Acquiring disguises was straightforward once Ruvle got over herself.

  “Ruvie, no,” Chain said, grabbing the air where her free wrist was a quarter-second ago.

  “It’s how we’ll get these,” Ruvle said, crouching in front of the double doors to the campus’s uniform shop and picking the lock with a small twig. He tried pulling her back by the shoulders, and a tiny shrug slipped them free. Dodging was incredibly easy to do one move at a time. “It’s closed. We need clothes. So we go in and steal something.” Most people wouldn’t be willing to do it, it benefitted her by saving the money she was short on, and those facts made it correct; she had to do something in line with her lack of principles already.

  “Listen. I promise you there are ways to buy clothes at night. Let’s walk for ten minutes, and if we still don’t find one, you can do this.”

  Ruvle sighed. “Okay.”

  And they didn’t find one in ten minutes. Still, she had her sense about her by that time–performative malice did not survive the ambiance of owls calming her many nerves in a town swarming with henchmen and henchwomen. Another ten, and they found the consignment shop, a squat angular building on an awkward lot: one big room crammed ceiling-to-floor and wall-to-wall with racks of castoff toys, kitchen appliances, textwork connectors currently out-of-fashion, and above all, clothing. Henching outfits with defects had to go somewhere, and this insomniac old man took care of the sales.

  “Why don’t any of you kids wear a hat anymore?” he asked, under his beret, from his chair next to the display window. Ruvle patted her head. Right, she’d packed her fez and forgotten to wear it. When wearing her hyperdexterity bodysuit to the monastery, she doffed any headwear so that it wouldn’t fall off during an acrobatic flip, and she didn’t get to wear those headbands reserved for the Fine like Elial did.

  Also, everyone wore some kind of hat; what even was this guy talking about?

  They soon walked out of the store in their new threads–common black suits, the consignment flaw in Ruvle’s being the stitch knots in the pants, and Chain’s outfit simply came in the wrong shade of dark gray rather than black. In her hand, she carried her new ‘hat’, a novelty rubber mask of the extremely tacky sort printed to look like a celebrity’s face–Sunim Selenium, a circus ringleader turned singer, with strikingly wild strawberry blonde hair that the mask emulated with terrible floppy spikes. It even had the bars of fine orange fuzz on Sunim’s cheekbones; she was a notoriously hairy woman. All of these wobbly splotchy colors, the greasy-looking lopsided rubber smile–all perfect for concealing her real face.

  Chain rattled the contents of a steel bottle in his hand; the label depicted a scide fruit with electrons orbiting it. “Thanks for footing the bill.”

  “I don’t have notary money right now, but still more than nothing,” she said, with a shrug. “I don’t want to spend time…hunting?...when we go to the grove. All of my energy needs to go into training. I can stomach some food pills for a while.”

  “Heh, yeah, they’re terrible.” He tossed them over to her, and she bowed her left shoulder in just the right way that it landed in her backpack. “I dunno, I think it’s a shame that they never caught on. I have no idea how to hunt or gather; city life forever, lass.”

  “Neither do I, but there are trees, so there are squirrels. I can catch them. I’m Coarse.”

  “Can’t argue with that,” he said, even though he could, because she was completely making stuff up and did not have survival skills. She’d figure out how camping or getting water worked later, when she got there.

  They skipped town–quickly. Soon enough, before them was but the open grass, wet and gradually sloping, taking its path downwards towards the annular low of Crater Basin. And this time, Ruvle had shoes, shiny black thick-treaded boots like any other henchwoman.

  A hot air balloon picture did no justice to the scope of the M.A.D. lab. Framing the grand central entrance, two bronze statues of massively upscaled leaves bent to frame the archway, a deep verdigris patina supplying a natural green nearly-obscured by the night. The sculpted veins of the leaves, alone, were free of corrosion, crackling with electric blue bolts–in the deep of night and visual illusion, the entryway suspended that lightning in the air before it. The complex stretched six stories high, blotting out the stars, filled with the distant hisses of snakes and honks of small animals being handled. Remote silhouettes of lightning rods peppered the hexagon-tiled ceiling. Ruvle could swear she smelled honey and heard buzzing. Miniature waterfalls flowed along the walls, detouring around knobbled stones embedded in the walls, with fish jumping along them and an otter flowing in the pooling circulation around them. Upon one elevated boulder far away from the water, the kind too large to be hauled away except in the form of smithereens, a tortoise slept–its head and neck lolled out, little limbs laying, and the twin six-barreled laser guns mounted to its shell pointing directly at Chain and Ruvle.

