She had little to do that night in the grove. Ruvle didn’t feel like jumping around like a madwoman to catch flowers. All she did was sit, watching the petals flutter down, the gentle breeze guiding them–doing her best to track each and every one, to the limits of her mental map. She couldn’t do it. Of course she couldn’t. Her arms crossed tightly over the slab of indigo stone held to her chest.

  A squirrel threw an acorn at her head. It bounced off her skull, a bonk and a grunt. It was amazing how the people that actually mattered in the world were untouchable, even to a man like Othek. But for someone who didn’t matter, it still stung a little to get a nut to the temple.

  “Ah, go away,” Chain said, emerging behind a tree and flapping his scarf in the squirrel’s direction; it bolted off. He chuckled into a grumble while he approached Ruvle, his light-up shoes shining around his footfalls. “How’d it go?” he asked, already tapping a section of his scarf.

  She didn’t answer. Chain wrapped the scarf around her shoulders. The scabs on the side of her face tingled with renewal.

  “Bad?” Chain asked.

  “Bad.” She hung her head.

  Ruvle told him the story. About the new glint, about how Fygra probably had multiple to merge now. About hiding so well and having been obvious the whole time. About Othek showing up and getting executed, being a pile of ripped flesh like livestock taken apart for meat. About having to sign his death certificate, and nearly her own. About how she had to stick to her lack of principles, just in case she could steal from Othek, only for that to go wrong, too. About how Nerso was more ruthless than her, so she didn’t even have that going for her.

  And the worst part: about how Fygra saved her. Because she was useful.

  “Have you ever been so bad at being an enemy to someone that they think you’re on their side?” Ruvle whispered.

  Chain sat quietly with Ruvle’s hand clasped in his.

  “Do I avoid them, now?” she asked, her voice shaky. “Until I’m Ultrafine? Until we have a chance?”

  “Yeah, maybe,” he said, giving a gentle squeeze. “Doesn’t mean it’s not worth anything to keep training.”

  “...I don’t know how I’ll ever get there. I can’t be more precise than a man who can stop time.” A tear fell from her eye. “I can’t do anything to them. I can’t hide, I can’t out-talk Fygra, I can’t even hope to hurt them…” And that was with her being proactive. She wanted to be untouchable herself, so not even the true citizens could hurt her, and she couldn’t even defend herself from a determined enough squirrel.

  “Come on, Ruvie,” he said, pulling down his mask to show a gentle smile. “We’ll find something. We’ll get those glints out of the picture sometime.”

  She wiped her eye.

  “Besides, you can do something to them. You got away with robbery.” He pulled his mask back up. “You smashed up Fygra’s lab, in disguise, and you’re still here. Imagine if she knew that was you. You wouldn’t be talking to me right now. But you disrupted something that belonged to her, and she didn’t know you did it. It’s not like you have absolutely nothing on her, even if it’s this one tiny thing. And the more we train, the bigger an edge we’re going to have, until you can swipe that glint right out from under her.”

  Ruvle let out a shaky sigh. “Thank you.” She furrowed her brow. “I can do this.”

  “You can do this.” He gently unwrapped his scarf from her. Ruvle touched her cheek, and the scabs crumbled off as black dust, the skin still red, raw, and recessed beneath–but sealed.

  “I will do this.” She took a deep breath. She’d succeeded on information-gathering, too, hadn’t she? Though the details were fuzzy, she’d seen those actuators on Nerso’s metal harness come down, and then Othek exploded. His goggles had something to do with the way he perceived and operated in the world. If she were to take him on, it would have to do with disabling that harness and his goggles. A plan for the Ultrafine future–and a future she would not let slip out of her fingers. “I know how I’ll get there.”

  “How?”

  “By training harder than these self-important m–” She wanted to say ‘motherfuckers’, but her notary voice had no swears. “These self-important Thoughtless-enablers ever could.” Ruvle stood up. Not like a Gross person would, not today–she did a kip up into her feet without use of her hands. “We’re not changing the plan. We train until we’re good enough.”

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  Chain stood and gave her a high-five. She answered with a hug.

  They practiced–on and on, days passing. Ruvle’s sector around her tree eclipsed most of its shadow, the unaffected region no longer the looming majority, but a dwindling slice of what Ruvle could no longer do. Her vigor had reached its practical limits, it seemed, her lungs and heart not willing to support any more fitness–but as she worked, her motions optimized, internalizing Elial’s advice about economy of mobility and keeping her options open. She came to think of different arrangements of near-earth petals as ‘positions’, like pieces on a game board, and her choices about her body as making good discretized moves. Soon. Soon, she would cover the entire shadow, not just three-fourths of it, and after that–it perhaps would be best not to continue learning from the tree at all; she could feel the way of thinking of partial-second timetables become innate even when not under the tree. Thoughts of the file room made her strategically ‘plan’ for the documents on the bottom shelves until her higher mind caught up with the worn-in grooves of many-times repeated actions, and she felt a lack of urgency whenever she held a food pill while standing up. It simply felt easier to put it in her mouth and choke it down when she sat down, her head and hand closer to the floor, as the petal floor had become the physical place where tasks were urgent in her mind.

