Danielle and Sadie got new granola packets from the snack bar without any difficulty, then finished their drinks and threw out all the cups. That freed up a hand each to write, and they started circulating among the groups in the waiting room, asking people what they’d heard so far. They confirmed that not everyone in the waiting room had been on busses yet that day, let alone chosen their necessities store gear. For anyone that had, they asked what questions their bus had brought up before going in. For anyone that hadn’t, Danielle asked what they’d been told about the plan for that day and/or the next.

  They did learn a few things over the next hour and a half. They learned that various agents on busses or at necessities stores had promised overlapping things about what the Sent would be given the next day. Danielle’s trio were the only ones they knew who had been told about the bag, but everyone had been told they would get cold weather gear; some agents had specified a cloak and mittens. Most girls who had been through the necessities stores knew that they didn’t need feminine hygiene supplies (Sadie groaned at the fact that their group had forgotten to go back for them, anyway). Most people who had been to the stores had been informed that they didn’t need to bring toilet paper. A few had been assured that they would get emergency radios so they could call for help if they really needed it, though there had been a confusing set of warnings attached to that – apparently over-use of the radios could attract some kind of trouble.

  The people who had actually gotten their breakfast there at the SA building had been told the schedule for the day: the Sending was divided into five groups, and parents were coming to five sites for their visits and to collect dorm luggage. That and a “visit to a store” were the schedule for the day – everyone in the sending had to do both things, and evidently the Sending Authority was stretched to its limits trying to give them all enough time to manage it. Agents had been overheard complaining about how far they’d had to send some groups to get enough necessities stores to handle the volume. Some people had supposedly slept in other buildings the night before, too, but nobody knew who. Everyone was expected to sleep in the schools that coming night, now that all the luggage was at the visitation sites for pickup.

  Rumor had it that some people’s families had declined the offer of a goodbye visit and made arrangements for the luggage to be delivered, instead. No one could prove that, but it was observed fact that the visits had started at eight am, and that more people had left the waiting room in the first hour than had seen families. Danielle pointed out that everyone had to go to the stores at some point, and it was possible the extra people had been called to get on a bus to a Nelson’s or one of their competitors, like Everyday Drop In.

  The conversation derailed for fifteen minutes onto jokes about “dropping in on the Drop In,” and bragging / horror stories about how they’d mixed sodas in Everyday Drop In’s signature self-serve soda fountain. Danielle was pretty sure every middle schooler had tried mixing orange with cola there at least once, though not everyone would admit to it!

  Then someone from the group they were talking to was called to the visitation rooms, and the cheerful, normal-feeling conversation died. Danielle and Sadie moved on. Noon arrived, and boxed lunches were delivered. Unlike the snack bar snacks, the boxed lunches were one per person, and they checked off names as they distributed them. They weren’t anything special; “train-car” deli sandwiches, potato chips in waxed paper instead of plastic bags, carrot sticks, and a cup of cut fruit identical to the one the snack bar offered, all in a paper box for easy transportation. Beverages came in waxed cardboard cartons; a choice of milk or orange juice. Napkins were provided, but no utensils, not that they were really needed.

  Danielle and Sadie took their boxes to a corner to eat and compare notes. Danielle drained her orange juice and pulled the carton open to hold carrot sticks, then quickly ate the chips and fruit. The messy fruit cup she threw away, the chip bag she used to hold the sandwich, and the box she unfolded and tried to hide under her denim shirt, against her back. An amused agent caught on and took her to put it in the locker with her bags, instead; Sadie offered hers to Danielle as well, and she took it. They both went into the Nelson’s bag. Back in the waiting room, Danielle copied notes from Sadie while she ate the sandwich, and they debated which rumors seemed most and least likely to hold a grain of truth.

  Sadie wasn’t quite as determined to hold onto the paper, but she did eat quickly and neatly, saving her own orange juice to sip last while they talked. At one point, she looked at the carton and commented, “Calcium fortified. We won’t see that again for a while. Where do Outsiders get calcium?”

  Danielle added it to the list of things she just didn’t know. They each had a bottle of rather generic multivitamins – 100 tablets. That was enough for summer, and a bit more, but what then? It was too small to last five months if they took them daily. When they got to the five month mark, when then? What even happened in five months? Did they get to order things from Inside? Did the Sending Authority have a store Outside, near the mysterious “the” rooms, that wouldn’t open for five months? Would it stock vitamins? Food? Toilet paper? Would they have to pay, and if so, how was that supposed to become possible?

  Sadie had just gone to the snack bar to get her third packet of granola from the amused agent there (“Your call, but don’t make yourself sick!”) when her name came up on the screen: “Sadie Weaver, report to visitation room 2.”

