Pulverizing a vertebra was a fantastic reason to miss work, but a terrible way to keep one’s cover when Othek would be looking specifically for someone who took major sudden blunt-force trauma at one specific time of day. Her disguise hadn’t been compromised, and that saved her today. She didn’t have enough time to get an injection before coming back to work, only enough to swallow a fistful of painkiller tablets in the bathroom and splash water on her face. Ruvle had to grit her teeth to put her notary outfit back on and simply do her job for the rest of the afternoon and evening, a big friendly notary’s smile on her face, verifying identities and co-signing documents and asking probing questions and helping people complete confusing paperwork and never letting on ever that her back was fucking killing her.

  At 9 p.m., she practically punted the last person out of the door to her office (a sweet old lady bringing her a box of cinnamon tea as a gift, yes thank you, yes this will help relieve stress, yes it is appreciated, but please leave because it is closing time) and rushed to the clinic. The medical examination and results were encouraging—the nurses gently broke it to her that the cracked bone was saved by an injection, but the injury tampered with her spinal cord and a region around her left kidney might be numb forever from now on. Ruvle thanked them and confirmed that she was not, in fact, numb anywhere.

  All those extra nerves she was growing had their advantages—redundant connections, among them. The Dye, surely, locked them in.

  It had been a rough day, and after night in and night out of hours catching up on flydodging, she felt...spent. And yet she’d gone through the day’s effort to make sure she could train tonight. Screw it. After changing into her indigo bodysuit, Ruvle gave herself a reprieve and went out and got a treat.

  ‘Mielo ~ Can we meet off-text?’ Ruvle scribbled into the textwork on the well-scratched brass table before her. Red-and-white diamond-patterned walls surrounded her, with dated picture frames nailed to a few and bars of green lighting along the ceiling. One very extended wall, elongating the building to the proportions of a couch, held rows and rows of sealed slots with ready-fresh food that one could open just by inserting coins; they took both vo and vouchers. People visited these automats for cheap hot meals or convenient treats all the time, with no interaction from the cookstaff, whose jobs were to stock slots rather than talk to anyone.

  ‘Chain Hydrapress ~ Why?’ he wrote back.

  ‘~ I don’t want the reason in writing.’

  ‘~ Good or bad?’

  Ruvle clicked her pen a few times. ‘~ Both. I’m training hard and it’s working. I have questions about Thuless glints.’

  ‘~ Aces, because I have answers.’

  Oh, fine. The textwork was inherently difficult to record long-term, anyway. ‘~ Do you have to destroy the glints? Couldn’t they be used for good?’

  ‘~ Nope.’

  ‘~ I know Othek’s glint has something to do with why hurricanes and tornadoes exist. If I had it and I cared about other people, I could make them stop existing.’ She felt a little better now about her bomb threat decision—it earned her Dye. Elial’s impending inconvenience felt so much easier to ignore.

  It took Chain a few minutes to respond, during which time Ruvle ate her treat, a twinnie—a puck-shaped dessert made from crystallization, sparkling white with hard angular inclusions of black and brown. They were made from hot blends of icing and chocolate seeded with tiny starter crystals, each of them a different atomic pattern that tesselated a different amount of sugar and flavor onto itself; very slow cooling produced this crowd of shiny monoclinic faces. The brown and black bits had all the chocolate grains concentrated into them and they were her favorite part; every bite shattered sugar into rewarding, relieving pebbles that melted in her mouth. Ruvle could only have a treat once per week or so—sugar gave her tiny tremors unacceptable for Exaction—so she sprung for the good stuff, something that both tasted great and wasn’t over in three bites.

  ‘~ Have you ever been gambling?’ Chain finally asked. ‘Maybe these tiny pieces of Thuless are fine on their own, but that’s never how this kind of thing goes. I know they’re not that powerful because if they could influence all of reality like Thuless itself, we’d already see every ocean current changing or something, stars turning off or on in the night sky, industries collapsing because semiconductors don’t work that way anymore. Stuff. The guys who have them are going to look for more, and that means putting them together. I’m not talking hypotheticals. There’s already public record of one getting a second glint at the same time a different true cit lost theirs. That’s the gamble: put two glints together and boost both of their powers, and maybe you’ll have enough to do that ‘good’ alteration you were planning. Maybe you need three. But eventually you’re going to stop having tiny pieces and it’ll start being fucking Thuless.’

  Ruvle swallowed a mouthful of sugar. ‘Oh.’

  ‘~ Don’t gamble. You trick yourself into thinking you could win, and that’s why you’ll lose everything.’

  In the background, a family discussed which of three identical slots they wanted to open for their kid’s meal. Ruvle had as little to say to them as to Chain.

  ‘~ Foresee well with your training, okay?’ he added. ‘I’m about to go into the alcazar.’

  ‘~ I’m not training yet, I’m having a twinnie before I start practice for today.’

  ‘~ SO JEALOUS.’

  This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

  A little something to pep her up for exertion. She was ready.

  Back in the monastery, Ruvle didn’t see Elial right away, so she set up her facade by dancing through the motions—dodging the jets of the laminar flow nozzles on the swimming pool area stage, testing just how much the Dye had done for her. She had a pretty weak understanding of the conversion ratio between Dye mass and power, and similarly how much was in that top hat, but her dips and sways around the water streams felt...natural. The patterns worn into her muscle memory from exhaustive practice felt less difficult, her judgment calls of when to twist clearer, her desire to stay in the center a sharper point of focus.

  Her black locks fluttered as she bent back, letting a gout of water fly past her nose, so close that her breath rippled its surface before it concluded. Ruvle had...time to think, even without an adrenaline boost. Like the mental clarity that came with exercise, amplified upon itself.

