There was a long silence, and Danielle fidgeted nervously in her seat, wondering what the others were thinking. Were they being amazed at the idea of seeing through stealth? Horrified at her breaking someone’s leg? Worried that she thought she might need to use stealth in life or death situations?

  “So, um. Did you find any good medical stuff you want to take now?” Sadie finally asked.

  “Oh, uh. Not sure,” Danielle said, belatedly opening her unlocked Skills to actually check. “Triage Tagging maybe – it lets me mark how bad people need help, in a way that other people can see. Nothing obviously great for dealing with mana pox specifically, though,” Danielle admitted.

  Silence fell again. A few minutes later, Akari broke it to say, “I think I’ll go ahead and take Bodyguard. It’s a lot more ‘me’ than Basic Weapon Fighter, and if Heather ends up going around checking temperatures, she’ll need someone to watch her back.”

  “That’s a great idea. Don’t tell Agent Bea until after, though, please. I don’t want her to try and renegotiate,” Danielle said.

  Akari chuckled. “I’ll keep it to myself.”

  “Thanks, though,” Heather said. “Seriously.”

  Akari nodded to her, and a thoughtful silence fell again. With the unnervingly quiet engines the Rangers used in their Outside vehicles, Danielle could actually hear the occasional bird complain about the passage of the truck. She could even hear bits of conversation going on in the cab, she thought, though it sounded too far away to make out clearly. Mana Sense told her that the engine rumbled, which was interesting – was it actually mana-driven, rather than electric-motor driven?

  Distracted with trying to feel/hear the motor in mana sense, Danielle didn’t realize they’d arrived until the fence actually came into view behind the truck. The gate was open today, and when she started paying attention again, she realized there was a line of similar trucks behind them. Ranger Miriam pulled the truck in at the same gravel parking lot the busses had used on sending day. It was Agent Bea who came around back to urge them out and lead them away between vehicles, though.

  The Agent led them away from the Dome of Decision, towards a line of mostly Rangers with a few green uniforms sprinkled in to prove the Sending Authority was participating. They were evenly spaced out holding what looked like plain wooden staves, except that Danielle could feel/hear mana leaping from one to the next, and there was a faint glow stretching between them that Danielle was at least 90% sure was actual visible light and not just Sense Mana messing with her perceptions. Agent Bea went up to the nearest green uniformed agent and said a few words while Danielle squinted at the staff, then led them along the boundary to the nearest Ranger. To him, she showed her badge and said something longer. Danielle ignored it to ask Sadie, “You see the glow, right?” To her relief, Sadie nodded.

  Then Agent Bea had them all back up a bit, and the two men she’d spoken to lifted their staves up, rotating them like an opening garage door panel. The glow followed them, becoming a ceiling instead of a wall, and Agent Bea led them under it. Then the staff-wielders lowered their staves, making the line a continuous stretch of wall again, and Agent Bea led the roommates down the path to the headquarters building again.

  The whole area back behind the trees was a hive of activity. A line of large tents had gone up, as well as some awnings without walls; they seemed to be housing boxes and crates rather than people, though. A warehouse door loomed open, fork trucks busily rearranging the interior. An outdoor kitchen was cooking something, Rangers tending large kettles and a bank of familiar burners and griddles where water was being heated for tea and something was being fried – chicken? Danielle recalled that there were supposed to be bag dinners with chicken in them. Had they left those behind in the crates?

  Then they were going through the door in the tall windows, and Danielle got to appreciate everyone’s faces as they saw the murals for the first time. Akari seemed amused, Sadie slightly awed, Heather simply shocked. Danielle hoped she would get to see Ezra’s reaction, too. Agent Bea wasn’t waiting around to let them appreciate the view, though.

  Once again, Danielle followed her back to the back wall with its painted marketplace. She was just wondering which side they would turn to, when she realized the stall that was almost real was open! In fact, not only was it open, but Zephyr was standing in front of it, having an argument with the old man inside.

  “I’m telling you, kid, you’re in the wrong place,” the man said. “There’s no reason for Sent to be in here today, unless you need the clinic.”

  “I wasn’t told to go to the clinic, I was told to go to the – ” Zephyr began in tones of strained patience.

