Sleep allowed her to appreciate the Fool’s Dye grove when she awoke.

  Curled yellow petals the size of her fingernails fell continuously, every second of every hour, coating the ground evenly in gold. The springy grassless layer of petals atop the earth compressed like blankets under her body, subtle crackles underneath tracking every movement above–a mix of rustling and snapping, the former the top layer, the latter the bottom, decomposed into brittle flakes for insects to enjoy. Mice squeaked and rabbits burrowed, all scattering petals, so easily followed by ear. The trees towered, several times her height, sparse enough for the sun to shine between them–where she could sprawl spreadeagle and bask, touching four tree shadows with the tips of four limbs, just like she had as she slept. In daylight, the yellow didn’t imitate Dye well–it lacked the subtle twinkle, the trick of the eye that made Dye so clearly a mineral. But when falling through the air, doppled by pinpoint-circles of sunlight that dodged through the tree’s canopy, seen against the rugged black bark of the sturdy wood it belonged to–Ruvle empathized with the fools.

  The late afternoon sun warmed her wax eye, a gentle heat shared by her skin. The long, complex day had been demoted to yesterday, separated by a genuinely wonderful sleep. Ruvle curled up her legs and sprung to her feet, no arms required, a smile on her face.

  Chain stripped off another piece of bark from half of a fallen branch in his hands, sitting up against a Fool’s Dye tree. “Honestly? I’m a convert on the hammock.”

  “I told you you’d like it,” Ruvle chirped. He was sitting in it; she’d hung it between the two closest-spaced trees in the grove before they slept.

  “You didn’t have to do that for me.” In absence of a knife, he cut off the bark with the side of the tape measure’s blade. “I was completely ready to sleep in the alcazar.”

  “I know, but you said how bad the alcazar is, and I didn’t want you to wake up scared and tired…” She strolled towards him. It felt so much better to be back in an outfit she belonged in, her bodysuit. Ruvle plucked her fez off a twig she’d stored it on.

  “I’ve never slept overnight in it, yeah. That could be really bad, testing my resistance too much.” He held up the newly bark-free stick and stood out of the hammock, twirling the wood.

  “It just wouldn’t have been practical if we’re training,” she added. “It’s nothing personal.”

  “Sure, you didn’t want to do something nice for me after I saved your skin back there.”

  “...Quiet, you.”

  He snickered and started whittling at the branch. “Alright. Pop a food pill; I already did. I’m gonna make some tiles to work with, and then we get serious.”

  Ruvle took one from the bottle currently in his briefcase, up in a tree. It tasted the way metal smelled; she gagged it down. He was still scraping a flat texture into the branch once she returned, slow work with a facsimile of a dull knife. No. Bad. She swiped both items from his hands.

  “Hey–”

  She zipped the blade along the branch in quick motions that she barely thought about, applying correct, controlled force like she’d practiced with the gearbox puzzle, but dramatically easier at scale. Wood sliced off with flat faces, leaving a square dowel, which she sawed and chopped like a vegetable. Thin square tiles flipped and flicked onto the hammock, spreading into a pile, clicking onto one another and sticking just the way Chain had claimed of foolswood, until she had but a nub between her fingers. She tossed it in the air, among the falling petals, and sliced it in half–a final useful tile into the stack, and the twig-tip falling into the earth, to join the carpet of yellow.

  “...Aces,” Chain said, eyes on her instead of the pile.

  “I don’t want to waste time,” she explained. “Start training!” she said, leaning in with hands on her hips, frowning in a way that only made Chain cackle.

  “Going in the alcazar real soon,” he said. “As for you? See that tree over there with the funky spiral branch?”

  “I do.” It reminded her of an unruly lock of hair on an otherwise-styled scalp.

  “I say go catch its petals before they touch the ground. As many as you can.”

  Ruvle smiled. It sounded like purpose. It sounded like fun.

  That challenge, as it turned out, exercised different mental circuits than dodging water jets. Ruvle dove to catch another three falling petals just a second before they hit the ground, her hand sweeping through them with the grace of a hummingbird; her other hand caught a fourth, and a fifth landed on her back. She shot up and crushed the five petals together to toss the floral ball outside of the tree’s shadow, sweeping with her left leg to catch more–but around her, more continually hit the ground, too many to catch up with. Were she an army of ten, each instance of her taking responsibility for more than an arm’s radius under the tree...some might still slip through. They numbered as raindrops.

  Fool’s Dye rivaled algae blooms in its ability to print biomass, in its case, as floral bounty.

  Ruvle didn’t even try for the whole tree, yet. One octant of its shadow, delineated by the extended tape measure on the ground–bent around the tree trunk–was her playing field. She bent back and swept her other leg, catching three more petals with the latter, one more as it fell onto her neck, and oh no, she forgot–she shot her hand out for the falling scrap of gold at the edge of her vision that she’d procrastinated on for critical seconds, but her depth perception misjudged it a finger-length further away than her hand could go. It hit the ground. Ruvle sighed and she

  This novel's true home is a different platform. Support the author by finding it there.

  hopped back up.

  When the water jets in the monastery fired, they did so close to the body, emerging so quickly that one didn’t have time to plan; they all had to be reacted to as soon as they appeared. Petals, by contrast, fell gently, fluttering, giving her time, perhaps ten seconds each. A child could catch one. One. But when a hundred were airborne, they formed a long task list, visual and vertical in level of urgency. With this training, she could learn not just spatial agility, but temporal agility, arranging her body to handle simultaneous tasks of dexterity that were not so simultaneous after all.

