For the next several days, Ruvle’s life looped without interruption: get sprayed by water in the evenings, get 9 hours of sleep, work in her notary office, repeat. She conserved her mental energy during the day to push herself during flydodging practice, and Elial was very much right—every jet of water splashing on her body proved this remediation necessary. Fellow initiates hardly struggled—whenever she had to take a break from the stage, she had the chance to watch someone else get inside and move just like Elial—even other Coarse initiates could do it, albeit with more concentration. Bodies bent, swayed and stepped in ways that Ruvle could too, so exactly, and yet whenever she tried, it would take less than a minute to corner herself and be sprayed unavoidably.

  All the sweating from the effort reduced her puffiness on Day 1, at least, but her slung arm only tolerated so many water jets before getting red and swollen. She bought a bottle of anti-inflammatory pills and painkillers to stop the swelling and keep training. She had to get this right.

  The hardest part of long, exhausting training sessions was not the burn in her lungs, nor the ache in her muscles from pushing her stamina into its ragged red zone, nor lying on the indigo floor in crying pain from her arm being bumped in just the wrong way for the fifth time in the night. No, it was not knowing what she was doing wrong.

  Some life skills could be picked up by having them explained. Some could be learned by exercising the principles until they were second nature. A third category had no instructions, but were built with practice alone, in marathon runners conditioning their hearts for distance. And then there were skills where one could follow the principles exactly and still have them mysteriously not work. But only for her. Everyone else could flydodge just fine. Ruvle could enter the stage with minimal movement in mind, with full intent to keep her options open, to dodge towards more-open areas and prevent her feet from leaving the ground—and no, one minute in, laminar flow splashed her shoulder. How did she corner herself again? She had no idea. The last two dodges seemed right, and then they weren’t.

  It didn’t change for the second, third, fourth or fifth days of putting in hours upon hours into dodging training.

  On the sixth, Ruvle could only tolerate about ten minutes and three splashes before she stormed off. She sat on one of the decorative rocks, her head in her hands—she’d finally waited out the clock for another injection, freeing her from that sling—and groaned. It escalated to a growl, and then a low-pitched wail, her fingers gripping at her hair, wet strands sliding flat against her pruned fingers like snakes.

  This wasn’t working. There had to be some trick to mastering this.

  Elial stepped on over, her hands behind her back and the swimming pool behind her, gray eyes focusing intently. “You’re improving.”

  “I am not,” Ruvle groaned, looking down at her feet. “I just can’t get it right. Every time I go in, I come out drenched, and I’m trying as hard as I can and it never stops! I can’t even blame my eye on this, because the water reflects so I know exactly where it is; I don’t have an excuse. I’m just stuck!” She scratched at the red wax tributaries around her eye. “And damn it, I have to fix my wax soon!”

  “Ruvle, you were struck twice per minute a few days ago. Today you nearly went the first five minutes dry. Do not let frustration get the better of you. Be a thoughtful adult.”

  Ruvle took a deep breath and sighed, letting hot anger spill as air from her lips. Another. “Sorry.” She put her hands on her knees. Insects chirped in the night, with the bright lights of colorbugs blinking, just above the open absence of rooftop. Red, green, yellow, blue, indigo—health officials warned not to stand among the colorbugs, because some of them had ultraviolet light as their shade, but no one listened. She looked up at them and smiled weakly. “It’s not an excuse, but I’ve been training for...20 hours? My self-control isn’t that good yet.”

  “Closer to 25,” Elial answered.

  “Maybe? I’m factoring in when I was taking breaks,” Ruvle said, slow and detached.

  “So am I.”

  Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

  Elial stood besides Ruvle, quietly now, her head tilted upwards. They shared no words while the colorbugs danced in the air, almost invisible in the darkness until it was their turn to become a glowing dot. They traced curves among the stars, each taking but a second to wink away, their own cycle to repeat, anonymous in the cloud.

  “I have to stare at these for a while,” Ruvle said. “Or I’m going to scream the next time I get sprayed.”

