Taking advantage of her unexpected vacation, Beth took her documents and found the bank. She’d even made an appointment, because that was an option now that computers were expensive and people were cheap. She found herself in a little room that bore the scars of being converted into an office and then into a meeting room before being returned to an appointment room. She and the account manager sat down on either side of a heavy wooden desk that might have been constructed at the same time as the bank itself. The woman she was facing couldn’t have been more than twenty-five, but she was as self-possessed as someone twice her age.

  If the only reason Beth was there was to overpay the debt, she could have done so at a counter downstairs. She wanted more. She had come up with multiple plans and multiple explanations to get the information she needed to know. But with the manager’s age and attitude, Beth decided on the simplest. She would just be blunt.

  “My father pressured me into taking out the debt in my name,” said Beth. “I want to pay it back faster, but I don’t want him to know that it’s being paid back faster. I don’t want to risk him asking me to take out more.”

  Beth didn’t even know any more if she was being deliberately misleading to get sympathy, or just telling the unvarnished truth.

  The manager hummed and looked through an actual bound ledger. Only the faintly grey tone to the paper revealed that it was a recent construction. Beth waited, breathing quietly as the heavy sheets turned with sharp snaps until they reached the correct page.

  The manager said, “The current balance is four-seventy and change. I see the minimum monthly payments of twenty odd ceeps have been made regularly. Who is doing that, you or him?”

  “Him.”

  “How much more are you proposing to pay?”

  “Sixty a month.”

  “Sixty?” asked the account manager, surprised into looking up at Beth.

  “Yeah,” said Beth. “I joined the scavenging crew. I don’t want him finding out about that either.”

  Beth had joined to get a justifiable reason for her wealth. That much, she wanted people to know.

  “Huh,” the manager said, consideringly. “Okay.”

  She closed the ledger and tapped her fingertips on top of it.

  “Okay,” she repeated. “His name isn’t on the paperwork anywhere. Technically it’s none of his business how much there is or isn’t left. I’ll put a restricted confidentiality stamp on it, so that it requires a password before any alteration or discussion. That’s just to make sure. No one at the bank should be revealing anything to anyone other than you, regardless.”

  “That sounds good,” said Beth cautiously.

  “In other words, no problems until you clear it at about the end of the year. Because, while we won’t tell him the state of the loan, we also can’t let him pay more than you owe.”

  “So then?”

  “So then, we make sure you never pay it off entirely. If, every month, you borrow another twenty ceeps before he comes to pay it, he won’t know any different. Keep that up for another eighteen months, and you’d get all your money back from him. Full length of the loan, and you’d even be up some one-eighty odd ceeps.”

  One eighty that would otherwise have been lost to interest payments. Additional interest payments for holding it the full three years, rather than nine months she’d end up paying it off. Enough money to keep someone from starvation for a year. That was… perfect.

  “Thank you,” said Beth. “Really, thank you.”

  Not even for the advice. Beth was grateful that someone was willing to be on her side. To want Beth to come out ahead, for no other reason than because Beth asked.

  “You’ll have to do the work,” warned the manager. “We’re no longer in a position to offer any sort of automatic transactions.”

  “I understand,” said Beth.

  With heavy intensity, the manager said, “Good luck. I hope for the best for you.”

  Yeah, Beth hoped that to.

  Beth timed her return home at the normal time her job ended. No-one noticed a thing. Her problem wasn’t solved just yet, of course, but she knew what the solution was. It was liberating. She had extra energy thrumming under her skin and the motivation to tackle some of the other things in her life.

  On the next proper rest day, Beth arranged for two guest passes for the twins to her allotment. With the difficulty of living away when most of the other children were boarders, and with what Beth suspected was their father’s active sabotage, they weren’t making friends the way Beth had hoped. Melanie, one of the other allotment owners of their little courtyard, had children of much the same age. Perhaps they’d find more in common with them. Beth was still worried about the damage The Book claimed the twins would be accused of, but she hoped they couldn’t do much harm under her direct eye.

  The bait she used to convince them to come was easy – the baby chickens were finally arriving. Beth had to be present to officially take custody, although she’d immediately hand them over to Melanie. The twelve of them in their little courtyard had all exchanged quotas. Beth had swapped the three chicks she was entitled to for the right to an extra fruit tree.

  Melanie had been very vocal about the stupidity of restricting people to only three chicks, when the best chance for chicks to make it to adulthood was larger groups, but that was how things worked. The allotment committee was always a delicate balancing act between common sense and the needs of too many people for too few resources.

