It was a beautiful early morning at Mount Micron. Elial was alone.

  The monastery’s exterior walls gave Elial the dimmest familial impression of home, a whisper of emotion, one that the worn-in grooves of self-control in her prefrontal cortex let slip away instead of chasing. Natural rock faces interleaved with gray flues of worked stone, most of them open to the sky and capped with stained glass skylights, of all different widths and heights–none exempt from the inconsistent protection of weathered mountain rock covering them. The indigo glass above the main entrance, an archway with hanging beads, depicted the road of advancement in abstract triangles–Gross to Coarse to Fine to Ultrafine, with the subcategorization of witnesses between them, such as Gross-Witnesses on the cusp of initiating or Coarse-Witnesses ready to leave their hearts behind. Elial stayed firm about her choice not to reach the practical endpoint that was Ultrafine; Point-Perfect, beyond even that, lay beyond any consideration. She quite liked still having her own feelings, shadows of Exactly excised desires.

  For example–plastic toys. She juggled three colorful cube puzzles in the air, the sorts that had to be twisted to unscramble colors and make every face the same hue. As each one fell in her hands, she had enough instants to spare to flick several turns into them, and only then toss them back up. Not a terribly difficult trick–these were just slow-moving arrangements of physical matter. Making decisions on three executed algorithms on three different cube states was harder.

  If Exaction as an art was so dying, to the point where the only two Ultrafines she knew wouldn’t respond to her textwork questions, she could at least have some fun in its deathbed. One day, she’d likely have to sacrifice again, let her artificial heart lose its passions once and for all, just so that there would still be at least one Ultrafine in the world to learn from.

  Hopefully, she wouldn’t need to.

  A glimpse of sandy-brown fur caught her attention, and Elial looked down the mountain from her spot, a slanted outcropping of stone a few feet from the monastery proper, much like any other. The arrival below stirred no opinions in her–a cluster of ten men in black suits ascending the beaten-white grave trail, each with sunglasses and a black visor, with holstered laser pistols and the occasional dark leather suitcase, each likely containing either an M.A.D. invention or the key point of whatever they were here for.

  They were not here to watch minor tricks or issue paperwork, judging by the four-headed squirrel the size of a bus.

  Man unsuccessful experiments of M.A.D. science like it were repurposed. Two of the men climbed the mountain properly, sans briefcases, and the others sat on the squirrel’s back for transport. It bounded up the rocks effortlessly, waiting only on its fellows on two feet–who were finally turning their attention to her, two stories up, far across the currently-gentle slope that let Elial see so much of the mountainside. There was a reason she’d been fond of this specific rock to stand on. “Good morning, visitors,” she said, monotone as ever. The others didn’t appreciate the effort in staying forever neutral, or the self-control-training purpose of it. “What brings you to Mount Micron?”

  The man in the front seat of the omnibus squirrel-saddle grunted. “Legal business,” he told her, propping open the briefcase to reveal a piece of paper that she couldn’t read from so far away. “This is an investigation.”

  Elial blinked slowly, making eye contact with two different left eyes of the squirrel-hydra. “What are you investigating?”

  “That’s for the highest authority of your organization to know. Bring us to them.”

  “An Ultrafine is not present,” Elial said. They never would be. “I’m the only one here. Speak.”

  The lead squirrel-rider looked over his shoulder and barked something to his compatriots, inaudible from here, all responding in kind with henchman-to-henchman communication.

  “Othek Perfectcoil was assaulted and stolen from, five days ago. The assailant was masked and disguised. Too fast and agile to be ordinary. We got a researcher on the case, and, isn’t this a coincidence, this old camp practices that.”

  Who was Othek?

  “You should come back another time when other initiates are present,” she said.

  “Get us a list of names.”

  “This may take some time.” People had come and gone, mostly gone, fallen off of learning Exaction altogether. She didn’t know if she should share former members with them, or Gross-Witnesses–

  “And stop juggling while I’m talking to you,” the henchman interrupted her pondering. “I want to talk to someone Thoughtful.”

  Well.

  Now she wasn’t inclined to cooperate.

