Emilia forced her core to cooperate—or, she intended to force it, anyways. Fortunately, it was just as aware as she was that they needed to get as far from that man as possible. So, when she pressed her core outwards, extending it through the tunnels, planning to use her energy to create a makeshift map so she could find the next nearest exit, lest he decided that no, actually, he did want to kill her, it didn’t complain. Instead, it gave back a haphazard map of what her energy vibrated through. It was crude—barely useable, except that she was microsparking through the tunnels, quickly determining what was accurate and what wasn’t. The general shape was right, so she didn’t doubt the
different material
it had noted a little ways away was probably accurate and hopefully an exit of some sort.
The base of her skull, where her Censor was installed, burned—overheating because she was pushing it way too hard between the impromptu mapping and her microsparking and the defensive skills spiralling out of her. Oh, there were also the panicked messages spiking into her.
Apparently that room hadn’t just blocked her ability to send messages but had also made her look, well, dead. Good to know, the knowledge a little balm on her soul because maybe
that
was what had happened to Olivier? Why he still showed up as dead?
Honestly, Emilia hadn’t even known that criminals—or at least those in Lüshan—were capable of blocking Censors like that. Part of her wondered whether other nations knew techniques to block Censors, and if The Black Knot knew. None of the clones in the group relay had mentioned anything about blocking technology potentially being the cause of Olivier’s Censor going offaether. Then again, who knew if it was normally a mobile technology—certainly, the few cases of purposeful Censor blocking she knew of in Dion were based in old, finicky buildings that had extravagant etchings that worked through ley lines, which few people knew how to utilize anymore. Instead, it was more common that Free Colony tech accidentally interfered with the aethernet’s reach, the most notable cases being in Mitine Dyn and Jinkai, or there simply wasn’t an aethernet hub nearby, and in both those cases, last location pings usually told the OIC System that a person was about to go offaether. Hence, it usually didn’t mark the person as dead! Hence, whatever had been blocking her Censor wasn’t something that the OIC System had expected!
Considering all of that, it could just be that the clones hadn’t wanted to get her hopes up by suggesting that suddenly, out of nowhere, a rarely seen Censor blocking technology might have a mobile version as well.
Questions to ask later. For the moment, while she knew everyone who had seen her contact information disappear as though she were dead was freaking out, that was a problem for later. Mostly, it was her friends, who had pulled up their group relay to communicate with one another while they worked on getting to her. The other place people were asking what had happened were the various Black Knot group relays she belonged to, although there was significantly less freaking out in those because those relays took a while to assume the person actually dead, which, now that she thought about it, actually seemed a bit… suspect, and if The Black Knot hadn’t known about the buildings that could block Censors she was going to have questions for them. While she was focusing on getting out of there, Emilia didn’t have time to deal with that or the people now asking if she was okay—as previously noted, her Censor was already burning. So, other than sending a blanket message of
later
to everyone who was messaging her, Emilia just muted all communication.
In a few minutes, when she was safe, she would tell everyone what was happening. For now…
Skidding to a stop in front of a door, this one built into a wall and presumably leading to a staircase, Emilia sucked in a deep breath and pressed her hand to the back of her neck. Cooling down Censors with any skill, let alone your own, was virtually impossible. Cooling skills just took so much out of a person—it was why most cooling skills worked more to slowly affect the air itself, creating a bubble of coolness that would bring in more oxygen as needed, while keeping the air that had already been cooled close to the person. With her Censor already burning hot, emergency alerts going off in her mind and being pushed down by her Censor because getting away had been considered a higher priority than keeping itself from frying, she tried to get it at least a little cooler.
It didn’t even take the edge off, although the temperature did go down the tiniest bit.
Fortunately, her Censor was in an accommodating mood, and when she checked the door for traps with her core, it easily acquiesced. The effort made her stomach turn—and to be fair, it was already roiling from what she’d seen that man do.
