Chain met up with her a few days later, the night before their big re-attempt at Othek’s spire—as great as the textwork was, long conversations worked best in-person, especially having discoveries to demonstrate. The mountains of the crater’s edge receded in the distance as Chain carried her, grinding the minirail away from Stepwise’s southern suburbs closer to the core.

“...and that little indigo spot on the mountain,” Ruvle explained, pointing generically backwards but too tired to care specifically where, “that’s the monastery.”

“So you’re telling me you run all the way there and back from your office, no minirail?” Chain cocked his head; he was clearly smiling behind the mask.

“Yes. It’s endurance training…” she let her head loll back, going limp in Chain’s arms. “Have to keep my core in shape, have to not run out of energy when I need it…”

“Not just being afraid of riding the fun way?” Chain asked. He spun on the rail clockwise, turning upside-down to avoid someone, his arms still secure around Ruvle. She looked ‘up’ to the rooftops above her, those that her hair dangled towards as she passed them by.

“No,” she pouted.

“Teasing ya. You should try this, get some more focused practice instead of jogging an hour.”

“Most days aren’t like this.” She closed her eye. The world inverted around her again. The tail of Chain’s scarf fluttered and battered the air behind them in the breeze of motion, every flick reassuring her ears that it was still there. “Today’s training was so hard that when I thought about running home when I was done, I just...I couldn’t do it, that’s why I had to ask you. I’m sorry.”

“Well damn, you told me she was trying to get you to rest. Why’s she wearing you out so hard now?”

“It’s not any worse than normal, it’s…” she rubbed her face. Her fingers were still un-wrinkling from getting in and out and in and out of the pool; every splash a new wet cycle. Getting over the intuition to put extra weight on surfaces to stay upright, instead of moving faster across them and complicating her step rotation, was anathema to her human survival instincts. The water had soaked her through so many times that her finger joints became white and soggy, and skin between her toes peeled. The wax covering her left eye socket collected cracks at the top and bottom of the vertical-slit ‘pupil’, and the skin around the wax tributaries inflamed with pinkness. “I didn’t take the rest day. I have to keep training.”

“Ruvie, lay down sometime, it’ll be good for you.”

She groaned to herself in between breaths. “I already sleep as much as my body lets me. I’m getting all the rest benefits I can…”

“Nah, take a whole day to yourself.”

“My office is closed today. This is my day to myself.”

“And you spent it all wearing yourself out all day and all night instead of doing neither,” Chain said, with a chuckle. “Look, I’m not gonna tell you what to do, you’re an adult, but if you want to put the raid off by a day, I can do that.”

Ruvle shook her head, still with her hands over her face. “No…”

She felt him shrug his shoulders. Several minutes passed in silence, apart from rushing air and metal-on-metal grinding. Through her fingers, Ruvle saw Chain occasionally look back at her as if to say something, but words didn’t form—once, twice, three times, looking for a comment about how hard she worked, one that didn’t come.

“So you don’t try to sneak in any extra work before tomorrow, how about I show you my stuff?” Chain offered. “Get familiar with the strategy, get better performance when we’re doing our thing, and it won’t take any juice out of you.”

“Okay,” Ruvle breathed.

Chain hooked her knees over his shoulder so that he could have one arm free, the other arm supporting her back. “Here.” He pulled his scarf off his neck, the light of tislets rippling with the fabric, dense and bright—no longer were the fields of stamp-sized symbols discrete and patchy, like adjacent cities, but the grid had grown together into one cohesive unit, each section bounded from each other only by optical illusions—tislets with heavy diagonal strokes, flush against each other, borders visible by squinting or distance. Only a few scattered cells in the grid were knocked-out, vacant lots with no useful takers. “Check this out.” He gave the scarf a flick, and it swapped colors to match the night sky above and the city below—no, rather, it had become a brilliant mirror, reflecting reality, with a maze of thousand-times reflected tislet light behind it as if staring down the hall of a library, bookshelf after bookshelf of information in neat evenly-spaced rows ad infinitum. “Perfect optical reflection in the visible spectrum. Most mirrors can’t handle a good laser, but this sucker will. And this...” He whipped the scarf to his side, and where its end cracked like leather, Ruvle and Chain rotated on the minirail with its momentum. “Hits like throwing a big rock. I can crack brick walls with a good whip.”

Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

“...At the same time?” Ruvle asked; the mirror hadn’t deactivated during the whipping. She couldn’t imagine doing gentle steps and flydodging at the same time.

“Yep! That’s tislets!” The corner of his grin peeked from the edges of his mask. “Everything’s reusable.” He wiggled the scarf; it turned off and on from mirror to light blue over and over again, stopping on light blue. “I know when you really get optimized on sequencing, you do some tricks to share tislets between sequences so you can’t do them both at once, but I’m not there yet; I just have a different sequence for all four physia I want to do. You can put tislets on these wooden tiles to make them one-use-only; they build those into support beams for skyscrapers to turn them extra strong one-and-done, but, come on, a guy like me is never gonna use them when I’ve got my scarf.”

Ruvle nodded blearily. Her left eye hurt. She didn’t want to take her hand off it. “Why’s the scarf…” she trailed off, her voice weakening.

“Oh, it’s a special material, the fibers are really small and it’s gotta have just the right volume, that’s why scarves are big enough these days to—“ he stopped and frowned at her. “You’re bleeding.”

“I am?” She pulled her palm away from her eye to see a fresh blood smear on the heel of her palm, rapidly drying against the nighttime air.

“You gonna be okay?”

“I think so,” she said, and at this point she felt it trickling down the side of her face, like mucus through her sinuses, but sharp. Her fingers traced over the places that felt like they’d been cut, only to feel the acid heat of disturbed wounds. “Oh, ow, I forgot, ow...I’m stupid, I haven’t…” She never gave herself time for this. “I knew I had to reapply my wax days and days ago, but I’ve been so focused, and now it’s cracking too far down…”

“Okay, don’t mess around with bandages or anything, that’s an open head wound, get injected.”

“I’ve had three injections in the last seven days already…” She’d been riding the line of that allowable maximum. “Ow, they can’t regenerate body parts anyway, I need my wax.”

“We gotta get you home fast.” He scanned the horizon from his elevated minirail position, glass and brick for miles around with a single bird of prey passing over the moon above. “That’s your office, right?”

“The checkered black and white building with my signature on the sign, that’s it.” They were almost there, but the office was far off to Ruvle’s right and the minirail was about to bank left, so they’d have to dismount at the station and then have a fairly long walk back, dripping a blood trail the whole way.

“Get on my back, I’m taking a shortcut.” He drummed his supporting arm’s fingers on her back, and a sequence of tislets on his scarf brightened. She took the hint and climbed behind him, thighs wrapping around his waist and her arms under his shoulders, secure as a living backpack with her bloody non-eye dripping down her cheek. As soon as the minirail took a rightwards detour to prepare for its hard bank left, Chain slung off his helmet; no longer electromagnetically stabilized, he immediately tumbled, but his scarf caught the air—and instead of taking the long way around on foot, they were airborne and gliding again, his arms up and angled to hold his scarf-parachute to sail though the skyline.

His momentum from the minirail carried him over low brick buildings, down a city street. Streetlamps were aglow above the interlocking tiled stone, with colorbugs flashing a rainbow between buildings, and pedestrians occasionally stopped to watch Chain from below.

“You’re good at controlling this,” Ruvle said. “It looks easy.”

“It’s one of those things that you see and it looks easy, but you know it’s hard, and then you try it and find out it’s medium.” He tucked his legs up. “Not too tricky. Careful lass, we’re coming in fast.”

Parallax masked speed. One could get a sense that streets were passing below them, but only when very close to the earth did velocity become visceral; the octagon-and-diamond stone blurred in motion, and Chain landed in a stumbling sprint, staying upright only with the last of the air resistance from the parachute. He was a few steps too late to not crash into the office door—

In the moment before impact, Ruvle thrust her key into the lock, twisted it, and let the door be pushed open by his momentum, first-try—and suddenly they were inside, in the dim light, one limp scarf behind them and the air no longer rushing in her ears.