Her grandfather was here. It was go time. Now or never. Could she do it?

Carnelia bit her lip and looked down at her hands. They trembled with fatigue, even as she rested one against the family totem. Her body, too. She was sore all over. She’d been climbing and falling all week, and her earlier tumble had hurt more than she liked to admit.

The answer was no. At least, not if she kept going at it like she was.

Carnelia glanced at her real namestone on the ground. The sack of tools still lay in the same spot beside it, exactly where she had left it at the start of the week. Untouched. She had hoped never to use it…

But now was the time to pull out all the stops.

Much to Jeorr’s surprise, the first thing Carnelia did after meeting their silent back-and-forth was to step away from the Blazebright totem. She also removed her harness and let the fake, rubber namestone on her back fall drop. A foolish hope bloomed in the old man’s heart for a moment as it settled heavily on the cavern floor.

“G—”
     “Giving up, girlie?”

Ms. Zenic stole the words from his mouth before he could muster them. Carnelia smiled and shook her head.

“Of course not! This is just… plan B.”

With a wink, Carnelia sauntered over to the sack that lay on the ground next to her real namestone. She pulled out a thick coil of rope from inside. Then, with a grunt, she lifted her real namestone on its side and began looping the rope around the namestone. It took a few rolls and crisscrossing knots before it was secure. Once it was, Carnelia let her namestone drop back down with a heavy, dusty thump, and she finished things by fishing out the opposite end of the coil of rope and tying that around her waist.

As his ward did that, Jeorr wondered what her plan was. Why use a rope if the harness she was using earlier was the lighter, easier option? Even after securing her namestone with the rope, a considerable length of it was left coiled on the ground. Now, she would have to carry all that excess weight in addition to her namestone as she climbed, and it all would be swinging below her too, unsecured, instead of strapped to her back. If she wasn’t careful, she could be yanked right off the pillar while climbing.

The murmurs and concerned noises coming from the surrounding crowd told Jeorr that his fellow Downtownians were thinking along the same lines. Carnelia ignored them all, giving her work a few hard tugs to check that everything was nice and snug. It was. She stood up and nodded, pausing only to secret a few more items from the sack into her pockets, then approached the totem once more.

Jeorr watched as Carnelia took a beat at the foot of her family totem and raised her eyes skyward. Without the weight on her back, her movements were light and free. She bounced on her toes, rolled her shoulders, and cracked her neck. Plumes of white dust scattered from her hands as she re-chalked them. She took a deep breath.

Then, she began her climb with a leap.

She flew almost a yard high before latching onto the smooth pillar like a gecko. Then she started to pull herself up, her hands finding and grasping the barely perceptible divots and bumps in the stone with ease. With the namestone still on the ground and a week’s practice under her belt, she moved fast, a far cry from her previous plodding attempts. In less than a minute, she reached the point where Jeorr had first spotted her. The same smooth spot that had caused her so much trouble before.

—and she leaped right past it, not giving the crowd even a moment of anticipation.

By the second minute of her climb, Carnelia was already hanging off the top of the totem, slapping Diamme’s name for good luck.

“Hiya, everyone!”

Carnelia’s greeting echoed as she waved from high above, and the crowd of excited geriatrics and retirees cheered in return. All except for two. Jeorr, who watched her progress with stiff and silent worry, and Ms. Zenic. She gestured drunkenly at the namestone, which still sat on the ground exactly where Carnelia had left it.

“It’s very nice you got way up there, but you forgot your special stone, silly!”

It was true. Carnelia’s real namestone, that terribly inconvenient slab of limestone, was still on the ground. But Jeorr noticed the rope connecting Carnelia to her namestone. It only had a coil or so of slack left. An oddly precise length.

Jeorr’s eyes widened in horror as his idle observation led him to a terrible, heart-sinking realization. Carnelia had already defeated his challenge. She’d defeated it the day he’d given it to her.

“You’re right, Ms. Zenic!” Carnelia shouted back from above. “If I don’t keep an eye on it, you might eat it!”

“You bet!”

Craning her head back, the woman brandished her false teeth and gnashed them, eliciting laughter from friends and neighbors. She laughed too, the loudest and most raucous of all.

Realizing what Carnelia was about to do, Jeorr hollowly watched as Carnelia finally clambered atop the pillar and stood tall. It was so simple. At this point, all she had to do was pull up the stone. It would take a while, and it would be strenuous, but she would get it up there eventually. There were ways for her to take a break if she needed to, too.

She could’ve done this any day of the week, he realized glumly. She had simply been waiting for him to crawl out of his workshop.

As Jeorr wrestled with his feelings, Carnelia began a series of stretches on the narrow space atop the pillar. Fingers to toes, hip twists and shoulder rolls; Downtownians exclaimed in worry as several stretches brought the girl teetering near the edge. But even from far below, they could see the white flash of her confident grin. On the ground or a tightrope, it made no difference. Carnelia’s balance was impeccable.

