“She has to be close to the end, right?”
“I think so? I mean, she’s definitely physically closer, but who knows how much that means.”
“Yeah, that place is like a maze. It could bring her around and around a few more times. It’s not like she’s hit all the puzzles or anything.”
Indeed, if Emilia had to guess, she’d say she’d only hit about a fourth of the traps and puzzles contained in the playground. A few of them, she wasn’t even sure
how
she was supposed to get to them—a lot of the puzzles were revealed by hitting some hidden switch or another, creating a diverging path, but a few had directly gone one into another. The last puzzle she had worked through had, rather unfortunately, led her to what seemed to be a dead end. So, she was currently just standing there, alternating between looking around with her eyes and recon skills and her general awareness of the aether and trying not to panic because going back wasn’t an option.
Either she found a way forward, activated her willbrand and tried to brute force her way out, or died there. None were good options. So! Distraction it was! Thinking about how, based on the hidden nature of some of the playground’s paths, there must be both a hidden switch somewhere at the beginning, which would have let her skip over all of this, as well as a hidden switch somewhere around where she now stood.
Something hidden. Something small. Something that would save her from dying in here.
There had to be
something
—Emilia refused to believe that whoever had created this thing had decided to set it up to be a dead end. Such things weren’t in the spirit of play, and while Curtisal—assuming that was who had designed this place—was clearly a sadistic fucker, nothing else had implied they were the sort of person to create a dead end.
So, distraction and finding the switch.
“What happens if she can’t get out of there?”
“She will.”
“You sound so sure.”
“I am.”
“Why?”
“Emilia’s story does not end here.”
“You can’t know that.”
“I do.”
“Why are you touching your stomach like that?”
“Are you hungry?”
“What? Why would holding her stomach like that be related to hunger?”
“I dunno? Don’t people get stomach cramps when they’re starving? I know I do.”
“So do I, but Vern…”
“What?”
“Where do you think your stomach is?”
“Like… here?”
Emilia couldn’t see the groups well from here, but from what she could tell, Rayleen had pressed her hand to somewhere around her bellybutton—perhaps even lower—while Vern had placed his around the proper location of the stomach—closer to his solar plexus. Had she been standing closer, Emilia might have poked at Rayleen’s body to see if she was pregnant. The only skills that could determine such things about a person were med skills, which were all highly regulated. Emilia had swiped up a few from Doctor Vickers over the years, as well as from the Ridge Rind, which did some amount of research for the strange non-organization that organized all the medical professions. While the non-organization was weird—seriously, no one seemed to know
why
they didn’t want to become a more official entity—they did have
a lot
of money behind them. As the Ridge Rind was the sort of research facility constantly decades—if not centuries—ahead of what could actually be applied in the real world, they struggled with funding. Hence, they took jobs creating skills and functions for the non-organization.
As she had, occasionally, hacked into their servers, Emilia had some of these skills and functions—and even when she didn’t simply steal their shit, their research papers often said enough that she could take of what they had learned and make her own skills and functions. Most research papers that were that advanced were difficult to understand without
a lot
of context—the sort of context that required reading dozens, if not hundreds, of previous papers to understand. Not something most people could do, but both she and Halen could, and between them, they had enough skills and functions that were effectively illegal that they could both find themselves victims of lengthy prison sentences.
Did this mean either of them would delete the skills and functions? No, but she kept a number of hers highly encrypted with strange names
and
locked down to her use alone, unless she purposefully added someone else to the list of users. Most likely, Halen did something similar. This effectively meant that even if the clones ripped the code from her head, they wouldn’t be able to use it or look at it or even guess what it was based on the name—not that Emilia’s naming schemes were generally good to begin with. Still, {Jaffy Stick} was not a name that suggested the skill could be used as a full-body scan to determine if the person were injured or hosting any parasites.
It was the sort of skill that was technically illegal, but if used in an emergency was unlikely to result in any charges—few people wanted to go before a judge and argue that yes, the only reason that person was alive was because an illegal skill was used on them but that the person who saved their life should be punished. Did the law say such situations called for punishment? Yes, but understandably, few people wanted to be the face of such lawsuits.
Was any of this relevant to the situation? No—although it was passingly related to her current legal issues, as while she assumed no one would bother charging her for invasion of privacy for use of {Jaffy Stick} in saving someone’s life, she now had little confidence in the Baalphorian government not simply applying laws to her because they could.
Clearly, the Baalphorian government was out to get her. Was this a slightly insane thought? Perhaps—Emilia didn’t think herself so important, and usually, she instead assumed that ‘ariah’s mother was pulling strings and favours together to force the government to charge her. Who really knew, though. Not her. She knew nothing. Definitely, she had no idea how to escape this place.
The other reason contemplations of using {Jaffy Stick} on Rayleen wasn’t relevant? The woman had given a rare solid answer to Clemence’s question of whether she was pregnant: no, but one day. This had devolved into the currently ongoing conversation about children, and Rayleen’s odd perspective on them—namely that while she knew she would have at least one, she knew she would have very little part in raising them, nor did she particularly wish to.
