Once beyond the saws, Chain and Ruvle stayed on the move, bringing with them protective debris from the cooled corpses of the blades. After two more flights of stairs—individualized in their own stairwells, this time—Chain stopped to investigate the conspicuously-empty hallway that connected them. Nothing. No hints of traps, according to him, not that he’d know what to look for, with his narrative-filtered experience in the form of radio dramas with no physical component. He took Ruvle forward after a decision to not overthink things. Ruvle, for her part, decided that there was probably a very well-hidden cabinet for the maintenance guy somewhere. She’d notarized the signatures of engineers before, on blueprints that contained a sealed chamber or a sequence of knocks on wall bricks to open up a hollow. (Rotating bookcases with a fake trigger book were the much more common method and had been so for decades, for complicated regulatory reasons.)

  Beyond the second staircase, the lights brightened up again—the walls exchanged thick concrete for sturdy laminate tiling just like the floor, leaving no clear visual distinction between the hall’s ceiling, sides and the ground below. A sour, ashen tang in the air irritated her nose; Chain, similarly, sneezed. The hallway remained narrow and square, giving Ruvle no options but to go forward, into the next raider-disposal filter: a network of static laser beams at all different angles, dense and of threatening yellow, like a wilting forest of bamboo half-toppled from age and sickness. Beyond it was a ramp down, the sloped ceiling catching sickly green highlights from light beyond, funneling to her the sounds of hisses and bubbles from something unknown. They were but the broken percussion to the main melody of the lasers buzzing, that same mains hum from above, while their intensities waxed and waned.

  “You can deflect those...I’m sure you can,” Ruvle said, behind Chain, leaning on the axle from the largest sawblade—a big metal pole, replacing the wooden dowel she’d lost, long enough to span the width of the hallway. She didn’t want to tackle this one; the energy in her muscles and nerves was draining out, diffusing like mist.

  Chain wrapped his scarf back around his neck, glowering at the laser maze. He dropped the sawblade-turned-shield he’d taken with him by his side, letting it clatter and roll to a spinning stop. “I’d love to, but, check it.” He approached where the lasers began and gestured to the nozzle of the first. “This is where it comes out, but this thing.” He pointed to its destination, a ceramic spot on the wall with concentric rings of metal inside. “Receiver. These aren’t to shoot holes in us; they’re detectors.”

  Ruvle groaned. “So if you reflect them with your scarf…”

  “They don’t touch us, but the receiver freaks out because it’s not seeing anything.”

  Ruvle leaned on her metal pole, shutting her eye. “I’ll take care of it.”

  “Aces. Look for a big shutoff switch.”

  She walked up, refocusing what she could of her attention on the static beams of yellow light. She could maybe twist her way around those two, or try that gap between the lowest horizontal one and the floor…

  “You okay, Ruvle?” Chain asked.

  Ruvle took a few breaths and lightly patted her cheek. “The caffeine's wearing off.”

  “I get ya.” He sniffed the air. “If you can hold it together a little longer, I think I know what’s next, and you can chill for it.”

  Ruvle rubbed her good eye. “I can’t have myself crashing…”

  “We can go back up a ways and lay down, if you need it.”

  Napping in the middle of a raid sounded like a really bad idea. “Chain, slap me in the face. Right here.” She pointed to the side of her face with her good eye.

  He did, and it stung. Not as hard as she wanted, but the wakefulness took. Ruvle rubbed the hand-outline of pink impacted skin, frowning.

  “I’m not gonna do it a second time,” Chain said.

  Ruvle winced into a smile. “Did that...girlfriend you had, never ask you to do that…”

  “She did! And I still don’t like hitting women!”

  The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

  She laughed. Okay. She could do this.

  With the maze before her, Ruvle reappraised the situation, tilting her head back and forth, getting a parallax sense of distance of the individual beams. The gaps were tight, but she could do this.

  She began. Ruvle inched under the first wall of near-horizontal beams, laying flat on the ground and tucking in her stomach, pushing forward one scratch and scrape at a time. Her hips barely squeezed through the narrow triangular opening. A hundred little nudges worked them through, and the next hard part began. Go too far forward and she’d hit a vertical ray, so she twisted her hips to her right, guiding herself through the right-angled tunnel of safety like a living pipe cleaner. One leg lifted, and then the other, stepping over a crossed knot of lasers.

