“Come on in,” Zephyr said, stepping back to let Sadie past. All three of the other girls filed in after her, and Zephyr looked both ways before shutting the door.

  “We were mostly talking about her, so I don’t think she heard much that she could make trouble with,” Danielle said. “We’re obviously not going to be able to talk about private party stuff tonight, though. She’ll be back at the door any second.”

  “Ugh, why is it so hard to get some privacy to talk?” Jordan complained. “I have questions.”

  “Yeah, well. I wanted to talk about our abilities and how to organize our time as a hunting party, but not while we have a hostile person listening in,” Danielle said. “I don’t think Vanessa herself is trying to actually kill me, but we know for sure that some people are, and I don’t want my schedule becoming public knowledge, you know? I won’t ask anyone to risk sharing their System info with a hostile party either. I guess we should just cook our soup or whatever, share out the berries, and make plans later. Maybe I’ll go try to finish my rounds at building seven before I make myself available for anyone else who wants to be on the list for medication times.”

  “I wanted to ask if you guys maybe felt like putting our soups together for a different flavor, or adding stuff to them or something,” Tom said. “Did you bring the pot?”

  “Yeah, we remembered the pot and the berries we dried,” Heather said. “We didn’t bring the, um, stuff we just foraged. That’s mostly going to also get dried.”

  “Did you bring soup for supper, or jerky and wild onions?” Danielle asked.

  “We brought jerky and some of the dried foraged stuff from earlier,” Sadie said. “To see how it is when it rehydrates. It would go pretty well with the beef barley soup, I think, if we add some more spices along with more water.”

  “I was really hoping you’d say that,” Tom said, grinning with relief. “Beef barley is my least favorite of the three flavors, so I’d love to try pretty much anything that’d make it taste different!”

  “Huh. I brought beef barley, too,” Gideon said. “What do you have, Ezra?”

  “Same thing,” Ezra said. “Will they all fit in one pot, though?”

  “Maybe we can do it two servings at a time,” Akari said. “Nutria jerky and t- um, dried foraged stuff, from us, and soup from one of you, to make two servings of beef and nutria barely soup. (Not saying anything we don’t want someone hostile to hear is going to get annoying fast.)”

  “Don’t worry, even if she overhears what specific forageable food we have, she won’t know where we found it,” Danielle said. “What’s she going to do, go wander east of camp and hope she finds the exact patch of picked-over plants we already foraged? If she’s that desperate, let her.”

  “East of camp?” Zephyr asked in surprise. “Aren’t we supposed to stick to going west?”

  Danielle shrugged. “West is the river, for fishing, and the area with the larger game, and generally being further from the obviously electrified and mana-charged fence. East is a comparatively much smaller area between us and the fence, which is technically fair game, but who knows what the Rangers do if they find you lurking too close to the fence, right? So early on, we went east first because nobody else was going that direction, and yes, fine, we found one good patch of forage that we’ve gone back to a couple times, when things have had more time to ripen and stuff; but mostly that’s just a first stop on the way to places further afield now. I don’t even know if it had a lot of forage to get today, and for the record, I’m not asking to be updated right now – but I know for sure it got foraged today, so it’ll be worthless tomorrow.”

  “Huh. You were south of here, like everyone else, when you had that miracle-thing happen, though, right?” Zephyr asked.

  “Yeah, we were south of the place where we did church – the prayer meeting, I mean. That place is a long enough walk, but we were south of there, even. I have no idea why they decided to do their hunting that far away,” Jordan said.

  “We were invited along with the big group because they wanted more Healers involved, and the group had scouts,” Sadie said. “The scouts found a herd the day before, and they led us to the right general area and then found it again, and we set up the hunt from there.”

  “Yeah, I assume the scouts just kept working their way south until they found something, and that was how far south it was,” Akari said. “I don’t know how far east from the river they were searching or how long it took them to find a herd like that. Like Sadie said, we got invited because they knew we had a Healer with Close Wounds. Our overnight hunting trip just involved trying to set traps in a different spot, and we got thrashed by a thorn thrasher instead.” She added nutria jerky to the pot she and Tom were working on, then spices from a Necessities Store spice shaker.