  The chicks would be kept indoors for the first few weeks, but in the meantime, the group was working together to build the predator proof run for them to grow out into. The buildings and existing walls helped a little but wouldn’t keep out a determined cat or a bird of prey. They were isolating a small area until the chicks were big enough to take care of themselves.

  “Just lucky that we don’t have to worry about foxes,” said Melanie. “They’d take out a whole coop of adult chickens, just to be cruel. Kill twenty and only eat one. I wish we were allowed to bring in a donkey to protect them. Or even just geese.”

  Beth looked around, trying figure out what they’d even do with a donkey. It was a large space for a courtyard – more than thirty meters by fifty – but that was hardly the size of a farm.

  Melanie noticed, and protested, “There are miniature donkeys! Smaller than a large dog. They don’t take that much space.”

  “If they’re smaller than a large dog,” pointed out Gwen, “then they aren’t going to be much earthly good against a large dog, either. Let alone a whole pack of them.”

  “Well, yes, that’s probably true.”

  “All academic, anyway. I doubt there’s any miniature donkeys on Pines even if you could get it past the allotment committee.”

  “Nothing gets past the allotment committee.”

  “Wasn’t there a petting zoo, down at the waterpark?”

  “Probably all meat, now.”

  The twins were temporarily out of earshot, and Beth took the chance to ask, “Are your kids not joining us?”

  “No,” replied Melanie. “Unfortunately not. They have a school thing. They’ll have to wait to see the chicks tomorrow.”

  Beth realised she could have planned things better. Oh well. She hadn’t mentioned the possibility to the twins anyway – nothing kids hated more than to be told who to be friends with. Fortunately, George had joined Gwen, and he was being very welcoming. It was slightly bizarre to hear them call George “Mister Corbin” and remember that George was a teacher at their school.

  George smoothly enlisted Oakley into helping set up the framework, leaving Beth to work with Calley.

  They worked at the temporary fold-out table to prepare the panels. No-one knew where Melanie had found them, and no one was asking, but the spaces were too big for the job. Beth and Calley had to tie each pair just off-centre to reduce the size of the gaps. After a little time, Calley was allowing herself to speak at a volume that would have gotten them both into trouble had they been at home.

  “—And Suzie said I only have the shirt because we’re registered, but that’s not true! I have it because the first thing Mum did when we arrived was buy us a whole bunch of stuff.”

  “Yes,” said Beth. “I know. I was there.”

  It had even been entirely Sophie’s idea. Sophie had taken such offence when Beth had borrowed clothes from Peter’s girlfriend Catherine, that she’d made the purchases without needing any further prompting from Beth.

  “And it’s not my fault I have summer clothes. Am I supposed to just not wear them? But Suzie’s upset because she got in trouble with her parents for cutting the sleeves off hers. And they shouldn’t be upset with her. She’s right. It’s just going to get hotter, and were her parents expecting her to walk around in long-sleeves for the whole summer? I mean, she didn’t just leave them ratty edged or anything, like Steve and his bunch. She sewed them up nicely, and everything.”

  “Maybe they’re worried about what she’ll do when it gets cold again.”

  “Those shirts aren’t going to make it anyway. Half of them have more holes than shirt already. But then she yelled at me about it! I didn’t do anything. I even agreed with her.”

  “You’re right,” said Beth. “It wasn’t your fault. People can say things they don’t mean when they’re upset. Maybe she just needs a bit of time.”

  Beth considered the problem of clothing, long term. Pines didn’t have cotton fields. It had some wool, but unlikely to be enough. Flax? That was the plant that made linen, wasn’t it? Or would they start using something entirely new? There might be a skill that was already in the process of levelling up. Still, in the short term, clothing really shouldn’t be that much of a concern. There should be plenty already on the island, even if they were in people’s wardrobes.

  “Maybe,” said Calley. “Anyway, we’re out of panels.”

  “Let’s take them over, then.”

  Beth piled them up and they picked up the stack between them, carefully shuffling over to the others.

  As they placed them down, George turned to Beth to bring her into the conversation. “What’s your vote on the alien motives?”

  “Proxy war,” answered Beth promptly.

  It wasn’t either a new thought or a new discussion. While it could slide into forbidden ‘rumour mongering’, it was an evitable topic for people to talk about. These months on, very few people believed that the infection could be anything natural. Even the positives, such as the way it didn’t target children, made it clear it was manufactured. It was something everyone had an opinion on and nothing anybody could do anything about. As an icebreaker, it was an even better topic than the weather. As long as the talk didn’t push too far, the authorities would look the other way.

  “Another vote on my side!” exclaimed George.

  “No, it isn’t,” objected Oakley. “You said it was a game.”

  George raised a finger theatrically. “And those are functionally the same thing. It only changes the alien’s motives, not their actions.”

