Dust motes hung in the air, suspended like atoms in vanadium steel.

  Nerso let out a puff of carbon dioxide. Every person, every thing, was now a lifeless statue, slain by the flow of time. Scientifically, biological matter was classified as dead if it had no metabolic processes–hair, fingernails, corpses. Build a fast enough clock, and science became necromancy–killing the entire world by looking closely enough in the debris of split seconds. Nerso, for this instant, was life–the only life, the only thing that still mattered in a world dead and silent.

  Dye was a wonderful thing. So were accelerant drugs, and so was the reactor on his back, burning through nucleons at the speed of a bomb. Unit cancellation played tricks on the mind–for this moment, he outstripped the energy consumption rate of all of Crater Basin, and yet, this acceleration took so little objective time that the fuel could fit on his back. He shouldn’t dawdle, of course. At some point, his necromancy would bring the world back as chronological revenants, playing out their lives on the order of seconds.

  Of course, he was not obligated to save the lives of everyone, now was he? He could exempt one from the spell of life.

  Nerso tapped his feet on the stones, propelling him forward through reaction, the earth crumbling around his toes like he were wading through smoke. His body drifted forward, towards the man Perfectcoil, that fist perhaps ten centimeters from Fygra’s nose. Interesting. Very interesting. He braked his heels against further stone, parting it like fireplace ashes, and studied the upstart. A goatee, a set of clothing covered in Dye, strong, corded muscles–easily capable of leveling the peak of Mount Radius, Nerso imagined. But he’d chosen to get in the way. And what did he have there, in the other hand, close to his chest?

  Nerso opened the man’s fingers, peeling the skin from the bones, like parting the rind of an overripe scide fruit. He simply moved the bones and skin and all the other meaty bits out of the way, in whichever directions they ended up going. The tendons held, interestingly, tying the muscles to the osseous surfaces, even as everything else crumbled and split. Tsk, tsk. Plenty of Dye, to be sure, but not enough of it to challenge Fygra. Micro and macro were one letter apart, and only fools confused them. Nerso plucked the glint droplet from Othek’s hand and held it close.

  The world was Nerso’s museum, and he, free to touch the exhibits. Nerso raised his finger and drew on the side of Othek’s face, slowly–precise movement was very difficult at these scales, as if he were wearing mittens and an encircling helmet. Flesh parted around his finger where he printed his name, opening up red surfaces below the skin–blood, muscles, the strokes of his finger, an N on his cheek, an E on his neck, and R on his shoulder. The cloth had to part, too, and Nerso took a moment to absorb the Dye from it all, not that he needed any more. That accumulation of power had become so rote that the sensation no longer entertained him.

  A spelling mistake, a stray stroke. Oh, imprecision, error bars so wide! No matter, for he had time to try, try again. Nerso laughed to himself as he fingerpainted in red over the man’s body, retrying his name over his back, his arms, his chest, decorating his print signature with swoops and swirls, rending cloth and scraping bone, pulling up chips of it like flakes of graphite. His finger swept through Othek’s unbeating heart the same way it would any other water, the wake left was his little treasure, short-lived art, like a beautiful nucleus of a superheavy isotope fresh from a particle accelerator. Ever so transient, and yet with meaning undimmed by its end. A memory, a unit of knowledge, to smile back on.

  He took time to admire his handiwork. The best angle was head-on, leaning a hand against Fygra, looking the Perfectcoil in the eyes. Fygra’s shoulder, of course, did not yield–even when he squeezed with all his might, as he did now as a reminder to himself.

  The upper left of his goggle display began to dim, the upper eighth of the charge in his reactor finally expended. An estimate, naturally. Computation moved on a fast enough scale, but he had yet to accelerate the electronics of the display to do more than this–by the time one-eighth began to respond, in practice, one-fourth had been fully expended. The light emitted, at least, cared not for time. The only entity that could follow him at this speed was his shadow, never letting him free from its grip on his ankles.

