Edge

It was solved.

Maya’s jaw dropped. "How did you even do that? That was ridiculously fast. And you didn't turn the cube over once!"

Edge looked up, his eyes bright and focused. "I use a different way," he said, holding up his perfect cube. "It's called *the ZZ method*."

"The Zee-Zee method?" Maya asked, leaning so far forward she almost tipped her chair.

Edge nodded. His voice was quiet and clear. "The main idea is pretty simple. Orient first. Then everything's faster."

Maya picked up her scrambled cube and squinted at it. "What do you mean, 'orient'?"

"You make a cross first, right?" Edge asked.

Maya nodded. That was the first thing everyone learned to do.

"I do something different," Edge explained. "It's harder at the start, but it makes the rest of the solve way easier." He pointed to the jumbled edge pieces on her cube. "The first step is called EOLine. That’s short for Edge Orientation Line. You have to make sure all twelve of these edges are flipped the right way up, right at the beginning."

Maya stared at the mess of colors. Flip all twelve edges? At the same time? "But... how?"

She picked up her cube and tried it. She twisted a side, and a yellow-and-blue edge piece popped into place. "Ha! Got one." But it was completely upside down. The yellow was where the blue should be.

"Okay, wait," she muttered, her brow furrowed in concentration. "If I fix this one…" She performed a few more quick twists. The first piece flipped correctly, but now two other edges were a total disaster.

"This is impossible!" she cried, her shoulders slumping. "It's like trying to pat your head and rub your stomach while hopping on one foot and singing the alphabet backwards!"

Edge gave a tiny, patient smile. "You have to do the hard part first," he said. "This first step takes the most thought. You have to see the whole puzzle at once, not just one piece."

He leaned over her cube and pointed with a slender finger. "Try turning the front face. Now the top. Now the right side."

Maya cautiously followed his instructions. Her fingers felt clumsy. Click. Clack. Click.

Suddenly, something amazing happened. All the edge pieces on her cube were pointing the right way. The colors were still a jumble, but every single edge was perfectly… aligned. It looked incredibly weird, like a half-finished secret code.

"Whoa," she breathed, turning it over in her hands. "Okay. Now what? The next fifty moves to fix this mess?"

"No," Edge said. "Now for the easy part."

He held up his right hand, then pointed to the top face of the cube. "From now on, you only need two kinds of moves. Just turns on the Right side, and turns on the Up side. That's it."

Maya stared at him. "You're kidding me. You can't solve the rest of the cube with just two types of moves."

"Just try it," Edge said, his eyes twinkling.

She was skeptical, but she gave it a shot. Her fingers started moving. R, U, R-prime, U. The pieces slid into place so smoothly it felt like magic. It was like the cube wanted to solve itself. She didn't have to stop and spin it around to hunt for a piece. Her hands just kept going in a steady, fast flow. R, U, R, U-prime. It felt less like solving a puzzle and more like playing a song.

In just a few seconds, she was on the last layer. A few more flicks of her wrist, and…