The day was done.

Ruvle dragged herself into her office, through the back room, up into her attic—a place not someone else’s, not even somewhere public, all hers, all Ruvle, somewhere no one even thought of as a space to consider, where she could sleep with no disturbances. In secret.

Her indigo bodysuit had acid holes in it. Tomorrow-self could sew them. Sweat had soaked it nearly through, and her stomach cried for food. But her safety, her darkness, her place where she had nothing to dodge and no lasers trying to kill her, her place with every object and location known and comfortable, those problems were made small enough to bear.

Once she had some egg and rhubarb stir-fry and plenty of that cinnamon tea, her body repaid the debt of today’s energy.

Once she changed into her fuzzy pajamas, sweat no longer choked her out.

And once she told the elephant plushie that she was going to sleep now, and told the cat plushie that she was going to sleep now, pain fell away from her like paper wrapping around a pristine toy, and she climbed into the hammock as her last experience of the day—and for the next 9 hours.

Ruvle spent the next day doing what her body had been begging for ever since she’d stepped up her training regimen—resting. After the simple matter of closing the office for the day, she chose peace, indoors—the most strenuous physical work was in light stretches and in cooking, bringing up an old favorite heron-and-rhubarb recipe for two meals and a crinkle tree bark bread recipe for the late night. It came out crunchy on the outside and spongy in the middle, well worth it. Much of her time went to playing mindless navigation games on the Silver Screen, talking on the textwork or listening to the radio. A final long bath in the private washroom, further away from public space than even the inventory room, ended her day restfully–Ruvle felt repaired, fresh again. Tomorrow she could confront what to do with the genetics kit, among her other problems looming on the horizon.

Three days of notary work later, and many other kinds of work, Chain showed up at closing time.

He shut the door behind him and his hands went to the back of the couch for support before she could finish locking up. His scarf hung loosely, dirtied like the rest of his outfit, his light-up shoes turned off and tracking in dirt. His mask was off and his hair in a mess.

“Mind if I, uhhhh. Can I collapse here?” he asked.

“Lay down. What happened?” She fluffed up one of the throw pillows. It felt socially correct.

He flopped down onto the couch and groaned. “Everything happened. The law wants me locked up. They’ve been hunting day and night, so I’ve been, uh, avoiding them. Can I get some water or something?”

She fetched him a glass, along with a slice of some leftover crinkle bark bread.

“Thanks,” he said, and crammed a bite of bread into his mouth. “Damn, this is good.”

“I know, I made it myself.” She smiled.

“Mmnf.” He guzzled the glass of water. “You know, Ruvie? I didn’t have a plan. Didn’t know what I‘d do if I actually pulled this off.”

She crouched down adjacent to the couch, getting eye-to-eye with the laying man. “I didn’t think you did. Eat and then talk; I’m listening.”

He devoured the rest of the bread in a matter of seconds. “I kinda thought, when I signed the Oath, that going out to destroy glints would be the last thing I’d do with my life, you know? That’s why I didn’t care about safety that much going in. I mean, I know I’ve been pretty vague on the textwork about what my before-times were like, but after that, tislets were something random I fell into; friend of a friend’s parting gift. Something cool to do until...I actually don’t know where the ‘until’ was going, but that’s what I was thinking. Then glints started escaping and I thought, yep, that’s it, that’s the thing!” He laughed. “But then I got your help and we did this crazy stupidly dangerous stunt and I’m still alive? And kicking? I have a shot at another one? How did that happen?”

Ruvle smiled awkwardly. “We trained hard and did our best.”

He cackled and kicked his feet. “Now I have to plan for real, don’t I? Aw, man.”

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

“You don’t have to, Chain. I liked not being ‘Thoughtful’ for a while.” She took his hand. “Practicing until I had new skills, then using those skills when I had the chance...that was nice. Something that keeps me going back to the monastery night after night is being able to do things that looked impossible before I learned how. I cartwheeled on a narrow pole that shouldn’t have been able to support me. We paddled through boiling acid.”

“Yeah. Yeah.” He coughed into his other fist. “I’m still kinda finding the new me. Old me was the hugest stats nerd. I was the most Thoughtful guy. I did a million calculations before every bet I took.” He snorted. “It didn’t work.”

She let him lay there and reminisce, his face increasingly frowning at the ceiling.

