The Number Between Nine and Ten

The gym smelled like folding tables and old varnish. Almost everyone had packed up. One seller was still winding tape around a box, and she waved a hand at the last tray without looking.

"Take the scratch kit if you want it," she said. "Nobody buys the busted ones."

The kit had nine little picks in a foam row, each one labeled with a number and a mineral. There was a gap at the end where a tenth should have been.

"One's missing," Soren said.

"That's the diamond," the seller said. "Diamond always walks off first." Then she went back to her tape.

Maya picked up number one. Talc. She dragged her thumbnail across it and it went to powder, soft as chalk dust.

"Watch," she said. She took number two, gypsum, and scraped it with the talc. Nothing. Then she scraped the talc with the gypsum, and the talc lost.

"So higher scratches lower," Soren said.

"Higher always scratches lower." Maya was already moving down the row. Two beats three. Three beats four. She was fast, thumbs quick, sliding each pick against the one below it. "It's a ladder. Every step is a step."

Soren opened his notebook and drew the ladder, one through ten, ten even rungs. He wrote a number next to each and then stopped, pencil resting on the page.

"Do it again," he said. "The bottom ones."

Maya scraped talc with gypsum. The line was deep and easy.

"Now the top ones," Soren said. "Eight against nine."

Maya took topaz, number eight, and dragged it across corundum, number nine. A faint gray smear came off, but it was the topaz that gave up. She pressed harder. The corundum barely showed a mark.

"That was hard," she said. "That step was harder than the whole bottom."

"It shouldn't be," Soren said. "They're both one step. One to two is one step. Eight to nine is one step. Same rung."

"It's not the same," Maya said. She scraped one against two again, then eight against nine again, feeling both in her wrist. "That's a nudge. That's a wall."

Soren looked at his even ladder and did not like it anymore. He erased the top rungs.

"The numbers just mean order," he said slowly. "Nine is harder than eight. That's all the number promises. It doesn't promise how much harder."

"So the ladder's wrong."

"The ladder's a list. We drew it like a ruler." He redrew it, and now the rungs at the bottom sat close together and the rungs near the top spread apart, further and further, like the mineral was pulling away from the number.

Maya looked at the empty foam slot at the end. The missing ten.

"How far is nine to ten," she said. It was not really a question. It was the thing she wanted to see.

"We don't have the diamond."

"We have the corundum." She held up number nine. "This is the hardest thing on this whole table. It scratched everything. There is exactly one thing on Earth that scratches this and we don't have it, because it walked off first."

Soren stared at the corundum. It had beaten topaz, quartz, everything. It was the champion of the tray. And it was still just number nine.

"If eight to nine already feels like a wall," he said, "and nine is the hardest thing here, then nine to ten is not a step."

"It's a cliff," Maya said.

The seller looked over. "You two still on the scale? It's just a ranking. Old guy scratched rocks in order two hundred years ago. Diamond won. End of list."

"But why does diamond win by so much," Maya said. "Everything else loses by a little."

The seller shrugged. "It just does." She picked up her box and headed for the door, and the door thumped shut behind her, and it was only them and the empty gym. He had written: bonds.

"The other minerals," he said. "They're built out of different pieces stuck together different ways. Some pieces hold tighter than others. So you climb, one to two to three, holds getting a little stronger each time."

"And diamond?"

"Diamond's one thing. All the way through. Just carbon, every atom locked to the next one the same strong way, in every direction, no weak seam anywhere." He pressed his own thumbnail against nothing, testing the idea in the air. "There's no soft direction to catch. That's why it's not a step. It stopped being like the others."

Maya turned the corundum over in her fingers, the hardest thing she could hold, the thing that had won every fight on the table and still could not touch the empty slot.

"So the number ten is a lie," she said, but she was grinning.

"It's not a lie. It's just the next name in the line. The line doesn't know how big the last gap is." Soren looked at his spreading ladder. "You could put a hundred between nine and ten and still not have room."

"A thousand."

"We don't actually know how many." He said it happily, like the not-knowing was the good part.

Maya set the corundum back in its slot. Nine picks in a row, and one empty space at the end where the whole rest of the scale would have to fit.

She dragged her thumbnail across the corundum one last time. It slid off clean, leaving her nail with a bright scratch and the mineral with nothing at all.