  Sadie stood, pocketed her granola and her little notepad, and joked, “I’ll throw out my own drink carton.”

  Danielle chuckled. “Well, your name isn’t flashing yet! Um, see you at the school, I guess?”

  Sadie nodded and left the row. She did a quick pass by the trash can at the snack bar, then strode through the door, her back excruciatingly straight, her stride even. Sadie often looked calmest when she was most tense. Danielle wondered if she would be able to squeeze out enough words to properly say goodbye to her family; but then, they knew her well, so they wouldn’t expect a lot of words at a time like this.

  Danielle had a lot of sympathy for Heather, all of a sudden, as she found herself alone in the increasingly packed waiting area. She told herself she should go continue the survey of news and rumors, but it was harder without Sadie backing her up. Well, maybe Sadie would back Heather up and they’d get some new information at the school.

  She had just about talked herself into trying to question the quieter end of a large group of older youths – Sent? – people, when another bus group started pouring noisily through the doors from the locker area. The front of the group had several of her class year’s most notorious gossips, all complaining about the boxed lunches they’d evidently just received. If the whole of the usual group was in the same busload – Danielle quietly got up, keeping her eyes at a slight angle to them, so she could watch them in her peripheral vison without obviously staring. She moved forward and closer to the wall, sliding into a seat walled off by the backs of the older group, which was taking up most of three rows.

  Sit behind someone who doesn’t care, she reminded herself. Be quiet and unobtrusive, so they keep on not caring. Look busy. She got out her notepad, and started copying the better rumors to a clean page, in a more orderly manner. A ‘thoughtful look’ toward the snack bar put the stream of arrivals back in her peripheral vision just in time for her fears to be proven well-founded; Vanessa threw open the door and stomped in, Mallory at her side. They both looked stung. Melanie came after them, continuing some argument, even louder than the gossips complaining about the food. Vanessa and Mallory replied in kind. More people came after them, but Susan wasn’t among them. Had she somehow ended up on a different bus?

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  It wasn’t hard to eavesdrop – well, it was a little challenging to separate out their argument from the background noise, as everyone spoke just a little louder to make up for the people half-yelling about too much mayonnaise on their sandwiches. Full sentences eluded her, but the gist of it came together after a few exchanges; Melanie was yelling about Vanessa and Mallory not owning her, and how she was allowed to have other friends too. Vanessa was yelling about messing up their chances of controlling the algorithm. Mallory was yelling about being selfish when they had limited carrying capacity.

  All taken together, it added up to an interesting picture: Melanie had apparently refused to plan their gear as a group, and then actually requested people outside their foursome among her top picks for roommates. Susan apparently had too, if Danielle was picking up the references right. Vanessa and Mallory had wanted their pod to become roommates, but Susan and Melanie apparently preferred different parts of their circle of friends. In the end, none of them had the relative certainty of four people all requesting each other – or maybe Susan did, but her other three people weren’t from her school dorm pod.

  That was certainly – well, news. Danielle couldn’t decide if it was good, bad, or neutral. She and her own dormmates would still need to avoid all four of them, and if they got over this spat, they’d still be friends. If they were all in different rooms, they might influence new roommates to persecute Danielle and her friends as well – not that they didn’t do that anyway, but it would be easier to draw roommates into a plot than neighbors.

  Danielle fixed her eyes to her little notepad as the argument started bringing in jabs like “are you even going to sit with us” – she wasn’t very remarkable looking from the back. Lots of girls in their year had medium-brown hair in ponytails. There was a reason a matching scrunchie was included in the girls’ uniforms! Long hair was in style, but everyone needed a way to tie it back, at least some of the time. Every new Sent girl in the room had the same hair band, the same clothes; as long as she didn’t show them her face, she should be pretty challenging to identify, and as long as Vanessa didn’t take it into her head to go looking for Danielle, they wouldn’t make that much effort at identifying people on the edges of other groups.

  Danielle gave a shallow sigh; she was getting too good at this stuff, really. This was undoubtedly the behavior that had resulted in her academic youth Career dropping a stealth Skill – because Deflect Notice was definitely stealth, but it was also the only way to get any studying done, sometimes. Danielle regretted the lost opportunity for an actual academic Skill. Although, she wasn’t going to be in school again for a long time, if ever. Maybe it had worked out for the best?

  “Where’s my old roommate?” Vanessa asked waspishly. “Maybe I’ll go ask what she thinks of this, I bet her answer would be fascinating.”

