Before anyone could respond to Cassy, everyone heard the voice of the Ranger with the announcement Skill. “Now Hear This: A message to all Exiles of Firmitatem on layer 1, from the Firmitatem Rangers Layer 1 Outpost! At the request of the Government of Firmitatem, the Rangers are calling a town meeting of the Town of Camp Constanza on Saturday, June 16th, 2337, which is to say, the day after tomorrow. A one-hour warning will be issued at 6am and the meetings will begin at 7am. The purpose of this meeting is to facilitate the election of Building Representatives to the Town Council of Camp Constanza, after which the Rangers shall distribute the catalog from which Residents of Camp Constanza may place Summer Fair orders this year. We will also be distributing – are we really calling it this?! – I’m fine, my wordcount is four digits! – We will also be distributing “care packages” from – I’m not reading this. You can’t make me read this lie over my Skill.” There was a pause, then he continued, “Yeah, OK. Care packages consisting of items donated by concerned citizens of the Inside towns of Firmitatem.

  “Uh, where was I? Oh, right. Care packages will be delivered only to Sent who are in their rooms to receive them after the town meetings, between 10am and noon this Saturday. If you miss your delivery, we will try again once, in two weeks, when catalog deliveries are being made. The Rangers will be available from meeting end until 1pm to answer catalog-related questions. Official message completes. Speaking personally, as a former Sent? The care packages are a little weird, and the politics involved make me mad; but trust me, you do want them. Please think about who you want for your building reps, and we’ll see you all on Saturday. End Skill.”

  For a moment, complete silence reigned over the campsite next to the Access Point; then for a minute, complete pandemonium as several people shouted variations on the theme of “WHAT WAS THAT?!” and “Did you hear that??” and “System preserve us!” Danielle thought she also heard Gonzo exclaim “See? See! It’s a conspiracy!”

  “Is it just me, or are people overreacting kind of a lot to a meeting notice?” Sadie asked.

  Akari shook her head. “I’m pretty sure they’re overreacting to the part where the guy didn’t want to read whatever the announcement originally said about where the care packages are from,” she said.

  “Do you think there’ll be food in the care packages?” Jordan asked hopefully.

  Danielle shrugged. “Maybe a little, but not enough to make a big difference. Or worse, just enough to make a negative difference – it’s something the party was talking about a while ago. We think one of the reasons they don’t normally let Sent do this catalog thing, or even come to the actual fair, is because if you get too much help early on you won’t get the critical Skills, or even skills, that you’ll need later on. Right now, we need to learn to find and preserve food; anyone who relies too much on the backup rations they gave us to start off with, or on buying food, they’re going to be in trouble when it gets cold, and they run out as stuff gets harder to find.”

  “Do, um, do you have a plan for the preserving food thing?” Tom asked. “You do, right?”

  “Yeah, we’re already working on dehydrating fruits and vegetables,” Heather said. “Danielle and I are both working on a Skill to make it easier, too.”

  “You have fruits and vegetables?” Jordan asked

  “Well, we’ve found berries, onions, and cherry tomatoes,” Heather said. “We’re also drying fish and strips of anything else we hunt – the stuff in the pot here is fish and tomatoes. Um, we got your share out of your bag, Danielle, I hope you don’t mind.”

  “No, it’s fine,” Danielle said. “Did Sadie purify it?”

  “I’m doing it when it’s done cooking,” Sadie said.

  Around them, most people seemed to be discussing who they wanted for their representatives. “Do you think we should get with the Lemonade girls and talk politics?” Cassy asked uneasily. “They seem to know more of the people in our building than we do. I mean, if the people who got invited here are anything to go by.”

  Danielle sighed. “I suppose we should see what they think at some point, anyway. Is there any chance that’ll be ready to eat first, though?”

  “Oh – yeah, probably,” Cassy said. “It’s been going a while, and the tomatoes look done I think.” She poked the contents of the pot with a spoon. “Akari remembered the spice shakers, so it should be a decent hot pot.”

  “Thanks Akari,” Danielle said.

  “Um, can we get that vote before you go off to do building stuff?” Tom asked.

  “Oh. What do you think, girls?” Danielle asked, and got a round of nods and thumbs up.

  “All right, then. As a member of the council of the SHAD Party, I hereby initiate a vote to add applicants Tom and Jordan, who are here with us, as Welcome level members of the organization,” Danielle said. The system formatted it as two votes, one for Tom and one for Jordan; she voted “Accept” for both and waited for the results to come up. She was pretty sure it was a decided question at that point, so she wasn’t surprised when the results came back unanimous.

