The next few days, leading up to Tony's victory tour's stop in Four, see her ferretting out her remaining stash and distributing it between her parents and Lynnis's family until it's all gone. They're assuming a ship lost a lot of merchandise at once. Bad weather, one assumes.
She stops replacing her shells by the doors. But she does show up to work, until the day before when she has to leave. Then, she fakes sick enough to stay home, spends the day sleeping, and - at night - is rested enough to execute her plan.
Dear Mom and Dad.
I'm going for Atlantis. It's okay! I have a plan! I'll come back and get you when I can and then we can all live there. Please tell Mr. Carrasen I'm sorry about the canoe. I'll bring him a new one after I get there! I love you! It's going to be great!
- Shell Bell
...the idea, after all, is to instantly convince them that she is dead. That she is too foolish and unprepared to have any chance. That there is no point in worrying about her any further, and they should move directly to grieving - certainly not wasting time looking for her or reporting her as a missing person. The fact that she's not swiping any of the cans and only one water container - is not even bringing a fishing rod - is another clue, of course.
Shell Bell wears her nice dress - it'll attract less attention in the town than work clothes, on a Victory Tour day where everyone's supposed to celebrate, and the town in question is big enough that her mere unfamiliarity won't catch her out immediately. She packs one more practical change of clothes, sticks her stick in her hair, and puts one salty roll in her pocket to eat at around midnight and a few strips of dried salmon to nibble on as necessary through the walk. She's also wearing the less remarkable-looking of the two protective amulets she traded for during her stay in Milliways. It looks like a lump of white glass - it could even pass for sea glass. The other stuff she obtained is waiting for her in her room in the bar.
She melts the lock on the canoe shed and buries it deep in the sand. She drags out a canoe. Briefly, she considers actually canoeing to the next town up, but while she knows how to row like any District Four resident does, she's worried about being noticed on her way in, and it'll be easier to avoid that if she's not in the place where all the actual industry goes on, namely the shore. She pushes it out to sea regretfully. Saltwater spatters her dress, but it dries as she goes.
She talks to her recorder in the dark silence.
And just before dawn peeps over the ocean, she's picked her way through the sleeping town to the train station and she's pretending to be a premature, eager celebrator.
Of course, no power on Earth will possess anyone but Sherlock and the train operator to be up this early.
"Good morning," she murmurs back, and leads Bell through the silent train to her room. After some initial shuffling, Sherlock has ended up with the back half of the very last compartment, Tony with the front half of same. Everyone else on the train is no end of pleased that this means they can sometimes go hours without seeing her, if she stays back there with the door shut.
One thing she did do, however, is close the steel shutters on every window. They have been closed the entire trip. She can't sleep somewhere with a transparent window; everyone who knows her knows that.
Bell trips a lot. Less, since she developed sea legs - dry land is comparatively simpler to navigate - but still a lot.
This is much of the reason she was flunked as a possible Career, when she went to the testing camp at age four.
It didn't really hit Bell, in the bar, that she was talking to Hunger Games victors, except long enough to ask Sherlock not to kill her. Now she is in the train, and Sherlock and Tony continue to exist, and, yes, they are victors and she is in their train.
Pause. "That's if I actually had to go. If Lynnis hadn't stepped up, the seventeen-year-old Career girl in training would have socked her in the nose and volunteered and the girl Four Careers would have been a year younger than they're supposed to be until we hit a cohort that had two - they put in occasional backups for that in case one dies or defects."
Obediently, the recorder plays a conversation between her and her benefactor about the amulets. The two work the same, they're only cosmetically different - the reason he has them is apparently because he bought three, not knowing which his daughter would like best, and these are the two left over. One should not trust them to protect one from anything serious. They will make physical injury - and the sorts of things that cause injury, like Bell's tripping - less likely and less serious. Often. But certainly not by enough that Bell ought to try to tapdance at the top of a staircase - though if she did, when she fell, she'd break an arm, not her neck.
"Seek: first instance within last 150 days of 'generator'," Bell says, after pausing when the conversation ends. "Play from nearest prior pause-mark."
Bell has apparently also obtained a generator. It is from a world with both tech and magic, and it turns the magical energy from a crystal inside it into nice clean electricity. Reportedly, it can output up to 570 megaglonns in its typical lifespan! ...There are attempts made to translate this into how many lights the generator could power for how long, but the woman who had the generator keeps clarifying "as long as the lights are, you know, reasonably modern and efficient" without being able to describe what that means, so this isn't much more useful than 570 megaglonns. At any rate, it's a device impressive enough to be in common use in a very advanced world. The same conversation also yields some batteries that can be charged from the generator, that "are designed for our devices, naturally, but you should be able to adapt them for anything with ordinary gold wire or spun-starlight". Bell's question about whether it has to be gold is immediately replied to with "Oh, or copper, I'm sorry, I keep forgetting."
"I thought so. And there's also the guns and stuff I took from that guy who wanted me to shoot at him, still. The amulet guy just wanted to help out after I talked to him. The generator lady wants a copy of anything 'particularly cunning' Tony makes left for her at the bar - she was vague about what 'particularly cunning' means so I'm going to interpret it as 'small and not terribly necessary'."
Goodness, Bell is full of questions.
Bell tentatively determines that Sherlock might not want to talk to her right now. She snuggles down in her chair, turns the volume way down on her recorder and holds it up to her ear, and has it start reviewing conversations she had in Milliways at 3x playback speed.