Jace sprinted through the hallway with Lessa close on his heels. They were thin hallways with low ceilings. Incandescent bulbs lit them yellow, and nets of pipes ran in front of them, creating shadowy arrays on the floor. They passed a pair of workers in mismatched garb, who both pressed themselves against the wall at the sight of the weapons.

With each step, the pointing length of Aes sparks drifted to the side. Jace turned as soon as he could. The blue sparks had turned perpendicular to him, and he followed them down the next hallway.

The scavenger guards chased behind, carrying their rifles but not yet pointing them. “Halt!” one shouted.

“Soon, they’ll raise the alarm!” Jace hissed. “I have an idea.”

The hallway turned again, depositing them at a staircase. Though it ran the opposite direction from the pointing tendril of Aes sparks, it was a way up.

But Jace only took it up a few steps before ducking into an alcove on the side of the stairwell. Lessa jumped into cover on the other side. It wasn’t very dark, and the alcoves weren’t very thick, but Jace didn’t expect the guards to be looking too closely. They’d be too busy sprinting up the stairs to look to the sides—they’d be expecting Jace and Lessa to be ahead of them.

Sure enough, the guards sprinted past.

As soon as they climbed the stairs, Jace leapt out of cover. He slammed one guard’s head into the wall, knocking him out. Lessa drove the butt of her rifle into the back of the other guard’s head, and he collapsed as well.

They took the stairs two at a time. The stairwell had mild red lighting, which reflected off the coppery, rusty walls and made them seem even redder. Girders stretched from the floor to ceiling, and utilitarian, exposed pipes ran up between the flights of stairs. It wound back and forth up the center of the Brakman Sect headquarters.

Jace monitored the line of Aes sparks. As they climbed, its angle lessened and lessened, until finally, it pointed horizontally. They stopped at the nearest landing and pushed open the door, emerging in another simple hallway.

Rectangular walls, exposed pipes, rusty, scavenged bricks. A bank of windows ran along the side of the hall, overlooking an atrium where lowly scavengers dropped off wares in exchange for silver coins. Each coin had a hole in the center—perfect for sliding onto a string or a storage rod. They had no markings. Maybe they had once upon a time, but they’d been used so much that the markings had rubbed off. Almost everywhere accepted them along with whatever local currency, especially in the planets on the borders between Starrealm space and Alliance space.

Jace skidded to a halt, then pulled back into the stairwell. A trio of guards patrolled the hallway adjacent to him, rifles at the ready.

“Which way is the card?” Lessa whispered.

“You can see the Aes tendril, can’t you?”

“I can! I just…wasn’t exactly staring at you.”

“To the left, then.” He traced the line of Aes with his own eyes, then leaned out around the corner of the stairwell door.

At the end of the hall was a circular steel door with a pattern of locking teeth in the center and a brass cog that reminded him of a ship’s wheel.

“A vault door. That’s what they’re guarding.”

“The card has to be there,” said Lessa.

“All that for a minor card?”

“It may, on paper, have a common rarity—it’s just a key-card—but it’s a key card that lets you through any of their torpedo nets. Valuable.”

Jace nodded. “Then I suppose it’s locked. Anything look…I dunno, weird? Alien? About the door? You think the Whistling Blade will cut through?”

“I mean, I’ve never been to Braka either. I’m just a farmgirl.”

“Don’t sound like it sometimes.”

“I read a lot!”

Jace inhaled slowly. “Sure. Well, we’ll just have to hope, then. If you distract them, I’ll close the distance.”

“Got it.” She flipped the safety of her rifle off, then ducked down and slid into the hallway. As she slid across the floor, she fired a blast of plasma. It seared down the hallway and caught a guard in the shoulder.

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The other two whirled to face her, but Jace activated his hyperjump card and flashed toward them in an instant. When he emerged, he slashed one guard’s rifle in half, then spun and kicked the other guard’s rifle upward. The plasma blast discharged into the ceiling, sending down a rain of sparks and dust.

The first guard drew a pistol. As soon as Jace registered the threat, he drove his sword into the guard’s chest, then swung it to the side. The other guard pulled his rifle’s bolt back, but not in time to get off another shot. Jace slashed through his neck.

All three guards fell to the floor, dead. He ran to the vault door—where the tendril of Aes was still pointing.

