Danielle activated Infrasight, then got up on her knees in bed and ran her hand along the footboard. The messenger – the angel, was beyond all of her available senses, but she was reasonably certain he hadn’t gone somewhere else, exactly. “Back behind the veil, I guess,” she whispered to herself. She tried to check the time, but her watch face wasn’t particularly legible in the faint infra-light of her own face and the equally faint, uniform radiance of being the same temperature as her arm. Danielle got up and filled her canteen, then set out a dose of Fever-Ace next to it on the counter and went to the bathroom. She used the toilet, then sat there with the door closed until her watch chimed. The messenger had been correct; it was probably less than five minutes from when she got up until the alarm.

  She turned it off quickly, and set her Skill reading from her Planner – shorter version, for Chime hours. “Now Hear This: A message from Medic Falconer to all residents of Camp Constanza. It is Fever-Ace time. Remember to drink a full canteen of water with your dose! You also need to eat something. End Skill.” While the System read off the message, she flushed the toilet and went to wash her hands.

  “Danielle? Izzat you?” Akari called, as she dried her hands on a washcloth, using it as a very small hand towel.

  “Yes, it’s me. I’m all set, you can go back to sleep,” Danielle said, and lay the washcloth flat to dry out.

  “How’d you get in there so fast?” Akari asked, then yawned widely.

  “The messenger woke me up a few minutes early,” Danielle said. “I was on the toilet when my alarm went off.”

  “The imaginary messenger woke you up to go to the bathroom?” Heather asked. “Are you still seeing things?”

  “Only what shows up in Infravision. I’m fine, it’s not hallucinations.” Danielle walked back into the kitchen and held up her pills, then belatedly realized they hadn’t left the bathroom light on as usual, and the others probably couldn’t see her at all. “I have my dose of Fever-Ace – two tablets – and my bottle of water. Have you really been giving me a midnight snack, or is the “need to eat something” just there because I was still using the same script as the one at noon?”

  “Just there because it’s the same script,” Akari said.

  “Some people eat a little snack to keep the medicine from upsetting their stomach. You can have a piece of jerky if you’re hungry. There’s an open bag for you in the cold box,” Heather said.

  “That’s there because delirious-you gets worked up if you miss an item on the checklist,” Akari said.

  Danielle chuckled. “Yeah, that sounds like me trying to function while too sick to think, all right. I guess I’ll have a piece just to make sure of my stomach, though.” She went to the cold box and opened it; it was dark in there, but Danielle knew roughly where the most reasonable place to put jerky was, and sure enough, holding a hand near that spot revealed a package of necessities store jerky. She extracted a strip, closed the cold box, and took her pills. Then she retreated to her bed with the water and jerky.

  She sat on the edge of her bed, alternating bites of jerky with sips of water. After a few minutes, Akari started snoring lightly, and Danielle heard Heather roll over in bed and re-settle herself with a yawn. Everyone looked warm and still in Infravision, but the light of their sleeping forms wasn’t very bright on everything else.

  The jerky went a lot faster than the water, so Danielle quietly sat down next to her footlocker and opened it. She got out the two strongboxes and opened them, grateful that she could read the denominations on mana tokens in the faint light, because they were represented as carvings not colors. She counted ten 200-mana tokens out of the project box, because she’d made 20 of the low-cost tokens they were intended for. 80 tokens remained in that box, which she closed and set back into her footlocker. Then she added the 300-mana tokens from the evening’s Combat Medic tokens to the other box. She dithered about what to do with the 200-mana tokens, then remembered the salad clamshell.

  She slowly waved her hand around in her footlocker until she found it, and carefully put the 200-mana tokens in as two stacks of five. Then she added four of the 100-mana tokens the Rangers had given her for profits from the discount tokens. “There, 2400 mana exactly,” she whispered. “Ready for Sunday.” She set it back in, careful not to rattle it. She counted the rest of her tokens, and ended up putting a 100-mana token in her belt pouch, replacing the 10-mana token that had been there before the thorn thrasher incident. She shoved two more into the token caddy from the care packages, which left only one to put into her token purse. It was pretty full, with seventeen tokens in it, but if she needed any size mana token she had, she could call it to her fingers with the token purse.

  That got all the loose mana out of her satchel. That felt good; everything was put away safely. She wasn’t sure if she should really be worried about people somehow spying on or trying to break into her footlocker. If they did, though, they’d find the obvious 600 mana in the caddy on top and in the center, and she could afford to lose that if it kept them from noticing the strongboxes. She’d have to rearrange things a little so she could cover them up easily; maybe in the morning though. It might be noisy. She closed and stored the other strongbox, then covered it with her torn denim shirt and closed up her footlocker again.

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  She sloshed the water in her canteen; still maybe a third of it left. She leaned against the end of the headboard; it made for a narrow chair back, but it supported her all the way up her spine. She took a few more sips, debating the wisdom of trying to work on the emergency supply kits for her bolt-hole rooms. For that matter, she really should update her journal. Both of those would require light, though, because she didn’t think she could read the catalog or write in her paper journal in the dim, red-orange light that Skill: Infravision used to represent her own body heat.

  She could create a light source, maybe; she had the Skill, and she had crystals. She’d never actually tried out that Skill; maybe this was a good time? It would be even more likely to wake up her roommates than just using her illusions to make a bit of light, though. Maybe she could make it only give off frahni light? Then it would be bright in Infrasight and dark to regular vision – but her crystals weren’t fully transparent to frahni wavelengths, and she wasn’t sure if that would be a problem. Her tired mind spun around pros and cons while she drank the water, until she was almost done anyway, and her Skill ended.