“We gotta lay low for a while,” he finally said.

“I know.” Ruvle crossed an arm over the armrest and pressed her cheek against it, close to the throw pillow. “I’d love to, but my job is public facing. I talk to people. All day.”

“Yeah.”

“I can’t stop the rumors when investigators come right into my office. I’ve been working the crowd and they’re coming around to it being awesome that I got away with a raid, but it was work! I had to talk so much to get there.” She sighed. “And suddenly I’m getting a lot of license nitpicks and building code questions? Not people asking me to notarize theirs, questions about mine.”

Chain grunted and sat up. “Can I help you out with any of that?”

“No. It’s all really detail-oriented paper filling. It’s notary work, Chain, you can’t step into it. And—and who’s we laying low? I can’t hide a person in a public place! You stand out.” Her hands were on her hips.

He chuckled sheepishly. “That’s the thing. I’ve been in the alcazar a lot. Can you hide just a scarf?”

Ruvle dusted some fingerprints off the table before the game console. “You said those two sentences like I know how they relate to each other, but I don’t. What even is the alcazar; what does that matter?”

“Oh, right, I need to actually explain that. It’s…” He fidgeted with the end of his scarf, rolling and unrolling it, staring at the ceiling, his lips worming left and right. “Agh, I wish I could just show you. It’s like this...the other tislet guys say it’s a physical representation of the abstract space of all possible names, and that comes out as this gigantic building that’s like. Bigger than Crater Basin. It has its own weather systems; it rains in there. I don’t think it’s names; I think it’s a mathematical space, because there’s a funny way to get under the foundation, and...I know I could explain what that looks like if I weren’t tired, but I can’t. Think a big blue library with bookshelves the size of suburbs. Same color as tislets, but a little darker, because light works differently there. Light sorta stops after a while, so things fade into view at a distance, and the only light there is what comes off of tislets. You can make journeys across the floor and it can supposedly take days, weeks, because you walk away from the little seating huts we’ve got in there and eventually you can’t see anything around you at all, because it’s all too far away, except the floor.” He nestled his hands under the throw pillow, behind his head. “We go there because it’s one of the first things a scrivener learns how to do, after we get our scarf, so we can all talk to each other. Some of the books have people’s old records in them, so we can look tislet stuff up, but the place you pop into the alcazar is…” He puffed air from his flapping lips. “That changes with who’s scrivening, and probably the year because there’s historical patterns or something, but I’m not sure. So, the guys I know are not all of the scriveners, just the ones near where I pop in. But when you’re in there, you can scriven for free; it doesn’t take tears and headache to draw a tislet. Being there in pure tislet-ness messes with most people’s heads and you eventually get locked into this trance where you’re scared and tired but don’t want to stop doing what you’re doing, but it turned out I’m pretty resistant to it, so I sit in there for hours testing tislet stuff.”

Ruvle nodded. “And you ‘pop’ in?”

He held up one end of his scarf and the tislets brightened. “This pile at the bottom of the scarf, that’s the ‘tag’. There’s some stuff I have to do to use it, and then I’m not here anymore, I’m there. My scarf stays behind, but I have a...it’s not a ‘fake’ version that I have there, this one out here is actually supposed to be less real than the inner one, but close enough; I get a fake version that’s synced to this outer one. Got anymore of that bread?”

Ruvle shook her head. “I can bake more.”

”Darn.” He shrugged.

Ruvle looked to her front desk, beyond to the filing cabinets, inkwells and papers. “I can hide a scarf. A normal scarf. It’s a lot harder if it glows.”

“Then…” He closed his eyes, thinking. “I can go into the alcazar...then erase everything on the scarf, including the tag...re-scriven the tag when it’s time to come back out...I can make this work.”

“I’ll put you away when you’re ready.”

“Thanks, Ruvie.” He yawned, then adjusted his scarf. “Is it gonna be quiet out here for about an hour?”

“In the lobby? Yes, I’m closed, I locked the door,” she said.

“Great, then come back around then and I’ll be a scarf on the floor. And we’ll chat other plans when I’m not wiped out.”

An hour was more than enough time to get dressed and have a meal before going to the monastery. She should spend as little time in public as possible, of course, so no side trips on the run there and back.

Oh dear. She’d have to take the minirail, wouldn’t she.