There were tons of reasons why Olivier needed to get out of there—what had Cheska called this place? Fräthk’s holding cells? So, effectively a prison, even if one manned by criminals. Lawyers often shared stories of the times they’d been arrested or detained for this or that. Sometimes, they were fun stories—lawyers who had been arrested for beating up a purist and such things—other times, they were more insane. Seriously, how did someone who was arrested in university for holding another boy hostage, so the poor kid would do their kidnapper’s homework, still manage to graduate, let alone be allowed to take the exams to become a lawyer?
The few times he and that man had come across each other in court had been quite enjoyable, Olivier summarily squashing them like the pathetic human they were. Evidently, as much as he was far older than Olivier and
should
have been further along in his career, cheating his way through his classes and running his mouth about holding classmates hostage hadn’t done much to endear him to anyone. While the former just made him a shit lawyer, it hadn’t taken long for the story of his kidnapping—as well as several other unsavoury stories—to pop up on an MemoryBoard dedicated to tracking the careers and personal lives of Baalphoria’s lawyers. Some people didn’t like the MemoryBoard, claiming it was a violation of their right to privacy. As someone whose own privacy had been violated when he was barely sixteen, Olivier didn’t feel too bad for them—none of the things found on the MemoryBoard, after all, were obtained illegally. Instead, it was filled with stories lawyers and people they knew had willingly shared and things that were public record, even if some of it would normally require official requests and more digging to find. Of course, it was always the lawyers with purist connections and other unsavoury things in their past who were complaining about the MemoryBoard.
In the back of his mind, Olivier wondered if this story would make it onto the MemoryBoard. It didn’t portray him in a bad light—not currently, anyways—but it was also so strange that… what would one even do with the knowledge that their lawyer had once been kidnapped by Lüshanian criminals who seemingly didn’t even realize who they were?
Still, it might be a fun story to share with the colleagues he was perpetually trying and failing to connect with. A few people had tried to assure him that as time went on, his age would make less of a difference—what was the difference between a lawyer who had been practicing for a hundred years and one who had only been practicing for eighty, after all? Olivier would believe it when he saw it—didn’t stop him from hoping that, one day, he would be able to find friendships, though.
A handful of faces flashed through his mind—potential friends who had fallen into his path since Emilia appeared in his life.
There was Halen, who had slipped into conversation with him so easily, and even if Olivier now suspected that at least part of that had been Emilia, asking if her former classmate could poke around his attachment to her original version of {{Blissful Silence}}, neither did he think that Halen had been lying in his kindness—in the smiles and laughs and gently shoulder nudges that had seemed to impossibly natural between them. Olivier didn’t think they could be good friends—not right now, anyways—something telling him that it would be impossible to watch Emilia and Halen love one another, while he lingered to the side, alone. One day, though, when the strange attraction he had to Emilia—that he suspected he could easily find himself aiming at Halen, that man having drawn his attention just as easily as Emilia always did—had flittered away… Yeah, maybe then the three of them could be friends, the word a sour stain over his mind and heart.
Byron, the clone he had spent so many hours with the night before, smiled at him through the haze of his memory as well. They’d spent to long talking, mostly about Emilia, but about Byron as well—about the three young men, just a few years older than Emilia, who he had spent the last thirty-some years raising. When Byron had talked of those boys, only a handful of years younger than Olivier himself, it had been clear how much he loved them—how much he intended to keep them as a part of his life for as long as they would let him. Thankfully, he’d said, they seemed to love him back—it wasn’t a given for young clones to love their guardians, apparently. Byron’s pseudo-children loved him, and he loved them back, and Olivier had found that he was a sucker for seeing the clones love and cherish each other—Emilia as well.
That was perhaps why even the Hyrat boys were there, in the flash of his mind wondering if, for as much as he had always imagined himself befriending other lawyers and people who lived in Roasalia, he might actually find the friends he had always wished for within Emilia’s eclectic group of friends. The triplets—as he had heard Emilia refer to them—were odd, and he wasn’t convinced the act they put on, pretending to be more lovers than anything to the amusement and horror of his class, wasn’t actually a reflection of reality. What was clear was how much they adored Emilia, and somewhere along the line, Olivier had accidentally found himself thinking that anyone who liked Emilia automatically had a check in their favour. He had no idea how it had happened, but it had. The girl was just… something—something that had wiggled its way inside him, and now, he couldn’t remove it, only hope the ache of her existence inside him faded.
When Olivier thought of all the reasons there were to escape, the fact that he didn’t want to die was at the top of the list, yet, there also Emilia. As he worked his way through all the skills and functions within his Censor, marking off which ones he thought he could use easily in a fight and which ones he should only attempt to use as a last resort, Olivier felt his mind shifting to the second thing, ridiculous and yet inescapable, that seemed to be pushing him to get out of there—to survive.
While he still thought Emilia’s case a lost cause, in all his testing of skills and functions from the blackaether, he had still thought of a few angles her defence could take. The fact that she had revealed herself to be highly trained with at least a few defensive skills—as her take down of Movree in Seer’ik’tine had shown—had unfortunately rendered some of those angles meaningless, but a few could still be used, maybe. They likely wouldn’t save her from being found guilty, but at least her defence could try—that was assuming he could tell her his thoughts.
So, yeah, he really needed to get out of there. Not just for himself or the Lüshanians trapped there, waiting for their miserable lives to end, but for Emilia and all of the people who loved her as well because there was a good chance she wouldn’t be spending a single day on house arrest; instead, she and her friends would leave, who knew how many of the clones going with her. As much as many Baalphorians were afraid of the clones and the power they represented, the reality was that they were an integral part of Baalphoria.
