Before leaving the monastery that night, Ruvle had an idea. Her big dumb conscience kept slapping her over what she’d done to Elial, and Elial herself still walked about with frustration buried in her eyes. Elial kicked around a puzzle box like a hackeysack, hitting it hard enough to clatter the inner mechanisms as she solved it with accepted precision and rejected delicateness. The colored stickers peeled with each strike. A many-legged maroon bug skittered through the front archway, across the floor, and Elial struck the puzzle cube with her heel, landing it in front of the insect with a loud clack. The bug scurried in the opposite direction without breaking stride.

  “How about we do a flag duel?” Ruvle offered.

  Elial kicked the puzzle cube back up and caught it in her hand; she solved it one-handed in a flash. “Why?”

  “I think we both still have issues to work off,” Ruvle said. And every extra bit of training helped.

  Elial turned away to the door, adjusting her headband. “You’ll lose.”

  “I still want to do one.”

  Elial tossed her cube up and down, considering it, and then tossed it up. “Then we will.” It landed atop one of the balconies. “But only because it will be quick.”

  Ruvle smiled. It wasn’t about getting beaten up, but about helping Elial calm down.

  Elial climbed up to one of the training rooms again and returned with the flags, jumping down and landing in a tumble, already covered in green flags for herself–twenty of them. Fabric composed of a tiny fibrous hooks fastened their bases to her bodysuit–four on her legs, another four on her arms, and the other twelve affixed to her torso and abdomen. She tossed the other color of flags under her arm–red–towards Ruvle, who caught the bundle.

  Initiates of hyperdexterity did not duel. Not with weapons, at least. Exaction lent itself to skill with a pocket knife or a laser gun, certainly, but it had so many more applications beyond that. No, Ruvle had seen what they called a ‘flag duel’ a few times. Tiose, her former Coarse teacher, had made them look incredible–he could duck, jump, snatch and swipe, plucking from the inexact with immaculate ease, and yet be evenly matched with other Coarse initiates in their attempts to remove one another’s flags. It was against the rules to reattach them, and the winner was determined by who detached all of the other’s flags first, to be recorded–in the simple indigo notebook that Elial carried with her now, weathered from use, but resilient with its hard cover. She set the notebook down at the edge of the ground floor, atop the contortion maze, and held aloft a small plastic stopwatch, in black.

  “Get ready,” Elial said.

  “Already done,” Ruvle announced, fastening the last flag behind her back.

  “Are you familiar with the rules?”

  “Steal all your flags without tools, duel ends when all twenty are stolen, no blood or bruises…” Ruvle pondered. “And results are recorded as how many the losing side stole.” If Tiose won a duel and his opponent snatched 13 flags, his win would be recorded as ‘20/13’, and in the opposite case, ‘13/20’. “And the stopwatch is for very close or one-sided results.” She’d asked during her first viewing of a flag duel what happened if they both stole one another’s final flag at the same time, and in that case, the winner went to the one who first stole the opponent’s nineteenth, with that tie broken by eighteenth, etcetera. Those were often marked with ‘20/19’ and then a time for when that nineteenth mattered, and blowout ‘20/0’ results also had a time for when the duel was won. “So if I mess this up, you can tell me exactly how badly I messed it up.”

  “That’s not what the timing is for.” Elial carefully tucked a lock of hair into her headband, preparing for action. “It is intended to show shades of skill, so that flag duels between those of different degrees of Exaction are still meaningful.”

  “Like between Coarse and Fine,” Ruvle said.

  Elial nodded. Ruvle still thought she could put up a good fight.

  “Time begins when I press the stopwatch,” Elial said, moving to stand four meters away from Ruvle.

  Ruvle didn’t need to plan this out Thoughtfully, but she figured the flags on her back and on her legs would be the most difficult to steal, so she should prioritize protecting those and go for the flags on Elial’s abdomen and shoulders when on the offensive. And Elial would likely slow down further into the flag duel–at first, she’d have twenty locations available for stealing from, but would be forced to pick from only the difficult remaining few later into the match. And when she overextended herself that way, it would be the perfect time for Ruvle to swipe something. Strategy seemed straightforward enough.

  Elial pressed the button and launched the stopwatch into the air with a mighty throw, simultaneously. Ruvle half-crouched with her hands forward, ready for acti–

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  She got a glimpse of Elial sprinting at her with both hands, something like a lunge, but with one foot always on the ground, and Ruvle tried to duck to her side to parry a forearm. And then the flag duel became a blur, everything happening too fast to process.

