The next day, well-rested and energized, Ruvle had something important to do. A spray of petals kicked up behind her as she chased that little rodent, that bastard which could dive and squirm through soft floral bedding and up hard trees, losing her at every turn. It mattered little–with her rapid gains in agility, she tore through the petal-dense earth like she were four live wires wrapped around a generator, unearthing its hiding spots and chasing its trails. Rodents, particularly these arboreal ones, were built from first principles for deftness and stealth, their entire biological guiding principles being their mobility and impossibility of tracking down.

  She blasted through enough debris to leave a cloud in the air, practically suspended in the sub-second timescales her mind operated on at its best. Her focus narrowed to a tree trunk. The fleeing thing upon it threw another acorn. She slapped it back through the air, reversing its course, embedding that acorn back into the tree as the creature ducked back into the yellow floral underbrush. Its brown fur had become golden, the same way Ruvle’s bodysuit had.

  She panted, staring down the tree as the cloud fell back to earth around her, her arms out to her sides, menacing, ready to pounce. Ruvle, a human, could beat it at its own game.

  Chain, sitting in the hammock nearby, looked up from scrivening on a wooden tile.

  Ruvle relaxed, took a few deep breaths, and composed herself, back into a dignified pose. “Hey. Chasing a squirrel.”

  “Chasing a squirrel: bored, or chasing a squirrel: hunting?”

  “Chasing a squirrel: nemesis.”

  He cackled. “You’ll get it in no time. You’re a machine.”

  “Machines wish they could be as quick and coordinated as me.” She pulled a lock of hair behind her head. It looked blonde. She’d have to give special attention to washing her hair next time she visited the stream, to get all the fool’s dye pigment out. “This is good. This is me being better. I might not be Fine, but I feel the difference between the bottom of Coarse and the top.” She should ask Elial about what it took to be counted as a Coarse-Witness once she felt ready to leave.

  “Almost able to cover that entire tree?”

  “Soon.” She nodded. “I’m still working on techniques…exoproprio is hard. My mental mapping is good, but I’m not fully aware like I need to be.” Otherwise, it would be easier to track the squirrel. Sufficiently good camouflage would still work, as would taking detours buried deep under the petal earth, but if she had that instant-by-instant mastery of spatial awareness…

  “I getcha. Don’t take this as me making fun of you, but you still do stuff like miss the giant flying saucer in the sky.”

  She tilted her head. He pointed.

  Sure enough, far out and high up along the slopes of Mount Radius, a gray, gleaming disc hovered in place, over a relatively flat outcropping. She couldn’t make out much at this distance, but there seemed to be a faint red…crown-shaped decoration on the mountain rock below it, perhaps, and a conical green beam of light coming from the underside of the saucer. The latter only showed itself against blue sky and sunlight due a cloud passing by, its white texture being filtered through a faint grass-stain tint. “I am so blind,” Ruvle pouted.

  “Take a look while you can,” Chain said, getting back to scrivening. “The sense of wonder from seeing that has been good for a few tiles.”

  “Which true citizen do you think it is?” she asked, tilting her hips and putting on hand on her waist, thinking. She’d seen Fygra’s personal jet over the skies of Stepwise several times, but a self-propelled discus with a spherical central bulge on top, that could be almost anyone. From the documents she’d seen across her desk in The Checkered Office, Ruvle figured there were at least ten flying saucers out there, in that sweet spot of rarity where speculations could proliferate but theories couldn’t be falsified. Some zany strangers thought they belonged to extraterrestrials, but she’d seen blueprints for bespoke saucer parts herself, penned by humanity, and certainly notarized by humanity.

  “Pff, I dunno,” he said. “Not what I’m thinking about right now, you get me? Let them do whatever it is they’re doing.” He held his tile up to his face, inspecting it, then flipped it over to scriven the back. “Gotta be ones with a big science lean, I guess. There’s a Udefa out there, would make sense if it’s him. Cambi, she’d be one, maybe Nerso. I’m leaning towards Nerso, come to think of it.”

  She dumped the first two names out of her mind like old tea. “If it’s Nerso, I’m going up there.” The squirrel could wait.

  “Maybe don’t.”

  “I have to! That prick took my eye!”

  He palmed his face. “Ruvle, I already talked you out of killing yourself against Fygra.”

  This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

  Ruvle huffed. But she’d learned. She swayed side to side, still staring at the flying saucer. “I know I can’t fight him. But I at least have to…”

  “To what?”

  “To mess with him.”

  “And you tried messing with Fygra, and almost got yourself paralyzed. I’m not trying to be mean, but I want you to do something smart and not die if you’re going all the way up there.” He picked out another tile to scriven on.

