The day was grey and densely cloudy, with fog lying heavily over the ground in thick banks and odd clearings between, where the rushing wind had direct access. The waning sun in the sky above signaled the oncoming evening and its Hunt.

  They were passing through a stacked-up cloud. On days like this, the floating island of Galton felt utterly alone, the sun above and the bowl of the inverted world below and above both swallowed by the endless swirl. Not so today: where snapping pinions and tight-strung banners demarking the starting line of the Race danced in the breeze, were people. Everywhere.

  It felt like everyone he had ever known was there, and their cousins, and what felt like too many strangers from out-of-town hamlets—nameless villages from along the mountain’s spine, homesteaders from The Overlook at the other end of the island, thin-spun robes fluttering skin-tight against shivering forms. There were traders and frontiersmen, and Dalliance saw the coach and horses of some of the Families, even. A lot of pageantry for such a small town as Talbotton.

  It was the sight of all the strange faces that really drove home that this was actually happening. It was real.

  The air was thick with the smell of food cooked in bulk on massive open-ground griddles. The scent of sizzling protein and fat an implicit promise of vigor for a long day’s hard work. It was a familiar smell from the planting season, when food was staged before the march from the barns to the fields, but he’d never taken part in person. Certainly not like this.

  As the mists moved across the face of the land, he filled his hands with a warm flatbread wrapped around diced cucumbers, spiced sausage, yogurt, and a thick slice of cheese. It was delicious. Children didn't normally eat like the field hands; the rationale being that children had the free time to walk back to the kitchen and didn't need to be waited on. The men, who had no time to make their own food, ate better. He conceded that this was a powerful temptation to follow his father’s prescribed course of Grit and Might.

  The vendor carts from the city had yet to open, but Dalliance could smell the thick sweetness of melted sugar and the smoke from toasted rice. They'd be ready by the time the Games began, as they were every year.

  Hungry as he was, he had another wrap, the food sitting in his stomach like a warm log. He was going to run with a full stomach, and as much as that sounded like a terrible idea, he didn't regret it at all. Today was his twelfth birthday, and he would need the fuel.

  He felt torn between being giddy at the opportunity to openly excel and the fear of the activities required to do so.

  “Alright, everyone!” The voice belonged to the foreman from one of the big dairy farms; to Dalliance, the man had always just been ‘sir’. "Man of the hour here! Young . . . Dalliance!" a foreman's voice boomed through the mist, the name apparently uncomfortable in his mouth. "Front and center."

  The man’s clipped words carried. His too-stubby fore-fingers pointed to a patch of earth, and Dalliance stepped forward.

  A multitude of eyes followed him: he felt the weight of expectations under their consideration. Everyone knew the custom: the newly Awakened race to earn their first ‘safe’ experience point. Ideally, they’d spend it on a stat point in Grit or Might: farmer’s stats. The others were little called for out here in the sticks.

  It wouldn't be his first, and he hadn't spent what he already did on farmer's stats, either.

  “We’ll have a clean race today,” the foreman stated, the pronouncement as certain as a farmer discussing grain futures—which is to say, not particularly, though no one gainsaid him. “Up the road, out across the Green Circle by the Wagoner’s Rest, and then down the home stretch!” He gestured to the course, which ran along the treeline, clearly marked with little stakes and flags.

  “The System rewards intent,” the foreman continued, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial tone. “It wants to know you’re trying. So I'll emphasize: when you are racing, you are fighting for the front. When you achieve it, you'll have beaten your opponents. It would be a great shame for you to reach the front running for the love of the game and receive no experience for it.” He waggled his eyebrows. “With that being said, I believe it is little Morality’s turn this year with the starting cannon.”

  The hand cannon was two-and-a-half feet long and, for this purpose, had been bolted to a flattened tree stump. It was placed to face out toward the woods.

  Morality Best stepped up and took the lighted taper from the foreman’s fingers, which promptly extinguished itself with a puff of smoke. She smiled thinly, turned to the nearby brazier to relight it, and then walked back to the cannon.

  She stopped directly in front of Dalliance. “Good luck,” she told him, her dark eyes meeting his in front of everyone.

  He was so surprised he could only stare. He didn’t know they were such good friends.

  She turned, touched the taper to the cannon’s fuse, and stepped back.

  The cannon roared.

  And Dalliance ran.

  His legs pumped, his brother's shoes slapping against the packed earth of the road and pinching his ankles. The food in his stomach was a heavy, sloshing weight. He kept a steady pace, letting the more eager boys surge ahead, already kicking and shoving one another. He wasn't trying to win with speed, after all.

  He focused inward, reaching for the skill Topaz had given him, the one she'd called a tool for survival. A way to predict his father’s whims while his other skill deflected his attention. It was the tool of a [Scamp].

  Dalliance invoked the skill [Prediction]. Its cost was brutal: at his skill level, it was a staggering eight points of Acuity per attempt. Though his Wit meant he had some to spare, each use was still like taking eight carefully measured steps toward end-of-day exhaustion, that state where all he wanted to do was sit down and stare at the wall, with only one in four chances of it working at all.

  Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  He rounded the first corner of the track, the Green Circle coming into view, before he got a successful use.

  [Prediction Successful!]

  And then the world was chaos.

  It’s one thing to be told what someone is planning on doing. It’s another thing entirely to see ghostly, translucent images of them all doing it, all at once, everywhere. A phantom Sterling cut sharply to the inside to block another runner. A spectral Woebegone prepared to trip the boy in front of him. Ethereal figures jostled, pushed, and sprinted, a confusing storm of future actions overlaid on the present, shifting from sequence to sequence unpredictably with the whims of their current selves.

