Rolling to the edge of the bed beside it, she presses her hands into the soft carpeting of the contraption’s platform. She crawls over it, pulling the weight of her legs behind her, and settles atop it just as she would the tin sheets she appropriates to slide herself around the city.

Settled comfortably, Dyeawan rests her arms atop the paddles, fingers curled around the end. Her natural instinct is to drag them backward. When she does, the motion of the paddles causes the contraption wheels to roll forward smoothly and easily almost a foot.

A sound somewhere between a laugh and a gasp escapes her lips.

It’s like rowing a boat without having to grip the oars or bear their weight. Dyeawan simply moves her arms back and the momentum of the wheels causes the paddles to complete a full arc.

She realizes the motion to control the contraption is exactly the same as those she uses to slide herself along the city streets, only a million times cleaner and more comfortable, and requiring not even an ounce of the effort.

It’s as if the conveyance beneath her was designed and built specifically for her.

Dyeawan experiments with the paddles, moving one forward and the other backward. As she suspected, it allows her to turn the contraption right or left effortlessly. By reversing her stroke on both paddles, the entire thing shoots backward at alarming speed.

After several minutes of wheeling herself around the confined space of the room, Dyeawan realizes she’s giggling and crying all at once. She’s seen chairs fashioned with wheels in the Capitol, usually supporting high-ranking Gen members, but she never even allowed herself to dream she’d possess one of her own.

And this is so much better and more magnificent than any chair could ever be.

She slides herself over to the room’s sole window, raising herself up as high as possible to peer outside. There is a mountain capped by clouds in the far-off distance to her right. To the left she sees water. There’s a beach not fifty yards from the window, although it’s far, far below. From there the ocean stretches until it hits a white misty nothingness miles offshore. There are no boats, no other landmasses in view.

There’s a knock at the door; Dyeawan can’t yet think of it as her door. The knock is soft, unobtrusive.

She stops herself at the foot of the bed, unsure of what to do. It doesn’t occur to her that permission to enter the room is hers to grant.

“Hello?” is the best she can come up with.

The door opens. A figure so tall it has to duck to enter the room. The man is as gaunt as he is lengthy, his nondescript brown robes hanging from him as if he were a coatrack.