  It hit her who ‘Othek’ was; that name Ruvle once mentioned–the owner of the tower she’d failed to raid, with her underdeveloped intuition for multiple dangers that led her to struggle with simple dodging. Elial changed the style of throwing her puzzle cubes, not from one hand to the other, but up and down in the same–taking simple near-vertical parabolic arcs, catching at one terminus and throwing from the other, an appearance of circular motion to those without keen eyes. “You may have the wrong location.”

  “We know exactly where we are,” the henchman snorted. A few in the back whispered to each other.

  “Even if the assailant visits here, something you cannot confirm,” Elial said, “I would not turn in one of my own initiates.” A trainee with such a drive to improve, to learn, and yet an arrogance-free ego? She wouldn’t lose one. What’s more, she trusted Ruvle; she spent so much time mentoring that notary lately that there was no way Ruvle had less than her best wishes in mind.

  “Well, you’d better. We’re authorized to search any home or business. Don’t play any law games with us, the gegha here’s deputized to go wherever we need to,” he said, patting the squirrel neck before him.

  There was, indeed, a collar around the lower left neck with a blocky green tag that read ‘DEPUTY’. The squirrel chittered from two heads. One of the other henchmen poured out a bag of nuts into one of its mouths.

  “And that isn’t the right kind of authority,” Elial said, remaining firm, still juggling. “This is a protected historical and geological site. Talk to both of those departments of the state for permission.”

  The stuffy, boring Historical Preservation Department that put everything in warehouses to rot without proper cataloging couldn’t agree on the right notary to clean up all of the paperwork, entirely because of petty bureaucratic power games. The Geological Surveys of Stepwise were once asked for permission to pour 10,000 tons of liquid nitrogen into an active volcano just to see what would happen, and they approved the project immediately with triple the requested funding. The departments hated each other. It was why the monastery hadn’t been closed or evicted for a true citizen’s development project in over two hundred years, all because of a tree imprint.

  Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

  “...Squad, get off the deputy,” the henchman said. “I’ve been waiting to throw some weight around.”

  Elial let them all dismount, onto hard stone, off the soft squirrel fur. Really, that tail looked gorgeous, the fur colored like rings of pale lumber surrounding the heartwood of its flesh tail. One could get lost in the flourishing dense hair, she imagined. The henchmans’ matching black climbing boots crunched the white gravel below, joined only by the sound of Elial’s catch and throw of plastic, over and over again, multiple times a second.

  “Pin ‘em down,” said the lead henchman.

  And the squirrel bounded forward like a railgun shot and, well, did something. Elial didn’t really care what. Razor-sharp claws the size of machetes came down simultaneously at her shoulders, just one of the many ways it could have helped her get up. With a simple lean forward, a grab of one of its squirrel-wrists, and a raised foot to hook onto the thick fur of its chest, she attached on it like a tick. The creature scrabbled at its own arboreal coat, raking wicked curved blades of keratin across matted hair, where Elial simply ascended. She need not think about each individual handhold or foothold in a surface made entirely of them, nor how to go left and right so the paws wouldn’t get in her way, the same way a person didn’t have to think about where they put their feet when walking from kitchen to front door in their own home. Fractions of a second to sweep with each paw gave her plenty of time.

  “How is she doing that!?” a henchman called.

  One of her puzzle boxes flew in the air over the squirrel, and by the time gravity reclaimed it, she was atop one of its heads and catching. The other heads chittered, pitched so low and amplified so loud as to be rumbling sirens. The heads and their teeth lunged towards her, in chaos and disunison, all of which could be sorted with single steps, from one cranium to another. Her feet shuffled in impromptu dance, every tiny step onto a different skull presenting itself right when she needed it. Elial need not predict where they would be and when–she understood where every motion would take them, her limited foremotion at work. It was good practice for deciding where to throw her cubes.

  “Is this the demonstration you were looking for?” Elial asked.

  The lead henchman responded by taking out something from his briefcase, a gun with a long plastic cylinder snout that didn’t resemble a weapon. He pulled the trigger and the net unfolded in the air, spreading its white lattice innards and outer ring of iron weights like a blooming starfish in the sky. Elial tossed one puzzle box and grabbed the other two out of the air as she skidded down the squirrel’s back like a waterslide, towards the henchmen, under the lowermost weight, and the net entangled the creature’s heads instead of her own. The puzzle box landed back in her hand. She’d tossed it through an unfolding opening in the net’s weave, barely the width of the box, necessitating the right rotational angle when passing through.

