By the time Beth was scheduled for her next salvage run, they had, indeed, changed the process. The military would clear the area of infected entirely – collecting the tokens themselves – and the scavengers would only be allowed in afterwards.

  When scheduled together, Beth worked with Helen and Seb. Even when it ended up just being any two of them, they still felt secure enough keeping to themselves. It wasn’t even Beth or Seb who had the main duty of keeping them safe. Helen had taken the detect infected skill – Painful Discord. As long as they checked regularly, and didn’t carelessly open any closed doors, they didn’t face any danger.

  While they settled into the routine, Beth hit stage increases one after the other. The first was acceleration hitting stage 3. It maxed out. It was only to be expected. The skills that started strong didn’t have anywhere to go. The final result was levelling twice as quickly when using active skills. Well, and one and half times for passive skills, not that that had much effect. Beth had wanted more, of course. She would always have wanted more. But it was already a powerful advantage that would just become more and more powerful the longer she lived. Within the same week, the skin shield reached stage 2 and started protecting from bludgeoning as well as slashing. Then knockback, offering a small measure of stun.

  Having one fewer skill to level up gave her the opportunity to start on the dimensional space skill. She could level that up almost every day, in addition to the every-other-day she was still giving to the defensive skills alternatively. It wouldn’t take long before it became useful. She did consider speeding up levelling of her defensive skills, but she had as much as she needed for safety, really. And she had to report her proficiency in both, so it wouldn’t be sensible to change her existing pace without any explanation. She had strong, good reasons that had nothing to do with getting the dimensional space accessible as fast as possible.

  On the next trip out, it was with just Helen and her. They were subjected instead to an overenthusiastic fellow scavenger, Boastful, who was regaling them with the story about how he had found an infected and sold the location to a less scrupulous military member.

  There weren’t any military members on the same boat anymore, and it didn’t seem like the crew was listening, but one never knew. Beth made sure she looked like she wasn’t listening either. She stared out over the shore. Sea-life was beginning to reclaim some of the coast, and a splash suggested something large hunting in the shallows. That wasn’t what Beth was looking for. The sound of the boat brought the infected to the windows of the uncleared houses. Not outside, not in the day. But still visible. Beth found herself scanning their distorted faces. Was that the owner of the bakery where she had bought her last ever chocolate dipped meringue? Was that the girl who’d walked a dog bigger than her along the coast every morning? Would they have lived instead of her if they’d been given The Book?

  The rest of the team was more vocal in their opposition to Boastful.

  Cynic asked, “Do you think the military has really been as careless about clearing infected as that? Are you saying we’re all actually still in danger?”

  “They are working under a deadline,” said Boastful. “They’re human, and humans make mistakes. And some of those are ‘mistakes’, if you know what I mean.”

  “You’re full of it.”

  “I am not!” he protested. “You’re all just jealous.”

  “Sure, jealous of your imaginary near-death experience.”

  Everyone laughed, and Boastful subsided into mutinous silence for the short remainder of the trip. Beth continued to pretend complete disinterest until the moment she and Helen were alone.

  “Do you think he was telling the truth?” Beth asked.

  Helen did not need any further context. “It seems almost too stupid of him to tell everyone about it. If it was true, I’d think he’d keep it to himself.”

  “Good point.”

  It was. And Beth should leave it at that. She didn’t need this. If Helen was genuinely tempted, she would have showed more enthusiasm.

  “But—” said Beth instead, before trailing off meaningfully.

  “Yeah,” agreed Helen.

  “No,” said Beth. “Low risk isn’t no risk. It’s hardly sensible to actively go looking for infected.”

  “It isn’t.”

  “And it’s not like we’d get the full two hundred ceeps just for reporting a location, anyway. We might not even get half.”

  “Maybe less.”

  “And where would one even find this corrupt military person? We could hardly go asking everyone we met.”

  “Exactly.”

  “We already have excellent paying jobs,” said Beth. “We should be perfectly happy with what we already have.”

  “We should.”

  “And it’s not like the money would even go to us personally. I’m getting it for family, and you’re getting it for your boyfriend. They should be figuring it out themselves.”

  That got her silence. She had pushed a little too far. Time for a distraction.

  Beth asked, “What does your boyfriend do, anyway?”

  “Anthony? He’s a doctoral student, with Pines.”

  “He is a student?” checked Beth. “As in, present tense? I didn’t know they were operational in any capacity.”

