"Hullo," says Bell tentatively, because she knows she doesn't love to be interrupted when she's reading but she's too curious not to try. "Um, I'm Bell. I'm from Panem. What's your name?"

"It's a country," Bell says, heartened by Matilda's willingness to put the book down. "It might be the only one on Earth but some people think there could also be Atlantis. I don't know if I think that, yet."

"In my world, Atlantis is imaginary," says Matilda. "At least I'm pretty sure it is. I'm from Lyndonville—that's a town. The country is called the United States of America."

"I think my continent might have used to be called America," muses Bell. "I read ahead in geography 'cause I can read while I shuck clams if my mom turns the pages for me, but I don't remember that part for sure."

"Your mom turns pages for you?" she says, impressed. "Some mom! Mine never did that."

"She can do it while she's sewing," explains Bell. "She says just because I started working before I had to doesn't mean I should give up on school before I have to, and if the best way for me to read my assignments is while I'm doing clams she'll turn pages."

"That's nice of her!" says Matilda. "Is she a teacher? I got adopted by a teacher and she's way better than my mom was."

"She teaches some years!" Bell says. "It depends on whether the school can afford to have a class of five-year-olds right then or not, and there are always people arguing that the entire school is pointless except for the stuff about boats and fish. So they usually decide they can't afford it. The other years she mends things."

Matilda's eyes widen. "Where you live can't afford school? That's awful!"

"We can always afford it for kids my age to age thirteen," Bell says, wide-eyed. "Four is one of the richest districts. It's just the older kids and the five-year-olds who sometimes get skipped."

"Kids go to school from five to eighteen where I'm from," she says. "I only started when I was six and a half because my parents weren't paying attention and they thought I was still four."

"Your parents... thought... you were four?" Bell asks quizzically. "Weren't they there when you were born? At least your mom?"

"Yeah, but they didn't really keep track of me after that. So I had to yell at my dad a little before he went and found a school and sent me there."

"Oh. Well, that sucks," says Bell sympathetically. "I got to go to school when I was five. They weren't going to have the class that year but my family was doing okay around then so my mom volunteered to work cheaper for the one year, since I was five."

"You have an awesome mom," says Matilda.

"Yeah! My dad is pretty cool too but he's not at home much. Salmon boats have to go out pretty far."

"My parents were pretty useless," says Matilda. "But they did sign the adoption papers for Jenny, so that part's good."

"That does sound good. Teachers where you are make enough to support a kid all by themselves? Or do you live with other people?"

"...I think they do," says Matilda. "It's complicated. Jenny's dad was a doctor and he had lots of money, and then Jenny's parents both died and all the money went to Jenny's aunt, but it turned out she'd killed Jenny's dad and she was really nasty so I got rid of her and now Jenny has all her dad's money so I bet she could have lots of kids if she wanted. But she doesn't, she just wants me."

"Oh," says Bell, clearly finding this explanation all much more sensible than the idea of an otherwise unfunded single parent teacher. "My dad would have made a lot of money but he messed up his knee and couldn't afford to get it fixed since he hadn't had much time to save up. So he couldn't be a Peacekeeper anymore. Now he does the salmon boat job. But that's okay because Peacekeepers aren't allowed to get married or have kids, so he would have had to wait for his contract to be up otherwise."

"What's a Peacekeeper?"

"They keep things peaceful," Bell says. "If people are poaching or getting into fights or trying to run away from District Four they're the ones who stop them. I can poach a little bit and nobody stops me because Dad made friends with them when he was one, though. And because I'm little. So I can bring home clams without officially working on a clam boat yet."

"Like cops," she says, enlightened. "Okay."

Bell shrugs. "Sure. Most of them come from District Two but people from other districts sometimes get into the academy if they try. I don't want to be one, though. I'm going to do clams." She sounds resigned to, rather than enthusiastic about, clams.

"Why clams?"