  “We can tell you guys about the thorn thrasher,” Danielle said. “That’s something people should just know is a hazard around here, so it doesn’t matter if Vanessa overhears it. What happened is this: we set our snares in a patch of forest far enough away from camp that we’d made plans not to walk back and forth to check it, and we practiced setting up a camp with our tents and stuff. Then we did personal project time for a while. Eventually, it was time to check the snares, so we all went to find our own snares, and got kind of spread out in a long uneven line with Sadie on one end, and Cassy on the other. Akari was standing guard over our stuff at camp, waiting for one of us to come back and trade spots with her. I was closest to Sadie.

  “Well, everyone’s checking their snares, and I hear Sadie going ‘Danielle can you hear me? There’s a vine monster with thorns, and I’m afraid to yell because it’s got a vine around my foot already, so I really hope you can hear me.’ So I ran for Akari, and told her to get her gloves and stuff, and she was all “Yes, mother!” which I admit, I deserved, because I was totally in emergency ‘remind everyone of all the details’ mode, and she really didn’t need all the chatter,” Danielle said with a chuckle.

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  “Danielle does that – she gets bossy when she’s stressed,” Sadie said.

  “She gets bossy when she’s not stressed, too,” Heather said. “You just have to keep in mind, most of the time she doesn’t really mean it that way – she’s making suggestions, they just sound like orders.”

  “Yyyeah, I might have a little bit of a problem with that,” Danielle said. “Please don’t let it stop you from telling me when I need to do stuff, or when you have a better idea we should discuss before we settle on a plan for real, or whatever. I’ll propose a plan, and these guys will make a counter proposal because they know how I operate, and we’ll end up with a better plan, you know? That’s how it should go, so if it sounds like I’m trying to dictate, and there’s legitimately time to discuss, just do the discussing and chances are it’ll turn out I’m totally fine with that.”

  “And if not, I’ll knock some sense into her,” Akari said.

  Danielle laughed. “She definitely can, too! Anyway, in this case, she actually did exactly what I was saying faster than I was saying it, because like I said, she didn’t really need the reminders; so we got back to where Sadie was fast, before the vine monster realized that we were on to it. Akari led the charge with her axe, with her hands protected by her work gloves, and hacked half a vine right off on the first swing! I brought my sword, but in the heat of it I mostly played defense with my staff, keeping the thrasher from sinking its thorns into Sadie and Akari’s heads or backs while they fought to control the vines.”

  “I could only do so much, though, while the two of them were fighting their way toward the core of this living blender! Heather and Cassy heard the noise once the fighting started and came running. Now Heather might have panicked a little at first – she got her moment to shine afterward, though. In the meantime, though, Cassy was trying to figure out how to get a proper hit in when she was armed with a sling. If you’re thinking that slinging big stones into the middle of a fight with your allies right there sounds like a terrible idea? Well, you’re thinking the same way Cassy taught all of us to think!” Danielle grinned at Cassy.

  “Darn right. Slings are like guns – don’t ever shoot one towards someone you’re not willing to hurt,” Cassy said. “Not if you’re armed with rocks, anyway!”

  “So there she was, working her way around the outside of the fight, and I had no idea what she was going to do,” Danielle said. “The rest of us had fought a similar monster before – that one was thornless, more of a strangling variety – but because we had, we knew that the way to kill it was to break the woody spiral off the bulb at its core. Akari was hacking off vines and trying to get a strike in at the core here and there, and Sadie was basically doing the same with her sword, but it’s hard, because it’s not enough to just hit the vine. You have to pull it tight and then hack at it, so it has enough tension to break. Well, they’d taken a couple chips out of that core, but let me tell you, that is some hard wood. Meanwhile, Cassy had worked her way around to the far side of the thing from the side we were all on, and she starts swinging her sling, then she keeps holding onto both strings and WHACK!”

