“What, no fuckin’ investigators today?” Chain asked, kneeling before one of the lobby’s chairs and pushing wooden tiles around on the seat.

  “No investigators,” Ruvle said, slumping down in a chair adjacent. For once in two entire weeks, no one had come through the door at closing time to ask a ‘few’ questions about her involvement with ‘a certain Perfectcoil’ like being coy and roundabout would work the hundredth time they tried it.

  “Aces, finally.” He nudged a tile towards the backrest. “I was wondering why ya pulled me out early.”

  “Yeah.” Ruvle crossed one leg over the other; even in her notary suit, she carried herself with posture and poise, unmoving where motion was unwarranted, her body an alertly coiled spring of muscle and nerve. She mentally re-fixed herself in the stage of her surroundings—the props of black and white tile, the decorative signature above her desk, papers loose and about behind her workstation, the bell for customers to ring, the scarf that dangled over the back of Chain’s neck, the tiles he pushed. “I didn’t know textwork writing could get into the alcazar. I thought you would see that message after you got out on your own time. How do you have access in a space that’s not...”

  “Not ‘real’? We got a reception tower in there. Made of broken bookshelf wood, same stuff we make the looms for our scarfs out of.”

  “Don’t textwork towers have to be metal...?” she wondered aloud. And they needed electricity. And for the message waves to exist in the general vicinity.

  “It acts like metal if we want it to. Remember, tislets.” He winked. “It’s covered in them. I can parachute ride over to it on a wind system if it’s a good day. You can see shades of it like a mural if you focus your eyes on just the ones with corner circles; the dude who got it working is an artistic genius. I wish I could talk to him about how it works, but he doesn’t appear anywhere near where I do.” Chain shrugged.

  Ruvle shook her head. Concentrate. “No investigators. They implied they were done last night, and I didn’t believe them, but now…” she fanned her face with her hand in relief. “I think we’re getting away with it.”

  “Heh. Nah, they’ll still arrest me if they see me, but if they’re not gonna check here anymore, that’s good.”

  “They won’t. I paid my fine.” She laced her fingers together in her lap.

  “Laying low is really working…” he grinned to himself. “Oh, that’s a good thought…” He traced a finger along one of the tiles. “Laying low is working. Laying low is working.” In the wake of his fingertip, blue light emerged, drawing a squiggle—like a stylized snake with a circle for a head, biting the middle of a shovel.

  “Is that a new tislet?” Ruvle asked.

  “It is.”

  She tilted her head, pointing her good eye at it. “What does it do?”

  “Uh…” Chain blinked. “Yeah, I can’t answer that.”

  “I can keep secrets!” she pouted.

  “No, like, that’s like if I wrote out the word ‘inclination’ and you asked me what the dot in the second ‘i’ means. You gotta put these together to do anything. But the more you know how to scriven, the more you can do, and do it with fewer tislets. I think. The sequences that work are different for everyone; it’s a lot about how you feel, you know?”

  “I don’t know. Shouldn’t...shouldn’t any sequence work for anyone? Like computer code?”

  Chain cackled. ”Nah, Ruvie, get this. I’m not better than the guys who think it’s code, but none of them are good. Their brains get all clogged up when they try to make it impersonal. Computer code, that stuff works on the assumption that it’s all that matters; it’s supposed to run the same way every time and not depend on the computer it’s on. Who writes it doesn’t matter for code, if two people wrote the same thing. That’s not what tislets are like. When you scriven,” he said, holding up the tile, “You’re powering it with emotion, and the ‘you’ part of you. You can sorta understand tislets by looking at them, but there’s always a hidden half that’s ‘who wrote this’.”

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  Ruvle blinked. “...that’s not the impression I got at all. You said people were hiding their sequences from you. Being ‘cagey’?”

