“Freedom!” Emilia cheered as she reached the top of the stairs. Almost immediately, she cringed, eyes clamping shut. “Please don’t just be a landing before there are more stairs. Please don’t just be a landing before there are more stairs. Please, please, please, please, please, please don’t just be a landing before there are more stairs,” she chanted to herself as she opened an eye, peering around the large, empty room.

“Yes,” she cheered, doing a little fist pump when there were no stairs in sight.

Unfortunately, the room was so large that it stretched out into the eerie darkness, its walls disappearing much too quickly. So, there could be stairs just out of sight, but she wasn’t going to think about that. Instead, Emilia sent her wisp of enthusiastic energy, which had recovered while it napped—or rested, although that seemed too boring a word to describe anything the little wisp did—surging out into the world.

She had spent the majority of her time climbing—which had not been insignificant in length—practising using her core. It had gone much better without the running or her stalker’s magic surging after her. The practice had been worth it, even if it had quickly grown boring and tiresome. Now, she felt relatively more confident at using her energy and core for both examining the world, and more importantly, keeping her muscles from collapsing under her.

Her energy zipped around the room, the translucent blur vanishing into the dark, while Emilia went the other way. Quickly, the doorway she had emerged from slipping away, into the darkness, and Emilia skittered towards the wall. Given how untrustworthy this place was, what with its fabricated lamps and books, and changing, yet infinite hallways and mysterious monsters, she didn’t really think it would do her much good to know which direction the staircase had once existed, but it couldn’t hurt either… unless the wall had eaten Rin or the asshole who had been chasing her—not to mention the asshole’s missing companion—and she should actually be keeping her distance from it. Personally, Emilia didn’t really want to add her name to that unfortunate list, although at least then she’d end up with the others? Maybe?

A droplet of her energy pricked against the back of her neck, shooting through her body to rest in her core. Information seeped out of it. Blackness. Nothingness. More searching.

More searching indeed.

Emilia sighed as she trudged on. Once, she’d loved things like this. She wasn’t sure if it was age or the war or all her knots, but now it just seemed tedious and stupid. This place was simultaneously a puzzle and an endless tunnel, just guiding her along. Hopefully, it was at least guiding her towards the heartcore—or an exit. Emilia would also take an exit, or her friend. For all she knew, this place could end up being a boring maze she’d be spending the next 20 some days inside.

That would suck.

The sound of something hitting the ground stopped Emilia in her tracks, her eyes shooting towards the general direction it had come from. She waited, watching and listening for anything else in the darkness. Nothing came, and Emilia glared into the abyss. She was almost positive she had heard something. She couldn’t completely rule out stress or hallucinations, but she had spent so long dealing with those in her regular life that she could usually tell the difference.

That particular sound hadn’t sounded like a figment of her imagination, stress swirling through her until it exploded out into the world as something there and not there all at once. When she’d been fresh from the war, she hadn’t always been able to tell what was real and what not, and to this day, there were still a few hallucinations she wasn’t positive hadn’t actually been her accidentally using skills.

Worry that she could be losing control of not just her mind but her abilities as well had been part of the reason she had started knotting herself. She had seen a therapist once, before deciding to hit up an illegal shop. The therapist had looked at her knots, tied up from decades of unresolvable trauma, and deemed them impossible to remove.

“Maybe with a few decades of counselling they will unknot naturally enough for a knot therapist to unknot the rest,” they’d said.

Emilia had been able to hear the lie in their voice. They had thought her too broken. She hadn’t been able to argue, and every moment running around like that had been another moment closer to potentially losing control of herself and blasting a hole in the world.

Blasting another hole in the world.

Emilia’s feet scuffed the ground as she continued walking, not seeing the sense in lingering while something or someone maybe watched her from the dark. Her worst fear was she’d get out of here, feel the way Payton had stretched and reformed her genes and hate how it felt—that she’d drop back into that paranoid, near cracking soldier she’d been a decade ago.

