The ramp down led to a lowered hollow—etched and eroded tiling gave way to slag, which in turn became a sea-green coating like verdigris patina, giving off a faint chill. Chain hurried across it without prompting, as did Ruvle, as soon as her intrigued-and-slowing pace brought on a sharp irritation in the soles of her bare feet. Another ramp rose back out; Ruvle mentally mapped the low stretch as like a trap in a plumbing pipe or the U-tube at the bottom of a siphon, and…that expended the last cognitively difficult action she had left in reserve for herself. The caffeine had finally departed, and the weight of so many days of constant training compounded on the difficulty of today. She let her shoulders sink, her head hang, and in just a few more steps, fell to her knees.

  Chain crouched down next to her and patted her on the back, closeby and protecting.

  Othek held back not a whit on this obstacle, and judging by the shiny door with an arched top on the far side of the room, it was the last before entering genuine living space for the man. No more were there cramped hallways—this resembled an open field, with a spacious high ceiling

  reaching what would normally be several floors high. Instead of grass, the field contained acid—a pool as opaque as a swamp, high-visibility bright chartreuse that complemented the similar verdigris walls. Despite the threatening bubbles and hissing, its chill cooled Ruvle’s sweaty skin, and an intense vinegar smell in the air felt as if it could fray her hair or wear holes through her indigo bodysuit. The platform on this side and the one before the final door were built like piers, verdigris pylons extending into the water to support metal planks, pockmarked with acid burn holes. She knew what the color of this enormous acid pool meant, but...verbalizing fright felt like too much work...

  She could just sit here and not move…

  For all the hours, days she’d need...she needed her hammock so badly, and the cat and elephant plushies, and...

  “You done raiding?” Chain whispered to her.

  “I can’t stop…” she answered. “It’s right there...it’s right there, if I just dig deeper...” a tear rolled down her cheek from her good eye.

  “Hey. Remember what I said? You can chill for this. This one is all me.” He squeezed her hand and leaned in close, getting forehead-to-forehead with her. “The sequence on my scarf I haven’t shown you yet? It’s for this, lass.”

  He broke away from her for a moment and unwrapped his scarf from his shoulders. The tislets buzzed between their forms, light waxed and waned along the fourth patch she hadn’t seen in use yet, and he dropped his…

  Ruvle wanted to yell ‘no’. He just dropped his scarf into the acid pit.

  And it floated, somehow. As a rigid, stiff-straight surface, like a surfboard, without dissolving.

  Chain swept her up in his arms, carrying her as if on minirail. Taking the pole with him, its end dragging with metallic scrapes on the pier floor, he stepped onto his scarf and it remained buoyant.

  “I know you’re about to pass out on me,” Chain said, “but can you do me a favor?”

  “Dnh…” she groaned.

  “Just sorta paddle with that pole until it gets eaten through.”

  She weakly did as instructed, pushing it backwards. Very easy, very little work for her. It propelled surprisingly well; the end sizzled and dissolved in the pool with energy like waketide, occasionally emitting puffs of yellow flame as reaction gases caught fire. Chain steered the scarf-board with his leading foot, humming to himself, and picked at threads of his collar.

  “It’s a cool physia, besides the surfing part,” he commented. “The property tweak is that the fabric thinks it’s a kind of final acid now, too,” he said, gesturing down at the pool.

  “N…” Right, final acid, that was the term. There were ‘weak’ and ‘strong’ acids, but one specific chemical mechanism made ‘final’ acids, capable of eating through any substance that was not also a final acid, which prevented it from reacting with itself. M.A.D. sometimes did material science research via turning something into slag by reacting it with a final acid, then reacting that slag with final acid again, and repeating until the hundred-times-destroyed chemical ash had a notable property. The only suitable containers were of that verdigris-appearing material, itself a final acid, one that froze particularly easily when lightly chilled. To hold materials that could eat through anything, science froze them and poured the liquid into a container of its own ice.

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  “I betcha all sorts of evidence is gone for good because of this room. Might be where he puts the bodies of people worse at this than us.” He looked over to his left. “Big bubbly spot there; gotta be that something’s still getting eaten at the bottom.”

  “I’m…”

  Their paddle grew shorter. Chain squeezed her close. The quiet between them made him frown.

