The visit to room 5201 was simple enough; the Sent Healer had warned them the Rangers were coming, and one of the roommates bestirred herself to open the door for them. Danielle checked on the other three roommates while Ranger Michael was doing diagnostics on the unconscious girl, and ended up rinsing and sterilizing all four canteens and refilling three of them. Ranger Michael made time for her to finish her job by giving Gideon another round of practice and advice on using Medic’s Diagnostics and assembling the stretcher. Then Danielle helped Akari get the girl onto it, and Akari took the feet again as they maneuvered her out the door.

  On the walkway, Danielle found that the room two doors down (which she supposed was the next one with any residents, if she was remembering the layout correctly from her view of the map on Saturday) had its door standing open. As the stretcher party paraded past, she glanced in and was unnerved to discover that it was Vanessa and Mallory’s room. They were standing at the door with their other two roommates, watching the miniature parade.

  “What are you doing now, Danielle?” Vanessa asked in an accusatory tone.

  Ranger Michael paused to glance back over his shoulder. “She’s doing med checks, and she and her roommate were available to come be female assistants to help get this patient on the stretcher and down the stairs after Healer Wood called in the patient but said she was too tired to wait for the stretcher crew. I gather Healer Wood is thoroughly exhausted, and Medic Falconer had a long nap, so I’m using the people I found available,” he concluded.

  “What was she doing med checks in our building for in the first place?” Vanessa demanded.

  “She wasn’t,” Ranger Michael said shortly. “I found her at another building and asked her to come up here. Please close your door now. If you start any kind of hostilities in the middle of a medical evacuation, you’ll find that it’s me who finishes that fight, regardless of how it started. Unlike some Healers I could name, I have a lot of experience protecting myself, my patients, and yes, my assistants, from fools who think they can take advantage of someone’s vulnerability.”

  Vanesse took a step back, unnerved. “You – what – I wasn’t!” she sputtered.

  “Probably not, but you’re interrupting all the same. Door closed. We’ll be clear of your stairs in a few minutes,” Ranger Michael said firmly.

  “But what about her?!” Vanessa said, gesturing to Danielle.

  “She’ll be going back to her rounds. What is it to you, anyway?” Ranger Michael asked.

  “It’s not her building!” Vanessa exclaimed.

  Danielle rolled her eyes. “I’ll be going back to building seven, where I was when he found me,” she said.

  “Building seven?! Are you crazy?” asked one of Vanessa’s roommates – a girl named Flora who Danielle had always thought of as a rather mindless hanger-on to the popular crowd.

  “I’m filling in on a floor nobody else was getting to,” Danielle said. “That’s why I brought a couple guys with me, though – same as the Ranger brought a couple girls to come up here. Anyway. I don’t need to do this building, you have enough classed Healers of your own, right?”

  “Enough conversation, ladies,” Ranger Michael said in a warning tone. “Door closed.”

  “Sorry,” Danielle said, then had a thought on Vanessa’s usual habits and added, “shutting up.”

  “Darn right you are!” Vanessa said, getting in the last word, and practically slammed the door.

  Danielle gave Ranger Michael a silent thumbs up, and he turned forward again and got the stretcher moving. She and Gideon helped Akari and Ranger Michel maneuver the patient down the stairs – the hairpin turn between flights was almost as tricky as the slope of the stairs themselves – and then they carried her past the tent to meet the stretcher truck and Jordan.

  The Healer that had been complaining about being pulled from another station and then set to plain guard duty turned out to have done some work on Bam in the meantime, and he was awake if not entirely clear-headed. Jordan was talking to him when they arrived. Danielle gathered that Bam hadn’t believed Jordan at first, about leaving so they wouldn’t have to take care of him, but was now apologizing for it. “They didn’ take care of me either,” he said thickly. “Not sure they even took care of they. Uh, them.”

  “Yeah, I don’t think they were drinking enough water either,” Jordan agreed. “It’s fine, no hard feelings. I’m just glad I got well enough to come back and check on you in time to get you the help you need, too, man. I mean, I was down for the count on Monday, you know? Tuesday wasn’t much better. Yesterday mighta been better except they put out that whole call for people with Detect Internal Temperature to do med checks, and I wore myself straight out just doing one loop around the building I was in, without even touching the stairs. Oh! Hey, Bam, these are the people from my party that came to do mutual defense while we checked on you guys. This is Akari carrying another stretcher already, and that’s Gideon, and that’s Danielle hanging back for some reason.”

  Danielle waved. “Hi, Bam. Nice to see you awake enough to talk.”

  “They gave me some water,” Bam said, as if that fully explained the change. Danielle imagined it was only one of several things that were helping; if nothing else, the hovering attention of the Healer was a pretty good indication he had issues that couldn’t be fixed by handing him a canteen.

  “Truck’s on its way?” Ranger Michael asked the other Healer.

  The man nodded. “They have rack space for two. I’m riding back to the clinic with them. Any special instructions for the girl?”

  “Nope,” Ranger Michael said. “Seventeenth verse, same as the first. Low blood sugar, dehydration, and untreated fever. Roommates didn’t spare her the attention to even notice she was in a bad way until the Healer came to check on them all.”

