“You didn’t stand up for me very much,” said What-the-Dickens.

“I don’t know what you mean. Come on, we got a deadline to make.”

“No.” He stopped. “I stood by you, Pepper, at Doctor Ill’s. I persuaded him to give you another chance. You could’ve been a little more — I don’t know — a little less — what’s the word —”

“Just because Clea thought you were a potential bank robber? Hah. She don’t get around much.”

“Well, maybe I am a potential bank robber,” he said stubbornly, itching for a fight. “How do I know? How do you know unless you get to know me?”

“Don’t talk like that!” She was alarmed; he could tell. Against the rules, she all but flew down the corridor toward the exit. Against the rules, he followed in like manner, his lumpen feet battering against the rustic trim that bedecked Undertree Common.

They emerged onto the landing strip — the top of the tree trunk — into a night brightened by a full moon.

“We don’t have time to argue,” said Pepper. “We’re booked for the runway any minute.”

“I’m not going,” said What-the-Dickens.

“Oh, for pity’s sake!”

“Why should I leave without even getting to know what life is really like here? That’s just collaborating in my own banishment.”

“Well, listen. One: I brought you here in the first place to look around, not to make trouble. Another one: You’re overlooking that you’re being allowed to leave. Like it is a given. And, to count out the reasons further, um, five: You owe me. You’re the reason I almost missed out on my license. So quit all this malarkey, will you? Get a grip and let’s get out of here.”

All around the stump, they saw evidence of skibbereen activity. In loose formations, small groups of skibbereen were launching off the runway.

He hesitated. She looked so agitated. And he had no rights here. He was an alien.

“Okay,” he said. “I yield to your common sense. But just show me a little bit more of the colony before we go, since I won’t be coming back. I’d like to be able to picture where you live when I don’t see you anymore.”

“Don’t talk like that!” she cried, horrified.

“Why not?”

“Because — because — skibbereen don’t talk like that.”

Oh, he thought. Oh well. Right. Skibbereen are never seen — not even to each other.

“Look,” she said, caving in a little. “You have a point. Okay, I’ll show you around some. We’re in a holding pattern here anyway. These squadrons are leaving every few minutes; the full moon is a dandy time for them.”

“I thought you didn’t travel in packs,” said What-the-Dickens.

“We Agents of Change don’t,” said Pepper. “Too risky. But those are the overnight delivery boys. They call themselves the Wish Team.”

“What are they delivering?”

“Wishes. What else?”

“Pepper, I just don’t get the commerce of all this. How does it work?”

“Listen up,” said Pepper.

He looked about the place with the eagerness of a cub reporter at his first cafeteria food fight.

“A skibbereen colony is divided into two sections,” said Pepper, as if rattling off a school lesson. “Uppers and lowers. Most of us skibbereen are the lowers — the laborers. You got your Scavengers, remember, I already told you? They hunt for seed money to capitalize the trade. You got your Agents of Change, like me and many others; we’re the solo operators on whom the tooth trade depends. We trade money for teeth. Then you got your Harvesters. They take the teeth we bring in and plant them, and tend them, and harvest them. You still with me?”

“You plant old teeth?”

“I don’t — I’m an Agent of Change. Or I will be once I get my final license. But yes, we skibbereen do.”

“But what do they grow into? More teeth?”

She looked at him in the moonlight. He thought her look was soft and sad. It’s not an easy time for her, he realized. Well, not for me either, but I notice it in her more. Just now.

“I’ll show you,” she said impulsively. “Follow me. But move it.”

They flew off the stump through a stand of tall grass. In the moonlight the growth stood out as stripes of ivory and sage against luminous black. Riblike, the blades arched above them.

“We double-plant,” explained Pepper. “A whole field sown with teeth would draw attention to itself if it were ever discovered, so we inter-seed teeth with common grasses and weeds. Luckily a tooth grows to maturity in the space of one full-moony night. We harvest just before dawn, so human ramblers, even if they tramped their clod-footed way right through our fields, would never know the industry taking place beneath their hobnails and soccer cleats and stiletto heels.”

“Show me!” What-the-Dickens was thrilled by all this secrecy and productivity. “I’m dying to know.”

Pepper dropped to the ground. “Ladies?” she called. “Girls? Don’t be scared; he’s with me.”

One by one, skibbereen females began to emerge from the forest of grass. They seemed, as a rule, shyer than the others, as if they didn’t want to speak, as if they didn’t like a male in their nursery. “He’s new here,” explained Pepper.

