Danielle could almost appreciate the irony of calling it a “town meeting” – almost. In an abstractly horrible kind of way, it wasn’t entirely wrong. The talking hadn’t lasted even five minutes, though, and now it was also a battle. Both sides wore the same uniform of denim, just starting to look broken in for some, already torn in places for others. Both sides, for the most part, shouted the same battle cry: “Return or Die!”

  The roadway between the buildings was chaos as they attacked each other with swords and staves, and a few gleeful monsters on the third story balconies with bows were shooting into the crowd. Other denim-clad teens dashed up or down the stairs of the four buildings facing the road, either rushing to join the mad battle or rushing to the safety of their rooms.

  At the base of the southeast building, where the lowest floor was dug half into the ground and the walkway was bounded by a half-wall to hold back the soil rather than a safety rail to prevent falls, Danielle stood trying to shake off a dazed sense of unreality. She needed to – do something. Surely, there was something a sane person should do at a time like this. Watching it like a bad history-class video was definitely not the answer. She gripped her staff tightly, infusing it with a defensive Skill; she needed to stay alive. That was step one. What else?

  Girls ran by behind her, but none of them made the mana in her staff surge; no attacks. They were just running for their rooms, in this building or the one behind it. Doors slammed all along the length of the building, here in the front walkway or in the parallel row on the back side of the building. Running footsteps and more slamming doors proved that the same was happening above them on the balcony walkways as well. Danielle was sure that there were hundreds of boys on the other side of the road running up their own stairways and slamming their own doors. That was probably a sensible thing to do. The “armies” in the road weren’t using fire; the Rooms were probably safe – well, physically safe.

  The flow of young mad-women running the other way had already ended, at least down in the ground floor walkway; she could still hear a few feet pounding down the metal stairs from upper balconies. A small crowd was growing around Danielle, though, pressed against the retaining walls at the south corner of the building. Many of them crouched; the support pillars for the upper walkway were too small to provide meaningful cover if the archers on the boys’ building across the way noticed them, but even if they were facing a System Skill or two, the dirt and concrete of the retaining walls were probably solid cover.

  “Danielle?”

  She turned to look into the anxious face of her friend Heather. Behind her, a dozen other girls and even a few boys watched them with expressions ranging from desperation to hope.

  “Danielle, what should we do?” Heather asked. “Should we go hide?”

  Danielle looked out at the chaos again. “No,” she said. “I don’t think we should just hide from this.”

  Danielle looked into the chaos of the school library’s main study hall and frowned. “It’s no good,” she said, “I think we’re going to have to go hide somewhere.”

  “We need to get at the books,” her friend Sadie pointed out. Danielle sighed and turned towards her. She stood straight in her school uniform, straight black hair pulled back and tied with a ‘ribbon’ that was really a complicated hand-woven tape with traditional patterns from her ancestral tribe marching down every inch of it. She was a rarity in the school; the native north-American tribes had their own states and nations, and their people rarely chose to live in Firmitatem. Sadie herself had been there most of her life, though, and her penchant for using the tribal weavings where other girls would use scrunchies or rubber bands was usually her most obvious nod to her ancestry.

  Beside her, Heather tightened up her own ponytail, curly chestnut hair held by a normal green-and-white scrunchie that matched their school uniforms for color but somehow always managed to be too loose. “Stay,” she muttered.

  Sadie turned to her. “Stay where? We’re not allowed to study in the hallway.”

  “What? No, my hair. Are we going in or what?” Heather asked.

  Danielle sighed. “Sure, if you don’t mind sharing space with all four of the evil roommates,” she said. “Worse yet, they aren’t even at the same table. Vanessa’s with a group project, I think; Mellanie and Mallory are sharing a book over by the reference shelf, and Susan looks like she’s doing the peer tutoring thing.”

  “So Susan could be done at any time, the two Ms would love an excuse to get away from the encyclopedias, and Vanessa may not be working at all?” Sadie summarized.

  “To be fair, Vanessa really does work hard for her spot on the honor roll,” Danielle said, looking through the narrow vertical window set into the library door again. “Um, but I get the feeling she’s less working than forcing her group members to catch up, right now.”

  “Distractable and already angry then,” Sadie said. “Even better.”

  Heather grinned. “Well you guys are gonna love this then – I put in for a private study room for us, and I put in the request form a whole week ago. All we have to do is get from this door to that door!”

  “Ooh. Are we straight back, or did you get one of the good ones on the left?” Danielle asked eagerly.

  “Straight back in the cavern wall,” Heather admitted. “The warm ones all require a teacher’s signature to reserve during finals week.”

  “You’re a sanity-saver,” Sadie said. “Let’s go.”

  “Wait until Vanessa’s definitely looking somewhere else, though!” Heather objected. “Otherwise, she’ll find some way to harass us, just like she did winter quarter.”

  “Not just like winter quarter,” Danielle said. “She got herself on the librarian’s stink list good and solid after that one – she wasn’t even allowed in the library without a babysitter last quarter, remember?”

  Heather grinned again. “Of course I remember, it was glorious. A whole quarter where all we had to do was get inside the library to be completely Vanessa-free! Mallory was hardly in the library all quarter either.”

  “She was asking for it, setting a water bucket trap around all these books,” Sadie opined. “She’s off probation now, though. There she is.”

  “Yeah. We need a way to get around her,” Danielle said. “Around all of them, but especially her. Maybe if I try a distractionary illusion?”

  Sadie shook her head. “She’ll scream to the librarians about you,” she said.

  “Exactly,” Danielle said. “I don’t think she knows about Deflect Notice yet, so if I go in with that active and make a little illusion way over by the other doors, she’ll throw a fit and make a scene over there, and you two can walk past while everyone’s attention is on her. Then I’ll quietly walk away from the main study area with Deflect Notice still on, and bam, we’re all in the clear.”

  “OK, but you’ll still be in trouble with the librarian,” Sadie said, frowning at her.

  “Lighten up, Sadie, tomorrow’s the last class day of the quarter,” Heather said. “They can’t give her detention when the quarter’s already over!”

  “I might have to do one when we get back, but I doubt it; they try not to carry stuff over the school-year break, and an illusion isn’t dangerous to the books like a water bucket,” Danielle agreed. “Besides, I hate dealing with Vanessa worse than I hate spending an hour in a quiet study area, you know?”

  “You’re never going to get your special rules on using System Skills revoked if you keep using them out of bounds,” Sadie objected.

  “Look in there and tell me we’ll get any studying done if we try to go past them without a distraction of some kind,” Danielle said gesturing to the window.

  Sadie stepped up and took a long look. “They all look stung already,” she admitted.

  “Let’s just thank Danielle for her sacrifice and get to the room,” Heather said.

  “Just try to do something subtle enough that the librarian on duty will be a little sympathetic,” Sadie suggested, stepping back from the door.

  Danielle grinned. “Don’t worry, my favorite fan of older-than-mana animation is there - and he seriously looks like he needs some cheering up!”

  “Warner? But Danielle, he’s a tattle-tale!” Heather objected.

  “Exactly. I’ll cheer him up a little, he’ll object just loud enough for the librarian to hear, Vanessa’s closer, so she’ll flip out but by then it’ll be gone. The librarian won’t actually see anything, I won’t be guilty of baiting Vanessa directly, and she’ll be the one who made a scene.” Danielle settled her bag and put her hand on the door.

  “It’s still baiting,” Sadie said.

  “You know that, and I know that,” Danielle said. “Honestly, it’s cheering up Warner too, though!”

  “And if this is the one time he doesn’t tattle?”

  Danielle shrugged. “Then I go for an image of myself sticking my tongue out at her or something; make it look like I was baiting her without using my System Skills.”

  “You’re crazy, but we’ll be ready,” Sadie said.

  Danielle nodded, flicked her eyes to bring up her System Interface, and selected Skill: Deflect Notice to activate. Then she slipped through the door and took a seat at the nearest free chair in the study area, pulling a book out of her school satchel to pretend to read. Deflect Notice wasn’t invisibility, after all, and it worked best if she didn’t do anything too noticeable.

  Diagonally across from her, a younger student muttered, “Activate Skill: Speed Reading,” and started scanning the pages of his book. One table over, a moment later, someone exclaimed, “I found it! Finally. Activate Skill: Memorize!” Danielle suppressed a sigh. Everyone was allowed to use academic Skills in the library except her! Of course, the Skill she was planning to use in the library wasn’t exactly academic.

  She flicked her eyes for the Skill activation instead of using the Verbal Interface. She wasn’t an Awakening School baby, to scroll with her fingers and say all her activations aloud; in fact, she’d done more training than anyone in her year towards the goal of controlling her System with subtle cues – maybe more than anyone in the whole school! Considering the way Vanessa got on her case whenever she caught Danielle using System Skills (as if everyone wasn’t using Skills every day!) Danielle might even be able to include the teachers in that estimation; very few people had as much incentive as she did to train more subtle interface cues than the eye-flick gestures that most people learned in sixth grade.

  Danielle activated Skill: Illusions, and started building her scene under the table Warner was working at. It was worth putting some detail into the cartoon rabbit; it didn’t have to exactly match his favorite older-than-mana show, but it would go a long way toward cheering him up if it was recognizably in the same style. Next, a suitable hole for it to pop out of – rocks and mounded dirt. If something really were to dig its way into the school, leave aside that the sanctuary wardens would kill it with extreme prejudice well before it breached, it wouldn’t have much dirt to pile into mounds; this wasn’t realistic, though. This was entertainment!

  Danielle gradually lifted her illusory rabbit-hole through the table, adding some moving clods to attract Warner’s attention. After a moment, he startled and jerked a hand back from the illusion. Danielle immediately popped the rabbit’s head and shoulders up through the table, too. It looked at him, and pulled a cartoon carrot out of nowhere to gnaw on.

  “Wha- Danielle!” As predicted, Warner admonished her just loud enough that the librarian could definitely hear. Danielle could just barely hear it, herself, but it wasn’t hard to fill in the blanks in the next bit from what she could hear: “You know you’re not supposed to use Illusions in the library!”

  Danielle had the rabbit make a comedic “oh yeah, I forgot” face, then leap up and swan-dive back into its hole, before she gestured under her own table to clear the field of the illusion. Warner laughed and turned back to his book. That was the insufferable thing about Warner; he would absolutely insist that whatever happened next wasn’t his fault, because he hadn’t tattled, he’d never said anything except to her!

  Well, that wasn’t stopping the librarian from scanning the stacks near that end of the study area, and it wasn’t stopping Vanessa from standing up at her own table and doing the same. Danielle turned a page in her textbook, just to keep up the ‘normal student, studying,’ ruse her other Skill was working with. Between the big atlas stand and the biography shelves, someone chuckled and slipped back and around the end of the bookshelves.

