Time slowed, granting Ruvle grace instants to think, time unnecessary. Tranquilizer needles fired, one, two in succession, the third and fourth simultaneous, each tiny line of metal a locus of her adrenaline awareness. Ruvle ran like she were flying, her coat billowing, her carpenter’s gloves tight around the soda bottle.

  She’d trained too long to be perfect, to be the namesake of Exaction, to fail this dodging test.

  The first needle zipped and she ducked, letting it fly over her. The next shot low and from her side; no requirement. Henchman five was pointing, on her other side. Dartboard. Ruvle batted the needle out of the air with the glass bottle and it sailed into his left cheek. Needles three and four: oncoming, onward, she could slip between them. No, it required turning sideways, constrained movement, still two more shots unaccounted for. Ruvle swayed left, extending an arm, letting both needles jab through her coat. The back. Two ammunition acquired. Running remained.

  Tranquilizers took time, seconds. Henchman five shot. Ruvle swatted the needle. He was still opposite henchman two. Dart returned from dartboard to sender. Six and seven ahead sprinted to intercept, body-blocking. No. Wide blockade. Ruvle slid, a hand on the earth, momentum grinding her glove and sides of her sneakers across the ground, between the left leg of one and the right of the other. She tossed the bottle up mid-slide; she grabbed the two needles embedded in her coat; she stood from the slide behind the two as they were turning and jabbed one into henchman six’s side, the skin between vest and pants. One hand was no longer sliding. She caught the bottle with it. Too late to jab henchman seven.

  Eight’s grip on his gun shook, his eyes wide. She kept sprinting. “What the fuck, what the fuck?” he asked himself. Right in the way. She climbed him like a ramp. Her other needle went into the skin under his jaw, now to jump off his shoulders. Dive-roll for a boost from the elevation, get up, run, sprint to the destination.

  Othek. Three more seconds of running. He was looking left to see her, dumb frown, eyes like staring into a searchlight. A goatee and a sharp pointed mustache, in black, making up for his baldness, his blocky squarish head. Hot burning air in her lungs did not stop her, full speed, every half-second counted. His coat fluttered. Her perception crawled, every ripple of fabric visible, dust motes on the wind before her, aware of each scratch on her work gloves as she extended her hand, grasping, there to accept that anti-lens of dark gas and malice—

  Wind blasted her with the gale force to catch her cloak, to slip her feet free from earth and throw her like a loose pebble, right back the way she came, her adrenaline slowdown granting her the image of his bothered, offended, mildly inconvenienced face like he’d knocked over a shampoo bottle when entering a bathtub. She was airborne. And she could not adjust her footing because she had none, could not dodge because there was nothing to dodge off of, no matter the magnitude of hyperdexterity, let alone for someone Coarse.

  But she landed on her feet, into a backwards tumbling roll. And there was a hand on her back between her shoulder blades.

  And she was gripped and thrust backwards onto the ground, suddenly pinned with a foot against her chest that wheezed the air out of her body for her, the tranquilizer gun pointed at her, inches from her masked face. The safety was on. Henchman zero slowly, deliberately, flipped it back to ‘OFF’, like he wanted her to see it.

  In a few more seconds, with the rush wearing off, the other nearby henchman who hadn’t been tranquilized arrived—one, three, four, and seven, all pointing needles straight at her, above her. She calculated how she could possibly move to get out of this.

  “Oh, no no no, let this one continue,” came the smooth, honeyed voice of a man who knew his place on top of the world. Gold glinted at the bottom of her vision as Othek approached, visible between the arms of two men, who took their orders and stepped aside—with only henchman zero keeping his foot on her, preventing any do-over of her duping him. The hem of Othek’s robes swayed with his steps. “Good afternoon, hoodlum.” The needle was not as sharp as his smile. “What does it for you? Alcohol, pills, a promise of fine women? What has made you risk everything, here and now?”

