Beth continued to level her two defensive skills methodically, but it was the inner space skill that was now getting three quarters of her points.

  Every upgrade was the possibility of becoming awesome and the possibility of being maxed out. The rumours around it varied too much to help, from unlikely claims such as the ability to merge with other spaces, to disappointing, like the ability to partition the space into multiple sections. Beth could not reveal her interest in it too obviously, and The Book was worse than useless about the matter.

  She could have patience. With her levelling every twenty-five days now, she would find out for herself soon. Beth realised that it wouldn’t be long until she was the highest levelled user anyway. Unless some other person had the combination of acceleration and inner space, they simply wouldn’t be able to maintain her upgrade speed.

  She counted down to the third stage upgrade with thrill and dread, and found out that it was the ability to move defined, but non-solid, objects in or out of the space.

  It wasn’t terrible, she told herself. It was silly to feel disappointed. In fact, she could think of it as a necessary pre-requisite to anything really interesting. If the space had any hope of growing plants or accepting humans, then it would have to first be able to contain air. The wildest flights of fancy she had, like having an entirely fully sustainable world, might be a long way away, but this ability was a necessary first step. Most importantly, it hadn’t maxed out. All things were still possible until it maxed out.

  She practiced on the limits of the skill. It took some effort, but soon she could move the air from inside a bottle, leaving the bottle behind. But no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t move the air from a more nebulous concept, like the area between her two hands. After some hesitation, Beth also tried to move the water from inside a plant and was relieved when that failed with a vague feeling of permission denied. She wouldn’t ever have been willing to move the air from someone’s lungs, or worse, but it was reassuring that no-one else could either. Logically, a death would be a death, whether it was from a bullet or from having one’s blood turned against one. Emotionally, the thought was enough to add another element to her nightmares.

  The other members of her team were also levelling up their own skills, even if not with quite the same rate as Beth herself. Sebastian reached his own stage upgrade and surprised her by taking her up on her half-joking offer to introduce him to Melanie. The stage change allowed for the delay or pause to the repelling effect, and more importantly, it allowed that start or stop to be triggered by someone else. Sebastian could offer his services without needing to arrive at the exact moment his services would be required.

  After getting him a contractor badge to allow him access to the high school, Beth walked him to the far end of their little courtyard. They could hear the flock of chickens before they could see them, scratching, rustling and low caws punctuated by sudden squeals and thumps. They turned to see the metal cage that enclosed the coop and some very thoroughly explored dust.

  Some of the other allotment owners claimed that they could recognise ‘their’ three chickens on sight and could point to them when inspected by The Committee. Beth couldn’t. The chickens were out of their awkward teenage appearances, but, while Beth could appreciate that they had differences, she couldn’t identify any of them.

  “Those are much cuter than I was expecting,” said Seb.

  “They are cute, aren’t they?” said Melanie.

  Beth made the introductions, but most of Seb’s attention was still on the chickens.

  “I didn’t realise they’d be so round,” he said. “And those fluffy little butts, like they’re wearing overstuffed shorts.”

  “Want to say hi?”

  Sebastian eagerly entered the run, getting his hands pecked at while he offered some seeds. Beth stayed back.

  “How many eggs do you get?” he asked.

  “None, yet, but it shouldn’t be long. Hopefully we can get a decent amount before they slow down laying for the winter again.”

  “Chickens stop laying eggs in winter?” asked Seb. “Surely we weren’t importing eggs all this time.”

  “Not the old industrial farms,” conceded Melanie. “They had artificial lighting, heating and supplements to make sure the production stayed up. But in nature, yes, they slow all the way down. I’m going to try using those light stones to see if it helps, but it’s all still untested. I don’t want to stress them unnecessarily either.”

  “Any eggs would be good,” said Seb. “You must all be looking forward to it.”

  Beth nodded along with them, but in honesty, she doubted it would matter to her. The fruit trees she had traded her chicks for had yet to even be planted. Beth had nothing of value to trade. She might have an excess of eggplants and courgettes, but so did everyone else. Sometimes the thought was enough for her to regret the trade, but she knew that wasn’t reasonable. If she had tried to raise her chickens herself, they would have died, like so many others had died in the hands of inexperienced carers. Or turned out to be cockerels, knowing her luck. Or been cockerels and still died too young to be turned into soup.

  “We are, yes,” said Melanie.

  “No plans to hatch more this year either, I take it, if it’s too close to winter,” said Seb, completely failing to hide his own interest in the matter.

  Although where Seb hoped to keep any chickens if he had any was quite beyond Beth. Unless he intended to have one on his balcony as an apartment pet.

