Post-disaster and post-mortem, a bulkhead door on the first floor of the lab clanked from the inside. It groaned its way open, the rubber seals picking up grime and paint flakes, freed from compression for the first time in ages.

  “Ah! I’d feared the worst,” Yoris said.

  The safety officer climbed out, sneering, her neck bruised and her red frizzy hair a mess. Her black gloves were smeared with grime and rotting animal parts, and used needles stuck out of her coat.

  “First: I’m getting an injection, fifteen vaccines, and every immune booster on the shelf,” she said. “Second: didn’t I have you install this for Boboe? Remember, he kept jumping down the waste disposal on purpose!?” She thumped a hand on the bulkhead and then closed it behind her.

  “He was an excellent researcher, but no time for mourning.”

  “I never thought I’d be in his place. Third…” She stripped off her gloves. “Someone higher up needs to know abrout this.”

  Many hours after the infiltration, against a wild tree and on twig-scattered earth, Ruvle shivered, still wrapped in Chain’s scarf. She hunched into a fetal position, her legs still unresponsive, a battle raging inside. Snake venom pumped into her furthest capillaries and most sensitive organ tissue, while tislets lifted the weight of chemical reaping from ravaged nerves, cell by cell–and for the first time, the venom was losing. Tears clouded her good eye, freely shed. Her pride bore a worse wound than her body, but she’d won, in her way–in her destruction of Fygra’s toys and her ticket to Fine, still right there around her neck. The artificial heart gleamed in the soft blue tislet glow, peeking out from between the crossing where the scarf wrapped over itself in an X, secure over her chest.

  Chain stood on the other side of the tree, arms crossed, his visor lifted and his briefcase set aside, next to Ruvle’s recovered hammock-turned-backpack in the grass, picked up at the end of a parachute ride off the top of the roof. He hadn’t stopped staring out towards the lab for nearly half an hour now. Lights had risen from it, but mostly in the direction of the college town, starting with the most likely place for a hideout.

  “...This was my fault,” Chain finally said.

  Ruvle shut her eye tightly and shook her head, blinking away tears. Her hands hurt too much. “We both did this. We both succeeded.”

  “I got you stabbed with a crazy dose of venom.” He sighed.

  “Sometimes I get hurt. It’s not my first time.” Ruvle tried to smile and it didn’t work.

  “Yeah, that’s the problem. That’s how you do things. I know we haven’t known each other in person for very long, grand scheme of things, but, ugh, I should have figured out what you’d do, right?”

  Ruvle shivered again. “Can you talk more directly, please? I can’t…make sense of people being cryptic. Everything hurts.”

  Chain took a few breaths, with the far-off look of gathering his thoughts. “When you said you were going to go directly attack Fygra and get yourself killed, I knew I had to give you something else to do. You’re an action person. I like that; that’s why we’ve been friends over the textwork for so long. So I thought I’d take you somewhere to do training; that’s your biggest hobby.”

  “It’s not a hobby…”

  “I get that,” he said, sailing past with a tone of voice unwilling to argue. “I didn’t know if that was enough, so I…came up with hitting up this lab. I was kind of fudging it with the artificial heart idea. I was really fudging it with the idea that damaging it would hurt Fygra’s finances. That’s not how it works. True citizens transcend vo and vouchers.” He looked down and shook his head. Seeing him without briefcase and without scarf, he seemed naked: separate from the entire reason he could challenge robots, snakes, pools of acid, lasers, and now injury, all in sequences of art and calculation, all in such mild forms. A man with a scarf, missing his scarf. “I didn’t even want you to break stuff. I was hoping that if you got to steal something, you’d feel ruthless enough and let it go.”

  Ruvle looked away, feeling smaller than the powerless man.

  “I’m still on your side and everything. You’re my friend, and I signed an oath, you know?” His one-cornered smile came back to his face. “What I mean is you say you’re ruthless, but you’re actually reckless. And I just gotta account for that whenever I plan for you in the future. Otherwise, I break what’s…gotta be months of income that got smashed in that lab, never mind all the animal parts. And more importantly, I get my best friend shot up with venom. Can’t have that happening again.”

  Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

  Ruvle rested her head against the grass. “I’m…sorry.”

  “Nah, you don’t have to be. I was kinda the one who told you we weren’t going to be Thoughtful about all this in the first place. I just, uh. Didn’t figure out that you had that covered for me this whole time. I mean, I was turning off thoughtfulness for a specific plan, getting into Othek’s tower and my oath in general. Didn’t know you could do it for everything.”