  “Not officially,” agreed Helen. “But they do what they can. Whatever they can fit around the power restrictions.”

  “That’s very dedicated of them,” said Beth. A more honest that’s absolutely delusional of them probably wasn’t appropriate. There was denial of the impact of the infected and the skills, and there was that.

  Helen said much more quietly, “It’s hard on him. He was always proud of his academic excellence. Top of his class, gifted child programs, academic scholarships, and so on. He got invited to Pines, you know? He didn’t even have to apply. One of the professors liked his work and wanted him to finish it here. He had this whole roadmap where he’d get his Nobel Prize before he turned forty.”

  “That does sound painful,” said Beth, feeling somewhat ashamed of her lack of empathy.

  Pain wasn’t a competition. She knew full well that These Trying Times wasn’t just about literal death. Loss of self was also a tragedy. People deserved the time to grieve that as well. It didn’t sound a particularly healthy way to cope, but it wasn’t hurting anyone. Well, perhaps except for Helen.

  Beth asked, “What was—is— his field?”

  “Matroid topology,” replied Helen. “He thinks it can be used to describe skill usage.”

  Oh. Okay, maybe that did make a little more sense, then. Maybe. She didn’t actually recognise either of those words.

  “He doesn’t need the extra money,” said Helen. “They can get volunteers to measure. It just slows him down a bit not to be able to pay for it.”

  “I’m sure,” said Beth.

  “But—” said Helen, trailing off herself.

  “Yeah,” agreed Beth.

  “We wouldn’t actually be facing the zombies,” said Helen. “We’d just be… finding closed doors. And then using my skill.”

  “I guess that is what we’re supposed to be doing anyway. Keeping an eye out for uncleared areas. Keeping ourselves safe.”

  “And if we did happen to find a zombie, we don’t need to find the military. There’s plenty of people with enough skills to kill one.”

  “There are,” agreed Beth. “Half the scavenging team could probably manage it.”

  “We might not be able to find any, but it doesn’t do any harm to look. If we do happen to find one, we’d have lots of options.”

  “We would.”

  They didn’t make eye contact, letting that hang between them in silence for a moment.

  “Any ideas of where to look?” asked Helen.

  “Yes,” said Beth.

  Beth’s first idea called right back to that very first day scavenging. While Beth had been throwing her guts up, she had spotted a garden shed at the back of the neighbour’s garden. She hadn’t consciously appreciated what was out of place at the time, but there had been the remnants of a worn path to it from the house, straight over the wall. Despite having everything, the preppers had apparently still been trespassing into their absent neighbours. Later, Beth had wondered if perhaps they had attempted to set up their own little quarantine area, only for it to be ineffective.

  This would be the chance to find out.

  They hurried through their normal scavenging and walked the few minutes back to that neighbourhood. They approached cautiously from the abandoned house side, not wanting to have to climb over the wall. It took a little investigation to find the shed which was hidden behind head-high bushes and weeds. That path Beth had noticed had long been lost to plant growth, but the door was sealed with a suspiciously new lock.

  They edged carefully forward until Helen was at the outer reaches of her range.

  “Yes,” confirmed Helen. “There is definitely a zombie trapped in it.”

  Beth gave a subdued whoop, and they grinned at each other.

  “One more?”

  “Let’s do it.”

  The next was another small building that Beth had noticed from the boat, one that likewise did not look visible from the roads or main houses. They turned the corner to sudden commotion and the decaying-paper smell of dead infected. Beth’s heartrate spiked until she was reassured that only a military team and another member of the scavenging team were still standing. Cynic, it seemed, hadn’t been so cynical after all. He’d gone looking for an infected and then had been forced to use his emergency signal. Beth had a moment of superior amusement before recalling that she had come there on the same errand.

  One military member dealt with Cynic, when the other stalked up to them.

  “What are you doing here?” asked Scary.

  Beth was conscious of being nowhere near the location they had been assigned for them to scavenge. She mentally considered the map and latched onto a possibility.

  “We wanted to come down to the river for lunch,” she said. “There’s a lovely little park that’s still pretty intact down this way.”

  “In a zombie infested area?” asked Scary.

  “This area has been fully cleared,” complained Beth with an arm sweep. “Or at least, we were told it was cleared. I’m sure we did. We didn’t get lost, did we, Helen?”