Jace pulled the Aes back inside himself and deactivated the tracking technique. Chances were, he wouldn’t need it anymore. But if he did, he could always activate it again, right?

It wasn’t a terribly complex movement, but it only seemed possible with hyperspace-aspect Aes. And it still took great concentration to activate.

“Lessa?” he asked.

She ran down the hallway to meet him, pulling back the bolt of her rifle and preparing the next shot. “Yeah?”

“Could you make a technique card from scratch?”

“If I had the materials, sure. But I don’t. And, I’ve never really tried that before. It wouldn’t be as strong as a blank base.”

Jace thought back to the Hanging House, where he’d found and taken a blank card base. There had to be others around somewhere.

But that wasn’t really the crux of his question. He continued, “So, technique cards automate most of the complex Aes movements required for techniques to activate, right? Their runes and…uh, stuff, guide it through the channels?”

“Yeah, basically. I mean, I could explain how the runes do their thing. But you probably wouldn’t remember it.”

“Hey!” He rolled his eyes. “Not that dense. Anyway, what if you made a simple card to automate that tracking technique?”

“I could do that. If I had a card. It’d be a pretty simple card—that technique wasn’t super complex, and I shouldn’t need to help you visualize the link if I’ve ingrained the same property into the card right then and there. It’ll be a candlefolk-and-Jace special!” She snickered under her breath.

“Right. I’ll keep my eyes out.”

“But it will have some restrictions, unlike you using the technique manually. That’s the trade-off. It’ll have a cooldown, and probably a certain time limit.”

“Sure,” Jace nodded. “I’d take that over the sacrifice in concentration.”

“Fair enough.”

“But a problem for later.” He raised his Whistling Blade. “Let’s break through that vault door.”

Adjusting his grip, he pulled his arms back, then slammed the blade into the vault door.

It bounced off.

A sizzling sound rang out down the hallway, and a mesh of hexagons lit up in front of the door. The shield-aspect Aes’ nature was to block, and it pressed up against Jace’s blade. It pushed back against the plasma-aspect of his blade’s cutting edge, trying to throw him away. He kept pushing a few more seconds until the lack of movement made the glowing blade’s energy subside.

He pulled away before the shield could damage his unprotected sword. “Not good.”

“Knew they couldn’t have just left the gate exposed…” Lessa muttered.

“Could I overpower it? Just use up the generator’s Aes?” he asked.

“It’d take a while. Days.”

They didn’t have that long. The plasma blasts would’ve drawn attention, and more guards would be coming soon. “Got your engraving equipment still, right?”

“Yep!”

“I’ll hit the door and activate the shield again. Hopefully it illuminates the inner workings of the control panel. Can you mess with the runes and deactivate the shield?”

She pulled an engraving needle and Aes cell out from her haversack and activated it, then ran over to the control panel and sliced off the corner welds with the needle, then pushed off the upper interface, revealing a circuit board. Instead of soldering, it had runes and lines of flowing script joining each button and segment.

Jace swung his sword into the vault door once more, activating the shield and lighting the runes of the circuit board. Lessa dragged her engraving needle across the board, effortlessly scripting a new line of runes to the side and redirecting a flow of shield Aes. She brought it around in a circle, then pointed it back into a segment that it already passed through.

Sparks of blue shield Aes sputtered out from the panel, popping and fizzing. The circuit board melted, and smoke burst from a wire buried in the wall.

The shield across the door fell.

Jace pulled his sword back, then took one more swing and sliced through the central interlocking teeth of the door. The blade melted through the steel like trying to cut frozen meat. Not easily, but not impossible. When it reached the unlocking wheel, it slashed it in half.

When he reached the floor, he brought the blade up and wedged it into the center. The Whistling Glass wouldn’t break under a regular lever force—he’d tried that enough to know—but, with the help of his slight attribute enhancements, he wedged both halves of the door apart. Strength helped with the brute force required, Resistance kept his feet from sliding.

The doors creaked and groaned, then slowly shifted aside. Once they were wide enough for Lessa to slip through, she did, then pulled a lever on the other side. The doors clunked as the locking mechanism tried to unlatch itself, then both slid either direction on rails.

Jace sprinted into the room beyond. “We need to get searching. If the plasma blasts didn’t alert guards to our presence, then us breaking into the vault certainly did.”