  “So how do we do this?” Chain asked, his visor lowering. He swung the secondhand briefcase in his other hand, his scarf secure inside.

  “I’m going to break everything, and everyone, I can get my hands on,” Ruvle said through muffling rubber, while tightening the mask around her face.

  “If you’re gonna break stuff, don’t let it be people,” Chain said. “We’re just here to send an anonymous message, you know? I bet–don’t bet–there’s only the cleaning crew here; it’s like three hours past midnight.”

  Ruvle shook her head and stepped forward. The right laser-revolver on the tortoise rotated by sixty degrees, and she stepped back. Hm. “No, what? It’s a science lab. They love working this late!”

  “Oh, ouch, you’re right,” he said, and titled his visor back up. “Man, we should have showed up after sunrise when no one’s around. Everyone’s gonna be here…”

  “But that…that might be good?” Ruvle said, forming an idea. She smiled behind her mask. “No one can see me without thinking I’m up to something, but I think you can distract them? What tislets do you have ready?”

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

  He opened his briefcase and held it up to Ruvle as if presenting bars of beryllium, his scarf neatly folded and hung on the straps inside, the blue grid finally filled completely–every square joined the chorus of pale blue light with a symbol of its own, many of them repetitions, but all important. “Check it out. I kept mirror, hammer-whip, and parachute, and then I tried dipping a little into sujecta. Turns out, that’s still way too hard, but I tried a tip about how sometimes you can tweak a sujecta down to a physia. It worked, and I switched out the final acid surfing with a trick I’m calling gauze. Wrap it around an injury for a while and it’s like getting a bandage so good that you don’t even need an injection.”

  “Wow…” Good for when they’d be away from civilization in the Fool’s Dye trees, or for being patched up if something went wrong here.

  “But. But! I got it to fit so neatly that I had space for this little decoration here.” He pointed to a patch of tislets which, presumably, the borders of were clear as day to him, but which Ruvle could not pick apart from the others (especially not with it folded like this). “So if I rub the scarf on something, it scuffs it up, like sandpaper.”

  Ruvle nodded. “That sounds maybe situational?”

  “Short little gimmick sequence I found in a book and tweaked it until I got it working Chain-style. Nothing groundbreaking, here.”

  “I think keep your scarf in there until it’s time…” she looked back at the building. “Okay, I know how this will work. Here’s the plan…”

  The front doors finally opened, and Chain held his arms out to his sides, social laughter on his lips. ”Hey hey, so you are open! I was about to run off.”

  The M.A.D. biologist at the door looked like science. Age imparted him a slight hunch and a receded crescent of a hairline, white hairs sticking straight up and burned-to-smoking on their tips. The too-big lab coat draped around his shoulders stayed in place mostly by a huge tan-and-black water snake coiled around his waist and arms, titanium fangs gleaming with every flick of its tongue. The giant safety glasses stuck to his face were a mount for exotic slugs, and he held a butterfly net in one hand. “That would not have done, not have done at all!” He spoke, voice hurried. “We’re in the middle of something, student, what brings you?”

  “Always wanted to see this place do its thing in person, you know? Figured I’d come at the most polite time. Do you have, say, guided tours?”

  “Well of course, dear student! But not while the eggs are hatching, no no, could you wait right here in the antechamber…”

  “Ace–” He caught himself. “Great, I got time, thanks a million.”

  The tortoise-mounted laser barrels rotated towards Chain, machinery whirring ominously.

  “Oh, cut that out, Henic, we have a guest!” The scientist spat.

  “Yeah, stop it, Henic,” Chain said.