  “No,” said Helen, following her lead. “Or at least, I don’t think we did. I mean, people were sent to scavenge here. We thought it would be safe. What happened?”

  “You’re perfectly safe if you abide by the guidelines,” he said. “Not if you deliberately go looking for trapped zombies.”

  “There was an infected here?” asked Beth, sounding deliberately breathless. “How was there an infected? Aren’t all these streets supposed to be cleared by taunts?”

  “Never you mind.”

  Beth looked over at the little building and realised that one of the windows had long-since been broken. The infected could have remained trapped if the taunt had pulled it in any other direction but still found itself unexpectedly free if someone walked up that side.

  “That’s terrifying,” said Beth. “You mean if we’d taken our break just ten minutes earlier…”

  “You’d get what was coming to you for treating a dangerous area like a tourist attraction. Next time, just eat at the boat. In fact, I think you should return to the boat and stay there for the rest of the day.”

  “Of course,” said Beth.

  “Yes, sir,” echoed Helen.

  The military team corralled Cynic and walked them all to the boat. It was fine. They hadn’t been caught. They hadn’t encountered any danger. As she walked, Beth mentally toggled The Book for reassurance that this was so incidental it hadn’t even rated a mention. But when she flipped through, she was confronted by an update. Sometime after she had left home, The Book had added a line:

  Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation.

  Beth knew that The Book wasn’t perfect. From the skill level description, it only promised to be 85% accurate. Beth had no idea how it was calculating that, but it didn’t seem unreasonable that this kind of coin-flip outcome was exactly the type of place it was most likely to be wrong. They could have come a little earlier, moved a little faster, looked for this infected first. The military team could have taken a little longer and failed to kill the infected. Or the garden shed with the infected could have had no lock, and The Book could have had a line:

  She would never have known, because she hadn’t checked for updates. The best tool in the world was completely useless if one didn’t use it.

  They were kept on the boat until departure, sweating miserably in mid-day sun on the damp salty plastic benches. When they finally got off the boat back at Pines, they were confronted by an officious looking Sulky with a clipboard.

  “Elizabeth with me,” he said. “Andrew, Helen, in the truck.”

  “What? Why?”

  “I’m afraid,” he said, not sounding afraid at all, “that you will have to spend the night in quarantine.”

  “We were nowhere near the infected,” said Beth. “We didn’t even arrive until it was already dead. The military can verify that.”

  “Any uncontrolled exposure to zombies requires quarantine. You should know that. Or do you believe that some mild inconvenience on your behalf is too much to ask for in order to guarantee the safety of the entire island of Pines?”

  “No, of course not, but—”

  “You are extremely fortunate that quarantine is only overnight. You never know, perhaps the military healer will have more urgent tasks and be unable to assess you for some days. It would be a great pity if that were to happen. Helen?”

  Beth did not believe that this civilian had any power over the military healer. But she wasn’t willing to risk him being able to mess with the paperwork somehow to achieve the same goal. Helen must have felt similarly, because she reluctantly got into the truck. Helen craned her head to try to keep an eye on Beth, but Sulky moved them away until they were out of sight.

  He said, “You know, if you were a little accommodating, then perhaps people would be willing to make exceptions.”

  Beth abruptly wanted extra layers of clothing. Her stomach churned. He couldn’t possibly be meaning what it sounded like he meant. She didn’t feel unsafe, precisely, not as close as they still were to the rest of the team. But she did wish she was not out of sight. Sulky stared at her, but when she failed to answer, he frowned.

  “Pity you seem to keep your favour for members of the civil service. It would be so much more to your advantage to branch out.”

  Was he seriously implying that she was sleeping with Theo? She hadn’t even met Theo until after she had been hired. Sulky didn’t know anything about her. She didn’t know anything about Sulky! She wanted to punch his nose in, but that wouldn’t help even if she could manage it. Unfortunately, she couldn’t see any other course but to pretend naivety.

  Beth said, “I try to treat everyone with courtesy.”

  “I’m sure,” he said with heavy sarcasm. He continued in a harder tone of voice, “We need to talk about your little stunt. I’m sure that you’re aware that anyone who intentionally places themselves in danger will be removed from the roster.”

  “I would never do anything to endanger myself,” said Beth. “Who would be insane enough to do that?”

  “I don’t know,” he said looking her up and down. “Why don’t you tell me?”

  Beth didn’t reply. She could think of nothing she could say that would help. Sulky let her stand there, in silence, for long enough that even he was showing signs of discomfort.

