The designers of the losing poster are kinda peeved about that.

There is not really anything she could have done about that but she is sympathetic anyway. It would be nice if her magic gave detailed rationales for things but it seems to prefer to restrict itself to facts and advice.

All the reading Margaret's been doing has left her a lot more educated on biology than the was a month ago. She asks Brian about the possibility of getting actual CDC-intern-type assignments beyond just "read this and prophecize about it."

"We have a healers track but you're not a healer. I guess you could join a normal team and just incidentally prophecize while using your job to keep your magic on topic."

"I don't see any reason why that wouldn't work if you don't."

"They usually don't hire high schoolers though, so it might be a ways out."

"It makes sense that they wouldn't. Should I be sending someone a resume, though, or do you mean that I should wait for a year or two first?"

"Wait a year or two, put something more than being a magical girl who reads a lot on the resume, maybe?"

"Sounds good." Maybe she'll try out for one of those national science fairs her junior year. 

In the meantime, do the scientists who set this whole thing up have anything to say? Are they getting the type of data they wanted?

They are very happy with her!

Oh good! Five prophecies a week with friendlier-than-previously timing seems to be the new normal, and she's pretty happy with it.

She has an idea for her science fair project, too. She's going to write up a statistical model of how diseases spread through partially-vaccinated communities, in situations where individuals are more likely to interact with other individuals of the same vaccination status. She can run a bunch of simulations and compare them to recent infectious disease outbreaks she can find public data on. It's on-topic enough not to mess up her magic, it's something she can work on on her laptop in the evenings, and it combines her old interests in math and programming with her new interest in epidemiology.

(She doesn't tell anybody about this except her parents, who think it's cool. At work she's as focused as always, and she predicts everything from contaminated food to a strain of antibiotic-resistant sinus infections.)

When the summer ends they want to experiment with various schedules of Slack and Skype check-ins to see how much it takes to keep at this level of output.

Well, she won't be allowed to use her phone in class, but she can check the slack between classes and be on it during swarm patrol and do video calls in the evenings or on weekends if anybody's willing to be around then for the sake of video. If that doesn't work for them, brief video check-ins after school might be better.

They can have someone around. Paying a grad student to be up at weird hours having a Skype conversation about their special interest is not very expensive.

Fine by her!

She spends most of the bus ride back to Massachusetts working on the code for a pandemic simulator. Her parents joke about how they can barely recognize her even though they saw the stylist's photos weeks ago.

With the timing of how her lease in Atlanta ran out, she still has two days of summer left before school actually starts again. How are Vanessa and Caroline and Susan doing?

Vanessa's been promoted out of the squad, Caroline's in charge now, and they have a new third they took from a different squad which wanted to give their ride-along a permanent slot when she turned 18.

That's cool! "Hi! I'm Margaret the ride-along, I was here for a while in the spring. What's your name?"

"Hi, I'm Charity," says, apparently, Charity. "I'm a short range teleporter." She has a peacock tail and a few feathers peeking out from her hair, and her outfit is in similar bold blue and green.

"Ooh, nice! So I have this thing where I can see what swarm bugs are going to do before they do it, and I can use it to give people advice during fights--which way to dodge and stuff--but if you're a tactical teleporter I might want to adapt the protocols we were using before to handle that."

"Yeah, it might be complicated."

She explains the north-south/east-west/up-down setup she had going on previously. "Maybe add 'across' or something to indicate going to the other side of the swarm? I might want to watch you fight first, see how you use it and build something around that."

"Makes sense," says Charity. "I teleport a lot in fights, I'm a bit hard to follow."

Nod nod. "I think I have an easier time following someone's trajectory around than a description of my power would make it sound, but that still sounds tricky. If we don't get a fight before the next training day, maybe I can pretend to be a monster and watch you teleport circles around me."

Charity laughs. "Sounds fun."

"Glad you think so!"

She can sit in silence for a while. She's kind of missed this--the gently swaying truck, the breeze, the uninterrupted working time.