Danielle immediately activated Bubble of Silence, letting it surround the whole group at the campfire. “Privacy Skill is up,” she told Nathan.

  “Right.” Nathan took a deep breath and blew it out, sort of an odd form of a sigh, Danielle thought. “OK, so. When I was little, there was a mana issue in my neighborhood, and there was a risk that younger kids like me might pick up mutations. It was a low risk, and the city was on top of mitigating it, but my parents were scared. They told me they prayed every single day while the crisis was on, that God would allow my body to reject the mana attacking it in an unusually strong way. The mana got drawn down to normal Inside levels, my parents had me checked for mutations and it came out clean, I wasn’t showing any symptoms of weirdness, they thanked God that nothing bad happened to me, and life went on.

  “Then I got my youth level about two weeks before I went off to awakening school. My parents panicked and took me back to the high-level System reader that had checked me out when I was four. He said I had a mana trait, and asked, were they Christians. Turns out, some pastor had used that wording in a prayer, and a lot of Christian parents had copied it during the crisis, and I was the fourth or fifth kid he’d seen that had been four or five during the mana crisis, and their parents had prayed that prayer, and the System reacted and gave the kid (which in this case was me) an early System Trait that let them process out more mana than a normal kid. Meanwhile, Systemist “guides” told their people to pray that the System would protect their children by converting the wild mana to holy elements; so he was getting kids the same age from Systemist families showing early signs of elemental attunement Traits."

  “Whoah. What did nonreligious kids get?” Sadie asked.

  “Nothing obvious, he said. Their parents mostly kept quiet and just hoped for the best, and whatever the System might have eventually decided to do for them, either it was more subtle or the problem was resolved before it happened,” Nathan said. “Anyway, I knew I had a mana Trait, and it gave me a little more mana, but I couldn’t see the details until we got Advanced. Turns out, I get double production and my mana pool’s bigger, too. I didn’t know it was connected to being able to tell when Skills were used around me, but if that’s what you were expecting?” He broke off and raised an eyebrow at Danielle.

  “Yeah, as far as I can tell, being able to sense Skill uses that adults insist you couldn’t possibly sense is a side-effect of Trait: Mana Improvement,” Danielle said.

  “Dang,” Marc said. “I bet for me it was my grandma. Mom and Dad aren’t believers.”

  “You what?” Sadie asked, looking nonplussed.

  “I have it too. Mana Improvement, I mean,” Marc said.

  “Are you kidding me??” Gonzo asked. “How many of you are there?”

  Danielle silently refreshed her Skill. Marc’s eye flicked to her, and she gave him a covert thumbs-up.

  “The System Seer said not all religious kids were affected, but my parents told me the June I was getting ready to go into middle school that they’d heard something like 5% of my class were showing signs of hidden youth Traits. They said, be careful not to make enemies and never pry about other people’s Systems, because probably half of those or more would be Systemists, and their elemental stuff might be ‘volatile’ – not that they explained what that meant,” Nathan said, a hint of remembered exasperation leaking into his voice.

  “Speaking as someone who has been in Systemist youth camps the last couple Junes, it means they have bad control of potentially powerful abilities,” Regina said.

  “You’re a Systemist?” Lauren asked her.

  “My parents are Systemist,” Regina said. “They almost named me Regolith. They drive me crazy.”

  “Ah. That’s why you disappeared so fast when the Systemist crowd showed up on Sunday, then?” Dana speculated.

  “Yeah, I don’t get along with some of them real well,” Regina said. “I believe in the theory that the System is like a mana-computer. I made the mistake of telling that to certain people who just won’t leave it alone.”

  “It’s a conspiracy,” Gonzo said. “A computer needs a programmer, and that means there’s a mana programmer out there somewhere pulling the strings of the whole planet!”

  “For once, your theory actually holds water as well as any I’ve heard,” Regina said. “Cynthia’s almost back, by the way.”

