“Can you message the rest of our party’s girls, and warn them Vanessa’s hanging around? I’m a bit mana-dry right now.”

  “Oh, sure.” Zephyr activated his Interface, and a moment later said, “Now Hear This, A message from Zephyr to Cassy. Is everything OK? Danielle and all the guys are here for party supper, where are you girls? Tell the others to watch out for Vanessa Vandere, she’s hanging around the walkway trying to make trouble. Skill Ends.”

  “I don’t think Cassy’s with the others, sorry, I should’ve warned you,” Danielle said. “Um, if she messages back and confirms that, then when you message the others, can you remind them to bring – ”

  Zephyr raised a hand suddenly, and Danielle cut off, knowing it was hard to parse a conversation and a Now Hear This at the same time.

  “Now Hear This, A message from Zephyr to Cassy. Everyone’s safe here, and Danielle says remind the others to bring - ?” he paused, glancing at Danielle.

  “The dried berries,” she supplied.

  “ – the dried berries. Thanks for the update. Skill Ends,” Zephyr concluded. To Danielle, and the listening Gideon, he explained, “Cassy says all four of them are safe and jogging home late with tomatoes.”

  “Ah. I guess she was back from the thing with her roommates earlier than we expected,” Danielle said. She sighed. “I’m going to be cutting tomatoes until midnight, or maybe all day tomorrow, or both!”

  “You think they’re going to find that many wild tomatoes?” Gideon asked skeptically.

  “We found a whole patch,” Danielle said. “It’s not huge, but it’s not really tiny either. I’m not really completely well yet, so I stayed home to take a nap while they went out to pick stuff, and the deal was I get to earn my share by cutting all the ones we want to dry.”

  “Did the Rangers come see you?” Ezra asked from further inside. “They came to see us. They said we’re all better now and the enhancement is a good sign, because when your System kicks out the last of the disease, a lot of the time it’ll try to make an enhancement with whatever mana’s left.”

  “They saw me, yeah. They missed the other girls, because they were out foraging,” Danielle said. “They said I was recovering well, but I have to keep eating soup until I stop generating extra mana.”

  “Did you tell them it’s unreasonable to expect you to eat soup for the rest of your natural life?” Zephyr asked with a teasing grin.

  “Heh. They meant, more than my System says is my base generation, of course,” Danielle said, resisting the urge to stick out her tongue at him. “They also said I totally didn’t need the new mana Trait I unlocked last night.”

  “You’re kidding me,” Zephyr said, his face going suspiciously blank.

  “Nope! The good news is, I can tell you all how to get it too,” Danielle said. “It unlocks when you empty your mana pool at some point during the day, five days out of a ten day period.”

  “Huh. That seems almost too easy,” Zephyr said, his blank look thawing into thoughtfulness as he and Danielle walked back past the kitchen area.

  Danielle sat down with her back to the half-wall supporting the open side of the U of counter space, and Zephyr sat down against the bed nearest the door. Jordan was sitting on the edge of the bed he’d been using, whittling something again – probably the same thing as the day before, Danielle imagined. Tom was in the kitchen, working on getting the little camp stove from the supply crates started, while Gideon unloaded something from his satchel onto the counter – something in cans, from the sound, though it also seemed like the wrong size for soup cans somehow.

  Danielle got her own soup can out and closed her eyes while she set it on the floor beside her, then picked it up and set it down again a few times. She re-opened her eyes to find Ezra had retaken his seat beside the bookcase, the same spot he’d been in yesterday, and was watching her with a mystified expression. “I’m listening to how my can sounds different from Gideon’s cans,” she told him. “It’s part of training myself to use Improved Hearing better. Vince thinks I can see through his stealth Skill, and I kind of want him to keep believing that, so I’m working on hearing through it!” She gave Ezra a conspiratorial grin.

  He laughed. “That would be cool,” he said. “I’m not sure how listening to cans helps, though.”

  “It’s about learning to tell the differences in things by sound. Like, I’m thinking whatever Gideon brought was bigger than a regular soup can,” Danielle said.

  “Well, it’s bigger around anyway,” Gideon said. “It’s one of those tins of pemmican from the bottom of the supply crates.”

  “I thought it was one big, square tin?” Danielle said. “Well, rectangular.”

