Days passed, and almost nothing went wrong.

  “Lass, you have to stop passing out from exhaustion,” the squirrel said, nudging Ruvle by the shoulder.

  She opened her one eye, unfocused at the squirrel, and faded back to sleep. Dreaming, she stood upon a crisscross of twine wires, extending from horizon to horizon, a thousand moons in the sky and a deep purple haze all around her. She balanced on the twine with the ease of hard ground, while other creatures floated by on their own. A ghostly visage of Elial walked across the wires, barely there in the distance. Henchmen paced elsewhere, faint individually, but their transparencies stacked atop each other to opacity. Closest still, yet, was a woman in a labcoat far too big for her, with frizzy red hair and stark black gloves, her veins lit up with a toxic glow.

  The labcoat hissed at Ruvle, like a snake. She would rather not confront it. She closed the curtain that just now existed over it, twinkling grains of Dye separating her from the reminder. Remarkably quiet, that hiss, with security in her growing power being a reminder, too. But it didn’t go away. She could hear it, and see the face–the lines of middle age around her nose, the curls that twisted the opposite chirality at her brow. More detail than Elial’s. She wondered how long it would take to forget that face.

  “Lass.”

  Ruvle grunted.

  “You doing okay?”

  Ruvle sat up–sleep paralysis did not exist at Coarse–and rubbed her good eye. “...You’re not a squirrel.”

  “Not that you know of.” Chain grinned.

  Ruvle laughed sleepily, leaning forward, putting her hands between her crossed legs. She’d spent the last few days–five?–of training beneath this same tree, for almost all of her time. By now, the sector around her had sunken like low tide around the others, no longer so easily replenished by the petals above and crushed flat by her feet all day, a fort of yellow slowly growing around that wedge-shaped recession. And like low tide, she’d found treasures buried among the petals. “There’s…this one squirrel that keeps throwing acorns at me.”

  “And missing?”

  “Every time. Unless I’m asleep, which means I can’t dodge…” she put a finger on a fading red spot on her temple. “I’m so…vulnerable sometimes. I’m Exact when I’m aware and oriented, but the snake and the squirrel…”

  “Hey, maybe it’d happen less if you didn’t work yourself to passing out.”

  Ruvle stood up, stretching her arms up. “I’m not. It’s not passing out. I train until I’m too tired to perform, and then, what else is there to stay awake for?” She smiled. “Dad’s running the office for now. All I have to think about is training.”

  “Huh.”

  “When I’m in Stepwise…I have to open consistently and close consistently. Time for being a notary, time for the monastery, and 9 hours to sleep. That’s almost all I do. It’s a tight schedule. I can’t sleep whenever I want when it’s so spoken-for. But now I’m out here and…I don’t know what time it is. And I don’t have to know!” She rolled her shoulders and sighed happily. “So when I’m exhausted, I can…just sleep it off. And then I’m fresh when I pop back up, and I train until I can’t train anymore, and then I sleep some more. It’s simple.”

  Chain whistled. “And the stress doesn’t drive you nuts?”

  “...What stress?”

  “The stress of that being the only thing that matters, if I’m hearing ya right. The entire value of your time depends on whether you did your best when you’re training.“ He chuckled nervously and rubbed the back of his head. “That’s half the reason I’m learning a bunch of different ideas. Like this, what if I did just one, and got stuck on it for this whole trip? I’d feel like dirt.”

  Ruvle blinked. “...I don’t think I get it. Why is that easier? I’m looking forward to finishing the gearbox puzzle so I can do only this.” She gestured back to the tree she stood under. “I almost have it; I can turn the big gear consistently now.”

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  “Aces.”

  “I’m not worried about doing my best. I know I am. I have one idea in front of me, I can do it all day, I get better when I’m doing it…” A tear came to her sighted eye. “This might be the best vacation I’ve ever had.”

  Chain looked at her blankly for a few seconds. And then he cackled in genuine joy. “I’m so glad we’re friends. Every damn time, you find a way to make me think.”

  “You’re welcome,” she said, in her practiced notary voice that leaked no confusion.

  “Oh hey, speaking of that–I found an answer to your question.”

  “Which question?” Ruvle sat down in the recessed sector of the tree, getting the sense that this would be long; Chain followed suit, sitting atop one of the piles of compacted petals, getting modest elevation.

  “You wanted to know why tislets act temporary when they’re on my scarf, but what they do is permanent when on a tile.” He pulled out a set of tiles from a cargo pocket, holding lines of five between each of his fingers on one hand, all glowing with one tislet on the front and another on the back. “Turns out? Tiles are the way tislets normally work, and I thought it was the other way around. They change a property and it stays changed. I thought that tislets had to be continuated to keep the effect going, but the magic isn’t something that temporarily overrides reality or anything. It makes itself part of reality. So it happens and then it persists, like how if you make a rock, it doesn’t have a finite pool of rock-ness that it’s using up; it just is a rock and stays a rock until there’s a catastrophic non-rock event.”

  “...Continuated?”

  Chain patted a patch of tislets on his scarf with his other hand, and they glowed brighter, spreading to the inscrutable borders of that sequence and flickering some of their constituents in and out of their alternative tislet-forms. That was probably the whip, since the other ones did something obvious and nothing seemed to happen. She couldn’t see visual seams between his sequences anymore. “Some books say ‘powered’ or ‘asserted’. I like ‘continuated’, because there’s no energy or anything and I don’t think there’s a cost, but you can think of it like being powered. Power on, they’re on, power off, they’re off.” Ruvle nodded, then gestured for him to keep talking. “This is the part I’m less clear on, but tiles get continuated too. It’s just that they’re done, and gone, by the time the effect takes place. When continuation ends, the effect ends too, but I don’t think continuation is fundamental. Maybe they cheat the ‘power off, turn off’ rule. I think since the tislets disappear, it messes up the whole idea of continuation in the first place and something deeper happens, but like I said, not so clear on this. For a minute there I was thinking that tislets on tiles were a written out version of what change is, like if you could somehow separate a clock from its tick, you would get a still clock and a bunch of tislets, but that doesn’t make sense with the idea of continuation.”

  Ruvle watched the fastest-flickering tislets on his scarf. “...Can you erase them while they’re continuating? And make them permanent, that way?”

  “Seeeee? See, you come up with this stuff!” Chain spread one end of his scarf across his lap. “T-stun. There’s a whole area of research. I talked to a lady with a mini-lab you can get to inside a support column, and the idea is there should be a tiny, tiny window of time where you can erase a tislet during activation. That could get a scarf sequence to work the same way as a tile sequence, but no one knows how to do anything more than a proof of concept. She has this erasing apparatus that works one in a thousand times.”

  “That seems obvious how to fix,” she said. “Just let me do it.”

  “Eh, maybe. I don’t know enough about how it works yet and you don’t know how to erase.”

  “It can’t be that hard!”

  “It’s magic; Ruvle, you gotta rethink your assumptions. Just like the computer code guys.”

  She crossed her arms and had nothing to say. The hack still felt obvious to her.

  “That’s all I got today. I’m still going down my list of crazy ideas; there’s one that I still can’t figure out why I can’t do. Any breakthroughs for you?”

  Ruvle shook her head. “I’m slightly faster and am slightly more aware of my surroundings than yesterday.”

  “That’s the spirit.”

  “I found some old windchimes buried under the petals and some soda caps–”

  She shot her hand up to catch an acorn out of the air, stopping it inches from her face, without flinching. Her eye swiveled to the tree past Chain, where a squirrel perched on the fork between two branches. It honked menacingly.

  “I need to go deal with this.”

  “Have fun!”