I'm here! I'm here. And I'm all set up to receive. I got held up after class, they transmit. The contact clicks in their hand and the feedback between the transmit and receive paths that isn't quite cancelled out beeps in their ear.

Hey, Scour! I'm all set up. I want you to tell me all about your day, but first I'm going to make you listen to me monologue for 13 minutes. Kidding! I'm kidding. I'll wait until you're ready to receive. But you would not believe the day that I have had.

Swift sits in the window of his room. The lingering heat of the day makes him wish that his window opened, but it's an old building from before the airshields were so reliable, and so it's a thick fixed-frame thing that takes a long time to cool down each night. Below him, he can hear his sisters arguing about something, but he keeps his focus on the radio.

Swift's message comes to them after only 2 minutes, but they knew they were cutting it close. The message is faint, attenuated by the unimaginable distance that separates them.

I read you! I've had a day of my own, although I don't know how it stacks up to yours. Mom still thinks that if I get startled enough I might develop a ranged attack, so she kept teleporting into my classes and hitting me with a watergun. I didn't want to tell her that the watergun was actually kind of nice, because you know that would just make her swap it out for something actually painful.

I know she means well, but, it's like "Mom, I don't want beam spells. I'm not going to be an adventurer, and I don't want to compete in a tournament or whatever to go upchain." But of course she wouldn't listen.

How about you? Is Shelters the Bright Fire of Redemption from the Storm still giving you trouble?

Scour pauses, to let him have time to reply. It's quiet here, on the edge of the city. They watch the last echos of sunlight fading from the face of the world every 16 minutes.

Shelters the Bright Fire of Redemption is a Brat, he replies. But she's starting on the bow and arrow, so her instructors had her too busy to get up to any mischief. Now that she's home of course she's complaining about her arm and the draw strength of her bow, and Sees got into an argument with her about hogging the bath.

I'm glad to hear your day wasn't too bad. I still think your mother is, like, four times too overzealous. I promise that most people do not care whether their kids have developed beam weaponry by 16. But I guess we already knew that.

My day ... he pauses for a moment. Smith, where do I even start. So first Lotus sends me back and forth across the city for an hour, because he couldn't be bothered to gather up all his dispatches into a batch, and so I had to make three separate runs to the widdershins office with 'urgent' requests. And then it turns out that the 'urgent' requests are perfectly normal equipment requisition forms that could have just been sent in the mail.

And then when I get off I have to go rush a bath before class, so I'm almost late to Natural Philosophy, and I get paired with Discerning Gaze of Owl's Wisdom. Who proceeds to just obliterate my development poem. "Oh, that's a half rhyme," and "Don't you think that you should use a more consistent anchoring metaphor?", and I just wish I could have pitched them off the side of the city, I really do.

Swift takes a deep breath and leans back into the cushions.

And then that bad mood just followed me through the rest of the day, I guess. I wish I could still partner with you in NP. I really appreciate your help with the homework, but it's not the same, not having you in class.

He pauses, checks his chronometer.

I think I should have just started reaching you. How were your classes?

Classes were like always. Everyone here is so martial, as though winning a spot upchain is the most important thing in their lives. But at least that means that I get plenty of time to swim. Eternal Hopefulness in the Face of the Swooping Shadow of Despair and I made plans to get together tomorrow and study. She's really good with plants -- I think she's hoping to get a job at the garden. She's going to show me some growing charms she's worked out.

Oh! I spent some time thinking about trains today, too. I think a non-stop train could make it from Audacious Anchor of Stability to 20th Glorious Clockwise in about 5.5 hours. The problem being that it would completely tie up the chain across 20 cities, and that there would be no way to safely move the train sideways to have it pass through the stations, because it would have a top speed of about 14% light speed. So we'd need to re-build all the stations to accommodate straight-through traffic somehow.

If we did that, though, a train from Audacious Anchor of Stability to August Antipodean City of Unsurpassed Tranquility would only take about 6 hours and 45 minutes. So you could imagine a hub-and-spoke model where everyone can take trains from their city to Anchor, and then back to a different city in half a day. I'm not sure if it's possible to have concurrent local service on top of that or not -- I think I need to make a time table.

Oh man, that would be great. Can you imagine being able to visit each other with 6 hours travel time instead of 3 days? You could come up every weekend.

How did you calculate that, though? I thought the trains topped out at, like, less than 1% light speed. It takes two hours just to move between adjacent cities.

If I'm understanding the impact of through trains right, though, it sounds like there shouldn't be that much interruption to local service, because you can run multiple through trains at the same time. Like, you could run a 7 hour train from Anchor to Antipode simultaneously with one from 1st Glorious Clockwise to 29th Glorious Widdershins, and from 2nd to 28th, etc. And then you could follow that up with a shorter through-train service in the opposite direction, or something.

It's definitely an interesting scheduling problem, though. I'm going to try grabbing some paper and sketching it out.

So I talked to one of the rail operators, and he said that the trains are actually limited by acceleration, not top speed. Well, they're also kinda limited by top speed, because they don't want to have too high a centripetal acceleration. But the curve of the chain is so long that practically, they're just limited by acceleration. So if they didn't have to stop in each city to pull onto the tracks that run on either side of the supports, they could just keep accelerating.

After that, figuring the total acceleration they can manage in the distance between cities is pretty straight forward.

I don't really expect you to crack it tonight, but let me know if you do. I'll take my own stab at it and then we can compare. Smith, I miss hiding away in the library together and working on stuff like this. It's completely unfair.

And then, after a small pause, I miss you.

Scour drums their feet restlessly on the guardwall, staring into the darkness. This far from the ground and from the other cities, any lights they might have are completely lost in the night. Other than the lights on the wall and the sounds of the city behind them, they could be floating in the void.

Scour doesn't count the seconds obsessively, like sand falling through an hourglass. They won't notice if Swift takes a moment to respond, too choked up to think of what to say.

I miss you too, he sends. Always. Every day.

He stares out into the night beyond his window. The reflection of his room in the glass washes out the darkness. Over such a distance, the radios have to be pretty directional, so he knows exactly which direction they're in. And he knows the distance. He can count the seconds between replies and multiply them by 300,000,000 meters per second and know exactly how far away they are.

So really, he knows where they are to an absurd degree of accuracy.

That doesn't explain why he feels so lost.

For midterm break, he says. If we both take a train to 10th glorious clockwise, we can spend 3 days there. It's more efficient then having one of us go all the way. We can sit in the gardens during the day and sneak in to sleep in the radiator berths at night. We'll both bring backpacks full of oats and refill our water bottles in the fountains.

It's a silly suggestion. But maybe if he saves he can get enough for a train ticket and a cheap hotel. Space is always at a premium in the cities.