  “That,” said Melanie with a sigh, “and I need a bit more time to see what we have before deciding what will be worth breeding. These are barnyard mixes, so they can have a whole range of health, temperament and laying characteristics.”

  “Really? They’re what were provided by the committee? Why?”

  “Because the previous generation was a very valuable commercial hybrid. They interbred just the right combination to get the optimum egg layers, mild mannered, and which clearly show gender at birth. But, you see, the catch was that you had to buy new chicks from them, every year. Chicks that used to be bought from the mainland. They don’t breed true. They breed into this random assortment.”

  “That sounds… bad?”

  “Not that bad,” admitted Melanie. “Some might even be better, for our purposes. Not so many eggs, but more willing to brood, for example. But yeah, they wouldn’t have been my first choice. But it is what they had available to them.”

  “Yet another way our past has managed to screw over our present, completely unintentionally.”

  They had an unofficial moment’s silence for that unfortunate truth.

  Seb clapped his hands to remove the dust, and they retreated out again. “So, this is the cage I’ll be protecting, then?”

  “No, actually,” said Melanie. “I’m already happy with the run. If I could get priority on more mesh to make it bigger, I probably wouldn’t need to ask for your help at all.”

  “What were you thinking, then?” asked Seb.

  “I’m hoping that I can set up a wooden frame around the whole perimeter of the allotment. Beth said that it didn’t need to be a solid object, right?”

  “Right,” agreed Seb. “Just a continuous structure is fine.”

  “I let them out whenever I’m here, you see, but I have a day-job. It would be amazing to extend that and give them a few more hours. Even if it is only a few times a week.”

  Beth looked around the allotment and wondered if Melanie intended all the remaining greens to simply become chicken feed. She supposed they’d already harvested the most valuable crops.

  “I would have thought there were enough people around to keep away any stray cats or dogs during the day already.”

  “Oh probably,” said Melanie. “They’re not what I’m worried about. I’m worried about birds. Hawks and eagles and maybe even seagulls.”

  “We haven’t tested the repel against birds yet,” said Seb.

  They hadn’t really tested it very thoroughly against animals either, Beth thought, but there was no reason to point that out.

  “How do we test it?” asked Beth. “I imagine they don’t attack when you’re around.”

  “I have to keep an eye out to chase them away,” said Melanie, “But no, I don’t intend to just stand out here and see if they try for the chickens. I figure we can put out some fish guts under one of the old cold frames. It won’t take long at all for birds to try for it.”

  Procuring the fish guts did take a little while, but Melanie was correct. They’d barely put it in place when a seagull began hovering. After a minute it seemed to give up, only to wheel back and swoop directly for the fish. Beth wondered if momentum alone would carry the bird past the frame. But with a truly outraged amount of feather flapping, the seagull aborted the dive. It tried again from a different angle to the same result. Then a second and third seagull gave their own best tries. The raucous indignation had the humans pressing their hands to their ears, but at length the seagulls gave up and flew on.

  “It works,” said Sebastian.

  “It probably works,” cautioned Melanie. “Raptors are smarter than gulls. If it’s just an uncomfortable feeling without any danger, they’ll start working to overcome it. But for now… yes. It works.”

  “Will it bother the chickens?” asked Beth.

  “Excellent point,” said Melanie. “If we only cast on the top of the frame, and have that at two meters, will that be far enough away?”

  “It might not upset them at all,” said Seb. “We have reason to believe that intentions play a factor.”

  “It would be easy to find out,” said Beth.

  Melanie was not enthusiastic about the experiments Beth had in mind, not wanting to upset the chickens. Chickens, it seemed, had far more fragile mental health than Beth had realised. But some tests made sense, and it was enough to create an outline of what the skill did. The repel didn’t do anything to the chickens if they were likewise uninterested. They could scratch themselves on the fence without any reaction. It seemed mildly uncomfortable for them if they wanted to escape, such as when there was something tasty to eat on the other side. And then there were the seagull attacks that had shown the biggest results. Intentions did matter. Beth was still plotting on how to test the effect on humans, but that could wait for later.

  After they had confirmed Seb’s skill worked perfectly for Melanie’s purposes, they negotiated the trade of him coming in regularly to top up the repel in exchange for future omelettes and fried eggs. Beth wondered if she was being greedy in hoping for a little commission for herself. In the end, she didn’t suggest it, but she hoped it would occur naturally if she was around at the same time as Seb.