  Dalliance had long ago figured out that this would be a skill whose interpretation was as difficult to master as the skill itself. Maybe another two points in Wit would change that, but for now, all he could do was hope to find a path through the storm.

  He dodged a visiting boy’s fumbling rush by inches and made his way offside, around Effluvia’s smoothly loping form. The older girl ran laps around the village every day at dawn, when those who had to work for a living were first setting out to the fields. It had always been demoralizing to watch, and seeing her run today was no different. She would likely not need stat points to outrun him.

  If nothing else, looking back at the tangle of limbs that thrashed its way to the ground around the previously running figure of Sterling Worth, Dalliance knew avoiding the knight’s son had paid off nicely. At a glance, the boy wouldn’t be getting up anytime soon, nor would the other three he’d tangled with.

  You’re fighting them indeed.

  He lengthened his stride. He wasn't the only one who had avoided the pile-up. Now there were two others ahead of him.

  One was Zenith Dawn.

  She wasn't participating in the jockeying and gamesmanship, just running flat out, sprinting. It was maybe a little too early for a final kick, but she passed him easily. Now he was watching the backs of both Effluvia and Zenith as they retreated into the distance, the footfalls of Charity, running poorly but out of the main lane of traffic as he was, coming up behind.

  Third place still counts, he thought. He poured on what speed he had, himself.

  They were coming to the cook tent now, rounding the bend toward the Wagoner’s Rest. Now, what had the foreman’s words been? The exact wording? He replayed the instructions in his mind: “ . . . up the road, out across the Green Circle by the Wagoner’s Rest, and then the home stretch.”

  What he had said was across the Green Circle. It was an area of grass kept specifically for livestock grazing while waiting for their handlers. But Zenith and Effluvia, ahead of him, were running around it, following the curve of the road that bordered the grass.

  This was a corner he could cut.

  So he did.

  He veered off the packed road and onto the damp, springy turf of the Green Circle, aiming for the far side, across the rolling mist.

  “Cheater!” yelled an angry male voice from behind him. That would be Prosperity Rotter. He’d never been Dalliance’s favorite person, but now he seemed to be the only one who had noticed the maneuver in the rolling morning fog.

  Dalliance heard Rotter’s heavy footsteps following him onto the grass. If it’s cheating, why are you following me?

  The fog was thick here, a swirling grey blanket. Shoefalls pounded behind him. His [Prediction] showed a horse—or the ghostly silhouette of one—crossing in front of him. He could hear the real thing distantly, but rapidly closing, a nervous whinny and pounding hoofbeats somewhere in the mist. Two pre-teens sprinting across a grazing pasture had spooked the animal. He judged the angles, the ghostly path of the horse, and the sound of Rotter’s pursuit, and adjusted his own lane accordingly. He could see exactly where the phantom horse and the unseen boy would intercept.

  He ran on. If he chuckled at the sudden sound of an indignant shout and a panicked whinny behind him, no one was there to hear it.

  He emerged from the fog bank a dozen feet ahead of a heavily puffing Zenith and a good twenty feet ahead of Effluvia, with only the home stretch left to go.

  He was the second to cross the finish line.

  [A race well run! Your alacrity has earned you one (1) experience point.]

  Dalliance was vomiting on the grass when his father came up and clapped a tray-sized hand down on his shoulder. The impact was heavy enough to make him stumble. Whimsy slunk behind the man, all lace and white cotton, but made no move to interfere.

  “Speak up, son. What’d you get?” Cadence demanded. There was no pride in his voice, but no derision either. It was the flat, assessing tone of a workman inspecting his tools before setting about a project. This was what Cadence Rather was like on a good day. This was his public face.

  The man’s mutton chops hung deep and silvery beneath a craggy face and wild, iron-gray brows. His silver eyes were fixed on him, waiting.

  Dalliance’s mind raced. He had three points. Okay, he’d spend them on Wit. Rank three cost three points. Now he had no points.

  It was like his eyes were finally focusing for the first time, or he'd finally woken up completely after a lifetime partly asleep. Hopefully it didn't show.

  Without mental skills, you couldn't pick where your stats went. But the physique skills, or their absence, could be tested.

  “Charm,” Dalliance gasped out, blessing the retching for having given him the extra few seconds to think, and engaged his [Deflection] skill.

  He felt it the moment their minds came into conflict, a silent, metaphysical clash. His father’s Wit was surprisingly high, equal to or better than Dalliance's newly-upgraded ability. So what? Suck on that: I’m only twelve, Dalliance thought defiantly. Whether or not he feared the man, he didn’t have to respect him. No matter what Da thought, his son's opinions had weight too.

  Besides, his Charm was at rank one.

  The tie broke. He won, on a technicality. The skill took hold, subtly nudging his father’s perception toward acceptance, but leaving Dalliance a bit less sure of himself in payment, more conscious of the eyes on them both.

  [Deflection Successful! Noteworthy deflection earned four (4) experience points!]

  [Experience bank limit reached: excess points for reallocation: zero (0) points.]

  “I suppose it isn’t useless,” his father said with a fatalistic shrug. This hadn't been what he hoped to hear. “Go again.”

  He gave Dalliance a hard shove toward the starting line for the next race. That'd been gentle, of course, for him. Dalliance blinked back angry tears at the indignity. No 'well done, son'; he was merely a tool being sent back for more sharpening. He felt his sister’s eyes boring into his back as he stumbled away.

  It wasn't all for the bad, though: he could increase Wit again already. The rush of clarity hit even harder the second time.

  Five effective Wit, after the class bonus. He was finally making progress.