Her teacher in Exaction took one look at her that night and shook her head. “Get well first. Broken bodies need rest.”

  Ruvle fumed, the indigo stained-glass-filtered moonlight turning her red face purple. “I went through the effort of putting this on and taking the sling on and off,” she said, glancing down over her bodysuit and her messed-up arm, “I’m not letting that go to waste!” Exaction let her change clothes without too much pain or wayward nudges of cracked bones.

  “No. You’ll hurt yourself further. It will set you back. How long are you willing to delay your recovery for lessons that will be painful?” she asked.

  A rhetorical question, but she had an answer. “A few days. Until I’m out of the three-in-seven-days frequency limit on injections and then my arm will be fine. I can develop in ways that don’t need my arm, and it might hurt; side effects happen, but it doesn’t matter because I already have to wait for the injection. Please train me. We’ll do precision or coordination or something.”

  Her trainer stared, thinking, dull gray eyes from underneath her headband. “...what is it that you want to practice?”

  It was a quieter night at the monastery, this time. An early Coarse initiate, like herself, was climbing about the walls and changing the indigo netting, while someone tinkered in the corner with a box fan. Besides those two, Ruvle and her trainer had the common grounds all to themselves. “Anything. Getting better at dodging,” she added.

  “That’s broad.”

  “It’s a broad problem.”

  Her trainer nodded. “Expect only incremental progress, especially in your condition.”

  “I know,” Ruvle said, reining herself in from more aggressive wording; why were people trying to dissuade her at every turn? “But I got shot out of the sky, and that’s why my arm is messed up now. I didn’t have anything to stand on and I couldn’t move, so—”

  Oh, her teacher was gesturing for her to follow, now. She didn’t actually need convincing. Ruvle stepped on after her, expecting to go to the center of the common grounds (a few seconds), but her teacher kept moving—all the way to the netting. Her subsequent quick hop up reminded Ruvle of that squirrel on the rooftop: she made it look like humans were built to climb, a natively vertical species, gliding in two dimensions up that wall with no effort at all in finding handholds and footholds—several every second, disregarding gravity like unsolicited advice. Coarse hyperdexterity afforded uncanny mastery of climbing, of never missing a grab and being fully-coordinated. Fine hyperdexterity made it look like there was nothing to master. “Up here.”

  Ruvle followed, ascending slowly with only one arm available to grab the netting, but three stories of ascent was not a challenge. They arrived at one of the balcony-platforms, and Ruvle couldn’t help but get excited—and confused—because this one led to the swimming pool area. “...hey, if we’re going to be working together longer-term, I should learn your name,” Ruvle admitted. It was tradition to rotate teachers or training partners day-by-day in Exaction, to develop the variety of skills needed for true embodiment, but that tradition died from depopulation—and her new teacher had become the only Fine initiate that still visited, really...

  “Elial.” Her Fine teacher told her, looking over her shoulder and walking down the hall—an archway tunnel, of tiled, worked stone through the mountain, flat to the feet and with light diffusing from the other end. As they proceeded down, the scent of clean pool water became noticeable, just as the luminosity so brightened. “You’re puffy. Why are you puffy?”

  “Fluid overload,” Ruvle explained. “I learned from the nurses; did you know that burns are really hard on your kidneys? I thought getting shot from lasers was the scariest part of it, but then I started peeing blood and now all the injection fluid stays built up…”

  Elial put a hand on Ruvle’s shoulder, her face serious. “If you want me to continue pretending you’re well enough to train, you need to not tell me that you’re peeing blood.”

  “Sorry. Pretend I didn’t say that?”

  Elial tapped her chin a few times, considering.

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  “You’re looking for training to deal with something specific. You said lasers, being in the sky, and your arm...tell me what your challenge is, and I’ll recommend something that won’t damage you further.”

  And so Ruvle explained—her failed raid, trying to dodge on top of an unstable parachute, being shot from all angles. She was not deep enough into Exaction to sail through that. And there was still a vault door to lockpick her way through afterwards, supposedly a laser maze that she’d almost forgotten about, and—

  “I’m about to explain something that you can take as an opportunity or an insult,” Elial said.

  “Do it.”

