Akari was taking soup cans from the pile in the corner and stacking them next to everyone’s headboards. Watching her work, Danielle realized that everyone’s crates were just under their beds on that end – and she had two! Which she remembered, now that she thought of it. “I think I’ll store my oatmeal packet and choose to eat another can of soup for myself,” Danielle said. “I’m still sick, and I think the Healers were worried about nutrition being an issue with getting better, since they knew I’d be extra sick and have a longer bout. That’s why they brought the extra crate and everything.”

  She slid out the crate nearest her headboard, setting her staff on the bed when it rolled against her foot. She put two cans of soup back in without really looking at them, then paused to take inventory. She found what looked like cardboard drink carriers, but instead of beverages they were half-filled with cans of soup – three of six remaining in each of three caddies. A thin cardboard box claimed it contained “canned heat, 6” but one had already been removed – presumably to heat soup earlier in the week. She found the tube of itch relief cream, apparently untouched, and the tube of Urgent-C supplements, from which she pulled one out for herself. There was also a mylar survival blanket, which was amusingly odd given that the crates were delivered only to people in their Rooms, where they all had woven blankets on their beds already. Under all the soup and everything else, a pair of wide flat tins proclaimed themselves pemmican and hard tack rations, seven days each. Danielle’s camp stove was still folded up in another thin cardboard box and tucked behind the soup. Tucked behind the stove in turn, she found her copy of the booklet that Heather had been carrying around, with the thermal color guide on the back; and in the far corner, there was a box of ginger tea in teabags!

  “Wow, have we not been taking advantage of tea?” she asked.

  Sadie looked over and shrugged. “We figured since we weren’t having stomach issues, and it’s not cold, it’d be better to save it for cold weather and focus on water and the Urgent-C.”

  “Why’re you in the kitchen?” Heather asked groggily, returning from the bathroom.

  “I’m making oatmeal for breakfast,” Sadie said.

  Heather blinked blearily at her. “Oh. I guess I’ll get on with water,” she said.

  “I already filled your canteen for you, and refilled the cooler,” Danielle said. “You can nap until the oatmeal’s ready, if you want.”

  “Really?” Heather looked around, and collected a nod from Akari and a thumbs-up from Sadie. “Well, all right, then. Consider me snooze-buttoned,” she said, and went to her bed. She fished her tube of Urgent-C out of her crate and popped one into her canteen, setting the cap on loosely to let it fizz, then rolled back into bed.

  “Do you want me to go before or after the oatmeal?” Danielle asked Sadie.

  Sadie looked at Heather. “Before, so she actually has time to nap,” she said.

  Danielle chuckled. “Good point.” She slid her own Urgent-C tablet into her canteen, closed up her crate, and came over to join Sadie in the kitchen. “I guess if we’re not in a hurry, I can even practice lighting this thing,” she said.

  Sadie already had a sparker in her hand, but at that, she handed it to Danielle. “Have at it,” she said. “Wake me when your soup is ready.” She went and lay down again, herself.

  Danielle chuckled. “Rest well, then,” she said. Ironically, she suspected Sadie was more likely to actually get back to sleep than Heather was.

  Akari passed her, heading for the bathroom. “I’m going to get first shower while everyone’s napping,” she said. “I need to wash my clothes.”

  “Enjoy. Oh! I can help dry them, if you need me to,” Danielle said. “Only for stuff you need dried to wear today, though, please.”

  “I will, I haven’t done any laundry since Saturday,” Akari said. “So thanks.”

  Danielle nodded and concentrated on getting the glorified candle of the canned heat to light. It took her ten minutes of frustrated effort before it finally caught. Then she opened the pull-top of the soup can, and started stirring, remembering Ezra’s mistake and carefully not letting anything sit on the bottom. Eventually, she realized with some discomfort that the can itself was getting dangerously hot – how was everyone handling these? She left it for a minute to get her torn shirt out of her footlocker, and used one arm of it as a hot pad, the rest dangling awkwardly off the counter. She checked the pot, and found that Sadie had already poured in three packets of oatmeal; a fourth sat next to it. Danielle picked that up and took it to her bed, where she set down the soup can next to her canteen.

