People finally started closing recording apps, pocketing data pads, and preparing to stand up. Michael didn’t stand right away; he was too far from the door. He’d just get chairs rammed into his shins while people jostled to get past them, without being able to really move.

  “Surely your junior Healer can handle solo duty during a low period?” the BoP representative asked. “I understand making sure the meeting does happen during a low period, but,” she trailed off suggestively.

  Commander Hardine sighed. “We’re down a Healer right now. We’re down people in general on layer 1 right now! A lot of people requested transfers to other layers, suddenly decided to cash in decades of backlog vacation time, or even resigned outright.”

  “What? What triggered all of that?” the woman asked in concern. Leave it to Bureau of Personnel to take the most notice of a personnel shortage!

  Agent Apira laughed, though she hardly sounded amused. “The Sending of 14- and 15-year-olds, obviously,” she said. “Everyone wanted some way to express their protest, since the government ignored all advice on the subject. Unfortunately, those same young Sent are first among the people inconvenienced by the shortfall, followed by the protesters’ fellow Rangers and agents, and the people using the protected campgrounds, which is also supposed to be served by Layer One Base.”

  “You mean you actually left nobody to mind the store?” the senator asked. With the door on the opposite end of the room from the presenter’s seat, he was blocked in worse than anyone, and waiting impatiently for a clear path to the exit.

  Agent Apira just shook her head and went out the door, clearing the way for her personnel to follow her. Commander Hardine paused long enough to tell the senator, “Don’t worry. We hired a pair of level 9 Sent from a different layer to come hang out in the radio room while our regulars were here in the meeting.” He concluded with a polite nod and stepped out the door, opening the way for the Healers.

  It only took a few minutes to clear the room from that point. Michael tripped on the spidery wheel-base of one chair and stubbed a toe on another, and that was with only half the table to get past; but then he was out the door and in the clear (well, in a depressing gray hallway in a building in a cave, but it was still better than the conference room). Everyone trooped down to the first floor, back portico, where official vehicles waited with yawning drivers to take them home. The Healers stood on the curb telling in-jokes while the other Outside personnel boarded a re-purposed school bus, angling for the front seats.

  “You sure we can’t just go for a run, boss?” Flo teased Healer Hart.

  The senior Ranger Healer rolled his eyes at her. “Sure, fine, go ahead. Tell me how it goes with the guys manning the mana-locks. See you next week,” he snarked back. He must really be tired; he hardly ever gave in to that kind of humor with his coworkers.

  Micheal hung back a half-step, just listening. He got the joke, of course; like many Returned Healers, the three of them had high-level Speed Improvement, and could literally run back to base faster than the bus would get them there – if they didn’t get held up at the tunnel gates, which they would if they just showed up without warning. Not literally all week, of course, but overnight? Maybe. Michael himself could doubtless escape without the help of the tunnel guards if he really felt the need to. It would require him to do damage to the mana control systems, though, so that was something reserved for enemy territory or truly dire circumstances, not just for wanting to get home 15 minutes sooner and being impatient with red tape.

  “Trying to decide whether to ride in the bus or on it?” Blanche asked from behind him.

  Michael turned around. “Oh, better, we’re trying to decide whether to wait for the bus or try to replicate the escape scene from Shelter Among Enemies,” he told the ORAP representative.

  Blanche mimed a dramatic shudder. “I hate that movie,” he said. “I know just enough about how expensive that kind of damage would really be that it gives me budget-meeting nightmares!”

  The two of them laughed together, and for a flickering moment Michael was just a person again, laughing with a friend over an unrealistic action sequence. He like to believe that moments like this connected him to centuries of humanity – maybe even millennia, if he didn’t mind counting unrealistic action sequences in books and stage plays alongside those in movies and stream shows!