  “Oh, they still are, it’s just...I’m learning this stuff too, you know? Grand scheme of things, I haven’t been doing this for very long. Someone said my scarf sequences are still in a ‘kid poured all his toys out on the floor’ kinda stage.” He snapped his fingers. “I’m trying the whole ‘tiles’ thing too. Still not sure what they’re gonna be good for, though.”

  Ruvle rubbed her eye. “Thanks for explaining. I don’t think I have the mind for what you do.”

  “And I don’t have the body for yours, but we’re working together. Cross these rivers and see what dams they break together.”

  She smiled.

  “Oh, speaking of body, you ever figured out what you’re doing with that DNA lab-in-a-box?” he asked, turning away from the tiles, wrapping his scarf around his shoulders. “If people aren’t gonna search us anymore, I think you can get to that now, right?”

  “I can.” She took her fez off and dusted it off in her lap. “I’ve just had a lot to handle. I would have used it earlier.”

  “Then come on, spill it. Ya gonna get wings, fire breath, immortality?”

  Ruvle shook her head. “You can’t...do that. They’ve only figured out how to do that kind of thing in animals. Mostly squirrels.”

  “Aw.”

  “But, I can make myself stronger or faster, quicker to think, make it a lot easier to lose weight...I get to skip one big step in my training, basically,” she said, nodding. “I looked into a lot of those, and then I decided...I don’t want one of those.”

  “Ohhh, I get it. Congratulations!”

  “...On?”

  “Being about to get your eye back. That’s what you’ve been about, right?”

  Ruvle tilted her head, thinking of how to phrase this. It was a little complicated.

  “I asked about that. And that’s something I can do. We know enough ocular genes these days that my body could regrow enough of an eye. Not all of it, but enough to do surgery to finish the job and I’d have binocular vision back. And that would undo what Nerso fucking did to me. But…”

  Chain sayed quiet, with full attention on her. She swept her hand across her wax eye, fingers tracing along the scar tributaries and up to the vertical pupil. “What makes me mad is not…the actual eye; it’s why I lost it. Losing a body part sucks, it really sucks, but what makes me mad is that a true citizen can just make it happen. Whenever they want. And I don’t have an option to get back at them because they’re true citizens. If one of them decided to kidnap and torture me, that would just happen and there would be nothing I could do about it, because they wanted it, and I know because that’s what they did!” Ruvle’s sigh came hot like steam. “Getting my eye back doesn’t do anything. It doesn’t fix me. What fixes me is being so strong that they’re afraid to even think about me in case I’m right behind them when they look in a mirror.”

  Chain tapped his heel on the tile floor a few times, thinking.

  “What I meant by ‘I don’t want one of those’ is that I want more than one,” Ruvle said. “I thought about how much I was training and how I crashed so hard during the raid, and I thought, I don’t want that to happen. I want to be able to train a lot harder, for a lot longer, so I can go through the steps faster. It’ll pay off better than skipping something. And it turns out, there’s someone from M.A.D. on the textwork who has a good idea about how to do that.” She put a strained, wistful smile back on her face. “So I’ll be turning up my endurance and my ability to recover, to above how much humans normally have. It should do a little of everything. I should stay standing for longer if I get beaten up, be able to put more hours in training, my 9 hours to sleep should put me back in top shape every time...if this goes on for decades, I won’t have to worry about aging messing me up for a while. I might not even care if I get cuts and scrapes. Instead of skipping one step, I’ll go fast enough that it’s like I’m skipping more than one.”

  That, finally, put Chain at ease. “That’s the one.”

  “But the most important part of it is training faster and harder. That’s what I really want,” she reminded him.

  “Aces. Go improve yourself,” he said, and tislets cascaded their lights over his scarf. They weren’t so fully-loaded like during the raid—only random patches all over the fabric, plus a gridlock near one hem as his way out of the alcazar.

  “I will,” she said, “There are a few genes to work out the details on because of the alteration budget, but I think the exact gene instructions will be ready by tomorrow night. I want you to watch me use it before I go off to train.”

  Maybe, despite her mistakes, everything would turn out alright after all.