“I dunno, I thought I could ride a thermal updraft or something!”

“Where would you get a thermal updraft?”

“An M.A.D. lab or a big chimney, a foundry, anything.”

Ruvle and Chain had been trotting around the suburb in the vicinity of Othek’s tower for an hour by now and Ruvle felt very stupid. She was failing to think things through on such a basic level—how to even begin on a raid. And yet Chain matched the jagged printed-on smile on his face mask with his demeanor.

“We’ll get there, it’s just tricksy,” he said. “Normally they’re all over the place. I’m gonna blame the glint; there’s a ton of thermodynamics that goes into making strong thermals…”

That sounded like nonsense. “If the plan is to glide, why don’t we just climb onto another tall building and glide from there?” Ruvle suggested.

“See, that’s what I thought,” Chain said, grabbing his scarf by both ends and whipping the bulk of the fabric, airing it out and shining pale blue tislet light in the nighttime, “but there’s no way I can get up there.” He pointed to the only building of comparable height nearby—a steepled library, of brick and iron and a stained glass mural above the arched front door. Libraries like this one frequently had big pointy spires.

“I mean. I can,” Ruvle said, looking over her shoulder to it.

“That’s a big climb.”

“No, it’s not.”

And two minutes later, she was swinging her way up the ivy vines that snaked up the brickwork. Training hard made everything easier, and she smiled with the ease with which this came, her only trouble being her hands scrabbling a slipped grab or two onto the brickwork from missed depth perception. Not that the adjacent squirrel wasn’t completely dominating her in verticality, because it was.

“Okay, great, but it doesn’t work unless you can carry me up,” Chain said with an affable head-shake, crossing one standing foot over the other.

“Climb up the vines,” Ruvle said, landing from a backflip up onto the roof. The squirrel skittered onto a roof tile and honked at her, as small animals did.

Chain was much, much slower. It sucked to wait. His hands stripped several leaves from the vines, and his boots kicked and scraped against the bricks, knocking red-and-gray dust onto the earth below. Ruvle grunted, pulling the other end of the vine to help him ascend, her biceps straining and her feet shifting on the roof tiles. At one point, Chain’s scarf got caught between loose mortar and brick, and he spent several minutes freeing it—the thread composing his scarf, so he claimed, was not worth any tear or fray. The squirrel did not help.

Soon, Chain was on the roof as well, both parties panting, with Chain bent-over and his hands on his thighs. Eventually, he re-tied his scarf. “I’m not doing this again.”

“So I hope we’ll only be here once,” Ruvle said.

The further climb onto the decorative spire tested endurance more than skill. With the masonry tapering up several stories and the windows growing smaller, the steep slope provided many more handholds and windowsills to ascend with than a sheer wall. Shadows moved behind the frosted glass—a patron or two in the restricted books sections. At one point, Ruvle overheard a man and woman arguing—relationship woes. The library finances just couldn’t add up all of the sudden, the complexities of bill management running away from them. Ruvle tried to not care.

Chain reached the top about twenty minutes after Ruvle did and twenty-one minutes after the squirrel. He sat opposite from her, on the other side of the multi-pronged copper lightning rod, which swayed in the breeze. Parallel, far across the street, was the orange-and-green vault face of the tower’s tip. Locks upon locks spackled it, texturing its face with so many raised pads, knobs to dial and recessed keyways that the door visually scanned not as a flat surface with decorations, but a scribbled-over surface. It traded quality for overkill. Cinderblocks made up the bulk of the tapering tower, heading down, down in an ever-widening column of masonry, until they joined the true compound where Othek lay in wait–one far bulkier, in black blocks and elegantly-curved panes of dark blue alloys and gigantic octagonal rivets the size of Ruvle’s arm. It even had an electrified fence, for good measure, and Ruvle spotted several hollows and wall seams, surely containing robotic defenses strong enough to make the intended route the designed failure point. Entering through the top was suicidal. Entering through the bottom was not an option in the first place.