  “I am pleased to announce that you have been unanimously accepted as Welcome members of the SHAD Party,” Danielle said, and the two boys turned to high-five each other.

  Then Jordan levered a fire-heated rock off of what turned out to be a leaf-packet of fish, Tom wrapped his hand in an extra sock and picked up one of the mishappen brown cups the Rangers had given away with the day-1 breakfast, Sadie purified the contents of the pot and dished them out, and everyone started eating. Tom turned out to be eating pemmican and hard tack, though he said he’d been eating squirrels the last three days. (“They’re tough and stringy, but food is food, right?”)

  When they were done, they all went over to the well, where someone had rigged a canteen on a string to substitute for a bucket on a rope. They poured well water into the pot and on the plates to rinse them, then used the pot as a rather unsatisfactory dish pan to wash everything with soap. When things were at least clean enough to put away, they went back to their fire and three boys got up from another fire circle and approached them, as if they’d been waiting for their return.

  Danielle recognized one of them from the CYC-Booker group she’d met on Sunday, but she hadn’t learned his name. The others were from her own school, and she did know their names, but she didn’t know why they would be coming to talk to the SHAD party. Gideon was one of the popular kids, not quite in the same circle as the four girls that always made life difficult for Danielle and her roommates, but still one of the people she avoided lest she incite the four to come after her. The other was Ezra, a quiet boy who she’d had a few classes with here and there but rarely interacted with; she knew essentially nothing about him except his name, and perhaps a few things he was not – not part of the popular crowd, not an athlete, not in any of the advanced studies tracks, not in the peer-to-peer tutoring program in either role.

  The boy from Booker took the lead, and gestured to Danielle. “This is her,” he said to the other two boys. “She’s the one who led the prayer meeting, and gave everyone the warning about not leveling too fast.”

  “Who – Danielle the Ghost??” Gideon said disbelievingly.

  “That what now?” Danielle asked incredulously, standing up to be on their level.

  Gideon looked embarrassed. “Oh, you uh, never heard that one? I guess it makes sense – the people who called you that mostly couldn’t figure out how to talk to you,” he said.

  “Who ever wanted to talk to me that couldn’t?” Daniele asked, bewildered.

  “Well, Vanessa and Mallory were looking for you all the time – ” he began.

  “They didn’t want to talk to me, they wanted to throw things at me, mess up my stuff, and threaten me!” Danielle retorted.

  Gideon gave her a skeptical look. “Seriously?”

  “That’s what they did whenever they did see me,” Danielle said.

  “Throwing things at you,” Gideon said disbelievingly.

  “Yes! Vanessa hated it when I used System Skills, and she found out I had Focus, so she’d throw stuff at me to disrupt my concentration,” Danielle said. “I spent so much time and effort avoiding Vanessa, the System finally gave me a stealth Skill as an academic Career Skill.”

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  “I find that very hard to believe,” Gideon said. “Vanessa was a core member of our interest group, you know.”

  “Well hoo-ray for you and your interest group,” Danielle said grumpily. “What do you want, Gideon?”

  Gideon frowned at her. “I – nothing. I’m trying to figure who, um, I’m looking for someone specific but I’m not sure who it is. Mitch thought maybe you, but now I think probably not.”

  “What, because I said something mean about saintly Vanessa?” Danielle said sarcastically. “If you want someone who likes being bullied, then yeah, look elsewhere.”

  “Vanessa was in the Christian interest group, you know,” Gideon said. “If you didn’t ignore the invitation after summer camp and dodge the group all year, you’d know her better than this.”

  “We were roommates the first year of Awakening school, I know her better than I ever wanted to,” Danielle said. “What do you know about what summer camp I went to anyway?”

  “They gave the list of attendees to the interest club leadership to follow up with,” Gideon said.

  “Do you expect me to believe that Vanessa was in the club leadership?” Danielle asked incredulously. “I knew she was a member, that’s why I stayed away, but – “

  “I was in the club leadership,” Gideon said, not loudly but with a great deal of exasperation.

  “Well congratulations on leading a club it wasn’t safe to join. Get lost.” Danielle said rudely, wondering if she could get away with duplicating Zephyr’s exit and “go scouting.” She hadn’t really pegged Gideon as one of Vanessa’s particular friends, but if he was, she needed to get out of the conversation before it got physical – not that she was doing a great job of de-escalating, either, she supposed. She looked around for a suitable excuse to leave the fire circle. She finally looked back towards him, formulating a vague excuse about needing water to wash something.