All that blood and gore.
All that screaming.
Emilia… didn’t really feel bad for the Drinarna officers. One had been threatening to rape her while the others seemed perfectly happy to let him, and they’d all intended to kill her, after all. Plus, they’d had some part in Olivier’s disappearance, even if it may have only been a passive part—something like being aware that
something
would happen that would allow them into that place but no knowledge of the specifics. That alone… Fuck. How many other people had they hurt for whatever they were doing? How many people would be hurt as this situation devolved around them?
Still, as she popped out the other side of the door, sending off a message to Norrayn and Raalian to let them know that she wasn’t dead and they needed to meet up with the clones as quickly as possible, Emilia mourned for the officers, just a little.
People didn’t just magically become bad people, was the thing. Some people thought black knots and lavender codes were inherently bad, and sure, some black knots were definitely recruited into The Black Knot because they were considered a threat and needed to be monitored, but more often than not, all the badness started somewhere external from their genetics, usually when they were kids with little control of their lives. Parents fucked up their kids, as did bullies and other shitty adults, each passing on their own hatred and trauma to the people who fell into their path.
Sometimes it was intentional—or, at least, the actions that caused the shifting within the child’s mind towards being a bad person wasn’t something benign. Violence and sexual assault, neglect and harsh words that inevitably dug themselves under the skin until they were nigh impossible to remove. Other times, it was the unintentional things that caused the most damage—those things that when pointed to would cause other people to roll their eyes, as though the things that traumatized a person had to meet some threshold of maliciousness, even within the inherently fragile mind of a child.
Polianna, for all that Emilia didn’t like her, had struggled with her weight and food for almost as long as they had known one another. For Polianna, it had become one of those things that were impossible to shake—this monster of self-hatred and over-awareness for every calorie that touched her lips that she may never escape. It was all because of one little comment, overheard between people she didn’t even know when she was too young, some glitch in her mood, some flinch in her mind, causing the comments to become ingrained in who she was.
So yeah, Emilia understood how the smallest of things could twist a person’s insides. Part of her could appreciate that whatever had caused those Drinarna officers to become the monsters she had seen inside that room, it likely wasn’t their fault. Sometimes, therapy wouldn’t help—not therapy for their mental health nor for their knots. So, she allowed a moment of mourning for the people they had been before those pivotal points in their lives—for the innocent children they must have been, if only briefly. Then she was pushing thoughts of them out of herself and bursting out the door at the top of the stairwell… if
bursting
could be used when she had been forced, yet again, to stop and check the fucking thing for traps!
Seriously, this was going to get old fast. It was also something of an issue. It was perfectly possible that man was the one behind the trap she had disabled—so far the only one she’d come across—but there could be far more people in the city capable of setting such complicated, dangerous traps. Even if it was just the one man, that still told her almost nothing; with as much power as he had, it wouldn’t surprise her if he was high up in whatever organization he belonged to, his traps extending who knew how far.
What a disaster. She really needed to find Olivier and get the fuck out of the city. Hopefully the Drinarna would just let them leave. If their corruption went too high, who really knew. It was unlikely that Wander, chief of the Drinarna, was involved. Those directly under him, however? Who fucking knew. The corruption that had allowed sex trafficking to be so lucrative in Lüshan back when all that had gone down had been far-reaching, and while Wander had thought he’d stomped it all out…
It was just too easy for those inflected with one sort of corruption to fall into another sort, was the thing—and realistically, it was far more likely that Wander had missed some of the corrupt officers, rather than assume that a whole different sort of corruption had either existed since back them or popped up in the meantime, completely separate from the officers enabling and profiting from the sex traffickers.
Fucking mess.
The building Emilia popped up in appeared to be abandoned—interesting, then, that the mystery man had set up a base at the bakery, rather than here—and when she stuck her head out the front door, she found herself in an area of Falmíer she’d never visited before because it was
the bad part
of the city. Due to the influence of the Drinarna, that didn’t mean much—at least, that’s what she would have said when they arrived.
