Danielle heard and ignored the alarm clock. It took some serious ignoring, because nobody else wanted to get it either, but she managed. Someone else finally got it off, and the kitchen light came on, and Danielle went back to sleep. She knew she’d gotten properly back to sleep, because she woke up again, this time because Sadie was shaking her shoulder.

  “Hey. Wake up. We’re all going out to tell other people it’s time to head out for the prayer meeting and hangout,” Sadie said.

  “Oh, right. I’ll meet you at the place,” Danielle said fuzzily, sitting up. “End of the road again?”

  “Yeah, that’s where the whole group is meeting, but we’ll be back here first,” Sadie said. “We’re not taking our bags up and down stairs just to knock on doors.”

  “Watch out for invisible Wolves,” Danielle said, rubbing her head. The headache was wasting no time roaring back into her awareness.

  “Right, um. I’ll do that. Are you still dizzy and stuff, then?” Sadie asked.

  Danielle frowned up at her. “Sadie. My head hurts, but I’m not crazy,” she said. “Invisibility is a thing. You’ve seen me do a version.”

  “Oh. You mean stealthed invisible,” Sadie said. “Stink, that does seem like something they’d do.”

  “It’s something Vince can do for sure,” Danielle said. “We know he heard me telling Jordan I had a status that said ‘saint’ even though we couldn’t see him, and I also got attacked by someone under stealth on the way home last night. I guess I don’t know for sure last night was Vince, but I’d rather believe I only have one stealth-capable assassin after me until I have proof to the contrary.”

  Sadie sighed. “All the more reason for us to pick you up and go together, then,” she said. “Get ready, and we’ll be back in a few minutes.”

  Danielle got up, used the toilet, showered, put on clean underwear and her less-recently-worn shorts and T-shirt, and filled canteens for herself – three, this time, because she didn’t know how long they’d be out. She didn’t know how long all that took, but she practically collapsed back on her bed when she was done. She was achingly tired, and her head was not giving up with the pain. She lay there a few minutes feeling sorry for herself, then got up to get a dose of Fever-Ace, and stashed a dose for later in her bag along with the water.

  “There, ready enough,” she said to herself, but she didn’t feel ready. She was forgetting something, she was sure of it.

  After a long minute (or two, or five) of thought, she remembered that she had never put her Alter Tag token into her token pouch. Maybe that was it? She fished the tag out of the pocket of her blue jeans, and put it into the token pouch. Almost full – well, she could take out a mana token. In fact, she had a good reason to take one out. She called out a 300-mana token, chuckling a little at the feel of the enhancement that plucked a matching token and placed it at her fingertips.

  She held up the mana token in one hand and held out her other hand empty, and activated Manifest Token, choosing to make a Skill token for Regen Burst – Heather was going to need that sooner rather than later, she thought. The Skill token appeared in her empty hand, and the mana token changed shape, two-thirds of a circle now. “Like a pie with two slices eaten,” Danielle said, inspecting it. The straight edges still had the symbols that all large mana tokens had around their normal edges for some reason. On the face, the number had been moved so it was still legible, and changed to 200.

  “Weird way of doing it, but I guess it works,” Danielle said to the System. “Again.”

  Just saying again wasn’t enough to repeat the process, so she went through it all again – activating Token Manifestation, telling it to use token mana first, choosing the pattern for Skill tokens, selecting Regen Burst. Then she did it a third time, and the last wedge of the mana token disappeared, leaving the new Skill token in its place. Danielle heaved herself to her feet to go put the two extra tokens in her footlocker – it felt like her bones had been replaced with lead, or maybe like she was under the affects of a gravity-doubling Skill. Would she know if there were a gravity Skill affecting her?

  Danielle opened her System Interface to see if she had status effects in her interface, but instead, she found a blinking line at the top, reading “undefined selections – please choose your options immediately.”

  “What options?” she asked aloud, and the System promptly brought up a level-up prompt.

  “Please select level two options for Class: Basic Sneak.

  > Choose one trait from: Longsighted (T1) or Improved Hearing (T1)

  > Choose one trait from: Subtle System (T2) or Forgettable Face (T2)

  > Choose one skill from: Operate Mechanism (T2), Listen at Doors (T2), or Illusionary Distraction (T2)

  > Choose one skill from: Personal Silence (T2), Least Invisibility (T2), or Delicate Leap (T2)”

  “What?? That’s not possible! I have my absorption pointed to Field Medic! Why are you leveling Basic Sneak?” Danielle demanded.

  “Classes and Careers gain mana with use, regardless of primary absorption,” the System printed into her Interface.

  “Ugh, is this the real reason I’m all achy and stuff? Because I had this waiting ever since I was last doing Basic Sneak stuff, so – what, did it come up while I was napping?”

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  The System didn’t respond to that, so Danielle couldn’t do much besides sigh dramatically and make her choices. Given her recent brush with an enemy that could be invisible, she didn’t waste much thought on the tier 1 trait, choosing Improved Hearing immediately. Subtle System said it was a Trait that made her automatically resist other people’s Skills or Traits if they would reveal elements of her own System’s status, which felt a bit redundant to Mana Deflector. However, Forgettable Face would literally make it harder for people to remember her, and it was a Trait – who wanted a Trait that made them hard to remember? Subtle System it was.

