Time blurred past as they settled into a groove. The old windchimes now hung up on the twin trees where she kept her hammock and Chain’s briefcase. The faint rainbow exterior–heat-treated bismuth metal–iridesced as it rang on windy nights, and she imagined where it belonged in the east-northeast; in their song, she understood why the people of the windy pass adored windchimes so much as to take their name.

  The sector under Ruvle’s tree widened, growing from an eighth of the area to a fifth as she pressed her ambitions. In the hours where she just did not feel up to bouncing around like a terrified rabbit under the tree, she’d practiced with the gearbox puzzle–and now it lay in a fold in Chain’s briefcase, solved. She could twist the smallest gears with sharpened twigs, controlling them on the order of individual gear teeth, viewing it through suspended water droplets in lieu of magnifying glass. But even that, in time, became unnecessary. Solving, unsolving, scrambling, twisting–before the trip, Exact precision and musclepower obstructed one another, the entire reason for unsolvability. Now, her control had narrowed until she could feel the variations in friction for each individual gear tooth, operating by touch alone. She could picture the rusted puzzle box in her mind, the same way she pictured falling petals–so, so many falling petals, enough to leave her buried in her hammock whenever she woke up in it, enough to have recolored her entire bodysuit. Enough that she wanted a reward, to feel her strength.

  Today, she looked at the food pill in her palm and sighed.

  “Something wrong?” Chain said, shaking out another pill from the bottle, this one into his own hand. He swallowed it with a swig of water from his scarf-as-bowl.

  “...Nothing,” she said, and repeated what he did. It was a taste that did not want to be acquired and made death threats to her tongue every day. “There are days where discipline is hard.”

  “Don’t I know it. Try something spontaneous that still moves you forward; you don’t have to do this the Thoughtful way.” He capped the bottle again and wrapped his scarf around his shoulders.

  She was talking about the food, not the training, but Ruvle didn’t feel like arguing. “Maybe the beehive again,” Ruvle said, with a sigh. “It’s fun to get close…”

  “So they swarm you. Yeah, I saw you do that. Amazing how you don’t get stung.”

  Ruvle didn’t even nod, simply thinking, sitting there on the petals between trees with her friend. “You didn’t stop me just to have a talk, did you?”

  “Not just to talk, but the talking is important. Kinda why I waited until you were sitting there rearranging dirt instead of fighting the tree.” He put a hand on her shoulder, and Ruvle smiled weakly. “I can never figure out if you’re tired or exhilarated in here.”

  “A little of both?” She put her hand over his. “The faster I go, the faster I wear out…the better my stamina gets. I like this kind of training and my body thinks it’s too much. I want to stop and I want to keep going. It’s a lot of work and a lot of getting better, and none of enjoying my strength. It’s…complicated.”

  Chain adjusted his face mask. “You know what? Good.”

  “...Good?”

  “I think people should have more than one emotion about the biggest part of their lives.” He gestured to the tree she trained under. They’d stopped using the tape measure as a marker and instead chose vertically-placed twigs, so the measure wouldn’t be lost under falling petals. “Come on, show me what you can do.”

  She returned to the tree and bent down to get some unearthed objects from the expanded sector out of the way, tilling the soil of half-decomposed petals and crackling dry chips of plant mass. Her bodysuit had started to crease and sag in places, most clear in these awkward poses.

  “Huh, neat,” Chain said. Ruvle tossed an irregular, polygonal slab of indigo stone out onto a petal fort pile, spraying yellow shreds into the air everywhere. Despite wear marks on the edges, rain, erosion, and much dirt from centipedes and worms, the color had not faded. And she knew because it was an exact match.

  “I found this,” she said. “I’ve been crushing down the floor enough that my feet hit something solid.” She brushed over the flat stone face, clearing dirt and revealing a deep, white scratch in the center–or, rather, two, two scratches that crossed over in the middle, yet nearly parallel in their angles of incidence, a shape that visually scanned as an I unless viewed closely. At a low angle, it became more like a vertically-stretched X.

  Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  “Cool,” he said, crouched down close to it. “Don’t know what it is, but I like it.”

  “It’s the kind of stone they use in the floor of the monastery,” Ruvle explained. She rubbed her palms over the surface, cleaning off more dirt, and then slid her fingertips over it. “It’s the same color and the same texture.”

  Chain whistled. “So is this where they got the stuff? I didn’t see anything like that color around here.”

