Emilia didn’t know what to do. So far, she’d just been running around the maze that was the Falmíer underground—which, who knew this place even existed? The few other times she’d ended up under the city itself, she’d ended up in the sewers. It had been disgusting, that running through sewer overflow with a gaggle of trafficking victims chasing after her, their own stench so profound they had barely wrinkled their noses at the reek of the sewers.
Shit had sputtered under their feet—some of them bare. When they’d finally managed to get out of there, into safe arms and the waiting attention of doctors, they’d all needed shots, their lungs inflamed from all the fumes and shit and piss they’d inhaled. It had been disgusting, yet, the lives those people had lived until Emilia had let herself be kidnapped, hoping to save them, had been far worse—so much worse that when doctors and social workers had asked if they wanted showers, some of them had simply asked
why?
Why
, as though they had forgotten they were covered in the filth of themselves, their companions, and the entire fucking city. Blood and gore, shit and piss and vomit and who the fuck knew what else. Yet,
why
—
why would we want to bathe?
Emilia hoped life never flattened her with such horrors—never turned her into a shard of herself, reflecting the world in a distortion that no one save those who had experienced similar horrors could ever hope to appreciate. One could understand the mentality of those victims, who had been stolen from their homes and left to rot in their filth as they were taunted by criminals over their impending fate as slaves within the terror of Chinsata and whoever else their slavers sold them off to. Emilia didn’t think anyone who hadn’t been there in their shoes could truly
get it
. Having been there for a few hours, she understood but the tiniest sliver, and as she ran through the underground, fumes from the sewers belong wafting around her—chasing her like the stink of a city rotting not just below but everywhere—it was gross, but she knew it was nothing compared to even that tiny bit of disgusting existence she had experienced.
This was nothing—not when compared to even the specks of misery she had experienced; certainly nothing compared to those innocent souls who had been sold and stolen for the greed of criminals who knew Chinsata paid well for the slaves offered up to them.
Still, she would have complained a bit, had she anyone to complain to. While she could complain to Malcolm—or to the abyss that currently was their group relay—she could feel the strain in every word he uttered, and he was not taking the situation well. That was somewhat unsurprising—this was his first real incident involving any of the handful of people he actually cared about, after all. Just as he had taken Finn being forced into a job they had all known he couldn’t handle badly—everyone was rather surprised Malcolm hadn’t killed the
older clones
who had ordered Finn to complete that mission—Emilia had known her childhood friend—her older brother, in many ways—wouldn’t take well to her being in danger. This was a test, in a way: a question of whether he would crack under the pressure and his mothers would have to reassess their plans for the future leadership of The Black Knot. While it was unlikely they imagined Malcolm at the top of the organization—the person who sat at the top needed more people skills than Malcolm would ever have—he was meant to sit high, to be someone of importance. If he couldn’t handle her—problem child that she was—being in danger…
Well, Emilia didn’t want to poke and prod him more than necessary when he was clearly already struggling. She also didn’t want him to realize a bunch of her crazy friends were currently on their way to Lüshan—he didn’t need that stress as well, even if telling him would mean she could get him to fill them in on the details she couldn’t tell them, due to the locked messages, she wasn’t quite desperate enough to tell him yet—and if she started complaining to him about such nonsense when she knew he was busy, the man would become suspicious as to why she was complaining to him.
Better to just not message him… or anyone. That was the real problem: virtually all of her friends were currently on their way to her—something she still thought was rather stupid, but she knew her friends well enough to know very few of them would be swayed by her attempts to talk them out of coming, especially without being able to tell them the whole of the situation. This left her with no one to complain to—not unless she wanted to use her xphern, and that would probably end with her running into a wall.
As she continued racing around the underground, eyes flickering over the occasional mark that
something
had been through the area recently—her heart shuddering in hope that those marks had been left by whoever took Olivier and they weren’t leading her fuck knew where—her mind shifted through the people she knew were coming. Most were people she knew would never be talked out of coming. A few, however, she might have been able to talk into staying, and she might have, except their group of friends didn’t leave anyone to face problems alone, even if abandoning them was the more sane option. Emilia knew that for those few people who might be willing to leave her alone in Lüshan without support she might end up needing…
No—that was the sort of thing that would cause them to be expelled from their friend group, and Emilia couldn’t suggest those people stay behind knowing that would happen. Still, a piece of her wondered if it would be better to let those few people fade out of their group; certainly, a few members of their group had long been suggesting a few of their childhood friends no longer fit with the rest of them.
Emilia couldn’t really disagree, but neither would she actively expel them without a good reason, especially when they might drag other friends from their group with their kicking and screaming. Better that they accept they didn’t belong anymore—go find friends they fit better with. Hopefully, as the next decade of freedom stretched around them, as they transitioned into education and careers apart from one another, they would find a better place for themselves. Probably, for most of the people who crossed her mind, it would be somewhere with fewer troublemakers.
Those troublemakers were a large reason why so few of her friends would ever be talked out of coming for her, even if it meant certain death—which she hoped to the stars above wouldn’t become the final note of this situation. Still, even aside from not wanting to leave her without help, so many of the people she knew would never turn down the opportunity to dive into whatever this situation might become, the itch of adventure and excitement over their skin too strong for them to ever resist. Maybe it would turn out to be nothing—simply a case of mistaken identity: Olivier awakening to find himself kidnapped before politely informing whoever had taken him that he wasn’t who they were looking for. The kidnappers would let him go, and they’d get the fuck back to the ship—after finding all the missing students, of course.
