Arc 1 | Chapter 11: Like the Aethernet Itself is Guiding the Way

The world was collapsing around Emilia, but at least it wasn’t hot anymore. They had lucked out, on their way towards the closest bubble stand, and run into another of Faylyn’s regulars. Alice Hayn had helpfully been headed into town to pick up her son and his friends, who had been protesting at the courthouse. She’d offered them a ride in her beat up little vehicle—so rare in a city that ran on slide lines and bubbles— and then they’d been bobbing along the cracked road until it reached the industrial area. The road had been clear and fast from there, and by the time she and Beth stumbled out of it, giggling about the world-bending hallucinations raging around them, less than half of their hour was up.

“Thank you~” they called between their giggles as Alice Hayn loaded up her son and his friends, still vibrating from the thrill of their protest, into the vehicle. There were a lot of them, far too many for the little thing to safely hold, Emilia was sure.

“Where now?” Emilia asked, trying to ignore the way buildings were crumbling around her. Birds of rock and glass flew by. The ground sprouted trees that grew to touch the sky and wither and die in the span of a second. Her shoes were gone—she wasn’t exactly sure if that was a hallucination, or if she’d been too hot on the ride and forgotten them in Alice Hayn’s vehicle. Whoops.

“Beth?” she called, turning to find her friend gone. “Fuck.”

Emilia looked around, trying to glare through the explosion of trees to find her friend. Well, at least they were in the city centre now. OIC cameras monitored the majority of the outdoor space within most major cities—more and more minor ones, too, since the war. Not everywhere, but if the system detected anything funny going on—like Beth getting dragged away by someone the system couldn’t identify as knowing her—it would send SecOps to assess the situation. Awesome fun that would be, especially with Sil having disappeared, calls to his Censor on the ride over having gone unanswered.

If Beth—or her—happened to get arrested for causing trouble, they’d need someone respectable to bust them out (Read: politely ask SecOps to release them into their care). Even while high as the clouds, Sil was their go to respectable friend. Without him… Elijah? Maybe, but he’d lecture them. Unpleasant. She could always call Olivier up—what an experience that would be. First time contacting him in a decade so he could bust her or Beth out of a high hold. He’d lecture them too, but he’d be so cute and grumpy doing it. Elijah would be judgy and tired, his jaw tightening in that way that always made her imagine him as a curmudgeonly old man.

More likely than the high hold, was that SecOps would escort them back to their dorms to sleep it off, if they thought they were too high for this early in the day. Wasn’t like she was new to that kind of thing; she’d been getting escorted home by SecOps since her teens.

The other risk was that they’d run into a raid. They’d be flagged as noncombatants, but she didn’t really want to waste her high stuck inside a raidland. Better to keep moving. If she was moving, the raids couldn’t find her, surely?

Emilia blinked around her and began to move, unsure of where she was going. She was sure she looked fucked out, blinking wide, blown out eyes this way and that, swerving around imaginary tress that bolted up in front of her and people who appeared from nowhere but had always been there—unless she was hallucinating people, too. She definitely wasn’t ruling that out.

“Princess.”

She swore as Olivier’s voice, that constant insult of his, echoed through her head, the words so loud they became a visible trail of letters through the world.

“Asshole,” she muttered to herself, even if his insult had come to hold a sliver of affection by the time he had won freedom for her. He was still an asshole, though.

She followed the letters of his words—she couldn’t help herself. She’d never been able to help herself when it came to him. She had poked and prodded him until he broke more than once. Usually, he’d ended up fuming, that carefully sculpted facade of calm cracking against her until he couldn’t lie to her anymore—couldn’t say that the life his parents demanded of him made him anything other than miserable. Other times, he had stomped out of his apartment, the one Emilia had taken over as her case got going. He still had some of her stuff, or she’d left it there once things were settled, anyways. He’d probably thrown most of it out long before the war had even been a ripple of thought across the world.

Her hand slid over cool stone, and she finally pulled her eyes away from the

Princess Princess Princess

dragging her through the city. This was the part she had always liked about pink vapour, the pull of it, the feeling that it was the aethernet itself talking to her, guiding her hands over the Strats to find each hold with perfect accuracy, as though the high was a gift from the universe, pushing her where she was meant to go.

Emilia’s fingers dragged over rough rocks, some exterior of an old wall, surrounding the courtyard of a building she could only see the top of. It sat so oddly within this area of the city, the area’s standard, stark white buildings towering floors and floors above the wall’s red imperfection. She continued on,

Princess

still visible from the corner of her eye, leading her deeper down the alleyway. It dragged her onward, the area overgrown, and even she couldn’t tell what was real anymore. Flowers and bushes and vines rose up out of the ground, natural and unmoving except against the brush of her feet—her definitely shoeless feet. Whoops indeed.

She laughed slightly before hissing. “Fuck,” Emilia breathed out as she glared down at where she had stepped onto a thorny bush. Who even grew thorny plants these days? Hadn’t genetic engineering weeded out the thorns on any plants worth growing yourself? And in the city, no less! True, people didn’t generally walk about without shoes, but—

“They are growing out from under the wall,” a too familiar voice said from behind her, and Emilia’s heart stopped. “My apologies. The gardeners should have kept better watch to keep them inside, although you should be wearing shoes.”

