They settled into it.
The third platform took two days. The fourth took one. By the fifth Jake had stopped counting the launches and started counting the landings — how clean, how controlled, how much his legs had left afterward. His body was learning the air. The moment of leaving the column, the arc, the correction at the peak that his feet kept doing whether he asked them to or not. It was becoming reliable. He still didn't understand it.
Torek climbed with them through the third and fourth platforms. He said less each day. On the third platform he watched Jake launch twice, said "faster at the top" and walked away. On the fourth he watched Vauren land, checked his feet, and nodded. By the fifth platform Torek was back on his railing at the base with his cup, and Jake and Vauren were climbing alone.
The platforms changed as they went up.
The third had a settlement — twenty or thirty buildings, a market smaller than the base's, Verath families living in stone houses with terraces that faced upward. Children played on the terraces. One of them watched Jake and Vauren arrive from the column and ran inside to tell someone. A woman came to the door, assessed them, went back in. Travelers were ordinary here. Two more arriving was the same as two more clouds passing.
The fourth was quieter. Fewer buildings, more open stone. A group of Verath were training on a flat section near the edge — the same movement drills Jake had seen in the courtyard on the base, except faster. Their bodies shifted through positions with a fluidity that made Jake's climbing look mechanical. One of them launched from a standing start, no column, just a push from the stone — her body going up and sideways to a small outcropping above. She landed, turned, dropped back down, did it again.
Jake watched her do it three times.
"No column," he said to Vauren.
"I saw."
"She just pushed off the ground."
"I saw."
Jake studied his feet. The stone. The woman launching again, the blue in her skin cycling dark and light with each push.
"We can't do that yet," he said.
"No," Vauren said. He was already walking toward the next column. His left arm hadn't moved from his side since the third platform.
They talked more as they climbed.
"How did your family decide who enters?" Jake asked on the fourth platform. They were sitting on the edge — Jake on the edge, Vauren a meter back from it — eating something they'd traded for at the third platform's market. Dense bread, dark, with a grain Jake didn't recognize.
"The firstborn of each generation enters at seventeen," Vauren said. "It has been this way for fifteen generations."
"What if the firstborn doesn't want to?"
Vauren turned to him. The question didn't seem to compute.
"Has that happened?" Jake asked.
"No."
"Never? In fifteen generations nobody said, actually, I'd rather not fight my way across a chain of worlds?"
Vauren ate a piece of bread. Chewed. Swallowed. "The Lindrith name carries obligation. To decline would be to end the line."
"The line doesn't end if you don't enter. You'd still exist."
"The line would end," Vauren said, with a finality that closed the subject.
Jake ate his bread. The wind pushed at them. Below, the third platform was visible, the settlement small from up here, the terraces catching the light.
"Did you want to?" Jake asked.
Vauren was quiet for long enough that Jake thought he wasn't going to answer. The wind moved his hair. His black eyes were on the platforms above.
"I have wanted nothing else," he said.
Vauren's posture was straight even sitting, his left arm held close. Fifteen generations. Every one of them climbing. Every one of them wanting nothing else.
Jake had entered because his father was out there. Vauren had entered because his name required it. Both of them on the fourth platform eating dark bread.
"My dad left when I was three," Jake said. "I don't remember him. I just know he's in here somewhere."
Vauren turned to him. It was the first time Jake had said it directly. The wind moved between them.
"Somewhere ahead," Vauren said.
"Yeah. Somewhere ahead."
They finished the bread. The wind kept pushing. Neither of them moved for a while.
The fifth platform was where the shoulder started costing.
Every launch required the body to commit fully — the push at the column's top, the arc, the landing. Vauren had been compensating for the dead arm since the second platform, tilting his launches, letting the right side carry everything. It worked. But each platform was higher than the last. The launches were longer. The margin between a clean arc and a missed one was shrinking.
On the first launch to the fifth platform, Vauren's tilt was too far. He corrected mid-arc — the water redistributing his weight in a way Jake could see in the shifting of his skin — but the correction cost him the landing angle. He came in steep. His right side absorbed it but his left knee hit the stone and he went down.
He stood up immediately. His face was controlled. His knee was bleeding through his clothes.
"Vauren."
"It is nothing."
"Your knee is bleeding."
"The landing was imprecise. I will adjust."
He said it and turned back to the column, and the not-reacting was its own answer. Vauren had been imprecise once. On a longer launch, imprecise meant missing the platform entirely.
He didn't say it. Vauren knew.
They made the fifth platform. Vauren's second launch was clean — the adjustment made, the compensation recalibrated. But Jake watched the way he stood after landing, the weight shifting off his left side for a moment before he caught it, and knew the recalibration had a cost that was adding up.
The fifth platform was mostly empty. Open stone, a few structures that looked abandoned, the grooves in the ground faded and partially filled with dust. The wind was stronger up here. The base platform was small below them — the town visible as a pattern of buildings and blue awnings, the arrival point a pale circle at its center. The cloud layer was brighter from this height, the white of it almost blinding when the sun hit it directly.
Jake stood at the edge and took it in. Five platforms. Five out of thirty-one. It had taken days, and Vauren's body was starting to argue with what he was asking it to do.
The platforms above were closer now — the sixth visible in detail, buildings on its surface, people moving. The seventh above that. The rest disappearing upward into sky.
Vauren came to stand beside him, facing upward too.
"Tomorrow," Jake said.
"Yes."
They found a sheltered spot where two walls met and the wind dropped. Jake sat with his back against the stone. Vauren sat across from him, his left arm in his lap, doing the careful testing Jake had seen him do on the first night. The range was the same. The shoulder stopped at the same point.
Jake watched him for a moment. Then he took off his shoes and checked the soles. Worn. The material thin where his feet met the grooves. Underneath, his skin was warm. Faintly, if he let himself feel it, the light was there — lower than it had ever been. Not his palms, not his forearms. His feet.
He put his shoes back on. Vauren had stopped testing his shoulder. The light was fading, the platforms above going dark from the top down, the last of the sun catching the highest ones Jake could see.
They slept with the sky above them and the wind pushing against the walls.