The yellow pill-shaped capsule crashed down upon asphalt beyond the north suburbs, shattering its ablative plating and sending ceramic fragments flying to the edges of the landing lot. The capsule tumbled end-over end, shedding yellow flakes and chips with every smash and revolution. It scraped to a stop, skittering and scratching over the aggregates below, and rocked not-so-gently in place, coming to rest. A trail of exploded ceramic lay in its wake.

  About a minute later, the siding hatched open, revealing concentric loops of copper and iron stacked on top of each other in the interior. Inside the core of silvery-gray ballistic gel, Ruvle squirmed. She found the seam in the gel and parted it with her hands.

  Chain tumbled out like a fish onto dry land. Ruvle landed on both feet and one hand, fingers splayed and gracing the landing lot below, between two chips of ceramic.

  “Woo, okay…” Chain stood up and pulled the map out of one of his cargo pockets. Ruvle blew a lock of hair out of her face. “So we gotta go north from here, avoid the henching college over that way…” He pointed to the horizon; to the left of the distant Mount Radius, Ruvle could make out the patch of distant square-block homes surrounding a black monolithic cube of a building, only visible in the night from its well-lit windows and surrounding streetlamps. This far to the edge of suburbia, the dominance of civilization met the appeal of exploring the crater’s flat plains–enough of the building lots were developed to justify modern infrastructure in stone streets, yet few enough to leave wide-open sight lines through distant stretches of empty soil for a great view of Mount Radius. The mountain itself appeared so much clearer at this distance–miles away, still, but without the horizon’s haze occluding it. Jagged and weathered, the exposed stone transitioned from gray to white as it rose, opening into fractals of cliffsides, plateaus and micro-mesas. Far, far above, the white stone became snow and ice, soon disappearing into the clouds above. Ruvle could see no higher with them in the way, and they were still nowhere close to the summit. The higher strata of Mount Radius belonged to the experts of human endurance. “...and we should get to the lab eventually. Can’t miss it.”

  Ruvle stood up straight and kicked a chip of ceramic away. The bright yellow compound absorbed far more energy when it shattered than similar materials, and tended to break into characteristically-sized chunks that could be swept up from a landing lot easily and then reforged; between it and the ballistic gel, landing was surprisingly safe for those of sound constitution. Its distinct yellow had become shorthand for anything railgun-related. “We should also pick up disguises…” She didn’t bring her previous one because the dots would be connected instantly.

  “I kinda figured I didn’t want one,” Chain said. “If the law catches wind that I’m over here, great, because we’ll be out of the lab before they get here, so they stop looking so hard in Stepwise.” He looked up at the stars above. Colorbugs danced between twinkles. “So I can go outside in the day again.”

  “Well, I need a disguise.”

  Chain turned his attention to the black cube building, grunting to himself. One more chip of ceramic fell off the landing pod behind Ruvle with an anticlimactic clink. “Yeah, you know what, that was me rationalizing not being able to afford a disguise anyway.” He scratched his scalp. “So that’s…the North Stepwise Henching College, if I remember right. We can probably go get spare henching outfits…”

  Ruvle shook her head. “I don’t think we can pretend to be Fygra’s henchwomen…they’re all women.”

  “I mean, you can.”

  Ruvle pouted and pointed to her wax-covered eye.

  Chain blinked. “Oh, right.” He shifted uncomfortably in that way she’d seen so many visitors to the notary office do right after a social blunder. “So we getcha a mask, and me an outfit…and we don’t pretend to be part of Fygra’s crew, we just use those to not be recognized. Sound good?”

  “It does.” She smiled to defuse the tension, and so did he.

  They strolled down the empty wild fields, idle land dedicated to wild shrubs and grasses, buzzing with beetles and blinking with colorbugs. A rabbit darted across Ruvle’s line of sight, spanning four different empty lots, finally stopping on a lone weed-choked concrete path to nowhere that probably had been put in place as minirail foundation and abandoned. The soil felt soft and yielding beneath Ruvle’s feet, and the narrow twigs of old shrubs snapped between her toes. She should pick up some boots at the college, too. She’d left quite unprepared, really.

  And yet, getting to not be Thoughtful had a thrill to it.