  Ruvle tried to remember the cluster of petals currently descending far away, at the edge of the octant, in need of a stride or two to reach them. She swiped as many as she could, close to the trunk, her arms flying and snatching, plucking yellow out of the sky like a frog’s tongue would catch a bug, ascending–until her shoulders ached and none left were urgent, all still fluttering from the canopy instead of approaching a root. But by then, to catch them all, she’d turned around to face the trunk. Out of time, she drove backwards, trusting her memory of where the cluster was, her relation to the world–and struck true, collecting more into her hands. Two of them made it to a resting place on her face, but two more had been a split-second lower than she remembered, and touched down onto the earth.

  And to dawdle on that would let a completely different left cluster get too much headway, never mind the general flower snow she kept track of, every flake a different entry in her mind…

  Adrenaline, in exercise, slowed the world. The human brain could get a lot done in ten seconds. She could do this, too. She had the speed for an octant, but keeping track of everything and yet taking on the associated endurance challenge of constantly jumping around to cover the ground ad nauseum?

  The challenge befitted her. This was a great idea.

  This was a terrible idea. The moon shone high in the sky, sometime around what must have been midnight. Ruvle hunched over with her hands on her knees, her head hanging, panting. The calves of her bodysuit had resigned from indigo and defected to yellow, her thighs well on their way to the same. Her hands pretended to wear yellow gloves. She hoped that her wax hadn’t compromised its color, either. Her heart and lungs refused any more work, and her left shoulder ached every time she rotated it. All that running to the monastery and back took endurance, as had deflecting darts, as had learning flydodging. This task required even more physical vigor. More, more, more. The petals continued to drift, no longer interrupted.

  Footsteps rustled elsewhere in the grove. Chain stepped out among the trees, holding his scarf in both hands, folded up into the shape of a bowl. Beyond her chosen octant, the hill of wadded-up petals blocked her view of him from the waist-down.

  “...are you still working on that?” Chain asked.

  Ruvle nodded slowly, her chest heaving.

  “Okay, break time.” He approached, and briefly whistled in approval at the size of the pile she’d built from haphazard throwing. He sat down in the middle of the octant, the earth squishing beneath him, and he held up the bowl. “Water. Drink.”

  Rocky powder grains had settled to the bottom of the scarf-bowl, lit up clearly by the new grids of tislets that Ruvle didn’t even try to comprehend. The water seemed clear. She joined him in seating and lifted the bowl herself–heavy!–and drank, however much her body needed.

  In total, enough to make her gasp for air twice over when she finally freed her lips from the fabric rim.

  “...where did you find water…?” she asked.

  “There’s a little stream you can see coming down Mount Radius at this one edge of the grove, where that lip of bluish rocks is,” he said. “So that’s what I did today; I researched if I could carry water.”

  Ruvle’s breath didn’t slow. “...you made a new sequence in one day?” He’d taken plenty of time the last two times he learned those, hadn’t he?

  He shrugged. “I tweaked the surfboard idea over and over until I made it a bowl. Still holds final acid, too. There’s, uh. This particular class of physia called…they have at least ten different names for it; ‘shape-functionality’ makes the most sense, but ‘Kid Logic‘ is catchiest. That’s the parachute, the surfboard, bowl. Ways where if the scarf can take the shape of something simple, it will be that something simple, I’m finding. Little easier to me than physia like mirror or hammer-whip.”

  Ruvle wiped her mouth on the back of her hand without thinking, then regretted the taste of her fancy new yellow lipstick. “Okay. Then…can you fold your scarf into the shape of a mirror?”

  Chain looked up and narrowed his eyes, thinking. “...Gotta try that. I bet…don’t bet, but I bet that saves 200 tislets.” He whistled. “Here, come with me, let me show you the stream.”

  “I want to be anywhere but under this tree right now,” Ruvle told him. She was out before he was.

  After passing by a wild beehive, the occupants of which bumbled around it enough to be worth detouring five seconds for, Chain led her to the treeline. The many faces of Mount Radius’s stone–white, gray, foreboding black, each cliff a different shade–imprinted themselves in Ruvle’s memory under this twinkling night. The jagged profiles of two cliffs met, straight lines of exposed mountainous stone just like every other, except for a conspicuous winding curve between them. Its brook of meltwater, from the snowy peak so high above, glimmered.

  “That’s a long walk,” Ruvle commented, crouching down to the current hill’s edge. The blue stones formed an intimidating rim, one only easily seen over from the inside, with no more climbing up the foothill left to do–and it contained the deep layer of petals in the peak of the grove.

  “Or a short parachute ride,” Chain said. “I followed the stream back up until I got onto that big black cliff there, then parachuted back. A little tedious, but a walk gets the ideas flowing.”

  Ruvle brushed away some petals from the rock-rim, absent-mindedly. “This would be a lot easier if you could fly, wouldn’t it? Can you research that?”

  “Nah, gravity is a big-boy property. There’s no turning that off without a zone.”

  Ruvle shook her head. “One day I’ll get an idea of what’s easy and what’s not…”

  “So will I. If I knew exactly what made everything hard, I’d already know how to do it in the first place.” He kicked a loose twig. “Speaking of which, that’s what I’m doing besides the bowl. Made myself a list of crazy ideas I wanna do and then I’m going to learn exactly why they’re all way too hard.” And he snapped his fingers. “And I still have to show you the alcazar.”

  “That’s three different projects in one day,” she commented.

  “I have time for three different projects, now.” He winked. “It’s the whole reason we’re here.”

  Ruvle thought about the gearbox puzzle, about exoproprio, about building stamina. All would be well.