  “Well. Now you know why I wasn’t worried about Nathan buying a new Career,” Danielle said. “When we were first working out the connection between ‘feeling’ mana Skills and the Trait, someone mentioned Nathan as someone who could feel mana Skills, so I guessed he’d have more mana available than most. I figured the rest of you were going to unlock Skills and support your Healer, so it didn’t seem like a problem. Dropping the Skill now?” she glanced around, and everyone nodded.

  She dropped the Bubble of Silence. “Hi Cynthia,” she said. “I was just telling everyone that I was trusting Nathan to have his mana reserves under control, and the rest of your party to be sensibly focused on unlocking Skills for mana bursts and planning. I’m just a little concerned because I don’t know about these other parties. If we didn’t have the catalog thing happening in just two weeks, I’d say an extra Career was a good investment, but as it stands I’m a little worried about people spending mana they should be keeping for the catalog, when they really could wait another two weeks, or four, or even six, and not actually have a serious problem.”

  Cynthia sat down next to Lauren again. “It’s nice of you to think about them, but don’t you think it’s their decision?” she asked. “I mean, regular Sent survive without the catalog stuff. The System says we’re adults now, and maybe it’s earlier than we expected, but if that’s what it says, then I think we should treat each other like adults.”

  Danielle leaned back and thought about that. “I guess there’s something to that,” she admitted. “I just feel like maybe we’re being treated a little too much like adults, when we don’t have adult levels of information.”

  “Do you actually know what the catalog is going to offer?” Dana asked. “I mean, I assume you don’t have the whole list, but have the Rangers mentioned anything specific?”

  “No, just that it’s supposed to help make up for our being Sent so early somehow,” Danielle said. “My best guesses are: tools and food. It’s just a guess, but I think they normally don’t expect Sent to eat their whole three-week supply of emergency rations in the first month, but with us, they kind of do expect that a lot of people might do that, so they’re giving us a chance to restock it.”

  “Oh, interesting theory,” Lauren said. “Be sure to mention it to people tomorrow, when we’re spending all afternoon trying to dry our own food. That’ll probably be as good a way of convincing Angela’s roommates as anything else you could say.”

  “I will, then,” Danielle said.

  The conversation turned to lighter topics then, such as how squirrel tasted and whether it would be worth collecting and tanning squirrel tails to make a winter hat. It took a long time for the nutria to cook, simply because it was the biggest game they’d yet taken, but the Lemonade party was happy to hang out chatting and eating their squirrels and game birds and salmonberries while the SHAD girls waited. When it finally seemed done, they took it inside to cut up and share out. With the other party’s enthusiastic help, they’d finished off the berries already.

  “Just remember,” Danielle told the other party as they left, “if you want to get eight hours of sleep and still get up at dawn, you have to be in bed before dark. It’s pretty close to the summer solstice, you know? We’ll see you at dawn.”

  “You’re the one with the actual clock,” Lauren said. “If we’re not there at dawn, knock loudly!”

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  The SHAD girls used A Ranger’s Guide to the Outside to decide what part of the animal to eat first, and cut everything else into thin strips to dry further. Sadie purified the meat again once it was all off the bones, and collected into a smaller volume for her Skill to work on. When Danielle and Akari went out to bury the bones, the Lemonade party had already left. The two of them had a brief scare when Akari noticed a hostile person a little way off in the woods, but whoever it was ran off when Danielle readied her bow.

  With the alarm clock wound and set for 5am, there wasn’t much left to the night. They walked Cassy home, took turns showering while they repacked their bags for the morning, and went to sleep early. Danielle snuck one more 5-point mana token into her stash before bed, just to make it a round number. She didn’t know about Cassy, but everyone in 6024 got to sleep pretty quickly in spite of their nap.

  She woke in the middle of the night with another nightmare, but this time she thought she’d managed not to wake anyone. She strained to see the alarm clock in the dim light, but it was facing away from the entryway and the reflected light from the bathroom, so she gave up and just tried to get back to sleep.

  When the alarm clock did go off, everyone got up and readied their bags. Sadie and Akari picked up Cassy while Danielle filled their usual canteens and Heather packed the last of their purple cherry tomatoes into two more. As usual, they brought all their weapons – Cassy even brought her sword and bow, though she intended to mostly use her sling. Heather asked to carry the other sling, and put it in her pocket with an appropriate stone.

