“Hey, you, no entry.”

  Ruvle stiffened, ready to bolt at a moment’s notice. It was so soon in the afternoon, directly overlapping Ruvle’s mid-afternoon work break, the time when the sun above cooked passing birds via the reflections of glass skyscrapers and much of Stepwise took their mid-afternoon naps of circadian low—a practice that Ruvle didn’t partake in herself; her body strongly preferred one long interrupted night of sleep. The landing lot shouldn’t be occupied at this time of day. Before her was a man in an austere black suit, with a high collar and a black visor in place of his hat, the sort of outfit that could look formal in public, threatening in private, and blend into the background when unnecessary—henchman was a difficult job.

  “I just want to mail a letter,” she said, glancing towards the freestanding postal box at the edge of the lot.

  The henchman grunted. “Don’t get closer than you have to.”

  She shouldn’t be so nervous. She had to mail a letter; that was all. She was disguised, even—Ruvle pre-planned with an unidentifiable set of thick red work pants and carpenter’s gloves. The drab black coat probably overcommitted to it, as with the red knitted cap with two pom-poms on the top, swaying in today’s strong wind. The most important piece of disguising herself as nobody, of course, was an oval-shaped white mask securely covering her face, tied with several different strings around the back of her head so that it wouldn’t slip. The wax splotch over her missing eye uniquely identified her over all other features, after all.

  In retrospect, the disguise was probably what got the henchman’s attention. But she was about to do something awful and therefore in line with her values, so doubly in retrospect, motivated reasoning alone must have told her to look unlike herself. Depersonalizing action from identity, as it were.

  She stepped off the street and past the bright red safety line that demarcated the edge of the landing lot, a pockmarked and thoroughly-indented expanse of gravel and bitumen that took up four city clocks, its damage concentrating towards the center. A groove of metal rail had been installed into the ground, leading from the postal box out to the street, and Ruvle followed it for the five steps to took to get to the box—a gray cuboid with googly eyes and a rectangular open ‘mouth’ to look like a robot. In the most rudimentary sense, it was, since it would ride its rail to take its letters to their destinations automatically.

  Her anonymous letter slid into the robot’s mouth. And when it was time for it to make its afternoon rounds, Elial’s work office would get it, and someone would open it and read the mysterious bomb threat written by forged handwriting that was clearly a teenage boy instead of a notary public, and Elial wouldn’t be able to go to work and she’d get to go train tonight, and it would be fine, completely fine, she was sure; she had to live by her principles of not having principles.

  “Now get out of here,” the henchman said.

  Ruvle took two steps back and looked out at what he guarded. Landing lots weren’t meant for congregation because the payloads of railgun shots crashed down there, but someone was out all the way in the middle as if he were invincible. Additional henchmen surrounded him at safe distances, somewhere around ‘I’m paid well, but not well enough to get hit by an intercity flying anvil at half the speed of sound’ far away, some braver than others. She counted a diffuse cloud of perhaps twelve of them, not counting those that had to be guarding other entrances to the landing lot. The man in the center gleamed in the sunlight—ostentatious robes fully the color and reflectiveness of Dye, drooping off his skinny frame and with heavy cuffs fluttering in the wind. Even his top hat had a thick golden Dye band around its center, and yet it didn’t fly off, despite the many fans sitting out around him as if to add to the breeze—some freestanding tall ones, some in boxes; he even held a small steel propellor in one hand that spun on its own when he held down a button on its base.

  If her joints could still pop, her neck would have cracked from tilting her head like a squirrel presented with a wiring diagram. “I have never seen someone who can afford to wear Dye act like that.”

  The henchman sidestepped up next to her. She got a glimpse of some barreled weapon behind his back, but not clearly enough to distinguish between an outmoded bullet gun, a laser that would be more official and work better, or something more. “The place the boss does his business isn’t up for discussion.”

  “I just mean...all Dye? Those fans look new and expensive; why is he doing all of that himself instead of getting one of you to do it? What even is he doing?”

  “Not up for discussion.” He pulled out his gun and held it across his chest; Ruvle stepped back. A tranquilizer gun. In all her paperwork experience, there were so many documents related to using laser guns and certifying training in old bullet guns, and even the newest ‘ray’ models using fast-moving ball lightning were going through endless legal red tape, but never tranquilizers. They passed through several legal loopholes to the point where they became more dangerous than actual firearms, because one could put a dart in someone in Stepwise center for transparently flimsy reasons and approximately get away with it. Tranquilizers simply knocked targets out for some amount of time, and M.A.D. had put in a lot of work to make the nonlethal dose extremely lenient.