  “It’s a very different thing!” objected Oakley. “Tell him, Beth!”

  “They’re different things,” said Beth obediently.

  “Oh?” asked George, amused. “How?”

  Beth took a moment but answered seriously.

  “Games have rules,” she said. “Wars have constraints. If it’s a rule, then they aren’t going to suddenly make the infection airborne, for example, even if they start losing. If it’s an expense, then they might.”

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  “That’s disturbing,” said Calley, reminding Beth that she probably shouldn’t be saying things like that in front of impressionable young ears, just a beat too late. “I guess we hope it’s a game.”

  “I don’t like the idea of being a plaything of aliens,” said Melanie. “At least if it’s a war, there’s more dignity involved.”

  “I’d rather be alive and undignified than dignified and dead,” said Calley.

  “Until round two,” said Oakley.

  “Sorry?”

  “Until round two,” he repeated more loudly. “If it’s a game, then they’ve only played a single round. The infection, and the skill auction. What are they going to do next?”

  Never mind her earlier concern. Clearly the twins were perfectly capable of thinking dark things all by themselves. If Sophie complained to her later about this, Beth had all the defence she needed.

  “Nothing we can do about it until it happens,” said Melanie.

  Except, maybe, get a little bit of a head-start by reading about it in The Book. Beth hadn’t seen the evidence, but would it even be included?

  But they were being a little too indiscrete.

  “Shall we start hammering?” interrupted George, clearly thinking the same. “Do you have a favourite song?”

  “Diggy Diggy Hole!” replied Oakley, easily distracted.

  “Excellent choice.”

  Beth started thumping out the beat as George started a verse. It could even have been the original for all Beth knew. To dig and dig makes us free, sing, sing, sing with me. Everyone joined in the chorus, using it to time driving the posts into the ground.

  Diggy, diggy, hole – SLAM.

  Digging a hole – SLAM.

  Once the posts were in, there were more people than tasks. Gwen took Calley off to help with lunch, while Oakley remained George’s second pair of hands. Beth allowed herself to fade into the background, amazed at how animated Oakley was being. Beth thought Oakley might have forgotten she was there at all, considering how much he revealed about the family. Their father would have been horrified. Beth might have given a hint, but she didn’t want to return Oakley to the sullen ball of misery he was at home. Also, Beth was learning things herself.

  Beth had egoistically assumed that if Peter wasn’t talking to her, then it meant that he wasn’t talking to anyone in the family. But it turned out that wasn’t true at all. He was talking to their father regularly. Perhaps not as regularly as their father would have liked, but not that much less often than before the infection.

  That hurt more than she’d expected. She had never done anything to deserve the indifference Peter was treating her with. She’d supported him every step of the way, standing right there by his side ever since those early days when he’d refused to call Sophie anything other than her given name. Even as he left the mess behind – and left her behind to deal with it. Was it just because she stopped reaching out?

  But she had stopped reaching out, she reminded herself. She had made her decision. None of that should matter.

  They had just about finished up when the expected call came from the main gate. They all swarmed out. The courier was holding a box that seemed entirely too small for the volume of cheeps that was coming from it. The courier was invited in to where a child’s sandbox had been filled with bedding and a little heat-stone that Melanie had been given special permission to purchase. Beth peered over his shoulder as he opened the box. It seemed at first glance to contain a single lumpy blanket, which resolved into individual little balls of fluff as he handed them out.

  Beth would need to wash her hands, but it was still the most adorable thing she had ever encountered. She held her three yellow marshmallows with beaks and feet, smelling of straw and sunshine, and didn’t want to give them up.

  “They need to stay warm,” reminded Melanie.

  Of course.

  Beth gently lowered the chicks into the container and watched them huddle back up with their box-mates, ‘her’ chicks instantly indistinguishable from everyone else’s. Beth ran a gentle finger along the back of one, and then reluctantly stepped away so that Calley and Oakley could do the same.

  “Gently,” reminded Melanie.

  They were only, finally, torn away by the bell announcing the beginning of lunch.

  In the great hall, they stood for a moments silence in remembrance of those taken by the infection, and a non-denominational prayer for safety. Beth let the normal conversation wash over her.

  “Half slops, again.”

  “Give it two weeks. Then the harvest will be enough.”

  “No, it won’t.”

  “It will be if we add in some potatoes from the rations.”

  “Pity we had to plant the first earlies so late. Otherwise we could have planted them straight back in the soil for a second harvest.”

  “I wouldn’t chance a second crop even if we’d planted out in March. The varieties are blight-resistant, not blight-completely-immune. Trying to push a harvest into September is madness.”

