Rule Fourteen

Part One

On her first day at Perihelion Academy, Tovi Marsh floated upside down in a corridor, clutching her own shoes, and decided that she had made a terrible mistake. Everyone else coasted past her like fish, because they had trained in zero gravity since they were nine. On Dray, the mining moon where she grew up, the biggest worry was falling rocks, and Tovi had been admitted because of one test score and a remarkably lucky guess. "Marsh," said a voice behind her. Commander Ibarra hovered in the doorway with her arms folded. "You are assigned to Team Eleven, the worst team in the academy. Please try not to make it official."

Team Eleven met in a supply cabinet, because no better room had been available. There was Dunya, who flew like a dart and could not be taught to slow down. There was Pell, a tall, gentle, soft-spoken boy who apologized politely to walls whenever he bumped into them, and Wick talked constantly, and Osei hardly ever spoke at all. "We have lost eleven matches in a row," Dunya told Tovi cheerfully. "Last week we scored by accident. The referee did not count it because we looked too astonished." Tovi laughed, then noticed that nobody else was laughing. "The big match is in nine days," said Wick. "Against Meridian. If we lose, we are sent to scrub the air vents for the rest of the year." Even Osei flinched.

Everyone at Perihelion knew about Meridian Squad, and they were undefeated for four seasons, and they were led by Captain Aurelia Voss, a girl so graceful in weightlessness that people said she could slip through a keyhole. The game was called Tumble, and two teams of five entered the Spindle, a gigantic spinning drum full of floating obstacles, and raced to fly a glowing ball called the Lantern through the other team's rings. Each ring was worth one point, and any player touched by a padded glove had to sit in the Net for thirty seconds, and Tovi read the rulebook twice that night, then a third time, then lay awake staring at the ceiling, which was also the floor.

The next morning Tovi marched to the library and requested the original copy of the rules. The librarian, a robot with a squeaking wheel, brought her a brittle, crumbling paper booklet from the academy's very first year. Most of it matched the new rules, but on the last page, under a coffee ring, she found Rule Fourteen. At the final horn, it read, the team whose Lantern rests nearest the axis of the Spindle is awarded the Heart Bonus of twenty points, and the rule was still in the current rulebook, in print so microscopic that the whole academy had completely overlooked it. She sat straight up and bonked her head on the ceiling so hard that the robot said, "Please, more quietly."

"You want us to do what?" said Dunya. "Absolutely nothing," said Tovi. "Well, almost nothing, which is surprisingly hard. Here is the thing about the Spindle, and it spins, so everything you let go of drifts out toward the wall. Everything except the middle. At the very center, the axis, nothing drifts at all. It is the only still spot in the whole drum." Pell raised a hand, which in weightlessness just meant that it drifted upward. "But Meridian will tag us. Nobody ever reaches the center and stays." "Nobody ever tries," said Tovi. "They are all too busy racing. And twenty points is more than Meridian has scored in a whole match this year."

They trained for nine days, and Dunya had to learn to stop, which she hated, clinging to a ventilation pipe and groaned like a kettle. Pell learned to link arms with the others in a tight ring, back to back, with the Lantern tucked in the middle, and Wick learned to keep quiet for ten whole minutes, which took four days and a great deal of suffering. Osei got the most important job of all, and he would count silently, and he would say one word out loud, exactly once, when the time came. "Is that all?" Osei whispered. "That is everything," said Tovi. Behind them, a sixth-year student walked past and whispered, "Are they taking a nap?"

Part Two

On match day the stands were packed, and the crowd laughed when Team Eleven floated out, while across the Spindle, Meridian Squad shimmered in spotless, gleaming silver suits. Captain Voss drifted over and held out her hand. "I have heard you have a plan," she said politely. "I would love to see it." Her smile was so warm that it was somehow even more frightening. "Just fly well," said Tovi, and she shook the hand. From the stands, Commander Ibarra watched without a word, her arms folded. The horn blasted, and Meridian rocketed forward like silver bullets, and Team Eleven turned the other way and began to drift silently toward the center.

Meridian scored in forty seconds, then again in eighty. The crowd cheered, and then began to roar with laughter as Team Eleven kept floating and did not even try to block. Three points, then five, and at halftime the score was nine to nothing, and somebody threw a crumpled paper cup at the glass, and Dunya shook with the tremendous, trembling effort of not moving, and Pell apologized to the cup. "Steady," Tovi murmured. She kept the Lantern pressed against her chest, right at the still point of the Spindle, where everything else in the drum seemed to turn around her. Wick's face turned purple from not talking. "Steady. Not yet."

With three minutes left the score was seventeen to nothing, and the crowd had mostly gone quiet, and Voss had scored so easily that she could afford to slow down, and she finally looked around. She saw five small figures linked in a ring at the center of the drum, and they were not moving and not trying, and they clung to a glowing ball like seeds on a dandelion. She did the math in her head, and her face changed, and Meridian could reach nineteen points at the very most. And at the horn, twenty points would go to the team nearest the axis. "Everyone to the center," she said, in a voice that carried across the whole drum. "Now!"

The Meridian players poured toward them like an enormous silver wave. Gloves reached in and tapped shoulders. Wick went to the Net, and then Dunya, and the ring shrank to three, and Pell trembled like a leaf but held on, whispering "sorry, sorry" to everyone who touched him. Voss was a meter away, then half a meter, her arm stretched toward the Lantern, and the clock on the great wall said eleven seconds. Tovi felt her hands slipping, and she understood that all her planning had come down to one tiny thing: a boy who had spoken perhaps fifty words that month.

"Now," said Osei, clearly, in the middle of the roaring noise. He had been counting the whole time, and he had counted exactly right. Pell and Tovi both gave the tiniest push, the kind you make when you brush a crumb off a table, and the ring slid backward into the still point, a hand's width out of Voss's reach, and her fingers closed on empty air. She sailed past, turning slowly, with her mouth open, and one second later the horn blasted, and the Lantern floated there, glowing and perfectly still, almost exactly on the axis of the drum, exactly where the rulebook said a winner should be.

For a moment nobody understood the scoreboard. MERIDIAN 18. TEAM ELEVEN 0. Then a long chime rang out, and the zero rolled over into a twenty. The stands went completely silent, and then they erupted into the most deafening celebration Tovi had ever heard, and Dunya was crying, and Wick, for the first time in his life, was speechless. Voss drifted over slowly, and then she did something nobody expected: she laughed with delight. "I read Rule Fourteen once," she admitted. "When I was twelve. I thought it was a misprint. You are the first person who ever believed it." She saluted, one captain to another. "Well played, Marsh."

Afterward, Commander Ibarra found Tovi in the hallway, and for the first time Tovi saw the old commander smile. "Twenty-two years ago," said Ibarra, "I captained the worst team in this academy. I found Rule Fourteen in the same dusty booklet, and we won by holding still. After that, I asked the printers to keep the rule in the smallest print they had." Her eyes crinkled. "I only wanted readers to find it." Tovi thought about how many people had flown right past the answer, and the fastest team in the academy had lost to the one that had stopped. And Wick, who had finally been allowed to talk again, had not stopped talking for an hour.