  “So, uh…” He looked for something to say. “Did you know this stuff’s green because that’s how the atoms work? Something about energy levels. If it’s not green, it messes with the part of the chemistry that makes it be scary, so every—”

  “Chain.” Ruvle blinked slowly. “I’m not paying attention,” she lied.

  “Sorry, I know you’re tired.”

  He was quiet the rest of the way, back to humming to himself. And when the pole finally ran out of un-dissolved length, that was perfect; she dropped the rest of it in the pool at the same time that her head lolled back. Zero tasks, zero demands on her attention.

  All time to herself.

  All time to regather.

  They reached the other side without her having to track how far along they were. Chain set her down on the far pier, just in front of the door, its acid-sputtered surface oddly beautiful with well-worn black speckles and inset dividers between quadrants. Spices, laid out upon a mirror. Chain stepped off to the pier, retrieving his scarf from the acid, with only the hems of his pant leggings worse for the wear with holes from acid droplets. He took out two water bottles from his cargo pockets and poured one all over the still-rigid scarf, which hissed and fumed with vapor—reacting away the acid taint.

  “We’ll get our prizes when you’re ready.” He tossed the empty bottle into the pool, handed the other to Ruvle, and sat down next to her.

  She nodded, looking up at the ceiling, and he said nothing more.

  Deep exhaustion had a way of scrambling the brain. She remembered something she didn’t know she forgot.

  She used to have specific memories—a straight chain of a line of thinking, fading backwards into the distance of decade-time, but its closest steps clear. When she lost her eye...she only had bits and pieces of that memory, impressions, understandings of events that reduced to words rather than objects. She barely remembered the pain itself, only the fact that she had been in pain. She remembered not the actual moment that her sense of self obliterated in one eye, but the fact that the energy and constant muscle-motion in her good right eye once existed in the broken left.

  Ruvle still could not visualize that memory well, but in this mental state of far recession, she landed on a different one. Equally faint and factual, rather than vivid, but popping up out of nowhere after years. Nine years ago, age sixteen. A notary office burned down.

  Not hers. Not her family. But she’d been on her way to pick up a specific document from Satar’s Office on the other side of Stepwise, needed for a dispute case so difficult a law expert had gotten involved, not notaries alone. She hadn’t become Nt. Ruvle then, still Mielo—this was her father’s task, but she could help.

  That document never materialized. She forgot what she needed it for. Ruvle remembered the flames rubbing up on the sides of the octangular building like an orange washcloth polishing a fruit. She learned the smell of burning paper that day, distinct from wood, electricity or solid fuels. Ash filled the air as scraps of gray snow, and she knew she ran into the building, with…

  With no help from emergency services. Danger navigable only by herself and the people immediately near her. No safety rails guarded her from a chance of death via misstep. Normally, a burning building would be descended upon by rescue workers, in bulky fireproof suits, all crinkled silver fabric and bronze faceplates, waterjets and foaming sprays. Tanks of water and foam always came along the minirail for added support, except then. Then, the minirail had been silent, un-crackling, clamps of lead and iron sagging their steel to make it useless even if any power came back on. There had been blocks of crates and debris, old furniture, on the streets towards the office--attended by henchmen preventing people from getting in.

  And Ruvle had been very slow in getting over them, past them, and…

  She remembered the moment of realization inside–that she couldn’t do it. Beyond falling structural beams and infernal smoke, heat that baked the water from her lungs, everything she knew of her profession became an obstacle. Waiting room chairs with fraying seat cushions, now loci of inferno to walk around. Satar’s signature above the lobby, in a slightly more flammable color of paint, roared with fire–too hot to approach. In a file room in the back, handles, knobs and paperclips became orange-hot steel brands that seared her wherever she tried to walk. Pools of polymer slag dripped through the ceiling, onto the tiled floor. She never found Satar.

  She was never fast enough, agile enough.

  Being a notary was nice and all, but it didn’t prevent someone sufficiently powerful from burning your life’s work to the ground if they wanted to. To those with true authority over society, a notary was still a nobody, she’d learned.

  Ruvle stirred and turned over, coming back to the present. Remembering did not change the course. Power was still in her future, and the next steps may very well be behind Othek’s door.

  Perhaps as soon as she had the strength to stand.