“What do you think he meant by that?” Heather asked, staring down the aisle after the Sending Authority agent. “That there’s not much he can say, I mean?”

  Danielle shook her head. “No idea. You’d think this would be a great time for lots of advice.”

  Sadie simply chose a black backpack-purse and put it on the way Danielle had. “Ugh. Backwards. It feels stupid,” she said. She put on the full-sized backpack over the straps anyway. “Only for the big hike tomorrow – after that, it’s one or the other.”

  “Presumably after that we won’t have to carry all our earthly possessions at once, ever again,” Danielle said. “Hm. Well, maybe once or twice more – there was that crack the guy last night made about deciding whether to bring our Outside stuff back in when we Return.”

  “Only once anytime soon, though,” Sadie said, adding a charcoal gray hip bag.

  “What’s with the depressing color scheme?” Heather asked, grabbing a school-bus yellow hip bag. “You don’t usually hate colors!”

  “I’m just making my set match,” Sadie said. “The big backpacks only come in black and gray.”

  “You can put anything with black!” Heather protested, choosing a bright pink mini-backpack. “And before you start, mine are flower themed, so there!”

  Danielle chuckled. “Come on, you two – color doesn’t matter as much as carrying capacity. Let’s go load these up.” She took her backpack back off for a moment and put the campfire cooking set into it. “There, see? Better already.”

  “So, what else do you think is urgent?” Heather asked. “You’re the one that did that first aid course.”

  Danielle looked up at the aisle signs, and headed for ‘bath and body.’ “I’m thinking before I start trying to take all the medicines, we should do the real basics – soap and washcloth. Toothbrush and toothpaste. Face washing towel, shampoo – well, maybe not. You can probably do hair with regular soap in an emergency, right? We might not want to carry liquids.”

  “Ah – stuff to stay healthy before stuff for dealing with getting sick?” Sadie asked. “We need some of both.”

  “Yeah, but they expect everyone to want first aid kits and bandaids, they’re not going to run out of those,” Danielle said. “We’ll want extras of some stuff – antibiotic ointment, for sure. Putting on the antibiotic doesn’t help as much if you can’t wash it off first, though, and we need to be able to wash other stuff too. Soap is super basic. Think about at home – or even school. You have hand soap, dish soap, laundry soap, shampoo is basically hair soap.”

  “We want a strong soap, not a fancy one,” Sadie said. “No lotion-y stuff. Something we can use on everything. Dad does that when we go camping – just one bar of Everpure does all the jobs you just listed. He says, the other ones are nice if you have a house to keep them in, but in a backpack, you don’t need them all.”

  “Everpure it is,” Danielle said, snatching up an eight-pack of bar soap.

  Heather hesitated, her hand over a two-pack. “Wouldn’t this be lighter?” she asked.

  “Sure, but will it last five months?” Danielle replied.

  “Oh. No, I’d say we’d need five for that, and that doesn’t even count using it for dishes and laundry and stuff,” Heather said, taking her own eight pack.

  Sadie followed suit, then they grabbed toothbrushes and large tubes of toothpaste (“Can you use Everpure for this?” “Don’t know, not trying it,”) from the other end of the aisle. Next, they headed to the ‘home’ aisle for washcloths and fluffy hand towels, before finally turning towards the first aid section. The main aisle there was clogged with a long line leading to the first aid kits.

  Danielle tried to sneak a look at their descriptions on the boxes, but an SA agent shooed her away. “You can read the descriptions on that poster,” she said, pointing into the pharmacy waiting area. Danielle craned her head and caught sight of a poster titled Which First Aid Kit Is Right For Me in large letters at the top.

  “Ah, perfect – thanks,” she said, and lead her dormmates back to the corner. It was surprisingly empty there, but then, the pharmacy windows were closed and shuttered, and there wasn’t much there as far as things to buy; just a free-standing display of pill cases of varying kinds. The poster was placed high over a suspiciously blank space with little round marks at each corner – maybe first aid kits were usually on a freestanding rack here? It helpfully detailed the contents of several kits, and listed places they were particularly good for – “Kitchen, Campfires, Hobby or Work Sites with High Temperature Equipment,” for example, was a red box with extra burn cream packets in it. “Office, Home, General Use” was white with a red Healer’s cross on the front, and had more standard bandaids and little tubes of pain relievers, but no ace bandages at all, while “Sports, Fitness, Camping” had extra ace bandages. A rugged-looking black kit with extra gauze pads and a pop-up visibility flag was marked for “Cycling, Vehicles, Outside Travel, Industrial.”

