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it was time to field test them. She ran. All the joints of the legs were spring stabilized, which was nice for stopping the momentum of the heavy steel mechanisms, but it was also meant to store energy on the move. She couldn’t manage the churning piston run of a normal human sprint but bounded like a two-legged deer once she worked out the gait after three steps. Higher and higher she bounced with each stride, longer and longer each bound until she reached the limit of what her muscles could manage with the load of the springs. The two player’s Hayfield’s squad kept back took an optimist’s angle to cut off her charge and found themselves left in Rynn’s wake as she sped between them like they were statues.
    She heard the shouts of encouragement as her own teammates broke off pursuit and cheered her on. There was no one to stop her from crossing the score line. She pressed on, full steam ahead until she reached the far painted line of the pitch and broke into an exultant grin as she scored.
    Slowing proved to be a different matter. Rynn eased off her sprint, but forward momentum carried her onward. At each bounding stride, the springs in the tinker’s legs returned much of her kinetic energy to her. Leaning back to ease up, she felt her balance faltering and stumbled to catch herself.
    The edge of the ship. It was too close. The Jennai was massive, with the plaza running the full length of the ship, but it was still finite. And Rynn had rediscovered that fact in alarming fashion. There were no safety rails or nets at the end of the plaza; its core function was as an aerodrome, not a sporting stadium. Even non-tinkers have a sense of certain applications of physics, quick scratchwork within the brain that tells them how to aim a rifle or catch a crashball. Rynn’s internal scratchwork needed neither her exact velocity nor her distance to the edge of the airship to tell her she was about to pitch headlong into the sky.
    The only way Rynn foresaw went against her body’s preservation instincts. It became a test of will; her instincts told her to keep herself from falling to the unforgiving steel of the plaza against the reasoning that it would hurt far less than a fatal fall from above the clouds. Rynn let the crashball tumble from her hands and braced herself as she put her feet together and used the muscles in her foot to catch a toe on the plaza floor. She felt the instant panic of falling, putting her arms out to cushion her fall. Rune-balanced for weight though they may have been, her tinker’s legs still carried their mass like the steel constructs they were. Rynn slammed face-first to the ground, dragged down by the mass of her legs to hit far harder than she’d have liked.
    Rynn’s arms did nothing to cushion her impact as far as she noticed. She blacked out as she hit the plaza’s edge, just a few feet from empty air. What could only have been seconds later, she blinked her eyes open, feeling the blood gushing from her broken nose.
    The crashball wobbled along and plummeted over the side.

    Madlin cringed and held her hands to her nose.
    “What’s wrong? Rock catch you?” Cadmus shouted over the grating of the auger and its steam engine. The auger’s bit reached through the open world-hole and into the guts of Korr’s moon. It dumped moon gravel into a chute that ran down into a newly cut hole in the bottom of the Jennai , dumping the extramundial stone debris into the Sea of Kerum in a fine shower.
    “No,” Madlin replied. She was standing by the head of the auger, but she was wearing goggles and helmet, and none of the large fragments were being ejected in her direction. “Rynn’s a clumsy idiot is all.” She checked a counter on the side of the auger, the numbered dials each turning slower than the one to its right. “Stop there! Three hundred twenty-five feet, two inches. You went over a bit.”
    “We’ll deal with the variance,” said Cadmus. Madlin was possibly the only one alive who