“Don’t you want to be on the council?” Jordan asked.

  “I wasn’t planning to be my building’s nominee from the Society,” Danielle said with an awkward shrug. “The person I actually nominated didn’t get voted in, but I did. Feels backwards.” She yawned. “Also I’m super tired, which is never good for perspective on things that stress you out,” she admitted ruefully.

  “I hate to say it, but I’m starting to see why you didn’t want to be in an interest group with Vanessa. Do you know what her problem is, with your illusions?” Gideon asked.

  “Yeah, kind of. It started with her being jealous because I awakened early,” Danielle said. She leaned back so she wouldn’t have to crane her neck at him so much. “If you’re going to stay standing up, can you step back a step? My head hurts already, and now it’s going to my neck.”

  “Aren’t you getting up?” Gideon asked. “It’s time to find a picnic spot and stuff. You’re too close to the fire to stay here while everyone cooks.”

  “Oh. I was kind of planning to stay put, but if I’m too close, I guess I can get up. Maybe I can find Angela while I’m up already, and then I can sit somewhere nice and out of the way and not move until it’s time to go back,” Danielle said, unfolding her legs and starting to stand up. It wasn’t that her body wouldn’t move, it was just that her body didn’t want to move. “I feel ridiculous. Do I look ridiculous? I actually checked my Interface for status effects, and there’s nothing, but it still just feels like it’s unreasonably exhausting to move.”

  “You look tired, mostly,” Gideon said. “Are you all right, though?”

  “I’m coming down with something,” Danielle said. “Lucas weakened it – do you know Lucas? Healer guy? Rooms with Peter?”

  “Yeah, I know Lucas. What did he weaken now?” Gideon asked.

  “The disease,” Danielle said, looking around. “I think Brooke has it too – remember how wobbly she was after the meeting? – and the Sending Authority people were saying they were seeing enough hints that they couldn’t let the Insider delivery people go back inside without checking them for Outside diseases, because there might be an epidemic. That means it probably wasn’t just the two of us. That’s why I need Angela – I picked up a few copies of something that’ll help Healers if there is an epidemic – that’s a secret, by the way. I’d say party secret, but we’ve only got the one Healer in the party, and that’s not enough.”

  “Hm. Well, there are more Healers than just Angela here,” Gideon said. “Nathan for one, that was at the prayer meeting last week; and Louis Cork from the our school – he was in the older class, but you’d know him if you ever came to CYC,” Gideon said, looking around.

  “I will allow you to introduce me to Louis and one other Healer you trust to keep secrets, on condition that you don’t bring up my prior refusal to share a room with my worst enemy again. Um, again today, at least,” Danielle said.

  “Your worst enemy? You mean Vince?” Jordan asked.

  Danielle laughed. “I barely knew Vince in school. He might qualify as my worst enemy now, not sure. Vanessa was worst until the Sending, though.”

  Jordan gave Danielle a very skeptical look. “Vince is only maybe your worst enemy?”

  “Well, the Wolf Pack leadership might be worse. And Vanessa’s enemy-ship might last longer.” Danielle scanned the crowd again. “I’m so tired. I’m sure I said that wrong, but my brain won’t produce the right word.”

  “Enmity,” Ezra supplied. “Are you looking for the Angela that went to the Access Point with us? She’s over there.”

  Danielle followed his pointing finger. “Ah-ha! Yes, that Angela. Excuse me, I’ll be marching that way until I catch up with her now. You can introduce your two select Healers after that.”

  Danielle pulled around her satchel and pretended to be rummaging in it; really, she slipped another 300-mana token out of the token pouch and converted it into three more Regen Burst Skill tokens while she walked, keeping her hands hidden in the satchel while she worked. Finally, she said, “There they are,” as if she’d just found something, and put the three tokens in her pocket.

  “Danielle, I mean this in the best way, but you’re a lousy liar,” Jordan said from behind her.

  Danielle jumped and spun like a cat that had just heard a vacuum cleaner entering the room. “Jordan, so help me, just because I get that the real enemy is Vince, that doesn’t make it OK for you to sneak up behind me,” Danielle said, adrenalin turning her pulse audible in her ears. She was suddenly very aware of her staff, with only one enhancement-song infusing it, and added Flash Shield.

  Jordan was looking down, rubbing the back of his neck awkwardly. “I’m sorry, I didn’t think – I mean, I was just sticking with you, I thought you knew I was here, and – I’m sorry.”