  By the time she was down on squirrel haunches, with the heads ripping through netting like sugar threads in water, the other henchmen had their guns out, the concentric rings on their nozzles glowing and the fingernail-sized bulbs at the end hot. Nobody looked like they actually wanted to fire. Henching was a profession of protection, not murder.

  “You shouldn’t shoot a deputy,” Elial commented.

  “You can’t dodge lasers,” a man in the semicricle of henchmen said, who she guessed was the second in command.

  “So don’t shoot the deputy,” she reiterated. “It will be hurt.”

  “We’re shooting you!”

  “That’s why I’m standing with tilted hips and this arm behind me,” she said, juggling the cubes behind her. “The one with the crooked visor’s aim tends left, so he will likely miss,” she said while looking straight at his slightly unsteady hands, “so I will rock my hips in the other direction if he corrects it before pulling the trigger. The one with the green laser rings rather than red is aiming for my toys, so I’m putting them in the safest location for his angle. The one with…”

  Wait.

  Elial tilted her head.

  “Are you trying to threaten me?” she asked. She needed clarification.

  The man with the crooked visor steadied his hands and fired a red laser–so she need only rock her hips as predicted, the shot zipping under her arm and burning squirrelhide into charcoalized hair. The creature’s heads barked disapproval with a majority consensus.

  “Oh,” she said. Now she felt stupid. Elial genuinely had not realized this was an assault on her person instead of an authenticity check because they never did anything dangerous. She really needed to hang out with inexact people more. “Then, you should leave.”

  “Or what?” the lead henchman asked, while the squirrel turned in place, its tail blowing a horizontal gust as it turned, rushing in her ears, tumbling loose gravel and necessitating a sidestep to catch her puzzles.

  “I suppose I’d physically prevent you from doing whatever you plan on doing here,” Elial commented, while being clawed at and bitten towards by the collection of traversable physical surfaces shaped like a squirrel. Before she finished her sentence, she was on its shoulders, where the four necks met. ”But since I am the only person here, and I will not cooperate, you have no method of getting the information you’re looking for…” She decided to stop beating around the bush and slipped a toe between the collar and the fur when a head poorly craned back to reach her; all she had to do was flick it off her ankle, grab with her free hand and sling it onto the earth.

  It scattered the loose gravel. A few of them struck the henchmen harmlessly on their suits or annoyingly on their skin; one smacked the gun in one’s hand and made it fall away, down the mountain, end over end.

  “...It’s best to find something useful to do with your time.”

  The puzzle boxes landed in her hand, square faces stacking exactly flush with each other in a tower of three—all solved.

  Fifteen minutes later, they were gone, and Elial was back on her preferred rock, gazing out towards the interior of the crater—the metropolis of Stepwise dominating her view, from this vantage, its glass skyscrapers and brick as eye-catching visual noise in the stonescape. Further afar, she knew, were other cities and other states in the crater–Rir Kranbar Ro and Windchime among them–all dwarfed by central Mount Radius.

  Elial had meant to hit all of the henchmen with that final stunt, but her foremotion was not yet that refined. Even at Gross level, a person had intuitive prediction of their own body movements, honed from decades of experience living in themselves, extending to held tools that they became familiar with. Foremotion extended beyond that, physical coordination so advanced that not only could Elial pick up any random object and be one with how it moved and behaved, but predict precisely how actions she took would affect complex physical systems—how, exactly, to throw a collar to make gravel scatter to its targets in defiance of chaos theory, or how a creature’s first muscle twitches foretold where its head would be in half of a second. Human foresight was cognition far beyond, say, a dog’s ability to understand what ‘sit’ meant—and Fine human foremotion was understanding of motion far beyond a dog’s ability to catch a thrown ball.

  Elial reflected as she sat, her hands in her lap, composing her body movements to be null—perfectly still.

  Perhaps she should tell Ruvle the next time they met. To not let her know that men had come looking for her would be sabotage. She would never do such a thing, in the same way she trusted her initiate not to sabotage her in turn.

  Besides, she’d surely be in the monastery then next time Ruvle showed up; losing a week of work to a bomb threat made her...want to be somewhere remote when her landlord needed rent.