✮ ✮ ✮
It was, of course, at this point that Emilia’s dreaming mind scoffed—she’d forgotten about this conversation. Having recently wondered whether Hyr’s mother was still alive and how much the sweet little syn had been subjected to her, Emilia couldn’t say she was too upset that the woman had likely had little to do with their upbringing.
That said… everything about this situation was odd. Back when she’d experienced this moment, so fractured within her mind because her Censor’s processes had once more been sputtering out, leaving everything a mess of half-remembered conversations, she hadn’t thought much of what Rayleen was saying or doing.
Now… seeing it all again… Had she looked a little harder, perhaps she would have been able to see it, this implication that she and Hyr—Rayleen’s future child—would have some sort of entwined fate. Meeting one another. Becoming friends. Becoming something more, perhaps, as distant as such ideas were.
How much had Rayleen known, as she pressed her hand to the flat expanse of her stomach? Had she simply known they would meet, and that therefore, it was impossible for Emilia to die here? Or had she known more—known how quickly her child would force their way into Emilia’s heart? How quickly they would find themselves seeking out each other’s company and warmth?
“At the very least,”
Emilia’s mind muttered as she floated around Rayleen and her friends, Jerrial the only one still drawing breath,
“I don’t have to worry about what you’ll think, assuming you’re still alive, about my relationship with your kid. You’ll probably just mutter something about
the will of the aether
if I bring it up.”
Suddenly, the world moved—that overwhelming pull that had her spiralling through the world and falling into another moment, and out of all the things that were strange about this dream, the fact that she was experiencing all of these people’s lives was up there, but so was the fact that whatever was driving her dream wasn’t her. Instead, something else was dragging her along from place to place, person to person. Everything was a dance—a story laid out for her. No story was complete, huge swathes of time missing each time she visited people.
Rarely would her mind visit Coral’s group, only now beginning to break free of the papers checkpoint—they’d been standing out, doing very little, but now they moved through the city. Several of the clones stuck with her and Polianna, several more split off to attend to various things. Some went to help the clones who were still attempting to get Olivier’s students back to the embassy—something all the more important now, as Coral’s group would be working to get them out of the city because they needed to get out of there.
Byron, on the other hand, went off to find Olivier, and for several long moments, Emilia simply floated with him, wondering what was happening inside his head. The older clone had only met Olivier the night before, but they had spent a long time talking—becoming friends in a way that was rare for both clones and Olivier.
While sometimes—somehow—dreaming Emilia was aware of what was rolling around within her friends’ heads, this wasn’t one of those times; instead, it was impossible to know what Byron was thinking—whether he was worried for a friend or for what his death might mean for her. The triplets had admitted to her several times that the main reason they had fought so hard for Olivier both here in Lüshan, as well as during other conflicts and the war, was because she needed him. As her lawyer, as her friend, as the man she loved but who didn’t love her back—at least, she hadn’t thought he had.
All the thoughts he’d had about her lingered within her mind, so much want for her—for Halen as well, at times, even if Olivier had been refusing to think of Halen in more than a few sparse moments. It was impossible to say whether she’d ever figured him out, that understanding of who he was and what he thought of her mutilated by the clones’ memory manipulations, or if she’d never gotten there; certainly, the present her hadn’t realized how much he had wanted her that first time they met, nor how often he thought of giving in—and the fact that he had considered asking her out? Had wondered if she and Halen could be his friends?
Those were things she definitely hadn’t known until she’d been planted into the intimacy of his mind. If she remembered any of this, she would have to ask him about it. What she would ask, she had no idea. Clearly, though, she didn’t understand the man she loved and their decades-long, complicated-as-fuck relationship. If she asked, would he tell her?
If she told him she’d had to relive the trauma of Lüshan again—of not knowing whether he was dead or not—maybe he would take pity on her.
✮ ✮ ✮
Emilia’s eyes slammed shut as she tried not to panic, having found no evidence of any way out of that place. Closing her eyes didn’t help, not because it didn’t erase the reality that she might be stuck—might be forced to unleash her willbrand and slice her way through, and really, who knew if that would even work.
No, the real thing that had been digging at her—that had left her hands shaking, her heart a moment from cracking—was the function she’d designed to monitor Olivier.
Two dots, one of which wasn’t moving, the other quickly moving through the city.
The function didn’t give back enough information for her to know which was Olivier, nor whether the one that wasn’t moving was dead or not. Emilia didn’t feel like Olivier was dead—and it felt like she would know, and that was crazy, but she felt like she would know, without a shadow of doubt, if Olivier was really dead.
Olivier didn’t feel dead, so did that mean the one who was moving was him? Or that the dot who wasn’t moving was simply injured?
Emilia didn’t know—couldn’t know—and it wasn’t helping her mental state. All she wanted was a hug, but there was no one to hug her in this cold, metal, prison of death.