The Step That Wasn't a Step

The shop smelled like wet stone and old dust, and the rain on the window made everything inside feel slower. Soren sat on an upturned crate with a wooden box of stones between his knees, sorting them into rows the way his great-uncle had asked.

"By hardness," Uncle Bert had said, before disappearing into the back to argue with the furnace. "Softest on the left. There's a kit in there. Scratch one against the other. Whichever one gets the scratch is the softer of the two. Simple."

It was simple. Soren liked that it was simple.

The first stone was talc, pale and a little greasy, soft enough that his thumbnail left a mark. One, he thought, and set it at the far left. The next stone, gypsum, his nail also scratched, but it fought back a little. Two. He kept going. A coin scratched the calcite. The calcite would not scratch the fluorite, but the fluorite scratched the calcite, so fluorite went to the right of it.

He built the row across the floorboards like a staircase. Each stone scratched the one before it and got scratched by the one after. The steps felt even. Talc, gypsum, calcite, fluorite, apatite. A piece of window glass slid in around the middle. Then a steel file. Then quartz, which scratched the glass and the file both and felt, in his hand, like it meant it.

By the time he reached the corundum, a dull red lump Uncle Bert had labeled in faded pencil, the staircase stretched almost the length of the floor. Corundum scratched everything below it. Nothing below it could touch corundum.

Nine steps, more or less, and each one had felt like the same size of step. A little harder. A little harder. A little harder. Soren had started to feel he understood the shape of the whole thing.

Then he found the last stone.

It was small and clear and ugly, wedged in the corner of the box under a rag, mounted in a steel tip the way a drill bit is mounted. The pencil on its tag said the number ten. He picked it up. It was cold in a way the others weren't, and it stayed cold.

He pressed its edge against the corundum and dragged.

The corundum gave way with a thin white shriek, a scratch opening across the red surface like a chalk line. Soren turned the corundum over and dragged it back across the clear stone as hard as he could.

Nothing. Not a mark. Not a whisper of a mark.

He tried again, leaning his whole arm into it. The corundum skated off and left the clear stone exactly as it had been. He held it up to the gray window light and turned it. Untouched.

That was when the staircase under him stopped making sense.

Because nine had scratched eight, and eight had scratched seven, all the way down, in even little steps. And ten was supposed to be one more step. One stone higher. The same size jump as all the others.

It was not the same size jump. It was not even close.

Soren set the clear stone down very carefully and looked at the whole row again, from talc on the left to corundum near the right. He could scratch his way up that entire staircase with patience and a steel file and a thumbnail. Talc to corundum. One to nine. He had done it in an afternoon, step by step by step.

But the gap between corundum and the clear stone was bigger than the whole staircase put together. He could feel it in the scratch he hadn't been able to make. The jump from nine to ten was larger than the jump from one all the way up to nine.

The numbers had lied to him. Or not lied. They had just been put in a row, the way he put the stones in a row, and a row makes everything look evenly spaced even when it isn't.

He picked the clear stone up again. Diamond. The tag didn't say it but he knew. He kept turning it in the light, looking for what made it refuse.

Uncle Bert came back rubbing soot off his hands. "Got them sorted?"

"The last one's wrong," Soren said. "The number's wrong."

"That's a diamond. Industrial. It's ten. Hardest there is."

"No, I mean ten is the wrong number." Soren held it up. "All these others, they're like stairs. Each step is about the same. But this one isn't one step up from the red one. It's like the red one is at the top of the stairs and then this one is on the roof. Across the street. On another building."

Uncle Bert laughed, but not in the way that ends a conversation. "Huh. You scratched the corundum with it?"

"Easy. And the corundum can't touch it. Nothing in the box can." Soren looked back at the diamond. "Why is it so far up by itself?"

Uncle Bert shrugged, honestly. "It's all carbon. One kind of atom, all locked to each other every direction at once. Same stuff as pencil lead, believe it or not. Different arrangement."

Soren did not quite believe it, and then he did, and the not-believing and the believing happened so fast they almost hurt. The smudge of pencil on the tag. The clear stone refusing the file. The same atom, soft enough to write with, hard enough that nothing in the world could mark it, depending only on how the atoms held hands.

He ran his thumb along the staircase of stones one more time, all nine even steps, and then let his thumb stop at the edge of the gap, the empty floorboard between corundum and the small clear stone where no step existed at all.

The rain kept on against the window. Soren left the diamond where it was, alone on the right, with a hand's width of bare wood between it and everything else, and that gap looked exactly as wide as it really was.