  “I have got to get that turned into a Trait,” she muttered, and pushed at the Skill absently to reactivate it. For some reason, she heard/felt a little burst of static in Mana Sense, but it didn't seem to do anything. The room went from impenetrably black to dimly lit again, and she got up and refilled the cooling bottle, then rinsed out and sterilized her water bottle – and zeroed out her Oceanic mana pool again. Oops. Oh well, she was going back to bed anyway. She retraced her steps from the sink outside the bathroom, past the kitchen and around the half-wall backing the inward leg of the counters, and set the water bottle down next to her bed. She moved her boti bag, with her first aid kit in it, up on top of the footlocker, out of the way.

  She rediscovered her staff when she got into bed, still lying next to her pillow. The Skill had faded from the unenhanced end when she got up without it, but after all, she was safe in here. She set it down next to her bed, then thought better of that and rolled it just underneath so she wouldn’t step on it in the morning, then curled up and fell asleep moments after her head met the pillow.

  If she dreamed again, she didn’t recall it. The next thing she knew was her watch chiming again. She tapped off the alarm and set her System reading the Now Hear This from her Planner. She was tired, and it was oh so tempting to go back to sleep for a while and let Heather take care of breakfast.

  “Oh, no,” someone groaned in the darkness. “We forgot to leave the bathroom light on.”

  “I’m up, I’ve got it,” Danielle said, lurching up and activating Infrasight. She went to the kitchen, filled her canteen from the cold water bottle, and took her Fever-Ace. Then she grabbed the canteen-bottle they were using to refill the cold bottle and headed for the bathroom. She turned on the light over the sink, set down the bottle, and closed herself in the bathroom.

  Out in the room, she heard someone say, “Aw, no fair, she snuck first dibs in the bathroom, too.”

  “She’s the only one who drank a half-liter of water at midnight, so I think that actually is fair,” Sadie said from closer. “What’s not fair is how I’m calling next.”

  “Sadie! I gotta go!” That was definitely Heather. How many times had Danielle heard this conversation outside the bathroom door, back in their two-bedroom pod in school?

  Sadie’s line was, “If you had to go that bad, you’d have been up and moving faster,” and sure enough, she said it. Danielle laughed.

  “What’s funny in there?” Sadie asked.

  “You two, having the same argument as back Inside,” Danielle called out to her. “My line, of course, is I’m almost done, don’t wake up the whole building over it.”

  Sadie snorted, which was her usual response to Danielle’s assurance/complaint, then realized what she’d done and started laughing, too.

  Danielle finished her “business” and came out to wash her hands. “At least you don’t have to wait for – ” Sadie passed her and closed the door. “ – me to wash my hands, too,” Danielle finished, and got about that step with another laugh. Sadie didn’t dignify that with a response, which was to be expected; she was a girl of few words most of the time, but especially in the early morning.

  Danielle took the refill bottle out to the kitchen, and found Akari filling her own canteen. “Might want to wait until Sadie and Heather do theirs,” Akari said.

  “I could do them,” Danielle countered. “You guys have been doing it for me all week, I can do one round.”

  Akari shrugged. “That’s fair. They should be by their headboards,” she said, and took her water back to her own bed.

  Danielle tossed her bottle on her own bed, then did Heather’s. Sadie came back out of the bathroom while she was doing that, and Heather fairly leapt out of bed and ran for the bathroom. She never liked to actually get up until she could go straight to the toilet; that was why their common early morning argument was so loud. She put Heather’s water bottle back in its place, full of cold water, and turned to find that Sadie had already taken her own into the kitchen.

  “Are we doing the soup thing again this morning?” Sadie asked. “It’d be kind of convenient, ending on four days like that, giving back exactly one can of each to each of us and keeping it even.”

  “We do still have meat and dry serviceberries, if you want that for breakfast,” Akari said.

  “Did I dry a bunch of stuff I don’t remember?” Danielle asked.

  “Yeah, Heather helped on Monday, but after that she got too busy,” Sadie said. “Speaking of which, how’s your mana? Can you help me Purify the meat again?”

  “I have, uh, just a sec,” Danielle said. She brought up her Interface and checked. “I have thirteen and ten,” she said. “I guess I’m still generating extra mana from the pox.”

  “Ugh, you generated more overnight than I did in the last 24 hours!” Akari complained.

  “Aheh, yeah,” Danielle picked up the refill bottle and poured it into the cold bottle. “The Rangers said I generate mana like someone twice my level. Which is interesting, because 36 is more than 4 times 6, so that proves it’s not just six more generation every level, right?”

  “Depends on how precise they were being,” Sadie said.

  “Mm. I’m gonna finish refilling this,” Danielle said, and escaped to the sink. The cold bottle held just over two liters, and the Decision Day ‘canteens’ held just about exactly a half liter, so it took four rounds with the refill bottle to get the thing full.

  “What do you think about using some of this oatmeal?” Sadie asked while she worked. “It’s a good compromise between using emergency rations and not using up soup, I think.”

  “That works for me,” Akari said. “Do we have the kind with little apple bits in it?”

  “Yeah, we got a whole box of that, I think,” Sadie said, rummaging under the counters.

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