“Freedom. Freedom. Please, please lead to freedom,” Emilia chanted to herself as they worked to get the next door open—if the thing in front of them could even be called a door.
Realistically, the thing that had awaited them at the end of the long, winding tunnel they had found on the other side of the kitchen reminded her more of a drawer. The door or drawer, or whatever she was going to consider it, spanned nearly all the wall’s ten or so metres, less than a foot of clearance on each side. Its bottom was a few feet from the ground, while the top was several meters above their heads and still a good ten or so more from the ceiling.
How they were going to actually get into the next area, assuming they could get the thing to move more than a few feet, Emilia had no idea. Human ladder, perhaps. If they were lucky, something would appear to help them into it. She wasn’t holding out hope on that, however.
A long, polished black bar extended from one side of the ‘door’ to the other. It was set low, just below Emilia’s hips. Most likely, it had been set there, so the majority of their group could help open it, a useless gift on the part of the labyrinth, as a large portion of their group had already given up, after nearly an hour of trying and failing to get it to move.
A few of them had refused to give up, and slowly the thing was opening.
Very, very slowly. They’d been working on moving it for at least three hours at this point, and it had moved exactly 4.3 feet, almost two feet of which had simply revealed the top edge of the door-drawer to them. Emilia had measured.
Still, a dozen tiny hands joined her own in their refusal to give up, little digits wrapping around the bar, their feet braced into the too soft earth as they put their entire weight into it. To each side, Gale and Sawyer were working to use what little magic they had to add leverage along the edges. Realistically, they didn’t need to move it far; they just needed to move it enough that they could safely work to get everyone through the gap at the top.
Safely was the problem.
As soon as they’d opened the gap of a few feet, children had begun to pipe up, saying that was enough space for them to fit through. Then, one of the younger, homeless girls had interjected, telling everyone that it reminded her of the local garbage shoot, where she had once seen someone decapitated by the top abruptly clamping shut around them.
⸂Why have you been there?⸃ one of the non-homeless—homed? Emilia wasn’t exactly sure what to refer to the three subgroups that had formed in their group as, but homeless, homed and outliers seemed the most obvious lines of division—girls had asked, her voice filled with a bark that Emilia didn’t like but wouldn’t dare speak against. ⸂Going looking for food? What, you couldn’t steal enough from us that day?⸃
Around the girl, a half dozen recently despondent children had snickered, while the homeless child glowered. Sawyer and a number of other homeless children had stepped between them, the aether scratching with private conversations until the homeless girl had allowed herself to be pulled away.
⸂We should open it further,⸃ Sawyer had told her, smile grim and pained as he ignored the whispers of the homed children. ⸂I don’t think many of us will be willing to go through without more of a… safety margin. We’ve all seen things like that happen—injuries that occurred due to desperation.⸃ The boy had smiled in the direction of the snickering homed children, something in his expression telling her that he wouldn’t much care if they got decapitated—looking like he wanted to tell them off—before wandering off for a brief reprieve.
More and more of the children who had been absently staring into space since the beginning of their journey had been snapping back into reality since the end of the water slide challenge, and everyone was aware that pushing those children too far—even just upsetting them—could risk their awareness of the situation. Unfortunately, avoiding upsetting them was proving to be a difficult task. It hadn’t taken long, since those first few had come back to awareness, for Emilia and the older children who had been helping the most to realize they had a problem.
It had already been evident that Gale held some negative views on the homeless children in their group, constantly biting at Sawyer and his friends, most of whom were homeless as well. Their comments had never transgressed into anything too awful, and Emilia hadn’t felt the need to step between them since those first, magic sparking moments at the beginning of their journey. All the same, it had been clear there was an invisible line of division between them.
Gale’s wariness of the homeless children—which Emilia had discovered through Miira was more a result of Gale’s parent’s dislike of them than any real slight between them—was nothing compared to that outright dislike of the previously despondent children, most of whom had parents and homes they were hoping to return to. Their negative views of the homeless residents of their town were palpable. Unlike the few homed children who hadn’t fallen apart in the aftermath of the stampede—who had worked together with the homeless children to get them through the first several challenges and Emilia now considered outliers—the newly aware homed children held no such camaraderie with children they had spent most of their life avoiding. Worse, some of the homed children had seemingly been taught to hate their city’s homeless children, a feeling they were doing nothing to contain now that they were talking and interacting with the world again.
This left their group with something of a problem. None of the homeless children or the outliers liked hearing the homed children speak negatively about the homeless ones, and it certainly wasn’t fair given how much work the homeless children had done to get them this far. After all, they were the group who had lost the most members saving the despondent, mostly homed children during the water slide challenge.
It didn’t matter that Sawyer had assured her that he and his friends had heard worse. It wasn’t fair to them, but after a brief discussion, their group’s leadership had decided that listening to the homed group speak harshly to and about them was better than risking their minds floating away once more. They would bite their tongues, keep their glares from growing too sharp, and continue on as they had—as the heroes of this disaster, willing to risk their lives for children they must have known would do not such thing for them, were their places reversed.
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The fact that the homeless children were willing to be the bigger people wasn’t stopping Emilia from fantasizing about giving the homed children a piece of her mind, however, nor was it stopping her from muttering about them under her breath. Astra and Miira had both given her odd looks, when they’d noticed her talking to herself. It had turned out to be a stroke of luck, however, as it opened the door for her and Miira to discuss some of the finer details of communication in this world during a brief break from their tugging.