  Chain waved to her as yellow beams obscured her view of him. Had to keep pushing forward…she bridged her glutes over the crossed knot and backbent, biting her lower lip. With her abdominals shaking from holding her contortion, she pressed the heels of her palms into the ground and stood up again, finally, beyond the first wall, lasers surrounding her so tightly that she dared not stand at full height—five beams were directly above her head.

  “Chain, pass me the pole, through the right-side triangle…”

  He held the metal rod against the right wall and carefully guided it forward through the most obvious small-but-impassable gap. Ruvle’s throat tensed up as he watched the end waver and tremor, quietly reminding herself that Chain did not have her skillset, oh dear–but he tripped nothing, using the metal knobs that were the lasers’ own nozzles as guiderails. Ruvle shortly grabbed it and slid it through on her end, keeping it pressed against the wall for lack of rotation room. She balanced it upon two nozzles; they looked sturdy and she was light…

  Ruvle hopped up onto the bar, getting flush with the wall as best she could and exhaling to flatten her chest as much as possible. The lasers crossed in an impassable web on the left side, and the right was also more or less impossible, but mostly because of vertical bars. If she stayed flat against the wall here, she could fit around the rightmost vertical laser…though she’d have to dodge that horizontal one, and that one, and step over…but if she shifted her weight on it too firmly, it would just roll off of these nozzles and break the signal beams, so she’d have to perform gentle steps, too…

  She stood on one foot, tucked her knee against her side, and cartwheeled on the rod, her arms slipping between and around the other nozzles. Her other foot tucked in just in time to avoid another, her waist bent at the final movement to hold a longer arc around one more laser, and…it was done. Ruvle landed on the other end of the metal rod and pulled it through again, this time with more space. She sucked in air, relief soothing her pounding heart. Did she actually just pull that off?

  But the hardest yet lay before her. Where she currently stood, random off-diagonal beams pointed about in ways that made motion strangulatory, but another web prevented any further ingress. This close to the ramp, she noticed a dip in the ceiling, like a protrusion in a rooftop to allow for a vertical window, inverted downwards and pointing away from her. Swaying her head for depth perception, she picked up on the acrylic sheen coating it—material protection for this protrusion; important. If she stood on her tiptoes and reached with her pole, she could easily touch it, but if it held the switch, she couldn’t press it from this side. And the web looked...beyond her to manage.

  Unless she could get over a horizontal laser wall, flanked by vertical beams preventing her from using the side walls for aid. But even then, with the floor so drenched in liquid laser beyond it, she couldn’t stand anywhere if she made it through; it’d just be a laser-cradled hollow around that protected dip in the ceiling…

  “I’m going for it,” Ruvle breathed.

  “Kick its ass,” Chain answered, as if he had any idea what the situation was from his distance.

  Ruvle turned to her side, taking a few practice crouches, judging how much momentum she’d bring if she sprung up with all her might. It had to be exactly right. One...two…

  She backflipped over the lasers, so close to the ceiling that her hair brushed against it.

  And before she could come down for more than half a second, she yanked the pole to be as perfectly horizontal as she could make it, as strong as her biceps could pull, wedging it firmly against both sides of the hallway with a high-pitched, echoing clang of iron. It held like a shower curtain, and Ruvle, still upside-down from her backflip, reached up with one heel to the protected part of the ceiling, her abs quivering and her shoulders about to give out. Looking at it from directly below, she found a metal panel on the far side…

  She scratched inelegantly with her heel along what she hoped was the control panel, feeling for anything, until hardened sole hit a round plastic knob. It yielded under mercifully little pressure—and then the world went dark, yellow traded for black, the mains hum dimming in her ears.

  Ruvle twisted the bar one degree to unwedge it and fell to the ground, flat on her back, pain brooking abrupt entry to her upper spine and back of her skull.

  She lay quiet, dazed from exhaustion—and accomplishment. These incredibly expensive defenses were meant to keep the ‘true’ citizens of reality away from people like her, and they still couldn’t stop her.

  What past was yellow and present black became future blue, tislet glow of a friend marching overhead. Chain reached down with a silent hand, and she clasped it with conviction.