V’s eyes snapped open and all he got was a smack in the face.

“⸂OUCH!⸃” he yelped, grabbing at his nose. Rude.

⸂Sorry,⸃ Caro said sheepishly. ⸂You startled me.⸃

⸂And that meant when I woke up, you had to hit me? Or were you already hitting me, and I just happened to wake up this time?⸃ V asked testily as he pushed himself up, taking in the sight of their prison once more. That had been one of the better parts of his raid dream: he hadn’t been trapped inside a terrible, blandly grey room without a proper bathroom.

Nearby, Gale made a rude noise. ⸂You’ve been out for a couple hours. We were starting to think you weren’t going to wake up at all.⸃

That wasn’t a no to the were you already hitting me question, and V tried not to focus his attention onto the state of his face, lest he discover it was bruised and painful from violent attempts to rouse him.

⸂What happened?⸃ he asked instead, blinking around and wondering where Astra was. Eventually, he located her, curled up in the pile of blankets, her eyes red rimmed.

⸂You started screaming,⸃ Gale told him, explaining that it had only been a physical scream, so only Astra had been able to hear him. ⸂That’s not the first time that’s happened,⸃ she noted, telling V about a time in the Livery Labyrinth where Emilia had had some sort of nightmare and woken screaming.

⸂It’s kinda amazing we didn’t realize she was a visitor then…⸃ Caro noted, tapping their dirty face in thought. ⸂I guess everyone just assumed she was feeling something in Emilia’s energy? Astra is so strong, I guess that would have made sense?⸃

⸂Plus she never gave any other indication that she could hear,⸃ Gale muttered, although from the look on Caro’s face, they didn’t seem to agree with that assessment.

In the past few days of being stuck together, however, V had learned that the almost-teenager was touchy when it came to the subject of Astra and her status as a visitor. They still seemed to care for each other, as far as he could tell, the three children snuggling together to sleep—and eventually Gale had relented and let him join their snuggle puddle—but there was a tension between them and both he and Caro had learned to not bring up Astra’s deception under any circumstances.

⸂It was so bad she was crying?⸃ V asked curiously. True, in the brief moments before he had passed out, he could remember screaming like his soul was being ripped apart, but if it had been a few hours since then…

⸂You were screaming A LOT!⸃ Caro said, bouncing on their knees beside V. Clearly, they had slept enough and were now brimming with energy that V would soon be tasked to help them disperse, lest they wreak havoc on the prison and drive the other occupants mad. ⸂You were… I think you were asleep? But you kept screaming like you were dying— At least, that’s what Astra said? She said it was bad. I guess Gale and I should be glad we can’t hear you?⸃ Their little face screwed up in thought before they shrugged and popped up, rushing over to Astra and beginning to shake her awake, telling her that V was awake.

Astra’s tired, puffy eyes opened, and she blinked at V. She looked like the child she was pretending to be—like the teenager she allegedly was in the real world. V had seldom seen her look like that, her general countenance instead one of relaxed indifference—or anger, mostly on Emilia’s behalf. Now she just looked sad and broken and in need of a hug.

⸂What happened to this kid…⸃ V wondered as he held his arms open in gentle offer of the comfort the little girl clearly needed. Visions of things that could have led to her being so affected by a scream, no matter how bad, rattled through his mind as Caro hauled the girl up and then the pair of them were falling into his embrace.

Astra would be old enough to have experienced the tail end of the war, so maybe that was it: she just had memories—even half formed ones from her formative years, where memories often blurred and warbled—of the horrors of the war. Stars knew that in the last years, things had been bad nearly everywhere. It had been in those years where Helix’s father had burned himself out, trying and failing to protect the northern reaches of Baalphoria. So many places had been levelled in those years, where fights broke out too fast and fierce for the military’s power units to reach them in time.

There had never been enough people or enough time, and in the end, the military had been left having to decide whom to save and whom to sacrifice. Children were, of course, prioritized, little chips implanted into them, so soldiers could spark in and grab them before the worst of a battle could find them. Better to evacuate a few children than no one at all, even if having to rip children out of their parents' arms, knowing that within moments monsters would be tearing those left behind apart, had been terrible.

People could only spark so much. Even people like Helix, Ri and Simeon, who seemed capable of sliding through the aether with the ease of a breath, could only spark so many times when they were carrying people with them.

Sacrifices had to be made.

Adults and parents had to be left to die.

Little parts of them—the soldiers forced to make such unfathomable decisions—had been left behind as well, each spark to and from a soon-to-be battlefield ripping at their humanity.

They were saving lives, they were leaving people to die. Some of the people they saved thanked them, so many more simply left their arms for someone else’s, screaming for their parents—screaming at them to go back and save the rest of their family.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

At the time, more than a few people had simply said the children they saved would understand, once they were older. Their little brains simply couldn’t understand yet that if it hadn’t been them who lived, it would have been no one. Sure, some now-grown kids popped up in interviews from time to time, saying exactly that: they were sad their family was dead, but they understood there was no saving all of them. All they could do was live on, and be grateful that anyone had even risked their lives to save theirs in the first place.