  While they were waiting for the chickens to start laying, the smuggling operations were showing good results. Winter clothing, bedding, and other essentials were entering the black market at rates high enough to provide for everyone who needed them. Mostly. Beth was more likely to run out of things to collect than run out of room in the inner space that was now over two meters cubed. There was a loss, of course, between the supps Beth was able to donate anonymously, and the prices being charged by the black market, but it wasn’t anything as bad as Beth had feared.

  Beth was relieved that she was not the person managing the distribution, because she’d had no idea that it would require so much finesse.

  “We’re keeping back some winter items and not selling them immediately… to keep the price low?” asked Beth.

  “To keep the supply constant,” corrected the reseller. “The redirected government supplies have already started to hit the market. That’s what’s driving the bulk of the price drop right now. Which is excellent. That’s exactly what we want. But it’s not what the other sellers want. We need to discourage them from hoarding their products in the hopes that the prices will rise again.”

  “By selling more of our own products when they start pulling back with theirs,” said Beth, thinking her way through it.

  “Exactly. Our hope is to keep the prices low enough for long enough that we can convince them not to risk waiting.”

  “If they wait too long,” said Beth, “then everyone might have already bought what they need for the year and prices might slip even further.”

  Unauthorized usage: this narrative is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.

  “Not many people will want to risk being left with completely unsold goods,” agreed the reseller.

  “And we have enough reserves for this to work?”

  “That’s the question we’ll be finding out soon. We don’t want to keep back too much, either, otherwise we’re the ones keeping the prices high. And some people are just spiteful. It won’t matter what we do, with them. They’ll play to win the game of chicken even if it ruins their own position. We just have to hope they’re more sensible than that.”

  “What if they’re just willing to… not sell?” asked Beth. “I mean, not sell this year. I doubt that the whole skill-situation will have improved so much that there won’t even be a market for second hand goods next year. There are plenty of unused warehouses at the port, aren’t there?”

  “There are, but anything short of a skill storage still risks getting damaged or stolen. And frankly, the kind of person selling government relief under the table isn’t going to risk leaving that kind of evidence lying around. It’s not impossible, but it’s not likely. We’ve got a good chance with this.”

  Beth wished them luck and made arrangements for the next drop off. The corruption, and knowing she might be able to do something about it, still crawled on Beth’s nerves, but the goods were getting to people. While things were still going reasonably well, it was enough of an excuse to continue not making the decision.

  The time ticked down to three days prior to the autumn equinox, but Beth still managed to lose track of the exact moment. Beth was at the Square-by-the-Wall with Gwen when the second auction was announced. It turned out to be a beautiful accident. It would have been a shame to have been alone for that moment.

  When the three bongs sounded, everyone slowed to a stop, collectively holding their breath as they waited for the announcement window.

  Skill Auction

  The pulse of noise and joy was otherworldly. In that instant, she was no longer isolated within her mind, trapped by her own thoughts and concerns. The edges between herself and everyone else blurred. She was one with the crowd, and the crowd was one with her. Cheering, laughing, crying. Everyone would be getting another chance to get skills, and a new hope for the future.

  A separate little bubble of noise rippled out to them. A girl just short of eighteen had been given seven hundred and twenty points. She’d be able to participate like this was the first auction.

  Beth felt tears pricking at her eyes in relief. She hadn’t sabotaged the twins by suggesting they consume their points as supps. The rest of the orphans in George’s class who had had no choice but to use them weren’t condemned into second class status before they were old enough to know any different. They’d have their chances to buy skills. Beth didn’t like to feel gratitude to the aliens, but in that moment, she did. At least this much, they had given.

  She wiped her eyes clear. Along with everyone else, Beth brought up the list to see what would be available to purchase.

  When the jubilation and shock ebbed enough to be heard, she asked Gwen, “Is the mixture of skills available different from last time?”

  Beth didn’t have all the 144 previous skills memorised, of course, but some were more familiar than others. And some of them were very unfamiliar.

  “I think you’re right,” said Gwen. “Is there something you missed from last auction that you won’t be able to get?”

  “Anything I missed I still won’t be able to get,” said Beth with a laugh. “The military is going to be able to outbid everyone.”

  “Ouch,” said Gwen. “I hadn’t thought of that. I hope not literally everything. Surely they’d let us take some of the quality-of-life or artisan skills.”

  “They only have so many level points to assign,” said Beth, thoughtfully. “They wouldn’t just buy skills they can’t do anything with anyway.”

  After a moment’s consideration, Gwen snorted. She was right. They absolutely would.

  “A second auction implies a third and a fourth auction,” said Beth. “If the kids are being given their points as they come of age, then that even implies a twenty-third and twenty-fourth auction. No-one needs to get everything immediately.”

  “What the aliens give, the aliens can take away. If I was stupidly rich, I wouldn’t take a chance on it. Would you?”