  “No, probably not, I…there could have been another monastery here,” Ruvle said. “Before hyperdexterity almost died.” Her eye widened. “Oh, that’s what it was!”

  “What?”

  “I thought your idea about falling petals sounded familiar. When I was just getting initiated into hyperdexterity, when I was still Gross, Tiose–he’s one of the other Coarse people–told me that people used to be able to catch every leaf from a tree. And Fine can keep the ground around it dry in a rainstorm. I think he meant these trees, Fool’s Dye.” She smiled.

  “You gotta share that with your buddies when you get back,” Chain said. “Eesol, was it?”

  “Elial. You know, no, I don’t have to wait,” she said. She ran to the hammock-bearing trees to fetch her notary pen (her bodysuit was getting too loose to hold it in place securely now), and wrote out a quick textwork message explaining what she saw. “Okay, done.” Back at Chain, she hopped into the center of the cleared sector of the tree. “Ready!”

  “Start catching!” he told her.

  Ruvle plucked a single petal out of the air. As a joke. Chain cackled, and Ruvle smiled to herself. That voice sounded good. It sounded like permission, to herself. To spend this session not trying to incremententally stretch herself to do more than yesterday, but to just…show off.

  She showed off.

  She became unto a gas, filling the sector of tree with herself–in each individual moment, she was a human, mid-leap or lunge, hands and feet out in all different directions. And yet, every second had nothing to do with the last. Ruvle was a blur, a blur of collection, sweeping the air like it were tile, bouncing off the tree and earth as one and the same rubber, all her muscle groups in perfect sync, never a moment idle–for on the timescales of sprints, she no longer needed rest. Flicks of her hands tested distances with puffs of air, twirling petals that she’d get back to later in their descent–a correction for her depth perception. Clusters fell apart from each other, and she minimized distance like Elial taught her, saving precious tenths of seconds. Her hands caught, her feet caught, her head caught. A strategic whip of her neck at the right time batted a petal in the right direction with her hair, simply because she could.

  The petals accumulated–not on the ground, but in her hands, a compacted ball of arboreal biomass, flaky and crunched-together. She bounded and sprinted, tossing the ball up at points when she needed all four limbs, always accumulating. The crunched dirt below waited and waited for its next infusion of yellow, and received nothing. The world was arid as far as Ruvle willed it in her domain, and it would only expand in further training.

  She remembered this aspirational state, this capability she’d so disbelieved on first visit back in her Gross era. Surely, that required training from birth and an exceptional human being…not a busy, sleepy notary with one eye. And yet the trees cared not for preconceptions. Ruvle had become the hyperdexterity she’d joined for, Coarseness sanding away the old self, her coordination a fine art, her stamina deeper than any inkwell, her precision an exercise in macro-scale perfection, finally dextrous enough to catch the wings of happiness.

  And when her lungs finally burned enough to slow her down, she landed, bent, and threw the ball of petals between her legs, landing it squarely in Chain’s lap.

  Ruvle panted, catching her breath. She wiped her brow. Once more, the hungry dirt resumed its meal of falling petals. “How was that?” she asked, with a satisfied smile.

  Chain spared one look down at the rough-sided yellow orb in his lap. “Damn.”

  “I would have tried gentle steps there, too,” Ruvle said, still bent-over, rubbing her hand against her shoulder to wipe off the floral grime. “I haven’t figured out how to be fast enough to not snap crunchy leaves. That might take until Fine.”

  “Yeah.” He blinked.

  “I have lots of subtle techniques now that you might have missed there,” she said.

  “I’ll be honest, I’m pretty sure I missed all of them,” Chain confided. “Just wanna make this clear, I appreciate your skill, that was wicked cool, and I wish I could do that. It was also, you know. Sexy. I was not naming skills while I was watching every move.”

  Ruvle laughed and stood up straight again; she spun on her bare heel. “Being sexy is more of a fringe benefit.” She flipped a lock of her hair back.

  “One I will be thinking about a lot in the alcazar.” He absent-mindedly combed fingers through his own hair. “I’ll let you get back to resting.”

  Ruvle fell with control onto her back, crossing one leg over the other. “Enjoy it.”

  And as Chain walked away with a gaze over his shoulder, Ruvle turned her good eye to the hollow where she’d unearthed the indigo slab.

  She hadn’t mentioned it to Chain, because the conversation had moved on and this didn’t matter much–but there was something else in there. A chunk of a similar slab, this one in scarlet, smaller–the size of her fist. The white engraving on that one was incomplete, but from what remained…it looked a lot like a lemniscate.