  To her surprise, though, Gideon looked like she’d slapped him. “Were you actually, literally avoiding members of the CYC club because you thought one of us was a bully?” he asked.

  “Yes? You keep acting as if my information was bad, but it’s not like she ever stopped bullying us,” Danielle said. “The incidents just got further apart because we got better at avoiding her.” She shifted her feet uncomfortably, edging towards the well. “If I’d shown up to a club she was in, she’d just have disrupted everything until I gave up and quit. That’s what she did when I tried to join the puppets club in Awakening school. I’m not sure she was even into puppets, until she found out I was there and decided I shouldn’t be.”

  Gideon looked down at her feet, then back up at her face. “Are – are you actually afraid of me??” he asked.

  “What? No, I – ” Danielle paused to ask herself if she was, in fact afraid of him. Her eyes flicked, almost involuntarily, to her staff, on the ground where she’d left it while eating. “Vanessa’s friends never seem to have a problem with people expressing opinions by shoving people, or throwing junk, or whatever,” she said. “I wouldn’t say it’s fear exactly, but I have a longstanding habit of distancing myself from her crowd for reasons that basically amount to safety. Out here, where we have the Wolf Pack and cats the size of literal lions and stuff like that to worry about, ‘dangerous’ kind of takes on a different meaning, but there’s still a strong impulse to go somewhere else.”

  “Man, that’s messed up,” the boy from the Booker CYC club said. “You still need to ask her though.”

  Gideon turned to him. “Are you crazy?” he asked.

  “You’re looking for a girl who is a servant of the creator, who leads people in prayer, who instructs and warns, and carries a hidden treasure in her System,” the other boy said. Danielle froze at the first description; the wording exactly matched her new Organization name. What did he know about things hidden in her System? “We can’t know who has something hidden in their System,” the boy continued, and Danielle released a breath she didn’t remember deciding to hold as he finished, “but who else do we know that meets all those other descriptions? We already eliminated Lucy, and she was the next closest possibility.”

  “What do you want with someone meeting that description?” Danielle asked.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Gideon said quickly, “it’s not you anyway. It’s probably someone from Booker, or I’d know them, right? Because of the Christian who instructs and warns part.”

  “I can see why you’d think that,” Danielle said, very reluctantly, “but a lot of things have changed for a lot of people in the last two weeks. If you’re sure, though, then good luck finding whoever she is. For whatever reason.”

  “Do you do art?” Ezra asked her unexpectedly.

  “What? I, uh. Kind of?” Danielle answered. “Never when Vanessa’s friends are around, if she finds out I’m doing that she really comes after me. Why do you ask?”

  “Well, I had this dream – ” Ezra started.

  “Listen, do you by some miracle have another use of that privacy Skill available?” Gideon interrupted. “Because this stuff sounds a little, um, crazy to some people and I don’t really want to just blurt it out in the middle of everything.”

  Danielle chuckled. “By some miracle, he says. Yes. I can put up Bubble of Silence one more time. You probably want Akari and Cassy to be inside it too – shall we step aside so everyone else can go back to whatever they want to do?”

  “I want to hear the rest of this conversation,” Jordan said.

  “You, uh, probably want your whole hunting party to hear it,” the Booker boy said. “You’re an org, right? You might even need them all to hear it.”

  “You seem very sure about this,” Gideon said, frowning at him.

  “I think my job is done here – good luck,” said the Booker guy, ostentatiously looking around the fire and giving Gideon a significant look. Gideon followed his glance uncertainly, then nodded at him. The boy (Mitch?) nodded back and returned to his own campfire.

  Danielle sighed and activated Bubble of Silence. “All right, lay it on me,” she said.

  “We both had this dream,” Gideon said. “In fact, everyone in our room had the same dream, but it was only instructions for me and Ezra. We’re supposed to, um, do something, when we identify the girl who meets that description and can answer Ezra’s question in the right way.”

  “When God saved Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego from the fiery furnace, it looked like a fourth man was with them in the flames,” Ezra said. “When he saved Egypt and Abraham’s household from the famine, it looked like a slave of Pharo building storehouses. What did it look like when he saved one girl and one boy from the lies of a predator, here and now, using the System as his tool?”