  “I will be watching you,” he said at last. “If I see any suggestion of you selling zombie locations, I will report you before you can find a bed. Believe me.”

  He swaggered back to the truck and gave Beth a completely unnecessary shove to get her inside. Helen reached for her with a concerned look on her face.

  “I’m fine,” Beth reassured Helen quietly. “He didn’t do anything.”

  He’d just said things. Sticks and stones. Helen extended an arm invitingly, and Beth willingly settled into her side. Beth wasn’t going to cry. She was stronger than that.

  They were driven only a short distance. When they were bundled out again, it was directly into a building. They were led through to what might have once been a canteen – long benches on either side of tables, with a barred door on both sides. Contrary to Beth’s expectation, they weren’t the only ones there.

  “Why are this many people in quarantine?”

  “They aren’t,” said Helen. “This isn’t quarantine. Or at least, this isn’t just quarantine. It’s general lockup.”

  “You’re kidding,” said Beth.

  “No one is infectious this early on. We aren’t a danger to anyone.”

  By that logic, they didn’t need the quarantine at all. They could have just been ordered to return the next day for a check. But that would mean treating them with trust and respect.

  “That wasn’t the bit I was worried about, and you know it,” complained Beth under her breath.

  “Relax,” said Helen. “They don’t put actual criminals in here. No one who has been charged with anything. We’re perfectly safe.”

  “I’m holding you to that.”

  Beth and Helen found an open spot and sat down. Supper was almost immediately served. Well, more accurately, supper wasn’t served. They just pushed a tray of metal cups through the door. Someone, promptly dubbed Helpful, was obliging enough to pass them around.

  “What’s this?” asked Whiny.

  “Hot water,” said Helpful. “I realise that it might be difficult to recognise for some types of people, given how rarely—”

  “What are we supposed to eat?” Whiny interrupted.

  “Supps,” said Helpful. “Our glorious and benevolent overlords are not quite so glorious and benevolent as to spend actual expensive real food on us reprobates.”

  “I’m not eating slops! This is a human rights violation.”

  That was met with hollering and jeering. Cynic rolled his eyes. “Sure, whatever. Shut up and eat. Or shut up and don’t eat. It’s not like it’s going to kill you either way.”

  “It might,” said Whiny. “I’ve heard that people that only eat slops start going weird. Turn into some zombie-like mindless shells of their own.”

  “For crying in the world’s tiniest bucket,” said Cynic. “Do not come here with those children’s horror stories. I don’t care what you’re in here for, but I have no intention of getting unregistered myself. Shut up.”

  Whiny shrunk back and picked up his mug reluctantly. He continued complaining to his companion, but at least it was not loud enough to disturb everyone else.

  Beth traded in a point for the two dozen supp kernels, stirring two into her mug and giving a further two to Helen. Then she just threw back her head and chugged. Helen drank hers more slowly but with even more distaste. Prior to the food supplements, Beth had mistakenly thought that water was tasteless. They had certainly enlightened her as to the difference. Someone had said that pure distilled water came closer, but even that had a flavour in comparison.

  Once they were done, she followed the lead of some of the others and returned the mug to the tray.

  “Come, join us,” called Helpful to her as she passed. “Our humble little game would be greatly improved by the presence of another two players.”

  Poker. Great. Beth made eye contact with Helen, and after a shrug, they approached and joined the little group.

  “Sorry,” asked the only other female player as they sat down. “But are you Beth? Beth Griffiths?”

  “Yes. How—” Beth blinked, frowning for a few moments, before she finally placed the speaker. “Denise? What are you doing here?”

  “Here in lockup? Or here at Pines?”

  “Either! Both!”

  “We’re on Pines because I ended up spending the winter vacation here, and then just got stranded. And you?”

  Denise had said that she’d be going to Pines after her gap year. Beth had forgotten.

  “My brother transferred here for his post-grad,” explained Beth without going into the details. “We were on holiday when the lockdowns happened.”

  “And what are you two accused of?” asked Helpful.

  Beth had thought that Denise had dodged that half of the question because it was some sort of taboo. Clearly not.

  “Quarantine,” replied Helen.

  Everyone groaned, and Beth looked at them in confusion.

  “We had a bet about it, you see,” said Denise. “No one guessed quarantine. We should have. In retrospect, it was pretty obvious.”