Emilia swallowed, every fibre of her being shifting and moving towards the man slowly walking towards her. If she ran, would he give chase? Probably. How was he even out here, without his security. Her Censor reached out, searching for anyone else, but no. There was no one else. Fuck, leave it to the de la Rue’s to have such a funky little house in the middle of the city.

“Are you alright?” Olivier asked, his voice far closer than before as his steps halted. Always so polite. Emilia had once assumed it was distance, apathy. He wouldn’t have been the first non-dev she’d met who barely gave a shit for anyone but themselves. As a rule, non-devs couldn’t have black knots, but she’d always found them more likely to be selfish pricks.

“Yes,” she replied softly, wondering if he would recognize her voice. If not for her hair, for the irregular deviation that gave it that particular silver-grey colour that hair stylists could never quite get right, maybe he wouldn’t have. She heard it when he recognized her voice, the soft intake of air, the swallow of his throat as he tried to figure out what to say, how to make her not bolt away. Not that she could get away, not high, not knotted like this, her perfect Physical D-Levels long since reduced to less than perfect. They were still pretty damn good, and even against Elijah’s perfect Physical D-Levels she’d been known to win. Not against Oliver, not against any non-dev, every one of her categories was too reduced now. Even if she had wanted to run—to escape him and her past—she couldn’t.

Emilia turned, her light-purple eyes catching on his. One a blue so light it almost appeared white, the other a bright, spring green. He was beautiful, just as he always was. Older than she’d last seen him in person, nearly a decade ago now. Somehow, his normally light-brown skin looked a little darker, his dark hair a little sun-kissed, like he’d actually spent time in the sun recently. Over a screen, he had looked good. It was nothing compared to him in person.

“You changed,” she said, stupidly. He had, though, the sharp suit he had worn to the courthouse discarded for less formal clothes—still formal compared to the current styles, the clothes she saw at school every day. Both the sleeves of his white shirt and the cuffs of his clay-brown pants were rolled up, the white burn across his forearm, from his near death during the last battle of the war, stark against his golden skin.

“So have you,” he replied, because, of course, he would assume she had meant he had changed in the last decade, not the last hour.

She smiled, despite herself, despite the anxiety and drugs and how beautiful he was. “I meant since you left the courthouse.”

“You watched?”

Her smile widened, saddened. “Not on purpose. I was in the slums. Girl who works the restaurant had it on.”

His eyes flickered, open in the way he rarely was with anyone, maybe with no one but her. Had he found someone else to be open with since the war? Or had she worked that hard to open up his heart just to deny him that openness when she ran? “You go into Alver?” he asked, using the rarely used name for Piketown’s slum. So polite. So respectful. Did he know even those who lived there didn’t use that name?

“Yes. They have fantastic food there,” she replied, wondering if it mattered. “Ever eat anything from there?”

“Yes,” he said, taking a tentative step towards her. “It is quite good. I believe it has more preservatives than most are used to. I have heard that makes it slightly more… tasteful, for a moment, at least.” He crinkled his nose, as though he’d let food from the slums sit on his tongue a bit too long, actually tasted what lay beneath those chemical enhancers.

Emilia laughed, leaning against the brick wall. Luckily, the vines climbing up it weren’t filled with thorns like the ones at her feet were, their leaves instead reminding her of a soft summer afternoon at her childhood home. The second one, never the first. The first had been hard and cold, even if the government had tried its best to make it soft and filled with laughter and love. It had always been clear how cold that prison was, under all the cushioning.

Olivier tilted his head, assessing or questioning, she couldn’t tell. Would he be able to tell how knotted up she was these days? Probably. “You’re high,” he said, not exactly judging her, not exactly not.

“Oh, yeah~” she sighed, leaning further into the vines. Maybe if she played it up, he’d just assume her empty brokenness was the drugs. “Did you know you can bottle up pink vapour?”

“No.” He was so close. When had he gotten so close? “You are also injured.”

“Oh? Oh, yeah.” She looked down at herself. She had looked cute this morning, despite the minimal makeup that was definitely not in style. Now, she was dirty, covered in specks of blood and patches of aether. “Got forced into a raid. It’s fine. A student nurse patched me up.” She shrugged, wishing she didn’t look quite so gross.

“Emilia—” he started to say, cutting off in a move that was so not Olivier that she smiled again, unsure of when she had stopped. He was one of the only people who ever called her that, except her parents when they were pissed. Whenever she got around to seeing them again—if she ever got around to it—how long would they use that name? How long would their resentment that she had needed to get away last?

“How are you still so beautiful?” she asked, raising a hand to drag over his cheek, grateful she’d wiped them down at the restaurant, and she wasn’t dragging grime over him.

He leaned, ever so slightly into the touch, his eyes fluttering, breath catching. “I take care of myself.”

She blinked at him. Once, twice, before bursting into laughter.

“What’s so funny?”

She giggled, the world buzzing around her, a thousand bugs that existed here and then and nowhere at all flying around them as the high began to peak before it would splutter out.