  They were out the door by 5:20, sliced nutria meat in hand for breakfast, but there was no one waiting at their end of the dome road. They finished eating, then went and knocked on Lauren’s door. Sure enough, the Lemonade girls were still asleep; but like the SHAD girls, they’d packed their bags the night before. The four of them went off in pairs to knock on the doors of the other girls, and then a group of four girls from the SHAD party and the co-ed party that didn’t have a name got together and went to knock on doors in building seven.

  Fortunately, they didn’t have any trouble with other residents of building seven, but all in all, it took until a quarter past six for the group to all gather. When the rest of the girls did get out to the end of the road, Danielle was in for a few surprises. The better surprise was that “Healer Angela” turned out to be one of the girls from the Booker CYC club; she and her roommates were the four girls that had left early to check trap lines on Sunday, Lucy among them. The nastier shock was that the fourth hunting party contained Heather’s roommate from the beginning of 7th grade, Melanie.

  Melanie was two full inches taller than the next tallest girl in the group, and heavy-framed. She kept her straight brown hair in a perpetual braid, and wore a sweat-band everywhere – even here in the Outside, it seemed. She was popular for her skill in sports, and got along all too well with Danielle’s own unpleasant former roommate, Vanessa. She did not get along with Heather, who had asked to be moved to a different room because of Melanie’s bullying; she insisted that Heather had ‘ruined her reputation’ by asking to be moved. Heather, Danielle, and Sadie had never figured out who supposedly didn’t think well of Melanie for that; whoever it was certainly didn’t stick up for them when Melanie threw balls at their faces in gym class, or “accidentally” ran into them in the cafeteria and tried to make them spill their trays, or pranked their dormitory door.

  “What do we do?” Heather whispered to Danielle. Akari gave them an odd look.

  “I don’t know,” Danielle said quietly. “I don’t really want her at my back with a weapon, I’ll admit.”

  “Can we just change our minds about going?” Sadie asked. “They still have two Healers, they’ll be fine. We can go try to find another nutria or something.”

  Danielle stared at Melanie, who didn’t seem to have noticed them. “I don’t know. On the one hand, everything’s different now; maybe she’ll drop the petty harassment in favor of survival. On the other hand – ”

  She broke off with an odd expression on her face, as she ‘heard’ a voice that she was almost sure no one else was hearing; it was similar to the way the voice of the System ‘spoke’ in a way that had no direction or complex resonances from biology or environment. It was very distinct from the human voice transmitted by the Rangers’ “Now Hear This” Skill, which sounded like actual voices as they might be recorded by a microphone. This voice was also distinct from the System, though; it was much deeper for one thing, and whereas the System always spoke in exactly the same accent as the System user, this voice had just a hint of an accent she couldn’t place.

  It said, “Go as you promised; I will protect you all. No one will die on this hunting trip.”

  Danielle activated Detect Mana Source and looked around, but there was no one within range of the Skill except the girls standing at the end of the road, and Nathan and Gonzo jogging up from building seven.

  “Is something wrong?” Akari asked.

  “I heard a voice, or something,” Danielle said. “I don’t suppose you actually heard it?”

  Her party members all shook their heads. “What did it say?” Sadie asked.

  “It said to go, I will protect you, nobody will die on this hunting trip,” Danielle reported. “It was weird; almost more like a System message than, say, that Ranger’s Skill he used to wake everyone up that first Saturday. Definitely not the actual System, though.”

  “That’s weird,” Akari said.

  “We definitely have to stay, now,” Heather said. “Who knows what’s going on with that? It’s like someone’s got a weird Skill and they’re messing with your head.”

  “I don’t know, it could be a good thing,” Danielle said. “Besides, I’m not sure it’d be a good idea to leave the group even if it was a bad thing.”

  “The group with Melanie in it already?” Heather asked pointedly.

  Danielle looked at Melanie, and felt oddly at peace with the idea. “Let’s give her a chance,” she said. “Maybe even go tell her you promise not to start anything if she doesn’t, let the past stay in the past, that kind of thing.”

