“That just leaves you, Ezra,” Gideon said. “Wanna tell everyone what you got?”

  “I dunno,” Ezra muttered. “You tell them.”

  “Oh, come on,” Gideon said. “You got good stuff! Just tell them, it’ll make you feel better.”

  “What’s wrong?” Akari asked.

  “Nothing,” Ezra said, leaning forward and hiding his head behind his sketch pad.

  Danielle raised an eyebrow at Gideon.

  He sighed. “We had a bad morning; I was in the shower and the other guys put Ezra in charge of soup, which is a bad fit for him as chores go, and something got burned a little, and some harsh words were said, and we came here to let everyone cool down.”

  “Are we talking, ‘tastes grilled’ levels of burned, or ‘I can’t eat that charcoal puck’ levels of burned?” Danielle asked.

  “I ate it just fine!” Ezra declared angrily from behind the sketch-pad wall.

  “He just burned some canned soup bits to the bottom of the can, no biggie, he traded Sam his uncooked can and ate the one with the stuck carrots himself, so no massive harm and he made it right,” Gideon assured them. “They really shouldn’t have just told him ‘watch the soup’ in the first place.”

  “I’m not too dumb to heat soup,” Ezra said in a much smaller voice.

  “You’re really not! You just haven’t done it before, and they didn’t give directions,” Gideon said.

  Akari raised an eyebrow at him, and he sighed. “Look, you need to understand, Ezra was thoroughly tested to be sure he could handle himself in a semi-independent living situation like the dorms. Twice, even! Once before Awakening school and once before middle school. He made a solid pass, both times, and he’s done fine in the dorms all four years. He’s not stupid, just – I dunno, kind of hyper-literal?”

  “Why did they have to do so much testing?” Danielle asked.

  “Well, I mean,” Gideon floundered a little, glancing towards Ezra.

  “I’m a retard,” Ezra said.

  “You are not!” Gideon said immediately. “You know you’re not!”

  “Wait, wait, you’re saying Ezra is, like, diagnosed developmentally disabled?” Danielle asked, trying to clarify.

  “Well, yeah. I mean, technically, so am I,” Gideon admitted.

  “You are?!” Akari blurted.

  “I have dyslexia, it slows my reading a lot,” Gideon said. “Ezra’s thing is less common and more complex, but at least he can read! His mom was going to homeschool him, but he passed his social function studies way too high, and they couldn’t afford the home mana management stuff without the disability stipend, so she settled for making real good and sure he knew how to read and study, and he’s been doing just fine!” he aimed that last at Ezra again.

  “Whoa. I did not know that about either of you,” Danielle said. “I knew who was in the tutoring program in our year, too.”

  “We both had to do a couple hours a week with a full up disability management tutor, but that wasn’t in the library like the normal tutoring stuff,” Gideon said. “Mostly, though, we just managed. Ezra’s parents took turns visiting him every weekend and helping him catch up on stuff, I learned a bunch of tools and tricks to get through required readings (plus I got useful Career Skills in school and used them every single day), and neither of us was in advanced track classes, but we both did OK.”

  “Mom and Dad held me back a year and found Gideon through church and made him my babysitter,” Ezra said from behind his sketch pad. “I mean, most of the time he’s more like a friend, but mom never stopped reminding me that if he said I needed to do something or, or whatever, I needed to listen to him, because he was strong where I was weak and I had to let him help me.”

  “She said we had to help each other,” Gideon objected. “Seriously, guys, you have no idea how many hours Ezra spent reading stuff to me in school – especially Awakening school, before I got Text to Sound. Even then, though, with only a few mana per day and lots of pages to read,” he trailed off and shook his head.

  “People never expect me to read good,” Ezra said. “I do, though.”

  “Don’t you even start with the kiddie-talk, Ezra!” Gideon said stridently. “I mean it, we are not doing this! So Sam said something mean to you, fine, that was wrong and he owes you an apology, but you are not going to have a meltdown over one nasty sentence!”

  “It sounds like you kind of got advanced practice at being Sent,” Danielle said, leaning on the counter next to Gideon. She belatedly realized she could have set her bag down at any time during the conversation, and put it on the counter.

  Ezra finally lay down his sketchpad on his knees again, so he could stare at her. “How is any of that like being Sent?” he asked, as Danielle started pulling canteens out of her bag.