  She spent ten minutes on stage. Where water splashed on the floor, droplets scattered, a few beading on the legs of her bodysuit. They alone were lucky enough to touch her.

  Twenty minutes in, life gave her two hints to stop: a jet of water nicked her ear, and Elial emerged from down the hall, her face as dispassionate as ever.

  “...I thought you weren’t going to be here today?” Ruvle said, and hopped off the stage, wiping off her ear on the back of her hand.

  “I wasn’t,” Elial explained, a tremor in her voice, “but someone mailed a bomb threat to the building I was to work on.”

  Ruvle faked her best surprised and indignant look, and then a well-timed sigh of relief. “I’m glad you didn’t go there.”

  “Life is unpredictable,” Elial said. “Until it’s safe to go back, I’ll be here.”

  “In that case…can you go over the gentle steps you talked about yesterday, again?” Maybe pushing her luck. “I think I need to practice something else. I think I’m as good at flydodging as I’m going to get with the water jets; I think I’ve memorized all the speeds and angles...”

  Elial wandered over to one of the storage rocks. “Tiose isn’t here today. I told him that I’d be gone, so he planned for the future accordingly, but I can begin with you.” From behind the rock, she whipped out two cardboard boxes, one with a small air pump inside—the sorts that were mostly circular with concentric black rings on the side, like a stripped-down hair dryer—and another with colorful plastic inflatable pool toys, a rainbow of cheap commercialism that looked entirely non-serious. “This will take a moment.”

  Ruvle balked at the toys, but, surely Elial knew what she was doing. So instead of saying anything, she sat down on that storage rock, crossing one ankle over the other. “That’s okay.” She let out a big sigh. “I’m pushing myself some. My body thinks it should be resting, but today’s not over…I get my sleep when I’m done, not before.”

  Elial nodded, inflating the pool toys without really paying attention to them. “You’ve put in much more training time than other initiates lately.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You’ve given yourself a difficult regimen at the same time that you’re losing muscle mass to nerves, and the more intensively you practice, the faster that conversion happens, putting more strain on what you have left. You’re accumulating longer-term fatigue. Take a rest day after today.”

  “I don't—”

  “Do it.”

  Ruvle let her fingers dangle between her knees; she hung her head, breathing deep. “It’s okay if I get tired. I want to be strong. If I push myself every day and make sure I get my 9 hours of sleep, that’s the growth I want. I know I can’t just measure it with a number, how much better I’m getting, but it’s the way.”

  Elial didn’t push the subject; she tossed a few inflated pool toys into the water. “How much do you weigh?”

  Ruvle blinked. “I don’t check very often? I think 85%?” Such was the usual way of measuring; Ruvle’s average height meant she’d be 100% of an average woman’s weight, if she weren’t in much better shape than a typical citizen and her muscle mass weren’t being replaced.

  “These are reasonable, then,” Elial said. “Follow after me.” After filling and tossing in a few more, she hopped onto the pool, and took her gentle steps.

  The pool toys were not sufficient for an adult. One child-sized recliner of bright green, with equally-spaced indentations in its bed surface, might support half of Ruvle’s weight. A lengthy foam noodle looked to have even less buoyancy. The white ball with swirling black patterns on it might be the best option for support, with an added challenge of its top being slippery and unstable. A torus with a decorative plastic beaver’s head on the front looked more steady, intended for a child to slip into the middle of the torus and hang onto it around them for flotation. On their own, none of them were enough, so Elial used all of them. Her feet lightly tapped the foam noodle as she jumped off it, low enough to be more like a stride, onto the floating ball. Her feet stayed perched on it for only half a second, Elial crouching and holding her fists near her ankles, before she bounded onto the torus, and its momentum carried her for the moment she needed to walk onto the recliner as a stepping stone back onto the foam noodle. Ruvle observed, her attention rapt on her teacher’s feet specifically.

  “It’s...you make it look obvious and easy,” Ruvle breathed.

  “It isn’t,” Elial commented, settling into less dramatic strides and quick steps, like trying out an avante-garde dance, but her feet just happened to always touch a pool floatie. “I’m slightly foremotive; predicting them comes naturally.”

  “I mean, it’s more…” Ruvle whistled. “I never really put it together before now, but now I get how to explain what makes Fine different from Coarse to people who don’t know anything about us.” Well, maybe. She blinked twice. “I’ll have to explain it to Chain.”

  “The raiding friend of yours?”

  Ruvle nodded. The pool floaties continued to yield every time Elial used them as platforms, but it didn’t matter how rapidly they sank, because that always gave her enough time to use the next one. The control over her downwards momentum was puzzling, and come to think of it, not intuitive at all—she had to push more on bigger platforms and less on smaller ones, taking every opportunity to counteract gravity, rapidly trading their buoyant forces to counteract her weight and how was Elial not even getting splashed?

  “Step on,” Elial recommended. Mid-stride from recliner to ball, she gestured to some of the other toys. A second recliner, this one fire-themed (kids loved irony), looked like a good starting point.

  “Alright.” Ruvle crouched down, getting eye-to-nozzle-seal with the fire recliner across the pool, stars twinkling above and her destiny in her hands.

  “Get the lowest jump you can,” Elial recommended, monotone. “Give gravity the least reason to tame you.”

  Ruvle leaped forward, smiling despite her fatigue, her arms wide and her attentive eyes sparkling, every free neuron in her ready to learn.

  Of course, she immediately sank, getting her first taste of the exact problem to solve, rippling the waterline with waves and foam. Ruvle came up for air, laughing, her hair splatted against her face with water.

  “Now try again!” Elial said, her buoyancy dance unabated. Today’s training would be fun.