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

Ruvle put her hands behind her back and rocked forth and back, waiting for Chain.

“I’m gonna…” he took a few breaths with his hand on his chest. “I’m gonna be ready, a few minutes.”

She looked over her shoulder with a patient smile. “I can wait. Isn’t this the hard part coming up?”

“Almost,” he said, with a snicker.

Once he’d recovered his stamina, Chain unwrapped his scarf and held each end securely. He fluttered it out into the breeze, letting it extend into a loose arc of cloth that dangled off the side of the spire. “...Wind direction’s good.” A section of tislets over the scarf modulated its glow, several of them blinking from one shape of tislet into alternate forms, ripples of change flowing over nearly half of the scarf. ”Ruvle, when I jump, grab my ankles.”

“Wait, you have to warn me about these—”

And before she could answer, he did—and caught the wind.

“So this is physia?” Ruvle asked, hanging from Chain’s ankles, many stories of free air separating her from the earth below, losing no altitude she could discern. Her hair fluttered against the breeze.

“You got it.” Chain grinned, while wind and momentum carried them towards Othek’s tower. With his arms held high, a V-shaped pose, his grasp on the ends of the scarf was secure, and the fabric itself stretched into a tight arc—a parachute, with the stability of a hang glider. “I can’t fly, but gliding? Even I can figure that one out.”

“That door doesn’t look so tough either,” Ruvle said, beaming and dangling her feet. She rolled her neck, spinning the tassel on her fez.

“How’s your depth perception up here?” Chain asked. “You’re gonna need that to not go splat on the wall. I get that it’s dark.”

Ruvle tilted her head. “Completely fine,” she said. “It’s mostly a problem when I have diffuse light and what I’m looking at isn’t moving. That’s why I still have those old cone lights in The Checkered Office; they point down.”

“Clever.”

“I’m getting directional light from the streetlamps, and we’re in motion. I can tell how far away everything is.” She smiled. “You were right. This is a good choice for a raid.”

“...Hold that thought, there,” he said, craning his neck. “Uh…”

Ruvle saw it too. They were but halfway to the tower when black chunks emerged from the clouds surrounding it, with beating insectile wings of metal and clusters of camera lenses for eyes. Spikes adorned their thoraxes in lieu of arms and legs; attack drones didn’t need them—and the buzz of their mechanical flight grew louder as they spread out, forming an arc, sweeping as if to surround their prey. They were but seconds from a head-on collision.

“Ruvle, do something!”

Ruvle swung her legs and pulled hard on Chain’s ankles; she let go and flipped herself up above him, landing on her feet onto the top of the scarf-parachute—it yielded down to her mid-shins, but was surprisingly sturdy. “I’ll try!” She lifted her arms into a boxer’s defensive stance.

It was a regulatory requirement from very serious and well-funded safety bureaus that a robot’s eyes had to turn red before it was allowed to attack people. And she could now see constellations of crimson in the swarm.

The fight was quick, decisive, and not in her favor.

To battle dozens of giant black flies bodyslamming her while covered in spikes, while balancing on pillowsheets and avoiding one wrong step to plummeting doom, was too much, let alone the back lines of the swarm that were shooting head-mounted laser beams from grisly, corroded nozzles. She could weave between a few attacks, ducking under two charging flies and letting them crash into each other, but with stuck feet, she could only backbend so far to avoid the next. Its spikes jabbed her left arm in three places to draw blood. Two more swept her from behind, which she was able to jump over, but leaving her footing entirely was a mistake, giving her no options to redirect her momentum when a laser shot her directly in the back. She fended off a drone that tried to slam her square in the chest by planting her palm against its glowing-red cameras, only for her to miss her landing back onto Chain’s parachute. He, himself, was being shot out of the sky—

And Ruvle didn’t remember much after that beyond panic at the force of gravity.