  “I think a lot of people are less failing to notice than they are assuming nobody cares if a Sent wastes away and dies,” Akari said. “It doesn’t excuse it, but it’s not quite the same thing as just not paying enough attention, you know?”

  “Sent do get depressed that way, sometimes,” the other Healer said. “We’ve been seeing a lot more cases than I’d expect if it was mostly that, though.”

  “When you say a lot more, have you accounted for the bigger size of the group, and the fact that we’re all three or four years too young and unprepared for this?” Danielle asked tiredly. “I’m afraid we have people that are still living on pemmican and hard tack and don’t have a clue what they’re going to eat when it runs out – not my hunting party, but we might be more unusual for this group than we are for Sent in general, you know?”

  “Ah, right,” the other healer said. “I hadn’t considered the effect that would have on the whole – hm.” He stared reflectively in the general direction of the patients on their stretchers, but Danielle doubted he was properly seeing them.

  “This camp has twice the total numbers of the one on your layer, but fewer classed Healers,” Ranger Michael told him. “We did a little unofficial surveying while we were passing out tokens at the beginning of this, and a full 32% of the camp went Basic Weapon Fighter at the Dome, because it was the most survival-oriented Class offered them.”

  “And on top of that, they didn’t let any of us have fishing line in the Necessities Stores,” Danielle complained. “They gave us some in the care packages, but if someone gave up and stopped trying before those even showed up this – uh, last weekend, would they even notice?”

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  Jordan gave her an odd look. “I didn’t even notice that,” he said.

  “Did you unpack the bag?” Danielle asked. “The fishing stuff was right under the shield. Hooks, lines, even a few lures. If we’d had that stuff up front, so many more people would’ve been fishing! They’d all be using gnarly sticks for rods, but still. Learning to work around it might’ve actually helped those of us who found the simple fish trap design, but for the other people, it would’ve been nice, right?”

  “You’re telling me my room has four complete fishing kits in it right now, and we didn’t notice because we didn’t get under those – those glorified trash can lids?!” Jordan asked incredulously.

  “You should check it out tomorrow,” Danielle said. “There’s school books too. And flower pots! As a set, it all feels really random, but most things you can figure out what they were thinking, if you think about it. I admit, I haven’t figured out the hard hat yet, though.”

  Ranger Michael laughed. “It’s a helmet. Best the committee could come up with. I hear the Returned Citizens involved vetoed some kind of sports helmet on grounds that it blocked too much peripheral vision; bicycle helmets were in contention up until the very last minute, though.”

  “We’ll be sure to wear them if we do any construction,” Akari said dryly.

  Ranger Michael chuckled again, and the other Healer joined in. “Pick up a couple good hand tools at the Fall Fair, and you just might use them next spring!” the other Healer said. “You’d be amazed at what you can build with a knife, a hatchet, and a 1” hand augur.” He looked startled when he suddenly had the focused attention of Danielle and her party members. “Uh. Haven’t heard that one yet, huh?” he asked uncertainly.

  “What’s an augur?” Gideon asked.

  “Like a big hand drill, kind of?” the Healer said. “Actually, almost like a drill bit with just a big handle – no gears or anything to make it go, just muscle power. It’s for making bigger holes in wood. Then you whittle 1” pins to go in the holes, but you want them to fit tight, see, so you can ‘nail’ your structure together with them. They make them smaller for smaller logs. Oh, and much bigger, too, for drilling post holes in the ground.”

  “Do the Sent on your layer build a lot of stuff?” Danielle asked. “I’ve been trying to figure out how we’d secure anything we wanted to build, and whether normal Sendings just don’t have the hostility problem we do and feel free to build stuff around their Rooms places, or if it’s a Skill we haven’t learned about, or if you just have to wait until you can learn to make wards.”

  “Um, well, I don’t have as much experience as some people, but from the two Sendings I’ve been able to observe so far, people usually start their first spring with some pretty communal stuff, like a smoking hut or something, and laying out gardening plots,” the Healer said. “Stuff that everyone’s going to leave alone, because everyone uses it, you know? Plus, by the time the Spring Fair rolls around, most Sent are starting to realize that messing with other people is a very bad idea. You bully someone, they get Skills for resisting bullying, and nobody’s happy when that happens.”

  Danielle raised her eyebrows at him. “I bet the people who can get around bullies are happy,” she said.

  “Yyyeah, for a while maybe,” the Healer said. “Out here, the bullies tend to get dead, so at first it’s a relief. Then the other people either try to go back to everyday life and realize the bully-murdering Skills don’t actually help much with anything else, or they lean into it and turn into straight up thieves or thugs or bullies in their own right. Either way, someone ends up wishing those people had never taken those Skills.”

  Akari sighed. “I don’t think any of us here knows what everyday life is supposed to even be, yet. I’m like three quarters of the way to level 2, and I have two Classes; if I was Inside, that’d be my whole life laid out in front of me, but out here it’s just some stuff I snatched to help me and my friends get through the first year. If we’re all alive to see the spring, maybe by then we’ll have worked through all this massive life change stuff far enough to imagine what life as Returned might look like, and what Classes we need to pursue to make that happen.”