  Danielle looked over at Jordan, then at Sadie and Akari. “You guys will have to correct me on the details,” she said, “it’s not like I exactly saw any of this.” Then she activated her Illusions Skill and started building a small illusion, like a diorama, showing herself in the center of the purple aura with gold starburst that Akari had described to her. She added Jordan behind her in the act of flying away, and the knife and hatchet flying away in the other direction. Trees – she had actually seen the trees. Sadie, Akari, and Marc on one side of the scene; Vince falling behind a tree on the other side. The shockwave of the Skill, throwing leaf litter and twigs in all directions.

  “You got the aura effect spot-on,” Akari said, “except it was way brighter. We could barely make out your face at all.”

  “Ah. That explains why the dreamers couldn’t tell from the face, I guess,” Danielle said, and brightened the purple and gold accordingly.

  Gideon stared at the image in dismay, and Ezra in delight. “It’s so perfect!” Ezra said.

  “So, um. What are you supposed to do now?” Danielle asked.

  “We’re supposed to join your org,” Gideon said. “Your hunting party, I mean. The other one is optional.”

  “What other one?” Danielle asked.

  “No.” Heather said.

  Danielle turned to Heather. “No what?”

  “No we are not inviting one of the popular kids into our party!” Heather said heatedly. She pronounced ‘popular kids’ with all the venom that Vanessa, Mallory, Melani, and Susan had earned their social circle in four years of petty bullying, whether by actively participating in or conveniently ignoring it. It sounded like it was meant to be a swear word.

  “Listen, I, um. I also found the Tree of Knowledge CYC to be kind of overly-social and under-welcoming,” Akari said, “and I didn’t even know that Vanessa girl. That said, for anyone outside of the five people actually in that scene to be able to recognize it, less than 24 hours after it happened – “

  “More like 36, now,” Danielle said. “Can you guys actually fill in details from the dream? To prove that you really saw this, and didn’t just overhear something and make up the vague description?”

  “You drew the timing a little wrong,” Ezra said immediately. “The big glow came before the explosion part; it went away when things started getting pushed away. And that was in the middle; the beginning was like a gold beam bolting out of the sky like a cross between a spell in a Former Fantasies game and a, a lightning bolt!”

  “Right,” Gideon picked up, “First he grabbed you, and our perspective was kind of over your shoulders in the dream, so we couldn’t see your faces because of that. Then the other people came, then there was the bolt of gold, then the System-purple glow with the gold starburst in it like you’re showing it; then the glow, um, it was like you sucked it into yourself? Or maybe it just shrunk away. I don’t know, it was fast, and right after that there was the explosion and this guy got thrown back, and the perspective was changing so we could see the hidden guy get knocked down and roll away, then the third guy who came with these two fell back, but he was practically at the edge of the effect so it didn’t throw him very far.”

  “And your hair flowed up, like you were underwater, until the explosion, and then it came back down even though everything else loose was exploding away!” Ezra added excitedly. “And then everything went quiet and the guy in hiding used an invisibility Skill or something, and then that part of the dream ended.”

  “I vote yes,” Akari said. “They remember it as well as I do, without having even been there. That’s not something you can explain as a coincidence.”

  “You can explain it as spying, though,” Heather said darkly. “How do we know they aren’t with Vince? He saw the whole thing too!”

  “Do we get a vote?” Jordan asked.

  “No! New members are voted on by the council!” Heather snapped.

  “Supposing I somehow talked Heather around, and I’m not promising anything yet,” Danielle said, “you do understand that the entire council of our party is female, right? That wouldn’t be OK if this was a church, but it’s a hunting party, so as far as I’m concerned, that’s different. If you join this party, you’re subordinates. You start at the bottom membership level like anyone else, dream or no dream.”

  Gideon frowned uncomfortably but all he said was, “I know. My job isn’t to lead the hunting party. My instructions are, join the hunting party, sys-org and all; receive the gifts God has entrusted to you when the time is right; and protect the ignorant, even the evil, even my enemies, for the sake of God’s wisdom and glory.”

  “Protect your enemies? Seriously?” Tom asked skeptically.

  Ezra shrugged. “It matches up with the Bible. I think we’re supposed to protect the girl in the vision. Um, Danielle, I mean.”

  “I didn’t think that was what it was going to be, but I didn’t expect the girl in the vision to treat me like an enemy when I found her, either,” Gideon said unhappily.

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