  Ruvle sweated under her mask. “I—I can’t let you use that glint, I’m sorry,” she said, and damn it, her words were failing her; she could do better writing documents. “It’s way too risky to everyone and everything to let those be out there, you shouldn’t use it.”

  Othek visibly took a moment to recalibrate on hearing the voice of a woman under her heavy disguise. It hadn’t failed yet; she could take solace in that one thing. “She almost touched me.” Othek stood over her, just beside the henchman. He tapped his one with one finger and pointed down at her. “She tried to injure me.”

  “You’re too tough for her, boss,” henchman zero said to Othek’s ego.

  “Prison forever, regardless,” Othek said. He twisted the gas-lens in his fingers, and the air around all of them became a whirling vortex, a circular wind-wall nestling neatly against the edges of the landing lot like an egg in a carton. “What a great way to practice what I’ve learned so far, don’t you think? Step off the hoodlum,” Othek said.

  Henchman zero did so without question and strafed backwards, still pointing his tranquilizer. Ruvle got to her feet, not bothering with speed. She caught her breath. She stood but three person-heights away from Othek, her arms raised in a defensive pose, while he behaved at-ease, relaxed—except for a firm grip on the glint of Thuless.

  “Well, go ahead,” Othek said, impatiently waving a hand. “Do whatever it is you do.”

  She was so dead. This was such a bad idea.

  Ruvle acted fast. Fast enough to close that distance and get her hand on the glint in less than a second, and it felt like...like...nothing in particular, nothing that she could name or put a sensation to, not even numbness, and pulling on it—pulling on it felt like trying to bend titanium. Not because of its structure, but because it was in Othek’s hand, and she yanked and yanked on him as if to fail to uproot a bronze statue, while he regarded her boredly.

  Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

  “That’s all?” the immovable object of a person asked. Ruvle could see a slight deformation of the robe around his upper arm, as if his triceps were activating, and that was all he needed to resist her entire weight and force. How much Dye was in this man!?

  She crashed the bottle into the side of his face, shattering it into a hundred sharp triangles, loudly enough to hurt her ears. He did not flinch. The sound hurt her more than the impact hurt him.

  "Why did I bother bringing henchmen, then?" Othek asked, exasperated.

  There was nothing to dodge. The entire wind system simply did what it did naturally and pressed in gale force down upon her—and everywhere she could possibly run to. Split-seconds of scrabbling for footing were no match for the weight of an atmosphere beating down on her, pinning her to the ground, spreadeagle. The wind tilted, and her back scraped against the stone and bitumen below like chalk. She clawed with breaking fingernails against the earth and stabbed with her broken bottle neck for traction and twisted her legs to get her feet under her, all to no avail, all so soon taking her back into the air, up into the much faster swirling wind wall around the landing lot. Before she could consciously formulate a plan, before her bending of her body in the air could attempt a safe landing, the gust crushed her against the riveted sheet metal and brick wall of a machine shop—feet first, from Exact reflex, giving her the privilege of buckling legs and a hard wall-landing on her rear.

  She tumbled to the street below, on hands and knees, holding back swears and screams from a thought-annihilating pain in her center back. Crushed spinal disc? Couldn’t tell, too much pain. Ruvle stood anyway, wincing, hunched-over. Can’t go down in one hit. She’d have been paralyzed if she had landed on her back or head.

  “I hadn’t meant to use the wind wall,” Othek pontificated, taking leisurely steps, several seconds of sprinting away from her. She couldn’t sprint like this.

  “Even your mistakes are brilliant,” grunted henchman zero.

  Another gout of wind threatened to grind her against the wall just as it had done against the floor, but Ruvle held fast. She gripped the brickwork with both hands, dug the tip of her shoe into it, and the diagonal push could only flatten her against brick—with her standing on one foot still on terra firma, her body posed so much like the branches of the fossil tree, an imprint. Her fingers trembled with all their strength, with the extra pain of her nails digging in too far, with desperation, a tear falling from her good eye against her mask.

  How could she survive someone who could declare with the air itself whether she had footing or not?

