Danielle wasn’t sure her brainstorm analogy had really been as funny as the laughter around her suggested. Regardless, it felt good to make people laugh on a day like that. Of course, it felt even better with a reasonable confidence that Vanessa wasn’t in the store.

  “Since when are you a social butterfly?” Sadie asked her, as they got closer to the front of the line.

  “Since Vanessa and the rest of the foursome aren’t in the same time slot, and since it might be a matter of life and death,” Danielle said.

  “She’ll hear, and she’ll try to prank us later,” Sadie predicted.

  Danielle sighed. “You’re probably right, but is it worth risking people’s lives – maybe even our own – by not doing everything we can? I mean, none of us is exactly ready for this, but the more people we have helping us think it all through, the more likely we are to think of any given thing that could be critical later.” Behind the employees passing out first aid kits, another employee went by with a stack of backpacks on a handcart. “Besides, not everyone has their dormmates or their best friends or whoever they’d brainstorm with here in this time slot,” Danielle added. “It’s my duty as a Christian to love my neighbor, and right now that means brainstorming with my neighbor.”

  Sadie and Heather both groaned at her. “Really, Danielle? We’re being Sent, we could die, and you wanna do religious stuff? Now??” Heather complained.

  “I’m not making you do it,” Danielle said defensively. “Anyway, when is a better time to do religious stuff than when you might die?”

  “I’d rather focus on living than on preparing to die,” Sadie said.

  “I am focusing on living! I’m focusing on everyone living!” Danielle insisted. “I’m just saying, if you know you could die anytime, you should live in a way that won’t embarrass you if it’s your last words, or last deeds or whatever. Look, let’s not argue about it right now. It’s our turn next, and then we do a full tour of the store – up and down every aisle until we get back to jewelry for our crystal whatevers.”

  “All right, fine,” Heather said. She muttered something under her breath that was probably an insult to all religions and especially the big ones, but Danielle ignored it. It wasn’t as if the two of them didn’t know already where she stood, and it wasn’t as if she didn’t already know where they stood.

  Danielle was just glad she hadn’t been stuck in a room with Systemists for the last three and a half years. The worshippers of the System never seemed to be able to understand how anyone else could not worship the System, and Danielle had endured enough of their tedious ranting while they waited for the busses to Parent’s Choice activities over the last four years. There was no leaving religion out of it when her parents had chosen to sign her up for a Sunday morning church bus, and there were two more busses taking people to the temple of the elements for Systemist ‘observations.’ Some of them were tolerable table-mates at the cafeteria or in the library, but not at the bus stop Sunday morning.

  Heather and Sadie, by contrast, just didn’t believe in the supernatural at all. They tended to treat Danielle as if she was a little crazy when religion came up, but in general, it didn’t come up all that much, especially once Danielle had been moved into the single bedroom, freeing her to do her youth group Bible study reading out of their sight. Of course, Heather had tried to make a stink early on by accusing the school of giving Danielle the private room because she was the only religious one in the trio; the other obvious option, since Danielle and Sadie had already been roommates for several quarters by then, would’ve been to give the single to Heather.

  The principal had offered to review the decision paperwork, and surprised the girls by pulling out the file right in front of them. Danielle thought she had probably been expecting to pull a sort of mockery of a review, glance at the file, say she didn’t see any problem, and kick them out of her office. To everyone’s surprise, though, her eyes had widened a bit, and she’d declared, “They had a very good reason, and religion had nothing to do with it. I will not discuss this further.” Danielle still didn’t know what the “very good reason” had been; the principal had been very determined not to say anything else about it to any of them, Danielle included, even in private. Her parents claimed not to know either.

  Thinking back on it as Sadie requested the first aid kit with the largest case, Danielle wondered if it was something she would have finally learned when she graduated from Tree of Knowledge to the high school? Did it matter now? If it did, would the Sending Authority know about it? It’s not nice to keep secrets about me from me, she thought again. The principal hadn’t been impressed with that thought, but it had come to mind again more than once in the seven quarters since the rearrangement that got Danielle and Sadie out of a pod in which the other room held Vanessa and Mallory. She supposed the school had hoped that after two years, Danielle and Vanessa could handle being neighbors, at least. It hadn’t worked out that way. Podding with Heather had been much better.

