6-1

Another lecture in history class, another sheet of paper scribbled on only for show. Clover glanced outside the window and found a smattering of rain. It was a gray day, threatening a headache, and she felt neither the need nor the drive to focus.

As an interchangeable professor reported on someplace five countries and centuries over, Clover looked at her idle hand. It was not being productive…but it was capable of so much. With these fingers, a pencil, and a grip, she could write great classics and regale the world—or simply amuse other people in a one-desk radius.

Actually, she could go further. She glanced over her shoulder up, way up at the row where Carmina sat. One major unanswered question she had—well, there were many, but this one felt surprisingly important—was whether Carmina was now accepting notes.

Then again, if she weren’t, that wouldn’t be too bad. When she’d crumpled that first one, it was so funny that if Clover had been any form of class clown, it would’ve been hard to keep herself from laughing. One good joke deserves another, hence the note on the dodgeball…and here she was today.

Clover had no clue what kinds of jokes Carmina appreciated—and knew there was an excellent chance she didn’t like any—so first and foremost, she would jot down something that entertained herself. If the strategy ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

Despite herself, she defaulted to drawing something she assumed normal people liked. It was Winster, the admittedly adorable parakeet hanging in her room. His cage filled the sheet, and inside, she detailed the bird’s pudgy cheeks, the feathers settling at the bottom. Then she folded it, passed it on to her neighbor Craig, and thus began the waiting game.

Twenty minutes passed before she got an answer. So much time had passed that she’d ceased expecting anything. Carmina might have taken the note not as an invitation to send a funny thing back, but as a mere random gift. She might have pocketed it, silently thrown it away, torn it in two…or simply suffered her note being lost in transit.

In any case, here it was. She opened it up underneath the desk and found Winster unchanged, but underneath, scrawled and contorted to ring around the edges of the page, was a very detailed message to her.

“I can get you into the woods. You’d have to fight wild animals. There’s an opening for a student internship doing morning patrols. Just show up at five at the southern gate and you’ll probably be charismatic enough that they’ll give you the job on sight. I’m not kidding.”

Time slipped away, but the rain continued.

A midnight filled with raging thunder…a black early morning tinged with the green of a worse storm that never came… Here was the moment Clover had spent too many hours thinking over, braining on the possibilities, wondering what kind of internship Carmina even had.

She came to the southern gate just as instructed. The drizzle was too gentle for her to bother with an umbrella. Seemingly intertwined with the half-open wrought iron were branches and ivy, the first tendrils of the woods beyond. Gazing into its depths, as usual, provoked useless thoughts, as always philosophical, rational, practical.

It started with money and how she’d be so relieved to be making some, then turned to her wand back home and the creatures of the woods. Why did bears produce such strong magic? Unlike deer and moose and rhinos, their bones weren’t prominent and exposed. Their fangs weren’t the greatest source of their power either; in that field, sharks and snakes far outclassed them. Yet people loved to traffic in their blood, their shaggy hides, and especially their bones.

Bears were large predators, but there were others. Yet when wolves showed up in their place at the Coliseum, anyone who knew anything about the event had counted it a disappointment. Those animal populations weren’t supposed to have a “down period.” Littleburo wasn’t just known for its bears; it was renowned for them, so much so that a globetrotting enthusiast like her Uncle Addison might abandon his buffalo hunting and marlin fishing just to bag one of the largest and fiercest brown bears known to man.

A roar startled her, made her heart stop. It was only thunder, though, and far away, mixing with her imagination.

“…Why, hello! What have we here? Is this the young lady you were talking about?”

Clover turned at the familiar voice. Professor Mary Dolby was approaching, along with two other shapes barely brighter than silhouettes. Then they and their umbrellas came under the gleaming light of two lampposts near the gate, both powered by the generators of the Spire.

Prof. Dolby smiled through her glasses, her off-white hair luminous, her teeth like thousands of little clacking pearls. Carmina and a gruff-looking man in something like a brown soldier’s uniform stood at her sides.

Clover curtsied, lifting the corners of her rain-streaked lab coat. “Yes, Prof. Dolby, I believe I am. I’m Clover Faber, and I’m pleased to meet you…again.” This was her perpetually discombobulated Environmental Science teacher.

The teacher pointed. “You’re in the second row!”

She nodded.

“And you fought at the Coliseum the other day! Excellent show, my good madam!”

Wow, “good madam.” Clover forced a giggle, but she was well-practiced, so all her giggles sounded right at home. The two shook hands, Clover refused all three offers of her umbrella, and then Prof. Dolby started leading them to the vehicle. Apparently, there was no body armor of any kind.

“This is Carmina—oh, but you already know that,” Prof. Dolby said with a titter as they stepped one by one into the crouching, spider-legged ATV. “And this is Ed. Bet you didn’t know that! We two adults will be riding in the front, if you don’t mind. Ed here will be literally ‘riding shotgun’!” She made physical air quotes. Ed locked and loaded.

“That’s great,” Clover said.

Clearly, Carmina had long since tuned them out. Sitting next to her—with a red hood drawn over her lush black hair, her eyes wandering out the window—Clover felt they could have been at the height of teenagerdom.

The ATV was an absolute feat of engineering, of course. It was less like a spider than a beetle with a hollow back and an enormous shell that arced over that back and kept them dry. It scuttled far faster than Clover expected—she’d read the statistics, but it was harder for her to comprehend “forty miles an hour” than to feel that even over rough hills, it ran faster than anyone.

Almost immediately, Clover covered her mouth. “What if I feel sick?” she said.

“We don’t have barf bags,” Prof. Dolby said. “You just hang your head out!”

She preferred not to, so she braced herself, swallowed often, and focused on the sights ahead. In the pitch-black early morning, only the headlights of the ATV could pick anything up. Mostly it reflected off the slick surfaces of the greenery. The ATV moved haltingly, brisk one moment and juddering to a stop the next, only to delicately rotate itself and take off again for half a minute straight.

One time it stopped when the coast was clear, for no reason Clover could see. Prof. Dolby leaned back and whispered, “My co-pilot hears something.”

“There’s a bear here,” Ed said.

They waited in suspense.

He shook his head. “’S gone now.”

Immediately the beetle charged ahead.