  “AH HA! Get back here Danielle!” Vanessa nearly shouted, pointing and activating her own youth Skill. Danielle flinched a little at the feel of it in the mana, but it wasn’t aimed at her, however accidental that might be. It was aimed at the laughing student in the biography area. “You know you aren’t allowed to use Skills in the library!” Vanessa called, darting around her table to aim another disruption bolt down the next aisle.

  “Vanessa Vandere! Neither are you!” the librarian exclaimed, already moving around the end of the circulation desk.

  “But she’s right there - !” Vanessa tried.

  The librarian interrupted, “And it’s not your job to disrupt her. She’s already ended the illusion anyway!” Technically, that wasn’t true; Illusions was a duration Skill, so Daielle could continue using it if she wanted to. Actually ending the Skill would require words or additional gestures. Still, no need to correct the librarian’s misunderstanding.

  The laugher stepped out of the aisle. Danielle vaguely recognized the face – someone in her own year, she thought. From the fencing team, maybe? Her friend Akari would know, she was on the fencing team too; but Danielle wasn’t that familiar with the sports teams. “Um, I’m not who you’re looking for, I’m afraid – I thought the illusion was cute, but I didn’t make it,” the girl said.

  Vanessa gave an inarticulate cry of frustration. Danielle couldn’t resist a grim smile, behind her textbook – Vanessa had used her entire day’s mana production on those two attempts to disrupt an illusion that was already ‘gone,’ and if she was like most students, she was probably planning on using her mana on study Skills – everyone had at least one, sometimes two by now. Vanessa had one; Danielle was fairly sure, because as System-recognized Youths, they got as much mana generation as their number of Skills, and Vanessa still seemed to be running out at two these days – one for her Youth Skill, and one for her academic Skill, whatever that was.

  By the time they graduated high school, in another four years (almost exactly!) they’d probably have four System Skills! High schoolers still had to make do with a ten-point mana pool, though; that internal mana storage didn’t grow with new Skills like their mana generation did. Even their official “Adult Advancement” wouldn’t add to the mana pool – not until they actually made it to level 2 would that number go up, along with their base level. Of course, a larger pool didn’t help someone like Vanessa, who couldn’t seem to keep any mana unused from day to day.

  That wasn’t to say nothing could make the number go up before level 2. Danielle knew that for certain, because her number was – not 10. She never mentioned that to anyone at school, though; she didn’t know what it meant, and she didn’t want to hear Vanessa’s opinion of it, or really, anyone else’s. People gave her enough trouble over her Youth Skill.

  The librarian had finished with the girl in the stacks and sent her back to her search for whatever book she needed. It looked like she was dressing down Vanessa now, but Danielle couldn’t hear her. It was time to move, while Vanessa’s friends were still focused on her. Danielle closed her book, keeping a finger in the spot, and walked purposefully through the arch to the literary wing, then made her way through the stacks to the back wall.

  All the school staff insisted that the back of the building was just as warm as the front, but the students knew better; the back of the middle school was pressed up against the wall of the sanctuary cavern, some of the chambers even carved into the native stone, and it was always a few degrees colder there. It was certainly not their imaginations! So what if that was as close as anyone could get to the mana-dense Outside without actually leaving the sanctuary complex? So what if rumors made out the thickness of the outside-facing wall to be anywhere from hundreds of feet to less than a yard? So what if that barrier of uncertain thickness was all that held back the dread of mutations and monsters and System only knew what else? They weren’t saying it was creepy, or scary; they were saying it was cold, and it was!

  Danielle passed through that temperature drop now – just a degree or two, really, yet quite noticeable. She walked along the back wall, with its line of glass-walled study rooms. Everything was neatly plastered, but generations of ninth graders had passed on the certain truth to generations of seventh graders: the partitions between the library study rooms were native stone, and those rooms were the thinnest point in the wall of the entire State of Firmitatem, never mind the scholastic town of Eruditio Cavernus. Half the schools in the state were here; Tree of Knowledge Middle School was only one of a dozen that lined the outer wall of Eruditio Cavernus sanctuary, though it was one of the two biggest. Danielle begged leave to doubt that her school just happened to have been the one built into the thinnest spot, and she especially doubted that anyone had allowed a school full of mana-vulnerable youths to be built against a cavern wall less than a yard thick. Still, the adults insisted that there was no temperature difference, and there clearly, objectively was.

  She found the cubby with her friends inside, and joined them. “We figure we’ll give them a half hour to get busy and distracted again before we go looking for books,” Sadie greeted her. “If we’re lucky, Vanessa will get done with her group project and leave.”

  Danielle nodded and settled down at the study room’s round table, putting away her decoy textbook and pulling out her data pad and a library book in its place.

  “Thanks for playing decoy,” Heather said. “Life is always just easier when Vanessa’s looking the other way. Did you get in trouble?”

  “Technically, they can’t even prove it was me,” Danielle said. “Someone in the biography section accidentally covered for me, and by the time they realized it wasn’t actually me in there, it had been long enough that they figured I was just gone. Vanessa actually got in trouble, though! I doubt it’ll stick, for the same reason I doubted they’d stick me with any real punishment, but it was still satisfying to see.”

  The three of them stayed in the library until closing. Danielle finished a research paper while the other two studied, then they found three copies of the same book in the literature section so they could work on a severely belated book report together. Technically, Heather wasn’t even in the same class as Danielle and Sadie for that, yet the assignment was pretty much identical. With that out of the way, they quizzed each other on Spanish vocabulary flash-cards until the intercom announced last call for student checkouts. Spanish was the second official language of the Unified States, but Firmitatem didn’t have a lot of actual native Spanish speakers. Heather was marginally bilingual, and helped the other two with their pronunciations.

  “When are you going to teach us some of your ancestral language?” she teased Sadie for the millionth time.

  Sadie rolled her eyes. “Same answer as the last time, Heather: never ever.”

  Heather chuckled. “Aww, but it’s probably interesting. Not like Danielle – her ancestral language probably is English.”

  “My ancestral languages are, like, every language ancient Europe ever invented,” Danielle said. “That’s why the cultural preservation people don’t bother my family; they can’t figure out what culture we supposedly are. Mom says it’s because they look back too far when they define cultures.”

  “Man, I wish they’d leave us alone,” Heather complained. “I don’t think any of my ancestors had spoken Spanish for generations before the Spread, but now the cultural preservation people flip out if I use the wrong figure of speech and lecture me half the hour about preserving my own culture and not other people’s cultures, as if my culture wasn’t Firmitatem culture! My parents have literally never been further from Firmitatem than the protected campgrounds, you know?”

  “That’s technically still Firmitatem,” Sadie said. “Just because it’s Outside doesn’t mean it’s not still inside the state borders.”

  They fell silent as they got in line for the check-out desk. To Danielle’s dismay, however, it turned out the librarians weren’t checking anything out. “No books out over break,” they said, over and over, as each student or group checked in the books they were returning. “If you need it for tomorrow, we’ll put it on hold for you, but no checkouts.”

  Danielle regretfully returned the book they’d used for their book reports; she’d kind of wanted to read it properly over break. “Why won’t they allow checkouts over the break this year?” she asked.

  The librarian shrugged, looking away – looking guilty? “I couldn’t say,” she claimed. “Something to do with older students not coming back I guess.”

  “I’m only in eighth, I’ll be back for – ” Danielle began, but the librarian interrupted.

  “No exceptions. Hopefully it’ll only be this one time, but this time we have to follow the rules. It’s not up to me.”

  She really looked like she wasn’t happy with the rule, Danielle thought. “Right, well, sorry. I didn’t mean to make things difficult,” Danielle said, and followed her roommates out the door.

  They stayed quiet in the hall, keeping a sharp lookout for Vanessa and the other three ‘evil roommates.’ The four of them all had it in common that at least one member of Danielle’s group had once been a roommate, and had asked to be reassigned due to their bullying. Room shuffling being somewhat uncommon, it was understandable enough that they’d ended up together as a natural outcome of their former roommates ending up together. The problem was, not only were they still low-grade bullies, they held a grudge against their former roommates for ‘humiliating’ them and/or ‘ruining their reputations’ by requesting the changes.

  The further problem with it was, the standard middle school dorm “pods” were four-person affairs, two bedrooms for two people each, joined by a living/study area with a minimalist bathroom. As a group of only three, Danielle, Sadie, and Heather were placed in the very last room in the hallway, where one of the bedrooms was stunted in size because the architects had insisted on an old Outside-style peaked roofline. For some reason, it had ended up with Danielle in the single and Sadie in the double with Heather, even though Danielle and Sadie had been roommates before; sometimes the school administration did things that were beyond comprehension. What made it part of the problem was, Vanessa and her roommates tended to get revenge for any slight against them, real or imagined, by trying to ‘prank’ them on their way to their room. Being furthest from the stairs gave them the maximum possible level of opportunity to set ambushes.

  Danielle was really expecting an ambush, but they got down the hall without any trouble. That could only mean the door was trapped. Fortunately, Sadie and Heather knew it as well as she did, and they all paused to examine the door.

  “Open,” Sadie said. It wasn’t quite stating the obvious, because the door was almost closed, touching the door frame but not latched.

  Heather huffed in annoyance. “It’s probably another stupid bucket trap,” she said. “Why can’t they just lock the janitor’s closet?”

  “They won’t be inside again,” Sadie said. “Their usual fans actually didn’t approve of that one.”

  “They don’t need to be, anymore,” Heather said. “They figured out how to almost-close the door on their bucket trap three tries ago.”

  “Water’s too heavy for the tape trick, though,” Danielle said, “so at least we won’t get doused.”

  “I don’t feel like cleaning up old-worksheet confetti tonight,” Sadie said, carefully sliding the door open a sliver at a time. She stood on her toes to reach the bucket better, getting ahold of it as soon as her fingers would fit through the gap. “Someone push the door.”

  Danielle obliged, and Sadie lifted the bucket down with a shkretch sound. She looked it over. “Yep. Tape on the outside, torn up worksheets inside. Could’ve been worse.”

  “Says you,” Heather grumbled. “Last time we actually fell for one of these, it hit me on the head!”

  From behind, a voice called out, “What are you girls doing?”

  Danielle turned to see one of the hall monitors coming towards them. What was she doing out and about at this time of evening? She normally only worked days. “We’re defusing a bucket trap on our room,” she said. “It’s a common problem; the girls in 315 have figured out they can get a bucket from the janitor’s closet and they’re getting good at getting the door almost closed after they set the trap. I swear one of them is picking our lock, too – they keep saying the door was open, but we’re really obsessive about setting the lock, there’s no way they’ve found it accidentally forgotten this often. Where’s Mrs. Bleeker? She knows this already.”