  Dear God, please don’t let anyone try to put us next to Vanessa in the Sending dorms, Danielle prayed. Then it was her turn, and she picked the largest first aid kit, took it around the corner, and joined her dormmates in pulling off the packaging, stashing the product code, and figuring out how much she could stuff inside. Full sized tubes of itch and burn creams, antibiotic ointments, and even larger rolls of tape went in easily enough. (Danielle took amusement from nesting the kit’s original tiny roll of bandaging tape inside the ring of a full-sized roll of tape.) Squashing in an extra ace bandage or two was harder, but Danielle managed it, and the case still closed. She kept extra band-aids and a package of gauze pads outside the kit for the moment, even going so far as to stuff the ones from the kit into the other boxes. She was worried about tearing their paper wrappers against the tools, with all the extra pressure she was putting on things in there. The iodine and rubbing alcohol stayed out because they never would’ve fit; the case was just the wrong shape for the bottles to go inside of it.

  Another agent noticed them unpackaging things. “Kids, you can’t – er, let me rephrase. Young Sent, we need to scan the codes on all that packaging. You aren’t stealing from the store, we’re paying them for whatever you take.”

  “We know,” Sadie said, holding up her envelope. It now had four code stickers on the outside, and enough packaging inside to show an obvious bulge in the middle. “We’re keeping all the codes for the cashiers.”

  “Ah. Well, um,” the agent paused, gears turning in her head. “Carry on then. Just be sure you keep aside anything that can’t have its code stuck into the envelope.”

  “We’ll pack that stuff in the purse-sized bags for now, I guess,” Danielle said. “Don’t worry, we have no incentive to help the government steal anything else.”

  This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  “Anything else?” the agent asked, raising an eyebrow. “What do you think the government stole already?”

  Danielle blinked. “Uh – huh. I’m honestly not sure why I said it like that. I mean – our lives, our families, our futures; arguably all the stuff we left in our rooms, but I know that’s supposed to go back to our families, so mostly stuff that doesn’t really count as real thefts, I guess.”

  “Ah. Nothing except for everything,” the agent said with a pained smile. “I actually, ahem,” she paused to clear her throat, “I understand that better than I’d like to. For what it’s worth, though, we do want you to keep your lives – so prepare well. I’ll get out of your way, now.” She retreated rather hastily from the aisle, headed for the front of the store.

  “I wonder what she meant by that?” Sadie asked, though she didn’t actually sound that curious. She went back to unpackaging her chosen first aid supplies.

  No one answered for a minute; Danielle and Heather worked on tightening up their kits. After a while, Heather said, “After Marcello was Sent, Juana applied to the Sending Authority, because she wanted to be able to help other families not have as bad a time with it as we did, she said. She ended up not getting through all the interviews, but maybe that lady was the same – the government stole one of her family members, like they did to my family. Maybe.”

  “Juana is one of your sisters?” Sadie asked.

  “Yeah, the oldest,” Heather said. “She had just graduated college. She was going to be a teacher, but then the Sending happened, and she was all ‘I don’t know if I can stand being around all those kids if the government’s just going to throw them away’ and she ended up getting a job writing training stuff for Closetfield Corp.”

  “We’re not just getting thrown away,” Danielle said, shoving things determinedly into her backpack. “Go in – there. Look, as a way of outfitting people for the Outside, this seems stupid and cheap, but it’s still super expensive overall, especially when you consider they’re sending something like five hundred people from our school alone, and there’s supposedly another school involved. They’re not shutting down stores for a day and letting us take anything at all we care to grab, just for – ” she paused, distracted by trying to arrange the various pain reliever bottles in the most efficient way possible. Why did they all insist on being different shapes? Did they think people needed to be able to tell Aspire from Fever Ace by touch?

  “ – for a publicity stunt,” she finally finished. “Giving us pre-packed gear they could buy in bulk would be cheaper and look better in terms of looking like they’d prepared us. They’re trying to accomplish something besides just killing us here, and as stupid as it seems to not explain it, well – well, it’s got to be something. I’m not saying the government never does things that don’t make sense, but this is expensive and complicated and if it didn’t have some reason, they’d be doing it a more efficient way by now.”

  “That’s a good point,” Sadie said. “Their reason might be stupid, but they have to have a reason. It’s probably something to do with that whole thing about the System watching how we prepare – if they just gave us a standard pack of camping stuff, we wouldn’t be doing the preparing, so the System wouldn’t have anything to see.”

  “Oh. Good point,” Heather said. “And if they care about how our Systems interpret what we’re doing, then again, that means they aren’t trying to just get rid of us; they’re trying to get some System result they care about. If they didn’t care about us coming back, they wouldn’t care about our Systems getting any specific whatever-it-is.”