  “Don’t tell Henic what to do, dear boy, he’s doing his best.”

  Far in the darkness, Ruvle sweated. She had to creep closer, the aim being to slide along the outer wall and through the waterfalls, to get inside and through the doors unseen, but every move turned the cannons towards her. They didn’t have anything to do with Chain. Maybe they really didn’t like her mask?

  “Sorry,” Chain added, with a chuckle and a scratch of the back of his head. “I do like your guard turtle.”

  “Ah, the guard tortoise is Japer. Henic is the algae colony growing on his shell.”

  “I’m learning a lot already. Hey, you mind calling Henic off for a second? I don’t want guns pointed at me until I get a henching job for real.”

  “Then consider losing the hair dye, my boy; no one henches in blue!” The scientist pulled a remote control out of his pocket, pressed the big red shiny button on it, and the energized glow of the nozzles powered down.

  Ruvle released her breath in silent relief. Thank you, Chain.

  The scientist hurried back into the lab containing hatching eggs. As Chain walked in, he swept one arm towards the antechamber, looking out into Ruvle’s sector of darkness with a nod. She had her chance. Ruvle hustled in as Chain’s shadow, making as little sound as possible right up until she learned just how redundant that was inside.

  The antechamber itself seemed nothing much–a square waiting room, large enough for two well-cushioned benches along the sides, each flanked by a unique potted plant–one needle-leaved sapling whose branches grew in helices, another a bush that grew no leaves at all, only algae colonies of its own on bare twigs. Ruvle recognized an ‘asphalt tree’ with pitch-black leaves, but only because it had once been the source for mundane black ink before over-harvesting threatened the species. One could pick up bits and pieces of the history of ink-making when becoming a notary; everyone had the question of why modern practice used Dye-infused golden ink (it was a costly enough signal of authenticity that it prevented forgeries). But beyond the antechamber and its tinted glass walls, past the greenhouse lighting that sustained the potted trees, the lab’s central ground floor made an enormous din, one big arena of cage-enclosures all throughout the first floor with bars going from floor to ceiling. Squawking herons and egrets, hissing snakes, buzzing beetles, whining and grunting beavers, croaking frogs, whimpering rabbits, and so many winged insects that they became swarms of black dots made of pure noise…even the characteristic sounds of humans were about, happy scientists in-their-element shouting to communicate, walking briskly with clipboards in-hands to different animals they need monitor, transporting prosthetic animal parts by metal carts, and collecting valuable data for humanity to learn from. With a quick visual scan of the environment, she didn’t spot anything resembling an artificial heart on the transport carts, and trying to form a mental map of the place with every single object and animal in sight–

  Her spatial reasoning shut down, like a file cabinet crumpling under ten million papers. Input too large. Couldn’t even attempt it, not without exoproprio.

  Ruvle shook her head. Had to get in and hide before a scientist saw her. One glance at the ceiling revealed the answer how. She climbed from the bench to perch on the asphalt tree and backed herself into the corner where glass walls met, scrabbling with splayed fingers and spread limbs for maximum contact friction, pressing against the sides as hard as she could without slipping and ejecting herself from the corner. Bit by bit, second by second, she climbed, backwards, biceps starting to quiver from the friction-maximizing effort.

  “You know, there’s a million birds here and I don’t see any impact craters from them smacking into the glass. These walls must be really sturdy,” Chain said up towards her, without moving his head, like it were an idle comment in case any scientist ran by at the wrong moment. No cracks from hard impact–that was all the hint she needed.

  Ruvle walljumped.

  And the technique to ascend reliably, in this chamber less than five meters wide, bouncing from corner to corner clockwise, tested her physical strength more than it challenged her coordination.

  She stopped only at the ceiling, where her fingers dug into a spot where glass wall became ductwork, covered by a slotted steel grate. She hung off it, panting, head hanging downward. A scientist finally came to speak with Chain, this one carrying a live fish in-bowl. And as Chain started his tour of the first floor, Ruvle popped open the grate to climb into the duct, for a tour of the first-and-a-half.