V had even met a few of those people over the years, now into their teens and twenties. They were nice, sweet in a way that said they were grateful for their chance at life—that they knew the cost that had been paid for it. It wasn’t like everyone returned from those missions alive, and more than a few supports had burned themselves out replenishing the aether stores of soldiers going in and out of cities, trying to save as many people as they could.

They were, in the end, only a portion of the lives they had saved. So many people—and not just the grown versions of these children they had saved, but others they had saved in more conventional ways as well—held nothing but anger towards the veterans who had failed to save their families, their voices ringing loudly through the world—a hatred veterans could not hope to escape, that made many of them regret even fighting in the first place and led them to never reveal more than the barest details of their service.

You should have done better.

Why are you still alive, while my family is dead?

Give me back my family!

Why was my life worth more than my mother's? Sister’s? My best friend down the street?

Why didn’t you come sooner?

Why didn’t more of you come to protect us?

Somehow, despite all the pro-military propaganda the government had spent the last few decades spreading—despite the money they’d spent rebuilding and the soldiers everyone knew had been lost throughout the war—for some people, it would never be enough.

They were grieving, and no matter how much time went by, they would never see the reality of the situation: that there had never been enough soldiers. Recruits had died too quickly, and too few people had volunteered to serve in the first place.

There had been talk, of course, of a draft. Force the men who now whined about how their family had died because soldiers hadn’t shown up fast enough—hadn’t left another city to perish—to sacrifice their lives for others. Not everyone was suitable to serve on the front, but there had never been enough people in any job, and—

And it frustrated V, the same way he knew it frustrated so many vets. If a person had been old enough to serve and had never even bothered looking into it, hadn’t tried to do something—anything—to help the world as it was being ripped apart, and then had the audacity to complain about how things had turned out…

V had no tolerance for those people—that was part of the reason he had cut his family off, because while a few of them had served, most hadn’t.

In their minds, they were above the military.

In their minds, only he was fit to serve, and only then because it had been worth something to them. Of course, it had been worth more to them when he was a strategist, working behind the scenes and yet planning attacks that they could point to and say, “Our child planned that, isn’t everything we did to make him worth it? He’s going to take us places.” He had never been happy in that role—either as strategist or as their pawn—and despite his awkward nerves—his inability to fully cut off his family or go against their wishes, so many decades ago—when Emilia and Rafe had shown up in his tidy little workspace, asking if he wanted to join them…

There had been no way he could say no, even if Rafe had scared the shit out of him—probably still would, whenever they met again. He could never say no to Emilia, though. Bubbly and bright in those still early days of the war, when he hadn’t even technically finished his compulsory education yet. She hadn’t been that much older than him, yet she had felt simultaneously like a rambunctious child—much like Caro, currently tossing and turning in V’s arms as energy overtook him—and someone who had already seen the world—both the love and horror of it—over.

So when she had asked if he wanted to join them, her voice catching ever so slightly on his name because she’d forgotten it between somehow getting a hold of his file and showing up in his doorway, he had found himself saying yes even as his brain dug at itself, trying to tell him both that his family wouldn’t like this and that Emilia looked oddly familiar. Everything from then on had been terrible and wonderful. He had seen more horror than he’d expected to see during the war, when Major Tyreen had set him up with that first job. He had experienced more parties than he’d expected, had sex for the first time for fear that he would die a virgin—thank you, Alex, for that one—and fallen in love with someone who hadn’t even noticed when he’d suddenly towered over her.

He could never regret those years and the lives he’d saved, nor even his love for Emilia, even knowing it would never be returned. V had saved lives—he had saved lives, not just with his brain but his own two hands. He had done good, and then he’d sucked it up and taken Olivier’s advice to say fuck off to his family, even if he hadn’t appreciated that advice much, at the time it was given.

V appreciated it now—it was part of the reason he kept up on Olivier’s life and cases, hacking into various terrible companies and local governments to snipe files and forward them along to him. As long as Olivier didn’t know the files were obtained illegally, he could use them in court to win his cases.

It would, of course, be so much easier if he just went and thanked the man—if he just went and told Olivier that his advice had, in many ways, saved his life. V was too nervous for that—Emilia hadn’t been the only one he’d had a crush on during the war, after all.

⸂What are you thinking about?⸃ Gale asked, something oddly wary in her voice.

⸂Why are you asking like that?⸃ Caro asked, because even they could hear the strangeness in Gale’s voice.

⸂I—⸃ the teenager cut off, looking off into the distance, her brow furrowing. ⸂Since when has the barrier been down?⸃

V’s energy surged out of him, searching for the barrier that had been keeping their magic and cores suppressed since their arrival. Indeed, it was gone, and—

Emilia was the expert with defensive barriers, as her protection of them from Fran’s attack had shown, days earlier. V had been watching her, though—he was always watching her. Now, he put what he had seen in her technique to use, hauling the children up as he tackled Gale and surrounded their prone bodies with as strong a defensive barrier as he could manage, trying to ignore the oofs and ows from the children as he landed on top of them.

A few bruises would be nothing compared to that thing if it hit them head on.

Even with the defensive barrier, the world around them burnt cold, ice magic surging out of the aether and turning everything an iced over white, even the shell of his defensive barrier, and shit.

This technique wasn’t meant for long-term use, V’s core already shuddering with the effort of sustaining it for more than a few seconds.

Shit.

Shit.

Shit.