Occasionally, a politician would argue that other nations managed to get on well enough without a form of law enforcement that could dig into their citizens’ minds, but Olivier knew that wasn’t exactly true. Despite being no expert on the Free Colonies, he had spent enough time within them over the last few years to have heard whispers. It was said that Dion’s Inner Court had a group capable of sniffing out lies, that Falrion had a specific irregular deviation said to allow carriers to drag truths from a person. The synat of Nur’tha could allegedly read the will of the aether to see a person’s past and future—although, most of the continent didn’t believe such things were possible. From the bits Olivier had heard over the years, only the most powerful synat were skilled enough to purposefully grasp at anything that might be seen within the aether; instead, the average synat’s abilities seemed more random—like catching raindrops between splayed fingers, letting fate determine which drops would touch your skin.
One day, Olivier hoped to be able to visit Nur’tha. It wasn’t exactly a nation Baalphorians
couldn’t
visit—not like Falrion or Mitine Dyn were, with their strict borders—nor was it simply not recommended—as visiting Jinkai, with its tumultuous government and haphazard laws, was. Nur’tha’s tribes were nomadic, was the problem. Some tribes had semi-permanent settlements, but the result was the same: there was no easy way to coordinate a visit, no accommodations within the sprawling Free Colony without a significant amount of time and effort, which was largely limited to the rare diplomatic visit.
All that was to say that Baalphorian politicians arguing for the destruction of the Hyrat clones—and by
destruction
most really did seem to mean by culling every one of them, rather than letting those who currently existed die naturally—were either woefully uneducated on the abilities of their Free Colony neighbours, or they were wilfully skewing and hiding the truth. Without the Hyrat clones, Baalphoria would be a different place, and according to the votes of politicians—the majority of whom always voted against even pulling in the clones’ power, which hadn’t been used against the government or public in generations—most didn’t want to see what that Baalphoria would be like.
That
was also an angle to take, he supposed: someone could always threaten the government with the reality that continuing to pursue charges against Emilia might send a significant portion of the Hyrat clones, not to mention some of The Black Knot’s children and their sub-30 friends, into self-imposed exile. It might work… or it might completely backfire—whoever had pushed for the charges could very well not care or actually be hoping that finding Emilia guilty might push some of those people out of Baalphoria’s borders.
Making a note in his Censor to look into who had pushed for charges—presumably the SecOps parent of the boy Emilia had killed, but he probably should poke around and confirm that—Olivier scanned through the suggestions his Censor had been popping out, covering everything from how to escape to how to quickly get information from new allies about their abilities. The suggestions were all coming out of a function Axelle had given him to help work through problems of
how
a person had decided to do one thing or another—a reverse engineering of human psychology or sorts. The function was actually meant for people who were playing some sort of war game. A lot of information could go into it—and it seemed to have the ability to pseudo-lock specific skills and functions in order to make the game more enjoyable, or perhaps more difficult? Olivier was unsure. What he was sure of, despite his cousin having no idea who had designed it—apparently it had been released anonymously on an AetherealBoard dedicated to players, who could also upload their particular setups and storylines onto it—was that it had come from either Emilia or Halen—possibly both. Most likely, it was a product of the
prank war
that Lan’za had spoken of, each story she told of their ongoing war another drop into the bucket that said Emilia could have spared the life of the boy she killed. Now, thanks to Byron, he knew more of the reasons behind her decision to kill him, rather than spare him—knew that when Byron said that everyone was glad Emilia had killed the boy, rather than risk giving him yet another chance, Olivier couldn’t exactly disagree.
The boy had been dangerous, and from what Byron had said, there had been dozens of chances to help him—to remove him from a situation that had clearly been escalating into one that had the potential to become fatal. Yet, the people who were supposed to help him hadn’t just failed; instead, they had seemingly been active participants in making sure he stayed in those situations, making sure he didn’t get the help he needed.
It was so frustrating. There
should
have been dozens of angles to come at Emilia’s case from; yet, each of them was a fizzle of potential, laws and precedents falling over Olivier’s mind because the law that Emilia was being charged under was, in the end, a slap over the soul of someone who had annoyed the government. It wasn’t a law meant to be applied evenly or in every circumstance; instead, it was a law meant to be brought out when nothing else worked.
A law meant to punish someone, not for the crime that had supposedly been committed, but for every other slight the person had committed that the government couldn’t stamp down upon them.
It was frustrating and ridiculous, and Olivier wished he could do something. The reality still remained, however, that even if he took her case, he would be no more successful than any other lawyer.
Still, he wanted to try. Still, his mother would never allow him to do so.
So, in the end, all he could do was get out of there—get back to that girl with her infuriating smile and give her all the thoughts he had on her case. They wouldn’t help, but Emilia deserved to know that someone was trying to help her, even if it was a lost cause.
A pop of blue appeared in Olivier’s vision once more, Cheska staring him down with a bright smile that didn’t quite spread over her features with the same cheerful, carelessness as earlier. That was, in a way, good; Olivier didn’t need the girl to speak to know that her smile had faded because she had also accepted the reality that in order for some of them to get out of there, others would need to be left behind.
Maybe their escape wouldn’t be a lost cause if they attempted to take everyone, but it was enough of a risk that as much as it was terrible, they would likely need to leave some behind. At the very least, Olivier didn’t think he would need to argue with Cheska over it—he was fighting his own heart, bursting to try and help everyone who fell into their path, enough as it was.
.
!
Arc 9 | Chapter 431: To Fight an Aching Heart
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