  “You got sent away from your family when you expected to be able to stay, and forced to just handle stuff nobody was really sure if you even could handle,” Danielle said. “Now, that’s what it’s like for all of us, in some ways at least. We’re sent away, and we have to handle life and food and freaking mana diseases, and we are way too young for this, they don’t really know if we can do it – how could they, they never send people our age, this is new! But we’re working together, and we’re handling it, and just because it’s not the same doesn’t mean we won’t, you know, endure and come out of it well enough. Have you customized your Decision Day canteen yet, by the way?”

  “What??” Ezra scrunched up his face in confusion. “Canteen? When did we start talking about canteens?”

  “Sorry, I was changing the subject,” Danielle said. “Too fast?”

  “I, uh,” Ezra looked to Gideon.

  “Did you understand what she was saying before she started in on canteens?” Gideon asked.

  “I think so?” Ezra said doubtfully. Gideon made a ‘go on’ gesture with one hand, and Ezra continued uncertainly, “She was saying going to school was hard and they thought I could do it but they couldn’t be sure, but I worked with you and together we handled it. Now we’re outside, and its hard and they think we can do it but they can’t be sure, but if we all work together, we’ll handle it, like you and me handled school?”

  “Yes, exactly,” Gideon said. “It’s like a bigger version of the same thing.”

  “I’m not sure it’s that much alike,” Ezra said.

  “Well, give it a month in the hunting party and see what you think then,” Danielle said. “For now, though, I really do want to know if you’ve made any changes to your canteen yet.”

  “Why would I change my canteen?” Ezra asked. “How would I change it??”

  “I don’t know, you’re the artist,” Danielle said. “I figure sooner or later, you’ll figure out how to do art to it, or else cover it with something you can do art on.”

  “Oh. That’s how I did it back in school,” Ezra said. “Mom made me these quilted covers, and I painted them with fabric paints, and they kept bottled drinks cold longer. I miss those. All we have here is warm water, and I hate warm water.” He tipped over the canteen by his knee with one finger, and hid behind his sketchbook again.

  “Oh, we are about to make your day,” Akari said.

  “Using, um, every canteen you girls own, apparently?” Gideon asked.

  “We-ell, we might own more canteens than normal,” Danielle said. “That’s a story we’ll have to tell you tomorrow, though, because we agreed with the other girls to have the whole party meeting where we finally catch you guys up on some of our secrets tomorrow. Heather was just too tired to come out again today, for one thing. But! Since you all know about Sunday night already, it might not shock you to learn that I asked if I could buy a bottle that made water cold, what with being feverish and thirsty and them trying to figure out anything they could pay me with besides mana.”

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  “Is that why they were selling you all those Skill tokens?” Tom asked.

  Danielle rocked her hand back and forth. “Yes and no, but more no than yes; the Ranger Healers said since eating mana foods would make me sicker, faster, the Sending Authority wasn’t allowed to make me eat mana food unless I could get enough recently added abilities to make one for every point of production I normally have, preferably one and a half. Um, by which I mean, three new abilities for every two points of production.”

  “So you had to take nine skills Sunday night?? No wait. You’ve got the Mana Enhancement thing, right? So, uh. Eighteen? I think?” Tom calculated.

  “Well, I didn’t have to take them all that very night; it just had to be since Thursday, since they’re pretty sure that’s when we got exposed to the pox,” Danielle said. “Lucky for me, and everyone who wanted to take Boost Recovery last ni- I mean, Sunday night (can’t believe I just did that), um, the lucky thing was that I actually had a little mana from an earlier, smaller token sale when we went to the Access Point. I took a Trait and a few Skills there, and then on Saturday they bought some more tokens and I went and took a Class and added a few more things then, too. Which means by Sunday I’d already taken most of the abilities I needed to get up to the ‘one for every point of generation’ level; and to make the Boost Recovery tokens, I already had to take Boost Recovery.”

  “Oh, wow. But they didn’t just give you Boost Recovery, they gave you all four of the recovery kit tokens,” Zephyr said. “They decided to go for the ‘three for every two’ level of massive Skill infusion? Oh! Oh, System strengthen me, I’ve heard of this! They were treating you like a newly elected government official!”

