“Are you feeling better, Danielle?” Cassy asked. She looked tired, like maybe she hadn’t slept very well; for one thing, she was actually leaning on her staff.

  “I am. I had some mana issues I had to straighten out, that’s – what am I doing, you four are the ones I can actually tell stuff to,” Danielle corrected herself. “Let me just activate Bubble of Silence – there. I accidentally leveled my Basic Sneak Class yesterday, using Active Camouflage to go meet the Rangers and the SA without letting on to the whole rest of camp. I didn’t realize I’d done it until this morning, so I had unresolved level-up decisions riding with me from maybe two or three o’clock yesterday afternoon until this morning. Ranger Flo says unresolved Class decisions are bad for you, because it’s loose mana in your body.

  “I think that’s what was making me so dizzy and stuff – at least part of the problem. Another part is that I took Trait: Mana Sense, and let me tell you, it is not the same as Mana Sight. Oh, and while I was in the access point, I thought it would be a good idea to take Light Shaper. I only found out afterwards that taking multiple Classes too close together can make it so your System takes a long time to get the new Class all the way set up, and since I just took Field Medic on Thursday, and then I took Light Shaper and a bunch of Skills all at the same time, well. That’s why they didn’t think I was actually sick. They figured I was dizzy from System overload, and made me promise not to use any of the new stuff for a few days until it had time to settle in.” Danielle explained.

  “So you have three Classes now, but one of them is already level 2, and less useful for level-up protection,” Akari summarized. “You’re not in danger of mutation just from taking too many things, though, right?”

  “I don’t think so. They didn’t say anything about that, but it all came through the System, and preventing mutations seems to kind of be what the System does, right?” Danielle said. “Besides, they would have said something if that was an issue. I mean, this is Ranger Flo we’re talking about.”

  “This evening, when we get back, we really should slow down and go over this stuff a little slower and with more detail,” Heather said. “It feels like ever since we went out deer hunting, everything’s been happening so fast and we’ve had so little time to talk in private, I can’t even keep up with what’s going on with you.”

  “Yeah. I feel like I can barely keep up with myself right now,” Danielle admitted. “I want to go to the prayer meeting, and obviously we’ll be staying for at least part of the hangout and cooking lunch, but I really kind of want to get home early and maybe take another nap this afternoon, because I really need some extra rest.”

  “Let’s go,” Sadie said. “We can play it by ear once lunch is done. Napping there might work too.”

  Danielle nodded. “True. Let’s go.”

  They weren’t quite the last people to reach the end of the road, but not many were behind them. Some people were sitting on the ground, waiting, but Akari pointed out that the last people they’d gone to awaken were coming down from their buildings, so Danielle stayed standing. She didn’t want to sit down only to have to get up right away; it wouldn’t feel worth it.

  Danielle listened to the casual talk swirling around her. Some people had gone on ahead to start the fire; people discussing it were happy that it would already be going by the time they got there. Some people were already planning to fish in the river during the prayer meeting. Some people were excitedly telling people about how many fish they’d caught yesterday with the new hooks and lines provided in the care packages. Someone was complaining that the council hadn’t put anything into the charter about keeping waste meat away from camp; Danielle started paying more attention when they said, “There’s been another one of those big wildcats spotted – twice, even! Maybe. It could just be the same rumor coming around from two directions, but I don’t think so. The details are different.”

  Danielle started a new list in her Planner – “Things to bring up to the council.” She made the first entry, “Wildcat issues.” She was just starting to try and figure out who had actually said that, when Peter stood up and announced that everyone they were expecting was there, and it was time to move out.

  The walk to the good spot by the river was a bit long, but with the big group around her, Danielle allowed herself to just follow along in the stream of people. She didn’t close her eyes this time, but she did pay attention to her other senses a bit more than usual. She listened to swirls of conversations; she listened to footsteps and rustling clothing and creaking bags; she listened to the forest rustling in its own, distinctively different way. Birds chirped and fluttered (away from the humans). Small animals rushed away in sudden bursts of disturbed underbrush, or small clawed scrabblings up trees. Danielle listened to their movements, and she listened to their mana. A fair percentage of the small fleeing things had whispers of stealthy mana around them; others had speedy mana; and a lucky few had both.

  They took a diagonal path toward the river again. Someone had actually blazed a trail; Danielle wasn’t sure what the paint was. It almost looked like nail polish, but she couldn’t imagine a single bottle having enough for all the blazes she’d seen, and they were all the same color. An hour into the walk, she realized that she was, in fact, a little hungry and also getting light-headed again, and started eating her breakfast jerky with the cheese from the council’s bagged dinners. It was an amusing cheese; tasty, with an echoing hint of goats bleating in Mana Sense, which made Danielle smile. It also provided two mana, which seemed like it could only be a good thing after emptying both her pools the day before.

  When they arrived, they found at least twice as many people already sitting around the wide meadow as were walking with group. Danielle thought she (or the person she’d overheard) had missed something; while there was a nice fire going on the pebbly beach, this many people had definitely not come ahead just to start the fire. It had to be nearly a hundred people altogether this time – maybe more than a hundred!

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  To Danielle’s intense relief, Peter took charge this week. He opened with one of the very old songs, called “It Is Well With My Soul.” Danielle had heard and sung the song before, but there was something new and interesting about singing “when peace like a river attends me on my way” while sitting next to an actual river. She’d never had a good sense of what a real river was like before she came Outside.