Bell starts ticking off fingers. "The boats don't go out too far, so I won't get eaten by a squid-mutt." (Bell is too young for anyone to be routinely saying "kraken" in her hearing.) "I can poach clams now, to practice and learn about them, so I can probably start getting bonuses faster than if I start not knowing what I'm doing on shrimp or lobsters or something. Even besides squid-mutts clam boats are some of the least dangerous kinds. I mean, I can swim, but anybody can drown in bad enough weather, especially when they're eight. And, now that I come here, I want the shells, because Bar will take shells like they're money, and that means I can buy food here."

"Math is okay. They don't do very much of it in the regular schools in District Four. If I passed a lot of tests they might move me to someplace with better schools, like District Three where people have to know how to do electronics, but then I'd just live in the school and probably never see my parents again. I don't try very hard on the tests."

"...I don't think I like where you live very much," says Matilda.

"Huh?"

"Which part?"

"What's a Career Tribute?" is what she settles on after a moment.

"Oh, okay, yeah, most places don't have them. See, in Four - and One and Two but I don't know if they do it the same way - when kids are four years old we go to a camp thing, unless our parents pay a lot of money to keep us out of it and mine couldn't afford that. And the camp thing tries to figure out if you're healthy and smart and fast and stuff. And if you're the healthiest smartest fastest four-year-old, you go to a special school up in Crabclaw Point, and then you get trained to be in the Hunger Games, so that whoever gets picked in the lottery doesn't have to and you go instead. There's a girl and a boy from every district every year. But they don't tell the four-year-olds what it's for, and if they think that your parents told you, or told you to try to do badly on the testing, then your parents get punished. Because they need accurate results to give the District Four tributes the best chance of having a winner. But I'm really clumsy, so even though I didn't know what was going on I didn't get picked. So if the lottery person ever says when I'm twelve or thirteen or whatever age up to eighteen -" She does a terrible imitation of a Capitol accent. "'Bell Swan!'" - she drops the accent - "then instead of me having to go up, the Career who's eighteen that year will volunteer instead so I don't have to go."

"...Go up and do what," says Matilda.

"What's the Hunger Games?"

"It's..." What a good question. Bell has obviously never been asked this before. "Well, it's different every year, but every year two kids from every District, One through Twelve, go to the Capitol, and they go in the arena and try not to die, and whoever doesn't die the longest wins and gets rich and famous."

"That's a bad game," she says authoritatively. "Whoever made that up is a bad person."

"Well, I think whoever made it up is probably dead, since it started like sixty years ago after the rebellion was put down to teach the Districts a lesson," says Bell, in an eminently reasonable voice.

"I don't like your world at all," says Matilda. "When I grow up I'm going to find it and make it not awful anymore."

"Really? How?" Bell asks.

"I don't know yet," she says. "If I knew how now, I'd do it now."

"The rebellion had lots and lots of people from all the districts - and there were thirteen then, District Thirteen got destroyed in the war - and it still didn't work, and now the Capitol has more stuff and the Districts have less stuff. So it'd be harder. I don't think one or two people could do much, unless they had a lot of magic or something," says Bell frankly.

"I don't have any magic," says Matilda. "At least I'm pretty sure I don't. But in my experience, when a grown-up says I can't do something, they're usually wrong. And I'm only six; I've got lots of time to figure it out."

"I'm not a grownup," Bell points out.

"But I bet grown-ups are where you're getting your information."

"Yeah," Bell admits. "I still think it'd take magic. Or really, really good technology. I'm pretty sure if you or me - even if we were grown up first - just walked into the Capitol and said 'you need to stop the Hunger Games!' to the President, then they would just laugh at us. Or maybe shoot us."

"Well, yeah," she says. "That's why I need a plan first."

"Well, you can think of plans, but I'm going to look for magic," says Bell. "I think magic will be useful. And I can get some here even though there isn't any at home."

"Magic is useful," she agrees. "I wish I had lots of it. Then I could do more stuff."

