“If not black, then monochrome,” Ashley said. “And if not monochrome, red works.”

“I like red,” Tristan said. “My costume, my power…”

“Green here,” Vista said. “Red is associated with too many bad memories. Green is like, ‘life here’.”

Sveta stuck out her arm. Vista smiled, reaching out to move the arm to get a better look.

“For the recod, red is stressing me out,” Golem said. He touched lines, moving them into a row. “We can’t have a twelve-character password, with numbers, letters, and symbols?”

“Three-dimensional space has so many more permutations, which makes it really hard to hack, even with your usual hacky tinker device,” Kenzie said. “And I really wanted a hallway with lasers that you could duck and weave through.”

“You can laser-dance through this mess?” Weld asked.

“You have to be able to,” Vista said. “If you screw up right at the end, then you have to get out of there before the space collapses in around you.”

“Stop saying that,” Golem said. “I know you’re messing with my head to get me to screw up in front of everyone.”

“Theoretically you can laser-dance it,” Kenzie said, and her eyes glinted as she looked up at Weld, a mischievous look without a smile. She lowered her voice to a whisper, “It looks possible, if you have the right powers. But it’s not really. You get to the end and you end up standing in just the right place for the security apparatus to gun you down. Think you’re clever? Bam, shrapnel to the knees.”

“You can’t tell people that,” I said. “That’s the kind of thing that gets spread around.”

“But it’s fun,” Kenzie said.

“Not fun,” Golem muttered. “Stressful.”

Golem advanced down the hallway, moving things with a bit more confidence as he got going.

He reached the end. The lines fell away. Ordinary hallway. A portal ripped its way open at the end.

Kenzie moved her hands, bringing up a fresh panel, and shut down the portal. We walked down the hallway.

“Vista makes fun, but she keeps scraping by,” Weld said. “She tried to cheat too, last night. Used her power. Immediate fail-state. We had people come from upstairs and downstairs, weapons ready.”

“Perfect,” Kenzie said. “Drills and testing the security is useful, especially if it’s people we trust who are poking and prodding at the limits. My investment is protected.”

Her ‘investment’ was a cube that stood taller than she did, nestled in a side room in the second floor, perched so it rested precariously on a corner. It was onyx, with irregular panels of chrome metal that looked mirror-reflective, with edges that looked like they’d been torn rather than cut.

I hung out in the hallway with others while she did her routine maintenance, watching through the door.

Sveta settled in next to me. I bumped her shoulder with mine, and saw her smile, though she didn’t look my way.