Arc 9 | Chapter 395: Hand Off

Jerrial, shockingly, wasn’t giving Emilia any answers about what exactly his abilities were as a Lowdouran, nor how he was the last of them. The most he would tell her was that, yes, he was sure he was the last living Lowdouran.

Apparently, the person whose holding cells they were headed to—and thankfully, Emilia finally managed to get the moniker

Fräthk

out of Jerrial, the word roughly translating into something like

the hand of death

, which, great—had another

little bug

who was capable of not only sniffing out irregular deviations but also determining who would be loyal to Fräthk and who would betray him. They weren’t always accurate, so Fräthk didn’t hold it against them when they missed something—like Jerrial escaping, or so he assumed—but if they said someone would betray Fräthk it was an immediate death sentence, or previously, exile into human trafficking.

It was because of this person, who Jerrial only referred to as

the golden one

, that Fräthk had become as much of a powerhouse as he was—at least until the trafficking group had been taken down, which had given the other, scary guy an opportunity to swipe up valuable people from under him. Previously, the corrupt Drinarna officers had been giving up anyone with an irregular deviation and a limited support system to Fräthk, but with so many struck back into the aether under Wander’s anti-corruption campaigns, not to mention the extra oversight that was suddenly looming over any officer who had contact with anyone with an irregular deviation… Well, the climate in the city had shifted, and power had shifted with it.

Emilia had always wondered why there had been so few truly powerful people among those she rescued from the traffickers. Sure, there had been a few, but they weren’t the pinnacles of what those with irregular deviations could be. To some extent, Emilia had just assumed the group wasn’t powerful enough to attempt to kidnap a lavender code or a Dyad whose powers could stretch through the aether in unique and terrifying ways. Now knowing that it had been a place to send the people this Fräthk guy had no use for or who were a threat to his power…

There was a chance she was going to be sick. Back then, she’d thought she was doing good taking that group down. Yet… was it? Presumably, without a way to get the people out of the city, Fräthk had begun killing all those people who would have otherwise been trafficked out of the nation, and what was the better option? A life as a slave in some other nation? Being sold to criminals who were after your power? Somehow managing to escape and ending up on the streets in a strange nation who probably hated you for your irregular deviations and heritage and being poor all at once? Were those things better or worse than being killed?

“I think I’d rather live,”

Cadence said, her hand gentle on Emilia’s back as Vern held her hair back and Jerrial rested against a different wall than the one she was vomiting onto.

“There’s always hope that things’ll get better!”

Emilia didn’t think the child had completely understood her mumbled reasons why she was sick and crying, especially since she was speaking like Emilia shouldn’t feel bad when she’d just said living as a trafficking victim was better than death, and that’s what Emilia thought as well.

It was better to live a terrible life, hoping a better day would come, was better than to just give yourself over to death—at least, that’s what she would prefer. To each their own.

“They picked up a lot of… other people,”

Jerrial told her when her gagging and hacking had subsided.

“It wasn’t just… people who were valuable to… Fräthk. Those people… are still alive, but were… allowed to remain… here.”

Well, that at least made her feel a bit better. It made her feel ever better when Vern added that he had heard a lot of the people Fräthk rejected were sold off to the worst sorts of people.

“Not people who would use you or the girl for normal things, but people who would ripe you apart for pieces and vengeance and the joy of murder,”

the man continued, shifting his language into more complicated words that had Candence complaining that she hated it when they spoke

all fancy

so she couldn’t understand.

“The girl?”

Emilia asked, pulling water from the aether to rinse out her mouth before spitting it out—as much as she could create things from the aether, for the same reasons that she didn’t really like eating food from fabricators, she didn’t really like using skills to pull the aether into a different form. Certainly, she wouldn’t be drinking aether water unless required, and while she understood that creating things from the aether was sometimes necessary, she generally preferred to just not.

Ideally, one day, she’d figure out a way to affect atoms that were already part of their world to shift their configuration more easily. Currently, it was possible, but not fun— Well, that was a bit of a lie. Willbrands were made by altering their molecular makeup, and their shifts in form were a similar alteration. The only reason they could do that, however, was a special metal and a shit ton of aether being pushed into them during their creation. If she had wanted to create the glass bottle she’d stored that woman’s toxicity inside of from, say, the various elements that made up the air or even the building or her clothes or something else? Possible in the way that she could do it… but would probably end up on her knees with a nose bleed without a very specific skill being used to do the alterations, like {Hidey Hole}, which somewhat got around the issue by more temporarily shifting atoms, rather than permanently altering them.

It was for all these reasons that glashial and other people with irregular deviations that could directly affect the physical world were considered quite valuable, but they were all relatively rare, and unfortunately, sometimes the situation called for altering the aether to create something physical.

So, from the aether she would take what she needed. So, when she could, she’d shift around things that already existed—cut down a tree to make a bridge, rather than create one from the aether. At the same time, she wasn’t about to die of dehydration or let anyone be hurt because pulling directly from the aether seemed a bit… wrong.

Actually, some of that was a lie! Ideally, one day, she’d figure out a way to return anything created from the aether back to it more cleanly. Everything returned to the aether eventually, through decomposition and such, but if a skill could pull from the aether and use it as needed, then put it back where it was found?

