‘Mielo ~ I’m in place,’ she wrote to Chain, holding her notary pen in her mouth and shining its light on the walls, snaking her way through the vents. She understood now why Elial had her job.

  ‘Chain Hydrapress ~ Aces, I just talked them into showing me a map.’

  Ruvle crawled. A four-way split in the ductwork opened before her, and she smiled in remembering the contortionism maze in the monastery. She’d never conquered it, but it proved that hyperdexterity did not forget flexibility, and Ruvle took a direction other than straight. It took some exploring to find what she sought–another grate, built into the side of the ductwork, which she pressed her face against. Chain and his tour guide walked far below, between a miniature scale replica of Stepwise built as a rat enclosure and something that looked like a mechanized giant rubber stamp full of spare lab coats.

  Ruvle delicately popped open the grate to maybe get a look at the paper map they were leaning over. Next to her, on a steel perch attached to the outside of the duct, was an owl watching the rats. It turned its head an entire half-circle to look directly at her, perplexed, and then Ruvle ducked her head back in and replaced the grate. Bad idea.

  ‘~ Third floor is where they do the surgeries,’ he reported. ‘Look there.’

  ‘~ Which way do I get there from in the vents?’

  ‘~ Can’t tell. Improvise.’

  She climbed further through the ductwork, heading wherever this branch would take her– unfortunately, a dead end. It terminated with a downwards swoop into a deadly whirling metal fan, above an empty crossroads between enclosures. Ruvle sighed. She didn’t have the space to turn around…actually, did she? A question for later; backing up was an alternative. Passing by the grate again, this time in reverse, she caught a glimpse of the mechanized stamp punching the ground, leaving a pristine, sparkly-clean lab coat and set of safety glasses under it, neatly-folded with the glasses on top. Chain strapped the glasses on and slipped his arms through the sleeves just as Ruvle passed by.

  As she explored the ductwork, Ruvle twisted and turned with ease. This maze would not defeat her. Mental mapping was key. The animal sounds below her gave her hints about relative location to the front door, while simultaneously masking the knocks of her hands and feet. Three-way intersections branched into more spits, a metal tree without loops, fanning throughout the first floor. Sometimes a duct pointed downwards into a terminating fan, others down into a long chute, for direct ventilation of specific enclosures against the walls. Exploring needed more than a few minutes. Her hands and knees did not tire–this did not compare to prior tasks.

  ‘~ Found a way up,’ Ruvle finally reported. A vertical shaft twisted upwards, not down.

  ‘~ Good job.’

  The tiny screws and rivets holding segments of ductwork together made for great handholds and footholds, speeding her ascent, but she could have climbed with nothing–narrow spaces allowed for hands on opposite walls. As she ascended, the pen in her mouth lit the way in blue, the external light from the first floor no longer filtering through nearby grates as an aide. Her hands and feet bumped and knocked, the work of supporting herself in the climb making all the noise it needed to–and that rattle became less resonant and hollow, but firm, like masonry surrounded it instead of open air.

  Fewer animals made noise above. She should be more quiet. Ruvle focused on pure coordination and precision. Noise, specious impacts, her hips hitting metal to firmly wedge herself in place for a complex ascent–none of these were necessary. She could stop her limbs before they struck steel any more firmly than a falling sheet of paper.

  By fiat of self, she became silent.

  And at the top of the shaft, her silent self spilled out to the ductwork of the second floor, to ignore any further grates. The third floor was her target.

  And that target eluded her.

  ‘~ I can’t find a path,’ Ruvle wrote, curled up into a tight ball in the middle of another four-way intersection, this one with corners cut, an adapter to conventional rigid rectangle ductwork paneling with a loose, circular, hanging kind with ruffled edges–it would bend under her weight and reveal her immediately down those paths.

  ‘~ I was starting to think that would happen,’ he wrote back. ‘Where are you right now?’

