Ruvle didn’t spend much time at ‘home’—the place where she slept and prepared meals was for recovery, not living her life. The notary office was already quintessentially her space, never mind that it belonged to the legacy of the family and the grip of Stepwise’s regulators. But at the end of a long day, nothing felt quite as good as going into the office’s back file room, pushing up the square panel that led to the attic, and climbing up inside. With no light save for her pen, under thick sheets of jet-black fluffy insulation for a ceiling, Ruvle shuffled past—past her chest full of plushies, past the stick-on reflective stars on the insulation to look like a night sky, past the old unused armoire that she repurposed as a pantry. She did her nighttime ritual—changing into fuzzy pajamas, telling the elephant plushie and the cat plushie individually that she was going to sleep now, and pulling herself up between the structural timbers that held her hammock. All that was left was to look at her pen as she turned it off, winking out all light and any need to keep thinking about her day. She was asleep within seconds, her arms crossed over her chest, face up to the sky.

The best measure of focused training was recovery per night. Exhausting oneself to collapse was not a magic bullet for skill; doing it constantly without enough rest would stifle the benefits, even without collecting injuries. Rest to recover from exhaustion was what promoted growth, and iterating it brought the body closer to perfection. New nerves under the skin would be waiting for her in the morning, while newer and finer tuning of her physical coordination locked in. None of it worked without having something to recover from, of course, but neither would it if sleep were cut short or fitful, either. Ruvle’s best days were ones in which she’d trained so hard that she could barely drag herself to her hammock, slept for 9 hours, and awoke so energetic that she jumped for joy to greet the morning.

She couldn’t get all nine this time. She had business hours at noon tomorrow. But Ruvle made do.

That evening, she shooed out the crowd of the notary office early—someone hosted a “best friend anniversary” party that was clearly a coded Consolidation anniversary, so she had a reason to close up as soon as they did. By 7pm, the doors were shut, and the office lights shone on Ruvle’s desk, where she let herself sneak in a nap—arms crossed on the surface, face down, her fez crooked and drooping, her knees on the floor and pointing to each other.

A loud knock on the door roused her. Her head shot up from the desk; Ruvle gathered her wits before her reflexes could shout ‘CLOSED’ for her. The frosted glass door had bright pale blue shining behind it.

“Chain,” she said upon opening it, her other hand smoothing the wrinkles on her notary suit.

“Ruvle, my main lass,” he said, clearly grinning behind that mask. His scarf was wrapped securely around his neck in three loops, instead of flowing freely. “Wanna go raiding?”

She smiled sadly. “I did say ‘maybe’.”

“I get ya, that’s why I’m asking instead of telling. I’ll swing it solo if you’re not feeling.”

“I didn’t...here, come in,” she said, gesturing towards herself.

Chain stopped standing in the middle of the doorway and took a seat on the gaming couch. He propped up his all-iron boots with grooved steel treads, a different choice from yesterday’s light-up-sneakers. “Got reservations?”

“I just need a...better reason to get involved.”

“Easy, smashing up Thuless glints’ll make the world a better place,” he answered. “And it’s not illegal to go raiding, just illegal to succeed!” He laced his fingers behind his head.

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Ruvle sat down beside him and smiled apologetically. “...Chain, that’s not a reason for me.” He dropped his arms and gestured with his hand for her to continue talking. “I’m a bad person. If there’s not something in it for me, I can’t help. I want to, but I can’t.”

He twirled the cable of the game controller around his finger. “Oh, that’s not bad-person stuff, Ruvle, everyone needs to get paid.”

But I AM ruthless, she thought, but didn’t protest aloud. No one made it ahead without willingness to make choices others weren’t. “I need a bribe, a big one. Sorry.”

Chain puffed air into his cheeks and balled up the controller; he slung it across the game table. “Tell you what, the Thuless glint is the part I care about. You can get sticky fingers for all his stuff if we get through and I won’t take a thing.”

Ruvle blinked. “D...deal.”

“Didn’t think I’d jump straight to 100-0 split, did ya?”

“No. I mean, it’s too late to take it back now, let me—” Ruvle stood up to go get a form from her desk.

“Put whatever you want on it, as long as you say that you’re coming with!”

People made formal documentation for illegal practices all the time—they just used the wrong forms for plausible deniability. Inheritance Dispute Resolution was the usual one for laundering suspicious acquisitions. Ruvle vaulted her desk and had a contract drawn up and signed within the minute. “Ready.”

“Get dressed, I need that super speed.” Chain winked.

Ruvle ducked into the back file room and into the attic from there; she made a quick change into her hyperdexterity bodysuit, but kept her fez. She didn’t usually get to wear aspects from two sides of herself. She re-emerged within another minute, the indigo contours holding close to her curves, making her the unspoken center of attention on the black-and-white floor. “It’s...not super speed, you should know,” she said.

“You don’t gotta be humble to me,” he answered, getting up from the couch and knotting the end of his scarf. The tislets didn’t follow the bunches and twists of fabric in the same way that her bodysuit held securely to her skin—the fingernail-sized symbols tried to hover over their assigned spots, without bending, remaining squares on a grid that minimized curvature. Knots caused them to intersect over themselves. It always looked like a visual mistake to Ruvle, somehow. “Can’t you pluck atoms and outrun light and all that? You just smack the vault door just and it magically opens twenty locks at once; you do hydex, that’s why I need you, you’ll never miss if we need to throw anything or hit anything!” He grinned and gestured for the door. “Come on, we’ll kick some butt.”

“I...no, I can’t!” Ruvle said, trotting up and holding her fez in place. “Chain, stop!” she told him, with him halfway out the door.

“Yeah? Did I say something?” He turned around, his voice going quieter.

“Hyperdexterity isn’t super speed.” She frowned apologetically. “It’s about coordination, precision, moving your body in the exact way you need it to. No one has...super speed, nothing you’d recognize as time turning off when they move. Ultrafine people are fast, but it’s not that, it’s never going to be that. And I’m not that good, I’m not foremotive, I’m not hypervoluntary, I can’t even see the difference in deoscillation yet—” She’d have to give Chain a lot of context to explain what those meant— “and I’m only Coarse, not even Fine.”

Chain chuckled. “Oh. That one’s my bad. Half of that was me using figurative language for compliments, to a chick whose job is getting words exactly right.”

Ruvle released her breath and her need for technicalities. “I just want you to know what you’re getting into.”

“Easy, I’m getting into Othek’s tower. That did actually help, though, I think I get what hydex is better now.”

“Hyperdexterity, or Exaction,” she corrected.

“Start calling it a different word that has an ‘ex’ in every time I say it, got it.”

Ruvle followed him out, smiling.