Norrayn had become her contact person back in the museum and was sending her regular updates about the nonsense going on with Olivier’s students. The situation there was… chaotic. Just as she’d seen, in the moments between realizing Olivier was gone and taking off to find him, the class had been quickly fracturing into two main factions: those who were panicking that their teacher and chaperone were gone, and those who were taking Olivier’s disappearance as a chance to take off and explore the city on their own terms. Norrayn and Raalian—the boy who was good at defusing arguments, even if almost everyone assumed he was just a bobble brained boy, constantly stumbling into arguments—hadn’t panicked and were currently managing the students who had stuck around. They were currently waiting for clones from the embassy to get to them. Depending on the state of the students and situation when they got there, the clones would either remove them to the embassy or try to get them back to the ship. With things so up in the air, Emilia had a feeling they’d be going to the embassy.
There were also a few clones out looking for the students who had fucked off. Unfortunately, there weren’t too many clones in the city to begin with, and as they were all trying to keep a relatively low profile in case the situation was a fuse waiting to be lit, they had to be slow and methodical in their search.
The general opinion of… pretty much everyone—the local clones, Malcolm, Norrayn and Raalian and all the students still with them, as well as Emilia herself—was that if anything happened to the idiots who had taken off, that was a
them
problem. They’d dug themselves into problems when they left, and seriously!? What kind of dumbasses leave when their teacher has just vanished? Did they have a death wish? They all deserved to suffer some sort of consequence for their stupidity, and while Emilia wasn’t
actually
wishing death on them, if someone got hurt because they’d taken off…
Yeah, if one of the clones out looking for them died while searching, Emilia might kill all those idiots herself. Fuckers. For all she knew, they had seen something—some clue as to where Olivier had gone and what had happened. They’d all disappeared and weren’t answering anyone’s relays. The only reason Emilia wasn’t assuming they weren’t all dead was because, outside of group relays, Censors bounced messages back as undeliverable if the person’s Censor wasn’t available. There were few situations where that happened: the person was dead, within {A Private Moment}, or were somewhere that was offaether—like the de la Rue bunker and other secure data and research facilities. There were a few other circumstances where messages were temporarily undeliverable—such as when they were asleep, or the person had set themselves as unavailable—but those had specific messages that bounced back to the sender.
Nothing came through on any of the relays Emilia or Norrayn sent—even Malcolm’s vaguely threatening messages got nothing. Therefore, it was highly unlikely any of the missing students were dead or kidnapped. No, they were just being assholes, not even responding to queries of whether they’d seen anything before taking off.
They could all go fuck themselves, and—
Emilia’s mind froze as the scent of something that very much was not the stench of human waste and the rotting dead—she wasn’t stupid enough to not think there were dead animals and even the occasional human corpse decaying in the sewers that ran beneath any city—reaching her nose. Part of the reason she hadn’t just activated a skill to disperse the scent raging against her senses was exactly this: while {Blissful Silence} could certainly dampen her sense of smell and still try to catalogue all the muted scents she passed by, it had never been optimized to do so—it wasn’t like she usually found herself in circumstances so disgusting she regretted having a nose!
That created a problem of the function
probably
having the capacity to catch anything odd and not of the normal sewer variety.
Probably
it would have caught whatever it was that she was smelling now—something sweet, almost like a baked good—but maybe it wouldn’t have. Emilia couldn’t take that risk, and while she’d definitely added expanding {Blissful Silence}’s cataloguing abilities onto her to-do list—a terrible thing, given she’d have to descend into other sewers and landfills and even more scent-heavy locations as part of her testing the scent aspect for overwhelm to the function—she could do nothing but suffer the smell and actively force her nose and mind
not
to acclimate to the grotesque world she was subjecting them to. A good thing she was, too, as the sweet scent might have been lost had she been forcing her nose to resist computing all the input it was getting.
Following the scent—which amazingly she’d caught several turns away, almost as though the shifts of the air flowing through the maze of tunnels had purposefully brought it to her—Emilia saw more signs of something having been through there recently. A smudge through the grime of the floor, revealing the cool grey stone under all the black filth of unknown, repulsive, origins. Drops of blood over the ground, soaking into that blackness so quickly she couldn't see them, but with the techniques she had been taught by the Blood Rain General and converted into persistent functions she could feel them, vibrating with energy that felt familiar.
Emilia didn’t know whether to hope it was the familiar feel of blood she had never seen but slept near just the night before or not. Blood meant Olivier was injured, but at the same time, this wasn’t nearly enough blood to have been fatal—there wasn’t even enough for her to think using one of The Black Knot’s crime scene investigation skills would give her any information about how injured he’d been, whether his heart had still been pumping blood when these droplets had splattered out of him.
That was… probably good. No, definitely good—Emilia was known to be all sunshine and smiles and unending optimism. Quite often, that was a shifting of her personality within the minds of people who didn’t know her well, or just wanted to think her someone who easily brushed aside problems as nothing to frown or fret over. That wasn’t the real her, although she certainly had more optimism than a plenty of people she met.
Right now, she would drag up that positivity and
believe
—believe that Olivier was okay, that this blood was his, and the reason there was so little was because he had been able to put pressure on his injury, cutting off the flow of life out of him.
Just be positive; just be optimistic—at least, she’d be those things until the universe gave her a reason to give up hope.
Arc 9 | Chapter 381: No One to Complain To
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