  “What? Like a town council member, maybe?” Tom asked.

  “No, because they definitely didn’t do that for the rest of us,” Gideon countered.

  “Guys, I’m talking like president and vice president,” Zephyr said. “It’s not a big public thing, but they make them go outside to get inoculated for a couple serious diseases that they can’t do Inside for some reason, and they give them a whole bunch of new abilities when they do, because it supposedly protects them from the big jump in mana.”

  “I think the serious diseases they get exposed to when they do that include mana pox,” Danielle said. “The Healers were saying they actually give ‘the big three’ to elected leaders – state and union leaders. Supposedly the thing with taking lots of new abilities makes for an easier recovery from mana pox and the speeds, which apparently is something we have to look forward to.”

  “And they decided to do that for you, too?” Zephyr asked, incredulous.

  “They decided that if I was going to eat mana foods when I already had one of those two diseases, I needed that to balance out the way it was going to make the disease worse. Considering I still ended up so delirious I can’t even remember anything for three whole days, I’m glad they insisted on it,” Danielle said. “I did have to pay for all the tokens I used, full normal price and everything. They just took it out of my pay for actually making the tokens I was making for them, though.”

  “Oh. Did you actually make any money, then?” Jordan asked.

  Danielle sighed. “I made a lot of mana,” she said. “I set aside half of it to make cheap tokens for people in Camp Constanza, and I still had a lot of mana. Hence the cooler bottle, which will probably end up in our hunting party’s org room once it’s safe to admit we have one. For right now, though, I just filled up a nice normal Sending Authority style insulated canteen for each of you, with actually cold water. Trade me your other canteen so you don’t get caught with extra canteens you can’t explain without breaking the party secrets rule, OK?”

  “Oh! Yes, OK!” Ezra said. He got up and took his canteen to the sink to pour it out, then traded it to Danielle for one that she’d brought. She stashed the empty in her bag again, and Ezra immediately took a long drink.

  The look on his face when he lowered the canteen was almost comically blissful. “That felt so good,” he said. “Is it secret?”

  “I’m afraid so,” Danielle said. “I really don’t want everyone in camp to find out I’m buying enhanced stuff from the Rangers and get jealous.”

  “I’ll take your secret to my grave,” he said. “I hope we can do this secret swap to get actual cold water a lot more now that I’m a member of the party though.”

  Danielle chuckled. “I’m sure we will. We’ll all have to suffer warm water sometimes, anyway, because it’s big for a water bottle but it’s still not big enough to fill regular sized bottles for the whole party all at once. We can probably do one a day, if we plan right, though. We’ll just have party water bottles, and everyone will swap for a new one in the morning, before we head out for whatever that day’s business is. The next day, those come back and you get the ones from the day before again.”

  “I’m intrigued by the implication that you also bought at least ten extra regular water bottles,” Zephyr said. “Were you already planning this system Sunday night?”

  “Um, no. We didn’t buy the water bottles, we got them by gaming the rules about Geardump Hill,” Danielle said. “The Rangers specifically forbade us from telling people outside our hunting party about that, though, as part of the condition for being let to get away with it.”

  “So, party secret?” Jordan said sardonically. “You have a lot of those.”

  “Yep, party secret,” Akari confirmed.

  “Between you, me, and the singing walls, we have way too many of those – but you’ve got ‘em too, Jordan, you’re a part of this party!” Danielle said.

  “The singing walls?” Ezra asked.

  “I hear the wards with Mana Sense,” Danielle told him.

  “Oh. That makes sense,” he said, and took another drink of water.

  Gideon laughed. “Sure. Why not? She hears the wards with Mana Sense. How else would you hear the wards?”

  Ezra looked at him suspiciously. “Does it not make sense?” he asked.

  “It makes sense, it’s just so unusual it’s, like,” Gideon gestured vaguely. “It’s like – I don’t know what it’s like. I keep wanting to say it’s like Sending 14- and 15-year-olds, except here we all are, or it’s like someone having three Classes, but hey, we know Zephyr! What even counts as being too unusual to be realistic, anymore?”

  “Gideon, whatever it is, don’t tempt the System to give it to me,” Danielle said. “I am so tired of people telling me I’m impossible.”

