasn’t trying to kill the guy who went crazy, either, just -”

  “He was already dying before he even went for me,” Heather put in. Danielle nearly jumped out of her skin; she hadn’t noticed Heather coming up behind her. She continued, “When Danielle knocked him down, though, he fell bad and hit his head really hard. It’s not like she hit him somewhere deadly on purpose, but if someone starts a fight and then they break their skull, the mana burst is going to be the same whether you wanted it or not.”

  “Right. That,” Danielle said. “How did we get on this subject again?”

  “How you learned about the 'leveling a month apart' thing,” Peter said.

  “Right! Right, because Ranger Flo was a little worried about me after all that. They warned me about it, and basically refused to leave until I’d moved my absorption to my Class. They also suggested I get a second Class, and hinted that I ought to try for another Career but I mean,” Danielle shrugged, “I’m a Survivor, I’m not ready to take two weeks off from survival. Jokes aside, I’m sure once we figure out how to preserve food for more than a couple days at a time, and without using that tiny cold box, then I’ll be able to get a crafting-type Career or something; but right now I don’t think I can take one week off from the straight survival focus, let alone two.”

  “I know what you mean,” Peter said. “I’m just glad Firmitatem at least took care of shelter for us – can you even imagine this as a tent camp?”

  “I’d rather not, thank you,” Danielle said. “The stench of the latrines alone – ugh. Anyway, learning stuff from Rangers. Yeah. It’s because we saw them after the emergencies, and they thought I especially urgently needed to know some stuff; and once we had them talking we asked questions, too. I get the impression they’re not supposed to just come around and educate us, but if they’re around for legitimate reasons like healing wild animal attack victims, and if we ask, there’s a lot more they can say and do.”

  “They stopped in to check on me after all that happened, too,” Nathan volunteered. “Ranger Flo gave me one of those, um, ‘self-sterilizing lancets,’ and made sure I was handling stuff OK. They told me the thing about spacing out your leveling, too. They said the walls of the Rooms won’t block mana bursts, so if I’ve already picked up some mana while healing, and the Wolves go on a rampage, I could be at risk. I mean, if I’m more than halfway from level 2 to 3; not so much right now, when I’m still level 1. I told her she was putting the cart in front of the pull-tractor, because I haven’t leveled even once, and I don’t have nearly enough mana saved up for a Class; but she said there’s no guarantee she’d be able to talk to me again between now and when it matters. They’re not allowed to just drop by for a chat, it has to be some kind of emergency response or official business.”

  “You were part of the party the wildcat attacked?” Lucy asked.

  “No, I was the other Healer Danielle came to get,” Nathan explained. “Ranger Micheal said Firmitatem wants to get back as many of us as it can, um, plus or minus some annoying politics, but they especially want Healers that will do first responder duties, and people with certain rare Skills, so if they know about us, they’ll check in on us when the rules allow for it.”

  “Oh, of course. ‘All citizens are valued,’ but some are valued higher than others,” Peter said darkly. Danielle recognized a quote from an advertising campaign that had been going around the year before. It had been a government-sponsored unity thing, but some of the slogans had become famous more via ridicule than agreement.

  “Did they say anything like that to you?” Lucy asked Danielle.

  She blushed. “Well, um. I might, um, have one of the rare Skills they want, so, it might have come up,” she admitted in embarrassment.

  “Really? Which one? Can you tell everyone else how to get it?” Nathan asked.

  “I can’t tell anyone how to get it, it just came up for me at the Dome,” Danielle said. “And no offense to anyone here, but I’m honestly kind of scared to let it get around. I’d like to be able to use it for everyone, but not until I’m strong enough to resist other people trying to control me. Plus, nobody has the resources for it yet, not even me, really. I feel like I should’ve waited to take it until later, and maybe taken Find Edible Plants or something instead; I won’t be able to use it effectively for months.”

  “Oh. That’s too bad. Why not?” Lucy asked.

  “It takes a lot of mana,” Danielle said. “I don’t have that much mana to spare - nobody has that much mana to spare right now, and if they did, they’d be saving it for the Catalog Un-Fair. Only three weeks to go!”

  Peter snerked. “Catalog Un-Fair. I like it.”

  “I got that one from the Rangers too,” Danielle said with a grin. “Some of them are former Sent – maybe a lot of them, not sure, but they know the deal.”

  “SHAD Party! Gather by our room to talk about lunch!” Akari yelled from somewhere.

  “Oh, that’s us,” Danielle said. “It was nice to meet you – are you going to hang out and cook lunch here, too? I’d love to talk some more after the rabbit’s on the fire.”

  “We hadn’t exactly made plans, but I don’t see why not. We’d have to go get stuff from our rooms, though,” Peter said.

  “I think some of us need to go get stuff from out there,” Lucy said, gesturing broadly to the south, into the trees. “Unless we want to eat more pemmican and hardtack, and frankly, my room is further into our rations than we’re comfortable with already. I mean, I know they gave it to us to help us get started, but if we just keep eating it every day and not learning to replace it, week four is going to be a disaster.”

  Danielle nodded in understanding. “We’re trying to think of that stuff as emergency rations, not to be eaten except in emergencies; working as a group helps, but until we get better at preservation and storage there’s no guarantees.”

  “We better go get our lunch started,” Heather said.

  “Yeah, all right – we’ll be back in a few minutes,” Danielle told the others.

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