He tossed the coin.
Ace lifted his hand. The wire woke.
The coin flashed, caught sun, and began its first turn. Gray's gaze wasn't on the coin; it was on Ace, measuring smaller in the way a blacksmith watches for color. Pelly's chopsticks ticked once against his palm like a metronome that hated showmanship.
Ace dropped the wire.
It kissed the edge of the coin and slid, a clean miss that felt worse than a burn. The coin finished its second turn and clinked back into Gray's palm like it had never been threatened.
"Twice doesn't mean two heartbeats," Gray said, amused. "It means the coin's music. Hear it or you will always be late."
"Late is still a time," Pelly said. "I prefer never."
Andrew, who had been making a loop he didn't strictly need, let the rope sigh. A small cloud drifted in and sat just beyond Gray's shoulder like a polite stool. "Insurance," he said. "For coins and feelings."
Ace resisted the urge to apologize to a piece of metal. Hurt one thing. He set his feet, let the ship's sway climb his calves, and watched Gray's fingers, not the glitter.
"Again," Gray said.
The captain snapped the coin up with a different rhythm. It climbed, rolled, and in that tiny pause at the top—the apex where gravity remembers its manners—Ace breathed in and folded the wire to a point. He didn't chase the coin; he met the quiet between flips, the thin beat when surfaces forgot which way was out.
The wire touched.
A dot appeared, small and rude, right of center. The coin finished its second turn and fell neatly into Gray's palm. Gray didn't look at the mark. He looked at Ace's hands.
"Acceptable," he said. "Again."
[LOGBOOK][AIR TARGET: FIRST MARK LANDED. CAUSE: HE LISTENED FOR THE APEX INSTEAD OF WATCHING THE SHINE.]
Pelly didn't smile, which was how he congratulated people he intended to keep alive. "Deck remains unscorched. Continue."
Gray plucked a second coin from nowhere captains keep their encouragements and balanced one on each index finger. "Two with different spins," he said. "You will want both. You get one."
Ace nodded. Hurt one thing. He let the instruction settle where panic liked to live. Gray flicked both coins. One left his right hand with a lazy clockwise roll; the other took a meaner, fast counterclockwise spin. They crossed once like birds arguing about a map.
The wire twitched toward both and Ace killed it mid-birth. He chose. The fast, mean coin would demand doubtless memory; the lazy one was a friend pretending to help. He took the mean one.
He counted the turn not in numbers but in edges. The coin showed him face, then rim, then face again. At the first face—the one that thought it was confident—Ace set the wire at a slant that stole space from the heat. The point arrived as the coin tried to finish bragging.
A pinprick bit.
The lazy coin fell to the cloud and rolled into Andrew's palm. Andrew blew on it like soup. "Hot gossip," he said, pleased. "Next?"
Alder's hum shifted with a faint change in the sea's shoulder. "Course holds," he said. "Tide steady."
Abel, still watchful at the rail, added, "Horizon clean. Three gulls, no Marines."
"Finally, allies," Pelly said. "Gulls don't file reports."
Gray nodded at Ace's choices as if he'd been inside them. "Choosing is a skill," he said. "Fate hates people who try to have everything."
"Fate hates competition," Charles murmured from his carpet, rolling his cup. "It likes points more than nets."
"Words, not poetry," Pelly said, ritual now.
"A point," Charles said obediently, and tilted his head as if listening to a door try to remember how hinges work. "A point like that." He meant the wire.
[LOGBOOK][TWO-COIN TEST: HE CHOSE THE HARDER ONE. GOOD. DO NOT PRAISE HIM OUT LOUD OR HE'LL WIDEN.]
Gray spun another coin across his knuckles and let it leap. Ace found the apex again, the quiet, the beat between beats. He laid the wire in like a stitch and felt the coin accept it. His shoulder stayed still. His hand did the work. His temper stayed in his pocket.
"Better," Gray said. "Again."
He threw left-handed this time. The coin rolled uglier, as if it resented being made by a hand that was too smart to be dominant. Ace adjusted the angle, protected the thread that wasn't there, and bit the rim so lightly that only the coin and the man who had ordered the bite knew it had happened.
Pelly watched the deck. "If this ship survives your education, it deserves a raise."
"Ships can't spend money," Damon said from the yard where he checked a line that didn't need checking.
"They can refuse to float," Pelly said.
"Fair," Damon allowed.
Ace's breath fell into the drill the way a foot learns a stair. The coins rose and fell. He marked them or missed them, but the misses shortened to a clean, educational kind. He stopped chasing and started meeting. He stopped thinking about magma and thought about music.