  Thinking of Elial, she made herself climb—sideways against the windstorm, horizontal across the brickwork. She hissed and whimpered, her spine and fingers wracking her, but she had her grip, she had her mobility, enough to work with. Othek pointed with the glint, waving it left and right, frowning—the windstorm ebbed weaker and stronger, cycling over seconds, not enough to budge Ruvle from the wall. The henchmen parted from Othek, avoiding the barometric wrath.

  A sparkle of steel from the debris, sawdust and iron filings around the machine shop gave Ruvle an opening. It whizzed in the air past her and Ruvle snatched it, her progress slipping an inch from losing one hand of grip on the wall. Old rusty pliers, with smooth and worn handles. Good enough. In perspective towards Othek, the wind wall blew to her left, so should bank the shot towards her right…

  Othek lowered his hand, and Ruvle too lowered, awkwardly sagging on the wall from the sudden lass of wind pressure against her. “Forget it. Shoot her and be done,” he said to his henchmen.

  They aimed their tranquilizers, in non-formation at a distance, and their needles shot wide—flimsy and ill-fitting for the wind wall. Ruvle spread the pliers in her hand, focusing through the pain, refusing its demands on her focus. Just like hitting a dartboard. She was not Gross like these men, or the Dyed man she aimed for. She, Ruvle, was exact. She was Coarse. The answer for how to survive dealing with this man was obvious all along.

  The thrown pliers slung from her fingers like a four-pointed star, flying to strike true, fast as a whip crack. Yet, in her intuition, she knew she had not the strength to pierce his skin, sharp bit of metal or otherwise.

  “You missed,” Othek announced with contempt, his short strands of black hair whipping in the breeze to reveal his male-pattern baldness, and it was just as well as if she’d hit head on.

  The pliers had nothing to do with the answer. The way to survive was to not fight. To run the hell away and stop being a hero. While the henchmen reloaded, Ruvle spun and bolted, back through the streets for but a second before she was in an adjacent alleyway, feet crunching on blown metal dust from the machine shop, under a minirail line up above, between two hexagonal windows and under checkered awnings.

  Away.

  Far away.

  Crying from pain, with the shouts of henchman and a frustrated citizen in the distance.

  “You humiliated her, boss,” henchman zero said, roughly fifteen minutes of fruitless searching later.

  “Of course,” Othek sneered. “Which one of you let her get so close to me in the first place?”

  None of them spoke up.

  “Of course, of course,” he reiterated. The soles of his Dyed boots scratched across the landing lot, windswept spotless of debris and dust. “None of them matter…but this is good practice for Fygra and her ilk.” The wind around them whistled, high, low, modulating speed to play a rough tune. “They will accept this proof that I am as important a force as them, once and for all…”

  “Shame about the hat,” henchman four commented.

  The battle had been a disaster and the pain worse still, but getting a glimpse of Othek from the other side of an appliance repair shop’s billboard was almost worth it, that shocked face as he waved his hands over his head, that dawning realization that he no longer had his top hat.

  Humans were great at throwing random objects at targets. Throwing bad projectiles through rushing wind, with heavy mental strain, through another target at a specific rotational phase...Ruvle felt proud that she’d actually landed the shot, that the pliers hadn’t just pierced the top hat with those two prongs, but landed on a roof on the other side of the landing lot. If it had hit the billboard exactly, it would have been a damn Fine shot. The appliance repair shop wasn’t even that terrible to climb.

  Ruvle picked up the pierced top hat from the roof’s shingles and unsheathed the pliers like a sword from a stone—the last use of a dead tool destined for rust and re-casting, perhaps the best of its life, from shelf to shop to squalor on street. Ruvle couldn’t control a creaking, weeping laugh of stress and relief as she pressed the top hat against her neck, willing the vital power of its band of Dye to merge with her.

  The gold twinkled, brightened, and finally winked out, becoming one with her instead of empty space—her tiny victory.

  She was quick to get the hell back down, throw the top hat and pliers into a municipal trash can, and leave before any search resumed.