Yeah, that would be nice—a more purposeful borrowing, rather than a theft that would trickle back to the source.

“The girl?”

Vern repeated, using the hem of his shirt to rub a dribble of water from Emilia’s face.

It was nice, if also gross. All three of her new companions looked like it had been weeks since they had last bathed, although Jerrial appeared mostly sweaty and tired—Emilia assumed he had been given a few sponge baths to help with the olthagri.

“That’s what you called Candence: the girl. I’ve just been trying to figure out what kind of relationship the three of you have,”

Emilia clarified. As they’d be meeting up with Nivel soon, she needed to figure out if they had any attachment to her or if giving her to the Hyrat clone was going to cause problems.

“Oh, Vern just got stuck with me cause Jerrial is a softy,”

Candence offered happily, tucking herself back into Emilia, seemingly unconcerned with her recent vomiting.

“He knew the bad people would come for me, so he grabbed me first. Vern said he was stupid for doing that, cause I’m a lot of trouble.”

“I did not say you were a lot of trouble,”

Vern grumbled in the tone of someone had had this particular discussion multiple times.

“I said if anyone found out about you, we would have more trouble. I said Jerrial was stupid for not being willing to trust anyone, not even the Drinarna, to keep you safe.”

Looking at her—a rarity, the man seeming rather anti-eye-contact—Vern explained that since Fräthk was already looking for them,

they

were actually putting Candence in more danger by keeping her with them. In a mirror of what had indeed occurred, Vern had been concerned that someone would eventually track them down and see Candence.

“Life on the streets is hard, but the irregulars protect each other these days, and there’s no way the Drini would have wanted her in the hands of criminals.

Someone

wouldn’t let us take her to any of the homeless hotspots or the Drini. Then, Jerrial got sick, and we couldn’t do anything until he was better again.”

The way the guy said it, confident in his friend’s recovery, was sweet, if also stupid. Given the way Jerrial looked away, he was also aware that with how sick he was, recovering while living on the streets would be effectively impossible.

Running her fingers through Candence’s short silver hair, the child practically purring in her arms, Emilia pointed out that it didn’t sound like they’d been together very long, if the adults had gone from arguing over whether to give her to someone else to Jerrial being sick. Indeed, they had only had her for about three weeks.

“So…”

Emilia said, heaving Candence up on her hip as they began moving towards the nearby tunnel exit once more, Nivel politely waiting a little outside the exit so he wouldn’t startle the men,

“if I say I want to give Candence over to someone else, so she’s safer, you’ll have no objections?”

Vern, unsurprisingly, didn’t have an opinion on the matter—despite only spending a little time together, he didn’t think Emilia a criminal who would be taking Candence off to some terrible place. He also didn’t seem convinced she’d be able to get the kid out of Lüshan, however.

“I want to send her with someone who can take her to the Baalphorian embassy. It wouldn’t be ideal, but if I can’t get her out of here, she can grow up there.”

It would really suck, and she’d probably have to convince the clones to send someone with a pod of younger clones to live there as well, so Candence wouldn’t be alone, but she hadn't been exaggerating when she’d assured Norrayn and Raalian that the embassies tended to be some of the most secure buildings in any Free Colony. Plus, while no Free Colony liked it when citizens of their own nation were sequestered into embassies, there was little they could do to get them out. They could try—could threaten this or that political consequence or even violence—but if there was an innocent kid at stake? One who was now being hunted by at least this Fräthk guy?

Well, the Lüshanian government would have a hard time arguing they needed to get the kid back into their custody, especially since it would put pressure on them to keep her safe. If she somehow ended up being disappeared into a life of crime or just straight up killed while in Drinarna custody, shit would break loose. Same went for her being in the custody of the embassy, of course. The moment they started fighting over the kid, she was going to become weirdly important to everyone.

Thankfully, Jerrial was swayed by this argument—or, he almost was. Unfortunately, when he found out she wanted to send Candence off with a Hyrat clone, the child in question curious what a Hyrat clone was, he was less enthused. Emilia couldn’t really blame him. Even in nations like Lüshan, where the clones didn’t have much of a presence outside of the embassy and the occasional time they aided the Drinarna, the Hyrat clones were known and feared as the monsters even Baalphorians ran from. It didn’t matter that their most terrifying ability—the ability to dig into Censors and manipulate memories—wasn’t applicable to Free Coloniers: they were still black knots, trained from birth to be heartless killers.

Still, through his apprehension, Emilia could tell that Jerrial wanted to say yes. He didn’t want Candence with them any more than she did. Probably, he also felt guilty that Vern had been right: that woman had come looking for him. While she was dead, and Candence’s existence currently remained a secret to Fräthk, if they took her straight into his holding cells, there was no way that secret would hold—not without a whole lot of blood, anyways, and none of them wanted to subject the kid to that unless absolutely necessary.

Emilia was in the midst of telling the group about how much she loved the clones and how she would trust—almost—all of them with the safety of everyone she loved when they exited the tunnels. This one also exited into a house, a rug covering the hatch they climbed out of. Two small rooms later, and they were face to face with Nivel, his eyes lighting up when they landed on Emilia, and how could anyone ever think this man dangerous!?

Then, his eyes landed on Candence—landed on the small child who had insisted on walking for a little bit and had ripped herself away from Emilia’s handholding to fling herself at the clone.