  “I guess we should pick the camping one?” Heather said tentatively.

  Sadie made a non-committal sound. “They overlap. Camping there, but campfire there,” she said, pointing to two options.

  “Yeah, and kitchen on one but home on another, as if most kitchens weren’t inside of homes,” Danielle said. “They all have a problem though.”

  “Just one?” Sadie asked dubiously.

  “One big common one,” Danielle said. “None of them is good for more than one or two emergencies of any given type. It’s all, you know, two doses of this, one packet of that. The basic tools are almost the same – scissors to cut gauze or tape, one of those CPR mouth thingies, two pairs of gloves, and four alcohol wipes. If we want to still be prepared after our first emergency, this poster isn’t just telling us which kit to get. It’s giving us a shopping list for the rest of the department.”

  “Should we even get first aid kits, then?” Sadie asked.

  “Of course we should,” Heather said. “We’ll still need somewhere to keep our first aid stuff when we’re out there!”

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  “That’s a good point – the case is a tool, too,” Danielle said. “We should write down all the supplies the different ones include, pick up bigger boxes or tubes or bottles of all those things, and then pick the first aid kit based on which one has the best case. Um, and then probably open them up and shove as much extra stuff as possible inside.”

  “What? We can’t open them up in the store, the cashier people have to scan them!” Heather protested.

  “We can’t hide stuff either,” Sadie said.

  “We don’t have to make it unscannable, just – OK, I do see your point, let me think a minute.” The other two glanced at each other while Danielle thought, then looked towards the aisles. “I’m thinking, we get envelopes from the office supply section, and put the product codes in there. Maybe even grab a couple of those reusable shopping bags and just fill them with packaging trash, and pack our actual bags like we mean it. Otherwise, we’re going to waste tons of space on boxes. We don’t need to carry boxes two miles, unless we can open them and put stuff inside for safety, you know what I mean? Unless the box is full, it’s not for us. Well, or unless it’s a size we can keep stuff in when we get there. Let’s go get something to write on, we’ve gotta take notes here.”

  “You’re gonna get us in trouble,” Sadie said, as she and Heather followed Danielle to the ‘school and home office’ aisle.

  “Oh really? Trouble? What are they gonna do to me Sadie, exile me?” Danielle asked acidly, grabbing a spiral notebook from a shelf. Then she thought twice and traded it for a composition notebook. “This is flatter, and can’t get damaged as easy as a spiral, or catch on other stuff.”

  “One of each,” Heather said, pulling out a pair for herself.

  “Oh – good point,” Danielle conceded. “Hm. There’s a lot of different shelving spots – what are the actual differences?”

  In the end, Danielle got a multi-subject spiral notebook, and composition books with narrow ruled, wide ruled, and graph paper inside. She also grabbed fancy leather-bound journals in hard and soft covered versions, a large box of pencils, a hand pencil sharpener, and the largest manilla envelope the store sold (nine by twelve inches). Then she chose a pair of scissors, used it to cut off the side of the pencil package with the product code, and dropped the resulting flat piece of cardboard into the envelope, while stuffing the pencils inside the coil of the spiral binding on the multi-subject notebook. “There, that’ll protect the pencils and the spiral binding better, and – ” she paused to peel the price sticker off the cover of the notebook. “Ta-da, now I don’t have to unpack either of them at the register.”

  Sadie gave her a skeptical look, but Heather actually looked scared. Danielle was about to ask what was wrong, when Heather blurted, “Hi, agent!”

  Danielle looked around at the SA agent who was watching them from the end of the aisle. “Don’t worry, we’ll make sure everything’s accounted for at the register!” she said, pasting the notebook’s sticker on the outside of the envelope.

  “Carry on, then,” the agent said with a nod, and stepped out of sight.

  The girls all looked at each other. “Scissors and an envelope,” Sadie said after a moment, and went to choose scissors. Heather looked at her, perusing the selection of scissors, staplers, and other desk tools, then back at Danielle one more time. “Well, all right then,” she finally said, and slid out two more large envelopes, handing one to Sadie.