  “Your regular dorm monitor is dealing with a situation in the other wing,” the hall monitor said. “Give me the bucket, please.”

  “Sure.” Sadie handed it to her. “Be careful of the tape.”

  The hall monitor pulled the tape off the outside, then rolled the loop in the torn paper so it wouldn’t stick to anything else. “I’ll just put this back in the janitor’s closet,” she said, and turned away.

  “You’re not going to ask any questions?” Heather asked. “Somebody tried to trap our room!”

  The hall monitor sighed, but started walking. Over her shoulder, she said, “It’s just some paper. It’s not worth making waves over right now.”

  The three roommates exchanged glances, and went inside. Sadie closed and locked the door (not that the lock seemed to be doing any good, lately) while Danielle and Heather set their bags on the room’s blocky, rather uncomfortable couch.

  “Is it just me, or are the grownups all acting weird the last couple of days?” Heather asked.

  “Definitely weird,” Sadie said. “The schedule’s off, too. Annual medchecks went early and took longer.”

  “Yeah, they had that System evaluation expert in,” Danielle said. “Mom said that’s actually normal for the class that’s moving up – she says ninth graders and twelfth graders both get the full System check, but they don’t usually do the seventh and eighth graders.”

  “You mentioned it in an email, huh?” Heather said. “Me too. My dad said it’s a bad sign, and might mean we have a higher risk of being Sent after high school – he says we’ll have to take the camping seriously the next few years. If it happens again when we’re in tenth or eleventh grade, then it’s a real bad sign, and we have to start thinking about what to do if we get kicked Outside.”

  Sadie shuddered. “I don’t understand Sending. The tribe has an Outside Braves program for people that want to get high levels – I think all the tribes do! Every place has to have some way of getting a few people above level 3. Why does just Firmitatem have to just take whole graduating classes and dump them out in the mana, though?”

  “It’s not just us,” Danielle corrected absently. “All 82 states of the Unified States of North America have Sending Authorities. Besides, foreign high-level programs are more like Sendings than they want to admit – not all of them are strictly voluntary, and even the voluntary ones keep their, uh, members? Participants, I mean! They always keep them strictly outside until level 10.”

  “Oh, look who’s an expert now,” Heather teased.

  “Mrs. Basalt made us do a research thing on it,” Danielle said. “Depressing subject to end the school year on, if you ask me. Sadie’s right, though – the adults are all acting just a little off. Like maybe they’re kind of depressed, actually. Usually, all the teachers want you to believe your last test in their class is the biggest thing you’ve ever done in your life so far, but this year a lot of them seem kind of – I don’t know what word I want. Like they care, but they don’t think it’ll change anything?”

  “Oh, yeah. Mr. Rowan actually told someone in my math class that it didn’t matter what grade he got on the test!” Heather said. Danielle and Sadie both gave her boggled looks, and she added, “Well, he said, “as long as you understood the material,” it’s not like Mr. Rowan actually said math doesn’t matter. It’s just that he usually says things like, “knowing the material will do more to help you get a good grade than memorizing a cheat sheet;” but this time he actually said the grade didn’t matter. It’s just a little off, like you said.”

  “Maybe it’s because the rewards ceremony got moved up,” Danielle speculated. “Usually it’s tests Monday to Wednesday, ceremony Saturday evening, so they have all of Thursday and Friday to grade their last set of tests and stuff. Doing it tomorrow night is just asking for all the teachers to be stressed out; they have to give tests in the morning, grade them in the afternoon, and turn in final grades in time for the principal to calculate honor roll for the evening ceremony. It’s crazy! Not to mention, they’re making more of the parents take time off of work to get here, putting it on a Wednesday like this.”

  “Maybe that’s why the last test doesn’t matter,” Sadie said. “Maybe they’re doing final grades without them, because they don’t have time to grade them.”

  Danielle and Heather traded glances. “That would explain a few things,” Danielle said slowly. “If they’re actually calculating final grades tonight, but for some reason they all agreed not to let on, maybe to make sure we still study or something, then the adults would all know they’re just going through the motions, but they’d still have to pretend just to keep the secret.”

  “I don’t get why they moved the ceremony in the first place,” Heather complained. “Like Danielle said, it’s stupid for everyone. The school doesn’t have time to do grades right, the parents have to get weekday train tickets and maybe miss work, and we don’t have time to pack!”

  “Aren’t you mostly packed already?” Danielle asked. “I know I’ve got everything I’m not using today or tomorrow packed.”

  “Not everyone is as obsessive about packing as you are!” Heather groused.

  Sadie laughed. “She taught me how,” she told Heather.

  Danielle chuckled. “My mom taught me! She’s good at – uh, there’s a fancy word for it. Space something? Spatial, um, thinking? Something like that. Dad says that’s why she’s a mechanical/structural engineer, and he’s electrical; he’s better at abstract diagrams and stuff and she’s better at spatial stuff.”

  “Your parents are cool,” Heather said. “Mine are just invisible office shleps at Viva!Stream; it sounds cool to have parents that work for a major streaming service, but they don’t do anything interesting there.”

  “They’re all going to have to get over their aversion to camping if we’re really in danger of being Sent, though,” Sadie said. “Learning about spatial thinking and the technical back end of streaming is all well and good, but Sent need to know how to fish and find traditional foods in the wild and all that stuff.”

  “Maybe they’ll send us camping with your family,” Danielle joked. “I’ve already been a couple times with Akari’s family. She’s got older brothers.”

  “I do too – well, and sisters, but you know what I mean,” Heather said. “My parents usually take us for just a weekend, and then send them with other friends, though. They say, “everyone should learn the survival basics so no disaster can kill as much of the human race as the meteor and the spread did, but that doesn’t mean we all have to make a hobby out of them!” Personally, I agree. Fishing is kind of icky. I’m happiest if the fish I eat comes to me already clean, cut, breaded, and frozen.”

  “Not all fish is fish sticks, Heather,” Sadie said, rolling her eyes. “Go pack. Move-out is tomorrow!”

  “I’ll help if you want,” Danielle volunteered.

  Heather sighed. “All right, all right. Thanks.”

  The three of them crowded into Heather and Sadie’s room and got busy, making sure all three of them were ready to go.

  Getting Heather’s side of the room halfway organized and partly packed took as much time as Danielle was willing to spend that night, and there was still plenty to do during downtime on Wednesday. First came a somewhat uneasy night’s sleep, a hearty if boring cafeteria breakfast (eggs and bacon with biscuits), and the last of their year-end exams. Danielle carefully worked out how many questions she could afford to get right on the history exam; she was pretty sure she was in danger of making honor roll, and that would guarantee at least a full school quarter of extra bullying from Vanessa, so it was important not to ace history by accident.

  History was her worst subject anyway, so it wasn’t usually hard. It was still worth figuring out the maximum number, though, then answering only that many questions from the ones she was sure she could get right. Making sure the rest were wrong was easy; keeping the answers mostly subtle, so she wouldn’t get lectured for blowing off the test again, was more difficult. Halfway through working on the wrong answers, Danielle remembered that the test might not even be graded, and paused to think for a long minute about whether it would be worth having some fun with it instead; but in the end, she wasn’t sure enough to go through with it.

  Lunch was one of the least popular dishes the cafeteria served, salad with chicken slices. Danielle didn’t know why they bothered to offer it in the middle school; a lot of people just ate the chicken off the top, wasted the greens, and then complained about being hungry the rest of the day. Danielle, Heather, and Sadie made up for it by finishing the rest of their stash of room snacks after classes ended; it made more sense than packing them, anyway. Between the three of them, they even managed to get Heather’s stuff all properly packed up before supper. The cafeteria ladies made up for it by serving pizza for supper, which was always a hit, and encouraged the vaguely festive end-of-school mood.

  For some reason, the summer break always felt extra special. It wasn’t that much longer – only four weeks, when the other quarter breaks were about three – but it was the one that was officially between school years. The school always tried to make a clean break between the years, so there was never any break-time reading, no long-term assignments hanging over anyone’s heads, no fretting about bringing up a grade in a given class; the annual permanent-record grades were all set in stone, and next month would bring a new start with new teachers and new electives. The ninth graders would actually be moving to a new school – all of three blocks away, for most of them, but the transition from middle school to high school was also an opportunity for parents to switch which school system their child was in, which was to say, which school. A few people could conceivably be moving to the other education-focused sanctuary city.

  Danielle felt like the sense of summer break being different was a little artificial, though, when it wasn’t a year when you were switching schools. She would still be rooming with Heather and Sadie next year, quite possibly in the same physical rooms. Vanessa would still be in her class, causing her trouble. Even if whatever was going on scared some parents into changing which schools people in her class attended, she reasoned, they would do it next year when it was time to move anyway, not between eighth and ninth grades and on short notice.

  Parents were starting to arrive, many with younger siblings in tow. Some of them paid for cafeteria pizza, too, much to the delight of the little kids. Siblings in fifth or sixth grade couldn’t come, of course, because they were still at their own school; Danielle overheard parents discussing it in line. Usually, it was all on Saturday – high school awards ceremony in the morning, middle school in the afternoon, and Awakening school in the early evening, then families could take all their resident-school kids home at once. This year, only the middle school had switched their date, and the parents were concerned about the reason. One father complained, “they’re acting like it’s a Sending – switching dates with no explanation, sending strongly worded ‘invitations’ to the award ceremony, my kid even told me they did the extra System checks along with the annual health checks. I know they can’t Send middle schoolers, but it has to be something, and they’re bending over backwards to avoid saying what before it’s time to release the kids, so it can’t be anything minor.”

  The other man he was talking to, an older father with a four- or five-year-old daughter trying to use his left arm as a swing, replied distractedly, “Well it can’t be anything too major, either. I agree it’s concerning – ow! Candice, sweety, don’t bend daddy’s fingers! What was I - ? Oh, right. There’s just nothing they can actually do with middle schoolers. It’s probably the school that has some trouble, and that is concerning, but it’s not the end of the world if we have to switch to a different school system. They all start and end on the same days anyway, and there are only two cities to choose from. I’m not saying it doesn’t matter, but – ow! Candice! Do you want a time-out?”

  That ended that particular conversation, and Danielle returned her attention to Sadie and Heather’s ongoing discussion about whether dessert pizza really counted as pizza, and if not, what it should be called instead. Still – it was concerning.