  Did Beth even want to know what they had bet on?

  Helen asked, “What are you accused of?”

  “A most scurrilous and unfounded allegation of gambling,” replied Helpful.

  Beth looked at the hand she’d just been dealt.

  “False, of course,” said Helpful. “We would never dream of gambling. These are just friendly games of chance.”

  “I see,” said Beth dryly.

  They weren’t playing for money now, that was true. Nothing illegal in what they were doing. It could be that had been true before they were picked up as well. In theory.

  Denise turned excitedly to Beth. “Tell me all about what you’ve been up to.”

  Beth was extremely vague before turning the question back on Denise. Denise was happy to relate everything she’d done in the almost two years since they’d last seen each other. She was even more happy to side-track into gossip about all their mutual acquaintances. There was a subtle melancholy for every person they spoke of whose life-or-death status was unknown, but they did their best to keep it light-hearted.

  Beth had no corresponding interesting stories to tell of her gap year. She’d spent hers doing chores and part-time jobs. She definitely had no stories to tell of her university experience, since her single gap year had spread into two. It had just been a temporary thing. Until the twins were a little older, and Sophie didn’t need as much help. From the topics Denise started avoiding, Beth got the impression she thought that Beth’s family had been too poor to let her go to university. Beth wasn’t willing to explore how valid that assumption was.

  After a little time, Helpful became impatient with their preoccupation and demanded they rejoin the wider conversation. Beth glanced apologetically at Helen for ignoring her, but Helen waved it off.

  “I have a friend on the scavenging team,” announced the last member of the group, Drunk-and-Disorderly. “He’s making a collection of lawn flamingos. Brings a new one back every time.”

  “No, he isn’t,” said Denise with an eyeroll.

  “He is, I swear it.”

  “Nothing decorative is on the list of valid salvage items,” said Helen. “While I’m not saying smuggling never happens, he could not have brought back a flamingo on the salvage boat. They would have noticed a flamingo.”

  “They wouldn’t if he had that magic-space skill,” he said. “Didn’t think about that, did you?”

  “They’re even stricter about checking the space skill users,” replied Helen. “And you couldn’t fit a whole-ass flamingo into that space anyway.”

  “You could!”

  Drunk-and-Disorderly was technically right about the space. Beth had been keeping tabs. People who’d levelled dimensional space all the way to stage three were looking at cubes of more than 1.3m on each side. A flamingo would indeed fit. But someone who was levelling only that and nothing else couldn’t then lie about it. If they claimed themselves to be completely skill-less, they wouldn’t qualify for the scavenging team at all.

  “Believe me, they’re absurdly strict,” said Helen. “Like requiring us to sit in quarantine just because we came within ten meters of an infected, even though that infected was already dead. They’d notice a flamingo.”

  “Why not just… lie about the infected?” asked Denise. “If you know you’re clear?”

  “Yeah, no,” said Helen. “You don’t want to do that.”

  “Yeah, not after what happened to Keith,” said Drunk-and-Disorderly.

  “Is Keith the flamingo guy?” asked Beth, trying to remember if she’d ever encountered a Keith on any of the scavenging runs.

  “What happened to Keith?” asked Denise.

  “He got a scratch from a box, you see? Never even saw any zombies, not even ten meters away, but he’d drawn blood. So he knew he couldn’t have been infected, but the letter of the law would make him sit through quarantine anyway. And … drumroll, he has a healing ability. So, he figures he’ll just heal it himself. No harm, no foul. Turns out they have some sort of healing skill user that’s been scanning everyone as they get off the pier, and they can pick that up. He was ‘disappeared’ off into the military. No one has seen him since.”

  “That’s bullshit,” said Denise. “I saw Keith three days ago.”

  “That,” said Drunk-and-Disorderly earnestly, “Is a different Keith.”

  “Yeah, maybe the military cloned him and replaced him with a copy. Who knows, maybe that’s the eighth stage of Frozen Moments.”

  “Frozen Moments?” asked Beth, her attention immediately caught.

  “Ah,” said Denise. “Yeah, inside joke, sorry. It’s a journalling skill that’s so completely useless, it’s unreal. All it does is document your experiences like it was an exceptionally boring autobiography. The copyright protection means you can’t even use it to fill in reports. You know that saying about the longer the skill takes to become useful, the more powerful it is? We all figure it has to have one hell of a payoff at some point. We come up with insanely overpowered things it could do when it finally reaches Boss Mode.”