  She turned her head, pressing her face into twigs and earth. Chain was just thinking aloud, she was sure, working through how to be compassionate and so on, and yet, no angry citizen or passive-aggressive fraudster had such a way with words. Simple impatient yelling could annoy Ruvle, but not peel off her facade of humanity and show the scum she was underneath. She sniffled.

  Chain crouched down next to her and put a hand on her back. “You’re gonna be okay, Ruvie.”

  “I’m not,” she whimpered. “I let you down for a stupid heart.”

  His hand slid up to her neck, then to the top of her head, giving gentle pats. “Like I said. It’s on me. I can’t make you stop being you, and I don’t want to. You get a lot of work done and you inspire me about it. It’s kinda easier for me to be the planning guy, anyway.” He sat, and adjusted the knot of the scarf with his other hand. “And we did get that stupid heart, so let’s not waste it. I’m gonna take this off you now, if that’s fine. I don’t want grass stains on it for when we find a surgeon for you.”

  Ruvle grinded her forehead against the earth as a nod. The metal against her chest rose and Chain slipped the string off her neck.

  “Training. You like training, right?” he said.

  “Yeah…” Her tears were getting back under control.

  “We’re gonna do lots of training. First, you’ll finish de-venoming and we’ll walk to the grove. Second, we have a nice long sleep, get some bonus healing done. And then you’ll have a whole day practicing your tricks, and you’ll end that day better at them than when you started, and we’ll keep doing that until you feel like you and I can crush any pathetic whelp who stands in your way.”

  It was nice of him to phrase it like that, words whose colors could never blend into his voice. No matter her setbacks, she would not be a nobody.

  “Sit tight. I’ve got lookout covered.”

  “...if they see you…?” Ruvle said, half-forming the thought.

  “In a black suit at night? Not happening.” She heard him step away, and her shoulders relaxed.

  Eventually, the specter of pain lifted. The rising sun banished its lingering possession, sending Ruvle back on the trail, with Chain at her side. The ground sunk around her shaky footfalls with each step, the wetlands slowly taking over on track to the ring-shaped lake around Mount Radius. The mountain loomed, and the plants reshaded to sea green, revealed by daybreak. Puddles of algae-filled water abounded.

  “How go your legs?” Chain asked, his arm around Ruvle.

  “Like radio static,” Ruvle said, with a laugh and then a yawn.

  “Does anything feel numb or missing? I’m kinda looking at the way you walk, but I can’t tell if there’s nerve damage.”

  “I hope not…” She looked ahead to the lake. “It feels the same way as if I slept wrong and it’s limp in the morning.”

  “Okay, good, you’re probably okay,” he said. “Yoris explained the venom thing to me. Low doses, it’s a neurodepressant, so they can turn off a limb’s nervous system before grafting it. High doses, it kills the nerves off; sometimes they need to do that for immunological reasons.” He put his mouth mask back on, his grin disappearing behind it. “Scientists really know what they’re doing. Example, he said the liquid helium system in there circulates on its own, because it’s superfluid, and that does something important for the preservation tubes.”

  “...I almost lost nerves from a scratch…” Ruvle looked down at her ankle where the fang split her skin, the site now a line of scab beads. If her reflexes hadn’t been so honed, and the snake had given her the full dose…

  “But you didn’t. And that’s good, because we’re gonna need you functioning for this next part.”

  “What part?”

  “Getting across the lake.” He pointed forward.

  They improvised a plan. Ruvle gave Chain his hour of silence, distant behind a drooping, dense tree, and came back to pick him up as a scarf. Her legs had stopped tingling, and despite fatigue and sleepiness, travel across the lake would not challenge her. Faced with a shallow, ecologically-busy lake that behaved more like a circular river, debris floated densely upon it, where open ocean–and most bodies of water outside of the crater–could not.

  The obscurity of the Fool’s Dye grove had to do with the lack of a nearby bridge. Spans over Mount Radius’s lake were built north and east, if she remembered right, near Crater Basin’s other city states–Rir Kranbar Ro, Gabardine, Windchime. But Ruvle did not need a bridge. Thinking of Elial, she bounced from driftwood to driftwood, from half-submerged dead bush to forgotten hunk of rust disposed here long ago. The water surface slosed and rippled, but never deeply, her steps too gentle to bring her down or bother the fish. At one point, she used a turtle’s back as a stepping stone. It bobbed barely under the water, mildly perturbed.

  Ruvle smiled. Chain could have re-scrivened the final acid surfboard idea onto his scarf and paddled across, she’d suggested. But this had been the right call. Ruvle was faster, boardless. And even if getting in and out of the lab had been a mess, this victory, at least, had no caveats.

  When she made it to dry land, on the foothills of Mount Radius, the grove in sight, she looked forward to getting a good, long sleep under golden trees–and much self-improvement to follow.