The Thing That Won't Be Hit

"You're doing it wrong," Maya said. "It's supposed to be runnier."

"It's not supposed to be anything yet. I haven't finished." Soren tipped the box and the cornstarch sighed out in a soft white slope. He added water from the measuring cup, a little, then a little more, stirring with his fingers because the spoon had quit.

"Let me." Maya pushed her hand in slow. The mixture parted around her fingers like cream. She smiled. "See. Liquid."

"Punch it."

"I'm not punching your bowl."

"Punch it. Cousin Theo said to punch it."

Maya made a fist and hit the surface fast.

It was like hitting a countertop. The sound was a flat smack, no splash at all, and her knuckles bounced. She pulled her hand back and looked at it, then looked at the bowl, which sat there being innocent and white and apparently solid.

"It hit me back," she said.

"It didn't hit you back. You hit it."

"Soren. There's no difference to the bowl." She pressed one finger in slowly and it sank to the bottom, easy as anything. She tapped the same spot hard and her nail clicked against something that had not been there a second ago. "Slow, liquid. Fast, wall. Same stuff. Same second."

Soren got his notebook off the counter and drew the bowl. Under it he wrote two words, slow and fast, and put a line between them like they were two different countries.

"What decides," he said.

"What?"

"It has to decide. Slow or fast. Something in there is deciding which one to be, and it decides instantly, and it gets it right every time." He pressed his own finger in gently and watched it disappear. "It never guesses wrong. It's never soft when I hit it and hard when I'm slow."

Maya stopped with her hand over the bowl.

"That's the weird part," she said. "Not that it goes hard. That it's never confused."

They both looked at it.

"Theo's lab is making armor out of this," Soren said. "Not exactly this. But this idea. Soft stuff you can bend, that goes hard the instant something fast hits it. So you can move in it like a sweater and a knife can't get through."

"How does a sweater know the difference between a hug and a knife?"

Soren wrote that down word for word. He liked it too much to lose it.

"It's the powder," he said slowly. "Has to be. The little grains are floating, all spread out, water between them. When you go slow they slide past each other, they have time to move out of your way. That's the liquid."

"And fast?"

"Fast, they don't have time. You shove a whole crowd at once and nobody can step aside. They jam." He pushed his palm down hard and felt the surface go to stone under it, then soften the instant he eased off. "They jam, and the second you stop pushing, they unjam."

"So it's not deciding," Maya said. "It's just the grains either having time or not having time."

"Right."

"That's better than deciding," she said. "Deciding could be wrong. Time can't be wrong. There's always exactly enough time or there isn't."

She scooped a handful out. In her cupped fingers it was solid, a pale lump. She held still. The lump began to drool between her fingers, slow, dripping back into the bowl in long ropes, becoming liquid again the moment she stopped squeezing.

"Look," she whispered. "It's both. Right now. It's hard at the bottom where I'm gripping and soft at the top where I'm not."

Soren leaned in. The same handful, the same instant, solid in one place and liquid two centimeters away, the line between them moving as her fingers moved.

"It's not the stuff that's hard or soft," he said. "It's how you're touching it. The hardness lives in your hand, not in the bowl."

Maya went very quiet "Theo doesn't have to make the armor hard." She let the handful slop back. "That's what everybody gets wrong. You can't make a coat hard, then nobody can move. He just has to make it full of grains that run out of time. The coat stays soft the whole time you're wearing it. It only goes hard for the exact half-second something tries to hurt you, in the exact spot, and then it's a coat again."

"The hardness comes when it's needed and goes when it's not," Soren said.

"Because of time. Because the bad thing is always fast." Maya looked at the bowl like it had told her a secret. "That's why this works as armor and a brick doesn't. A brick is always hard. It can't move with you. This is lazy until the exact instant it can't afford to be."

Soren wrote: lazy until the exact instant it can't afford to be. Then he underlined afford twice.

"There's a whole kind of stuff like this," he said. "Has to be. Stuff that's one thing slow and another thing fast. Ketchup, kind of, but backwards. Quicksand. The Earth, maybe, deep down, if you pushed it slow enough for long enough." He looked up. "We only ever touch things one speed. Our speed. We don't even know what most stuff is, because we only ever touch it our way."

Maya put both hands flat on the surface and pressed, slow as she could, slower, feeling them sink, the cool white closing over her wrists, the bowl swallowing her without resistance.

"Try to take them out fast," Soren said.

She pulled.

The whole bowl came up off the counter, gripping her hands, hanging in the air solid as a cast, refusing to let go for as long as she pulled hard. The second she stopped, it remembered it was a liquid and slid off her fingers in a slow white sheet, back into itself, smooth, forgetting everything.

Maya held her dripping hands up and watched the last of it let go.