  Ezra and Tom both jumped at Danielle’s sudden near-shout. “Cassy swings her spun up sling down on top of the thrasher’s core, like a spinning club, and all that momentum hits at just the right angle to bend that spiral right over at the place where Akari had chipped a divot in it, and that thing was dead. And. Gone!” Danielle concluded. “The best part was, Cassy didn’t have a scratch on her! Even I had a couple nasty slashes across one shoulder, and of course Akari and Sadie both had a whole bunch of nasty little slashes all over from neck to knees (plus the one on Sadie’s ankle). Mostly they were pretty high, though, because remember how I said the one with no thorns was a strangler? Yeah, thrashers know to go for the neck. They’re awful.

  “Anyway, we gathered up whatever thrasher bits looked useful and retreated to our camp to heal up; Heather did what she could with close wound, and we used like half a bottle of alcohol trying to sterilize all those cuts. Then I actually had to give them some stitches, which was a nightmare – literally, I had nightmares afterwards. How are you two doing with that, by the way?” Danielle asked, looking at Akari and Sadie.

  “I had a couple bad dreams, but nothing extreme like you were getting,” Sadie said. “Just old stuff that got dredged up by all the stress. I told you about it already, and I’m not telling Vanessa.”

  “I had a bad dream or two, but then the mana pox hit and my brain decided it had more current things to stress about,” Akari said. “Like Sadie said, it wasn’t ‘wake up screaming stuff’ like you were having.”

  “Ah. Well, I’m sorry you had any nightmares, but glad it wasn’t haunting you all week,” Danielle said. “So there you go – the story of our battle with the thorn thrasher. Oh, it ends with us discovering that thorn thrashers are super septic, and we didn’t do nearly good enough of a job with disinfecting all the cuts, so the next day we walked partway back and called the Rangers once we were in a spot we could describe properly. They came out and healed us properly, and dealt with some details about unlocking Skills and stuff for me and Heather.”

  “You’re never going to take us to that part of the woods, right?” Tom asked nervously.

  “What? Of course we are,” Akari said. “We’ve already killed the thrasher there, so it’s a great place for trapping, now. One less predator competing with us, right?”

  “Two less,” Sadie said. “The thorn thrasher and the vine thrasher are both gone.”

  “Exactly! We’ll totally take you there in a day or two,” Akari said.

  “But what if there are more of these vine things there?” Tom asked.

  “Yeah, what if there are more of these vine things there?” Gideon asked incredulously. “I mean, if there were two, what’s keeping there from being three?”

  “Tom, do you know what I call a mutant monster we know how to kill?” Sadie asked.

  “Um, no?” Tom replied.

  “Free mana,” Sadie said with a predatory grin.

  Tom gulped and stepped back from her a half-step.

  “What if it thrashes you again, though?” Ezra asked.

  “I’m not worried,” Sadie said. “I don’t think there’ll be more anyway, but if there were, Heather has Disinfect Wound now, Danielle got lectured on how to give stitches right, we have mana in the first aid kits – we learned from the last time, and we can handle it now.”

  “I still say we need to work on some eye protection,” Danielle said. “I don’t know how we’d do it on our own, but there has to be a way. Maybe we can get glass from the System Store? If we haven’t figured it out by fall, we’ll have to look for something at the fair. It’s not just about thrashers, anything we encounter will be easier to deal with if we have some protection for our eyes.”

  “I’d like to work on something to keep them off our necks, too,” Akari said. “But I agree with Sadie – the chances we’ll find another one right there are pretty small. Especially if we trap it regularly ourselves, so it doesn’t turn into a hot-spot for thrasher food.”

  “When you put it that way,” Cassy said, “We better go back tomorrow – we’ve left it alone all week, and it needs trapping.”

  “See, Cassy’s got the right idea,” Sadie said.

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