  She went over and gently shook Sadie’s foot. “Sadie, you’re up. Time to do the oatmeal,” she said.

  Sadie woke with a small start. “Wha? Oh, oatmeal. Yeah.” She got up and went to collect the pot and an empty oatmeal packet, for the “fill to this line” mark on it that helped measure the water.

  By the time Akari came out of the bathroom, Danielle was halfway through her can of inauthentic jambalaya, and the oatmeal was bubbling over the camp stove. Akari was wearing a wet T-shirt and shorts, and presented Danielle with a set of wet socks and underwear, another pair of wet shorts, and her blue jeans. “Dry, pretty please?” she asked.

  Danielle grinned, and activated General Dehydrate for the two larger items separately. When she was down to the underwear, she folded the pieces together and tried using the Skill on them as a unit. It was a relief when it worked. “There you go. Don’t need a T-shirt?” she asked.

  “The shirt will get dry on its own, I can handle that; wearing wet underwear is gross, though,” Akari said, and took the dry clothes back to the bathroom to change. When she returned, she unfolded the mylar blanket from her supply crate and spread it on her bed, then lay out the wet things to dry on top of it. “There, now they won’t get the blanket wet,” she said.

  “Good call,” Danielle said. “We should all wash blankets later, but I think maybe not today. Maybe Saturday – that’s tomorrow, right?”

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  “Yeah, we might need to take the guys to the fishing spot tomorrow, though,” Sadie said. “Who knows if any of their food survived.”

  “They have shares of the dried serviceberries, at least,” Danielle said. “We should take those over and weigh out the shares tonight. And do the meeting thing.” She paused to collect up a last spoonful of barley pearls. “Did Dehydrate Food turn out to be a volume thing?” she asked.

  “Yeah. Took a few tries to get the exact level in the pot that was just small enough that it’d let you do it, but no smaller than necessary. Then it took several more rounds to get the whole batch dehydrated. Fortunately for the food, you were bubbling up mana so fast it was scary, and it was just as good for you as for the berries to get it all done,” Akari said.

  “I believe it,” Danielle said. “I think I must still be at twice my normal generation, so if this is what it’s like after it’s slowed down again? Yeah.”

  “Ranger Hart said you were up to four,” Sadie said soberly. “He said if you got any worse, they’d have to send you further away than his clinic, to someplace where they’d have the Skills and equipment to actively get mana out of your system without hurting you.”

  “Mm.” Danielle looked down, incidentally into her empty soup can. “I guess that’s why some people thought I was risking my life? Going over the limit on bonus mana must be more serious than we thought.”

  “Might’ve just been risking mutation, but that’s close enough for some purposes,” Akari said.

  “I just hope it was worth it,” Danielle said. “I mean, that everyone who got Boost Recovery tokens because I was there making them actually used them right – or at least most of them did. That it made the disease easier for people and that I didn’t just make it so a quarter of the camp can get sick again from something they should’ve been immune to.” She drank that last few drops of broth out of her can and stood up. “What have we been doing with these, anyway?” she asked.

  “Washing them out, setting aside the labels for fire starters, and giving the metal to Sadie for later,” Akari said.

  “Ah, for crafting? Good plan. I’m keeping this one, Sadie, but the ones you’ve already got are fine with me.”

  “What are you going to do with it?” Sadie asked.

  Danielle shrugged. “I’m not exactly sure yet, but I think I’m going to want to try and work out what all the elements and their combinations and stuff are, and how they relate to mana casting proper; so eventually I’m going to need some metal for metal-element experiments.”

  “Oh, yeah, that makes sense. Might be until winter for that, though,” Sadie said.

  “It might,” Danielle admitted. “I love everything about having Mana Researcher on my Status, and I want to learn all about the System now that I’m out here where I really have the mana and freedom to explore it all; but survival still comes first. Speaking of which, I’m going to shower so we can go out and make sure our neighbors are all surviving too.”

  “OK. The oatmeal’s almost done anyway,” Sadie said.