⸂Hmm… not really?⸃ Miira told her, glancing up from the paper Emilia had scrawled her question across: Are your thoughts ever accidentally heard by other people?
Gale scoffed as she plopped down beside them, returned from telling one of the homed children to keep it down. ⸂Only if it’s on purpose,⸃ she grumbled, eyes sliding back at the child she had just finished telling off, their voice still carrying uncontrolled over the area. ⸂Plenty of people claim to lose control of their voice from time to time. They say it’s an accident. It never is.⸃
⸂Ah… that’s true…⸃ Miira admitted, explaining that after a certain age, losing control of your voice was difficult. ⸂It’s more common in times of high stress,⸃ she added, telling Emilia that her parents ran a restaurant. During times of high traffic, sometimes their voices would escape them without conscious thought, but it was rare.
⸂It’s the same with volume and who can hear you. That kid back there? Totally faking it when she says she’s being loud by accident. Yeah, sure.⸃
⸂The same things happens with… ah…⸃ Miira trailed off, cheeks lighting up red and highlighting the smattering of freckles over her cheeks.
From the corner of her eye, Emilia could see Benny’s head twist their way, his eyes blowing wide as he watched the girl. He had a bit of a crush on her, Emilia had learned. Miira seemed aware of it, but unsure of how to respond, especially under the circumstances of not just the labyrinth but their different lives as well. Emilia didn’t have the heart to point out that if Miira’s suspicions were correct, and her parents had indeed died in the stampede, she was just as much an orphan as Benny now.
Then again, Miira was a sweet, well-behaved child. Perhaps friends of her family would take her in, assuming there was anything left in their town to go back to.
In a truly teenage move, Gale’s eyes rolled. ⸂What she means to say,⸃ the girl sighed, annoyance filling her voice even as she leaned in close to Emilia, a conspiratorial smirk on her face, ⸂is people… let things slip—totally by accident, of course—all the time. By fake accident,⸃ she added, just in case Emilia was as stupid as the teenager seemed to assume all adults were.
⸂Sometimes… people will accidentally let secrets slip,⸃ Miira said, apparently trying to toe a middle ground between claiming people were lying and that something less malicious was going on.
⸂So-and-so likes so-and-so, and then, oops! Did I say that out loud! How terrible of me! Alas! I cannot control my thoughts~⸃
The three of them looked up to find Caro smiling down at them. Astra, who was snuggled into Emilia’s lap snacking away, did not look up.
⸂My sister does that all the time,⸃ Caro explained, sliding down beside Emilia and grabbing some of the food they had prepared. ⸂She let it slip that her best friend was going to break up with her boyfriend. Claimed it was an accident. It wasn’t. I actually think the best friend told her to do it, because she didn’t want to be the one to break up.⸃ Caro shrugged, explaining the friend had gotten pity points for being broken up with. The girl’s parents had apparently taken her to a concert in a nearby town, in an attempt to cheer her up.
Emilia pulled the notepad back from Miira, scribbling, “How do you control whether you’re thinking or talking out loud?” onto it.
Caro peeked at the paper, squinting at it like if they tried hard enough they’d suddenly be able to read. It didn’t work, and they flopped backwards when Emilia passed the book back to Miira, Gale peeking over her shoulder in turn. The pair glanced at each other.
⸂Thinking?⸃ they asked in unison.
⸂We don’t… think words?⸃ Gale said slowly, as though she were talking to someone particularly stupid. The girls exchanged another look, their eyes flickering as a private conversation flowed between them. After a long moment, Gale deflated and turned back to Emilia, nervously asking, ⸂Do you… think with words?⸃
What followed was a discussion about how locals didn’t think in terms of words. Emilia had met a few such people in her own world: people who thought in pictures and emotions and vibes, as opposed to a concrete, inner dialogue. They weren’t common, and most simply leaned further into abstract thought. Words and numbers still existed within their heads, but they were often the minority, in comparison to the more abstract thoughts. They had little internal voice.
Life for them… was difficult, to say the least. While Censors could interface with those abstract thoughts, they were designed to work with solid, voiced thoughts. A significant portion of a teenager’s life, after installation, was learning to work with their Censor, their Censor learning in turn to read not just solid thoughts, but also the more abstract ones. A freshly installed Censor couldn’t understand that the vague lines of thought that represented the picture of a specific dessert represented that dessert, but after a few years it could, connecting the voice of I want x dessert with that image and negating the need for the voice.
It was why her own Censor could track her balance levels, monitoring her mental state for dips and highs that indicated a problem. That sort of thing was only possible with a Censor that knew you—that had lived with you for the majority of your life, and understood your voiced thoughts first. Hence, life for people who had little internal voice often couldn’t interface with their Censor well, and that sucked. So much of Baalphorian life relied on working with your Censor, after all.
“There aren’t many people like that in my world,” Emilia wrote out, along with a brief explanation that her society was difficult for people who couldn’t think in words, at least to some extent.
A groan of annoyance escaped Gale, and Emilia really wanted to ask whether such sounds were the result of locals thinking the sound as words. Did they think “Arrg~” or did it just escape them unbidden? Before she could snatch her notepad back and scribble the question, however, Gale’s voice filled her ears—her aether? her core? She actually had no idea what organ heard aethervoices.
⸂No wonder you visitors can’t access the system or use magic, if you’re thinking about it all wrong.⸃