  “It can work!” was the protest, but it was shouted down.

  The twins couldn’t participate in the conversation and were beginning to look bored. Gwen kindly turned to Calley and asked what her favourite skill was.

  “Mum wanted us to get things like that water creation one, Morning Dew,” said Calley. “You know, before she realised we couldn’t get any at all. I do like it. It’s getting pretty powerful now that it’s levelled up.”

  Cranky – Helen – had taken that skill. Calley was right, it was powerful. By the time Helen had been willing to use it during the allotment clearing, it had already become a significant volume of water. Unfortunately, the creation didn’t come with any force behind it, otherwise they could have had a pressure washer available to them.

  “It isn’t the levelling up that does it,” interrupted Oakley.

  Beth blinked. “The levelling up is what makes it powerful. It’s gone from a tiny droplet to a solid ball of water.”

  “No,” said Oakley, “you see, that’s an illusion.”

  “An illusion?” prompted Gwen, being more polite than Beth would have been.

  “Yeah,” he said. “So, one of my classmates has a brother who has Morning Dew. He measured how much water he could produce in total in a day. He said that the amount went up by a little bit every day. But it was the same little bit every day, whether he levelled up or not. Levelling up just made it faster to get to the total. The whole system is like training wheels or safety rails. You develop your psychic abilities just by pure practice, and the skills and levels are guides.”

  Beth forced herself to stop and think about that. Beth wasn’t going to wildly trust Oakley’s classmate’s brother, of course, but she wouldn’t dismiss it entirely. It was quite possible that the experiment had done precisely what he said it had. She had also felt that her ability to use her skills in general was more granular than the levelling system would indicate. But levels also fundamentally changed how the skill worked. Not all of them were nice clean increases like the volume of water. The theory wasn’t correct – but it might not be entirely incorrect either.

  She couldn’t help but ask, “What about the skill accelerator skill itself, then? If that changes how fast people gain levels, then it can’t be that the levels just recognise the natural increase in ability.”

  “Simple,” said Oakley. “That’s a scam.”

  “A scam?” repeated Beth.

  “Yeah. The skill doesn’t accelerate anything. It banks the levels people put in it, and then slowly returns those levels one by one as the extra speed. As soon as it runs out, it will stop working.”

  Beth’s instinctive reaction was even stronger this time. It wasn’t a scam. It couldn’t be.

  Or did she just not want to consider it because it would mean she’d wasted a small fortune in tokens? Beth toggled open the menu and tried to do the mental arithmetic.

  Without the accelerator skill, she would have gained about three levels every four days. It had been two and a half months. Call it seventy-six days to make it divisible by four, then times three – fifty-seven. She would have had fifty-seven levels to assign. That was considerably more than the forty she’d assigned.

  She closed her menu with a snap. Even if the skill maxed out at the next stage, it would just stop improving. It wouldn’t stop working. No skills just stopped working.

  “Which is why I think it’s hilarious that the military big shots spent so much money on it,” said Oakley. “It went for thousands. Which also proves the military must have known about the tokens in advance. They must have been collecting and converting tokens for ages to have bid it up that high.”

  Well, it had gone for about a thousand. Enough people had clearly discovered the use of tokens before the end of the auction, but the price wasn’t to the extent that it required people to have discovered it before the start of the auction.

  “I wish we had a chance to get skills,” said Oakley wistfully. “I wouldn’t have wasted my chance on scams or water or puppet shows.”

  Beth wished she could reassure the twins that they’d have their chance to buy skills themselves, one day, but she had no good explanation why she’d suspect that. She was accidentally giving herself away too often to risk dropping intentional knowledge.

  “Puppet shows?” asked Gwen.

  That prompted an enthusiastic description of a play they’d been taken to see. The play itself was alright, it seemed. It had managed to live up to Oakley’s high expectations. The frivolous use of skills in making it work had not. Calley was more forgiving. She was very enthusiastic about the skill that had been used to create the scenery, producing something between a painting and a sculpture of solid light. Gwen was equally interested. It turned out that Gwen had been something of a digital artist herself, and the two spent the rest of lunch comparing experiences.

  After lunch, Beth planted out some seedlings, letting the twins help in small ways. The next round of spinach, lettuce and carrots, as well as the winter cabbages and a few of the more exotic crops she was hoping to get in autumn – purple sprouting broccoli, beets, cauliflower. She was hardening them off slowly, but one entire tray of salad crops had disappeared overnight. Not to a human thief. That would have been easier to deal with. To slugs and snails. She’d moved all her seedlings to a different table, but she’d have to be out every night for a while with a precious battery powered light and tweezers. That was the only hope of slowing the predation long enough for the seedlings to get established.