  She twisted her shoulders and leaned down the rigid duct, craning her neck and folding her knees up against her lower ribcage to be able to peek through the nearest grate. ‘I don’t know. Hallway with tubes lining it.’ It had a thatched floor of steel and numerous small computer terminals, each sweeping a green line over their displays in unison, all belonging to a set of the thick glass tubes that rose from floor to ceiling. Bubbles occasionally rose in the fluid inside of them, with inert animal bodies suspended within.

  ‘~ Green fluid or yellow fluid?’

  ‘~ Green.’

  ‘~ Cadaver wing,’ Chain explained. ‘Every good lab ends up with a corpse locker, and this is a good lab.’

  ‘~ It’s not helping me.’

  ‘~ Getting to that.’ Ruvle spotted a hunched-over goggles-clad scientist wearing a medical apron, carrying a plastic tub, humming to himself and occasionally letting out the diabolical chuckle of a smart person having a good time. ‘I got a minute to look at the map again. The areas around the surgery wards are something called positive pressure rooms.’

  ‘~ Air only flows out of them, not in.’ She vaguely remembered Elial mentioning positive pressure when talking about her job at one point.

  ‘~ Yeah. And there’s a big clean-room up there for working in air with very few contaminants. I get the sense that the third floor has its own separate vent system.’

  Love this story? Find the genuine version on the author's preferred platform and support their work!

  Ruvle silently sighed. ‘~ So I can’t get there in the ducts, since they don’t connect to the third floor.’

  ‘~ Keep trying.’

  The scientist pressed buttons on one of the monitors, which beeped with each contact, leading to a hissing decompression noise as one of the tube’s fluids drained downwards into some other vessel. The scientist strapped on medical gloves with two quick snaps as the glass lowered from the body of a heron, its feathers still dripping with the preservative fluid, and the scientist plopped it into the tray. His satisfied giggling followed him back down the hall.

  Ruvle kept trying. All she would need to do is find the normal path to the third floor and sneak into it without anyone noticing…

  But frankly, this was a big lab, and she was getting confused. The ductwork defied every new guess of its structure–she didn’t even know what a sensible layout would be. It tunneled along hallways that all looked similar, shades of different colors preserving different sorts of animal parts in varying states.

  She climbed and twisted her way through, visiting and revisiting them. Had she been to the yellow-fluid wing before? Twice or three times? She forgot what this one specific T-intersection went to. There were break rooms that blended together, chemical lecture halls with fume hoods where she could not bear to stay long (she held back sneezing from the chalk dust–it would give her away), and an entire snake enclosure filled with logs and stagnant wetlands water for some reason.

  ‘~ Why is there a snake enclosure here?’ she wrote to Chain.

  ‘~ I’ll ask.’ And she waited for him to get an answer from some scientist or another. It took a lecturous number of minutes. ‘~ Neurotoxic venom farm. Important for preserving parts. Grafting. A bunch of things they do on floor 2.’

  Ruvle continued looking and climbing, looking and climbing, but retreading her way to unexplored ducts was getting long and difficult–and with each one that didn’t lead her to an important-looking staircase up nor elevator, she had fewer and rarer places to look. Her shoulders finally burned from holding awkward positions, her spine aching from twisting herself in knots to turn around with the fluidity of an octopus. She wished she had Chain’s map. No, she wished she had her map. A fully static environment would be trivialized by exoproprio, a mental map strong enough to keep track of everything effortlessly. But Ruvle lacked one. She didn’t know how much longer Chain’s tour could last.

  “Excuse me,” spoke a female scientist, distantly, somewhere below, beyond the ductwork. “Are you busy?”

  “Always,” another answered, male. “Do you need something?”

  “I heard rattling and I think I saw something through one of the AC vents,” she replied. Ruvle froze. “I think a snake got into the vents again.”

  “Ah. Ahah. AHAHAHA! Go get Dusaw. He’ll corral it back in.”

  Ruvle crawled, taking extra care to be completely silent, hands and knees moving quickly but decelerating to near-zero at the moments of impact–the micro-scale force control that needlework demanded. Where was she now? She sort of recognized this area. Peeking through a vent with no scientists below, she saw red tubes, and specifically that preserved exotic llama head that worked as a visual landmark…which meant if she took three lefts over there, in that twisting-and-untwisting duct spiral that had to be a construction error…she could get near the recessed, hidden area behind dark glass. She could probably hide in there.