  “Probably not,” Danielle said. “I’m planning to study this winter, but I’m not expecting to get through four years’ worth of home studies books in one season.”

  “Even if you did, would that really tell you what you need to know to pick Classes for going back Inside?” Jordan asked. “I mean, how do people Inside even pick Inside Classes? Do they teach you what’s useful when you’re a high schooler? Do entry level jobs teach you how to unlock the Classes that are right for the, uh, small-c careers you’re supposed to build up from those jobs? I’m fourteen, it hadn’t occurred to me to ask those questions yet. I mean, I thought about what I wanted to do when I grow up a little, but not like that.”

  “They give you System Careers at jobs sometimes,” Bam said from the stretcher. “I dunno about Classes, though.”

  “Wow. You guys are kind of blowing my mind, here,” the Healer said. “I mean, I knew you were Sent young and all, but it hadn’t occurred to me what that meant for stuff like how you’d even choose Classes. I mean, in my Sending, everyone complained about how being Sent messed up our plans, but we all had plans. Now here I am, and just listen to you guys asking if high school teaches you about Classes! Man, trying out different Class-preparation courses feels like it was such a huge part of my school life. In three years, most high school kids go to at least six Themed Skills training camps, so they’ll have plenty of unlocks waiting for them on Advancement day.”

  “And now we have twelve hundred Sent who will hopefully eventually become Returned Citizens – that won’t know what that’s like,” Ranger Michael said. “Can you imagine? Give it maybe 25 years, and we’ll have hundreds and hundreds of parents of high schoolers who literally don’t know if all those Class-prep courses are actually good for anything. Can’t be too important, right? Their kids probably don’t really need ‘em.”

  “You are joking, right?” the other Healer asked.

  “I’m imagining the attitudes of a large group of parents that got all their Classes the hard way,” Ranger Michael said. “A few months ago, when these kids were still legally kids, someone decided they didn’t need any of that; what’s going to happen when they have kids of their own, and someone tries to tell them that their kids definitely need it? If they get that far, they’ll be looking at each other going, ‘nobody I know needed a bunch of lame Skill camps and prep courses to get a Class.’ Because of course they’ll make a few Inside friends, after they settle back in, but they’ll all know each other. That’s how Returns go.”

  “I knew this was a nightmare, but now it’s going to give me actual nightmares,” the Healer said. “Do you think anyone involved in making that decision thought through it far enough to be sharing that nightmare?”

  “I hope so,” Ranger Michael said. “I’d like to think they’ll be motivated to come up with some solutions before these unusually young adults actually start coming back Inside and the problem becomes obvious.”

  “You guys are looking way too far forward for things to worry about,” Danielle said. “You want to talk nightmares? We still have whole political parties in this camp who believe that the warning about not leveling too fast is a malicious rumor spread to bring people down, and their members are going to show us all by leveling straight to base level 10 before they have to see snow.

  “The Six Elements Party and the Shade Tree Society might have as much as half the camp, between us; but two of the other five parties think they’re ‘armies’ and I think they did that because they think it’ll keep them from getting murder tags somehow. That makes possibly as many as – what, two in, um, five shares of half – Two in ten? Maybe? That many people who are still at high risk of killing things or other people until they get mutations. You won’t have to worry about them bringing kids to the normal schools in 25 years.”

  “OK, see, it can’t really be that bad,” the other Healer said. “If it was really that bad here, the Sending Authority would be forced to do something about it. There’s no way Firmitatem is going to risk losing 20% of any Sending, let alone one this big.”

  “Really? I thought half of us had to die,” said Bam. “Like, that’s the point, isn’t it?”

  “What? Of course it’s not. The point is to get level 10 citizens they can tax for mana,” the Healer said. “Dead people don’t pay taxes.”

  “It’s more complicated than that,” Ranger Michael admonished him. “The state doesn’t literally Send people out here like this, just to increase tax revenue.”

  “You sure about that? I’ve been hearing some crazy stuff about the state of the mana reserves, lately,” the Healer said.

  “I’m sure it’s not the only reason, yes,” Ranger Michael said. “I will admit it is one of many reasons, but if it was the only reason, they wouldn’t go about it the way they do. There are better, more certain ways of getting high level citizens if all they wanted was mana to tax. Ways that are in use all over the world.”

  “More expensive ways,” the Healer said darkly.

  “Ways that don’t produce enough Skill Sharers to allow them to travel and hire out to other nations,” Ranger Michael replied.

  “Eh, OK, you have a point there,” the Healer admitted. “Nobody’s ever figured out a more reliable way to get Skill Sharers, and Returned bring in a lot of other high-value low-incidence Skills and Traits too.”

  “And those two aren’t the only reasons taken together, either,” Ranger Michael said. “Truck’s finally here.”

  “What? Oh, right, the stretcher truck.” The Healer shook his head. “Almost forgot what we were doing for a minute.”

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