  The Skills were a bit harder to choose from, especially with the distraction of a pounding headache in the background. She didn’t want to read all their descriptions, but she needed to. “Focus Danielle,” she told herself. “Just scan them quick, and if it’s not good for hunting, escaping murderers and assassins, or keeping your rare Skills out of sight of the violently jealous, you don’t need it.”

  That pretty much eliminated Operate Mechanism, which seemed to be a sort of generalized version of the long-theorized but never confirmed lockpicking Skill. Danielle was sure an honest person could still figure out how to have lots of fun with it, but she didn’t need it. Listen at Doors was like Eavesdropping from level 1; it was better for spying than for privacy or safety. It would let her listen out in the walkway before leaving a room, but from the description, Bubble of Silence was a hard counter to it anyway. Illusionary Distraction was thus her first choice almost by default; it allowed her to make a non-transparent illusion that would start close to her and move away. It promised more control at higher levels, as so many Skills did, but for now it was severely limited by having to start very close to her position and move in a straight line. If she used Active Camoflage at the same time, though, maybe she could make someone think she’d run in a different direction than she was really going.

  The last choice was the real sticking point; Personal Silence was an upgrade to Bubble of Silence, at least for purposes of Danielle’s own movement. It wouldn’t be as good for general use though; it was definitely a sneaking Skill, not just a privacy Skill. Least Invisibility was pretty similar to Active Camouflage in some ways; it would only conceal Danielle rather than a sphere around her, and it had some protection against System detection, but that seemed redundant to the Trait she’d just chosen. It seemed like it might explain what happened with Vince the day of the miracle, though. Delicate Leap was a companion Skill to Step Light from first level; Danielle hadn’t taken Step Light – except she’d bought it from Agent Bea as a token. It occurred to Danielle that technically, it would’ve been cheaper to just advance it out of her unlocked skills. “Oops. That was dumb,” she muttered to herself.

  Delicate Leap would muffle the sound of her landing when she jumped, and reduce the footprints she made where she stepped off for the leap; if she used Step Light at the same time, and the ground was firm, she could theoretically run up to a stream, jump across, land, and run some more without making a sound or leaving a single footprint. She wasn’t sure it would allow her to be truly soundless if she was leaping down the metal stairs of the Rooms, though; the description said muffled not silent. “The question is, am I more worried about being tracked or about being heard walking around?” Danielle said.

  She was still contemplating the question when someone knocked on the door. She hastily selected Personal Silence and headed for the door, Regen Burst tokens still half-forgotten in her hand. She activated Hostility Sense; no result. Good enough. She cracked open the door and looked out on the faintly worried face of Lucas.

  “Good morning, Lucas,” she said, stepping back and opening the door further. “What’s up?”

  Lucas frowned at her. “Peter said you were acting really weird last night, and I should come see you before we leave and see if I can practice Weaken Disease on you,” he said. “How long have you had those spots on your arms?”

  “Arms?” Danielle looked down at her arms. Sure enough, she had perhaps a dozen more red spots. “Huh. I don’t know. It seems like it must be overnight, but that would mean the bugs biting me are in the room,” she admitted, worry infiltrating her own voice.

  “Are you ok with my trying out Weaken Disease? It might be more of a rash thing than insect bites,” Lucas said.

  “You can try,” Danielle said doubtfully. Were the spots really new? She’d been wearing her denim uniform all day, yesterday. Would she have noticed them?

  Lucas reached out and touched her shoulder, and she felt his Skill – a fiery Skill, she thought, though small. Tiny traceries of fire, imperceptible to her actual sense of touch; they didn’t exactly burn her new mana sense either, but fire was the flavor of them. They leapt and branched through her body – and her headache immediately began to ease.

  “Oh. Oh no,” Danielle said.

  Lucas looked downright anxious now. “What’s wrong? Did it hurt? Are you ok?”

  “It worked,” Danielle said, in tones of horror. “It was a disease. It’s not just random symptoms, there’s a for-real disease. It’s the epidemic.”

  Lucas chuckled, sounding relieved, and she frowned at him. “Don’t scare me that way, I thought it hurt you or something!” he said.

  “Oh – no, sorry. It’s just the epidemic thing – ” Danielle began, but Lucas waved the words away.

  “Calm down, calm down, it’s not an epidemic just because one person is a little sick,” he said. “Listen, you stay in today and rest, and – ”

  “No, you don’t understand,” Danielle interrupted him in turn. “I was talking with the Sending Authority people yesterday, and they said all the care package delivery people had to be quarantined before going Inside, because there were signs of an Outside disease in camp. She was hoping it was a false alarm, but everyone in camp was out with their whole buildings yesterday, and then all the building representatives – who stood in line and were in hand-shaking distance of literally everyone – we all got together in one place. If I’m sick, not just over-tired and over-exerted from using too much mana, then it’s not a false alarm and everyone is exposed.”

  Lucas had the grace to look a little worried, now, but he still said, “OK, I see why you’re concerned now, but I still think you’re jumping to conclusions. Let’s just take it one day at a time, ok? I’ll come back tomorrow and weaken your disease again, and you’ll get over it much faster.”

  Danielle bit her lip, thinking. “OK, thanks,” she finally said. “Let me pay you for your help, then.” She held out one of tokens in her hand to him.

  “Oh, thanks, but – ” he looked down at the token and gasped. “This is a Skill token! Where’d you even get this?!”

  “SHH!” Danielle hissed angrily. “Don’t shout about it!” She pulled him inside her room so she could shut the door, and activated Bubble of Silence. “Listen, you have to keep this secret,” she told him.

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