  Ah, well, he supposed he should resume patience. No one would get to see Nerso’s handiwork in this one moment, but everyone around–including the henchmen–could see art self-destruct.

  He returned to his post, tracing his steps back through the parted air, into the snug pocket between nitrogen and oxygen where he’d been standing before. It was time. Nerso willed his reactor to cease. He willed himself to be patient.

  The instant finished passing.

  Ruvle flinched. A deep, shocked masculine scream exhausted itself in a split-second, drops of blood and frays of fabric spraying at such speed that they embedded themselves in the solid stone. Her twitch to avoid the sonic boom and the spray of debris paid off, dodging the worst of it on increasingly well-trained reflex. The pebbles from the primary rock explosion missed, but secondary dust from blood impacts and micro-shreds of fabric scratched her cheeks and hands, the pressure striking her ears like a mallet ringing a bell. She’d been harmed by shrapnel of shrapnel.

  The mangled heap of Othek parts on the ground drew its last strangled breath. He barely had time to suffer, so covered in his own blood that Ruvle could no longer tell if the clothing still had Dye. Nerso’s posture had changed, accounting for a new purple candle flame atop his finger, at shoulder-level in triumph. Fygra, annoyed, rubbed her shoulder as if with a slight ache. Her shoulder–not her face, which the fist bounced off harmlessly.

  “Perhaps I do get a glint out of this after all,” Nerso chuckled, lifting the purple gas to his face, admiring it like a microscope slide.

  “I could have ended this conversation earlier…” Fygra said, straightening her blood-splattered cloak. The mechanical ticking from inside her slowed down. With a nudge of her foot, she scraped Othek’s fresh remains into the hole she’d dug and blasted it with gaseous final acid from her hands. Ruvle hoped she could forget that horrible boiling and hissing.

  “A shame, really; I’d enjoyed having the political equivalent of a pet mouse.”

  Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

  Ruvle sunk down behind her sheltering stone, trying to make herself as small as possible. So long as they left…they both had what they came for; he should leave on his flying saucer any minute now.

  “Yes,” Fygra said, the word shaping a sigh, “there will be questions, someone of partial power gone…mmm, I’m sure the substrate of society will bother me to no end.”

  They just had to leave. Please, please leave.

  "It will go much more smoothly if he has a death certificate,” Fygra pondered, her face lighting up with the idea. “Go get the notary that's been watching us this whole time."

  "I was wondering when you'd mention her."

  Ruvle spontaneously learned how to sprint downhill–

  And not fast enough. The distant beep from Nerso mixed with the pounding of her heart and feet over jagged stone cliffside, and in an instant, a hand closed her throat and her feet could no longer touch earth. She kicked and flailed and scrabbled, desperate, fingers seeking traction on his gloved hand while her legs scorched at the man’s lab coat, repelled by metal. And all she could see was that face, that cocky smile and bowler hat, goggles covering his eyes like a mockery of the covering he’d given one of hers. A part of her could notice, among the reflected lights on the goggles’ lens display, a vertical battery bar five-eighths full. She mouthed voiceless words, pleading around his grip, prying his fingertips. They could not be made to move any more than the seasons could be made to stop changing. Her kicking feet bounced off hard steel harness and true citizen flesh, and her toes could tell the difference because the steel was softer.

  As her lungs contracted and burned for air, Nerso carried her back up to the dodecahedral pillars, whistling. Ruvle was strong enough not to pass out for that minute, at least, and when tossed onto the ground, she still landed on her feet, sliding gracefully to standing.

  “Sign,” Nerso told her. A henchman from the flying saucer had already descended from its tractor beam with a stack of sheets of paper.