  The problem was that it happened to be that snake enclosure. Ruvle went for it.

  Moments later, the screws on the face of the humming duct atop the snake enclosure counter-rotated, spinning out from within, and they fell simultaneously. In an instant, Ruvle’s hands shot out, sweeping the duct’s freed face under their paths of descent and catching them simultaneously, none falling into the water below. She dangled down, moving much like a snake herself, until she could hang from the ceiling with one hand and set the duct’s face aside, onto the limbs of a decorative plastic tree, slimy with water and residue from its reptilian brethren, free of leaves.

  The water snake coiled between the branches raised its head to look at her, breaking its camouflage. Ruvle hadn’t noticed it.

  Below her, the enclosure caught only the stray, diffuse light that peeked out from the top of a black glass pane, a light source like a crack atop a door installed upside-down. Enough to see by, but a sight where the brain made educated guesses about color. The enclosure resembled the moat outside the lab, sticks and rocks poking up out of stagnant water, where slippery swirled contortions swam just below the surface. Logs floated peacefully, the decaying wood a breeding ground for insects to feed the snakes, and a rim of textured, faux-grassy flooring lined the outside. Ruvle spotted a seam in the glass, rusted metal rivets forming a square, presumably a small door for scientists to open up and inspect the snakes through. She needed nothing of it.

  Ruvle crouched in a corner, opposite the fake tree and not immediately visible if the door opened up, balancing the duct face in her hand. A good place to hide, if no one checked it.

  Now for no one to check.

  She held in her sighs and the stress in her heart. Infiltration was no harder than a very rowdy day at her office…just don’t catch suspicion…

  Snakes passed by under the water before her.

  And still, she felt she had to keep moving. Ruvle shifted side to side, looking over her shoulder to the black glass wall, and seeing no faint silhouettes moving through it at the moment. Perhaps a few, very distant? So dar. She could barely make out the hallway intersection. Think–were there any unexplored places nearby the enclosure? She couldn’t remember. Perhaps one. Ruvle stepped–

  A camouflaged snake’s fang scratched her ankle, missing an outright bite as her Coarse reflexes flinching for her. It slithered from the rim back into the water, its cover of a clump of wood blown. Her ankle started to tingle–fiercely.

  Now she definitely couldn’t stay here, but she found her idea.

  Ruvle sidestepped back to the fake plastic tree and grabbed the snake that had been looking at her a moment ago, snatching it just behind the head so that it couldn’t bite her, and jumped for the duct again. If the scientists were looking for a snake in the vents, she could just provide them one.

  “BEES!” Chain’s science tour guide called out, swooping his arms forward against the majesty of the many crinklewood cubes-on-stilts, inside of which colonies buzzed in enormous hives. A screen of woven fibers separated him from honey and doom.

  “BEES!” Chain joined, right behind him and pumping his fists towards the apiary exhibit (a massive data science project!), one larger than most people’s entire homes. His briefcase dangled.

  “BEEEEEEEEEEEEES!” The scientist cried, followed by heroic laughter, and that, too, Chain joined him in.

  It lasted for many minutes.

  “We’re learning so much about how colony life cycles change with hive geometry, dear student,” the scientist finally said, rubbing a finger against his safety goggles as if to wipe away tears, but only smearing slug trails.

  “It’s fantastic,” Chain told him. “Do they ever get out? Wouldn’t want bees upstairs, I imagine.”

  “Never,” he said.

  “Speaking of upstairs, I’m having a blast. Can you show me the second floor?”

  “Hm. hm hm.” The tour guide chuckled. “I shouldn’t, but you’re being such a good sport of all this.”

  “Thanks!”

  And while the scientist guided him to the elevators, Chain hoped Ruvle’s sneakery was going more smoothly. He hadn’t expected to get this far.