  “Quartermaster’s counter,” the man chimed in.

  “Well is this it, or isn’t it?” Zephyr asked, annoyance leaching into his voice. He was standing in a casual enough stance, one hand on his staff in a walking-stick position, the other behind his back; but the hidden hand was fisted in white-knuckled fury, or perhaps extreme frustration.

  “It is, and I apologize for the mix-up, Frank,” Agent Bea interjected. “I was expecting to beat them all here. We’re expecting a total of ten Sent, hopefully nine of them quite soon and one in another hour or three.”

  “Station Manager,” the man greeted her, offering a respectful nod. Danielle wasn’t sure if he was a Ranger or an SA agent; whatever uniform he might be wearing was hidden by a pair of denim coveralls and a leather apron. “I don’t suppose you’d care to inform me now, since you’ve caught up?” he asked Agent Bea, his eyes flickering across the room group following her.

  “I’ve secured a source of non-Karen tokens, but I have to give members of the SHAD hunting party an extra token from the ones we aren’t running out of as part of the deal,” Agent Bea said. “Also, we need to arrange temporary room access for some young men with roommate issues.”

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  Zephyr’s eyes also danced across the faces of the girls before he asked, “Am I one of the young men in question, or am I just here for an extra token?”

  Agent Bea looked to Danielle. “Well, Miss Falconer?” she asked.

  “Oh, uh, well, I, um.” Danielle floundered. “I remember agreeing on the token thing, but I don’t remember where the room access thing, uh – I mean, I said I was worried, and I have hopes that this is going the direction I think it is, but, um. Did you actually tell me the plan on this? Because I don’t remember a plan.”

  “You mentioned one person with no roommates, and two with hostile or unreliable roommates. The plan is to give the latter two access to the former room, so they can support each other,” Agent Bea said.

  “OK, Great! Good. I thought – I hoped so – this is a great plan, but we need Tom here to OK it first, because it is still his room, right? I mean, he kind of invited them before, but it’d still be best to confirm before we start changing door access stuff,” Danielle said. “Can I sit down? I’m just gonna sit down against the wall here.”

  Danielle picked a stall that wasn’t harboring a real door and put her back to it, then slid down into a cross-legged position, staff upright, trying to channel a caravan-trader sort of look. She could only hope she looked a tenth as much like someone who belonged in the imaginary marketplace as the quartermaster did!

  Speaking of the quartermaster, he leaned out of the stall to look at her. “Now that one needs the clinic for sure,” he said. “I can feel the mana boiling off her from here, Bea.”

  “Good,” Agent Bea said grimly. “We need every point of mana she can offer. I just hope I’m right about her Skill readiness.”

  The old man shook his head at her. “You’re playing a dangerous game with that, Bea,” he said. “I’d rather play dentist with an untranquilized cougar than deal with SS Impera again, given the choice, but I’d also rather play with the cougar than waste the life of a young Sent.”

  “I’m not risking her life!” Agent Bea threw her hands up in exasperation. “What is it with you all, doom and gloom from every side! It’s just mana pox, not the glittering plague!”

  “Have you talked to the Healers about this?” the quartermaster asked, a note of warning in his voice.

  “She has, and we’re here,” a voice came from Danielle’s other side.

  She turned to greet Ranger Flo and a man she didn’t recognize. “Hi Ranger Flo! Did Agent Bea talk to you about a comms org?” Danielle asked.

  Ranger Flo barked a foreshortened laugh. “She mentioned it. We even did the paperwork. If all goes well, we might be able to set it up at the un-Fair. For now, I’ve been talked into giving you a detailed physical, so as to properly document the big fat No I’m going to stamp on this ill-conceived project.”

  “What project now?” Danielle asked in confusion. “I’m just here to, uh,” she glanced at Zephyr, and the two unknown men. “I’m here for another job like yesterday,” she finished.

  “That’s what I meant. Come on into the clinic now, so we can have some privacy for the evaluation,” Ranger Flo said. She offered Danielle a hand up.

  “Not much of an evaluation if the conclusion is determined in advance,” Agent Bea said, aiming a frown at the Rangers.

  “We’ve agreed not to stand in the way if you can show that she’ll be below safe thresholds,” the Ranger with Flo said. “Do you want to observe?”

