Danielle nodded to the agent manning the family visit rooms, and headed out the door. She was vaguely amused that the agent seemed to somehow know less than she did about the sleeping arrangements. It must not be her department, or something. In the meantime, Danielle went to the snack bar and got a cup of fruit and a packet of granola, then took them to the east door and leaned against it, watching the panels for the message officially telling her to go through. As usual, it didn’t take very long.

  Through the door, she found an agent waiting for her. “Looks like you have a locker key,” he said. “Come this way, and we’ll pick up your things before you leave.”

  They walked down the hall past a door to the outside of the building, where Danielle could see a school bus waiting. The agent guiding her had to request access and show a badge to another agent to get through a checkpoint marked with a stripe along the floor; Danielle barked her knuckles on an invisible barrier there when she moved a hand too close while they were still going through the formalities. Then the barrier went down, and they went around a corner, and there was the mysterious black barrier again to her left; she was on the other side of it. She almost asked the agent what the point of blocking off the restrooms that way might be, but on further thought, it probably had to do with making anyone that wanted to escape to their parents’ attics go past more agents.

  Danielle collected the contents of her locker and returned the key, then they retraced their steps, complete with her escort showing his badge to the guard at the checkpoint again. Then he saw Danielle onto the bus. There were only six other people aboard ahead of her, all with bags in tow, so she had her pick of seats. The bus driver activated a Skill after she sat down and the agent left; Danielle didn’t know what it was, though. It didn’t seem to affect her, at least. She finished her fruit, and moved to the front of the bus to throw away the cup, and the driver seemed fine with that. A few minutes later, a boy with reddened eyes got on, and as soon as he was seated, the driver had the bus moving.

  Danielle almost laughed when they pulled up to the main entrance of Tree of Knowledge middle school. It was less than a full day since she’d been thinking she’d never see the school again! She and the others collected their bags and the eight of them headed for the main doors. The bus pulled away behind them the moment everyone was clear – so much for the obsessive anti-escape measures. On the other hand, there were several agents visible in their green uniforms, so maybe they would be in charge of chasing anyone that tried to run. Danielle noticed one of them giving her the stink-eye, and gave him a cheeky wave.

  Danielle paused outside the main doors to look up at the name of the school on the big sign over the doors. “This isn’t my school anymore,” she said to herself. “It’s just a hotel for the night. I live Outside now, this is just where I’m staying while the move is in progress.” It was a sobering thought, and yet, it felt very correct. This was Eva’s school now; Danielle might stay overnight in the dorms, but she no longer lived in the dorms. Even more than going with the agent the night before, or spending the night at the Sending Authority, the act of saying goodbye to her family felt like the crossing of a line.

  “Go on in,” one of the agents called to her.

  She glanced at him, and nodded, and stepped inside. She was in the same place as yesterday, but she hadn’t come back. From now on, there was no ‘coming back’ until she could Return.

  Inside the main foyer of the school, Danielle and the other seven Sent from her bus were met by another agent. “Congratulations, new Sent!” he said briskly. “You have your gear, and you have endured your farewell visits and come out functional; those were the last two rites of passage between you and your early transition to adulthood. Tomorrow, you Advance your Systems, becoming adults in the eyes of the Greater System and the laws of Firmitatem and the Unified States. Between now and then, all we ask is that you don’t cause any trouble – don’t steal anything from anyone, don’t get in any fights, don’t stage any stupid escape attempts, don’t do anything stupid in general. Let the record show that last-minute injuries will not get you held back from the Sending.”

  “That’s a lot of ‘don’t’ options, so let me suggest some things you are allowed to do for the rest of the evening, while we get the rest of this massive Sending through the first two challenges. You may eat normal Inside food in the cafeteria; I hear it’s burgers and potato fries. It’s not quite your last chance, that will be tomorrow morning, but it’s nearly your last chance – the next time you see any ground meat you didn’t grind yourself, it’ll probably be November. Unless it’s breakfast sausage, but after that, November. Fun fact: it took my sending three entire years to figure out how to make ground meat, just because nobody considered it a priority until then.”

