Chapter 336: Keep It Gentle

Chapter 336: Keep It Gentle

The leaf shot out of the circle, hit the guesthouse curtain, and dropped behind the radiator.

"Stop," said the woman on the laptop screen. "Stop there. Breathe."

Elsa lowered her hand, her face red from the neck up.

"Sorry. I’ll get it—" Elsa said.

"Leave it. We have plenty of leaves." Instructor Wen Aldous leaned closer to her own camera, and for a second her face filled the screen. She had gray-streaked hair pulled back, and another leaf ready on her desk. "Tell me what you felt, just before it went."

Elsa thought about it. "It wasn’t moving. So I pushed a bit more. And then it was moving too much."

"Good. That’s exactly what happened," Aldous said.

It was Monday at five. Elena’s laptop was propped on two library books, its camera angled down at the writing desk. Elsa had traced a dinner plate on baking paper. The leaf was supposed to stay inside that circle.

Jin was on the bed with a tactics textbook he wasn’t reading. Breeze was in his nest box across the room, with Elena beside him. Elsa had insisted on that before they started.

"If I mess it up," she’d said, "I don’t want it anywhere near him."

"Your talent is strong," Aldous said. "That isn’t the problem, and it won’t be for a long time. The problem is that you only know two settings. Nothing, and a lot."

"I’m trying to find the other ones," Elsa muttered.

"Then we’ll start smaller." Aldous held up her own hand to the camera, palm down. "Don’t try to push the leaf. Push the air under the leaf. Imagine the air is already moving, very slowly, in a circle. Your job is only to keep it going. If the leaf drifts toward the edge, don’t shove it back. Ease off on that side."

Elsa set a fresh leaf in the circle and raised her hand, lower this time. It trembled, lifted, and slid toward the edge. Her fingers tensed to correct it.

"Ease off," Aldous said quietly.

Elsa’s fingers relaxed instead.

The leaf slowed. It turned a lazy half-circle inside the marker line, hovering maybe a centimeter above the paper, and stayed there. One second. Two. Three.

On the fourth, Elsa’s breath hitched, the current broke, and the leaf dropped flat.

It was still inside the circle.

Elsa stared at it.

"That," said Aldous, "was three good seconds. Most people in their first lesson don’t get one."

"I got three," Elsa said, looking at Jin to make sure he had seen.

"Yes. Don’t try to stretch it yet. Repeat that until you can do it comfortably." Aldous was already typing. "Twice a day, ten minutes, no more. Stop when your hand shakes. Next Monday, I want five."

When the call ended, Elsa let out a long breath and wrote the practice limit beside Monday’s target. Then she went to check Breeze.

"When he’s bigger, I want to use it around him," she told Jin. "I can’t keep throwing things across the room."

Breeze sneezed. Elsa glanced back at the radiator.

Wednesday’s care visit was the first time Breeze met the rest of the family’s beasts.

Dr. Alcott’s technician had approved it with conditions. Glitch was to be lying down. Flicker would stay at ground level or on her perch. The visit would last fifteen minutes, and Elsa would keep a hand within reach of Breeze the entire time.

Glitch lay stretched across most of the stall. Breeze, set on the straw near the stall door, looked at him with his ears pinned flat, then sat down very hard.

"He’s scared," Elsa whispered.

"Maybe," Jin said. "Give him a second. Don’t bring him any closer."

Breeze thought about it for nearly a minute. Then he got up and began, extremely slowly, to approach Glitch’s tail, which lay across the straw like a fallen tree.

He sniffed the end of it. Glitch’s tail twitched, just slightly. Breeze leapt backward, fell over, got up, and came back to sniff it again.

Glitch opened one eye, established what was going on, and closed it again. His tail stayed perfectly still after that. Jin was fairly sure that was deliberate.

Breeze climbed onto the tail and sat on it.

Flicker leaned forward on the perch rail, then hopped safely down to the straw in front of the kit. Breeze immediately abandoned the tail and followed her. She hopped left. He tumbled left. She hopped right. He tumbled right, caught his own back foot, and rolled over.

Elsa scooped him up before he could chase her under Glitch’s jaw.

"That’s enough introductions for one day," she said, and Breeze yawned in her hands.

The tactics room on the fourth floor of the First-Class wing had a projection table in the middle and nowhere to hide.

Instructor Halden Crowe set the exercise up on Thursday morning without much preamble. He was a broad, quiet man in his fifties with a habit of asking a question and waiting out the silence until someone gave in.

"Two against two," he said. "Recorded field layout. Your pair is here." Two blue markers on the table: one for a beast, one for a tamer. "Your ally’s pair is here." Two more, fifteen meters to the left. "Opposition is a heavy earth-type and a fast aerial type, with their tamers behind them. Your beast is stocky, durable, and can close a straight line very quickly." He looked at Jin. "Astor, you’ll know the type."

A few people smiled. They had seen his semifinal. That didn’t make him any less nervous about answering in front of them.

"Find me an opening," Crowe said. "Both of your pairs need to come out of it able to continue."

Jin studied the board. The earth beast was anchored in the center. The aerial had drifted a little high and wide to cover the flank. Between the earth beast and its own tamer, there was a gap: seven, maybe eight meters, a straight lane.

He’d driven Glitch down a lane like that in Highmarch.

"There," he said, and traced it. "The heavy’s too far forward. My beast goes through that lane at full speed, straight to the tamer. The heavy can’t turn fast enough to cut it off, and the aerial’s too high to drop in time."

Crowe nodded slowly. "That’s right. That lane is real." He waited. "Keel?"

The girl across the table was called Rowan Keel. Her beast was Rank 1, 8-Star, a shield-backed tortoise Jin had privately rated as one of the most annoying beasts in the year to fight. In this exercise, she was playing the ally.

"If his beast goes through that lane," Rowan said, "the aerial stops caring about the flank." She slid the red aerial marker out of its wide position, straight to her own tamer. "It comes for me. My beast’s anchored forward to hold the heavy, because his just left. I’m standing on my own for about four seconds."

Jin looked at the board.

She was right. He had checked the distance to the enemy tamer and how quickly Glitch could cover it. He hadn’t checked the distance to Rowan.

She was standing right there. How did I miss that?

"You’d take their tamer," Crowe said. "And they’d take yours — your ally’s — about half a second later. Is that a trade you’d make?"

"No," Jin said.

"Why not?" Crowe asked.

"We still have to deal with the aerial," Jin said. "And I’d be making her take a risk she never agreed to. We haven’t even discussed it."

"Try again," Crowe said.

Jin tried. He moved the blue marker to a shorter angle, one that let Glitch’s piece threaten the lane without committing to it, so the aerial had to stay honest. Rowan tested it by shifting the aerial marker again. This time, Glitch’s piece could turn back before the bird reached her. They tried a different angle, then a quicker approach, and Jin changed his position to leave her a retreat. His answer was slower than the first one, but they could both work with it.

"Better," Crowe said. "Save the layout before I clear it."

Jin took a photograph with his phone. Rowan added the failed approach to her notes, which was mildly embarrassing until he realized she was keeping it for her own practice too.

"Version two, next Thursday," Crowe continued. "Same layout, one change: your ally’s beast is injured and can’t anchor. Find me something that works then."

As the class filed out, Jin looked at the photo. He had found a straight lane and nearly treated it as a win. Now he could see the aerial’s route just as clearly.

Next week, Rowan would have even less protection. He stayed beside the table a little longer, tracing where he could put his own beast instead.