  Ruvle smiled nervously, absently reaching for the non-existent fez on her head, trying to switch mental states from life-or-death to notary work. She could do this. Just like she had when negotiating Othek out of a fight. “Of course!” she said, her cheerful, helpful voice in public-facing register. “This is an additional convenience for you; I have my pen with me already.” She took it out of the neck of her bodysuit and clicked it. “He identified himself in several ways, so that step is settled,” she said, taking the paper and starting to draw out a certificate, and that was not how that worked, you needed real actual identification but you don’t say that to a true citizen–

  “Interesting,” he said, looking her in the eyes.

  “Correct! The documents nearly write themselves for some events!” Ruvle said, with a fake smile, scribbling away, every stroke precise. She’d memorized many forms, and she placed every droplet of ink where it need be. Her certificate would be identical to the official forms in her office, down to the font choice and line weight, the only difference being its entire body being printed in golden ink rather than purely her signature. She glanced up and down and up and down, and a lens of his goggles had zoomed in, taking a look at her left eye. Her missing one, covered in wax and a vertical slit pupil.

  “This one!” He laughed. “The program really did do its work!” She chose not to ask questions, like Fygra had taught her, and instead chose to hate him. “Though unlikely this particular one, hmm hmm, hmm…clearly to give to another; I see several mind and body incompatibilities…”

  “Notaries are independent,” Ruvle said, a neutral response to whatever this prick was talking about, and handed back the certificate. “Here you are! So much time saved!”

  “Sign this one, too,” Nerso said, swapping the completed certificate for a blank paper.

  Ruvle blinked. “Death certificates don’t require duplicates, I’m afraid.”

  “Oh, I know, but I need one for Othek and one for you!”

  Ruvle held onto her public-facing smile for dear life, thinking about how to–

  “Do not,” Fygra said, rolling her eyes.

  “Ah,” Nerso said, disappointed, folding his arms over his chest while a mechanical arm held the blank paper in place. “I wanted to see if I could get someone to sign their own death certificate; it would be a great conversation-starter.”

  “It would be a novelty,” Fygra said, in the tone of a long-suffering parent agreeing with their small child that vegetables were yucky, “but no. This is the second time this one has been directly useful to me, so I’ll need a better reason from you than that.”

  Nerso stared down Ruvle for a few more seconds. Sweat from her brow hit the rock below.

  He shrugged. “This is a henchman’s job.” Nerso turned and walked back to the flying saucer, to stand directly under its beam. “Goodbye.”

  “Goodbye,” Fygra said.

  “Goodbye!” Ruvle called out.

  In a moment of tractor beam action and restabilization of the saucer, he was gone, and it flew off into the distance, leaving Fygra behind.

  “The crushing burden,” Fygra muttered, “of putting up with him.” She shut her eyes.

  Ruvle knelt down. “Thank you, Perfect Fygra, for sa–”

  Fygra’s eyes reopened to reveal golden irises. She crouched down and jumped off of Mount Radius, leaving quaking earth in her wake. Ruvle visually followed her as a wisp of black in the distance to the north, bounding across the land in consecutive instant jumps like a flea across skin, until she disappeared into the distance, behind the haze of the humid day.

  Ruvle was alone. Her public-facing smile dropped, as did her knees.

  It took several minutes for her to click her notary pen closed again and put it back in her jumpsuit. She picked the bits of rock and thread out of the side of her face, wincing, letting blood continue to flow down towards her neck. One micro-pebble had embedded into her wax and took delicate fishing to pull out, trivial, but necessary. Her neck felt sore from Nerso’s choking, but the pain was already receding–gentle finger presses where his hand had gripped her suggested mild bruises, the limited Dye in her system hardening her.

  And…that completed the wound-tending, she supposed. It hadn’t been a battle, because she didn’t die immediately.

  It hadn’t even been a battle against Othek. Just an execution. She watched a man die. Exceptional people didn’t care if they saw a man die, or they’d be slowed down. So she had to not care.

  Ruvle slunk off, and wished that her wounds were worse, because then they’d be on her body instead of in her heart.