“Did I tell you yet that I hate climbing?”

  “You did,” Ruvle answered, spinning a dial on the spire’s vault face with one hand, dangling from the top with the other.

  “I could never do what you do. Seriously, mad, mad props for taking care of this part,” he said, above, looking over an unfolded piece of paper from his pockets; he’d somehow made it on top of the lip of the vault door to sit there, poised for action.

  There were so many types of locks on it that it resembled an activity board made for toddlers, and she’d been tampering with them for an hour now, with Chain’s guidance—he had the research about which kind could be cracked which way, and she had the precision to do so. Her arms were getting very, very tired, what with alternating between them to hang from, but Ruvle defied exhaustion. Last one, she could do this last one. “What am I feeling for again?”

  “Should be a seam between the tumblers or something. Every combo lock gets a little harder or easier to turn at the right number, but how much depends on how good it is. Good ones need you to use an electric safe-cracker with a voltage readout to four decimal places or something crazy. If you turn it with the right amount of force, you should feel something.”

  Ruvle gritted her teeth as she tried to twist the dial with as little force as possible, riding the line of dynamic friction as closely as she could. “I...I think I used too much caffeine, I’m jittering…” She couldn’t see any tremors, but something just felt wrong in her muscles. Her hanging arm’s exhausted twitches echoed all the way to her opposite fingertips. Even her heartbeat in her fingers might be too much, if this was as secure as it looked…

  “You’re fine. Show ‘em who’s in charge, Ruvle.”

  The dial stopped twisting, not from finding the seam, but from dipping too far under friction’s resistance. Ruvle groaned and spun the dial around a few times; she picked another random number to try from. “I’m okay, but I can’t tell the difference in inertia in dust motes…”

  “Here, I can try something with the door,” Chain said, now stomping around on the top of the vault door, vibrations reaching her fingernails.

  “If you can tislet your way through, please do it, I’m dying here…”

  “Well, nah, if I knew what I was doing and I had a bag of like ten thousand tiles with me to slap on it, it still wouldn’t work because this orange-green plating on the door is stoko. It’s a stupid metal; you can’t put tislets on it,” he said. “How about this…” Tislets flickered and his scarf hammer-whipped at something; Ruvle wasn’t looking. “While I was looking up how the locks worked, apparently a lot of small locks get easier if you can pull on the shackle. No shackle on this big guy, but—oh, really, this works?” he asked.

  “What?”

  “Popping all those other locks means I can pull this open by a hair or two, apparently. Hang on.” She looked up; he was grunting and digging the backs of his heels into the top lip of the vault door. “Hey, get up here, I think I can see the thing.”

  She used the dial as a stepping stone and pulled herself onto the lip with him, relishing the chance to rest her shoulder. The circular top only allowed enough ‘flat’ ground for one person, but she could stand on sloped metal to avoid the tight squeeze; it would be fine. “What’s ‘the thing’?”

  “Emergency release lever. Bright red. Here,” he said, pulling a roll of tape measure out of his cargo pants, the sort with a metal case and a retractible length of paper-thin marked steel. The case was barred like a cage, or a wireframe wheel, with a logo of a beaver chewing on a nuclear fuel rod. “Use this and poke it.”

  “Why do you have…” she trailed off.

  “I can’t bring a bunch of cool stuff; I don’t have money. Thought you could do something fun with it.”

  Truly powerful people didn't have to improvise like this. Ruvle felt small. One day she’d stop having to use bottles to parry, pool toys to train with, or tape measure to break into an elite’s building.

  She put her ego aside, yet again, and did what success required—she had to clip off the hook at the end of the tape to get it to slip through the gap, barely thicker than paper, but she did it, extending the tape all the way to the lever and pressing down on it through the base—bending the tape with writhing clatters a few times, in the characteristic sudden way of such thin metal. When the lever finally yielded, the vault door’s hinges creaked, the lip of the vault door separating from the spire masonry, now a balance beam challenge bone-breakingly far above ground.

  “Yeah-heah, that’s it,” Chain cheered, parachuting down past the door. Ruvle dropped down behind him and shut the vault behind her with a stoko handle the size of her arm.

  Inside, the directional glow of streetlamps below and starshine above was replaced by diffuse bar lights, bathing the unsettlingly empty walls in yellow. The floor tiling became dark-scuffed octagons tessellated with squares to fill the gaps between them, blotches of red and black scattered about, suggesting blood and debris without having to be unclean. There was no hallway or room, per se—an antechamber, moreso, leading immediately to a spiral stairwell, with only one direction: descent. Ruvle squinted up at the weird lighting, holding her arms out to her sides, putting herself back in the mindset of lenient balance on solid ground again.

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  Chain led the way downstairs, Ruvle close behind. One continuous left turn—down, down, down.

  “I thought this would be full of traps everywhere…” she said. “It’s built more like an office, to me.”

  “Told ya, this guy’s defenses are unusually weak,” Chain answered. He scratched the back of his head and chuckled. “If you’re looking for answers, though, this is where my prep ends. I’m as blind as you. Never done a raid before, only heard what they’re like on radio dramas.”