  The vacation, perhaps, was best to be almost over–almost. Once she achieved exoproprio, she could could press Chain to leave. Her father mentioned to her over the textwork that the nice old lady had another box of cinnamon tea waiting for her. And she had to stop herself from trying to catch Chain’s scarf when it fell to the ground, at times.

  Chain took her aside to explain his own developments, one afternoon. Admittedly, his conceptual breakthroughs–or rather, acquisitions of existing knowldge–went over her head. What she cared about was what more he could do with tislets, and he had answers.

  “...That makes it a long sequence, but that’s how I get it semi-vulnerable,” Chain explained, pacing around at the edge of the grove, waving his scarf around in both hands and crunching sun-dried petals under his shoes; the light-up functionality of the right shoe had worn out, so only the left sole blinked in his brainstorming pacing. “Not the same thing as indestructible, but kinda. There’s no reason not to keep it up if I got the sequence scrivened, so I might be able to use the scarf more defensively with that as a base…”

  “How long is ‘long’ for a sequence?” Ruvle asked, her hips and her head tilted.

  “Now? I think I’ve got stuff optimized down to under a thousand tislets each, so I can fit five or sometimes six, but semi-vulnerable, that takes up like two thousand of my 5,888.” He flapped his scarf around more vigorously, snapping it against the breeze. “It’s not gonna do anything solo unless I want to jam some gears by feeding my scarf into them or something. But there’s also this trick, I’m calling it sling, where…” He picked up a loose blue stone from the grove’s raised rim and tucked it into the scarf. He briefly bundled it up and swung it over his head a few times before releasing one end of the scarf in the exact manner that one would expect of a person who had never used a sling before. It sent the rock flying–far, much farther than expected. It hit somewhere against the cliffside of Mount Radius above their preferred water stream, rather than tumbling down the foothill’s slopes. “I gotta get some practice with it. There’s something with potential here, can’t figure it out exactly.”

  “Let me try,” Ruvle perked up.

  He handed her a rock and his scarf. Ruvle bundled up most of the scarf, leaving only a small loop in which to hold the rock and spin it vigorously. She frowned, focusing visually on a small stack of stones she’d built atop that stream cliffside one day to clear her head. It looked to be about…about…she already knew about how far away it was from having visited there over and over, but the bright sun today and fuzzy shadows made it slightly unclear, and she needed clarity with today’s transverse breeze…it reminded her of her shot against Othek’s hat, but with a much longer distance and without pain…

  Ruvle had also never used a sling before, so she slowed her fabric-spinning and adjusted her grip a few times. But she figured it out, and tossed a few rocks against blank mountainside, getting an idea of how much extra velocity that tislets cheated into the projectile. Now for the real target. With one more wind-up, she launched a final rock.

  The stone hit the stack on the cliffside, tumbling it over, and Ruvle smiled.

  “Nice.” Chain made grabby-hands motions, and Ruvle tossed him his bundled scarf back.

  “Is that the same ‘extension’ idea you mentioned when you came up with gauze?”

  “Yeah, a little of it!” He wrapped it around his neck again. “There’s shades of how much you can stretch physia. What I’m thinking is, you know what, there can’t be too much difference from a super-tweaked physia and a sujecta outright, but that’s still above me to get the details. I can just see the path now.” He put his fingers on his temples, grinning. “Mirror, hammer-whip, parachute, gauze, acid surfboard, lots of different kid logics, semi-vulnerability, sling. Whole bunch of random tiny tools that I can load up my scarf with. There’s a way to get through someone’s defenses in here somewhere, I can feel it, but it’s not gonna be direct. I’m gonna take a different tactic.” The scarf rippled in the wind, and he tied it more tightly as dried petals showered it horizontally. “Still haven’t figured out how to stamp out that one crazy idea, either. I’m trying not to get too excited, but it almost looks like I could actually do it.”

  “And what is it?”

  “If I tell you, I’d disappoint you when it fails.”

  Ruvle pouted. “Then tell me if it succeeds.”

  “Oh, you’ll know. You’ll know.”

  With parting assurances, Ruvle went back to getting stronger.