Ironic as it would be, for the country to be inadvertently wiped out because one of their so-called war heroes accidentally blew it up in a haze of traumatic hallucinations, it wasn’t exactly how she wanted things to end. She’d been responsible for enough deaths in the war—some avoidable, many more not—she wasn’t going to kill anyone else, not unless she had to.

Emilia twisted, blood blade sliding through the air as someone else’s weapon nearly collided with her. Whatever the weapon had been, it vanished as soon as her own blade touched it, drops of blood splattering through the air and forcing her to dart backwards. “Why, hello there, little stalker,” she said sweetly, ignoring the blood now wiggling on the ground as she twirled her blade idly.

Out of the dark, a young boy appeared, walking slowly towards her. “Ah~ I’m sorry!” the boy swallowed out, his voice shaky and innocent sounding. “I was just afraid and…” he trailed off, biting a thick bottom lip as he looked nervously around.

“And?” Emilia asked, concern lacing her voice as she pushed her skepticism aside in favour of some maternal worry. She wasn’t a mother, but she knew enough great and terrible ones to know how to reflect the perpetual care, concern and acceptance the better ones had. Her own mother was excellent at making her children feel like scum for doing wrong without actually saying anything negative towards them.

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Sometimes, her kindness was part of her plot to force her children to confess what they had been up to. More often, making her children feel bad wasn’t the woman’s goal, just an unfortunate side effect of her kindness. Her mother was just so naturally kind and concerned, and the fact that her soft acceptance of errors had once accidentally caused Emilia to burst into tears over a dropped plate of food was part of the reason she was avoiding her parents.

She may have been about seven at the time of the plate dropping incident, but it was still a totally valid reason for avoiding the woman! Olivier’s kindness had been bad enough. She didn’t need her mother’s as well.

And stars above, she most certainly didn’t need whatever she’d get from her father.

Sometimes, it would have been easier to have parents like Olivier’s. Actually, parents like Rafe’s would be even better. Rafe’s moms were a whole different breed, and they had certainly never made their children feel loved or cared for. They were nice and neutral, neither too concerned about their children nor too apathetic.

For the moment, however, she needed to channel her own mother’s ability to get answers with a smile. Kind and suspicious and ruthless when she needed to be. That woman knew when to put on a smile and wait for her children to either confess their crimes or fuck up and accidentally reveal something that would lead her back to whatever nonsense they had gotten up to.

Emilia needed this boy—if he even was one, given how the appearance editor had allowed them to so drastically alter everything about their appearance, including their age—to fuck up and prove he wasn’t actually the innocent boy he was pretending to be.

Two could play at being innocent, naive children.

The boy licked his lips, eyes darting nervously around. “And there was a guy with me. Before. We were separated a while back. Or… he disappeared? It was weird.”

“Just a ‘guy with you?’” Emilia asked, trying to keep her eyes as subtly glued to the kid as she dared. She didn’t want him to outright know she didn’t trust him, but she also wasn’t about to just let him stray into a blind spot—especially since she had no idea how convincing her trusting act was. She’d always been a pretty good liar and actress, but that was in normal, everyday life. This was a raid, where everyone was bound to be running on paranoia and killing instinct.

Plus, with her knots doing stars knew what, she wasn’t even sure she could trust her own perception of herself.

“Oh…” The boy glanced away, his steps halting a little ways away from her. He fiddled with the hem of his shirt, a ratty burnt-brown thing. He wasn’t wearing shoes, either, and the cuffs of his pants were torn to shreds from being too long. Mud was caked to the bottoms, really selling the whole innocent—if potentially homeless—child look.

“He was… someone who was helping me? Sort of. He was creepy. I didn’t like that he was chasing you.” His faced twisted, hands digging into the fabric of his shirt. He looked almost like he was about to cry. “He wasn’t very nice. Not to me or anyone else.”