  After supper, the roommates split up to go greet their own families, who arrived in a crowd of other parents that had been on the same train. Danielle posted herself at a window near the main entrance to watch for them. Danielle’s parents apparently hadn’t found a babysitter, because her three youngest siblings were with them. The oldest of her siblings, Eva, was in Awakening school, about to graduate sixth grade. It occurred to Danielle that if something was wrong with Tree of Knowledge Middle School, her sister would be affected as much as she would. Her nine-year-old brother Timothy still had a year to go before Awakening school, though, and stood awkwardly behind her parents while they waited for other families to get through the traffic jam at the doors. He was making their father bend back a little bit, trying to pretend he wasn’t holding hands with his parents; Danielle privately admitted it was a little embarrassing for a kid his age, but there was a lot of crowd to worry about.

  Her father’s other hand was gripping her littler sister’s wrist; evidently seven-year-old Lydia had tried to escape and wasn’t trusted to just hold hands right now. Danielle couldn’t hear her whining through the window and the crowd, but she could imagine the sound based on the look on her face and a great deal of personal experience. Her mother had the very youngest sibling, four-year-old Micah, held in her arms. He huddled nervously against her, probably shy of all the strangers around them, as they crept towards the door with the rest of the crowd from the train stop. Tree of Knowledge was the second-closest school to the station, after the one that was directly across the street, and the traffic lights kept the crowd bunched up.

  Danielle could actually see other adults she knew; Sadie’s dad was always very distinctive, with his classic native-north-American skin tone and high-bridged nose, his long, braided hair, and an outfit that made maximum use of the same distinctive woven banding that Sadie used for hair ribbons. Her mother stood out less in a crowd, since she could pass for a more ‘ordinary’ Hispanic, and generally dressed very professionally. The high-class business-woman image was only slightly dented by holding hands with Sadie’s five- and seven-year-old siblings. The ten-year-old brother was walking proudly with both hands free, next to his father; he was old enough to start Awakening school in a month, if Danielle was recalling his age correctly. She couldn’t dredge up his name, but she thought the age was right. It wasn’t quite the whole family; like Danielle, Sadie had a younger sister in Awakening school already.

  Akari’s family hung back, as usual; and as usual, it hadn’t saved her mother from being latched onto by one of the other moms, determined to talk her ear off. Danielle didn’t know the other woman’s name, but she’d seen this behavior enough quarters in a row, now, to know what was happening. Akari’s mother had a different flavor of Asian heritage than her father, and the two cultural preservation groups had never gotten over the ‘mixed’ marriage. Akari complained about it often enough; she had as much trouble with her ‘pure blooded’ classmate as her mom did with the classmate’s mom. Danielle didn’t know what it was the other woman wanted Akari’s mother to actually do at this point, but every time parents came in from Danielle and Akari’s home city, there that woman would be, talking a mile a minute while Akari’s mother pasted on a pained smile and looked for any excuse to extract herself from the conversation.

  Danielle noticed to her amusement that Akari’s father was actually covering up her youngest brother’s ears; he looked grumpy about it, probably because he was also ten – old enough to Awaken any time! – and didn’t think he should get his ears covered around nasty words like a toddler, but their father persisted. Danielle thought he looked worried, but whether it was the cultural preservation activist worrying him or the oddities surrounding the early awards ceremony, she couldn’t guess.

  Heather’s parents were trying to reconnect after getting into different parts of the crowd somehow; that didn’t surprise Danielle anymore, even though it still seemed weird to her. Those two were both big socializers, and were forever getting into different conversations and wandering apart at these quarterly student-pick-up events. Heather claimed she’d once been left at a train stop as a pre-Awakened child, because each parent thought she was with the other one. At least they didn’t have to drag any un-Awakened children with them anymore; Heather was the youngest child in her family.

  Her parents both looked very worried, today; and with rumors about a Sending going around, it was no wonder. They’d already lost a son to a Sending, two years ago, and Heather had another brother graduating from high school this year. If another Sending was really happening this year, he was the one at risk; if the government was planning a Sending in the next couple of years, a different brother would be at risk, and if it was really the middle school classes being evaluated as possible future Sent, then of course Heather was at risk. In normal times, Sending’s didn’t happen so close together, but people said that every so often an oldest and youngest sibling from the same family would both end up Sent.

  Of course, from everything Danielle had ever heard about Sendings before that day, they were always very hush-hush beforehand; the first sign was supposedly when some high school’s graduation ceremonies ended with a Sending announcement, and the graduates were taken away in busses to the Sending Authority instead of going home for break. The teacher that assigned the research project on Sendings told the class how it could be hard on the colleges and trade schools, because they lost some of their expected students for the coming year – depending on which school’s graduates were Sent, anywhere from dozens to hundreds.

  The assignment had been a month ago, but the teacher had looked very serious, talking about how the Sending disrupted the schools and colleges. Watching Heather’s father get distracted on his way to the doors to greet someone else and ask a question, Danielle wondered if the announcement at a graduation ceremony was really the first sign. Would teachers hear rumors or see hints earlier than the average parent, living in a different sanctuary city? The scholastic towns weren’t that big, and both of them had perennial problems keeping the mana density low enough for really small children; Awakened “youths” were more resilient, and could even benefit from a slightly higher mana density, but parents with younger siblings still in the home never wanted to live in the academic towns. Who would hear things soonest? Apparently not the man Heather’s dad was talking to; he shook his head with a worried frown of his own, and pushed on toward the door while Heather’s dad stood on his toes to try to see her mom over the crowd.

  Help support creative writers by finding and reading their stories on the original site.

  Danielle’s family, meanwhile, finally made it to the doors, so she moved away from the window to wave at them. Timothy saw her first, and broke away from their father to run at her, yelling “Danielle, Danielle!” He ran into her hard enough to rock her back on her heels and wrapped his arms around her. “You’re all right!”

  Danielle laughed and hugged him back. “Of course I’m all right, silly. Why would I not be all right?”

  He leaned back and looked up at her, forcing her to adjust her footing or be pulled over in the other direction. “I dunno, but all the grownups are super worried and they keep telling us kids not to worry about it, but something has to be going on!”

  “Aw.” Danielle hugged him again. “It’s OK, I’m fine. The grownups here are acting weird too, but they don’t tell us anything either – there might be something wrong for the school or something, but I’m just fine.”

  “I’m glad to hear that,” her mother said with a smile, adding “Hug daddy now, Micah!”

  So saying, she lifted Micah away, turned, and held him out to their father, who protested, “Hey, wait, I don’t have my hands – ” but Micah grabbed him around the neck and more-or-less settled himself on his father’s hip, where “daddy” could support him with the arm Timothy had left free. “Thanks for the warning,” he concluded ironically.

  Danielle’s mother ignored him to wrap Danielle in her own hug. She hadn’t looked particularly surprised, or even relieved, when Danielle told Timothy she was fine, but Danielle could tell from the hug that she was worried. For one thing, she didn’t seem to want to let go. At first, Danielle hugged back, but eventually she looked up to her dad, trying to formulate a question.

  He just shook his head with a fond sigh. Lydia, meanwhile, was leaning and tugging against his grip on her wrist, insisting, “My turn, my turn! I wanna hug Danielle, too!” Then Timothy just had to jump in and tell her, “It’s still mom’s turn, stink-brain!” and she switched from trying to get to Danielle to trying to get at Timothy.

  That finally got their mom to let go of Danielle and intervene, and while she was making the two of them say reluctant (not to say grudging and insincere) apologies for calling each other names, their father finally managed to get a one-armed hug in, with Micah half-turning to hug her with one arm, too. “I’m glad to see you, sweety,” her father said. Micah just squeezed, then patted her head with his free hand – a little harder than was comfortable, but Danielle was pretty sure that was just him being a four-year-old, not hurting on purpose.

  “I’m glad to see you too,” she said. “Seriously though, Dad, do you know what’s going on with all the rumors and stuff? Why are all the adults acting weird?”

  He sighed again. “We don’t know. There’s some sort of announcement happening at the end of the awards ceremony, and between that and the change of date, and the fact that no other hints have gotten out about whatever it is, it just feels too much like the run-up to a Sending. It can’t be that, because this isn’t a high school, but since we don’t know what it could be – well, it just makes it feel pretty dire, and leaves everything else to people’s overactive imaginations.”

  “It’s probably something legal,” her mother said, turning back to them, Lydia and Timothy’s hands now firmly held in her own. “Some teacher accused of abuse or something. It’s the only thing that makes sense – they’re keeping the details under wraps because it’s an ongoing case, but it’s about to hit the press, so they have to inform the parents, and doing it at the ceremony means that nobody hears before anybody else.”

  “Why the ‘strong suggestion’ to bring siblings, then?” her father countered, and her mother immediately shook her head; Danielle got the feeling they’d had this conversation already, possibly more than once. “Don’t shake your head at me; you would suggest younger siblings stay home if you had to announce an abuse scandal!”

  “Look, nothing fits all the evidence properly, but abuse scandal fits the most evidence with the most flex for the rest to be explained by pure poor decision making,” her mother insisted.

  “Can we talk about something else?” Lydia whined. “I wanna see Danielle’s room!”

  “I wanna see Danielle’s library!” Timothy added. “I wanna see the study rooms with the thin wall to the outside!”

  “That’s just a rumor,” their father said quellingly. “Just because we’re against the wall of the Sanctuary, that doesn’t mean we’re right up against the Outside. There are dozens of yards of rock between here and the Outside, at least, plus all kinds of mana control systems and their access tunnels.”

  “I can show you the library anyway, though,” Danielle said. “There’s still almost an hour until the awards ceremony, it’s the perfect time to give tours.”

  Her parents had seen it all before, of course, but they gamely went along with the tour, if only for the sake of giving Timmy and Lyddy something to do that wasn’t fighting with each other or otherwise causing trouble. The cafeteria was closest, but Danielle started with the dormitory anyway. It was a poor impression of the dorm pod, since everything was packed up – the middle room was completely bare, and the girls had left their standard-size school footlockers, book satchels, and extra luggage bags, all next to their beds, per instructions. That was an annoying extra rule this year; the dorms were being inspected during, not after, the awards ceremony, so everything had to be taken down, packed, and placed in the right spots. School data pads on the desks, luggage next to the beds, uniforms to be sold back to the used uniform program on the beds, book satchels in view on top of the footlockers – it was all very specific. Danielle was just complaining a little, expecting some half-hearted commiseration from her parents and much more sincere sympathy from Timothy, but she saw her parents exchange a darkly significant glance when she told them.

  “Do you think it’s because they’re trying to get everyone out faster after the ceremony?” she asked. “That was Heather’s theory. She thinks they’re going to knock down the building tonight for some reason, but I think that’s just nuts. They’d need way more time to clean out the rest of the school first – no way they’d knock down the building still full of data servers and virtual whiteboards and real whiteboards and, and cafeteria stuff, um, right?”