  Danielle forced herself to take long deep breaths, and not short fast panicky ones. “Look, you’re forgiven. I mean that. It’s just that in the part of my brain that is taking notes on all the things in this new environment that could kill me if I’m not careful, ‘guys who sneak up behind me’ is looming pretty large, you know? Right there next to ‘guys who sneak up under invisibility’ and ‘giant wildcats.’ Plus, forgiveness is kind of a fake-it-till-you-make-it thing, you know? It’s like, you decide to forgive even though you don’t feel like it, because of course you don’t feel like it, feelings almost never work that way. So you just keep reminding yourself that you decided, right? Which is fine, as long as you have time to remind yourself; but right now, anyone that sneaks up and startles me has about a 50/50 chance of a staff to the gut, so I’m just saying, sneak around if you gotta, but don’t sneak up on me.”

  “Um, OK, I think I get it. Sorry anyway, though.” Jordan said. He still looked sad and tired and stressed, though.

  Danielle clapped him on the shoulder. “Look, walk next to me, all right? And try not to convince the System I need acting Skills. I really don’t actually want to keep this secret forever, I’m just – there’s too much going on, and too many people around that I can’t trust. Maybe less right here and right now, but I don’t know that for sure, so fine, maybe I’m not fooling people much. As long as the dangerous people don’t figure out the whole truth, though, it’s definitely still safer than just not even trying to keep stuff under wraps.”

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  “I can’t decide if I’m more scared for you, or scared of you,” Jordan said. Seeing as he was still walking next to her, though, Danielle thought the answer was obvious.

  “Not sure why’d you be scared of me in the first place,” Danielle said. “I mean, you literally tried to kill me in front of my friends, and here you still are, so what’s to be scared of after that?”

  “Vince has a broken leg,” Jordan said.

  “What does that have to do with – oh. So it was him, last night?” Danielle asked.

  “He asked the Wolves to call a Healer that could deal with it, and Wolf Alpha tore him a new one. The whole building could hear it, again. That guy likes to yell, and eventually Vince starts yelling back – says what’s he supposed to do when the pack tells him he’s not allowed to advance until he takes you, and you’re unkillable? Wolf Alpha says what is his lousy stealth Skill for, and he says you can see through stealth, and he dares anyone to prove otherwise,” Jordan reported.

  “I’m really not unkillable,” Danielle said.

  “You sure about that?” Jordan asked, looking at her intently. Then he stumbled, because she was still moving, and he wasn’t watching where he was going. “Ack. Sorry. Um, but seriously – this is what, the third time he’s tried for you? Fourth, even?”

  “He’s just incompetent,” Danielle said. “Well, and I might be able to detect him through stealth now. It’s not exactly seeing.”

  “So you can sense someone through stealth well enough to break their leg, and if anyone gets too close, bam, miracle. Yet you’re not unkillable?” Jordan prodded.

  “I’m not counting on repeat miracles,” Danielle said. “Not ones that obvious, anyway. Would you call it a miracle if completely unrelated business lands me in the right place to hear about an epidemic that might be about to hit camp, and it just so happens that my unrelated business also makes it possible for me to do something to help deal with the epidemic?”

  “I dunno, sounds like a coincidence,” Jordan said uncertainly.

  “Eh, maybe. It was a couple of stacking coincidences that came in exactly the right order at exactly the right time. I bet the combined probability of it happening by true chance is pretty darn low,” Danielle said.

  “So this is one of those ‘God doesn’t play dice with the universe’ things?” Jordan asked.

  “It’s one of those things where, if you keep rolling the top number again and again, at some point you start asking if the ‘dice’ are really random,” Danielle said. “We’re there, let’s leave this for later. Hi Angela!”

  Four girls were sitting around a picnic blanket that was really a beach towel. Danielle wondered how many ‘beach towels’ ever got used on real beaches; she’d never questioned the term before, but really, they were more ‘swimming pool’ towels in actual use. Pulling back from that distraction, though, the roommates were Lucy (who helped lead the prayer time), Angela (the Healer), Tina (the one who panicked over deer having horns, if Danielle recalled correctly), and one more girl whose name Danielle had never caught.

  “Hi Danielle. Um, you look rough,” Angela said. “Do you need Healing or something?”

  “Or something,” Danielle said. “Listen, this might seem like a weird time for a personality quiz, but would you say you’re best at finding out secrets, keeping secrets, or knowing exactly where and when to share secrets?”

  “Um, keeping I guess,” Angela said. “I like to help people out when they need someone to talk to, and you can’t do that if you can’t keep stuff confidential.”

  “It’s so unfair,” Tina added. “She knows all the best gossip, and she almost never tells.”

