In terms of good things: Emilia’s upgraded aethervoice was functioning, and her internal voice had been forced into submission. No more wandering thoughts for her! Hopefully, V would show up at some point, and she’d get a chance to show it off. She could have all the sexy thoughts she wanted about him now, and no one would be the wiser.
In terms of not so great things: she had no idea where Oria had gone. The strange thing was she hadn’t actually seen the girl leave the city level. Granted, she hadn’t been paying the most attention to the girl’s dot moving through the city, having been more concerned with Conrad and messaging Boundary what had happened, but Emilia was also pretty sure the girl had only made it about halfway through the city without vanishing.
Would the Haym family really have summoned the girl back to them? Fucking stars, would they really have tortured her, burning that array into her in the first place? Something told her that any family that was willing to align themselves with people as crazy as Conrad’s family were probably pretty bonkers themselves.
What did that say about her, random person who had aligned herself with him and then tried to make friends with one of his nieces? Most likely that she was a little lost in the stars as well.
Emilia was okay with that.
What she wasn’t okay with was that, for one, she was alone again, and for another, they hadn’t actually found the weapon that had possibly been created in Salsetrun. Awesome. Either Oria had had it—possible, if a little odd—Conrad had destroyed it when he killed his nephew—unlikely, considering blood weapons were nigh unbreakable—or someone else had it.
A member of the Haym family? Tobias? He hadn’t been inside the Clarity City System when the rebel woman had shown her the visitors currently within it, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t lingering outside it, waiting for the perfect moment to come in.
But why? That kid had been hysterically nervous when they met, and while he definitely could have been faking it—stars knew Emilia had faked being a dumb silverstrain more times than she could count—it hadn’t felt like acting. The boy who had been eavesdropping on her and V had been nervous and afraid. So why leave a weapon of mass destruction with him?
A thousand reasons shuffled through Emilia’s head before it caught on one, not because it was any more likely than the last, but because it offered an alternative to the boy being dead or just lingering on the outskirts of the city system: he had a gift that hid his presence. He hadn’t had anything like that when they’d run into him in Salsetrun, but clearly, the rest of his family had visited a collection of labyrinths since then. Why not him too?
Well, that wasn’t exactly the most encouraging of thoughts, that an antsy teenage boy might be running around, unseeable by perhaps even their maps, with a weapon of mass destruction on his person.
Annoyed, Emilia sent a warning off to Boundary—who confirmed that there were some records of similar, presence erasing gifts within Risen Guard records—and then… And then, she didn’t know. Losing Conrad hadn’t been part of the plan, nor had them not getting the weapon been something they’d considered—another oddity, as Conrad had never even considered that his last nephew might have had the weapon, something in the way the man had spoken suggesting the boy was untrustworthy.
So seriously, what had changed?
Emilia pushed her way into the stairwell the siblings had exploded out of, The Quiet Boy’s massive energy blast having destroyed a significant amount of the wall and leaving large swathes of the stairwell visible from the city, rubble still crumbling down. The buildings directly surrounding it had taken a beating as well, impressive, considering the only thing she’d really seen harm the buildings in this world had been the blood weapon the Valoren family had used to destroy the library itself.
⸂Seriously, how was that kid so powerful…⸃ she mused, climbing over the rubble to get to the stairwell.
A tangle of metal—or whatever the staircases were made of that seemed like it might be metal but probably wasn’t—met her. It groaned under her feet, reminding her of disaster movies, which had been popular before the war. Not so much after.
Going down seemed like a terrible idea, but she couldn’t waste time searching for another stairwell when she was already going to be wasting time simply not knowing where she was going.
Absently, she sent a message off to Boundary and Rin, asking what they thought she should do. At the very least, they still had Phlostra with them. While originally, the local woman had had no idea where Ajarni was, maybe in their travels they’d figured it out.
Alas, a moment later a message came through telling her they had no leads on where the Clarity leader had ended up, although Phlostra did send instructions for getting to a Clarity meeting place several dozen levels below her, where there may be members she could kill.
Going on a mission to kill a bunch of Clarity members wasn’t exactly what she’d had in mind, but in the end, it was better than nothing, and armed with Phlostra’s less than stellar instructions—it wasn’t like the levels had numbers or any names that popped up on her map, so all she had was the number of floors she needed to descend—off she went.
It didn’t go well.
Whatever The Quiet Boy had done, it had mangled up a huge amount of the stairwell, compromising its integrity so badly that, less than a floor into her travels, it kinda… collapsed. Specifically, the majority of three or four floors of it collapsed, leaving Emilia stranded in the middle of its busted metal frame, looking and feeling like she would fall to her death at any moment.
Lovely. Just what she needed.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
After several minutes of looking around, gauging if she could even attempt to move, she realized that no, no she couldn’t. Not only was the entire thing rather unstable, any movement on her part liable to send it toppling downwards, but even if she could try making her way downwards, there were too many disconnected bars—she’d never make it more than a few meters before sliding to her death.
In her life, Emilia had definitely been in worse positions—see one incident being lost behind enemy lines with Halen and another where she’d almost drowned in a sea cavern, not to mention the whole kinda-sorta eaten by the universe thing—but this one might have been the most embarrassing, for the simple fact that she should have found another route.
Clearly, this was where she was going to die. There was no one to save her, and she’d rather die than ask Boundary and the others for help—they had their own things to do, and the one rebel Clarity member who had enough energy left to teleport was already off with Key, and his life was more important than hers.