  “Moving on, you can talk to other new Sent. Don’t underestimate the value of that one – talking about what you want for your early Skills and why you want them is a great use of time the night before your Advancement. You’re Sent now, not Insiders; you’re going to get new Skills tomorrow, and more in the coming months. I’m not allowed to sit you down and educate you about Class, Skill, and Trait unlocks, but some of your peers might know stuff, so ask around. You can also talk to the System, do some soul searching and make plans – don’t get too attached to your plans, things change fast during your first year; but it’s still good to have goals, and some preliminary plans for meeting those goals.

  “You can shower; there’s hotel-style soap and itty-bitty towels in the dorm bathrooms for you. Don’t complain to me about wanting shampoo, just use the soap. It won’t make your hair fall out, I promise. Yes, you can keep the little soaps and towels if you want to haul them to the Rooms; no I don’t think it’d be worth it, unless you forgot to pack your own. You may not have any of the bedding.

  “Oh – rooms. Because someone in my department is an absolute idiot, you’re just using the same rooms you were in during school, except without any of your old stuff. I won’t blame you if you’re not inclined to hang out in them like that, but it’s allowed. Getting extra sleep is a good idea, since you have a massive physical and emotional workout ahead of you tomorrow. You can also hang out in the cafeteria, or the gym if you feel like killing time playing with some inflatable balls or maybe working on some last-minute Skill unlocking exercises. Places you’re not allowed to be include all classrooms, all teachers’ and administrators’ offices, and anywhere that is blocked off by a Skill-based barrier.

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  “None of these lists are exhaustive – if something might be stupid and destructive, but I didn’t list it? It’s probably still not allowed. If something might be productive and helpful to yourself or others, but I didn’t list it? Chances are it’s an option. You’re less than a day from being legal adults; act like you’re ready, and we’ll treat you accordingly.”

  The agent looked down at them with a sigh. “You’re not ready; even regular eighteen-year-old Sent rarely are. The will to fake it until you make it real is a surprisingly powerful thing, though. Do your best to live up to it, and you’ll probably get farther than you thought you could. Do give yourself a break from being ostentatiously mature once in a while, though, and have some fun. Even actual adults need a break now and then. Anyway! You’re free to head for your rooms. No keys tonight, it’s all temp wards on the doors – safer that way, even if it was improbably expensive to set up. Supper service has started in the cafeteria, so if you need to find someone, try there first. No one will tell you to go to bed, but wake-up calls will be at six am sharp, and you’ll be kicked out of the dorms, ready or not, at six thirty. For now: you’re dismissed!”

  Danielle and the others turned toward the stairs in a cluster; none of them were exactly trying to be with any of the others, but there was one obvious best way to the dorms from the main doors, and nobody was packed lightly enough to feel like running in the halls, so they were just roughly together-ish until they got to the turn where girls had to go right and boys left. From there, a long wide hallway led past all the halls containing the ninth-grade girls’ dorm rooms to another set of stairs, leading up for eighth graders or down for – well, no one, tonight. In a month, it would be the new eighth graders, and the new seventh graders would take the middle floor.

  It turned out that both of the other two girls on the bus were ninth-graders, so Danielle was the only one to enter the far stairway. A shimmery forcefield blocked the way down – apparently there were a lot of kinds of barrier Skills; this was at least the third one she’d seen just that day. As she climbed the stairs and walked down the hallway to her pod, Danielle tried to remember if she’d ever seen a Skill barrier before yesterday. She wasn’t positive – there were a few occasions when she might have been near one of the invisible kind. She could remember seeing lines painted on the floor of the hospital, that were similar to the ones in the Sending Authority building where she’d banged her knuckles on the barrier at the checkpoint. That meant maybe four or five times? Once for each sibling she’d visited in the maternity ward (not Eva; two-year-old Danielle hadn’t been allowed in for that visit), and once for that time she’d broken her leg trying to copy a stream-show character’s wall jumping tricks.