Previously, Emilia would have said that while there were definitely criminals in the city, they had become pretty uncommon after the trafficking group was taken out. The Drinarna just had too much power, and without an easy way to leave the city without their permission, being a criminal was just difficult. There were still crime groups in Lüshan—Emilia didn’t think it was possible to have a nation without some criminal organization or another forming—but they were supposed to be small, weak. That man definitely hadn’t been weak, and sure, Emilia didn’t think there were any members of the Drinarna capable of taking him on—or if there were, she’d never heard of them, and it certainly wasn’t like those Drinarna officers had been capable of taking him on. No… if anything, they seemed to have been sent to their veritable death, even if they had seemed surprised that he’d shown up so quickly.
So, was the guy and his power an outlier? Or was something bigger happening in the nation? Emilia was willing to bet the latter because as she peeked out the door, there was a veritable fire fight going on in the street!
Not going out that way, then. She personally had no more desire to get involved in whatever war was brewing between the Drinarna and some criminal organization—possibly multiple organizations, or different factions of one, if her suspicions turned out to be true.
Backtracking, Emilia used {Hidey Hole} to slip into another building, startling the people who lived there.
“Gœfrta!” she cheered as she ran past the couple and the child they’d pulled close to their chests. Feeling a little bad for scaring the child, Emilia activated a cute, decorative skill before opening another instance of {Hidey Hole} and finding her way outside, the laughter of the child vanishing as it snapped shut behind her.
Fortunately, she’d gone through the painful process of upgrading her Censor using specs out of The Ridge Rind. It wasn’t something most people did, outside of soldiers and high-ranking law enforcement. A bunch of them had gotten theirs upgraded when The Black Knot had been upgrading a number of their agents. While she and Halen in particular had messed around with it, Emilia could definitely see why most people would never bother upgrading: the pain and readjustment period had sucked, and even in their prank war, the upgrades had made little difference. Mostly, it was because in their prank war, their Censors wouldn’t let them push their minds and Censors so far that the new version’s enhanced cooling made any difference, and neither of them ever did anything so insane that the slight increase in processing power did much.
Now, she could appreciate those small improvements so much more, and while she was increasingly concerned about so many of her friends heading her way—after all, few of them would be able to check for aether-based traps, let alone disarm them—she was happy that at least they’d have a little bit of extra help. Most of them would, anyways. Some…
Some, she worried about, for so many reasons.
Maybe… maybe she should convince them to stay in Dion? Or maybe in Seer’ik’tine, if they hadn’t left there yet? Or… they shouldn’t even be there yet, should they? Emilia was a bit foggy on the details and timing of their rescue attempt. The details hadn’t really been important, since she’d been thinking that by the time her friends were anywhere close to getting there, their help wouldn’t be needed. Baalphoria was far away, after all, and the fastest she’d ever managed to get anywhere near the Lüshanian-Dionese border from their home was over eight hours. That was far too long; hence, while she thought they were all asking for trouble by coming this way, it was more because the Baalphorian government was going to flip, not because they’d actually be putting themselves in danger by entering Lüshan.
Eyes skimming through the group relay and cringing when she realized her sudden
death
had caused Valor to fall off the trans-Dion aetherstream, taking several people with him—fortunately, they were all okay—Emilia realized that she was wrong. Halen had somehow—and she was totally forcing him to tell her what the fuck he had done—managed to get them significantly into Dion already.
At this rate… two hours—maybe a little more. That was all it was going to take for them to reach Falmíer—to reach her.
Just over eight hours, cut down to barely two and a half.
Fuck—Emilia wasn’t sure what to think of that. What she did know, however, was that she didn’t want anyone she liked in this place any longer than necessary.
.
!
Arc 9 | Chapter 386: Upgrades Aren’t Useful (unless you’re running for your life)
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