2:30 a.m. passed. Ruvle stood with shaky legs, her arms pockmarked with blunted jabs from darts. She struggled to catch her breath, but it would not stay in her lungs, like water draining from a colander. Her hair splattered in the sweat along her neck, and the red blush of overwork and pumping blood was taking over her skin. Her muscles ached down to their tendons. She longed for her hammock at home.

“2,” the teacher told her, tossing another dart.

Ruvle batted it out of the air, the broomstick knocking it up into a graceful overhead arc. The dart clattered against Sector 2 of the dartboard, just as planned—but at an angle too steep, bouncing off instead of getting stuck.

“A lower angle this time.” Her teacher smiled faintly. Ruvle let out a wheezing breath. “15.”

Ruvle knocked the next dart out of the air. It struck close to the correct sector—a fingernail’s width over the line into the wrong one.

“I’m surprised that you’re not too exhausted to continue,” her teacher told her.

“I am,” Ruvle gasped. “But I want to be strong. I’m pushing.”

Her teacher lined up another dart shot, pride in her eyes. “Zero.”

Ruvle grunted and slapped the speeding dart with the broomstick. The dart sailed into the board, directly into the bullseye, joining many others embedded in the dense board.

While her teacher stepped over to retrieve the darts, as she’d done so many times already during this endless training, Ruvle stuck the staff into the broom head and leaned on the reconstituted broom like it were a walking stick. Her head hung. She couldn’t slow down. She needed more Dye to build endurance faster. Dye helped a person advance in essentially every physical and mental aspect, albeit inefficiently—something that could be done in parallel with ambitious training, so if she could get—

Her pen clicked of its own accord. A message from the textwork? Ruvle tugged on the neckline of her bodysuit and reached down the collar; she pulled out her notary pen and twisted the barrel in a careful sequence. Everyone’s communication device worked differently and hers was this one. She pressed on the clip, shining a golden light onto the indigo floor tiles like a flashlight—and in the illuminated spot, text showed in dark spots, shadow puppetry with words instead of fingers.

‘Chain Hydrapress ~ I’m leaving this for you to wake up to. I got a plan, tell me when you want to talk.’

Something to think about besides how exhausted she was. Ruvle scribbled her response in the air and then slid the clip up and down to send it. ‘Mielo ~ I can talk now’. Ruvle had to use her old name on the textwork to avoid it becoming another channel of informal paperwork and requests for off-hours work.

‘Aces, you’re awake,’ came Chain’s response with the next click of her pen.

‘Not easily,’ she wrote back.

Ruvle noticed that her teacher was already back at the box of darts, with the board plucked clean and a dart in her hand, waiting patiently like she’d been there for minutes. They made awkward eye contact for a few seconds, and her teacher twirled her dart. No words were exchanged, but both of them looked at the pen, then the dart, and Ruvle understood that juggling these two actions would be her last dexterity challenge of the night. “4,” her teacher said.

Ruvle knocked the thrown dart out of the air, broomstick in one hand and pen in the other. It hit Sector 4, while Ruvle read Chain’s response.

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‘I went through my list of true cits that I’m pretty sure have a piece of Thoughtless. All of these guys are untouchable. I can’t do very much with the tislet skill I have, everyone is MASSIVELY protected in their towers and forts. The gauntlets you have to go through are skills I’ll never have.’

“8.”

Ruvle grunted and swung for the dart, knocking it vertically upwards.

‘Then is your oath impossible?’ Ruvle wrote back, as the dart arced up in the air—and on its descent back down, she struck it again, sending it sailing into Sector 8.

‘No, because some I can get eventually. One of them has a gauntlet where you move megaton-sized stones. You can get a robot for that.’

There were two kinds of personal security systems. One was the boring, practical kind that didn’t give people an obvious but incredibly difficult method to defeat them, the sort for masochistic video game players, but instead were just straightforwardly murderous well-studied security principles with no exploits to close off any actual ways to get to a true citizen.

The others, the multilayer deathtraps that required extreme skill to get through, were the kind that actually worked. It turned out that if there was no way to beat a security system, the weakest link became the physical integrity of the entire personal fortress, and people tried blowing it up or launching railguns into it instead. Bombs that unsorted half of the structure’s masonry were a bigger problem than cleaning up fried skeletons along the intended route every once in a while. Ruvle didn’t have mental bandwidth to speculate on a world where the opposite would be the case at the moment.

‘But there’s this one guy. He’s not a true citizen, he’s someone who a true cit sponsored for a while and he’s rolled on that ever since. I think there’s a chance,’ Chain continued.

“12.”

An instant of hesitation from fatigue, and another from unsurety of her depth perception—and the dart bounced off Ruvle’s shoulder before she reacted.

“Try not to lose awareness,” her teacher told her. It wasn’t a lack of focus. Ruvle missed having binocular vision so she could know for sure how far away something was.

‘Othek Perfectcoil. The only reason I know about this guy is that he’s been making a huge fuss around Stepwise lately. He’s cooped up not even a railgun shot away. There’s this giant tower with a hydraulic vault door at the top, there’s a laser maze on the way down, flying security drones that shoot at you outside. I think I can handle the acid pit room myself. But then there’s that other stuff.’

‘And you need me for that,’ Ruvle answered.

‘Yeah! Give it a spin, lass!’

“11.”

Ruvle groaned and shut her eye, shoulders shivering. She waited for the whiff of air and heaved with all she could of her strength; the dart hit the board, but several sectors away.

“Give me one more good deflection, Ruvle. You can do this.”

She groaned. She took a few breaths while answering Chain. ’Maybe. I’m not training tomorrow.’

‘Aces. I’ll come by then.’

“Zero,” her teacher repeated. Ruvle stared down the point of the dart as she lined it up for a throw. “Push yourself. Only one more.”

She twirled her pen and the broomstick in opposite hands. Her teacher threw and Ruvle lunged into a swing, grunting much louder than she needed to—and with two rapid clangs of metal on two different kinds of wood, the dart came to rest, impaling the board behind her—through the bullseye.

She looked over her shoulder and let out a relieved sigh, dropping the broomstick. Her teacher smirked with pride. “If only I had your willpower when I started out.”

Ruvle put her pen back in her suit, putting in the effort for her muscles to stop quivering, to show her own pride in herself. “If you don’t get to Ultrafine first, I’ll catch you soon.” She smiled back.

“And when you take the surgeries to get there, I’ll watch you pass me by.”