Several more days later, Ruvle put on a blindfold for her second training goal.

  “Five full rotations,” Elial told her, a hint of fatigue in her monotone.

  Ruvle spun in place, five times as instructed, just enough for vertigo to pick up where she left off, turning the world around her while she kept her feet anchored. She resisted the urge to follow it. In her hand was provided a dart, one not there half a moment ago, the warmth of mentor fingers lingering on it.

  “Hit the bullseye.”

  Ruvle’s scrambled mental map of the room barely helped. She did her best, and it struck exactly where she intended—relative to herself. It clacked against stone instead of dartboard foam, the impact clap earning a sigh from herself.

  “Your elevation was correct,” Elial said, her voice ephemeral and exploring the room in all directions. “You’re misaligned by a few degrees. Touch a pillar and reorient.” Ruvle reached for the— “without taking your blindfold off.”

  Thus, instead, she swept her arms out and took random steps, shortly finding a smooth stone column, built into the floor, one that she could wrap both hands around and touch fingertips. She reached to her left and found the other, arms’ lengths apart, and that told her her location again in this less-used training room. The highest balcony led to this oval-shaped hollow of worked stone, most of its evenly-spaced pillars still standing, others crumbled to stumps from wear and accidents. The budget to fix a less-used room like this didn’t exist, doubly with its original purpose a mystery—other initiates told her that it was once for practicing walking on narrow ropes, but a dedicated space for an easy task like that made little sense to Ruvle. No, today its repurposement felt more challenging and worthy of practice. Now that she knew where she was, she deduced the dartboard again, hanging up on a wall graciously free of pillars that could intercept a throw. Her mental map updated.

  “Four rotations, then hit the nearest broken base.”

  Ruvle did as told. She reoriented her map again, once back in place, and threw another dart that had just been placed in her hand. The dart clattered on the ground, not against a stump.

  “Nearly, but still off,” Elial repeated. “Try again.”

  She found the two arms-length pillars again, spun, and threw. Another clatter.

  “Are you keeping track of your direction at all times?” Elial asked.

  Ruvle pulled up the blindfold, her eye shortly adjusting to the bright indigo tiles all around her, with visual vertical divisions in stone-gray. The pillars terminated halfway to the ceiling above, which too had been decorated in indigo, with occasional steel hooks in the grout between. One hook had a long-forgotten dangling knot of red twine from it, around which a spider made its home. “I’m tracking it when I have to throw,” Ruvle said, to the room in general.

  “Look carefully at the dartboard and commit it to memory,” Elial told her. Ruvle finally located her, crouching atop a pillar behind her, both hands and feet on its lip and her back arched. The room’s acoustics did not play well with directional hearing. “Gauge the distance, count your steps forward and back, if needed.”

  “That’s not the problem,” Ruvle said, “I’m not having a depth perception moment, I know I’m 9 meters away from it.”

  Elial tilted her head down, shifting her headband to shade her eyes. “For this exercise, try not to think of yourself as distant from it. Think of it as distant from you.”

  “That’s the same thing.” She frowned. “Don’t do cryptic wisdom sayings, please just explain what you mean so I can get better at it.”

  Elial nodded and leapt from one pillar to another, getting back into her crouched position in a flash. “Perhaps I didn’t explain what I’m teaching you well enough.” Elial closed her eyes and performed another leap, landing on another pillar without issue—and then another, and another, turning rapidly, navigating as if she’d never known or needed sight. “Exoproprio does involve understanding your place in your environment and tracking that accurately, but that is not the goal. If you consciously understand your orientation in your surroundings at all times, you will become better at navigating them when disrupted, and if you can track yourself with no sensory cues, you’ll be even closer. But that is also not the end goal. Exoproprio…” She performed a backflip and grabbed one of the tiny ceiling hooks, to hang there by one arm. “Is such automatic tracking that it subsumes into your self-perception. That is the flashpoint. In the way that you know where your arms are when blindfolded, you will know where everything stationary around you is. They become part of the same neural pathways. You’ll never be lost again. You’ll retrace your steps as well as time rewound might. You’ll walk with confidence through smoke as if it weren’t there.”

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

  Ruvle mimicked Elial’s crouch pose from a moment ago, thinking. “...will that ruin my sense of self? That sounds like...other objects get to feel like parts of my body…?”

  “Not quite.” Elial opened her other hand and dropped a dart; Ruvle caught it out of the air. “Developing exoproprio does not change where you draw the boundary between you and not you. Needlework may even be worse than it, when you interrogate too deeply the parts of yourself that you don’t control. That is what happened to Acoff, one of the earliest Ultrafines.”

