'Please, Amelia,' he interrupted. 'You are throwing off my results. We are short on time.'
He was right I turned and sped off in a rush of accelerated water. Our final exam was only a week away.
I am sure I was not crying. It's stupid to cry. Besides, the water would have hidden it.
The three weeks were nearly done. My reports at night were even more incomprehensible than Victor's or Quentin's. Simply, no one could follow what I was saying. They could not imagine a hypercube, or follow the math used to describe one. I was tired of Vanity and the boys giving me funny looks: I had to try experiments whose results they would understand. Something plain.
Something clear.
Once I tried playing with the fishes. I reached into their governing monads, the point of nonbeing where their material and mental states overlapped, and tried to give them more free will. Free will is always good, right?
Five days later, the last Saturday before Vanity's dreaded exam, came a strange night. A school of my fishes levitated out of the water, glowing with unearthly fire all over their scales, and the coral growths they drifted across turned into bubbles of some substance harder than jade.
Colin was on watch; we woke to the sound of him screaming in panic. Rushing out of the tent stark naked (who uses a nightshirt in the tropics?), I was in time to see a line of twelve bloated sea-forms, glowing like fireflies, bobbing toward us through the trees, their little mouths opening and shutting.
Quentin tapped on the ground with his staff, and words like slithering snakes shivered from his mouth. A dark thing it was not good to look at too closely reached out from behind the trees and began snatching up the little fire-fishes, one by one.
Victor said, 'Leader, should we keep them for study?'
Vanity, crouched in the tent flap, said in a shaky voice, 'The world, the universe, is not paying attention to them right. They're not... right. I think the laws of nature don't like them. Kill them.'
Victor waved his hand. Nails bent awry during early, unsuccessful experiments in carpentry, Victor had not thrown away. Now they came out of a neatly labeled pouch on his belt, flew through the air at twice the speed of sound. The shrapnel splashed fishy guts across the trees, where they glittered with unnatural gemlike fire, dripping against gravity.
He also picked up a dropcloth and draped it over my shoulders, and wrapped it around me, very gently.
Colin, for once, had not been staring at me. He was watching the little fiery silver shapes dissolve.
'We can deform reality, can't we?'
I nodded. 'Yeah. We're dangerous people.'
Victor said, 'Good. Maybe if we are dangerous enough, we can kill the enemy, and stay alive.
Leader, do you want me to gather those fish? As a food supply?'
Vanity shivered, and shook her head. 'We're not eating those. Amelia, was that your handiwork?'
I nodded. 'Yes, ma'am. I increased the inclination of the latitude of action. I was trying to splay the number of possible futures to give them more free will.'
'Colin, since it was Amelia's paradigm, you're on burial detail. Quentin, if Colin needs to be inspired with how to keep the dead fish... normal... you know, not enough free will to move around as icky corpses or something, can you inspire him? Do you have a spell for keeping fish, um, fishy?'
Quentin bowed, touching his forelock. 'Yes, Leader. I can tell him the true name of the first salmon.'
To me she said quietly, 'Keep the trick in mind to use against an enemy weapon or something. But don't be rash, Amelia. Work with Colin if things get out of hand.'
(Work with Colin? Colin, the walking bag of sperm? No, ma'am, thank you, ma'am.) Vanity added, 'And, Amelia...'
'Yes, Leader?'
Loud enough for the others to hear, she said, 'This episode will not go on your permanent record, but our final exam is in three days. I am hoping for better results than this! Please keep that in mind, Miss Windrose.'
Something clear. Something plain.
That was when I decided to see how high I could fly. Oh, yes.
Oh, yes indeed. I waited till no one was around.
Dawn. The layabouts were still asleep. The air was crisp and the morning sea breeze was still cool.
I stood on trampled ferns, and the scent of bruised grasses mingled with the ever-present smell of coconut palms.