  She was distracting herself, but opening the door to her room – her old room; some new student’s soon-to-be room – the safe and unemotional train of thought derailed. The pod had a foreign sterility with everyone’s personal effects already packed away and given back to their families. Both bedroom doors were standing open, the beds made up in plain white sheets with flag-green blankets folded and left at the foot in case they wanted to be warmer. Danielle already missed her blue ‘Outside sky’ themed sheet set with clouds printed on the pillow and all the edges. Heather’s bed should’ve been a riot of color with flower-theme sheets, and Sadie’s bed looked dull without its absurdly luxurious high-thread-count sheets with fancy natural fiber cloth, embroidered details, and manufacturing defects carefully hidden by strategic folds. “She’s going to hate sleeping on that,” Danielle whispered.

  With all posters and decorations removed, and no nearby sounds of life to hide it in noise, ‘white’ or otherwise, the room fairly echoed. Sadie and Heather had both set their bags on their beds and gone elsewhere – the cafeteria did seem like a good bet. Danielle used the restroom and washed her hands, because that was what one did before going to the cafeteria, but then found herself lingering in the restroom, just staring at herself in the mirror, wondering if she should have packed a mirror for herself; would the Rooms have them built in, like the dorms did?

  Her image wasn’t anything special, really. There was no reason for her to get mentally stuck, just staring like this. She had an average face, maybe a little over-pointy at the chin; pale skin with a zit trying to hide behind the bulge of one nostril; wavy light-brown hair that used to be blond but was getting darker as she aged and would probably be next-best-thing to black by the time she got into her twenties, just like her mother. Her blue eyes had just enough green in them to make them a slightly muted, slatey blue, with none of Eva’s hazel or the exotic gold flecks around the edges that their grandfather had. “It’s a good face for Deflect Notice to work with,” she muttered ruefully.

  Somehow it felt like she should look more different. Really, the only real, provable difference so far was the change of uniform, and even the uniform was hardly a stand-out. Lots of people had jeans jackets, and while the denim shirt wasn’t quite as heavy as that, it wouldn’t look wildly out of place in public. It didn’t have any printing or patches on it declaring her Sent, and neither did the T-shirt; they were just clothes that happened to be the same as everyone else’s clothes. “Look like an adult,” she told herself; her reflection stayed stubbornly the same.

  Well, that was fair; what did it even mean to look like an adult? People wore fancy dress clothes for quinceanera parties, and those were theoretically coming of age ceremonies. It meant more back in the bad old days closer to the spread, when the population was at its lowest and fifteen was old enough to Advance and start contributing to survival of the family, the town, and the species. Old enough to work Outside! “Jerks,” Danielle whispered. “Can’t even stick to the age limits they used in the dark days.” To be fair, though, she would be fifteen soon. Everyone in her class would be fifteen by this time next year, and everyone from the ninth grade class would be fifteen no later than – well, yesterday, she supposed. The first of June was the age cutoff date for standard placement in Firmitatem schools. Which, coming full circle, meant that anyone in her class with a late May birthday was nearly a full year from their quinceanera, so yes. “Stupid government jerks.”

  Her eyes started watering again. She hadn’t been entirely looking forward to her own quinceanera party, since they could get awkward depending on your relatives, and – well, she wasn’t going to have to worry about all that anymore, now was she?! She wasn’t going to get a big party with fancy clothes and visiting relatives, awkward or otherwise. She probably wasn’t even going to get cake. Or hamburgers, not that she could imagine her mother serving hamburgers at a quinceanera.

  “S-sorry mom,” she choked out. “Whatever you might have been planning, you’ll have to save it for Eva. My day’s going to be survival-themed.”

  Danielle allowed herself five minutes to cry – not that she was timing it – then she opened one of the travel-sized soaps and washed her face. “OK, that’s enough of that,” she told her reflection. “I’m not going to fall apart. I’m going to go find Sadie and Heather, and see if anyone’s talking about unlocking stuff, and maybe do some exercises if I figure out what that was about, and get to bed early so I have half a chance of getting a full night’s sleep.” Her reflection looked determined, if dour; she could live with that. She nodded firmly at herself and headed down to the cafeteria.

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