  After that, it was time for Beth to take the twins home. Oakley spent the walk telling her all the news about the refugee school that he’d been stubbornly refusing the speak about for weeks. Beth might not have found them friends, but at least the day’s activities had helped in other ways.

  “— And Steve was bragging about getting a chance to do real work. Just because he’s almost fifteen. Acting like he’s a real adult and everything, like he isn’t in the same class as the rest of us.”

  “I don’t think it’s real work,” said Calley. “What kind of real work would they let him do anyway?”

  “You both did real work today,” said Beth. “You did a very good job.”

  Calley sighed like the long-suffering teenager she was. “That’s not the same.”

  “I wish it was,” said Oakley. “Steve said that they’re promising him a room of his own. I want a room of my own. Or even just a room at all.”

  “It will get better,” promised Beth, even if she didn’t know how.

  “Sure, it will,” he said, crossing his arms over his chest.

  That was the end of the confidences. Beth cursed herself, but there was nothing she could do immediately. Perhaps she’d find a reason to bring them out again. Beth let them walk the final section alone and returned to the allotment. She needed to go after those slugs before another tray of seedlings spontaneously disappeared.

  “Nice kids,” said Gwen.

  Beth didn’t comment on how surprised she was herself at how well-behaved they had been, and that they were nothing like they normally acted. There was no need to tear them down in front of others, no matter how true.

  “Yes,” said Beth. “Thank you for being so patient with them. You’re very good with kids.”

  “Well,” said Gwen. “I’m learning. At least your two are old enough to treat like adults, most of the time. George’s students are all of eight years old. Half the time I feel like I’m some kind of alien when I interact with them.”

  Beth knew what she meant. When she was younger, she’d never understood how adults could battle to speak to children. Hadn’t they been children themselves? How could they just forget? But as she got older, and the twins got older in turn, she had found herself forgetting. At some point, she would have had an excellent idea about what a four-year-old would like and could understand. But that understanding faded as she’d stopped needing that information.

  “Speaking of,” said Beth. “You said that George has been talking to the authorities about the support for his students. What’s going on with getting them more clothing? And getting the other refugees clothing? Calley was saying they’re really battling. Are there any plans I can help with?”

  “No,” said Gwen with unexpected firmness.

  “No? I mean, with—”

  “I mean, no. You are not to have anything to do with it.”

  “I don’t— I don’t understand,” said Beth.

  Gwen sighed and led Beth over to a quieter spot with a hand on her arm.

  “You can’t talk about this to anyone else.”

  “I won’t,” promised Beth.

  “George got himself into pretty dangerous waters a little while back. He was doing exactly that –trying to get support. The wrong person overheard and turned him over to the authorities for encouraging discontent. They took him in for a ‘conversation’.”

  “Is he okay?” asked Beth.

  “Yeah, his people pulled strings and none of it became official, like. They kept him overnight and then cut him loose with a warning. He’s a fourth-generation landowner, you know. Related to half the island. But one of the warnings they gave him was that I’m not so well-connected. That if I get reported, then I’m going to get my registration stripped away from me. Even if later, it turns out there wasn’t anything to report after all.”

  Beth felt chilled. “Could they really do that?”

  “What would stop them?” asked Gwen. “They take my registration, and I lose my job. I lose the allotment. I lose the right to live here. Even if they let me re-register later, I’m not about to get all of those things back again. If they can do it to me, then they can do it you. You’re so young, and once you get a record…”

  “There is my brother,” admitted Beth.

  “The one who works at the university and got you your residency in the first place? How influential would you say he is, really? Because, frankly, that could go either way. You might get some protection from people on his side, but his enemies might come down even harder on you as a way to embarrass him.”

  Beth didn’t like to think of Peter having enemies, but he would, wouldn’t he? And Peter wasn’t the influential one, was he? That was the de la Hayes. They had been generous enough to get them residency, but would they really bother putting themselves out for a person they barely knew? One that Peter wasn’t even close to anymore?

  “So the kids just go without clothing?” asked Beth.

  “No,” said Gwen. “We haven’t given up. But we are staying quiet about it. Complaining isn’t going to get us anywhere. We have to be smarter than that. Promise me, if you think of something, come talk to me. Maybe it will be something that works. But speak to me first. Believe me, Beth, you don’t want to come to anyone’s attention.”

  One of the other gardeners came out of the arch, and Gwen pasted a smile on her face.

  “Shall we hunt for those snails? We can check behind pots and see if we can find any before it gets dark. Save some of the batteries.”

  “Good idea,” said Beth.

  If Beth was a little more violent in crushing the snails than she needed to be, Gwen didn’t say anything.