6-3

There were a few more spots to hit: a few more caverns, dens made of nothing but dirt and hanging moss. Most of them didn’t hemorrhage bones, but Carmina would collect any old organic matter. Just as long as it wasn’t wood or leaves—those were cheap, weak, and abundant.

The rain had ended and the sun was beginning to rise, turning the world a misty blue. It felt so humid, Clover could’ve been in the center of a cloud. As the spider-car shunted and Prof. Dolby talked on and on, she found herself watching Carmina more often than not, but she wouldn’t watch her.

There was nothing Clover felt stronger than pain, laughter, or jealousy—in this case, a jealousy with no rhyme or reason that sought to yank Carmina’s attention away from the forest itself. If there was a fourth place, it was fascination. She was intellectually fascinated by this girl who trailed secrets like a bird of paradise dragged feathers. She was dazzled by the idea of what she could learn in the future. She busied herself over her; she wanted to be busied over by her; it sounded like love, either that or desperation.

She’d rather not drive her away, but…she didn’t know enough about what she liked, so she puzzled over how to keep her.

It would be great to ask her, but Carmina had made the very strange choice to bring Clover along on a mission she didn’t enjoy. Worse, she’d made this the new normal.

“…take them back to the lab, where our machines can make key microfractures at select points, exposing just enough marrow to gauge the—oh, hey! Here we are! All hands on deck!”

She said that one already…

They left the bug, only to find, right behind the curtain of leaves, a fifteen-foot metal wall. The rainfall had washed away much of the dirt, but not the dents or even char marks along the surface.

Prof. Dolby approached it and touched it with a gentle hand. “It’s okay, you can feel it,” she said to Clover in a low, giddy voice. “Go on!”

Clover looked back at Carmina and Ed. They had glazed expressions—everyone knew this was not a work stop, but a museum exhibit for Clover’s benefit. She touched the wall.

A current slightly stronger than static made her arm muscles spasm, and her breath hitched. But she held steady. Prof. Dolby laughed quietly.

“This is the Bearland Perimeter. Kind of an essential part of the Bearland Project. Can you guess what it does?”

“Why, yes, Prof. Dolby, I can. You don’t see me falling asleep in class, do you?”

The professor tittered. “You would be surprised!” she said, wagging a finger. “The waking comas you kids fall into!”

Clover smirked. “Fine. The wall keeps bears out.” Seeing it in person raised a real question, though. “Why isn’t it hurting us, right now?”

“Because you’d have to smack into it, or apply some heavy pressure. Try leaning.”

That made Clover worry that she’d be frying her nerves, but she put the fear aside and leaned gradually harder. Nothing happened until she was adding her body weight—at which point a definite shock ran straight through her spine. She stopped leaning.

Prof. Dolby laughed like she’d pulled off a joy buzzer. “See? It can hurt! Hence the caution signs you’ll see dotting the wall if you start walking along it.”

Clover fought the urge to rub her arm as if it were smoking. “This fences in the rest of the earthbound animal kingdom too, right?”

“Not rodents. They tunnel under it. We also let a few streams through.”

“Alright, well…aren’t bears strong enough to get through this anyway, if they really want to?”

“If that’s the case,” Prof. Dolby said playfully, “then I guess they don’t really want to!” She tapped the wall with a fist. “It takes dynamite to blow through this.”

It seemed to Clover like a huge resource expenditure just to make sure Melo Academy’s property didn’t escape—which, technically, would mean the bears becoming the property of the next village over. Girding the place with a wall meant every train coming in or out of Littleburo needed to come through an opened gate or arc over a bridge; it meant charging it with a constant current no doubt provided by the Spire.

They hurtled through the last stretch of the workday. Class would start soon, but Clover had to fight back a yawn. Only tomorrow would she start collecting organic matter with Carmina. There was no reason why she couldn’t have started today, that she could see, other than that Prof. Dolby took a shine to someone even half as talkative as her, and would keep her precious little lab coat somewhat clean for as long as possible.

Soon they entered the Academy gates again. The bug was parked, Ed took an early leave, and the professor gave Clover such a glowing review that you’d think she’d done—anything. Then Prof. Dolby left. The telltale early-morning gloom was still above them when Clover found herself and Carmina standing together.

“By some coincidence,” Clover said, “we have the same class now.”

Carmina put down her hood and looked at her: a small victory.

Clover led the way as they began to walk, trying pitifully to kick the mud off of her boots. “You’re blunt. You’re direct. You don’t seem like you’d mind if I asked you some pointed questions…would you?”

“No, I guess not,” said Carmina.

“Why the hell did you invite me to do that?”

“There’s tons of reasons. Most people are falling over themselves for money. Now you don’t have to. You might get to fight sometimes, and you’re a good fighter. They’ve been talking about wanting a good fourth person in the back. I’d rather it be you, not someone I’ve never met. Also…it’s the only thing I could think to put on that paper you passed me.”

That was a lot, and all mashed together.

“That was so sweet of you! Very thoughtful. Here I thought you simply felt pressured to take me someplace you hated.”

“I kind of—wait, I don’t hate the woods.”

“Well, I don’t think it’s just Prof. Dolby.”

They took a left. Empty side streets broadened, turning into campus.

Carmina took a long pause, then spoke deliberately. “I love the woods. I only left because I could no longer live there.”

“What? Like you were driven out?”

“No…I mean what I had was no longer enough to survive. Because I changed, I got sick. My mother wasn’t willing to shoulder the burden.”

Nothing about her looked sick or weak to Clover. “How long ago was this?”

Carmina slowly shook her head. “Months? This is too many questions.”

“I’m sorry.”

“…No, it’s not too many. You can keep asking, just about something else.”

Two pieces clicked together in Clover’s mind. She’d rather not talk about or be within the woods because she loved them.

“I’ve also been remembering what Dolby said about giving you food and shelter.”

“Ah, right.” Carmina seemed to relax a little. “That was the deal I made with the Academy. They have really high hopes for me.”

“And you have?”

“A desire for the food and shelter they’re giving me?” She shrugged. Clover refused to believe that motivation was all there was to it. No way was this girl directionless.

The building housing their history class came into view. A low fog hung over the campus, but at least things were brighter. “I don’t like the work, but lots of people don’t like their work,” Carmina said—she seemed to enjoy shifting their talk to the practical, physical side of things. “And it’s shocking that a lot of mages apparently don’t want to do it.”

“In my case, I’d never heard of the position.”

“They don’t advertise it because it’s picking up shit…shit and bones.”

“Ah, right. And it’s slow. Battle maniacs just go for security and pre-military.”

“Yeah. But they all pay.”

Their conversation lost the thread. Stepping inside didn’t help, with the throng of other students and the slight anxiety of a too-soon bell. When they reached the door to class, Clover offered a goodbye, and Carmina returned it—but it felt weak and a minute late.

What she should’ve done was tell her all the possibilities of the in-class note. At least she had returned one, and her heart hadn’t been irretrievably claimed by Bearland, and she hadn’t been hating Clover’s presence, presumably. Clover was already planning her next doodle. Here’s to many more.

She couldn’t help but paint mental pictures of Carmina as a survivalist. With so little to go on, it was hard to imagine—probably deliberate on Carmina’s part. But Clover had seen homeless people on the Littleburo streets. She thought of the big brown wall that marked one edge of campus and imagined the Carmina of a few weeks ago sitting against it. Begging or stealing from the fringes. She imagined her really, sincerely directionless—except for the money. The coins in her hand. The job she’d been offered on a whim. And an invitation to do it again.