  “Perfect!” Danielle said, not trying to hide her relief. “Let’s find somewhere I can put up a privacy Skill without catching any gossip collectors in it, and have a quick talk.”

  “Way to go, Tina,” said the fourth girl; Tina frankly pouted.

  Angela got up and made a ‘come along’ gesture to Danielle, heading for the edge of the meadow, further from the river. Danielle waited until her Skill had plenty of space, then said, “This is good. Let me activate my Skill.”

  She activated Bubble of Silence, and glanced back to be sure Jordan hadn’t followed her again; to her amusement and relief, she saw him blocking Tina from following. She waved at Tina, who stuck her tongue out and flopped back down at the edge of the towel. Jordan looked over his shoulder, and she gave him a thumbs-up.

  “Tina’s a little bit incorrigible when it comes to gossip,” Angela said. “She’s mostly a really nice person, though.”

  “I’ll have to take your word for it,” Danielle said. “Gossip does a lot of damage, most of the time. Even when I was kind of relying on it to spread the warning about not leveling too fast, people who heard it from gossips just assumed it’s a rumor and now we have those stupid wanna-be armies.”

  “How do you know it’s not just a rumor, though?” Angela asked.

  “I heard it directly from the Rangers!” Danielle said, failing to contain her exasperation. “Why would they lie about something like that? A lot of them are former Sent, if it was just a conspiracy you’d think they’d be the last people to join it!”

  “They’re keeping a lot of secrets, though, aren’t they?” Angela asked again.

  “I’m keeping a lot of secrets; most of them because I’m afraid of people killing me or kidnapping me or something. You’re keeping a lot of secrets too, unless you just lied to me! Sometimes there are good actual reasons for keeping secrets!” Danielle exclaimed.

  Angela sighed. “Look, what’s this all about? You didn’t call me over here and spend mana on a Skill just to rant about the leveling-speed rumor, right?”

  “It’s not a rumor,” Danielle insisted. “It’s the difference between going back Inside someday or being locked out forever! Plus, the thing I did come here for is also something I heard from the – well, the Sending Authority, technically, and it’s something I put together from stuff I overheard (plus some evidence I got directly) rather than stuff that was directly told to me as a warning, so if you can’t take a warning seriously when it’s an official warning, there’s not much point going forward with an unofficial one!”

  Angela frowned. “I don’t know about that. Evidence you got directly is definitely not rumor-like. Can you walk me through it?”

  Danielle frowned back, but reluctantly said, “Yeah, all right. So this first data point is strictly a secret right now, OK? Fact: The Sending Authority sticks to their rule about letting Sent do stuff Outside when it has to do with Sent people or territory or whatever, and so do the Rangers. They stick to that rule so hard, that when they found out I had a rare Skill, they started paying me to use it for them even though I’m only level 1 – in the Skill, I mean – and they theoretically have access to higher level practitioners.”

  Angela raised her eyebrows. “That’s a pretty big claim. What Skill?”

  “That I’m not saying even with the silence up,” Danielle said. “It’s not important to the next part, which is, while I was doing work for them yesterday, I overheard a Ranger and two Agents talking about needing to set up quarantine for the care package delivery people before they – the delivery guys – went back Inside. The reason they gave for this was that they were seeing signs of Outside-specific illnesses around camp, and there was a chance it could be an epidemic. The senior agent told the junior one that new Sent usually have three epidemics their first year, but sometimes one holds off until year two.”

  Angela went pale. “That’s definitely news,” she said.

  “Unless it’s just a rumor,” Danielle said caustically.

  “Uh, right. But they weren’t telling this to you, they were telling it to each other?” Angela asked.

  “It started with that, yeah. I did ask a question about why they needed to quarantine the delivery guys, which is when she said the part about ‘seeing just enough symptoms around camp.’ At that time, the agent in question was acting like she didn’t think it was really the epidemic starting, but she had to make sure, because she couldn’t risk it happening Inside, too. She acted like it was just a part of the process for Sent, but a big deal for Inside. I don’t know why.”

  “That’s a little unnerving,” Angela said. “So the warning is that three epidemics are coming probably this year, just not right now?”

  “It would be, except one of the other counselors was so tired and wobbly at the end of the council meeting yesterday that she literally couldn’t walk straight,” Danielle said. “I wasn’t doing so well either, and when another Healer friend of mine tried his Weaken Disease on me this morning, it did something. Ergo, I have a real disease, and so does the other councilor, and both of our entire buildings, at least, have been exposed.”

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