  Ruvle descended, preparing herself inwardly.

  The stairwell went on for a terribly long time. Ruvle suspected that it was disconnected from the usable space of the tower, like an elevator shaft—the walls became hard concrete siding, then further enforced with steel bands that she could see between the bricks. Ruvle had the vague feeling of being watched—no specific camera stood out to her, but between the visually-confusing texture of the stairs and the occasional straightaway in the spiral of descent, there could be a place to hide a camera and ample space to track her. A distant grinding from below grew louder and louder, and electric mains hum became inescapable. The air heated with each turn downwards. She noticed a discarded paper cup or plastic food wrapper here and there—were they entering a trafficked area? A maintenance team’s work?

  Soon, the stairwell did open up, far enough down that Ruvle lost her guess of elevation. The hallway pointed forth, down the brutal concrete walls and through to where the bar lights failed, the corridor darkening in foreboding distance. But a patch of unlit hallway provided a different source of light, the grinding and churning of red-hot circular blades, sweeping past one another in oscillating motions–spinning at speeds that made their teeth solid blurs of heat. Some moved predictably, others along their slots in chaos, some the width of Ruvle’s shoulders and others as tall as herself. Intuitively, she visually scanned for gaps, and found none—the blades tiled together, vaguely closeby in depth (she couldn’t tell exactly without a second eye), forming solid walls of incandescent steel with gaps so narrow that a person could not fit through them. The forest of near-molten iron was impassable—not for lack of skill on Ruvle’s part, but because the spaces to slip past did not exist any more than she could have slipped around the vault door.

  “So fancy prep wouldn’t have helped…” Chain mumbled to himself, fanning out his scarf, his eyes fixed on the wall of blades. The heat was unwelcome in Ruvle’s lungs, excavating moisture. “Well, uh...this is just a hard stop, isn’t it. Uh...lemme…” he trailed off, knees bent, ready to spring into action that wasn’t coming. The red glow washed out the blue fabric of his scarf, but the tislets were as bright as ever.

  Ruvle put a hand to her mouth and watched a moment longer. Oh no. There were no person-sized gaps, but the wobbling of the larger blades and the erratic bounce of the chaotic ones...they could be pushed, couldn’t they? “I think these are here to tear up armor and equipment…”

  She closed her eyes and took a deep breath of hot air, preparing herself. She had an...idea, of what she was supposed to do, but she didn’t know if she had the strength for it.

  There is always a way to succeed.

  Most people are nobodies. They do not succeed.

  To achieve an outcome that isn’t ordinary, you must do what ordinary people are unwilling to do. Evil. Sacrifice. Acts of iron will.

  Otherwise, you will not be extraordinary. You will be a nobody.

  And I am not willing to be a nobody.

  If Ruvle could push some of these blades out of the way, a path would be open. They looked potent enough to saw through anything, but she knew gentle steps. She could press on the sides, quickly, just long enough to nudge them without being spun herself. Ruvle was willing to be horribly burned in the pursuit of a better life—she told herself that, she reminded herself of that. Maybe she could ask Chain to put his shoes on her hands as a protective cover, good for perhaps or two blades, but after that...she steeled herself in preparation for voluntarily giving herself red-raw, cracking, bleeding scars of hot iron on her hands, and—

  A whip-crack and cymbal crash jolted her from her hesitant dread. Chain hammered on the side of a blade traveling through a particularly wide groove, and with each crack of his scarf against it, the hot steel became more erratic and wobbling. “You know, I wondered why they stopped—” Crack, crack, cymbal crash after cymbal crash. “—using these in the stories, but I think I get it now.” His next strike hit home, and the spinning blade jammed against the end of its groove, no longer turning and with its teeth deformed against the flooring, faster than her eye could follow. It had bent so far that it was no longer aligned, like a gear rubbing against its housing. “I’m not gonna attrition our way through all this, let’s just do this instead.” His scarf crashed into more and more blades as he pressed forward, taming the smallest ones and bending them around their grooves with one strike each.

  “...What’s…” Ruvle didn’t know what to say.

  “They’re just hot metal.” He looked over his shoulder, pulling down his mask for a goofy grin. “We’re gonna attack our way through these, not defend.” He coiled and uncoiled his scarf around one hand; it looked unharmed by the heat. “Ever used oven mitts?”

  Ruvle followed.

  She honestly felt a little disappointed that self-sacrifice wasn’t the solution. Being willing to burn her hands into charred flesh was proof that she would rise above, but now she couldn’t demonstrate that proof. Ruvle sulked to herself as she proceeded through the graveyard of shattered metal and cooling red shard, sweat rolling off her brow.

  Then she realized she was being childish again and that, no, it was a reason to celebrate that a close friend saved her from burning her hands. Ruvle was a Thoughtful adult.

  She put a smile back on her face. “Thanks, Chain. I was about to do something bad.”

  “And that’s why we’re working together,” he said, and slipped his mask back on.