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  “Sorry.”

  “Othek doesn’t want to be disturbed.”

  That Othek, the man on Chain’s agenda? Ruvle caught a glimpse of the Dye-wearing man’s other hand behind him, and found it hard to form any mental description of what it was. A thing. A something. Like a….a puff of gas, deep purple and black, as if bending light away from it, with violet high-frequency fringes doing a better job of staying the course. Wind whipped around it, but the gas didn’t dissipate, gusts of air conveniently always gathering it back into a lens in his hand in a way that felt obvious and intuitive that large wind systems would do that, until she thought about it at all, and even though thoughts were slipping out of her brain like blood draining from a wound. The glint. The piece of Thoughtless/Thuless.

  “I don’t want to disturb,” Ruvle said. “Can I at least spectate?”

  The henchman grunted.

  “Sorry again,” Ruvle said, lowering her shoulders and tilting her head down, “I’m just...going through the same thing you are, I think, seeing a true citizen in person and nervous about my place, the same way you have the responsibility of protecting him, and that must be a lot, too.”

  It was a total shot in the dark, but the henchman lowered his tranquilizer at that, the needle poking out of the barrel shining in the sun. He looked over his shoulder to Othek, still facing Ruvle. “It’s a step up from getting between the frizz-heads and their shark tanks; I’ll say that much.”

  Ruvle relaxed. The winds around Othek rippled and clashed with each other, visible in blown dust and clothing folds. It seemed so clear that the three fan-winds meeting one another should form a vortex the way they did—and then nothing changed, and the winds canceled each other out, leaving the air between the three fans quiet in a way that anyone could agree that wind did. And nothing changed again, and the air became chaotic directionless turbulence between them, drowned out by the day’s breeze, because why wouldn’t it? ...The basic air flow, individual gusts and fans, stayed as they always did, but the interference came on the level of consequences of complexity applied a hundred times down the line. Emergent properties, those that had no trace in the underlying rules, and yet organized themselves into existence as direct extensions somehow.

  She...

  She had to go for it, right?

  “You can watch until I tell you to scram,” the henchman said.

  Wait, no, what was in it for her? It’d be getting in the way of the big payoff of whatever might be in Othek’s tower, probably entire vials of Dye set aside for Consolidation, tons of money to spend on additional Dye, luxury appliances, one of those really fancy zeroberry juicers…

  “How long have you been in the henching business?” Ruvle asked. Othek, distant, tossed aside the steel hand-fan and gestured with the glint, pulling the wind system together into a whirlwind that surprised Ruvle for not being there earlier.

  “7 years. Might be 8. Keep forgetting which week I started this shindig with.”

  “Mostly for scientists?”

  “It’s where you start.”

  Ugh, no, Chain wouldn’t forgive her if she let him go. She could just not tell him, but…

  Othek tipped his top hat. It elevated in the wind, swaying, and landed back down on his head at a jaunty angle.

  All of that Dye was right there, and she could probably break into his tower so easily by using the glint for herself, anyway…

  “Why...wind?” Ruvle asked.

  “Won’t tell us. My guess is that he doesn’t have Big Nothing’s whole anti-brain with that piece there, but he’s got the part that made hurricanes and tornadoes real. The more pieces, the more stuff the boss can do.”

  Ruvle shuffled her feet. “You must have seen people be really stupid,” Ruvle said. She looked towards the henchman’s gun. His hand securely vice-gripped the covered handle. Despite being stronger than the average woman from getting so much exercise in training, she wouldn’t be able to pry that from him...

  “Plenty of times.”

  “I can listen to a good stupid-stunt story, if you have one,” Ruvle said, sizing up the fifteen-second sprint between her and Othek, and how she’d deal with the eight of the henchmen close enough to get in her way…she tilted her head left and right to get a better sense of depth, and found a dirty red glass bottle laying out next to the postal box; she picked that up in preparation...

  “This one’s a riot,” the henchman said, cocking a grin under his visor. “A chick got into the DNA lab, had with her a sample of fish cells, turns out she wanted to be a mermaid—”

  And as Ruvle bolted, her free hand slapped the side of the tranquilizer just so, setting the safety switch to ON. In her sprint, the wind whipped past her, and the henchmen on the path to Othek pointed their own tranquilizers.