  The moment passed, though. It always did. Blanche wasn’t one of his old summer-camp buddies; they looked the same age, but Michael’s high Body stat was actually disguising a 25-year age difference. Their friendship was based on sixteen years of working together – or was it eighteen years? The oldest of the little Dunnings Michael had first met over the years, this one as a bright-eyed toddler making things awkward for his parents during the first Sending Camp Closing banquet Blanche had attended, was recently married himself now. Michael had captured the little scamp when he tried to escape into the woods to find something more interesting than the speeches – Blanche claimed the boy still had the butterfly that had led him away, now a neatly dried and framed conversation piece on an apartment wall.

  They talked about such things between meetings, or at inter-service morale picnics; they shared photos over email. Michael knew that Blanche’s youngest daughter had picked up a second performing arts Skill from her academic Career somehow. Blanche knew that Michael’s oldest grandchild had recently won a fishing contest during a week-long Historical Skills camp, and had correctly identified Camp Berryfield from the background of the photo. Now, the Insider would ask him for an unofficial opinion about the Sending they were both working on, because that’s how these things went.

  “Sooo, while you’re waiting around, let me offer you a distraction from plotting the disablement of thousands of dollars’ worth of access control and mana exclusion equipment,” Blanche began teasingly. Michael placed a mental bet with himself. “Tell me about this Skill Sharer?” Blache asked.

  Michael nodded. Trust Blanche Dunning to care more about the potential VIP in his assigned Sending than about the existing VIPs making life difficult Inside. That was one of the things he liked about the man.

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  “Danielle Falconer. Skinny little girl, light brown hair, gray eyes, started off at the Dome with Basic Sneak and thoroughly embarrassed about it. She’s mad at the adult world for assuming she knows what a high-schooler should know about the System, the Outside, and everything else the government decided was “common knowledge” without examining the question of what age groups it’s “common” among. She levelled up within the first week, when someone attacked her Healer and she won the defense. She’s been earning mana from Combat Medic and turning it straight into more Skills, Traits, and Classes. She’s not double-classed, she’s quadruple-classed – Basic Sneak, Combat Medic, Light Shaper, and General Enhancer.”

  “You’re joking. Are we still talking about the Sending that went out three weeks ago?” Blanche asked, his eyes going wide.

  Michael smirked at him. “She claims she no longer cares what people say is impossible, because we keep telling her what she does is impossible after the fact. She’s got a bunch of Careers, too; Survivor from the Dome, Medical Assistant from the epidemic – because of course she helped out, she had all four of the Skills we asked people to help out with – Food Processing from the care package, of course, but from an Access Point Career search, Mana Researcher. And no, she’s not a Systemist, so yes, she’ll probably get crazy things from it.”

  Blanche chuckled and shook his head. “Wow, that’s crazy. Has she been warned?”

  “Agent Apira tried, or so I hear,” Michael said with a shrug. “She doesn’t normally blow off warnings, either. When we warned her about the lunar-month minimum cooldown on leveling, she apparently tried to tell the whole camp. It didn’t go over as well as we might have hoped, but she wasn’t exactly a trusted authority figure, you know?”

  “Camp Council, though?” Blanche prodded.

  Michael nodded. “She’s Christian, and she says a miracle happened to her. Well, more to the point, one of those Wolf Pack boys went around yelling that a miracle prevented him from killing her, and she was a saint and a miracle worker and “unkillable.” The whole town heard it, or heard about it, and some of the Christians got pretty excited about it all. The ladies working the vote for her building said she literally told people not to vote for her just because of that, but – ” he trailed off with a shrug.

  “Kids will be kids,” Blanche said knowingly. Then he frowned. “So, ah, is she already starting to have a lot of trouble with the camp’s Systemists, then?”

  “It varies. Frankly, she’s having trouble with some of the Christians, too,” Michael said, and Blanche groaned. “I know, I know. Look, she’s sticking with her friends for mutual protection, and not starting fights on purpose. She’s got good situational awareness – broke that Wolf Pack fool’s leg while he was still under stealth, even! Oh, and however it happened, she’s got access to a pretty darn effective shield Skill. We can’t expect her to just keep her head down and stay off everyone’s radar – apparently she tried that in school, and it got her access to Basic Sneak, but now she’s too big a target to just hide in a corner. We probably can expect her to take sensible precautions, defend her friends and allies and accept their defense in turn, take warnings to heart when we give them, manage her mana to the best of her ability and information, make thoughtful choices about when to do things the easy way and when to pursue delayed gratification, and stick to her principles when the going gets rough.”