“Don’t worry,” she called out. “I have everything under control!”

The truth of that statement became all the more apparent to Jeorr as she proceeded with the next step of her ‘plan B’.

With her warm-up finished, Carnelia pulled out from her pockets what she had secreted earlier from the sack. Four small, wooden wedges and a long-nozzled tube of adhesive. Jeorr immediately recognized them as being from his workshop. Carnelia lathered the sides of each wedge with the gray paste, crouched down, and stuck them in pairs against the side of the Diamme’s namestone. The pairs were placed on opposing sides of the pillar, pointed downwards, and with a slight gap between them.

The adhesive she’d chosen cured near-instantly. As Carnelia tried to wriggle the wedges from side to side to test their bonds to the stone, Jeorr heard Miss Eleina make a noise of comprehension.

“Ah, I see. Clever girl.”

“What is it, Miss Eleina?” asked Opal.

“It’s—“ Miss Eleina caught Jeorr sneaking a glance at her. She quickly turned away and patted her young student on the head. “—a surprise. You’ll find out soon enough.”

Back atop the pillar, Carnelia was nodding, apparently satisfied with her work. Then, planting her feet wide, she lined the rope up between the set of wedges in front of her —the gap between them perfectly matching the width of the rope— and pulled the rope taut. What few coils of rope remained on the ground vanished as she wrapped the excess length around herself, and after a few test pulls, had the namestone bucking up and down off the ground.

Then Carnelia backed herself to the edge of the pillar as close as she could. The crowd hushed as she gazed over her shoulder at the long drop behind her.

It was clear what she planned to do.

“Oh, I can’t watch!” Opal cried out. He clapped his hands over his eyes and tucked his face into Miss Eleina’s dress. The governess herself clutched Jeorr’s arm nervously.

“The stones on that girl!” she whispered.

Though his stomach was as tight as a vice, Jeorr didn’t turn away. He knew, at least in his mind, if not his heart, that Carnelia was not about to traumatize them with the sight of her young corpse splattering on the hard, stone floor. She had a plan, even if it didn’t quite match how he’d envisioned her beating his challenge.

With everyone in silent anticipation, Carnelia took a deep breath. Then, with a deep breath and a spring of her tightly bent knees, she hopped off the pillar.

She dropped like a stone.

The crowd gasped. But before she could drop too far, Carnelia grabbed hold of the pillar and skidded to a halt. The crowd let out a collective sigh of relief.

After a moment, those sighs turned into excited whispers as they realized what Carnelia had done. Matching the exact distance she had fallen…

…the namestone had risen a meter above the ground.

Jeorr cursed as he belatedly put the pieces together. Carnelia had figured out an even easier way to beat his challenge than he had initially thought. She was using the pillar like a pulley, with her own body as the counterweight to her namestone. After all, why pull up the stone when she could rely on gravity to do all the work? The wedges were guideposts to keep the rope from slipping free of the pillar.

It was easy. Too damned easy.

Indeed, Carnelia made it look practically effortless. After adjusting the rope to make sure it was still aligned with the wedges, she began to descend. And with her weight partially canceled out by the namestone, she looked like she was floating as she rappelled down. Like an astronaut landing on the moon. Her quick arrival back on the cavern floor was met with a storm of applause.

However, Carnelia’s task wasn’t quite finished. While she had reached the ground without a problem, back at the peak of the pillar, her namestone was still stuck at the lip. Nothing a few hard yanks couldn’t solve, but Jeorr could tell right away that Carnelia didn’t want to end it that way.

As she loosened the knot around her waist, Carnelia turned to the crowd of neighbors, mentors, and friends that had shown up to watch her climb. She held out the taut rope with a bright smile and a showman’s flourish.

“I need three volunteers to hold the rope in place for me!”

Jeorr scowled and crossed his arms, but it didn’t matter. Carnelia had no shortage of other volunteers. Starting with Miss Eleina—who roughly elbowed past him—a flood of townsfolk converged towards Carnelia with eagerly raised hands. It ended up with Miss Eleina and Ms. Zenic holding the line, with Opal also helping to mixed effect.

In the meantime, Carnelia returned to face her nemesis, the pillar. But this time, without any burdens holding her back.

It was no challenge at all. Before Jeorr could even have a chance to worry, she was back at the peak of the Brightburn family totem, perched right under her loosely swinging namestone.

For this last hurdle, Carnelia didn’t use a fancy workaround. She merely gripped her legs around the pillar, locked her feet, then with her free upper body, grunting and straining, lifted the namestone...

...and dropped it in its final position with a heavy thump.

The sound echoed loudly in the silent anticipation that filled the cavern. The Downtown was quiet as it ever had been. Jeorr stiffly turned to regard Miss Eleina and Zenic.

Sharing smiles, the two women counted down.

“Three.”

“Two.”

“One.”

They let go of the rope. It fell slack to the ground and no namestone came tumbling down from the sky.

Carnelia’s distant whoop echoed across the whole cavern.