  “Exactly! So we assume they intend us to survive, therefore it is possible to survive, therefore we prepare to survive,” Danielle said.

  “Here, here,” Sadie agreed, her voice low but fierce. “Even if they did want to get rid of us, I wouldn’t just go quietly. My father’s tribe may not care to claim me, but they don’t have a monopoly on living, not even in the mana wilds. For one thing there’s other tribes, and for another thing, if their precious tribal Skills were the only way to survive, there’d be a lot less euros around, but here we all are, still alive after all this time, and I’m going to stay alive and prove them all wrong!”

  “Um, OK?” Heather said in a mystified voice.

  “I don’t really want to talk about this – let’s go do that full tour of the store Danielle was talking about. We have to look for the less obvious stuff now – stuff that you wouldn’t think of as a survival tool, but we can use it that way. Like, um. Tarps! Yeah, this isn’t a hardware store, so we won’t find real tarps, but we can still get shower curtains! They’re big, flat, waterproof – and curtain rings will let us connect them.”

  “Oh, good idea,” Danielle said. “Let’s go! On the thorough tour, I mean, but we’ll definitely pick up shower curtains when we get there.”

  Going through the store again in detail was somehow exciting in a way that just figuring out the basics and the biggest needs hadn’t been. It felt less like staving off death and more like pursuing adventure, though Danielle wasn’t sure that actually made sense. They didn’t have space for anything really big, but the outer front pouches of the backpack and satchel were both available, as was most of the space in her small bags, and there was a little space at the top of the backpack and in the corners between round bottles.

  There in the medical supply section, they started with some compact wrist, ankle, and knee braces – nothing bulky, but some of the elastic sleeve types were quite compact. Danielle also took an arm sling, saying, “I bet you can hang more things with it than just arms!” In the office supply aisle again, Danielle chose a pencil bag and stuffed it full of mechanical pencils, better quality pens, refills and erasers in several brands, plus a 6” ruler, the scissors she’d chosen earlier, and a set of paint pens Sadie pointed out – the idea of those being that they would use them to make trail blazes so they could find good hunting spots again easily. They each took a set of the paint pens, but only Heather collected a set of regular markers.

  Danielle considered some clear tape, then chose masking tape and duct tape instead, as more likely to be useful. They were bulkier, but fit OK around the iodine bottle. The quest for stronger tape led them into the home aisle again, where they also picked up “dorm, barracks, and travel” sewing kits, more for the packet of needles inside than the thread and plastic thimble. The shower curtains were in that section as well, and Danielle managed to slide a plastic one and a cloth one down the very back of each of their backpacks, though it took some effort. Carefully clipping the product codes off their packaging without actually removing the rest of it took some effort too, but the curtains really needed the packaging to help them stay compact. Curtain rings, on the other hand, came out of their packages and went around other things.

  Back in the food and kitchen aisles, they each took one package of hard candy to go in the mini-backpacks. Then they had a long debate about whether they needed more eating utensils than the ones in mess kits, which ended with Heather and Sadie taking a package of chopsticks each, while Danielle went for the admittedly low-quality half-metal silverware. She also snagged a net bag with wooden spoons (and a spork for some reason), and shoved it down the inside corner of her backpack, net and all. Danielle tossed a can of peanuts and some raisins into her bag of mostly trash, for room snacks that evening, in case she got locked in early again; the other two opined that there was no way she’d get away with eating in the little rooms, though. Heather, in particular, said the Sending Authority would certainly take away their packed bags until it was time to actually leave in the morning. Sadie packed a can of mixed nuts in her hip pouch “for when we’re there, not for while we’re in here!”

  Another aisle yielded small flashlights and batteries, and Heather chose a small alarm clock that used the same batteries. Danielle and Sadie both took small but heavy steel tool sets with hammer, screwdrivers, pliers, and adjustable wrench. A second trawl through the seasonal aisle didn’t yield any new observations, but coming around the end to go to the next aisle, they ran into the canteen stocker, who handed them canteens, refusing to meet their eyes. “Here – if you don’t have water, you don’t have anything,” he mumbled. They didn’t have space, either, but the man had a point, so Danielle tied a loop of cord around the neck and tied it on to her backpack next to the filter pitcher. The others did likewise, and they checked each other’s knots before moving on.

  need high-level workers. Regular Insiders can't use the high-tier System Skills required for such large spacial compressions.

  https://discord.gg/u5dtzpShv2