  Zephyr gulped the last mouthful of water from his canteen and held it out to Danielle to exchange. She passed him a full one, then did the same for Jordan, who had squeezed past to give his a quick wash. Tom offered his next. Gideon quickly drank off his own, and exchanged it, completing the set. Danielle packed the empties all back into her bag.

  “Anyway. I’m obviously bringing a lot of resources to the party right now, but I think it’s important to still remember that rule Ranger Miriam gave our room the first day: don’t let anyone make you dependent on them for food. That goes for water and Skills and everything else, too; the enhanced canteen makes water cold, but it doesn’t purify it, and it’s only two liters at a time anyway. I could theoretically buy ludicrous amounts of pemmican, but I’m not, not even just for myself. I’m working on my proper survival Skills, and so are my party members,” Danielle said. “So I’m glad you all got good Skills from the pox.”

  “Ezra, you still haven’t said what yours are,” Gideon reminded him.

  “Oh, yeah,” Ezra said. “I got Find Edible Plant, so that’s a good survival Skill. Also Calligraphy, which is just kind of weird, but I guess it’s from leftover Academy Student stuff. I used to try calligraphy on report cover pages and stuff. I never got very good at it though, people found it hard to read. Even people who didn’t have dyslexia.”

  “Maybe it’d work better as a fancy embellishment on something that is more for being artistic than for being read. Like, you could make new water bottle bags for yourself using the sewing tools in the catalog, and put your name on them in super fancy calligraphy; everyone would know they were yours by the fanciness even if they had trouble with the letters,” Akari said.

  “The catalog has that stuff? Fabric paints and everything?” Ezra asked. “I didn’t notice it.”

  “It has fabric that comes with matching thread,” Danielle said. “You’d have to figure out paints yourself, so that part would be a winter project. I bet you could try out embroidery though – either ask for two contrasting colors or go for subtle texture-focused stuff. The first one would be kind of a learning piece, but hey, it’d be uniquely yours, and come fall if you enjoyed it you could get more materials and try for something better.”

  “In between finding edible plants?” Ezra asked.

  “Oh, for sure. Nobody’s mana lasts forever, though. We all need things to do when our Skills are on hold for mana generation,” Danielle said. “Speaking of which! I need to go see the Rangers in the tent, but after that, Akari really wants to head home. I have mana I want to spend on temperature checks, though, so I was wondering if any of you are feeling well enough to go with me, assuming the Rangers don’t decide to keep me busy until dark anyway? You know, so I’m not alone if someone like Vince decides to jump me.”

  “I could,” Jordan said. “Are you sure you don’t want to head home, though? I mean, if you were still delirious and stuff just yesterday.”

  “People might need checked on tonight,” Danielle said. “Earlier, we almost skipped the last couple rooms on our floor because we were tired and Heather was out of mana, but I had enough mana to finish, so we found someone who really needed to go to the Ranger clinic and got her picked up so she can be taken care of. I know there’s less Healers in camp than the SA expected, and their plan for making sure we could handle most of this ourselves called for the Healers to step up and act like adult professionals, right?”

  “Yeah, I remember that part of the script,” Zephyr said. “That, and expecting us to all take care of each other, like that was just a given.”

  “Right. So if I have time, I’ll be asking the Rangers if they know any buildings that have gaps in their Healer coverage, if you see what I mean,” Danielle said.

  “That’s very noble of you and all,” Zephyr replied, “but I really think you should focus on taking care of yourself. Also, we really are all tired.”

  “I’ll go along with you and Jordan if Ezra can stay here with our party while I’m out,” Gideon said. “I don’t want to leave him alone with Sam and John again, and he’s not enough of a fighter for me to suggest he come with us if it’s basically a ‘defend the Healer’ situation.”

  “I could sketch water bottle cover ideas,” Ezra said. “Or try out calligraphy where I try to make it fancier instead of more readable.”

  “Or both!” Tom said. “Supper’s over anyway, so you can hang out as long as you want.”

  Akari groaned. “OK, fine, you win Danielle. Let’s go see what the Rangers want, and if they don’t nix the whole plan, we’ll let Jordan and Gideon practice being defenders. But as soon as we’re all healthy, I want you to give them the same bodyguard training lesson as you gave me!”

  Danielle laughed. “Now that’s just mean,” she said with a wink. “Come on, you three, let’s go see what the Rangers have to say.”

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