  Ruvle strode over to the hammock-supporting trees and grabbed her notary pen again. She twirled it and held it aloft. “What if I do this? Look, look, I’m bringing the textwork, we can stay in contact.”

  “Sure can.” There came that half-smile out of the side of his mask again. “Got a plan?”

  “No, I’m not going to be thoughtful! I’m just going to see the opportunities I get,” Ruvle said. “...sorry, I snapped at you there.”

  He flicked the tile away onto the hammock, losing interest in it. “Meh. You’re gonna watch what the guy’s like in person?”

  She nodded.

  “So it’s information hunting instead of squirrel hunting. Harder prey for someone with the skills for it.” He rolled over to recline back in the hammock. “If it’s not your guy, let me know on the textwork and come right back.”

  “...You’re taking this well,” she said. He’d been almost panicked when trying to make her stop going after Fygra, then morose about her spontaneity in the lab, but here she was with another revenge-fueled excursion in mind–no one fucking understood what it felt like to tamp that down, to let the emotional fire consume you instead of the one it was born to burn–and Chain just seemed fine with it?

  “I’m figuring it all out. Like I said after the lab, this is what you do, Ruvle. I am here to make ya do it less recklessly.” He winked. “Besides, you’re not actually going to climb a third of a mountain before it leaves.”

  “I am too.”

  “...I just goaded you.” He palmed his face again. “I’m so stupid.” He cackled. “Seriously, don’t die, that’s my number one rule.”

  Ruvle dropped to put her palms on the ground, bending one knee, ready to sprint. This wouldn’t be a vast climb to the clouds, but she’d have to stop to let her ears pop and equilibrate a few times.

  “Run if it gets scary,” he said. Ruvle nodded back, and she bolted, kicking up petals in her wake. She jumped off the blue stone lip of the foothill, a little yellow-covered shooting star that trailed the grove’s golden debris in her arc to the earth. Moderate falling was no longer grave danger. Neither was mountain climbing without gear.

  For some reason, she had assumed that her greater vigor from these weeks of training and the fine art of Exaction would make climbing a mountain a quick and easy task. It was not. Vertical ascent for short distances, such as the height of a library, was one thing, but doing so nonstop for upwards of an hour on unworked stone…it reminded Ruvle of why railguns needed so much power; it had everything to do with the height of the shot, of the inherent energy of pulling oneself out of the gravity well of terra firma. By the time the flying saucer was no longer a malformed speck on the distant horizon–now something she could get to with the length of a walk across Stepwise–Ruvle had to walk up the ragged slopes with a forward lean and walking-pace steps, catching her breath, her calves stinging in all of the ways the beehive could not. Her toenails were polished in rock dust, and she’d stopped leaving yellow footprints ages ago. But she’d made it, and it wasn’t that hard. Not much farther now, maybe five more libraries of height, and a few more of horizontal distance.

  Ruvle crested around a small cliff. The rest of the path to the flying saucer had no forced vertical ascents, only a long hill climb, making it an obvious route from here–

  “No entry.”

  –and an obvious outpost, where two henchmen and two henchwomen set up. Along the hill, the two henchmen were hurriedly getting up from a long flat rock used as an improvised table; only one of the henchwomen had noticed Ruvle immediately, now pointing a tranquilizer gun.

  Ruvle ignored her and kept walking.

  “No entry! Turn around!”

  Her fellow henchwoman shoved her soda bottle back into a bright green cooler and pulled out a tranquilizer of her own, bringing the total aimed at Ruvle to four.

  This time, Ruvle stopped in place, letting her lungs and heart finish the climb that her muscles had made. She looked around, left and right, sizing them up and swaying her head for depth perception. The sharp shadows from the sun gave her a good idea of their distance. Men and table on her left, women and cooler on the right. She tried to come up with something to say, but decided instead on a dismissive, unheeding stare.

  Ruvle resumed walking. She’d dealt with henchmen before, and hadn’t been as powerful then. The henchwomen whispered to each other about making sure their safeties were off. The front henchman kept his gun trained on her. “One more step and we fire,” he called out, and Ruvle did not slow even a snail’s rate. She raised her arms, gradually, to her sides.

  The tranquilizers fired, four in the span of a second. Her hands flew in flashes to the projectiles, intercepting them. Her palms clapped together.

  She held up the four darts in one hand, one between each pair of fingers, sunlight catching on the needles. Ruvle stopped walking. Her frown and her unblinking stare, under a lowered brow, the sunlight at just the right angle to cast shadows across her face…

  Ruvle almost wanted them to not get the hint.

  But they did. After a few seconds of silence, the front henchwoman dropped her gun and raised her hands into the air; the others put down their weapon and followed suit, all frankly doing an admirable job of not showing terror on their face, a neutral acceptance that they were not equipped to deal with Ruvle and shouldn’t try.

  She passed them by.