  “That’s right,” her father said easily. “Whatever it is, it’s definitely not going to be demolition tonight. It might be about getting people out of here faster after the ceremony, though; not just you kids, but the staff, too. If they need to get a full building inspection done tonight and then clear out for some other kind of workers to take over tomorrow, construction or moving or otherwise, this would help speed things along.”

  “Moving – like, moving the whole school?” Danielle asked. “I hadn’t thought of that. Wow, we could be at the same school, and still be in a whole new building.”

  “I guess you’d better show us your library while it’s still the same library you remember,” her mom joked, not quite banishing the tension from her voice, but trying her best.

  Danielle continued the tour as best she could. The library was unlocked, but the study rooms were all locked up, and some of the bookshelves had covers pulled down over them. Danielle couldn’t remember having seen most of those covers before, and couldn’t account for their appearance during a time when family tours were a common activity. The gymnasium was also open, and full of cheap inflatable balls for younger siblings to play with (and un-Awakened kids playing with them). That distracted Lydia and Timothy long enough that they barely got a glance into the cafeteria before it was time to move on to the auditorium to try to get good seats for the family. Students, as usual, were sitting in class groups so they could file up in neat, easy rows for the more common recognitions.

  For both the Awakening school and the middle school, it was normal for the school administration to set up tables after the ceremony to pass out report cards to the parents; this year, the tables were already out and attended by various teachers, and a sign between the auditorium doors read, “Please collect your report cards BEFORE the ceremony.”

  “Wow, they really are trying to get rid of us as fast as possible,” Danielle’s mother said. Her father was silent as they got in line next to a sign reading “D-F” – like a filing drawer, Danielle thought. She would be alphabetized by last name under F, as “Falconer, Danielle.”

  “Do you think you got good grades?” Timothy asked Danielle while they waited.

  Danielle smiled. “I’m pretty sure it’s all As except history, as usual,” she said.

  “What is it with you and history?” Danielle’s mother asked. “If you’d just study it instead of making your history teacher mad every quarter, you’d be on the honor roll!”

  “I keep telling you, honor roll is the problem,” Danielle said. “The last time I made honor roll for a quarter – ”

  “I know, I know, that Vanessa girl made your life miserable all quarter,” her mother said with a sigh. “You know, that was in Awakening school. She might have grown up a little by now.”

  “She has not,” Danielle said. “She won’t let me do anything good without punishing me for it. Well, not anything that gets me any attention, or uses my System Skills, but that’s close enough. It’s worth it sometimes for little things, but honor roll will get me a whole quarter of constant pestering and bullying and lately she’s figured out how to get around the door locks, and it’s just not worth it. Well, unless the school really is closing and we can go to different ones next year, but it was already way too late to change most of my grades by the time that rumor started up, and anyway, it’s just a rumor.”

  When they got to the front of the line, Danielle discovered with dismay that the teacher handing out envelopes for their line happened to be her history teacher. “Miss Falconer. I enjoyed your extra credit essay on how jealousy over resources led to the First Plains War,” she said in ironic tones, while ignoring Danielle’s extended hand to pass her report card envelope over her head to her father.

  Danielle put her hand down and gave her a horrified look. “You didn’t give me extra credit for that, did you?! The question was about the first Straits War!”

  “Not even pretending to be confused, this quarter? I was sorely tempted. It was well-written, demonstrated understanding of the subject matter, and frankly, the questions you got wrong overlapped so heavily with the ones you got right, it would’ve been a better representation of your mastery of the material,” her teacher said. Danielle’s eyes widened, the specter of a full quarter of constant room invasions and boobytraps yawning wide before her. “However,” the teacher continued, “I did actually get the point you were making in your essay, and with current events being what they are – well. I decided to let you have your desired obscurity.” She sighed.

  Danielle closed her eyes and took a deep, steadying breath. “Thank you. You have no idea how much trouble that saved me,” she said.

  “For once, I honestly have to admit that I don’t,” the teacher said. “Do stay out of trouble, Miss Falconer. If you can avoid your own personal Plains Wars, I’m sure you’ll go far.”

  “Does that mean you know what’s going to be announced in an hour?” her father asked, giving the teacher a tense frown.

  “I do, but I can’t comment before the announcement. My job is very much on the line, and losing my job would not allow me to help anyone. Her final tests and papers and so forth are in the folder; please find your seats and try to appreciate the awards part. The announcement will come soon enough,” the teacher said.

  There was nothing to do from there except edge back out between the A-C line and the D-F line, and head for the auditorium. Danielle’s father paused inside to open her envelope while her mother scanned the room for seats. As usual, the seventh and eighth grade students were crammed into the right-hand bank of chairs, while the high-school-bound ninth graders were seated on the stage to make them look extra special (and not coincidentally, make more room for parents). The auditorium was decorated in “Congratulations!” banners, and posters showing confetti and mortar boards (even though middle schoolers didn’t wear any such academic regalia to their year-end ceremonies). The Awakening School would use the auditorium for their own ceremony that Saturday, decorations and all – if it hadn’t been torn down, Danielle reminded herself. With the hurry the staff seemed to be in to get everyone out, demolition tomorrow or Friday seemed within the realm of possibility!

  “Well, you were right,” her father said. “History is a B+ and everything else is A or A+, leaving you just barely short of the requirements for honor roll. I disapprove of the goal, but you apparently managed to calculate your margins quite accurately.”

  “Um, thanks,” Danielle said awkwardly. “I worked on it.”

  Her mother shook her head disapprovingly. “Just imagine if you’d worked on getting a good grade instead,” she said.

  “Hey, B+ is good!” Danielle protested. “It proves I paid attention without getting me in trouble!”

  “Oh, we’ll just see about that!” her mother said.

  Her father slid the report card and the final tests and papers back into the envelope. “Let’s see what this announcement is before we start making threats, dear,” he said. “We might have bigger fish to fry.”

  “Um, I better go,” Danielle said, edging to the right to go take her seat for the ceremony.

  “Micah, go hug mommy,” her father said, handing Danielle’s report envelope to Timothy, and giving Micah to her mother in much the same way she’d passed him earlier. Danielle paused, as much because she wanted to protest handing her grades to Timmy as anything else, but found herself wrapped in a bear hug. “Listen, I hope this will all turn out to be just an annoyance for our family, but if not, never forget that your family loves you, and God will be with you,” her father whispered. Then he stood back up and said, “Give Lydia her turn for a hug before you go, she missed it before because of fighting, and after the announcement we might be too busy leaving real fast to do hugs.”

  “Yeah, my turn!” Lyddy shouted, and threw herself at Danielle.

  Danielle laughed. “What am I, a park swing?” she hugged her little sister. “Love you, Lyddy. Try to be good during all the talking!”

  Lydia leaned in as if to give her a family kiss, but instead blew a raspberry against her cheek, then tried to run off laughing. Danielle’s mother caught her, saying something about not being mean on awards night; with the noise of the crowd starting to pick up, Danielle already couldn’t hear much of the lecture, even though they were only a few rows away down the right-center aisle. She shook her head. “I don’t envy you being the oldest kid at home with Lyddie doing the wild-child thing,” she told Timothy.

  “I know!” he exclaimed. “You get it – everybody else is like, ‘why do you even care, you’re not the one getting in trouble,’ but half the time I am!”

  Danielle’s dad ruffled his hair. “Come on, it’s not the right time for complaining about family. It’s the right time to watch family get school year awards! Let’s go find seats.”

  The two of them went down the aisle after the others. Little Micah looked over their mother’s shoulder and waved at Danielle, a small, shy wave. She grinned and gave him a matching little wave back, then turned and headed for the far-right aisle, along the right-hand wall of the auditorium. The doors at the back were big double doors, a pair at the top of each of the main aisles; along the side walls, single doors with small, narrow windows were placed periodically for fire safety and urgent restroom dashes. The hallway outside had most of its lights turned off to prevent the little windows from shining odd lights into the auditorium when it was dimmed to highlight the stage or the main projection screen, but Danielle had a more immediate use for the doors; her spot in the alphabetical seating was the row right by the third door down, second seat from the end.

  They’d had a practice run on Monday, with notecards stuck to everyone’s seat backs with loops of tape. Now, Danielle slipped past a dorm monitor to her assigned seat. The notecard was slightly askew from fidgeting during the practice session. Danielle sat down and pulled her feet in, so all the slower kids with F names could get past her. Tree of Knowledge wasn’t the biggest middle school in the state (that was Booker middle school), but there were still somewhere in the vicinity of 250 kids in each class. The youngest class, now-thirteen-year-olds just finishing seventh grade, sat below her class of fourteen-year-old eighth graders. The new seventh graders would arrive as twelve-year-olds in a month – at least, if nothing went wrong. Danielle didn’t know if she was looking forward to sharing a school with her sister or not, but it was still weird to find herself wondering, now, if Eva would really be coming or if everything was going to change in some completely different way.

  The seats gradually filled in. Danielle couldn’t resist turning around every so often to see if she could see her friends. Sadie’s last name was Weaver, so she was most of the way up, halfway between the first and second doors, in the row right in front of the staff section. She was insulated from Vanessa Vandere by only five people (a VanZorn, a Victor, two Waverly cousins, and a Waterson). Fortunately, the middle school auditorium and the exact seating arrangement put the row break between the Waverlys (Danielle suspected shenanigans on the part of the teachers, because the cousins tended to either fight or incite each other to mischief). Heather’s last name was Orellana, so she was in the back half of the class, too. She was almost directly in front of Vanessa, but with several rows in between; and she was down the row from Melanie Numina, but really all the way at the other end. Danielle didn’t envy her the proximity, but she was just far enough in either direction that there probably wouldn’t be trouble. The other two ‘evil roommates’ were in front of Danielle – Susan Chert slouched in the C row, while Mallory Alvain leaned over the back of the seat in front of her, heckling the younger students in the next row for some reason.

  Finally, teachers started shouting last calls, and the rest of the seats filled in. A pair of similar-looking girls took the seats to Danielle’s left – another pair of cousins, if she remembered correctly, but mostly she thought of them as “the tennis twins,” because they always seemed to be in the school’s racket-sports rooms during free time. The school didn’t actually have dedicated tennis courts, but that didn’t stop them; they would go for racketball if it was volleyball week in the court-sports area. The nickname was hardly original to Danielle, and the cousins seemed to like it all right.

  To her right, a nervous boy slid in at the last minute. “Hey Alex,” Danielle greeted him. “I thought you said you were going to fake a stomachache and go hide in the nurse’s clinic?”