  “Enjoy them,” Elial said. “There is much that doesn’t feel worthwhile anymore, when you’re Fine or beyond. But these…” Elial cracked a smile. “...I still love them. I haven’t lost that.”

  Ruvle took Elial’s hand and squeezed it as emotional support. Elial, too, sat down, on the floor next to the rock, to simply watch. Ruvle’s notary pen clicked, and she ignored it; the textwork could wait.

  “I expected you to spend months mastering this,” Elial said, “But you surprise me. It takes fortitude to work exclusively on your weaknesses for any length of time.”

  “I want to be stronger and that’s how I have to do it,” Ruvle answered.

  “You could cross-train.” Elial crossed one ankle over the other. An adventurous colorbug landed as a black speck on the glass covering the tree imprint, blinked green, and flew off. “Tiose asked me to teach him gentle steps. Since you’ll be in this area regardless, you could join in.”

  Ruvle sat up straight. “That’s—you think I could...I thought only Ultrafine could run on water,” she said.

  “That’s the extreme form of gentle steps,” Elial corrected her. “Gentle steps can be any rapid contact with a surface that has trouble supporting you. Running across a plank of wood can be gentle steps. Walking across a bed without your feet sinking into it can be gentle steps. You mentioned a parachute when you laid out your plans for me—walking on a parachute can be gentle steps. A man striding through mud without letting his boots sink in too far is taking gentle steps. As long as standing in one place for too long would yield the surface, whether it be a minute or a tenth of a second, you can rapidly stand on different places and let them take turns supporting you. Ultrafines can run on water, but it will be enough for you to run on cloth.”

  Ruvle’s eye sparkled. “Thank you...so much for all your help. When can we start?”

  “In about nine days.”

  Ruvle blinked.

  “My time for the rest of this week is spoken for, which is why I’m checking in with everyone,” Elial explained. “My workplace scheduled me for nights.”

  Oh, right. Ruvle vaguely recalled her being part of a ductwork company, because she could fit through air conditioning vents in buildings easily. Airflow modeling simulations usually pointed to the ideal width of a building’s ducts being enough for a person to crawl through with great difficulty; smaller ones than that didn’t work for obscure turbulence-related reasons. “Can you...can you be here during the days, then?”

  “I would stay at the monastery if I could.” Elial frowned. “It’s one of the few things I still ever want to do, but I cannot this week.”

  Ruvle fumed to herself. So she should get use out of today as best she could…

  “I’ll depart now to talk to the others.” Elial uncrossed her ankles, but didn’t get up. She was still, stiff, her eyes to the sky. “...Thank you for giving me a reason to watch the colorbugs,” she finally said, and only then did she leave, back into the monastery to climb down the netting.

  The next water pulse to hit her took five minutes to do so. That five minutes of training was all Ruvle had the patience to endure; she instead left the stage again and pulled her notary pen from her collar, to point its light at the wall.

  ‘Chain Hydrapress ~ Guess who has a textwork connection and a good reason to be taking this long,’ his message read. Time to answer.

  ‘Mielo ~ What happened?’

  ‘~ I’m paying back a favor that I can do at the same time as solving clusters and research. Tracking down an old tislet for a guy. It has the right weighting for me to do something in like 90 tislets that used to take 217, so that’s on the improvements pile.’

  ‘~ Great!’

  ‘~ I can already fit in hammer-whip now, and I think this might get me to fitting mirror coat, too. I’m learning a lot. Should be ready to run in three more days, tops.’

  So, not enough time to wait to learn gentle steps. ‘Good luck.’

  ‘~ And if I wrap up this favor, I can get some more specs for Othek’s vault. We’re gonna win this time.’

  Ruvle didn’t answer that one. She put her pen back and thought, pacing around, her nose scrunched up. Elial was the best teacher here and she really wanted to get that training…there had to be a way to fix the time crunch...

  What was she willing to do to succeed that others weren’t?