  Ruvle remembered that story that a different initiate had told her. “I thought the reason he peeled off his skin was to try to go beyond Ultrafine. ...Am I misremembering that we didn’t know about Point-Perfect back then?”

  “It wasn’t known then. But the reason he died from flaying himself is that his sense of self narrowed entirely to his muscle tissue, when he had untreated mental illness and self-harm tendencies that no one stepped in for. We are much better at affirming embodiment today.”

  With so much on her mind, Ruvle made a mental note simply to not stare into that abyss. “I...I still want to do needlework; I did solve that puzzle you gave me.”

  “Good.” Elial smiled to herself and dropped down. “It’s my second favorite.”

  “I put it in a bottle cap next to the contortion maze.”

  Elial dropped down, landing to crouch against one of the pillars. Her eyes remained closed, her head lowering, alluding an exhaustion. Ruvle...wanted to not care; she’d already been concerned enough about Chain, and a person had to be rough and callous to get ahead, but…

  “Are you too tired to teach me today?” There, that was phrasing things self-centeredly enough.

  “I am not. Spin, five times.” Ruvle blindfolded herself, tightly enough to be snug over her wax, and did as told. “My personal problems need not be your concern.”

  “Well, they can be,” Ruvle said, and stopped spinning. “Hey, can you pick a different pillar? I can tell which direction you’re in on that one and how far, and that feels like cheating myself.”

  Feet softly tapped elsewhere—elsewhere enough that she couldn’t discern it, perfect. “They’re not useful to talk about,” Elial added. “Nothing but financial trouble.”

  “I feel that sometimes,” Ruvle said, resuming rotation, her understanding of external reality blurring down to her current angle and speed. “The investigators about my raid finally settled on a huge fine. I won’t have ‘notary money’ for a while.” She owned The Checkered Office and the business represented almost all of her expenses, so it meant she wouldn’t get to buy anything fun rather than threatening her survival.

  Elial didn’t answer.

  Ruvle stopped, re-estimated her position and angle, threw her dart, and hit the wall again.

  “Why are you pausing?” Elial asked, something simmering under her voice.

  “What do you mean?”

  “When you stop spinning, you take a moment. Are you keeping track of your surroundings or not?”

  “I am, I just have to think about how I’ve changed in them and do intuition in my head.”

  “Stop. Stop that,” Elial said. “Track your surroundings at all times. Know how the pillars fly past you with each step, every rotation, as if they’re the ones rotating rather than you—or expand your mind and know yourself exactly upon it, like watching yourself dance across a movie screen. Don’t let your spatial reasoning lay fallow when you’re moving; that’s exactly when you need it the most and when exoproprio will matter. Anyone can remember where they are if they aren’t moving. Do the work, Ruvle.”

  The next dart landed in her fingers with force. Ruvle curled her fingers around it, frowning.

  “...Sorry.”

  Elial sighed. “I shouldn’t have been harsh.” They both remained silent, only the distant chirp of insects outdoors in the night and the footsteps of other learners on the ground floor far below. “When I mentioned financial troubles, I meant that I couldn’t pay my rent this month. Not enough work. My landlord’s underlings are upset and giving me contempt.”

  Ruvle connected the dots this time that her bomb threat made Elial miss work, which made her miss rent, and…her mind flinched away from facing the consequences. There were several things she could do, but that would require both admitting fault and going back on willingness for ruthlessness. No, she couldn’t.

  “I’ll do the work this time.”

  Ruvle found the arms-length pillars once more. She rose onto one foot, bending the other to the back of her thigh like an egret standing in water, and concentrated. She put her thoughts into the space around her, choosing Elial’s second recommendation—imagining the world as a stage, fixed, which she stood upon, her mind’s eye following herself as she moved. Ruvle twisted left and right experimentally, gauging herself, and then went for the five rotations.

  One. Two. Three. Every degree was an opportunity for error, but her mind should be as exact as her body. Four.

  Five, and she threw.

  The metal tip did not clatter against stone—only a solid strike of parted felt and backboard. Ruvle let her shoulders droop in relief.

  “You hit the outer rim, and barely,” Elial said, neutrality returning to her. “That’s better. Now repeat thousands of times for weeks until it is deeper than instinct.”

  “Right away!” She pumped her fist. Exoproprio and needlework: her new skills planned for the coming time, to join flydodging and gentle steps, to meet her internal transformations of nerves. The infrastructure for Fine could rise from the earth of the self with day after day of refinement.