His eyes met Emilia’s, so much pain ripping through them that she was almost inclined to believe him. She might have, if not for the fact that she’d seen some of Olivier’s memories of her and knew she could be just as convincing in her lies. Everyone had some terrible memory they could summon up to draw out of time and place emotions across their features. Maybe this boy had really been hurt by the psycho who’d been chasing her, maybe not.

“I’m sorry,” Emilia said, sliding her suspicions behind a friendly smile. “My friend disappeared as well. She was a local, so her colouring was all… red.” She laughed, throwing enthusiasm into it, hiding every thought she had about the boy behind her own innocent, ignorant mask.

“I haven’t seen her,” the boy said.

“Too bad,” Emilia sighed, letting her eyes flicker away from the boy for the slightest moment. When her eyes turned back to him, he was still standing there wearing a blankly worried face. “Shall we? I don’t really know where I’m going, but I figure moving is the best option. I think the guy you were with might have been, ah… eaten by something? I don’t know about you, but I don’t really fancy being monster chow.”

The boy blinked, expression barely changing at the revelation that his companion, someone who had hurt him, was likely dead. “Yes, let’s go.”

Emilia’s smile widened as she walked towards him. He didn’t look nervous, even when she was right there, staring into his eyes—light-brown meeting silver. She looped an arm through his—because she certainly wasn’t going to be letting him walk behind her—and off they went.

“I’m Emilia,” she said, wondering not for the first time if giving out her real name had been the smartest decision.

The OIC System might make it relatively hard for anyone who didn’t want to be found to be found, but she also knew her old friends and family mostly didn’t find her through other means because they were polite enough to know finding her would send her running. Well, a decade ago—maybe even six or seven years ago—it would have, anyways. Now, she had connections she wasn’t as willing to lose. Now, when she ran into her past through Olivier, the thought of running had barely occurred to her.

Still, if she ran into anyone she knew in here, they would immediately figure out who she was—how many silverstrain Emilia’s who were insane enough to join a raid like this could there be in Baalphoria? Not a lot, that was for sure.

“Cade,” the boy said in return.

Emilia glanced at him. He was tense beside her—far more tense than he’d been before, his arm ridged under her. “How old are you, Cade?”

“Thirty-one,” Cade replied immediately.

Emilia nodded to herself, telling him thirty-one was a good age. Her own thirty-one had been a celebration and a funeral. A celebration because she was free—because she wasn’t going to jail for life. A funeral because she had lost something of herself during that long year of court, and it had taken over a decade to find it again.

Sometimes, she wondered if she’d ever actually found it again, or if she’d just been fooling herself.

“Is this your first raid like this?” she asked, trying to distract herself from that particular strain of thought. This probably-lying-and-conniving boy didn’t need to hear her moan about how terrible her life was even before the war.

“Yes.” Not going to be a talkative partner/potential enemy, then.

Emilia was just opening her mouth to say something else when her energy came surging back towards her. The boy, luckily, didn’t seem to notice it plunge into the base of her skull.

Information flashed through her, garbled and all but unintelligible. The only thing she could understand was that her energy had found something back there. Unfortunately, she now had a companion, and she didn’t necessarily want him to know she had any control of her core, let alone that she could send her energy out on spying missions.

Slowly, another piece of her energy slithered out of her. It shot backwards, sacrificing itself to explode into a flash of light and sound back where she had emerged from the stairwell—closer to where her energy vibes were telling her something was located.

“Ah!” Emilia cried, the perfect picture of innocent confusion, concern and curiosity. “What was that?” She squeaked as the boy turned around, her body swinging awkwardly around with him.

“We should go back,” he said, his innocent act dropping away before abruptly reappearing. “As long as you think that’s a good idea? I don’t really know, but…” He looked off into the direction they’d been heading before the explosion had attracted their attention. “I’d rather go towards the light than the dark.”

Emilia blinked wide, innocent eyes up at him. “Sure!” she said, smiling warmly at him. “I don’t see any reason not to go back.”

Cade visibly relaxed slightly, and when they began walking towards the light, his steps were faster and more confident than before.

Emilia wondered if he knew how bad an actor he was.