  “Hey, Chain. While we have the time…” Ruvle spoke up, curling her fingers around the straps of her hammock being used like a backpack. “I was thinking about your tislets. I had some questions.”

  “Go ahead. Is it cool that I’m walking behind you?” he added.

  That was the classy way to ask ‘is it okay if I’m looking at your butt’. “It’s okay. You’re polite. You’re not the first person to notice I look good.” The gentle breeze blew her hair, and the zipper on her bodysuit jingled softly in the night, catching the blinking light of Chain’s sneakers. “When you said it was easy to scriven on foolswood, what does that mean? Does it help you get the shapes right? I knoe penstrokes follow the threads of fabric if you’re not careful, but you trace with your finger, so that doesn’t matter…” she said.

  “You put less emotion into the scrivening for foolswood. Wood’s better than most materials in general. It’s hard to hold a high emotional state for long, plus, if you think about the same happy memory to power your tislets too much, you might lose the happy part of it, you know?” Fabric rustled and unfurled behind him, and the fluttering, silken slide to its sound could only have come from his scarf.

  “So that’s why you make tiles out of wood?”

  “Yeah, it’s not just a tradition. Plastic kinda sucks. Stone is okay. Cloth is generally pretty good, except felt; felt is terrible because it’s not woven. If you’re wondering why that matters, so am I.” A blue colorbug landed on Ruvle’s nose and flashed for her; she smiled as Chain spoke. “And metal is basically totally random. Goes all the way from…I can’t remember, this one alloy. It’s easier than wood, but no one mass-produces it for anything. And the worst is stoko, which you can’t scriven on.” He paused. “I take that back. The most impossible metal to scriven on is a tie between stoko and mercury, because tislets have to be on a solid surface.”

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  She nodded. “Only solids? Can you put it on skin?” Ruvle imagined tislet tattoos to make a person stronger and faster…

  “Nope, too many oils and stuff. Seems like the kind of thing that can go wrong really easily, anyway.” The stars twinkled above, and the cool air cooled Ruvle through her bodysuit, an extra comfort for the walk. Beetles buzzed in the distance, and she heard what might be a beaver’s tail thumping. The twigs, grass, and suspended colorbugs were too many to populate her mental map with–her mind did not have that much space. The world of easy obstacles blurred into low resolution in her mind’s eye, but she chose to keep that limited awareness, to allow the compromises in her attempts towards exoproprio. “You’d have to get the scrivening right the first time, because when you activate the tislets, boom, they’re done and they’re gone; you’re stuck with whatever physia they did. I think sujectas don’t really work either. The human body is way too compound of an object, so there’s no way for the tislets to get everything that’s you and nothing that’s not you.” Chain chuckled. “Oh, shit, that’s probably why no one does tislets. I bet if you could power your body up directly with them, everyone would get scrivened on at the same time you get your vaccines.”

  Ruvle didn’t think so. “I don’t think I get it, still. If what you write on wood is permanent–”

  “Scriven. You can draw out a tislet without scrivening it.”

  “If scrivening is permanent, why isn’t it permanent on the scarf?”

  “I know they stick around on this specific mass of this specific fabric, but I haven’t figured out why it happens yet.”

  “Thank you, but I mean…” she twirled her hand in a circle as she walked, collecting her thoughts. “I know they don’t disappear when they’re on the scarf. But why does that make the effects temporary?”

  “Hmm.” She heard scratching sounds behind her. “Ya know what? Thanks for asking me that. I gotta go look that up next time I’m in the alcazar.”

  Ruvle looked over her shoulder to him, and he brought his gaze to meet hers. “Really? I thought you’d be annoyed that I was asking.” Clientele at the notary office rarely enjoyed long strings of queries to confirm their identity.

  “There is an attractive woman asking me intellectually stimulating questions about my magic powers.” He paused. “Life is good sometimes, you know?”

  In this disputed territory between civilization and nature, the henching college campus was the embassy of the former–instead of empty paths to nowhere and grid delinations that sectioned grass and stone into order, true streets and true streetlamps emerged, illumination overriding the glow of Chain’s tislets. Brick-walled homes and metal-sided educational buildings abounded, in between spacious parks and loose empty lots, while the giant black cube of the college center loomed over this tiny college proto-town. Owls hooted and honked in the night, a choice depending on their mood, perched on the corner gutters of small shops, including a brightly-lit liquor store–the only sanctioned places to find alcohol in Stepwise, with a duty to distribute their drinkable drug responsibly. There was even an automat, out from which Ruvle could spot three henchmen-in-training, walking half-adorned in their suits, wearing berets instead of visors and in fuzzy pink-and-green house shoes for their midnight munch run. They laughed with each other over some in-joke she couldn’t get every word of at this distance.