  “You better believe I do,” Agent Bea said. “Quartermaster, get these girls their first token, and collect up the rest of the party. Oh, and make a four-token set for Danielle. We’ll be right back.”

  Danielle took the helping hand and was pulled smoothly up and along into the door under the stairs on the Rangers’ side of the building. Behind her, she heard Akari saying “Hey, wait a minute,” and Zephyr asking, “Do I still get to crash in Tom’s room even if Danielle fails the physical?” but she didn’t have time to respond or ask any questions of her own before she landed in a tiny examination room with three other people, which was too many. On top of that, the room felt/sounded unnerving, or possibly unnerved; it sang of disconnections and things broken and missing.

  “I don’t like it in here,” she whispered to Ranger Flo, sitting uneasily on an exam couch that would have felt at home in her primary doctor’s office Inside, but seemed bizarrely out-of-place here in a room echoing with mana. “The mana feels all disjointed.”

  “How long has the mana felt disjointed?” the Ranger man asked.

  Danielle frowned at him. “Since I came into the room,” she said. Hadn’t she just said that? Maybe she hadn’t exactly said that.

  “Close the wards, sir,” Ranger Flo said. “She has Mana Sense as a Trait – a new Trait, I should add – so she might honestly be sensing the wards being disengaged.”

  “Is that what it is?” Danielle asked, as the man reached for a shallow shelf set high in the wall near the door. To her surprise, he didn’t take something off the shelf, but slid the whole thing into the wall. As it slid in, several mana songs switched from ‘frustrated’ disconnection to ‘contented’ activity – and the room took on a feeling of quiet and isolation. “Oh! Privacy wards! That makes sense,” she said.

  “Is there any difference so far?” the man asked.

  Danielle chuckled. “Well obviously,” she said. “The wards aren’t disconnected anymore, so now they feel like privacy instead of frustration. Thanks for settling them. Um, so seriously, what kind of examination is this?”

  “General health and mana health,” Ranger Flo said. “Please lower your resistance for me, I’m going to start with a Skill, then ask you a cartload of questions.”

  Danielle lowered her Mana Deflector as requested, though the power of the Skill that hit her was such that she doubted the resistance would’ve been effective anyway. It was much more nuanced than prior times when she’d encountered strong Skills, though. She could feel/hear how this Skill had lots of moving parts; they danced around and through her body and sent messages back to Ranger Flo, who scribbled on a notepad, looking up and down between Danielle and the pad. The messages must be taking the form of highlights or something she saw, rather than words she heard, Danielle guessed.

  Ranger Flo spent fully ten minutes writing down whatever they told her, with Agent Bea looking over her shoulder. The other Ranger used a Skill that rested on himself, and looked Danielle over thoroughly. “Different kind of diagnostic, huh?” she asked him, and he nodded absentmindedly at her.

  After that, Ranger Flo flipped to a clean sheet in her notebook and started asking questions. Danielle couldn’t answer some of the first ones, like how much mana she’d had when she woke up this morning or how many Skills, exactly, she’d used today. Eventually, though, she realized that they were trying to figure out her mana generation without trusting that it was the same as her base generation numbers – how much was the mana pox already adding, basically. Then she pointed out that her Riverine mana pool had definitely been empty when Agent Bea ended the meeting Saturday evening, and hadn’t been used all day, and she could say with certainty that it stood at 23 points right now.

  Her examiners agreed that was enough information to do the math with, and after some calculating (and checking each other’s calculations) asked how much mana was in her Oceanic pool right now (37 points) and did some more calculations. Then Ranger Flo tried to say that the math proved they were going to have to call Karen, and Agent Bea used a privacy Skill and had an argument of some kind with the Rangers until Danielle pulled off a corner of the sanitary paper covering the center strip of the exam couch, wadded it, and threw it at Ranger Flo.

  She grinned at the startled looks on all their faces, and beckoned them out of the Skill’s zone of silence. They exchanged glances, and brief words, and dropped the Skill.

  “I feel like this argument should be including me,” Danielle told them, once the song of the privacy Skill was gone and she was sure they’d hear her. “It’s obviously about me, after all.”

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