  “No,” conceded Beth.

  Later, Beth went over the options with the military list in hand, but now with more of an eye to avoiding anything the military thought was valuable. She came up with suggestions to pass along to her fellow scavengers and fellow refugees. Skills that would be useful, but not so useful as to be expensive. One element the military list had was an estimation of how many of each skills had sold in the first auction, which helped with the guesswork. While there was no guarantee that this second auction would be identical, it did seem more likely than not that it would be similar.

  The additional knowledge could only do so much. Even discounting the military, everyone had a better idea of the good skills, and the costs would reflect that. It might even be the military skills themselves that were cheaper, since the people with unlimited access to tokens would already have them.

  So, while Beth was tempted by the longevity skill – very tempted – she had a strong suspicion that all her points together, official and secret, all five hundred odd, would not be close to enough. It hadn’t even been that cheap in the previous auction, rumour had it, even with the paltry effect of delaying old age by twelve hours per level. It was a skill that would be attractive to the very people who could outbid her. There were entire army bases of people richer than her, after all. She could not tie up her points on such a long shot.

  On the other hand, she’d picked all the obvious long-shot options in the previous auction, and she only had some two hundred points she could explain. She decided she’d use all of it on a skill that allowed for the short-range teleport of items either to or from her hand. She’d claim it as a quality-of-life improvement to speed up scavenging, but her real hope was to use it in combination with her space. If she could deliver things into the space without obviously touching them and vice versa, then it would be much easier to hide her smuggling.

  Finally, she’d use a hundred points in five-point increments on all the skills so useless that no registration was even required. Beth paged to the very end of the military report, to the lowest ranked skills of all and went wild. She could always just wait for one of those later auctions. She didn’t need to go broke immediately. She still had two skills from the first auction she hadn’t even begun to level up. It would be a waste of her accelerator skill if she didn’t have anywhere to assign levels, but she was hardly at that point yet.

  Almost at the very end of the list was a skill that gave her pause. A skill that hid another skill. The military guess was that it was an enhancer for existing stealth skills, but it had shown so little effect that they’d condemned it entirely. It might be because they’d misinterpreted it. Perhaps it didn’t make the stealth skill better at being stealthy. Perhaps it directed attention away from skill usage and made it look natural. It could be the perfect way to conceal the fact that she was using her inner space skill. It was worth the attempt. Beth put fifty points against it.

  The three days wait until the auction ended was filled with suggestions, counter suggestions, and conspiracy theories.

  “Anyone who wins the good military skills will get conscripted.”

  “Some of the skills turn you into a zombie, and they’re covering it up.”

  “Other districts have better auction options.”

  “Anyone who bids on the military skills will get arrested!”

  “There’s a special reward for reporting anyone who plans to bid on a skill that needs to be registered.”

  “Anyone who wins the longevity skill will get murdered, because that will get the skill returned back to the pool.”

  “The longevity skill went for thousands in the first auction and will be even higher this time.”

  “The accelerator skill went for thousands and will be more expensive now.”

  “There’s a new skill that allows points to be transferred, and they’re going to use that in place of other punishments in future.”

  Some of the rumours were more likely than others. Pines did have a well-established method to rat out people for skills they hadn’t registered, so it wasn’t unreasonable for them to be a bit proactive with it. It was a good warning not to be too vocal about choices. Beth knew personally that the accelerator skill hadn’t been thousands. It hadn’t even been a full thousand. But still, an amount firmly out of the reach of anyone without access to zombie tokens. Beth wondered if the price had been inflated as part of a campaign to discourage people from bidding on it, then wondered if she was coming up with just as many conspiracy theories as everyone else. It was possible that some of the rumours might be planted, but rumours sprung up by themselves equally well without assistance.

  The countdown was much quieter than the announcement, and Beth was safely alone to see what she had won. Altogether, she was pleased. She had won the short-range teleport for one-eighty, proving that some prices had indeed come down. Of the long shots, she had only picked up some skill that seemed to freshen air, which she had some optimistic hope would prove to be valuable when used with her inner space. Lastly, she won the stealth skill at thirty-two. It was instantly maxed out before even the first level.

  She hesitantly applied ‘Illusion’s Reach’ to ‘Wandering Fragments’, the inner space skill, checking first that it was not an irrevocable choice.

  False Walls.

  The same suffix as The Book. Beth already had strong suspicions that “Frozen Moments” had meant that she had been gifted a snapshot of the skill, even as that raised more questions than it answered. Whoever the mysterious benefactor was, however, they had thought it necessary to add False Walls to it.