“What is he?” asked one of the less timid ones. “He doesn’t look like a Scavenger.” She bobbed and becked. You might say she looked like a tiny jellyfish, almost invisible in moonlight — insubstantial, and docile, and spineless.

“He’s a mistake,” said Pepper. She spoke without malice, but What-the-Dickens winced. A mistake? “He don’t know what he is,” Pepper continued, as if maybe she guessed at his discomfiture. “Doctor Ill don’t know yet, either. Not a Harvester, though, dear ladies of the plantation, so don’t stew your giddy heads over him. I’m just showing our guest the tooth garden. Won’t be long. Settle down. You can go back to your tasks.”

But the Harvesters hovered in a crowd, unwilling to separate. Murmuring like frightened doves.

Pepper sighed and whispered to her new friend, “They ain’t got much character, poor chuckleheads, but they do give their all to their task.” She pulled aside a decomposing leaf. Three tapered prongs were thrusting up from the ground — slender waxy posts of varying heights and thicknesses. One was about three-and-a-half inches tall and striped around with a pale, ascending blue line. “This one’s about ready, I think,” said Pepper. “Could one of you do the honors?”

But none of the Harvesters wanted to oblige.

“Very well, I’ll do it myself,” said Pepper. “Really.” She reached down and snapped the narrow cylinder at its base. “I think this is done. See?”

She held it up. What-the-Dickens didn’t recognize it.

“It’s a birthday candle, for a birthday cake, silly,” said Pepper. “Humans always blow on candles and make wishes on their birthdays, but the wishes only come true if they are made on one of our candles.” Her voice was full of pride.

“Really? Wishes?” What-the-Dickens got all excited.

“Hey, wait,” said Pepper. “I can see it on your face. Forget it. Tooth fairies don’t get to wish. We’re the Agents of Change, remember? We don’t change ourselves. Ain’t in the program! No wishing allowed.”

“But I could wish to find my family!” he said.

“You might find that they were all dead,” said Pepper frankly. “Anyway, you can’t wish; it’s not done. We work in the service of others, not ourselves.”

At his hangdog look, Pepper took mercy. “Come on, now. Pay attention, okay? I’ll review it for you. Scavengers collect the investment money. Agents of Change take each tooth and replace it with a coin. Free the tooth! Ha, ha. Then Harvesters plant the gathered teeth and tend the garden and reap the results on a full-moon night. Finally, the Wish Team flies our candles to the nearest stores or candle factories, or sometimes even to private homes, where we substitute one of ours for a commercially made candle. Most of our chores are done between midnight and dawn, because that’s when the most humans are asleep. We call this the Wishing Hour.”

“Joy,” said What-the-Dickens, without much joy.

“Let’s go,” she said. “You’ll feel better when we get to work. I always do.”

They left the field of candles and made their way back through the grassy forest, on foot this time. “What about predators?” he said.

“Luckily,” said Pepper, “we have few natural enemies in the wild. Sure, you have to watch out for the occasional nearsighted owl, who might mistake you for an airborne mouse. Then, of course, there’s the dangerous deadly human.”

“The ones we give wishes to?” He was aghast.

“You bet. Humans would pen us in cages and sell us as pets as soon as look at us, if they discovered us. The beasts. That’s what they do. And human pets — like dogs and cats — are treacherous, like their owners. Probably goldfish would be, too, if goldfish could manage to get loose and roam the earth. They’d be schools of shiny assassins, I’m told. Vicious little creatures.”

“But — giving wishes to humans — if it’s so dangerous —”

“As a small, defenseless species goes, we make out all right.” Pepper sounded offhand, but proud. “Cats are nocturnal, true, so that’s an ongoing cause for alarm. But our only serious natural enemy is ourselves.”

“Meaning … ?”

“The separate colonies of skibbereen ain’t always able to live in peace and tranquility. Sometimes there are raids, and the occasional Harvester or Scavenger gets carried off. I’ve known bank robberies you wouldn’t believe. Now and again, an outright attack. An invasion. There’s a belligerent colony high up in a big old pine over near Pilot’s Knob, called Sequoia Heights. Division D. You wouldn’t want to mess around with them slobs, believe me.”

“Does Undertree Common go on raids and attacks, too?”

“Depends on what the crown tells us to do. It ain’t my business to decide on all that, is it? I’m an Agent of Change, or I will be if we ever get launched tonight. Let Doctor Ill decide whose Liberty is worth defending and whose Liberty is worth trespassing against.”

“Why does he get to make all the decisions?”

