After three days, Kaleb could finally consistently tell that there were differences between the fields that Erid generated, and he was getting better at identifying which of them Erid was pretending to have at that moment. His mind throbbed, but the pain had receded. He was in the peculiar fugue state of having been pushed too hard for too long to care much, and just kept at his exercises until Erid told him to stop, and then would traverse the rest of his cycle in a haze of exhaustion.

“Alright” said Erid, halfway through the third day. “I think that’s all we’re going to have time to do.” he looked somewhat frustrated, and Kaleb felt his heart sink. They were sitting opposite one another on the carpeted floor.

“We’ll need to move on to the next stage. Normally you’d spend a month refining your senses before attempting to alter the flow of your own field, but we’re short on time, and so we’re going to have to make up for it somehow… Once we’re out of this city, you should continue this exercise, but with people on the street. It’ll be a much better experience.”

“How did you learn it?”

“Oh I learned it from my teacher… but it wasn’t until I went out into the world and saw people with spikes that it became useful.”

“There’s somewhere else without spikes?”

“Yes… or rather, there was. I lived at the brethren’s school along with all the other kids they’d adopted or rescued.”

“Really? What happened to your parents… oh. Sorry, that was rude of me.”

Erid smiled a pained smile and Kaleb cursed his parochial inability to understand that he didn’t have to know everything about everyone. One of the problems growing up in a place so small that everybody’s lives were everyone else’s news.

“That’s ok. I don’t remember them that well. I mean, I remember the day I lost them, we were attacked by monsters… but now I struggle to see my parents’ faces. It’s kind of disturbing for me to think about how that part of my life seems… so far away now.” Erid seemed lost in thought “but I got a new family, you know. That’s what the brethren are. What I’m teaching you is some of what the brethren knows, skills, techniques, but the true strength; the real strength of the brethren is that we are family, first and always and until the last. That is what has always been our true strength.”

Erid frowned, cutting through his speech, “that’s enough reminiscing! It’s time to get on with learning to manipulate your field into the shape of another. Hopefully you can learn more from this about how to differentiate between fields too.” Erid clapped his hands and then pointed to Kaleb’s right shoulder. “I want you to gather your field in your right shoulder. In a point. Imagine bundling it all up and placing it there. That is one place where people often have a capacitance spike. We’ll move through your body adding more and more spikes once you’ve managed to make one.”

“Ok.”

Kaleb resigned himself to the task. His head throbbed. How was he going to do this?

“You’ve used your field to do a variety of things in your life? Allow you to jump further, run faster, land easier. Well, all of those are techniques that extend your field. What you are going to do now is build up a charge in one place. It will feel uncomfortable at first, especially not being able to release it, but it will get easier.”

Kaleb thought about how to gather charge in his right shoulder. What had Erid said? To bundle it up in one place. He could feel the tingle of his own field on his skin now – a side-effect of trying so hard to sense Erid’s changing example. And so he tried to bunch it up in his right shoulder… and immediately cried out in pain and let it go. It was as if he had tried to break his own arms. He felt his body, which was flat against the floor now –though he hadn’t noticed falling from his sitting position– scream out in protest. After all the sensitivity training, it seemed that this experience was amplified even further. His fingers twitched and shook.

“Mmmmm, ok, not the gathering approach…”

Kaleb, who was on his back panting after the wave of pain had subsided, groaned and returned to sitting slowly.

“This time, try and imagine this:” Erid stretched his shirt out, and then held one hand under it, and pressed the finger of the other through it, a little pocket formed.

“What? Why? Shouldn’t I keep trying until it works?”

“Not the same way, no. It’s one of the difficulties of working on field generation. You never know what method will work for which individual. Fields aren’t visible, they aren’t tactile if they aren’t realised, and so we do our best to turn our ideas into analogies that allow us to think about how they might be manipulated. But it isn’t a hard and fast method, you just have to try and see which approach works.”

“That’s encouraging to know,” said Kaleb sarcastically, to which Erid only offered a wry grin.