  But Ruvle needed to reserve her vo to buy disguises, and she followed Chain’s lead to a different, free, snack opportunity, growing in one of the vacant lots.

  “I never pass these up,” Chain said, rubbing his hands together in excitement as he strolled through the desire path between two shrubs, towards a tall and slender tree in the center. Amid its many-pointed leaves, its branches split into dozens of thick twigs all at once rather than incrementally, opening out into white helical flowers with mesmerizing swirls of red leading down into their centers. From the higher half of them hung heavy hook-shaped orange fruits, their soft, textured peels following the same counterclockwise helix. The aroma had it all–a kick of floral aromaticity, a delicate sweetness, mixing with gentle tart and a savory allure uncommon among fruit.

  It had been a good choice to eat light today, Ruvle decided, as she pulled herself up two sturdy branches–avoiding decomposing peels on the ground surrounding the tree–and plucked a fruit for each of them. “Here.”

  He grabbed his falling fruit out of the air and unspiraled the peel; he had two bites taken out of it before Ruvle even got back to terra firma. “Mmph, I love scides.”

  “I think everyone does,” Ruvle said, smiling, and took a bite of hers. Sweet enough to tamp down a craving without imbalancing the body with a sugar bomb, firm flesh that made it satisfying to chew, the yielding crunch of the seeds within, the nutritional wholesomeness that matched the human body’s needs so well…poems had been written about the scide fruit’s virtues. Deeply depressed people found the will to eat when given a scide. Inheritance disputes grew ugly over a patch of scide trees on the property. She considered it one of Thought’s little gifts for humanity, when entertaining the idea of Thought as an entity instead of a story. “I’m only going to have one.”

  “One is enough. Fills me up, too.” He munched away where he stood, losing no chunks of the pale orange flesh. “I’d have been sad if there weren’t any left.”

  Ruvle crouched down to rest while eating. “There’s always some left on these.”

  “Heh, yeah. Kinda wild how fast they grow, right? You’d think someone would have cracked the code by now, but, you know.”

  “I think they’re still trying.” Ruvle let a length of the peel fall into the grass below her.

  “Yeah. Fuckin’ Thoughtless, ruining a good thing.”

  The perfect fruit also happened to be completely uneconomical to farm and distribute. The only sources were wild trees.

  No individual reason could be pointed to, of course. Scide grew quickly, needed less water and fertilizer than comparable fruits, tolerated the close packing of an orchard well, and transported without bruising. They thrived in every climate of Crater Basin and grew year-round. The reasons why scide orchards never took off were esoteric and abstract, arguments forged in the manifestos of economists. Sometimes the trees had clockwise peels instead of counterclockwise, which mattered for some reason. The many-pointed leaves did something during automatic harvesting processes. Something acted strange in the demand curve that prevented the sacred pricing mechanism from behaving. Numerous tiny details had to be assembled into second-order, third-order, and higher effects, in 400-page tomes gradually building up the arguments from first principles. Everyone loved these trees, they that produced so much that tiny towns like this one failed to strip them bare, and yet for deeply emergent properties too ephemeral for non-scientists to even name, the economy could not farm more of them. Simply couldn’t be done, not at a profit.

  “These aren’t the reason I’m stomping out Thuless’s glints,” Chain mumbled. “But they sure help with the motivation.”

  Wherever Thoughtless’s tendrils entered, the world lost its light. And true citizens out there–surely including Fygra–had its pieces.

  “Are you still with me on taking out the glints,” Chain asked, “or is getting stronger still your main thing? …That isn’t a test, I’m just wondering.”

  Ruvle would rather not wake up one day and find anything else no longer possible to buy. Perhaps rhubarb, perhaps water snakes to roast. Or twinnies. Small joys, potentially gone, by malfunction of emergent properties. “It can be both,” she finally said.

  “I’ll take it.”

  She and Chain had much to train for.