  Aaand that was Danielle’s cue to activate Deflect Notice. She hated it when Vanessa actively came looking for trouble – she just hoped she’d give it up before the Skill wore off. Danielle had a vague feeling this was a good day to save up mana for tomorrow. She wasn’t sure what she’d do with it, but Focus was always good for helping remember something she was trying to learn, and she was likely to have a lot of learning experiences in the near future. Illusions also had a lot of uses, and she’d worked hard to be able to take advantage of them. Deflect Notice, well, she was proving the utility of that one right now.

  With the Skill active, she risked another quick glance toward the snack bar. Vanessa and Mallory were both scanning the crowd, presumably for her; Melanie, interestingly, actually did seem to have found another group to sit with. Danielle looked down again. A moment later, she heard Mallory say, “ugh, they’re not here yet. Now what are we supposed to do while we wait?”

  Danielle started drawing a somewhat complicated maze, trying to picture what it would be like to walk through it. She’d had an idea of using her illusions as a sort of infinitely portable game system, but it would take a lot of work to get the maze-run game right, and then to actually run it for someone, and of course it wouldn’t last very long unless she saved up her mana for several days. It felt like a good training exercise for her illusion Skill, though, and soon she could level up and start saving up to level the Skill, too, so it would last longer. She wasn’t about to activate Illusions in the same room as Vanessa, not in the middle of everything else, but the drawing and visualization exercise were things she could do without mana while keeping her head down.

  She couldn’t resist glancing up at the displays frequently, all the same. While her Skill was active, it wasn’t a problem; everyone was glancing at the displays frequently, so that wasn’t going to attract attention. When it ended after ten minutes, though, it started to make Danielle nervous. Still, everyone was glancing at the displays every minute or three; they needed to. It would look weird if she didn’t, right? While her name didn’t come up, she could also keep an eye on Sadie’s name.

  Sadie stayed in the visitation room exactly half an hour. Danielle happened to be looking up right when her name turned red; if she hadn’t been, she would have missed it, because it blinked out immediately afterward, faster than any name she’d seen go red so far. Danielle got up and headed for the east door by way of the snack bar, grabbing another orange juice and granola packet.

  Sadie came out and immediately went to stand next to the east door. She was in full stress mode: ramrod straight posture, severe-looking poker face, silence. Not a single tear marred her face, of course; not even the extra shine of them in her eyes. Danielle wordlessly offered her the orange juice, anyway, and she accepted, drinking in small sips, her eyes focused on some distant elsewhere. She finished, and absently handed the cup back to Danielle.

  “Did you learn anything useful to share?” Danielle asked quietly, passing her the granola packet. You didn’t just ask Sadie ‘how did it go’ – you’d get a one-word answer, or a grunt. The trick was to ask tangential questions, and give her the chance to bring up anything she wanted to get off her chest that way. Sadie delayed her answer, pocketing the granola with a half-whispered thanks, then looking off into the distance again.

  “You get exactly a half hour,” she said quietly. “They apologized that it’s so short. It’s supposed to be longer, they said, but there are too many of us this time. They’re scheduling families in blocks, so they know when to take people to the stores. They’re having trouble keeping people on schedule. Some families will have to go late at night.” Her tone was even, perhaps just a bit clipped.

  “Ouch. No wonder there’s rumors some have given up, then,” Danielle said. “If the parents couldn’t get time off, and they didn’t get a slot when they can actually get here, they’d have to just arrange what they can arrange.”

  “They should’ve made more spots,” Sadie said. “They already made some just for this – they should’ve just made enough.”

  “I’m glad you got to see your own family, anyway,” Danielle said.

  Sadie nodded. “We said all our goodbyes right away, then Dad and Mom spent the rest of the time telling me anything they thought might be useful. We all owe Dad’s old tribe a kick in the – face. Everything. The way it is, is the best revenge is living well. Every time we do something good, especially with Dad’s ancestral skills and the System Skills that come from them, that’s the best way there is of sticking it to those – ” Sadie paused, jaw clenched.

  “No word bad enough?” Danielle guessed.

  “Yeah. So. Dad actually believes in some big spirits – uh, great spirits. He says they’re giving me an extra chance to stick it in the eye of the tribe, because of how the tribe gave me an extra helping of injustice. He says, I can do whatever I want, but if what I want is to honor my heritage through him and through Mom and shove it up the tribe’s, um – nose, then there are certain things I can go for that’ll sting worse. So I have some stuff to plan with, now.” Sadie glanced up at the displays. “There’s my bus. Let’s talk plans at the school, OK?”

  “OK,” Danielle said. “I’m glad your parents sent you off the right way, with honor and determination, and not just sadness.”

  Sadie nodded. “Still hard,” she whispered, then turned and speed-walked through the door.

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