"I wonder what kinds there are and which kind is best."

"There might be infinite kinds," Matilda says consideringly.

"No, I think that seems like too many," Bell says, on reflection. "At least not that many different sorts. Maybe if two people have the same kind one of them can pick up one pound without touching it and the other can pick up two pounds without touching it and so on. There could be infinity of that. But any two people with magics different besides in their numbers should be able to explain to each other how they're different in English without taking forever. So, it can't be infinite kinds."

"But there might be infinite different kinds of universes connected to Milliways," she says. "And if some fraction of those have magic, that's infinite universes with magic, and they could all be different kinds. Anyway, your proof doesn't hold up. There's infinite integers, but you can describe any integer in English without taking forever. Same with the rationals, I think."

"That's why I said they had to be different in ways other than numbers to count as different," Bell points out. "I know you can talk about infinity numbers just fine."

"But why can't you talk about infinity different kinds of things?"

Bell considers this. "Well," she said, "maybe you can. Maybe there's a boring way for magics to be different, like if a bunch of them only work in their own world, or something. Then it would be different because you couldn't float the same specific things without touching them, or whatever, and that's not a number difference. But I don't think there's an infinite number of ways for magics to be interestingly different. If the difference is interesting it shouldn't take forever to explain. You should be able to say 'well, I can make the weather do what I want, but she can make food appear, and he can do one or the other but it depends on what day of the week it is' - and then you find someone else who does weather and you talk to each other for a while, and you say, 'well, I'm doing it by asking the sky, and it listens to me, and she does it by waving her hands around in a pattern'. Any fiddly little difference that did take forever to explain wouldn't be interesting. Does that make sense?"

"Hmmm," says Matilda, frowning. "But I don't think you're right about what's interesting. What if it takes a long time to explain because it uses a lot of concepts we've never seen before? I always think that kind of stuff is really interesting. And there's already more kinds of not-magic knowledge just in my world than most people would be able to learn in their entire lives even if they tried really hard, and before now there were a bunch of different kinds of knowledge that are actually wrong in my world but might not be in somebody else's. You could have kinds of magic that work by alchemy and kinds that work by quantum physics and kinds that work by geology, all different kinds of each one depending on how they work and what they do, and then you could have even more kinds than that because there's lots of worlds where the whole laws of physics work differently than they do in mine and there'll be sciences there I can't even think of. And I don't think that's boring, I think it's the opposite."

Bell considers. "Does that add up to literally forever?" she asks dubiously. "I go to a lousy school, so maybe there is literally infinity stuff to learn and they're just not telling me, but I don't think you can get infinity just by adding up a lot of laws of physics and things magic could do. You could get a really huge number, though, so long that unless you lived forever you could just pretend it was infinity. I want to live forever but I don't know how. Did you know that quahog clams can live for hundreds of years if no one eats them?"

"I did not know that," says Matilda. "I want to know everything, which means I have to live forever, because there is infinity stuff to learn especially at Milliways."

"If I figure out how to live forever, I'll tell you," Bell assures her cheerfully.

"And if I figure it out first, I'll tell you!"

"Great! Now we both have twice as many chances to learn it."

"On average, yeah!"

"I think I'm most likely to find that sort of thing here," Bell muses. "I'm pretty sure my world has no magic. And the only way I could get anywhere near the serious science would be to pass the removal tests and I don't want to do that because if you do that you get removed. And if you could gain a clam's powers by eating it somebody would have noticed already."

"I don't know enough about my world yet to say really for sure if we have magic or not," says Matilda. "It could go either way."

"If someone had hiding magic," Bell amends, "then maybe the Capitol wouldn't have found it and started using it, but I don't see how I'd find it either unless I had some finding magic from here to start with."

"I have something that might be magic but I don't know if it is or not."

"What?" Bell asks, sitting bolt upright.