  A quick experiment with Gwen showed that it did nothing to conceal the use of the skill, not that Beth had expected differently anymore. No, now her suspicions were far more sinister. That False Walls was there to conceal the very existence of the skill. And that had the implication that a skill existed that revealed other people’s skills. One of the ones that would be released in the future. One that might have already been released in another district. One that was already present under a misleading name.

  Which meant she could not waste it on her inner space skill. Despite the implication that her skill would soon be revealed. Despite the fact that it was no longer safe to just keep quiet and hope. The False Walls only applied to one skill at a time. It wasn’t a complicated puzzle. There was only one answer. She had to use it on the acceleration skill.

  She needed to register.

  It wasn’t the first time she’d had that thought, although without the current urgency. She’d investigated, as carefully as she could, how they tested the space. She would have been unsuccessful if it was only done at registration, but they were the same tests as those done every time a person with an inner space left or returned to the pier. Plenty of opportunity to observe and discuss.

  The space holder first removed everything from their space. They were given a wooden block that would completely fill their registered size. The tester, who had a tethering skill, would apply that to a very small object. The test taker was instructed to attempt to store it. If the person had undeclared space, and tried to move it in, it would disappear and break the tether. If they didn’t try to move it at all, the tether would remain. Only if they tried, and there was no space available, would the tether break but leave the item remaining. It was rather ingenious, actually.

  Beth hadn’t even had to bring up the matter for discussion herself. The group had inevitably debated methods of fooling the test. One suggestion was creating an outer wooden box that could accept the inner wooden box inside it. That was swiftly shouted down, because of the rather obvious flaw of not allowing anyone to smuggle anything either. Someone had proposed then that the outer frame be empty and then filled with water just prior to check, something that would have been difficult but not impossible after the stage three improvement. But there was another, equally obvious flaw. Someone might hire a carpenter to mock up a single outer frame. If they paid enough or were very lucky, that might not be reported. But a new box every time she levelled, or every time she claimed she levelled? There was no way something like that would go unnoticed. Maybe something clever could still be done with water – but the calculations and the risks involved were daunting.

  But there was a potential ray of hope in the stage four upgrade she was within hours of reaching. She had previously prayed it wouldn’t be the rumoured useless space partitioning skill. Now she was praying that it was. Beth exercised her skin shield over and over, until finally the level upgrade. It wasn’t entirely relief when the upgrade proved itself to be exactly that, but it was close.

  She focused on the individual steps before allowing herself to explore her emotions. The partitioning was irrevocable, and not anything she could afford to get wrong. She ran the maths three times, and then a fourth when one of her results contained an error. Then she made the splits.

  Firstly, the dummy. The exact shape and size of a stage two cube, 1.333m on each side. Since she was currently at exactly stage four, it would increase size at precisely half the speed as the space it was mimicking. She would have to go through every check on an even skill level. A risk, but one she could put procedures in place to ensure.

  Secondly, her smuggling space. It would be the same volume as the dummy, but with one side a third the length of the other two. Having a flatter but wider space would be more immediately useful until she could level it back up to a decent volume.

  Lastly, the hope for the future, containing the remaining three-quarters of the space. She’d use it for smuggling as well in the beginning, of course, but this was the one she had hopes would eventually become the space of her dreams. It maximised the area at expense of the height. Even more squashed than the smuggling space, the height would be a mere eighth of the other two sides. Far too small to be useful immediately, but one day – one day, the height would become more than could be needed while the area would prove its value.

  The next step was to check whether the partitioning was even enough to fool the test. Basic attempts to move an object into one area or another took only a little concentration. Forcing an object to one full area while others were empty took considerably more. Difficult, but possible. Something that Beth could practice, and she intended to practice.

  The last step was to apply to register as soon as would be reasonable after the auction, but with enough time until the actual appointment for her skill the reasonably have reached stage two. Beth had no idea what testing they did to make sure a stage one user was genuinely a stage one user, but she wasn’t keen on finding out, either. She could dither a little, but if she pushed it too far, she might as well not have bothered with the pretence at all. That step, ironically, involved very determinedly not paying any bribes. She ignored suggestion after suggestion, some with no more than token requests as she refused to pick up on hints, while her application mysteriously fell to the bottom of the pile over and over again.

  Beth and the clerk responsible both ran out of excuses on a date just over five weeks after the auction. She’d spend that time pretending to level up her inner space alone, ignoring her other skills, while actually dumping all her levels elsewhere. It would still imply faster progress than normal, but not impossibly fast progress. She’d just have to pretend more diligence in levelling this up than she had previously.

  Deep breaths. She’d be legal soon. Well, mostly legal.