"Enough air," Gray said at last, and his eyes were bright with the kind of joy that had nothing to do with mercy. "Over water."
He tossed a coin not up but out, a neat arc toward the rail. Pelly swore, which meant he approved the lesson in a way he would deny in court. Teuton straightened. Andrew's rope pulled a little on a place in the sky and a small cloud wandered under the coin like a waiter catching a poorly thrown tip.
Ace moved with it. He did not widen. He looked at the arc, at the apex before the cloud, at the second where gravity would change its mind and the deck would breathe and the cloud would decide to be generous. He put the wire into that second.
The coin took the bite and then sat on the cloud as if embarrassed to be helped.
Andrew wagged a finger at it. "No shame in public transportation."
[LOGBOOK][OVERBOARD DRILL: HE DID NOT PANIC. HE USED THE CLOUD WITHOUT RESENTMENT. NOTE: PROGRESS = TRUST.]
Ace burned off the ghost in his vision and exhaled. The ache behind his breastbone answered like a polite echo. Hurt one thing. His jaw loosened. He waited without hating the waiting.
Gray's grin skewed. "Fun," he said. "Again. Faster."
He snapped two more coins outwards at opposite angles. Ace ignored the one that begged to be first and took the one that would arrive ugly. He was late by a word and knew it; he pushed smaller into doubtless and made up the syllable. The mark landed. The other coin thudded into Andrew's cloud and sulked.
"Stop collecting," Pelly told Andrew.
"I collect experiences," Andrew said.
"Collect plates. Wash them," Pelly said.
"I do not wash," Andrew said, wounded. "I inspire washing."
"True," Colin said, appearing with a cup he absolutely hadn't been hiding behind his back. He handed it to Ace. "Water."
Ace drank. It tasted like permission. "Debt noted," he said.
"Incorrect," Colin said cheerfully. "Debt compounding."
Teuton braced against a push of wind as the ship took a shrug from the sea. Alder's hum faltered, then resumed. Abel lifted his chin half a degree. "Two sails, very far, wrong direction. Not ours."
"Keep them nonexistent," Pelly said.
Ace sharpened the wire and let the world be background music. He took coin after coin, failed and succeeded in the correct ratios, and felt the failure change shape into something that wanted to teach him instead of punish him. The deck stayed clean. The air smelled like warm metal and manners.
[LOGBOOK][SPEED DRILL: HE HITS WHEN HE DOES NOT THINK HE DESERVES TO. THAT IS WHEN PEOPLE GET INTERESTING.]
Gray flicked a coin between forefinger and thumb and let it blur. "Before it turns twice," he reminded, and then complicated the math with a toss that added a small, cruel spin at the end.
Ace didn't chase the cruelty. He aimed for the moment before cruelty mattered. The wire arrived, not wider, not proud, and the coin carried a pinprick into its second turn as if it had been born with it.
"Acceptable," Gray said, which was a feast.
Pelly tapped his cigarette ash into the dish he kept in his pocket purely to annoy everyone. "Kitchen soon."
"After one last test," Gray said, predictable as weather. He turned the coin like a thought between his fingers and looked not at the metal but at Ace's stance, at the way the ship and the boy and the horizon lined up. "Vertical."
He snapped the coin straight up, fast, so it became a column of glitter instead of an arc, a thin thing that wanted to vanish into the brightness.
Ace did not widen. He listened for the moment between up and down, the thin blink when a coin forgot how to be a coin and became a question. He put the answer there, thin as a hair. The mark bit. The coin came down. Gray caught it without looking.
"Again," Gray said softly, almost pleased enough to admit it.
[LOGBOOK][VERTICAL TOSS: HE FOUND THE BLINK. NEXT: CHOKE HIS DOUBT UNTIL IT DOESN'T NEED AIR.]
Andrew's cloud, bored, drifted a palm to the left. Teuton nudged it back with a look, which ought to have been impossible and yet worked. Damon grunted at wood in a way that meant the ship would forgive all of them later.
Alder reported, "Sea's manners holding."
Abel added, "Sails still wrong and far."
"Good," Pelly said. "Let them stay poetry we don't have to read."
Ace flexed his fingers once. He wanted to thank someone—anyone—for the way the world had become a set of rules he could obey without losing his self. He didn't. He took the gratitude and put it into smaller.
Gray rolled a third coin onto his knuckles and snapped it up in a fast, tight vertical that would barely show you a face before it pretended to be a line.
"Before it blinks," the captain said.
Ace lifted his hand. The wire woke.
[Foreshadow] When steel flies for real, the hand that hears the blink wins.