I am using my last evening – well, I presume that it will be the last evening before they start using us and we need to leave – to soak in the hot water. In fact I am learning to control the colouring of my carapce. I am making blue spiral patterns appear on it.

I do not stay alone for long. Within a few minutes all my companions make their way here, too.

L: Are you making plans for tomorrow.

P: No.

L: Isn’t that what old people do? Make plans?

P: Hey!

M: He never made many plans.

L: But isn’t he supposed to be dependable and boring?

M: He is.

P: Hey!

M: But he was the kind of boring of being ready to do the same thing every day, not the planning boring.

P: Hey!

L: Seriously, what do we do?

Z: What we want to do, unless they tell us otherwise. You want good jobs, don’t you?

She is seeing this as a much looser relation than I did. But then with a good lawyer, she would walk free.

L: Can we do that?

Z: Why not? In case you were wondering, I got a mail. They’ve preponed and elongated the summer recess. Something about needing to renovate too many school houses.

M: For now this is freedom.

--

The morning finds us turned into delivery people. The order arriving by phone just tells us where to pick up the goods on the day after tomorrow.

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The trip is spiced up by a guard freaking out, as we enter a bank for Maria to cash her cheque in. Telekinesis is such a handy tool if you think that somebody should not be able to draw a weapon.

We even get an opportunity to test our new papers by crossing a border. We are being questioned. But after a few hours we are let through. We find a cheap rural motel close to the border. They need the money after the monster incursions, but they have only two rooms left. We see a lot of foreign license plates on the cars in the lot. People are coming in to check on their relatives. Zora claims Maria as a room mate with the memorable words „she is the only one of you three who doesn’t skim down at my chest“.

Natalija shies away from Lidija a little bit.

L: Are you afraid of me, my little one? (I think – my language skills are improving though)

N: You, but you smell of pepper.

P: Yep, she is right. You do smell a bit like you slept on the spice rack.

L: Well, that is a new one. So you want to sleep in his bed?

N: Yes, if you do not step on my tail again.

P: I am very sorry, I could not look down. I was carrying the box with your family’s car.

N: It hurt a lot.

Thankfully she does not object to being sent to brush her teeth.

L: You seem very content with our current task.

P: I view it as temporary. Look, a few months ago monsters were unknown to the general public. Now people are being transformed. I don’t think that we have reached a final, stable state.

L: What else could happen?

P: I don’t know and that it the point.

L: What else would you do?

P: Drive a magic bus on the old hippy route to India through Afghanistan? Things are becoming possible. Most of all they are changing.

L: Very well. We should see this is the best opportunity for a bonding experience.

P: You mean we should go out into the city together and look at girls with short skirts?

The quick jab to my arm was more mock indignation than the real thing, but iron-rank carapace is a bad thing to hit for a muggle.

--

The stuff we have come for turns out to be camping refrigerators. Those and an equal number of closed and locked cylinders you use for transporting cash.

M: This is a test.

Z: And they must know that we would know. What does that tell us?

M: They are telling us that we are sent on secondary jobs.

Zora is stronger than me. She has packed away all four remaining fridges, while I still load the one I picked first. The guys running this shop, which is a general metal working and car repair shop, no nothing. They were paid by „some guys“, who just looked „average“.

M: How did they do that?

P: I think like the crooks who took your old car.

Z: Is that this aura manipulation you spoke of?

P: Presumably. We need to find information on that.

Z: Why not find out ourselves?

P: They have two centuries of head start on us.

--

The guys running the shop have worked out the best route, which Lidija has noted down.