“Oh, I didn’t finish my little outline, did I?” They were nearing the runway on top of the stump, so Pepper dropped her voice, out of respect or, perhaps, caution.

“You see,” she continued, “all that I described — the Scavengers, the Agents of Change, the Harvesters, and the Wish Team — that’s us. We’re lowers. The workers, that is. Anyone who is differentiated — well, you might say talented — they’re uppers. Like Doctor Ill, and Old Flossie, et cetera. And Silviana the Entertainment Industry, and so on. Clea the Banker. Not many of them, but they have harder work to do because they have to make it up themselves. The rest of us, we’re more or less decided.”

“What decides you — I mean us?”

“Instinct. And ‘instinct breeds specialization.’ They drill it into you in nursery school. I’m specialized to be a worker. An Agent of Change, who gets a dandy private name, is the highest I can hope to go. But uppers are specialized to be special. Look, uppers don’t work unless they have something to grind against, and that’s us: the lowers.”

What-the-Dickens shook his head. It was all too confusing, mostly because he couldn’t find himself in the scheme of things. “I don’t know what I am, or what I was meant to be. A Harvester or an Agent of Change, a Scavenger or a member of the Wish Team.”

“Nothing’s better than being an Agent of Change,” she said, forgetting for a moment to curb her excitement about it. “We get the most freedom, that is, within respectable limits. Look, are your wings unfurled? Let’s stop yapping and get going. This is going to be a busy night.”

But just when they turned to register with the stump mistress and to queue up for takeoff, a bunch of Wish Teamers cut the line and demanded priority clearance. And got it. “They think they’re so smart,” whispered Pepper, “but their brains are all in their bums. That’s what gives them enough bottom, so to speak, to be able to haul a load of candles without being blown off course.” Sure enough, the Wish Team fellows seemed broad of beam, fundamentally suited to carry the candles laced onto their backs with cords of knotted grass.

“I’m not built like that, either,” said What-the-Dickens, “so I guess I’m not meant to be a member of the delivery services.”

“Maybe you’re a mutant,” said Pepper cheerfully. “Another, I mean, if you believe the legend of the First Fairy. Now, your wings responding well enough?”

He looked at Pepper as she flexed her pair. Little specks of light ran in coded sequence along the tips, occasionally diverting along capillary routes back toward her shoulder blades. “How does all that work?” he marveled.

“Beats me,” she said. “I’m not the brightest lightning bug in the storm cloud, you know. But our wings is our public access communications network. As whales sing headlines across the ocean depths, or elephants thump the news against dusty savannas, or songbirds twitter the daily gossip from tree to tree, we skibbereen receive information from Central Command through our wings. It’s a kind of telegraphic system, I guess. We pick up changes in our assignments. Predator sightings, weather updates. That sort of thing.”

“I can feel tingling, but I thought it was just pins and needles. It doesn’t mean anything to me. How do you learn to read it?”

“You just can,” she said. “Don’t you do anything by instinct?”

“Ask questions?” he said, not as a joke. “Does that qualify?”

“Well, stop asking,” she replied. “We’re being signaled out for departure. Good luck, friend.”

Old Flossie squinted at the moon, counted on her fingers several times — one, one — one, one — counted What-the-Dickens and Pepper — one-one — and gave up. “Higher math,” she muttered. “Twists my noggin into pretzels something dreadful. Math is a myth. Okay, you-all over there. Oh, it’s Pepper. And What’s-His-Name.”

“What-the-Dickens,” he corrected her.

“Whatever-the-Dickens. So this is good-bye, then,” said Old Flossie. “I’m not much for sentiment, but I wish you the best. You’re not a spy, we decided that, so you’re just a raw nerve. Here’s my parting advice to you, since you come unequipped with sense of any sort. Keep hidden. Got that? And if you’re ever caught, go to your grave with our secret on your lips. Squealing is forbidden. You are forbidden. Got it?”

“What if I’m tortured?”

“Ask no questions,” barked Old Flossie, out of habit, and continued, “and don’t answer any, either.”

He nodded, catching her murmured remark to herself as she turned away, “And don’t come back, fellow, if you know what’s good for you.”

“Ready for countdown,” said Pepper, positioning herself.

“Three,” said Old Flossie, “four, six, go on, get outta here.”

Pepper tucked her head down to correct against possible wind shear, and What-the-Dickens tried to do the same. There was still so much to learn. First and foremost, though, was the basic matter of whether he was even capable of learning anything.

“Go, I said,” shouted Old Flossie. So they did.