Dark floorboards an infinity below me on three sides were illuminated only by the many green-tinted joints and digits that the endlessly long arm had at irregular intervals. I moved to back up, ready to leap again and retreat toward the back of the room, and an arm moved to block me. I turned another way, and an arm swept across that exit to sweep out and destroy floorboards between two of the penetration points.

Nothing to grab onto, no handholds with the nearest joints a couple of feet below my own two feet, and higher above me than I could have jumped or easily climbed to access.

The floor dipped precipitously again. My feet began sliding on dusty, pine-needle covered floorboards, and that horrible rollercoaster-drop feeling became an ongoing thing.

Too wide a gap to jump, no footholds.

I adjusted my grip on the spear, stabbing down at the joint below, driving the tip into the mess of faint green wires. It penetrated, doing some damage, and remained jammed in.

The arm dipped another foot, and the bottom end of the floorboard was pulled out of my hands. I backed away, not because of fear or immediate threat, but because I was one more shift of the floor’s angle from sliding down into oblivion, and I wanted a chance to be able to think and react before I did anything there. With hands and feet, I could move back three or four feet, and I would summarily slide two feet back toward the edge.

I wasn’t even breathing, and I had to force myself to start, because I could not afford for my muscles to be oxygen starved at a moment like this.

Tinker, I thought. It’s a tinker and it’s a shaker and it’s a changer, for all intents and purposes.

There were rules for engaging with tinkers, changers and shakers. Tinker especially, you deprived them of their stuff and blitzed them where possible. The rule for shakers was to avoid fighting on their turf.

I couldn’t stay put. The two ideas were half-formed and they combined into one notion, that I put into motion before even being able to fully visualize it. My mom had dropped the ‘visualize’ part of her general encouragement when I’d become a hero.

Like the basketball was always a thing of dreams, fancy, and imagination, and the hero stuff, that was what required practical advice and attention.

I pushed myself forward, rising to a standing position and running down the slope, to plant my foot on the very end of that floorboard. It bowed and splintered under my weight, and I dropped toward the infinity below.