Mizzy stopped fiddling with my back. “I dialed down the flows,” she said. “So you can practice without quite as much force at first.”
“I don’t need to be coddled,” I said.
Exel looked at me seriously, then rested a hand on my shoulder. “I joke about death, David. It’s an occupational hazard—you learn to laugh at it when it’s all around you. But we already lost one point man from this team. Wouldn’t it be silly to lose another one while practicing? What happened just a few moments ago could easily have ended with you flipping into the air, then driving yourself face-first into the rooftop at high speed.”
I took a deep breath, feeling foolish. “Of course. You’re right.” Prof’s protections were good, but not infallible. “I’ll take it easy at first.”
“Then stand back up, Steelslayer, and let’s get to it.”
24
IT turned out that the difficulty in using the spyril didn’t have to do with its power. After a half hour of working, we had Mizzy up the strength of the water jets, as they provided a better footing that way.
The trouble was with balance. Trying to remain stable with two shifting jets of water coming out from your legs was like trying to balance a pot full of frogs on the tips of two half-cooked pieces of spaghetti. And I had to do it while keeping my left arm always pointed downward at the water, or I’d lose my power. I could use my right hand for stabilizing, fortunately. That one had what Mizzy called a handjet strapped to it. With it I could shoot out streams of water to adjust my balance, but usually I overcompensated.
It was all pretty complicated. Left hand with the streambeam had to stay pointed at water. Right hand opening and closing would adjust the strength of the water coming out my footjets, and the right thumb would control the strength of the handjet. But I couldn’t use that to stabilize unless I remembered to point it the direction I was falling, which—when you’re trying to juggle all of this in your mind—was easier said than done.
Eventually I managed to accomplish a stable hover about fifteen feet above the water. I wavered there, using the handjet to shoot a stream backward to keep from falling when I began to topple in that direction.
“Nice!” Exel called up from below. “Like walking on flexible stilts, eh? That’s how Sam put it.”
Well, if you wanted to be pedestrian with your metaphors.
I lost my balance and crashed back down into the water, relaxing my right hand and stopping the jets. I came up sputtering but let myself float there for a moment, Exel and Mizzy standing above me and looking down.
Falling again was annoying, but I wouldn’t let myself get discouraged. I’d had to practice for weeks with the tensors before getting the hang of those.
Something brushed my leg.
I knew it was probably just a piece of garbage moving in the lazy current, but I jerked my legs up and instinctively made a fist. So, when water jetted from my feet, I shot backward like a fleshy speedboat. I released my hand almost immediately, surprised by how easily I’d moved.
I turned around, face forward and legs back so I was on my stomach, and tried the jets again. I eased into the power until I was moving at a decent clip—about as fast as I’d seen Mizzy swimming the day before when she’d been giving me instructions. I checked my goggles and nose plugs to make sure they were secure.
Then I increased the speed.
For some reason, even though my feet were pointed straight back, this spat me out of the water so that I flew just above the surface. It was quick, lasting only a few seconds before I plunged into the water again face-first.
Wow, I thought, surfacing and then spurting from the water again in a splash.
I relaxed my hand, slowing my momentum, then put myself upright. The small amount of force coming from the jets raised me up out of the water about to my waist, the water churning in a donutlike ring around me.
I’d gotten going pretty quickly back there. Could I go even faster? I let myself sink back into the water, then stuck my feet out behind me again and put the jets on full blast, shooting face-first like a torpedo. Water sprayed off me as I splashed up and down, thrilled by the speed. I got the hang of this power-swimming much more quickly than I had the hovering; I was having so much fun that I almost forgot I was in the water.
Eventually I swam up to the others and stopped the jets. Above, Mizzy was gasping. “That,” she said, tears in the corners of her eyes, “was one of the most ridiculous things I’ve ever seen.”
“You said ‘awesome’ wrong,” I grumbled. “Did you see how fast I was going?”
“You looked like a porpoise,” Mizzy said.
“An awesome porpoise?”
“Sure.” She laughed.