She’s standing on the poorly calibrated bathroom scale at one in the morning. Darian is right beside her, listening at the closed door for any sounds that might indicate a person who might be able to hear them whispering in the bathroom and infer that they’re both in here and probably doing something weird. 

“No one,” says Darian, ear still at the door. 

They’d gone through all of the important stuff in the past days and weeks. They were splitting all of Mom and Dad’s things fifty-fifty, after some lengthy discussion. Sure, if they could be certain that Pen would live, then it would be better for her to have all of it from the start and hand much of it off to Darian when he entered or when she left, but there was no possible way to be sure that she would make it. It would be the most unfair thing in the world to take all of their resources with her, die, and then let someone loot her room, so that Darian had to go to school in two more years with nothing. So: fifty-fifty. 

What fifty-fifty worked out to in practice was more complicated. Both of them got a shield holder. Each of them got the enchanted clothing of the parent of the matching sex, oversized as it was. Neither of them got any consumable healing magic. Each of them got eighteen of the thirty-six mana storage pendants that had been passed down in Dad’s family for several generations (or, at least, Pen was telling herself that, because it was much cooler if the pendants were mostly from the 1800s than if Dad’s grandmother had made them sometime in the sixties, and it wasn’t like she had anyone to ask, anymore). They also had a bunch of ivory animal figurines that Mom had used for mana storage, all of them ones she had made herself, as the artistic sort of artificer. They were somewhat less leaky and held quite a bit more mana, at the cost of weighing much more than the pendants. All of the storage wildly outclassed anything they were likely to make on their own until long after graduation, and she was pretty sure it was on par with what the Philadelphia enclave kids had, which meant it should be plenty good enough to survive on. Theoretically.

The rest of the packing is - more haphazard. Mom was planning to do it with her, and then of course Mom had collapsed two months before induction - just a stroke, just a normal stroke, and of course those are perfectly healable with magic, but it’s not like there’s a wizard hotline for these things, and it’s not like Pen could pay for the work to be done if there were, not without access to any of her mother’s accounts. And, of course, if you had a stroke and didn’t get it fixed right away - well, a week later the foster parents they were sent to live with had had to break to them that the hospital had somehow been attacked by a bear, and that the bear had eaten their mother, which Darian and Pen found much less surprising than everyone else.

So the nonmagical packing is - what they could manage. Odds and ends that they were able to find in their house in the few panicked hours that they were given to pack before being taken to their new house. Some things that they’ve stolen from around that house, which Pen would feel worse about if any of the things they got that way were actually valuable in the outside world. Their foster parents can always buy another first aid kit, they seem much less strapped for cash than her family has been ever since Dad died. There are still some holes - Mom never went and got her reusable pads, and when Pen summoned all of her courage to ask the foster parents for them, she got handed disposables. She has some washcloths, and is hoping that those work.

She has no idea how prepared she is. She has native English, pretty near fluent Mandarin (from spending five years in an immersion school), passable Japanese (from being allowed to play as many video games as she wanted, as long as they were in Japanese), and half-forgotten German that she hasn’t used very much since she was a small child.

She knows that Mom was always incredibly stressed about them, much more about Darian than about her, but also about her, just because the survival rates are so bad, and she’s been good enough at doing all of her schoolwork in a panic at the last minute that she’s never really kicked the procrastination habit. She’s awful at talking to people, which is half the reason they moved out of the enclave in the first place, to get better at that. But between Darian’s panic attacks and his getting kicked out of schools over and over, there was never really time to focus on polishing up her weaknesses, so…

“Just talk to people enough that they like you,” says Darian. “Everyone likes you, but they can only know that if you talk to them.”

“I’m not really sure it’s a sure thing, like that - “

“You need to make them like you. Otherwise you’ll get eaten.”

Her stomach does a funny thing, and then decides that maybe the funny thing is just hunger, and rumbles. The foster parents must be beside themselves, between the skipping dinner and the sudden haircut (which they would have done right before, only they’d thought that the induction might be on July first, without Mom’s calendar to look at, and, well). 

“What’s the scale say?”

“Somewhere between 149 pounds and 155.”

“Okay, well, take something out until it’s sure.”

“It only read above 154 once!”

“And you’re gonna feel really dumb and then die if it was right that time!”

“What are you two doing in there?” booms the voice of their foster father, who is really kind of terrifying even though he hasn’t done anything awful except for loudly tell them to clean the house on weekends and insist on watching Darian in the shower (because, supposedly, he doesn’t know how else to tell that Darian is adequately showering, which would be more unambiguously terrible if Darian ever actually showered at all without being forced to).

Darian springs to the door to hold it shut, even though it’s locked.

“Take something out,” he whispers, urgently.

The watch on the counter says 7:59, but they know it’s a couple minutes fast. Hard to say exactly how fast, but definitely a little fast. She opens the backpack, and luckily the least important things are on the top, because they packed the sure things first. Unfortunately she can’t pitch any clothes, because they packed her spare clothes around the figurines to keep them safe. What else weighs a pound, what else weighs a pound…

She takes the rags out. Now she has no period solution, she’ll have to figure something out inside. 

“Open the door,” says their foster father.

She zips the backpack back up and gets on the scale. The watch says 8:00 even, but it’s fast. The scale says 152.

“You can’t camp out in the bathroom together, there’s only supposed to be one of you in there at a time.”

“Just don’t grab anything,” says Darian, still holding the door and gripping the doorknob, as if a twelve-year-old is really going to be able to hold the door against a man who’s built like a lumberjack. All she can think is that if he opens the door in the next minute she’s dead, the induction won’t happen and she’ll die, and nobody will ever know why, they’ll just say she ran off or was eaten by a bear - 

“Honey, where’s the screwdriver, the kids are hiding in the bathroom and it’s way past bedtime.”

“Flathead?” asks a female voice, from the other side of the door. 

“Yeah.”

“Oh, I don’t know. The toolbox is under the stairs.”

“Well, check the toolbox.”

8:01. But it’s fast. They checked. It’s like, two minutes fast, or one and a half, or maybe three…

“That one work?”

“I don’t know, try it.”

There are some scraping sounds. She closes her eyes.

The tug comes, and she could weep with relief, except that she just then realizes that she’s going to spend the next two years wondering what happened to Darian and how he’s managing on his own.

When she opens her eyes, the bathroom is already gone.