"Telekinesis," she says. "Or something that's a lot like telekinesis. I can move stuff around without touching it. But I don't know how it works, and I've never heard of anybody else who can do anything like it, so I don't know if it's really magic or something else."

"That sounds like magic to me," Bell says, "especially if it's not just something that everyone can do where you're from. Lemme see?"

Her book lifts up out of her lap and then settles back down again.

"It used to be really hard but it got better with practice," she says. "I can do lots of stuff at once. I can move anything I can see, and sometimes stuff I can't see if I know right where it is. I never do it by accident or anything, only when I mean to. And I can't really tell if I can feel where it is or not, because I have to know where it is and where I want it to go before I can move it at all."

Bell tilts her head. "I have to look at things to pick them up, too, at least if I don't want to just knock them onto the floor. But I can feel that I'm feeling them and not just knowing where they are, 'cause they have textures and temperatures and heavinesses and stuff."

"It's a different thing from picking stuff up with your hands," she says, shrugging.

"Well, yeah. Yours is magic. How fast can you make stuff go? We could borrow stuff from the bar to float, and a timer, and go outside and you can zoom it around!"

"I haven't done that! Let's do that."

Bell races to the bar, politely solicits an array of balls of various sizes and a stopwatch, and then frowns at the results, as she has no good way to carry six balls in her arms. "I think you might have to carry most of it," she says, picking up the stopwatch.

The six balls float up into the air and commence following Bell around like a trail of ducklings, largest to smallest.

Bell giggles and dashes out towards the door to the outside, looking over her shoulder and only barely not running into the doorframe or tripping onto her face.

"This is awesome," crows Bell. "Okay, so..." She picks up a stick and plants it in the ground, then runs to a distant point still visible from the original. Then she picks a spot between the two to stand so she can see each stick. "I'll time you, and you can start with the small stuff and move it as fast as you can from the first stick to the second stick! And then try the bigger stuff and we'll see if that's slower. Or it could be faster!"

"Five seconds!" reports Bell.

Next ball: zoom!

"Five seconds," Bell repeats. "Maybe it doesn't matter how big the thing is, maybe you could move a whole whale from here to there in five seconds!"

"Four seconds! That's even faster! Maybe this is more like rolling stuff down a hill than like picking it up. Can you move stuff that's alive? Can you move me? Can you move you?"

"I wouldn't know how to move me," she says. "It'd be like the Lorax picking himself up by the seat of his pants and flying away. But I can move people all I want! I made a bunch of kids in my class fly!"

"What's a Lorax?" Bell asks.

"He's from a kids' book! He's fuzzy and yellow and he speaks for the trees and at the end of the book he picks himself up by the seat of his pants and flies away and nobody ever sees him again."

"So he's not real," Bell clarifies.

"I'm pretty sure he isn't."

"Okay." Bell picks up another stick and scratches 5, 5, 4 in the dirt to record the results so far.

"Four," Bell calls, as she adds the numeral to the list.

"Really?" Bell says, adding the numbers. "I'll start a new row, try the first one again?"

"If you get any faster than this I won't even be able to tell the difference," Bell says. "I can't push the button that fast, and you have to be able to see it so we can't just move the stick farther away..."

"Time me there-and-back," Matilda suggests.

"Okay. We can just add laps, unless you get too fast for me to even see what's going on," Bell agrees. She draws a line under the new row.

"Let's do ten round trips," laughs Bell. "You're getting really fast and maybe this way it'll take a few rows before you get down to one second again."

"I'm not gonna be able to count how many times you take it past the far stick if it goes any faster," Bell says frankly. "So I think the experiment just says you can move stuff fast and you can get faster."

"What?" Bell asks. She goes over to the rock, but doesn't try to climb it - she'd fall.

Bell watches in fascination. "Does talking to it help?" she whispers.

Bell stares.

"SQUID," screams Bell, forgetting wonder in place of fear and hiding behind the rock.

The squid's attention to anything on the shore is sufficient to send Bell tearing into the safety of the bar.