  Wherever Ruvle moved, arm or leg or entire position, Elial had already accounted for that. Any movement away was trivially corrected for, a minimal flick or adjustment of angle of approach, ripping away multiple flags every second. Ruvle reached, and found air instead of solid person to grab onto, where Elial had been instants ago–a woman not supernaturally fast, but always on the move, always countering Ruvle’s intent tenths of a second in advance. It was no use dodging when Elila was always right there where she dodged to, faster and able to reorient herself in better reaction time–

  “Time.” Elial extended her hand to catch the falling stopwatch, button-first.

  Ruvle panted for breath a few times; it had happened so fast that her heart didn’t even get the idea that it needed to pump at anaerobic speed yet to keep up. Her bodysuit had been stripped bare.

  “Five seconds or so,” Elial said, frowning.

  “Can I…try that again?” Ruvle asked.

  “I’m still recording it.” Well, yes, why wouldn’t she? Elial handed her back her bundle of twenty flags with her other hand. As Ruvle reattached them, Elial wound up her arm for another throw. “Try again.” She tossed.

  Ruvle did her best. She tried grabbing Elial’s flags instead of defending her own, this time, but her teacher moved in ephemeral jerks, just out of reach, like the solid-seeming locks of flame in a bonfire that could in truth never be tactile. Ruvle raised a foot to step on a loose flag on Elial’s shin, but a quick sideways shove to her thigh and a matching push on her shoulder sent her spinning on her heels, unwanted–and Elial spun her until she peeled off all of the flags like bark from a crinkle tree.

  “Time.”

  She had an extra second before she caught the stopwatch. “Six.”

  Ruvle frowned.

  “Better,” Elial said, narrowing her eyes, still neutral of face. “When a Coarse initiate reaches for me, they lose time, mostly.”

  “...they lose time?”

  “Bringing themselves closer to me lowers the distance I travel to take their flags,” Elial explained. “Their attempts to grab mine require no special defense. But it took me more time to strip your flags rather than less.” She gripped the stopwatch tightly. “Again.”

  Ruvle gulped. She put her flags back on. Eliali tossed and threw.

  “Time.”

  She couldn’t even really process it that time. Ruvle just knew she’d been trying to swat and block and grab, operating on reflex and lower brain reactive decisions, and it felt a lot like trying to grab the green dot of a laser pointer on the ground. Ruvle found herself on the floor, face-up, panting once more.

  “Six again,” Elial said. “I think that’s enough.”

  Bubble wrap. Ruvle thought of bubble wrap. She’d assumed Elial taking her flags would be like randomly rolling dice, dice with twenty sides, until all of the numbers came up–Elial could tear through the first flags quickly, but would need many rolls to get the last few, when only a few numbers left would do. The flags on the back would be the hardest, the flags on her shoulders the easiest, but, no. Elial was Fine. All difficulties were equally negligible, as if she were popping twenty bubbles on bubble wrap, and Ruvle had been trusting the bottom bubbles to be ‘harder’ to pop somehow.

  Elial retrieved the notebook again, and quietly wrote a third line in it.

  “I’m glad you’re my teacher instead of my enemy,” Ruvle said.

  Elial closed the book. “Keep practicing, and do not take this as discouragement.”

  The power difference didn’t bother Ruvle. It gave her a reason to keep pursuing hyperdexterity. That could be her–one day, and one day soon.

  When she returned to The Checkered Office before dawn, Ruvle had one more thing to do–a comment from Elial to follow up on, from the quick downtime between starting on exoproprio and the flag duel. In passing, Elial mentioned something about henchmen, a squad that had come by the monastery with a gegha. A four-headed squirrel. They’d been looking for her.

  That didn’t give her any new information about Othek to act on, but the file room answered half of a mystery–it turned out that the form to approve that gegha had crossed her desk before, unless that was an unrelated experiment that also accidentally created a giant four-headed squirrel (which was not out of the question for M.A.D.). But based on when that deputized investigation had happened, and the decreasing frequency of the bureaucratic pecking of her office…

  It sort of looked like Othek was losing interest. No, not losing, but redirecting it.

  Idle speculation, but Ruvle had to wonder if he’d stopped trying to get revenge and started looking for a new glint. It would be…practical. And also stupid. What if she were in his position? The person who took something irreplaceable from her, her eye, wasn’t going to get off easy just from the passage of–

  She shook her head and took calming breaths as she ascended into her attic. She told the elephant plushie and the cat plushie that she was going to sleep now–Ruvle had more than one problem to solve, and that could best be done well-rested.