Therefore, death.
But also…
Emilia was extremely focused on the silly delivery game, having nearly completely one of the more difficult hidden levels, when suddenly, the world disappeared from under her. Amazingly, she didn’t scream, but that was mostly because she was just too consumed with her game. Then, the world was back under her, proper and secure, and where was she?
Blinking back out of her secret system game, Emilia found a dozen faces staring up at her: the missing kids, the ones V had gone after in the Livery Labyrinth.
⸂KIDS!⸃ she squealed, kneeling to gather them into a group hug. While she hadn’t spent nearly as much time with these kids as the ones who hadn’t been spirited away by the labyrinth, but they were still precious creatures she had worried about.
⸂They would have insisted I rescue you,⸃ a voice Emilia immediately recognized, despite only having heard it a handful of times, said.
Glancing up, she found Carne—and for the life of her, she couldn’t decide if it was the old or new Carne—absently staring off into space. Of course, he wouldn’t deign to look at her.
⸂Would have?⸃ she asked, curious if he would actually acknowledge her, now that they could actually speak.
The man still didn’t look at her, but did ramble something off about how the universe told him that if he didn’t save her, the kids under his care would likely find out and be upset he hadn’t saved her.
⸂Oh… well, thanks,⸃ she said, rocking amongst the hoard of children surrounding her. ⸂Are you taking the kids out of here? If you are, Boundary and my friend were willing to help.⸃ She didn’t think Carne would appreciate help from the rest of the Risen Guard, but he might accept it from the pair of them.
He hummed noncommittally, continuing to stare off into space, and that alone told her it may very well be the old Carne—the one that may very well still go by Ash, for all she knew—in control at the moment. The first, heartcore affected Carne she had met hadn’t stared into space like they couldn’t quite get a proper hold on their power; rather, he had seemed confident and sure of his abilities.
⸂You are wondering why I don’t seek out my sister, when I am like this?⸃
Emilia hadn’t actually been wondering that, although she was sure she’d been about to, so she hummed in confirmation. ⸂I was under the impression she thinks you’re completely gone. Obviously, you’re not.⸃
The eyes of all the kids turned up to look at Carne in a rather terrifying display of synchronized movement. Creepy.
⸂I am rarely this person, and I am still not the person Gale knew. It is easier if she believes me gone.⸃
⸂Is it?⸃ Emilia wanted to ask, only for her own heart to seize up at the reminder of the people she had left behind, thinking them better off without her in their lives, for how broken she was. ⸂Hypocrite,⸃ she laughed to herself, only to startle when Carne’s eyes flicked to hers, fierce and hot as though chastising her for… something.
Then, those ruddy brown eyes dulled and they were looking away again. ⸂Down,⸃ he said. ⸂That is all the universe will tell me of your story: it is down.⸃
Emilia followed his gaze to a door. ⸂Okay… thanks?⸃
⸂The universe does not need our thanks.⸃ Carne frowned, his distant expression wavering into confusion. ⸂The universe especially does not need your thanks.⸃ His head cocked, truly making him appear to be listening to the aether. For a long moment, everyone simply watched him, thinking he might say more, but then he shook himself, and the spell was broken, dozens of little eyes turning back to her instead.
⸂Will you tell your friend we don’t blame him?⸃ one of the little boys said, rubbing the sleeve of his oddly clean shirt under his runny nose.
Clearly, Clarity had supplied the kids with new things, but it didn’t suit them. These were homeless kids, and like most of the Livery homeless kids, they were okay with that. It was their life, and it let them have each other and Carne. The clean clothes were nice, and she doubted they would get rid of them in favour of rags, but neither were they likely to take much care of them, once they left this place.
Another child nodded in agreement, another.
⸂The labyrinth was being mean,⸃ one of the kids said decisively. ⸂I don’t think he believed us, when we said something was interfering with the will of the universe, but it was!⸃
⸂The labyrinths interfere with the will of the universe?⸃ Emilia asked, glancing back up at Carne as though he might suddenly answer her.
He didn’t, but one of the older homeless kids—one of the few girls—explained to her that usually it wasn’t like that. ⸂When we explored it before, the labyrinth always flowed with the universe, but when it was choosing challenges for you and your friend…⸃
⸂Something was interfering,⸃ Emilia finished, thinking back to the labyrinth host and his cruel laughter and jokes. Something had been interfering with the natural flow of this world, and even the kids could tell. Could Sawyer? Had he kept that from them? Or simply been too preoccupied with the challenges and keeping everyone moving to pay much attention to it?
It didn’t matter, she supposed, but the fact that the kids had been able to feel the unnatural flow—that potentially the platform maintainer had been fucking even more with these kids and V than it had been with her…
That really pissed her off, especially considering how haunted V had seemed over the whole thing—how much he had felt like he had been the reason the kids had experienced things he hadn’t even wanted to tell her about. It wasn’t him, though, not entirely, anyways.
It was someone else, someone who had likely gone through the list of skills the system had created for V and then purposefully picked ones that would fuck with V and the kids the most. That felt personal, and as Emilia bid the kids goodbye—asked them to give Sawyer, Benny and the other homeless kids her love and hugs and most heartfelt goodbyes—as she tugged the door open and found another set of stairs waiting for her, she wondered who in the world hated V enough to do something like that to him and the innocent children he had been trying to keep safe.