Ruvle’s next day involved half paperwork and half needlework, the latter graduating to more than a twisting puzzle cube. Elial’s new task for her required reassembling a miniature box of metal gears, once part of an M.A.D. demonstration of the bacterial flagellum–an excited teacher could place a human hair in one end of the box for the gears to spin like the world’s tiniest paddle, with the rest oft he device so like that the reaction force propelled it through oil. The gears on this one had long become rusty, so Ruvle additionally had to file the rust away without damaging the teeth; no cheating by using cleaning solvents.

  Material machining had come a long way. With this being made of one uniform metal, Ruvle was pretty sure that the M.A.D. lab had used the expensive technique of sending an upscaled version into a chamber that destructively consumed a one-material device to create a far smaller one, usually called the “shrink ray”.

  Frankly, Ruvle couldn’t figure this puzzle out. Very minute movements required tiny amounts of energy, but scraping rust demanded force; it was much harder than cutting a film inside a needle that fell apart at a touch. Several times, she scrambled across her maze of loose paper and behind her desk to catch a gear that went flying. If her reflexes weren’t Coarse, she may have lost one to a thousand bounces and floorboard seams, and there would be no finding something that fit in the dots of her j’s.

  Come closing time and after changing into her bodysuit, Ruvle stood before the front door, her arms crossed, waiting for Chain. Nightfall already. She wanted to leave, but she should really give Chain the time. Ruvle paced, looking down, mulling over her next attack target, what preciousness of Fygra’s could break between her ‘lesser’ hands. Chain arrived running, feet thumping on tile and blue shoe lights aglow–his scarf had nothing save for the shortened tag, less writing than the rolled-up paper in his hand. Given his hair styled back into his usual spikes, his mask on tightly enough that she couldn’t see his mouth, and a spring in his step, she could hear him out. “Ruvie! I figured it out.”

  “What, a new tislet trick?” she asked.

  “No. I mean, yes, turns out Teeth of the Last Cat and OQ-46 are two names for the same tislet, but that’s not what…take a look,” he said, slapping the paper up against the wall and unrolling it. Upon an annotated, desaturated picture of a small region of the crater (routinely acquired by governmental hot air balloons on cloudless days), Chain had drawn a trail in red ink. It looked to Ruvle like the southern wetlands near Mount Radius, and the less-populated outlying territory of Stepwise even further south, far north of city limits or the minirail system. Mount Radius dominated the very center of Crater Basin where the geological impact struck deepest, and thus water systems preferred to settle around it in a wide ring, half lake, half river. “You want to go after something of Fygra’s, right?”

  “Right.” She leaned in for a closer look.

  “So let’s take this path here.” His finger loosely traced the line emerging from the south end of the map towards the wetlands, taking a leftward swoop to stop at a marked six-sided facility, with red and purple hexagonal roof tiles so bright that the sun demanded a feat of chemical engineering to not bleach them pale. The path continued to avoid a more mundane-looking spread of homes around a generic black cube of a building, so boring that it wrapped back around to bold. Eventually, skipping through the wetlands and onto the foothills of Mount Radius itself, the trail terminated in point marked with an X. “There’s this old spot here, it’s usually pretty hard to get to because of the cliffs, but it’s got this hollow at the top of the hill where Fool’s Dye trees grow. Thing is, Fool’s Dye wood is really good for tislet tiles. It’s not hard to scriven on at all, it’s not like metal or floor or paper. It’s got this grippy texture so tiles that you put next to each other stay like that. Big step up from crinkle wood. And there’s a way that its petals fall around this time of year–I think you could get a lot of good training for your hydroflex out of them; I have ideas. We like training, right? You want to do training?” He asked.

  “I’m listening.” Hyperdex. Falling petals sounded familiar somehow. He didn’t have to belabor the point to her like a child, but she did sort of threaten to go after a person she had no hope against on an impulse without even trying to be Thoughtful about it. “Where does Fygra come into this?”

