As the Rangers chased the rock-throwing girls into the trees, Danielle sighed and loudly said, “I’m level two and I didn’t use all my mana yesterday! I can do that again!” She didn’t wait for a response, though, and simply walked back over to the side of the tent, where the other candidates were staring at her, many with dropped jaws.

  “Not the kind of crazy I expected,” Ember muttered as Danielle rejoined the group.

  Danielle shrugged. “Not quite the kind I expected either, to be honest. For one thing, I didn’t expect a Ranger to freak out so hard, or doubt her own Skills like that.”

  “You are claiming blasphemy against the System, you know,” Ember said.

  “What, just by saying I really do have the Skill I have?” Danielle asked. “I think I successfully proved that I do, in fact, have it.”

  “I meant, by claiming that this god of yours gave it to you, in violation of the System’s rules,” Ember said.

  “Yeah, well, God paid the System its mana. Maybe we just don’t know the rules as well as we think we do,” Danielle said. “Killing me with rocks won’t change the facts of what happened regardless, so if it wasn’t God, then go ahead, tell me your non-blasphemy theory of how this happened!”

  Ember just stared at her, frowning, until Ranger Anna finally managed to call the crowd back to order. “All right! That got a little more exciting than intended, and we are definitely running late now, so please listen carefully and move as efficiently as possible,” she finally said. “Each candidate’s name has been written on a box inside the tent. You need to line up to enter the tent on the same side as the platform. The candidates will line up in front of the platform and remain available to answer your questions while you’re in line. When you get to the tent, you will be given your voting balls. Put the 2 in the box for the candidate you want to get 2 points, the 1 in the box for your 1-point choice, and the 0 in the box of a candidate you don’t want. Leave the tent on the far side, where you’ll be handed your copy of the catalog, and then you’ll be free to go. We’ll announce the results via Now Hear This later in the day, after the boxes have been tallied. Mess with the vote, you get to compare Skill power with our security team, and your attempt at election fraud will remain on your permanent record Inside. Go ahead and line up now! Candidates, in front of the stage, you vote last.”

  Danielle lined up in the middle of the group of candidates, with Ember on one side and one of the independent girls on the other side. “I am so black-balling you,” Ember told her, as the voting line got moving.

  “Do what you think is right,” Danielle said, “but my zero ball is still saved for Miss ‘I know what’s best’ and her ‘law for every hour of the day’ plan.”

  “I’d black-ball both of you if I could,” the Safety in Order candidate said haughtily. “All of you! I’m putting both of my balls in my own box.”

  “You can’t,” Ranger Anna said, leaning on the railing of the platform above them. “The act of putting a ball in a box locks it until you exit the tent and the privacy ward resets. You can dump your one-ball in the empty bin as a protest vote if you like, though.”

  “Black-ball the liar who claims she can mess with the System either way!” Ember said.

  Danielle sighed. “This is why I didn’t want the whole thing to get around,” she said. “Everyone keeps putting words in my mouth. I can’t mess with the System. I never said that; why would you think I said that? I can’t and I didn’t.”

  “Then – then how – ” Ember sputtered.

  “Why do you think I think God was involved?” Danielle asked. “It’s impossible for me, or for anyone I know of, so clearly it has to have been a higher power. It also happened right after I called upon a specific higher power for help. The cause and effect seems unambiguous to me.”

  “Yeah, it was unambiguously the System that had pity on your ignorance and did it for you instead of your imaginary God,” a girl in the voting line scoffed.

  Ember frowned at the girl, but slowly said, “Well, that seems like it should still be impossible, but given the evidence that the Skill was indeed bestowed, somehow,” she trailed off. Three more people moved through the voting booth. “I suppose you might have been half-right about one piece of it,” Ember finally said. “Maybe there’s some nuance of the System’s rules that isn’t normally taught to middle-schoolers that would explain this. There seem to be an awful lot of things that we need to know out here that just hadn’t come up yet, but probably would have if we’d been inside another three or four years.”

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

  Danielle shrugged. “I suppose I can’t argue with that one piece of your conclusion,” she said.

  Ember gave her a suspicious look. “Which piece?”

  “There are an awful lot of things that we need to know out here that just hadn’t come up yet, because they’re things that aren’t normally taught to middle-schoolers; and that clearly includes lots of nuances of the System’s rules and behaviors,” Danielle said. “I swear I’m learning new stuff about the System every day out here.” She gave an unamused laugh. “Of course that might be because I was thoroughly ignorant, as much as anything else. I’d never even heard of Skill Sharers before I was Sent, and all kinds of other Sent seem to know about them. Just for example.”