  Then he opened it up to others to share songs. Some people chose songs older than mana, others chose songs that had been written by struggling survivors during the dangerous years of the Spread, when many people weren’t sure the human race was going to survive. Still others chose new songs from Inside songwriters. Some led popular songs that nearly everyone knew; a few chose to share songs they had to sing by themselves. Danielle sang along when she knew a song and listened quietly when she didn’t, like everyone else. While a fair number of people had taken themselves off to the side or to the river, there were still easily sixty to eighty people participating, and with such a large group, there were a lot more songs to share.

  Peter was trying to move to the next thing when someone asked, “Wait, did sai- did Danielle share a song?”

  Danielle tried not to let her frustration show on her face. Couldn’t they just let her be on the sidelines for a day? Although, now that she thought about it, she did have a song she could share. She reluctantly stood up, and said, “This is one of the older-than-mana songs, and I felt a little awkward sharing it because I don’t know if anyone else will know it; but since you asked, let’s try Word of God Speak.”

  “I'm finding myself at a loss for words,” she began singing, “And the funny thing is it's okay/ The last thing I need is to be heard/ But to hear what You would say – Word of God speak! Would you pour down like rain/ washing my eyes to see/ your majesty/ to be still and know/ that you’re here even in this place/ please let me stay and rest/ in your holiness,” a few people were singing along with her, which was good, because she was choking up just a little. Fortunately, it wasn’t a very long song, and the chorus repeated. A lot of people joined in the second time, and Danielle repeated the first verse and the chorus one more time just to let everyone who was catching on get a full verse in. It felt a little funny to sing about being at a loss for words when some of them were insisting she ‘speak,’ but then, maybe not so funny after all.

  “That’s actually a good transition,” Peter said as she sat down. “This week we’re going to add a new element to the meeting. We have a copy of the book of Mark that one of our brothers copied out by hand in the time between the Necessities Store trip and the actual Sending, and he has graciously allowed me to copy out a chapter to read this week. We’ll talk about letting some people with the Transcribe Skill make more copies after the catalog fair – I encourage anyone who is interested to pick up a notebook and a pack of pens for it. However, we’ll also be reading a chapter every week here at the prayer meetings. So, without further ado, the word of God from the Gospel of Mark, chapter one.”

  The Gospel of Mark was concise – chapter one was packed with short sections, just a few sentences each, about John the Baptist, and Jesus’s time getting started with teaching and healing, and gathering disciples. Near the end of the chapter, there was a spot where it said, “Very early in the morning, while it was still dark, Jesus got up, left the house and went off to a solitary place, where he prayed. Simon and his companions went to look for him, and when they found him, they exclaimed: “Everyone is looking for you!” ” Danielle felt a new sympathy for Jesus; though she doubted the way ‘everyone’ seemed to be looking for her the last few days could compare to how it had been after Jesus publicly healed whole crowds of people.

  Beside her, Sadie quietly commented, “These days, he’d just be another classed Healer in a hospital.”

  Danielle looked at her, trying to figure out how to convey why that comment was so wrong. “If he had come during these days, he wouldn’t do little tier 2 and 3 healings when he was stepping up to prove he was God,” she said. “He did it then because when there was no mana, he was the only one who could do it. If his first coming was now, he’d do something that’s impossible for us now.”

  “Like changing people’s Systems?” Sadie asked, still quietly, so as not to disrupt Peter and the larger group as they started going through the prayer.

  Danielle thought about it another minute while Peter and Lucy and someone she couldn’t put a name to prayed about God as the Father in heaven. “Maybe he’d find people with damaged Systems and repair them; or remove mutations,” she suggested. “Healing mutations seems like it would fit all the pieces of what he was doing – helping people, but also proving he could do things that only God could do, and fulfilling prophecies. I guess if he had been coming in our time, the prophecies would’ve been a little different, but it’s close enough for a hypothetical version.”

  Sadie went “hmm,” and turned her attention back to the prayer, and so did Danielle. Again, however, with so many more people there, the number of people who spoke up in any one section got larger, and thus the whole thing got longer, and Danielle found her mind drifting a bit. She prayed silently over each distraction, turning them over to God and bringing her attention back to the group prayer – she prayed for protection from the epidemic, in general and especially for the people there with her and most especially for her roommates. She prayed for protection from wildcats. She prayed for the success of the town council in making a town people could live in safely. Several times, she came back around again to how overwhelmed she felt with all the extra responsibilities that had come her way in the last two days, and simply prayed “God I can’t handle this – help me!”

  The prayer ended without any particularly clear answer to that, of course. Immediately afterward, though, as people were rearranging and enlarging the fire and getting ready to cook, Jordan came up to her from somewhere else in the crowd. Tom, Gideon, and Ezra trailed him, which suggested that they’d come together, or at least they sat together. Part of Danielle’s brain was instantly thinking of hunting-party food supplies and whether or not she should’ve found and sat with them as soon as they arrived. Another part, though, was thinking that Jordan’s presence with the party was proof that God absolutely was helping her with things she couldn’t handle. What could the council throw at her that was scarier than being attacked from behind and held at knifepoint? What social situation was more awkward than looking at her own would-be murderer and realizing she needed to help him stay alive?

  Jordan noticed her staring at him. “Didn’t you think I’d be here? Pretty sure I’m only alive because of a miracle,” he told her with a lopsided grin. “Seems like it’d be ungrateful not to at least show up.”

  Danielle smiled back. “I was thinking that if God could handle that, and end up with us working together, then I’m being kind of petty acting like just being on the town council somehow means my life is out of control.”

  Jordan cocked his head at her curiously. “Don’t you want to be on the council?” he asked.

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