  “Oho, see, this is the beautiful part. Here.” He pointed to the hexagonal-roofed facility. “This is an M.A.D. lab. It’s completely under Fygra’s control.”

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

  Ruvle perked up. “What does it do?”

  “Wildlife conservation. I dunno how much of that is Fygra, but scientists are the kind of people to have their hearts in the right place, you know?” He nodded, circling the hexagon with his finger. “Speaking of hearts, here’s the thing. One of the things they do for conservation is find endangered species; they bring them inside and surgery them up. There’s this one kind of rare wetlands frog and every time they find one, they give it cyborg legs and put a laser on its head so herons always lose when they try to eat it; it’s hilarious, they’re not going extinct ever. Stuff like that. The thing is, the cyborg parts they give have to be, to an extent, one-size-fits-all, right…”

  “Right?”

  “So I bet. Don’t bet, but I bet. After you go in there and send a message, kick over all the shady parts of their operation, you can swipe an artificial heart, human-sized.”

  That…that would dissolve the barrier to becoming Fine, if she could get it implanted…Ruvle put a finger on her chin while Chain rolled up the map.

  “What do you say?” he asked.

  “How did you find out about all of this?” she asked.

  “I spend all day in a magical library and I’m crashing in a notary office by night,” he said, deadpan.

  Ruvle chuckled under her breath, despite herself, putting one hand on the side of her head, fingers tracing the tributaries of her wax eye.

  “I still want a yes or a no. A yes would be nice.”

  Ruvle nodded. “I think…how long do you want to train, if we make it there?”

  Chain shrugged. “Until we feel like we can do stuff.”

  “That’s a long time to be away from…” She perked up again with an idea. “I’ll let Dad have the office back until I get home.” His textwork messages in response to her updates about her skills had been ones of such pride. “Yes, Chain, let’s do your plan.”

  “Aces!” He let out a big, relieved sigh.

  After returning to the monastery that night (Elial insisted she keep the gearbox puzzle with her despite mentioning that she’d be gone for a while), and a long textwork correspondence with Dad the next day,Ruvle made her final preparations. Her formal notary suit stayed at home, and in a backpack, she packed her hammock, her cat and elephant plushies, the tin of wax for her eye, and her fez. And she drank a lot of cinnamon tea. It shouldn’t go stale and be wasted over the time spent away, and Dad confirmed he didn’t want a taste. He preferred his tongue not stomped on by pure liquid spice. Ruvle thought he was missing out.

  Whatever else she needed, she could buy. For the trip out that night, she waited by the front door in her freshly re-sewn indigo bodysuit, looking forward to getting her revenge–and right on time, Chain arrived, strolling freshly out of the door, with his scarf bundled for less recognizability and unburdened save by clothing.

  Minirail worked for short distances in-city, but for a longer trip, civilization provided many advantages. No one needed to spend days trekking from one town to another, not with the most efficient method of long-distance travel as an option. After a long walk from Ruvle and a minirail ride from Chain, they arrived to the terminal–a city block dedicated to an amalgamation of bright yellow metal plating, thrumming mega-capacitors the size of small houses brightly-lit in cyan and fully charged, an enormous concentric dais upon which the machine could rotate, and layers of iron fencing that that did nothing to keep anyone out of the public service–their role was to control and re-harvest electrical pulses. The machine was about the shape of a crane, with a bulkier neck, designed for people to ascend its inner rubber elevator and to ground the machine to terra firma. Twin copper rods–cables that dwarfed the minirail–pointed diagonally into the sky, ready to be directed at a moment’s notice.

  Railguns took a lot of work and power to maintain, but the advantages of the engine being stationary rather than moving, all of the stresses being engineered-for, and getting to use however much mass one wanted to design it–there was a reason that these beat aviation and turned the jet engine into an impractical toy for true citizens.

  “After you,” Chain said, gesturing past the fences. Ruvle smiled and swatted him on the shoulder.