  “We who acknowledge the System instead of dismissing its power hold Skill Sharers in high honor,” Ember said severely. Danielle had to fight not to burst out in hysterical laughter. From the corner of her eye, she caught sight of the angry Ranger, still scowling.

  “I suppose that’s consistent with other things I’ve heard said since I came out here,” Danielle managed carefully. “Skill Sharers, Element Shapers, people with large numbers of Skills and Traits in general. Supposedly all very honored.”

  “You can just drop the ‘supposedly,’ denier!” Ember said heatedly.

  “Which one are you?” Danielle asked her.

  “What?”

  “You’re one of the six head Element Shapers, right?” Danielle asked. “Zephyr was bending my ear about how someone wants him to replace you. What’s keeping them from doing that, besides the fact that Zephyr doesn’t want fire? It has to be extra Skills or an elevated Class, right? What’s your honor-worthy thing?”

  “I – I have an extra Skill over most people,” Ember said. “It’s not much, but nobody has much right now!”

  “Not unless they have very good or very bad luck,” Danielle agreed.

  “Which one do you have?” someone in the voting line asked. Danielle vaguely recognized her from the Shade Tree Society vote-ins the night before.

  “Both, apparently,” Danielle said with a sigh. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, having a rare Skill is awesome, but tier 3 level 2 does chew through mana faster than I’m comfortable with right now, and some people just threw some pretty big rocks at me. I might need to figure out what those prerequisites are and take them, too, so I don’t have holes in my System long-term. If that’s a thing. I have to hand it to Systemists, they seem to teach each other a lot more of this stuff than other people do.”

  “You need to learn a force Skill, a shield Skill, and a speed Skill,” Ranger Anna said. “Not that anyone’s ever proven the stacking structure theory. There are plenty of people who got Shield Burst without all three Skill prerequisites just by getting it from a Skill Sharer; just not before they hit the required base level. That’s the actually impossible part.”

  “I guess it’s something to work on, anyway,” Danielle said. “Wait, is Flash Shield not a shield Skill?”

  “Not in the relevant sense,” Ranger Anna said; then the conversation went on hold while the candidates answered several questions for a talkative voter. Cassy, Lauren, Ember, and Danielle herself all told the girl that Danielle wasn’t really “a miracle-working saint,” but the girl somehow didn’t let that dent her certainty and went in still gushing about voting “for the miracle.” Danielle could only wonder what she meant by that.

  “I’m getting a horrible feeling that I’m going to get pushed into the council even though I don’t want to be there,” Danielle said. “It’s been there ever since the whole ‘make a party’ discussion went and got so big, and the way people keep talking like I’m supposed to literally do miracles here absolutely gives me chills.” She rubbed her arms demonstratively, then pulled out her water bottle and took a long drink.

  Ranger Anna looked down at her. “You’re not actually feverish, are you?” she asked.

  “No? Why would I be?” Danielle asked.

  “Mm, I’m no Healer, you just look a little pale and – I don’t know, off,” the Ranger said.

  “I blame the assassination attempt,” Danielle said. “I’ve been learning how slings work, I don’t underestimate rocks.”

  “Hm. Could be. You used a lot of mana for your level in a very short period of time, too,” Ranger Anna said. “Some people are sensitive to that.” Her watch gave a discreet double-beep, and she frowned down at it.

  “Mm.” Danielle privately thought that if 51-point enhancements didn’t cause her problems, a few uses of Shield Burst weren’t going to either, but she had to admit that using Shield Burst felt very different, at least as perceived in the weirdly pseudo-tactile mana sense that came with Trait: Mana Improvement. In any case, she hardly intended to announce any more of her System abilities in public. All she said aloud was, “I wish I’d gotten a watch that had hourly beeps like yours, and alarms and stuff. Trying to tell time by the sun is hard when it’s the real sky and not track lamps.”

  At least some of the girls going through the line actually bothered to care about her actual plan for five core rules, and she got to talk about that a little while the line crawled through the tent. She could hear the Safety in Order girl stridently telling people to her right that they needed a lot more than those five. Ember, to Danielle’s carefully suppressed amusement, proposed that the correct number of core rules was six, and the sixth one should be “do not blaspheme.” The urge to tell her that there were five components to that and try to convince her to reinvent the actual Ten Commandments was strong, but Danielle resisted, if only because she distracted herself trying to figure out how to make all the relevant rules sound like a Systemist’s own idea until she actually ran out of time, and Ranger Anna released the eleven candidates to go cast their own votes.

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