  “I tried,” he said, “but there was a Healer there – like, an actual classed Healer, and a high level one, too. She checked me over, and said it was just nerves – which, I mean, she’s not really wrong – anyway, she gave me a little pill to settle my stomach and sent me back out, and then my dad actually showed up. I didn’t think he would possibly – because seriously, in the four years we’ve been in boarding school, this is only the second time, and it’s in the middle of the week! How did he even get off work? They don’t let him off for anything! Anyway, he’s here, so I kind of have to, now. I hope the pill works.”

  “Stomach ache’s not that fake now, huh?” Danielle asked sympathetically.

  “It’s not an ache exactly but – well, I don’t like being in front of crowds, and I threw up at a kiddie choir concert back in neighborhood school once,” Alex admitted.

  “Yeesh. And if you already didn’t like being on stage, well, after that – ” Danielle broke off with a shake of her head.

  Alex nodded. “Exactly. What I want to know now, though, is since when does a big-shot Returned Healer like that come to school awards nights? If my dad’s going to be here, I guess I’m glad she was here to sort me out, but it’s still just weird.”

  “What’s Returned?” Danielle asked.

  Alex gave her a weird look. “You know, like – former Sent? You get Sent, and if you get to a high level you come back, and then they call you Returned, and you get to be Inside even though you’re over level 3, and you can do all the crazy high-tier System stuff.”

  “Oh. I guess I never heard what it was called, before,” Danielle said, trying not to blush too hard. “I mean, the books we used for the research project always just said ‘high level individuals,’ or stuff like that! It’s not like I actually know anyone high level, or anything.” She looked around the auditorium at all the adults filling up the left and middle sections. “Well, not that I’m aware of,” she added.

  “Yeah, it’s weird how most people spend their whole lives just getting to level 3, or maybe 4, but people who go outside at age eighteen can be level 10 or even 11 before they turn thirty. We could totally have classmates with Returned parents,” Alex said. “Probably not very many though – Returned get rich off their high-tier System abilities, and we don’t have that many rich kids. They all go to Booker.”

  “Not all of them,” Danielle said. “Booker’s supposed to be better for networking – the social kind – but Tree of Knowledge is friendlier to parents who want their kids to learn religions other than Systemism, or to anyone with special needs but not special enough to get into Nurturing Hand.”

  “Or who could get into Nurturing Hand, but their parents don’t want their kid to give up on day 1,” Alex said. “That’s what my mom says, anyhow. Aren’t there a bunch of smaller school systems that just do, like, specific cultural preservation programs, or specific religions, or whatever?”

  “I’m not sure,” Danielle said. “I mean, I think they exist, but I hear a lot of them had to send their older kids to larger schools for the mana handling the last few years, and just run their stuff as ‘parent’s choice’ programs. Something about the mana handling equipment being too expensive to upgrade or something.”

  “We are a pretty big class,” Alex said. “One of the janitors was telling me how most of the time, classes here run between a hundred eighty and two hundred, but we’re the third class in a row that’s been practically at maximum capacity, and the two after us are just as big.”

  “Huh. Maybe the extras are the ones that would be from the smaller schools?” Danielle said. “I never really thought about how many kids that’d be, before, or anything like that.”

  “Me either, really,” Alex said. “The thing with the janitor was last year, and I never thought to wonder who was from the other schools. I mean, Awakening schools are always smaller, and when you go between schools is always when people who are going to switch systems do it, so – ” he shrugged.

  Danielle nodded. “You wouldn’t notice them in the crowd; a few dozen from a littler school would just fade into the chaos and everyone from the big three Awakening schools that are in-system with us would just assume anyone they don’t know is from one of the other two.”

  Alex nodded back. “And now we’ve been with them two years, so unless you pay attention to who goes on Parent’s Choice stuff, you wouldn’t have a clue who they were.”

  “I mean, I kind of do,” Danielle said, “if only because I have Parent’s Choice stuff, and I notice who’s out there catching busses at the same time; but at this point, who even cares? I mean, besides their parents.”

  “I dunno,” Alex said. “It’s just weird to think about. Plus, some parents who like the school in general still think it’s rotten that the government charges so much for home-study permits. Seriously, you should hear my aunt; she talks like the government steals everyone’s kids and brainwashes them.”

  Danielle shifted awkwardly in her seat. “Well, it is pretty frustrating being away from home most of the year. My parents come out once a month to visit on the weekend, but it’s not the same as living at home, and breaks always feel too short. I feel like I barely know Lyddie anymore – my little sister, I mean – and I’m never quite sure if my four-year-old brother actually remembers me.”

  “I know, I have a brother that age too, and it’s the same – he’s too squirrely to sit through weekly vid calls, but then when I’m actually home, he acts like he’s all shy of me and stuff,” Alex said. “You know what he did at winter break? He – ”

  Alex cut off as the lights went down, and the principal stepped out on stage. The front curtain was already open, and she walked briskly to a microphone set front and center. “Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to year-end awards at Tree of Knowledge Middle School. Please stand and offer your congratulations to the graduating class as they take their places of honor!”

  Music started, a traditional march, more suitable for a grand procession at a high school or college than the opening of ceremonies at a middle school; Danielle knew from the year before what was going on, though. Behind the principal, the back curtains parted, to reveal the area that would normally be considered backstage. It lacked the polished floor and fancy lighting, and right now it was filled with a set of portable bleachers. Students from the older class clanked up the slightly rattly metal stairs of the bleachers and filed in from both ends. The music wasn’t quite loud enough to hide the sound of slightly-loose metal contacting other metal parts.

  The lead boy from the left side of the second row was so nervous, he accidentally started down the third row, then clambered up over the bench to the second when he realized his mistake; the audience rattled with nervous laughter as he straightened up in his proper place, face red. Akari filed up not much later, landing in the third of five rows. The very last row wasn’t on the bleachers at all, but a row of low wooden benches set in front of them, the first bleacher row just barely higher by enough to see over.

  The parents in the audience stood and applauded, along with various vaguely-confused younger siblings, and of course the younger students and staff. Danielle thought it was a little excessive to keep everyone clapping through the whole procession, but it was tradition or something, so she kept patting her hands together the whole time, even if she only clapped loudly when Akari was just arriving.

  When the ninth graders were all in place, everyone sat for the principal’s opening remarks, which were basically the same for every end-of-quarter assembly; she was proud of their students, she hoped the parents were proud too, their school was great. The only thing missing was the usual half-joking comment about not forgetting everything during the month-long break.

  After that came the certification of grades, an absurdly over-serious ceremony in which the principal handed a scroll – an actual old-fashioned scroll with rollers and everything! – to a man from the government, and swore an oath that “the records contained herein reflect the academic performance, System development, and physical health of our students as accurately as we are capable to evaluate.” Danielle had seen the ceremony four times every year, starting with her graduation from the neighborhood school (which only had to provide records for students going into Awakening school the next quarter) and continuing all through Awakening and middle school. All the pomp and solemnity notwithstanding, she was dead certain that the real report was made electronically. She had never stopped wondering if the scrolls themselves had anything written on them, or if they were just blank ceremonial props. As usual, this quarter’s scroll was kept tied shut as it was handed over, so she wasn’t likely to find out.

  The certification ceremony ended with the pledge to state and nation every quarter. Sure enough, after taking her oath and handing over the scroll, the principal said, "Please stand honorably for the pledge of allegiance."

  “What are we, neighborhood-school babies again?” Alex complained under his breath as everyone stood.

  It was weird, Danielle couldn’t deny that. The pledge had a lot of big words in it, so little kids still in the neighborhood schools needed help just learning to say it. The very youngest of them would only listen, while the older ones would learn to say it, and practice the rhythm and pronunciation of words like “existential” and “preservation” and “bulwark.” The official position was that the pledge wasn’t binding on children anyway; but once your System Awakened, you weren’t a child. With Awakening, the System changed your age status from Child to Youth, and then you were supposed to start taking the pledge in all seriousness, not just blindly reciting it. That was why Awakening schools changed the formula from “please stand honorably for the pledge” to “Please stand honorably and join in making your pledge.”

  “Mmmmaybe it’s because all the little sibs got invited?” Danielle said uncertainly. She wasn’t sure she believed it, though. Younger siblings came every year, and even every quarter, if not so many of them. Some parents just didn’t have anyone to watch the youngest kids while they came to pick up the older ones. The principal had never left out the “join in making your pledge” part before.

  A lot of people had noticed, too; the principal had to wait for the whispering to die down a little before she began the pledge. “I pledge allegiance, to the flags, of the Unified States of North America, and the State of Firmitatem,” she began. Student council members from the ninth-grade class came out of the wings with the two flags. The principal continued leading the familiar words; “my twin shields against the existential threats, of mana mutation and human warfare, deadly destroyers of humanity. I pledge my life and honor, to the preservation of my sanctuary, for myself, my family, and my fellow citizens.” Was she choking up? “Come hard times or easy, let us not forget, the allegiance we owe, to our nation, our state, our sanctuaries, and our people, for that is our bulwark, against extinction, and by it we live.” Danielle wasn’t sure, but she thought she saw a tear in the principal’s eye. When had she suddenly become so patriotic?

  The flag bearers put their flags in the stands at the sides of the stage and took their places on the bleachers. The principal took a deep breath, cleared her throat, and launched into the boring part of the ceremony. There were dozens of minor recognition ribbons to be awarded to hundreds of students; high achievement in each subject drew almost 20% of each class, though which 20% varied by subject. Danielle had to get up and come forward with the lines for several of those. She could at least sit still for the honor roll, which called names a little slower, and played a march again to make it seem like a bigger deal. “Major” awards, each given to only two or three people per class, still added up to dozens of awards in total, and for those, they waited for everyone to come up individually and be applauded and photographed shaking hands while receiving their ribbon or plaque or trophy.

  Danielle had always found the whole thing made her rather sleepy; sitting in the dark, listening to the seemingly endless drone of names, it was hard to concentrate. Most of the awards seemed, not exactly trivial, but less momentous than the school was trying to make them look. For the first time since she was a first-year Awakening school student seeing it done for the first time, though, Danielle found herself too nervous to be in danger of nodding off.

  Somehow, in spite of the days of slightly odd behavior from the teachers and staff, all the rumors that had been going around that day, and the worried parents, nothing had really triggered a sense of danger the way that slight omission at the beginning of the pledge of allegiance had done. The principal had never gotten emotional about the pledge before, either. Something was wrong, and her mind wouldn’t leave it alone. Maybe it was something about the dire wording of the pledge; easy to forget, in the haze of constant repetition, that the pledge had been written in a time when the human race was in real danger of extinction (or anyway, had believed themselves in real danger of it; with over two hundred years of hindsight, historians argued the technicalities). What had made it hit so much stronger this quarter as to move the principal to tears? Was she experiencing an ‘existential threat?’ Worrying about the ‘preservation of her sanctuary?’ How serious was this – whatever-it-was?