  “You tell her!” Heather said. “It’s your crazy idea!”

  “Do you promise that if I do, you really won’t start anything? Just keep your distance if you can, act all professional if she needs healing?” Danielle asked.

  “I will if she will,” Heather said reluctantly.

  “Same,” Sadie said, fingering her bow. Danielle could almost hear the implied “and if she does start something I’ll finish it,” but that was just her imagination and how well she knew Sadie.

  Cassy stepped back a bit, out of Sadie and Heather’s direct line of sight as they glared towards the still-apparently-oblivious Melanie; she raised an eyebrow at Danielle and pointed up. Danielle shrugged, and mouthed “maybe.” Akari, paying attention, raised both eyebrows at that.

  “All right,” Danielle said, “I’m going to give it a try. If she makes a scene and tries to get everyone to ditch us, then we have our answer and it’s on her, right?”

  “OK,” Heather said, and Sadie echoed, “OK.” Akari and Cassy edged back another step, and Danielle saw them both fold their hands in prayer.

  “OK. Here I go.” Danielle looked toward Melanie – one of the four worst hostile classmates in their school and grade, and found it took all the courage she had to actually take the first step in that direction. It took a moment. It took a long moment, but she made herself move, and then approach Melanie.

  “Ahem. Good morning, Melanie,” she started.

  The other girl jumped, apparently not having noticed her approach. “What – uh, good mor – you?!” she stammered.

  “Yes, hi. Sorry I startled you,” Danielle said. “Um, listen. My roommates and I didn’t know you were coming when we joined up with this – “

  “Please tell me you mean your Rooms roommates, not your school roommates,” Melanie interrupted.

  “Same people,” Danielle said, “but we want you to know that it doesn’t have to be a problem. Everything in all our lives has changed. We’re probably never going to be great friends, but if you don’t start anything with us, we won’t start anything with you; we’re all supposed to be adults now, we figure we’ll practice being professional, everyone will get their food, and it doesn’t have to be a whole thing. Does that work for you?”

  “It’d work a lot better if you losers just shoved off,” Melanie said nastily.

  “Well, ah, it might or it might not,” Danielle said. “See, Heather and I are both part of the ‘three Healers and a medic’ that Lauren promised everyone would be in the group. I’m kind of worried that if we drop out just to stay away from you, that might cause exactly the kind of drama that none of us needs.”

  Melanie actually went pale, as if Danielle had made some dire threat. “You wouldn’t,” she said.

  “Wouldn’t do exactly what you just tried to tell me to do?” Danielle asked. “Or are you asking about something else?”

  Melanie folded her arms tightly, almost defensively, and looked away.

  “Um, so seriously, Heather and Sadie and I would rather just let what happened Inside stay Inside, all right?” Danielle reiterated. “We just want to know that you’re on the same page.”

  “Fine,” Melanie said shortly. “You stay away from me, I’ll stay away from you. Like I never even met any of you before.”

  “We can work with that,” Danielle said. “Good luck with the hunt.”

  Danielle gave Melanie a polite nod and walked back to the others. “Could you hear all that?” she asked Heather in a low voice.

  “Yeah – good enough, I guess,” Heather said.

  “Agreed. We can work with that,” Sadie confirmed.

  “OK, good,” Danielle said with relief, then looked beyond them to Cassy and Akari, who were whispering excitedly to each other. She raised an interrogative eyebrow at them, and to her surprise, they both responded by pointing up.

  Sadie looked back at them, and they both dropped their hands and rejoined the main group. “Do I want to know what that was all about?” Sadie asked.

  “It was a religion thing,” Cassy said. “Do you want to know?”

  “Nope, that’s enough detail,” Sadie said.

  No one had a chance to say much else; Marc, Reggie, and the boys from the other hunting party arrived together, and Lauren confirmed that everyone was there. Once she finished roll call, Gonzo set a challenging pace (for most of them) to the south-west. The forest was noisy with birds of all kinds calling to each other, but the group hunting party was nearly silent except for the labored breathing of everyone that didn’t have Speed Improvement.

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