  “You’re missing a foundational skill that you should have mastered by now.”

  Ruvle frowned and stamped her feet and was almost a big baby about it but…but having an ego would not serve her! “Is it weird that I’m taking that as both?”

  They stepped down a lip of three stairs, towards the swimming pool. Of all the exits of the mountainside where one could glimpse worked stone instead of natural cliffs and eroded cobbles, this was the most beautiful—at floor-level, the walls took the smooth undulating texture of a cavern frequently visited by water, with no ceiling to speak of, only an open view of the stars and moon above—and an atomic jetplane streaking across the sky with green fire. The indigo floor tiles mingled with the dark beige stone, no longer a full replacement, but providing branching paths—one to the pool itself, others to conspicuous outcroppings of stone in which discreet nozzles had been installed. The last path ended at a preserved monument high up on the wall: the imprint of branching tree leaves in solid stone, the ghost of a dense canopy of four-pointed leaves of a species no longer native to the crater. IAbove, a heavy natural awning of stone shielded it from rain, further preserved behind glass film. It was a microcosm of the story of the pool area from prehistory to today, as Ruvle recalled: for when the crater first formed, all life ended at the impact site, the corpses shoved to the walls of the impact basin and compressed with enough force to fuse stone. In time, dead biological matter decayed away, this open pocket of the mountainside among them—and with it exposed to the air, rain collected frequently, leaving a standing pond that had been here for years uncounted. Only the tree, so high up and naturally-protected, had its gravestone survive erosion. Getting rid of a beautiful pond was unpopular, and had been converted into this pool instead, its sides and depth still irregular, but now crystal-clear and maintained with pumps, down to the rocky floor.

  And one distracted moment to think about history was enough for Elial to fetch equipment from behind one of the stone outcroppings—a yellow squirt gun of the kind that fit in one hand. Her foot kicked a switch, and the nozzles around a different rocky pedestal—large enough to be an elevated stage to dance on—sprayed a staccato of laminar-flow water, at random, each shortly splattering on earth, several a second. “There’s no formal name for this skill, which is why I didn’t notice you lacked it during your test for Coarseness. I was told the metaphor of a housefly recently, so I will call it flydodging for you.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Anyone can dodge. Fewer can dodge multiple projectiles at the same time. From what you’ve told me, you back yourself into a corner with no options during multiple dodging, and then are shot. What you have to do…”

  Elial jumped into the laminar flow spray and stayed in motion; she swayed and ducked in center-stage, rolling her shoulders, sweeping her arms away from water. Casual, gentle tilts for close misses were interspersed with sharp lunges that Elial somehow didn’t fully commit to, stopping as soon as she could with firm footing, even on slick stone. She gyrated in the center, but never strayed.

  “...is choose to dodge in ways that retain your freedom of movement. Notice that my feet never leave the ground, no matter how direct—” She pulled back into a backbend that was over before Ruvle could even process it, back upright. “—the water’s shot is on me. I can always take steps to avoid a surprise when I’m mid-dodge, because I have ready contact with a support surface.”

  “Oh.” Ruvle thought back to her dramatic flips during the raid attempts and it hit her how unnecessary they were. “I should stop jumping when I don’t have to.”

  “An acrobatic leap is flashy, but it’s rarely correct. Do one when you can fully predict a danger, or when you have no other options. Moreover…” Elial tilted her head. “Notice how most of my movements are small.”

  “I’m noticing.” Ruvle held her slung arm with her other, attention rapt on Elial.

  “Have you ever slipped past a stranger in a crowded shop to get into an aisle? It’s much easier to stand and wait your turn. You have less to dodge, because you stay in a more open area. Spaces with less room for motion have fewer options, and they must be acted on faster.” Elial ducked down under two jets of water. “Good example. I could have twisted to my side to slip between those,” she added, back to standing and back to dodging, “but I would have been tightly horizontally constrained. There was more parsimony and flexibility in ducking down.”

  “So...so I want to learn to apply this, how do I do it?”

  Elial stepped off of the stage. Ruvle’s bodysuit had been lightly sprinkled with a dozen drops of water from the splashing of water against stone, by now. Elial’s bodysuit was drier than hers.

  “Step in and practice.”