  About two-thirds of the way through the individual awards, in the relatively sudden quiet as the principal lifted a hand to quiet the crowd so she could start announcing the next award, Danielle heard a quiet but distinct click from the nearest door, and whipped her head towards it on reflex, her nerves strung so tight that the unexpected sound almost had her out of her seat. Through the small window, she locked eyes with a strange woman wearing flag-green, almost like a school uniform, except it included a hat of some kind. Danielle couldn’t see much through the narrow strip of glass, but she saw the woman’s eyes widen as she realized she’d been caught; then she brought up a finger to her mouth in a “shh” gesture, and simply moved away from the door.

  Alex was slouched so low in his seat that his knees were touching the seatback in front of him; it looked like he might actually be asleep. Danielle leaned forward against the seatback in front of her, and turned to whisper, “Alex, move your legs.”

  “Nuh,” he grunted, not opening his eyes.

  “Alex, c’mon, I need the bathroom,” Danielle whispered.

  “Nuh-uh. ‘S almos’ done. Jus’ wait,” he mumbled.

  Danielle let out a hissing breath, frustrated and increasingly afraid, of what she couldn’t say with certainty, but – well, she was about 75% sure the emergency doors were locked. Why would someone do that? She couldn’t think of an answer that wasn’t bad – that was not, in fact, an emergency. Alex was right about one thing, though; the principal was awarding the Scholastic Achievement Medal for their grade, the highest award of the ceremony. There would be one for the ninth graders, too, and then the awards would all be given out, and normally the ceremony would end. This year, well, they’d been promised an announcement.

  Danielle ignored the applause to focus on trying to locate her family in the crowd. They’d been in the middle section, hadn’t they? They’d been in the right-hand aisle, and they couldn’t sit in the far-right section with the students. How far down had they gone? A boy came down from the bleachers to receive his medal – last chance – Danielle frantically scanned the audience while they all applauded one more time. Was that Micah, clapping his pudgy toddler-hands, but looking towards her instead of the stage? If so, they were nearly level with her, but near the middle of the center section. In the dark, it was hard to be certain, but –

  The prickling feeling of a System Skill in use washed over her. “Someone just used a Skill on us,” Danielle hissed.

  “Don’t be stupid, everyone knows you can’t really feel Skills,” Alex hissed back.

  Danielle groaned. “Seriously? I know at least three people besides me who can,” she argued under the fading applause.

  “Not having this dumb argument again right now,” Alex said, shooting her a glare. “My roommate’s bad enough.”

  The applause ended before Danielle could reply, and the principal gripped both sides of her podium, a grim look coming over her face. Danielle’s attention was immediately riveted. “I would like to thank all the family members who came out this evening to make this final awards ceremony, ahem, of the year, special for the students,” she said. “I do have one final announcement, however, and, ahem, as many of you have gathered, it is not a happy one.” She paused to take a deep breath, then another. “It is my ho- ” her voice choked off with a squeak, but she took another deep breath, cleared her throat again, and tried to continue. “It is my solemn duty, to announce that this year’s graduating class,” she paused again, and that was definitely a tear running down her cheek, “as well as the eighth grade class – ” she paused, wiped the tear, cleared her through again, and choked out, “have been select-hed, f-for,” she had stop again, looking down. “I can’t do this,” she whispered, but the microphone picked it up.

  From the wings, a government man in a green uniform came – a flag-green uniform with a cap. The same uniform as the woman outside the door? Danielle had never seen it before, but the uniform had the Firmitatem flag on each shoulder, and the USNA “banner” below it, and the narrow name patch above the front pocket with a bar of colored symbols underneath it almost like a military uniform. It was the wrong color, though; the military didn’t use flag-green. There were no obvious insignia of rank, either, unless it was encoded below the name patch. The man put a hand on the principal’s shoulder, and said something the microphone didn’t pick up, and the principal nodded and moved aside, still looking at the floor.

  The man took the podium and scanned the crowd. Some of the adults were talking to each other, others already trying to push their way out of the rows of seats. He spoke with gravity, but not slowly. “Ladies and gentlemen, please remain calm. It is a particularly heavy duty of honor to announce that the eighth and ninth grade classes of Firmitatem middle schools are being Sent this year.”

  The auditorium erupted in noise and chaos. Adults were shouting, Youths were screaming, and children were shrieking or crying. “They can’t do that,” Danielle breathed, momentarily numb with shock. Shouts echoed her – “YOU CAN’T DO THAT!!” and “THEY’RE CHILDREN!” and “YOU CALL THAT HONOR?!” Other people were just shouting, wordlessly, and in moments the shouts were joined by pounding on the doors. It was oddly muffled; certainly quieter than balls hitting the gymnasium doors, which were of similar construction. A part of Danielle thought that didn’t seem right, and wanted to know why it was happening, but another part whispered, the doors are irrelevant unless the locks break. Go for Mom and Dad instead.

  Alex had cleared his seat to go pound on the door he hadn’t let Danielle check earlier; the tennis twins were trying to push past her. She stood, releasing the folding seat so she could stand back against it, and they dashed into the aisle to pound fruitlessly on the door with Alex. Danielle looked around more carefully; what would she need to do right now, for Deflect Notice to function properly? With all the chaos, she could climb over seatbacks, scream at the top of her lungs, and even whip her uniform jacket around, and she would hardly stand out from the crowd. She spotted her dad, standing with his face to the aisle; behind him, Timmy and Lyddy seemed to be standing on a seat. Danielle could only assume her mother was beyond them. “OK, that’s where I’m going,” she told herself.

  Her row was chaos – was someone actually having a fistfight there in the row? Now of all times? The row in front was just as bad, but the row behind was mostly cleared out, everyone running in panic to the doors. A sigh of frustration came over the speakers. “Please calm down. The Sending Authority has been doing this for a very long time, and I assure you, a panicky riot will neither change anything nor help anyone to understand.” Someone must have turned the volume up a lot, Danielle thought vaguely as she climbed over the seat and started down the clearer row.

  She passed a girl curled up in her seat, arms covering her head. “We’re dead, we’re dead,” the girl muttered between sobs. “We’re not dead yet,” Danielle said. “Not everyone who gets Sent dies, that’s why we have Returned people.” The girl ignored her – or maybe that particularly choked sob had been a derisive laugh. Danielle moved on.

  “Please return to your seats. Any seat will do,” the man on stage said. Nobody showed any signs of paying attention to him. Danielle reached the end of the row, but her way was blocked by a press of mostly adult people trying to get – anywhere, it seemed, except where they were at the moment. Danielle thought she could worm through if she crouched below adult waist level and moved fast, at just the right moment. She tried to activate Deflect Notice in hopes it would keep anyone from trying to stop her, but the Skill fizzled, half-formed; it felt almost like when Vanessa disrupted her Illusions Skill. She immediately looked around for Vanessa, and spotted her pounding frantically at the highest emergency door on their side of the auditorium.

  The staff, oddly, seemed to have simply disappeared at some point – had they evacuated their spot when the green-uniformed people were locking doors? Sadie was up in one of their rows, standing on a seat; Danielle could tell she was looking for something, but not what. Her parents seemed like a solid guess, though. Danielle couldn’t see Heather. She got up on the nearest seat to confirm the location of her own parents, and found them still where she’d seen them last. It was smart; nobody was getting anywhere by trying to wrestle their way through the aisles. With the doors locked, the middle of the room was the safest place to be – it was where everyone was trying to move away from.

  Suddenly, big arms grabbed Danielle and swung her, shrieking in terror, over the aisle. “Sheesh, kid, stop screaming in my ear and find your parents,” a man said.

  “I – I – thank you?” Danielle stammered. Now on the correct side of the densest part of the crowd, she clambered over seats towards her family. She was at a slightly better angle now, and could see that Timothy was sitting in (or possibly kneeling on) the seat behind her father, holding a crying Micah, while Lydia stood on the seat, also crying; their parents stood back to back on either side, protecting that seat from the crowd.

  “Danielle! Come take a seat until things calm down,” her dad yelled, stepping forward to make another protected seat.

  “I’m coming!” Danielle climbed over another row of seatbacks, then moved down the aisle to the back of the seat her father was guarding, and climbed over that one.

  “I’m here – want me to hold Micah?” Danielle offered.

  “Oh thank you, Lord,” Danielle’s mother exclaimed. Her father said, “Keep your feet off the floor, in case people try to crawl under; and yes, hold Micah if he’ll tolerate it.”

  That explained why Timothy was kneeling. He passed Micah to her with considerable relief; the four-year-old was a bit too big for him to handle properly, and was flailing his arms. He tried kicking, too, forcing Danielle to pin his feet between herself and the seat back, but she tolerated the flailing arms, and tried to wrap her arms in as hug-like a manner as she could manage without letting him kick her again. It ended up with her sitting sideways with her feet on the seat, which wasn’t entirely comfortable, but her back was to her dad, so at least it was as safe as she could get in the current circumstances.

  “Sit down wherever you are and put your hands under you,” the man on the stage demanded. “We will not allow this to go on all night. I know this is a severe and unusual situation, but it will not be improved by riot gas. Sit down. Sit down.” He started repeating himself.

  “Now what?” Danielle’s mom called.

  “On the seats, like the kids, and keep our hands down,” her dad called back. “Make sure your weight is balanced towards the back, just in case.

  The adults had a harder time wedging themselves into the seats with their feet drawn up, and they kept their hands on the arm rests, not underneath them. Many other adults sat on the ground, or gave in and moved into the nearest seats. Danielle finally spared a glance for the stage; the ninth graders were all out of sight. Whether they’d been taken somewhere, or simply fled down into the crowd, she couldn’t guess; she just hoped Akari was OK.

  In front of the empty bleachers, the man stood at the podium, grimly chanting, “ – not allow this to go on all night. I know this is a severe and unusual situation, but it will not be improved by riot gas. Sit down. Sit down. Sit down where you are and put your hands under you – ” Danielle wondered why he bothered, until a woman in a green uniform came out of the wings wearing a gas mask and handed one to him as well. Ah – riot gas was not considered an improvement, but it was still a possibility.

  Danielle’s mother was praying; Danielle couldn’t hear much of it through the continued yelling and pounding, but she caught “please don’t let them gas the children,” more than once. The man on stage strapped the mask on, then opened one fastener to let it hang down against his neck, and returned to his repetitious message. Danielle felt the tingle of a Skill going by again, and saw the woman gesturing at the crowd; that seemed ominous, but at first nothing happened.