  “It’s a rectangular tin with just a pretty close fitting lid, that has sealed cans of pemmican inside it,” Gideon said. “The hard tack one is the same. I’m pretty sure if we empty out the cans, the tins will be more useful for holding something else.”

  “Oh, like those cookie tins we got in the care packages?” Danielle asked. “That’s kind of a sneaky way to give us a useful gift – one that’d work for regular Sendings too – a little extra reusable packaging in the epidemic supplies. If it’s normal for a Sending to get mana pox their first summer, then normally everyone would get those two rectangular tins full of stuff that doesn’t need to be in them in summer, and they could store dried food of their own in it for fall.”

  “We still can, too, right?” Ezra said.

  “Oh, yeah, for sure,” Danielle said. “In fact, remember all those serviceberries we picked?”

  Zephyr sighed. “Probably rotten by now,” he said.

  “Nope! Heather and I dried them,” Danielle said. “I might’ve done a lot of it. I guess I was producing nearly four times my normal mana on Monday, so I had a lot of mana that needed using.”

  Tom whistled. “Four times! That’s a lot of mana – is that even safe?”

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  “It’s really not,” Danielle said dryly. “It made me delirious, remember?”

  “Oh, right. The ‘three days you can’t remember’ thing,” Tom said.

  Danielle nodded. “They told Heather if I got any worse, the Ranger clinic wouldn’t be enough, and they’d have to send me to a more specialized place for treatment.” She paused, cocking her head toward the opening in the counter. It sounded suspiciously as if someone had just made a sound of frustration right outside the door of the room.

  Danielle stood up and put her finger to her lips, then pointed at the door and mimed listening at it. She got several confused looks, then Zephyr suddenly frowned and grabbed his staff from under the bed. He stood and went to the door, positioning his staff to slip through the first crack as it opened, then opened it suddenly – and caught Vanessa against his staff as she fell inward.

  “Doesn’t anyone teach you Christians not to listen at doors?” Zephyr asked, shoving outward with the staff. “Get lost!”

  From the direction of the stairs, Danielle heard a girl’s voice say, “Ooh, is that Zephyr McPherson?” and another call out, “Give it up, girl, McPherson’s way too high up the social ladder for the likes of you!”

  Vanessa made another frustrated sound. “Ooooh! How dare you!”

  The first girl out by the stairs ignored Vanessa and the second girl alike (had the second girl even been talking to Vanessa?) to shout, “Zephyr, date me, I promise I’ll make a great complement to the house of fire!”

  “I swore I wouldn’t date until I was sixteen at least, and I’m sticking to it!” Zephyr called back, and closed the door. He came back and sat down, muttering, “Maybe by then I’ll have figured out how to tell gold-diggers and nutjobs from sane girls. There’s got to be some way.”

  “Good luck with that,” Danielle said. “I don’t think the rich girls at my school had it figured out for identifying regular friend options, and that didn’t even involve wild crushes or puppy love or any of the other kinds of crazy that people think are normal for dating.”

  Zephyr gave Danielle another one of his suspiciously blank looks.

  “Dang. I’d expect that kind of a demotivational speech from one of my older brothers, but from a girl?” Tom said. “I figured a girl would say it was easy if you just understood girls or something.”

  Danielle laughed. “Which your brother would then say is impossible, right? Well, bad news. Girls are just as complicated inside as boys. Money is an issue, famous parents are an issue, being popular is an issue even if your parents aren’t rich or famous. Other people’s opinions of who you should and shouldn’t like come into play, like Gideon is finding out with Vanessa. Figuring out who likes you for yourself and who hates you for yourself isn’t always easy.”

  Gideon came around the counter so he could see her face. “You’re saying, you figure people hate you, but you’re not sure who hates you for yourself and who hates you just because Vanessa hates you?”

  “Well, I guess in school, it was more ‘who really hates me’ and ‘who just follows Vanessa’s lead even though they don’t really care one way or the other,’ but now there’s people that hate me because they think I’m claiming to work miracles, people who hate me because I didn’t die when Vince first attacked me, probably people who hate me because I dare to hang around Zephyr while not being Systemist, and definitely people who hate me because they don’t like being woken up by Now Hear This at midnight and six AM. None of those people necessarily know me at all,” Danielle said.

  Zephyr looked faintly guilty for some reason. “OK, you win,” he said. “I have trouble figuring out who has opinions about me for myself, but at least in my case, some of them are positive opinions.”