  Predict the future, that’s what.

  One particular detail took her focus. “You said it has copyright protection? As in, it supernaturally stops others from reading it?”

  “Well, as supernatural as the status window. You can direct the output to appear anywhere you want, but it isn’t actually physically there, you know? It’s in your eyes. You’d see the report nicely filled in, but to anyone else, it’s empty.”

  Beth could feel the laughter bubbling in her chest. All of those plots and plans to get Peter to read The Book, and it never would have been possible in the first place. He would have thought her completely nuts, talking about a book that predicted the future, she promised when it didn’t even exist. His indifference had done her a massive favour, and she hadn’t even realised.

  Later, she promised herself. She’d laugh herself sick about it later. She focused back on the conversation.

  “— who think they can get ahead if they just find an awesome skill,” said Drunk-and-Disorderly. “It’s all bullshit. If you want real power, then you’ve got to be born into it.”

  “Or buy your way into it,” suggested Helpful. “Like that Peter-Whatever who oh-so-conveniently saved the day after all those early food thefts.”

  For a minute, Beth thought he was talking about her brother. Then she realised that he couldn’t be. Her brother never had the kind of resources to bribe anyone, even if he’d wanted to. Peter wasn’t exactly an uncommon name.

  “Same thing, though, isn’t it?” asked Drunk-and-Disorderly. “You need to pick your parents to be either powerful or wealthy. If you don’t, then that’s just on you, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, yes,” said Helpful. “Life is terribly unfair and everyone behaves most selfishly.”

  “It’s true, though!”

  “We don’t care, though!” said Denise, to general laughter.

  It wasn’t, Beth thought, that they didn’t care. It was just that they’d all been forced to accept that there was nothing they could do about it anyway and were tired of talking about it.

  The angle of the high windows soon meant that it was too dark to see the cards. People began to try to find ways to make the benches comfortable enough to sleep. Beth didn’t succeed. The bars of the bench dug into her hips and shoulders, forming new bruises every time she shifted position. It wasn’t cold, but the absence of a sheet or blanket made her feel somehow exposed. Every time she might have drifted off, the doors opened to a new influx of people, often drunk. She was beyond grateful she had the next day off from allotment clearing.

  When morning finally arrived, a bored guard called out all the quarantined people by name. She exchanged a quick we-really-must-catch-up-again with Denise, but without the actual contact information to make such an event likely. Beth certainly didn’t have anything further to catch up on. Fifteen minutes later they were free to go, with a stern warning to stay away from trouble in future. Beth followed Cynic and Helen out, red-eyed and nauseous, only to find herself in the middle of a demonstration.

  ‘Pure Humanity Now!’

  ‘Resist the Alien Invasion!’

  ‘Skills are Shackles!’

  “They should lock these nutcases up,” said Cynic quietly.

  “They’re harmless,” said Helen.

  They were harmless, but other people had been detained for far less. Beth suspected that they didn’t do anything because the Pure Humanity people didn’t have any skills. They were so valueless they didn’t even make valuable indentured servants.

  Once they were finally clear and safe from eavesdroppers, with Cynic having gone his own way, Beth turned to Helen and relayed the basics of Sulky’s threat.

  “I am so sorry,” said Beth. “We were almost killed for no reason. We can’t risk selling the information now, not without drawing attention to ourselves.”

  “Nonsense,” said Helen. “You just suggested the locations – and you were even right about them! I was the one who suggested we try going after the infected. I should be apologising to you.”

  That was only technically true. Beth had primed the conversation with that trail of leading objections. Helen would probably never have thought about it if Beth hadn’t led her carefully to the conclusion. Still, Helen was an adult. Older than Beth, even. Wouldn’t it be rude to assume she had been manipulated? Surely she knew her own mind. Beth didn’t have anything to feel guilty about.

  “Besides,” said Helen. “We can wait it out. They won’t be watching us forever.”

  “You don’t think someone else will find it before we can sell the information?”

  “No, I don’t,” said Helen. “You can’t see the shed from either road, or even the houses, really. It isn’t like it’s on any maps. Everyone knows that the houses in that area have all been very well cleared. We can wait a few weeks or months and check again.”

  They could. And Beth could remember to check The Book after making her decision, next time. It wouldn’t be any additional risk. Beth didn’t need the money. But the money would certainly be nice.