Kaleb breathed out, and then prepared himself again. He thought about the cloth, and tried to press his field through the hoop of his right shoulder. An immediate tearing sensation laid him on his back again.

“Fuck!” he said, his vision going black and then shivering back to normal. Erid looked down chuckling.

“That’s how it goes… do you need a moment?” Kaleb nodded his head, still lying on his back. It took him a few moments to stead his breathing.

“Ok” he said, still on the ground.

“This time, try imagining that your field is like a tap, pouring water into a basin. Then imagine a plug in your right shoulder, and the field forming a pool there.”

“Alright” Kaleb said, with far less enthusiasm than when he had begun the exercise.

He sat himself back up and prepared for another painful experience. He imagined his field flowing around his body like a stream of water. Then he put a plug in his shoulder. He braced himself for the pain.

It didn’t come.

He opened his eyes in surprise as he realised that his shoulder was feeling heavier and heavier. He looked down at it, but saw nothing, but he realised that he was feeling his field gathering there. He reached out with his field sensitivity, and to his surprise, thought that he could detect something similar to what Erid had been doing. It still eluded him, but there was something there –something that wasn’t part of his normal field generation! It was some kind of forcefulness, some potential waiting to be realised.

“Yes! That’s the stuff!” Erid pumped his fist in the air in obvious excitement. “We’re getting somewhere!” He smiled broadly “Now, I want you to let it go and then collect it again. Do that a few times, and then we’ll see how long you can keep it going for. It’s also good to make an imaginary overflow into your basin image– if you just keep on building a charge, you can lose control of it, and it can do damage– both internal and external.”

Kaleb hurriedly let the still-gathering field go, and then carefully set a limit on how much he would gather the next time before it joined the flow of the rest of his field. Then he set about repeating the exercise, and as he did so, he felt the strain and stress of the last few days flowing away from him. He could do it. To tell the truth, he’d been beginning to feel an overwhelming sense of inadequacy through his instruction. Erid was so obviously skilled, and so obviously on a level so far above him that he couldn’t help but feel dissuaded. But now, as he once again plugged his shoulder and felt it fill with charge, he could at least do something.

“Very nice!” Even Erid seemed overjoyed at this development, and Kaleb couldn’t help but smile.

“Now we’re going to try and see how long you can keep going for.”

And so they started again. This was going to be the deciding factor in the end – how long he could maintain the facade of having spikes for. Essan had already said that it would have to be half and hour at the least. That is how long it would take to go down the mistship port and then to get on the boat. But it would be best if he could maintain it for an hour.

The feeling of keeping his field charged in one place eventually became, to Kaleb, like holding a light weight out in front of himself. It started off easily, without any strain. But slowly it seemed as if his muscles were failing him, and the weight became intolerably great and then there was a sudden moment of failure and the weight fell back to his side. At least, that was how he imagined it. In reality he was simply sitting still on the floor, gradually sweating more and more and gritting his teeth as his face turned red with exertion.

“Good! You’re getting there” said Erid “that was a full fifteen minutes!”

“Ugh...” Kaleb had stopped making intelligible sounds after the first ten attempts.

“Alright, let’s have a break. Drink some tea, enjoy the facilities, we’ll reconvene in an hour or so.”

Kaleb nodded and stumbled to his feet, before immediately careening into a table, which he propped himself up on. He waited for his body to readjust to verticality, and then tried for a step, finding that he could in fact walk, he made his way to a chair at the bar, which he propped himself up in, and skulled the glass of water before him, feeling its refreshing flow diffuse through his body.

Essan and Erid were conferring in a corner, but Kaleb couldn’t bring himself to eavesdrop. He was too tired and far too worn. His world had reduced to the circle of his body, and everything exterior to his skin seemed to have faded into the background. There was, he realised, a certain joy in it. Now that he had successfully performed one of the exercises as well, he felt that there was some realisation that was trembling just beyond his awareness, and he felt the tantalising possibility of future discoveries, even through the mists of pain that permeated his body.