  “It’s not a contest,” Danielle said. “I’m just saying, life is complicated, and figuring out other people is also complicated. Even before you get into how girls think different from boys. I’m not exactly an expert in that, but there’s got to be some reason boys are so, um,” she trailed off, trying to think of a way to say what she was thinking without letting it sound insulting.

  “Masculine?” Zephyr suggested, wiggling his eyebrows at her.

  “Sure, let’s go with that,” Danielle said, her tone somewhat less than serious.

  “And why girls are so girly!” Ezra chimed in.

  Zephyr and Jordan laughed. Tom rolled his eyes. Gideon grimaced, and said, “Let’s maybe put this subject on hold for a while. Say, for a decade or two?”

  Everyone laughed at that.

  “Um, seriously though, Danielle, how do you personally figure out if someone likes you?” Gideon asked.

  Danielle looked at him. She suspected her own face had gone blank, because she suddenly had no idea what to say. “I, um, I don’t know. In school, I guess I went by if they let Vanessa drive them away. So, you know, it was a very small number of people, but I didn’t have to work very hard to figure it out. Now there’s a lot of people who have all these crazy ideas about me, and I have no idea how I’d tell. I just have to – well.” She stopped short of telling them her best plan was to extend a little trust to the people that asked for it, and see how it went; if Vanessa was back at the door and heard that she’d find some way to abuse it for sure. “Pray and hope God helps me, I guess,” she finished instead.

  “So, you’re saying you assume people hate you unless you have active evidence of the opposite?” Gideon asked.

  “Well, no. Like I said, I assume most people just don’t care,” Danielle said. “Sure, a lot of them treated me pretty bad when she was around to lead it, but most people just didn’t interact with me, and as long as they didn’t, there wasn’t an issue. As long as nobody made it a big issue, they didn’t have any reason to notice, and it just wasn’t a thing for them. Like you! You knew I was around, and you knew Vanessa, but since I didn’t show up to the CYC group and force the issue, you never had to have Vanessa coming around and telling you not to talk to me before. You didn’t hate me; you just didn’t have any, what’s the expression – didn’t have any money on that race?”

  “I didn’t know a ‘race’ was going on!” Gideon protested. “That’s not the same thing as not caring.”

  “Isn’t it? I mean, it’s not the same as knowing she was mistreating me and not caring, I’ll agree to that. I’m just saying, in terms of what I think other people think about me, I figure most people don’t think about me. Why would they? And ultimately, I think that’s what Vanessa wants; so fine. I don’t push it beyond my little circle of friends, and she has no reason to push back.” Danielle shrugged. “It stinks having my life limited by the need to stay out of her way, but spending my life fighting her over it would stink too. Basically, living in the same school or camp or whatever as Vanessa just stinks. For me, I mean! I’m sure there are plenty of people who are free to just not think about her too, and to them it doesn’t matter, right? So it’s all a matter of perspective.

  “I figure – I used to figure, eventually we’d go to different colleges, and I’d be free to make new friends again. It’s not the end of the world, waiting; I mean, I’ve got a couple really good friends right now. I was looking forward to not having to dodge the honor roll, too. I’m good at school, and it’d be nice to feel like it was safe to get some recognition. I don’t know what the plan is now though, I mean, they wouldn’t let me refuse the nomination for town council so I’m stuck with that until next year, and you guys asked to join the hunting party, and there’s the whole thing with the religious stuff.” Danielle sighed.

  “Yeah, that’s definitely a thing that I don’t want to try to explain to Vanessa,” Gideon said with a sigh. “She belongs to a church that says all that miraculous stuff ended once the 12 apostles were gone. If I tried to tell her God gave me instructions in a dream – ”

  “You probably just did,” Danielle said. “That’s why I was putting it so vaguely.”

  “She can’t still be – ” Gideon started, but he was interrupted by a shout at the door.

  “Hey, what do you think you’re doing?! Get away from there, spy!”

  “I can’t believe she actually came back,” Gideon said.

  Danielle sighed. “I bet that was Sadie. She caught Vanessa listening at our room door like that back in school, once, and kept calling her ‘the spy’ for a whole year. It took more than one try to chase her away that time, too.”

  Zephyr got up and went to the door again. Someone knocked when he was halfway there, and sure enough, he opened it to find Sadie in front. “We’re here. Vanessa’s still at the building too, but we chased her around the corner,” she said.

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