  Blanche stared at him thoughtfully – or possibly through him. He’d given his friend a lot to think about, and it was rather late at night. Michael would be up for hours on overnight radio watch, but Blanche was probably quite tired by now. Finally, he said, “It sounds like I’m in for an interesting five-to-ten, in more ways than one. I guess if we can really trust her for all of that, though, then I can probably take comfort in knowing that at least all the stress will be worth it in the end!”

  “That’s the spirit!” Michael would’ve added something, but the sound of the bus starting its engine distracted him. “Ah – sounds like I better board my escape vehicle,” he joked, and offered a hand to shake.

  Blanche shook it warmly. “Thanks for the real off-the-books chat,” he said. “See you again this fall, or whenever the speeds rolls through.”

  “Which will also be fall,” Michael predicted, “so see you then! Oh, and don’t forget to forward that wedding picture!”

  “Will do!”

  Michael swung himself up and around the front post and into the first seat on the bus. The driver got moving, too familiar with Ranger antics to even consider the possibility that a little vehicle lurch here or there might endanger a Returned passenger. A glance out the window past Flo showed the car with the ORAP markings pulling out last; the senate van was already a block down the road, even though the senator had been last out of the conference room.

  “Well, our exciting departure from routine is done,” Flo snarked, gesturing back towards the building as they turned past it onto Tunnel Gate Way. “Back to the old grind, eh?”

  Healer Hart snorted. “Assuming nobody on the Insider side of our duty area has stepped in a patch of poison ivy in the dark, anyway. Can you imagine the hand-wringing if one of our Sent watch-sitters actually had to respond to a call in the protected campgrounds?”

  “We’d have heard already if that happened,” Flo said dismissively. Then she yawned. “Michael’s problem either way, though! I’m running off to bed the moment this bus stops in the compound. You won’t see anything but the dust cloud!”

  “With any luck, I’ll finally get a proper feel for what the old grind actually feels like at this post,” Michael joked. “I know I’ve been off-layer a while, now, but I’m pretty sure the last few weeks have been atypical!”

  “Don’t worry, you’ll be just as bored as you would on a high-layer base in about another week,” Flo predicted. “Well, that’ll be the Summer Fair – so maybe two weeks. The school-break campers will all go back Inside, the all-layers System checks will be done, Camp Constanza will be done having crazy special events and it’ll still be way too warm for the speeds. I’m sure we’ll still have newbies falling out of trees and calling us to set their broken bones, and all the usual new-Sending chaos. Just, you know, the normal chaos instead of the special edition chaos!”

  Michael leaned back in the bus seat with a chuckle. “I’m looking forward to it. The boredom, that is.”

  Healer Hart agreed, “Boring is always good when you’re a Healer.”

  “Boredom on the job anyway!” Flo said. “For off-shift options, though, I set my comm to download the latest season of The Longest Storm while we were in there with the good Wi-Fi! Let me just make sure it completed.”

  The bus jostled as it rolled past the second gate, and Flo started tapping at her pocket data-pad. Michael watched out the front windshield, already looking for his first glimpse of the real sky (or at least, the real clouds). Flo held up her comm pad triumphantly, displaying the “download complete” message for her fellow passengers to see. A few quiet cheers came from the seats behind them; Flo was apparently in the habit of having streaming parties with her favorite shows, saving people with cheaper accounts the annoyance of trying to watch over the questionable Outside network connection.

  Michael nodded, even though he personally wasn’t that excited about the stream show. He didn’t need to discuss his tastes in entertainment streams right that moment. His mind was still on the Sending, anyway, and how the three of them could best help all 1200-ish remaining Sent get through the rest of the season. To the other Rangers, he simply repeated, “I’m looking forward to it.”

  ? BoP - Bureau of Personnel

  ? TAIR - Trade and Internal Resources

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