  Danielle got herself and her clothes cleaned, but didn’t wash any extras like Akari. She would have to do that soon, but for today she didn’t want to spend more time and mana than necessary. She even tried to copy Akari’s frugal choice to only dry part of her clothes, then changed her mind once she actually put on the wet T-shirt, and dried that too. Once she had it back on, she came out and propped up her staff so she could hang her denim shirt from it to hopefully dry out without using yet another point of mana.

  She stashed the oatmeal packet in her footlocker with the packets from the boxed dinner, then sat down to drink her Urgent-C while everyone else finished their oatmeal. The other three seemed tired and weren’t talking much, so she started a list in her planner, whispering to the System to save mana. For starters, what did she actually need in her hide-away rooms?

  The catalog offered an emergency set of medications, just a few doses each of all the things Danielle had been collecting bottles of in the Necessities Store. That was definitely on the list, along with alcohol, bandages, and antibiotic ointment. If she was running from an attacker and ducked into a room wounded, bandaging up and taking a dose of pain relievers would be a high priority. A set of emergency rations was a must, too. She should account for water – the rooms all had their sink, but she would want something to drink out of. A canteen should be in the room, in case she lost her gear in whatever fight or flight drove her in there. Maybe some hot mugs, too, to heat stew in. That meant a method of heating things, though; the catalog listed “kitchen brazier” but, annoyingly, no camp stoves.

  Braziers went on the list, but annoyingly again, they were one of several items that listed a deeply discounted price for one, and then a regular price for more. “Insider’s problems,” Danielle muttered to herself, then “Delete last two words.” She really had no standing to be complaining about a fifteen mana difference in price, she reminded herself, when she was spending a few hundred mana out of her “impossible” thousands. Granted, she wanted several copies of this kit, so maybe it would add up to a few thousand.

  Well, she had a few thousand, so she was going to spend enough to make the rooms fit to stay in for a day or two. A few extra food items went on the list: oatmeal, flour, herb shakers, a bottle of honey, a box of tea. Cooking equipment to use with the presumable fire in the brazier she’d just listed included a stew kettle, a frying pan, and a set of hot pads. Soap was required to wash those things once used – actually, it was required anyway for the first aid setup, and so were washcloths. Larger towels were available, so she added one of those, too. Pencils and paper! An actual dish pan! Let’s not go overboard with the luxuries, she reminded herself, though those “luxuries” were definitely going to come into her normal room, too – and an extra set for her and Akari when they split off into room 6022.

  If she was going to assume she might be chased into a room with nothing, she needed a tinder box, a basic knife, and an emergency radio. Hairbrush and toothbrush also seemed like good ideas. Clothes? After the way the thorn thrasher had torn up Sadie and Akari’s clothes, it seemed like an oversight to forget that. A full Sending uniform was only 24 mana! (Well, not counting the boots.) It was sold as separate pieces, but Danielle added them all to the list; whatever piece was torn, she could still come out looking like nothing had ever happened to her. Well, if she wasn’t limping. What if she had damaged her boots? Replacements cost half as much as the entire rest of the uniform, and it seemed relatively unlikely she’d use them. There was an entry for leather-and-wool moccasins, which were cheaper; she decided they would be good enough. What if it was winter, though? She added one of the wool outerwear options; cape or ruana, she wasn’t firmly decided which it should be.

  Heather was in the shower when she paused to add up the mana cost of her list, and decided maybe she was going just a little bit overboard, at a bit over 200 mana. She thought about it, and decided to make two versions of the kit: one for the rooms -013, of which she needed eight copies; and one for the corner rooms, a bit bigger and more pricey, but only copied three times. She let the corner room list swell up to a 250 mana price tag, but pared the ‘lucky bolt-hole rooms’ kit down to 130 mana. Together, they added up to 1790, which was close enough to a round number to justify tacking on ten mana somewhere. In the end, it became 35 more mana, because she had trouble evening things up; but all together it was a manageable list for outfitting eleven rooms to a reasonably livable standard (as the Sending went, anyhow) and only four line items outside the main kits.

  Heather came out of the shower, and Danielle took that as her cue to stop second-guessing it all and write out the lists for Agent Bea. She counted the 1800 mana in 300-mana tokens out of her project-mana box, and added a 25-mana token from her token purse. She wasn’t sure when she’d made it, which meant it had to have been done while she was delirious.

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