  Danielle snagged a three-pack of little notepads and a package of cheap ballpoint pens before leaving the aisle. Sharpening pencils in the store would be messy. She put the notepad product code sticker on her envelope, then shared out the notepads to her dormmates. (Well, her former dormmates; she hoped they would also be roommates wherever they went tomorrow, but she didn’t trust the Sending Authority’s computer.) They took some notes on what else they might want in that aisle, then returned to the first aid kit information poster and took notes on that.

  From there, they started through the first aid section, choosing supplies. Conversation wandered from the immediate (“Should we get one with pain reliever and one without?” “Definitely – and one of the other brand, too!”) to their plans for later selections (“Oh, I know what we need! Duct tape!”). Around them, other conversations swirled, especially where people had to wait in lines.

  Rumors were the order of the day. The worst part was, for once, the rumor mill was churning over something that actually mattered, and Danielle didn’t know how seriously to take any of it.

  One set of rumors concerned the immediate future. The general gist of most of them was that the way they all prepared for their coming departure from the safety of the sanctuary cities would somehow affect their coming Advancement. Depending on who one believed, it was better to bring a lot, bring very little, prepare for conflict, prepare for wilderness survival, prepare to be as civilized as possible, prepare for stealth, prepare to be bold; about the only thing everyone agreed on was that it was important to prepare for something – anything! – rather than give up before you got to the Advancement itself, because if you had already given up, you wouldn’t get anything helpful.

  Danielle’s best guess, after overhearing easily a dozen arguments about it all, was that the points of agreement must be based on something real; so it was important to choose a plan and try to prepare as much as one possibly could, thus showing the System what one was trying to do so that it could try to help. If she was right, preparing to be stealthy and preparing to be bold would both have results, but different results. Which one was better would depend on conditions at the destination, of which they’d been told very little, but both would at least result in some bonus rather than no bonus.

  Heather was skeptical. “Look, I know how Advancement goes,” she said. “I’ve been to three advancement ceremonies, all right? Your parents give you the token, you put it in the pillar. The System writes a bunch of stuff in your Interface, about how your System age is Adult now, your Parental Assistance is expired, and you get this Skill – what’s it called – um, something about mana tokens. It’s the same for everyone.”

  “You forgot the Career, though,” Sadie said.

  “What? Oh, yeah. Well, that’s about your whole high school education and stuff, though,” Heather replied. “Um, I think. I guess for us it’d be our middle school education?”

  “It’s not just school. It’s how you’ve prepared yourself for life, how you’ve talked to your System about what you want to be,” Sadie said. “Supposedly your youth Skills, too.”

  “Yes, OK, but it’s not something you can change in a day, is what I’m saying!” Heather protested in annoyance.

  Danielle gave up trying to decide if rubbing alcohol or iodine was better and slid both of them into side pockets of her backpack. “Maybe not normally, Heather, but if you think about it, all our options have changed in a day. My youth Trait is that stupid – well, I mean that frustrating thing where I can hear computer data if I try. It’s half of something I wanted really bad, and mom and dad always told me I could learn whatever Skill or Trait I need for the other half when I level up, if I took all the computing and data systems electives in high school, and maybe studied IT in college. I was going to be able to understand when computers talked to each other, I thought. Hoped. Well, I’m not doing that now, am I? They don’t sell data pads at necessities stores, and it sounds like our stupid Outside dormitory isn’t going to have proper electrical service, let alone networking, so I’m about to go for at least five months and maybe ten years without any electronics to listen to at all. Today is the day I have, to show the System what I want to be under these circumstances.”

  “Oh.” Heather looked like she was having one of those moments where the weight of it all really hit.

  Danielle was kind of having one herself. Tears welled up, and she blinked them away, taking a deep breath to deny a sob access to her throat. “I kind of, you know, I’m having the rug pulled out from under me so hard it basically invalidates my Youth Trait. At the beginning of this year, Mrs. Basalt made us do that ‘where do I see myself in five years’ essay, and mine was about college and picking an IT specialty. What would I write if I had to do it now?”

  “Do you think we should?” Sadie asked. “Pause and write a paragraph in these little notepads, figure out what we’re focusing on?”

  Danielle held up her notepad, the visible page full of medical supply lists with a variety of checkmarks or strikethroughs or circles. She stared at it blankly for a long moment, then declared, “Mine says, ‘Alive.’ I don’t know what else to put.”