“You basically just confirmed for me that I look like shit now. I mean, I clearly do.” She smiled, cheeks aching with how wide it was. “Most people would be too polite to say anything about it, though.”

Olivier’s jaw tightened, and then he was right there, pressing her back against the vines, which exploded across time around them, wrapping them into a safe, private cocoon. “You do not

‘look like shit,’

” he said, voice so harsh it reminded her of when she was younger—when they had first met, and he hated her with every fibre of his soul. She didn’t think he hated her anymore, but Olivier had always kept his softer emotions so tightly controlled that she really couldn’t tell. Even if he hadn’t hated her the last time they’d met, who knew what a decade long vanishing act had done. “You are dirty—filthy, actually—but you do not

‘look like shit.’

”

“Then, why are you so pissy?”

“Because you imply that you are not taking care of yourself,” he bit out, jaw clenching as he tried not to say more.

What could he even say? Guilt her into taking care of herself? “

People died so you could live. So live.”

She’d heard that one before. All it had done was make her feel guilty, the tiny nudge she’d needed before her perfect Balance had shattered, traumatic knots winding their way through her genome until she was a fraction of what she had once been. Until she hadn’t had the strength to even try unknotting the mess she’d become.

Olivier sighed, his head falling forward to press against hers. “Are you at least safe? Happy?”

Emilia let her eyes flutter shut—let herself just breathe their shared air. His hand trailed up her back. Fingers pressed at the base of her neck, a cooling rush of aether flowing over the small scars where her Censor was installed, before sliding further up, scratching into the base of her ponytail. She leaned into him slightly, letting him pull her hair free of the elastic. It fell messily around her, dirt and sweat and lack of a shower that morning making her cringe slightly. He didn’t seem to notice or care, though, and his fingers were as gentle as they always had been as he ran them through it, pulling knots out as he went.

“Yes,” she said a million years later—or maybe it had only been a moment. Time was spinning around her, moving this way and that. Explosions and love and sex, fingers dripping blood over the Strats, cold rooms with two small forms pressed against her sides and a dozen others crying from their own beds because they weren’t good enough to find homes for themselves.

“Yes,” she swallowed out, willing the drugs to dissipate, to spiral away and leave her to come down into the safety of Olivier’s arms. “I am… happy.” She smiled up at him when he pulled back, a true happy one. She was happy. She had friends who loved her—who were willing to piss her off by dragging her to raids because they knew she needed the money. She had a boyfriend who—regardless of whether he finally got around to breaking up with her soon or not—had given her a year of fun and laughter. He’d also given her seven years of hating him before that, but even that hatred had been

fun.

“And safe?” Olivier asked, eyes skimming over her, taking in her general state of filth, hair that definitely needed a trim, but she otherwise slathered in all the fancy shit she could afford. Not too skinny. She was high and slightly injured, yes, but she had no marks running up her bare arms or tucked behind her knees—no signs of drug abuse so severe he should be worried. His Censor knocked lightly on hers, and she rolled her eyes before batting it away.

“Let a girl keep her secrets, will you?” she teased, taking the chance to run a hand through his own, dark waves, trying to ignore the burn stretching from beneath his collar to his ear. “It’s longer than when I last saw you,” she said, fiddling with the locks that fell to just below his ears, styled back to keep his bangs out of his eyes. It was a stupid thing to say. Hair got in your eyes in a war—almost everyone had chopped their hair short, or bound it up in ponytails so tight it made your head split apart. “Bet your parents love it,” she added when all he did was watch her in that horrible, all-seeing way of his—of all non-devs, but it had always felt like Olivier saw more of her than even he meant to. Lawyer skills, perhaps. Lawyer genes, even—hundreds of years of lawyers breeding into the perfect, beautiful destroyer of injustice.

“Safe?” he asked again, and she had the distinct impression that he would not be letting her leave if he wasn’t assured she was safe.

“Yes, mom,” she said, smiling brightly when his eyes narrowed at the familiar nickname. He’d spent almost a year working on her case, she’d spent that year thinking she was going to jail for life and partying as hard as she could. He had not been impressed. Locked her into the apartment she’d taken over once, when he’d gotten sick of her coming home wasted with some nobody he’d have to kick out the next morning. Even her escape skills hadn’t been able to break through whatever defences he’d enacted around that apartment. She’d screamed at him, hit him, pushed him up against a wall. He’d flipped them, and then they’d snapped. Fucked against that wall. Fucked on the couch, the bed, in the shower. She’d stopped going out after that, content to push and prod at her new toy, see how far she could get—how much she could get away with—before he snapped and bent her over the nearest piece of furniture.

She pushed and prodded against the Censor that was still hovering at the edge of her own. Olivier let her in easily, let her press the memories of that night and a thousand fragments of the months after into him. He was so close, pressing her into the wall of life behind her, that she could feel his reaction, see the way his eyes dilated, those stunning, heterochromatic eyes of his filling with black—just like that first time.

“Wanna have some fun, ‘vier?” she asked, tugging gently at a button on his shirt. “Assuming I’m not too dirty for you?”