  The man on stage finally said, “This is your last warning. Sit down and put your hands under you. We will resort to gas if anyone is still attacking the doors of the stage in fifteen,” a pause, “fourteen,” a slow countdown then, “thirteen – ”

  A lot of people finally started sitting down, or at least crouching. There was still quite a lot of screaming, but Danielle couldn’t see any sign of any of the doors giving way. “Strong doors!” she shouted to her mother, who barked a strained laugh, and replied, “Skill reinforced!”

  When the countdown hit three, the woman in the green uniform yelled, “Activate Skill: Noise Reduction as 5!” Suddenly, the noise dropped by at least half; people were still yelling and screaming (and crying, like Micah and Lyddie and that girl in the eighth-grade seating area), but it was all muffled. “Two,” the man counted down. “If you haven’t figured out by now that no Skills are working without special enhancement assistance, this is your warning. Last call.” Another man and woman in green rolled out a covered cart, and opened a flap at the back to fiddle with something out of sight.

  Most of the crowd was sitting, but a few desperate holdouts – many of them students – were still pounding and clawing at the doors. “One,” the man said, and when nothing changed, “Activate your Skills, agents. Release the gas at will.”

  The gas came, but flowed oddly, mostly avoiding the seating areas and flowing to the area immediately in front of the stage (there were a lot of adults there, now that Danielle noticed it), the doors, the clusters of people standing. One group that had been standing in the seating area on the far left hastily sat, and the gas swirled around then flowed elsewhere. “Ah – Skill targeted,” her mother whispered (or was that the Noise Suppression?) and her father replied, “They’re using Returned! He said it was enhancements, but it could easily just be high levels of the right Skills or Traits – when you have level 10 agents and everyone on the other side is maxing out at level 3, it’s not hard to flatten us with sheer power, using something the agents will still just shrug off as a matter of course.” He sounded bitter and angry, which was not something Danielle was used to hearing from her father.

  It suddenly hit her – she was going to be Sent. Outside. For years.

  The virtual explosion when the man first made the announcement had distracted her, but as the noise slowly faded from the auditorium, a rushing filled her ears, and she started trembling. In spite of the recent research assignment – had her teacher known?! – most of what she knew about Sendings were really rumors. The basics involved taking the graduating class of a high school – this is not a high school!! – and moving them out of the sanctuary caverns, to live in the unregulated mana of the Outside – live where Outside? In the woods?? – and try to gain the crucial level 10 – crucial why? – so they could come back in. Some of them always died – of what? Mutation? Monsters? Human warfare, like the pledge said? All three? – but some always survived to come back with incredibly useful high level System Skills – how do you get useful Inside Skills while living Outside? – that they then used to benefit society and coincidentally get rich.

  There were a lot of steps missing in the plan that was outlined, “Receive the Honor of Sending, Get to Level 10, Get Rich.” How did Sent know what Skills were incredibly useful Inside? How did they get to high level without getting mutations? What was special about level 10 – why wasn’t it 9, or 11?

  Danielle stroked Micah’s head, trying to soothe him to sleep, or at least to stop crying. I’m not going to get to know him any better, her thoughts whispered. I’m going to be outside while he grows up. I’m not going to get to know Lydia either. She’s going to grow out of being a stupid little kid while I’m outside, and I’ll come back and really, truly not know her. How long were Sent usually outside? That hadn’t been one of the questions on the research assignment. Hints in the recommended sources she’d read suggested a decade – Lydia would be a senior in high school, in a decade. Eva would be graduating from college in a decade! Micah – well, he would be the age she was now. That might not be so bad, actually; she could skip the annoying little kid stage and get to know him as a youth – except she would be so old by then!

  The man on the stage was saying something about parental rights and responsibilities. “Your children’s possessions will be returned to you tomorrow after your farewell visit,” he said. On the other side of the room, someone blurted out, “To THEM? What about me?!”

  The man paused midsentence. “Information for the new Sent is being provided in the gymnasium,” he said. “The short version, however, is that in the past, there have been several major controversies regarding what Sent youths are and are not allowed to take out with them, and the conclusion has long been, nothing from the old life goes Outside. Your parents will keep your things safe until you Return; you will get new things for your new life, and whether you bring them back or leave them Outside in turn will be up to you. Now, where was I?” he glanced down in front of the stage, where the other people in green uniforms were collecting the people the gas had put to sleep.

  One of the other agents called up, “Parents collecting their kids’ effects at final visitation.”

  “Ah – yes. Farewell visits will be conducted tomorrow from 10am to – ” the man on stage went back to his lecture. Danielle paid a little more attention to her surroundings. An emergency door on the side of the auditorium was open, but behind it was some sort of booth or shell, not the hallway. Agents in green moved an unconscious boy into the little space and closed the door. Minutes passed before they returned without him and collected another. Adults, meanwhile, were being laid out in neat rows in front of the stage. A regular policeman with a Healer’s patch and a first aid bag was moving between them as well. A green uniformed Healer did the same for the youths, approving them before they were moved. Yet more agents were moving through the seats in pairs, collecting students – Sent – from there and walking them to another door-booth.

  Most of her conscious classmates seemed to be going quietly, but nobody exactly looked like they were going to be honored. If anything, they looked like they were going to a funeral – or maybe an execution. Everyone knew the Outside was deadly dangerous; that’s why the sanctuary cities existed! A little mana was useful; it let you use the System and do all kinds of things that people from the ages before the meteor (and thus before mana) would’ve thought magical. Some people even still called it magic, because many parts of how it worked still weren’t well understood scientifically.

  One thing they did understand, though, was that uncontrolled mana caused mutations. You could die of mana mutation, or you could survive changed – sometimes not altogether for the worse, depending on how much mana you’d absorbed, and how lucky you got. Plants and animals had their own Systems, but outside the sanctuaries, they also had their own mutations – sometimes generations of them, though the mana induced kind weren’t always inheritable. Worse, the System did for animals and plants the same thing it did for humans: it tried to understand what they were doing, and help them do it better. If what they were doing was hunting prey? They’d become better hunters. If it was poisoning anything that tried to eat them? They’d become more poisonous.

  I’m going to die, Danielle thought. No wonder they hadn’t asked the students to take the pledge – they were losing their “twin shields against the existential threats of mana mutation and human warfare.” The sanctuary she’d been pledging her “life and honor” to protect wasn’t hers anymore. She could step out the door and be eaten by a six-legged tiger with orange and black striped moth antennae, like the one in Timothy’s favorite stream show! (Maybe not that exact thing – the show was animated. Could that tiger mutant be real? It probably wasn’t real. It was hard to be sure, though; it might be based on something real.) She could get eaten, though! Or she could eat a perfectly normal looking tomato and die of deadly tomato-poison. Or she could run into exiles from the tribal nations, and get killed and scalped, and Firmitatem would write their home nation a strongly worded diplomatic letter and they’d extend the killer’s exiles indefinitely, and the killers would use her skull to decorate their Outsider lairs. I’m definitely going to die.

  She might have whispered it aloud, though it wasn’t on purpose; she realized when her mother turned to her and whispered, “You are not going to die. That’s what your teacher meant; she didn’t like how you did it, staying off the honor roll to avoid trouble with that Vanessa girl, but she did see that you are a youth who isn’t afraid to deal with her own troubles, and you found a solution and worked out that solution. You’re going to go out there, and do exactly the same thing – you’re going to find a way to stay alive, and work hard on whatever it takes to live and thrive and honor God, and maybe it won’t be the solution everyone expects but it’ll be practical and it’ll work and you’ll survive. You’re going to grow up to be a Returned Citizen we can be proud of, and come back inside, and tell your brothers and sisters all kinds of fantastical stories about the Outside. That’s what’s going to happen to you.”

  “That’s probably true,” her father agreed, adding his own whisper from the other side. “Remember, do whatever you can do, then pray and trust God to deal with the things you can’t. It’s going to be hard for sure, but whatever the needs before you end up being, work hard on them and just remember that God loves you, and we love you, and you can get back up and try again when things go wrong. You’re not dead until you stop trying, and every day you survive through is one day closer to coming back home to us. Don’t let yourself spend time worrying about dying. Just focus on living, and becoming the kind of person you want to be; show the System you’re being resilient and enduring and it’ll help you be more resilient and enduring. Show it generosity, and it’ll give you resources to be generous with. Show it care for others, and it’ll give you the Skills of a caregiver.”

  Her dad wasn’t looking at her or the stage, he was watching something behind Danielle, which made him a little hard to hear through the drone of parental information from the speakers, still turned up to cut through the noise of a crowd that had now fallen silent. Now, though, his focus revealed itself with another voice. “Sir. I’m here to bring Sent Danielle Falconer to the uniform line. Is that her little sister she’s holding?”

  Micah had been draped awkwardly over Danielle’s knees, but now he stood up and yelled, “I’m a boy!” Some of the people around them chuckled, but even yelling, a small child couldn’t compete with the auditorium sound system.

  “That’s right, you are a boy,” Danielle’s father said, blinking away a tear as he held out his hands to Micah. “Come sit with Daddy now.”

  Danielle leaned away from the seatback to release Micah’s legs, and promptly got stepped on for her trouble, not that she hadn’t expected it. Her father took him in his arms and stood up, releasing the seat to fold up so he could step back and give her space to pass him. Danielle hesitated, reluctant to take that first step towards the Outside.

  “Go on, Danielle,” her father encouraged gently. “Go show the world and the System how you intend to live. We’ll pick up Eva and come visit tomorrow, like the man said.” He gave her shoulder a squeeze.

  “Be – be courageous,” her mother said, and Timothy echoed, “Yeah, be brave!” Lyddie just stared at her with wide eyes.

  Danielle reluctantly swung her legs around and put her feet down, then pushed herself up out of the chair with her arms, as if she had the weight of the mountains pushing her back down. The woman in green, waiting beyond her father, beckoned and started moving down the row. Danielle followed, passing a boy from her class – she couldn’t think of his name at the moment, but she gave him a thumbs-up as she edged past his chair. “Time to be courageous,” she whispered to him. He looked at her as if she was crazy, but she just kept going. The agent waited at the end of the row, and gestured for her to go first up the aisle toward the back. In the booth outside the door, she shivered as a strong Skill was used on her, but nobody told her what it was; the outside door of the booth simply opened, and she stepped out into the auditorium lobby.

  will get back to that scene in the prologue, eventually, but it'll take a while.

  https://discord.gg/u5dtzpShv2