[Can’t Opt Out]

One of Emilia’s favourite teachers taught a class that had nothing to do with the degree she was floating through, unsure of what she would do with the rest of her life when everything had felt so untethered since the war ended—had felt untethered long before that, if she were being honest.

A thousand facts lay behind her, some buried under trauma, others tucked beneath memory manipulations that she could sometimes forget existed as a constant stream of contradictions and were sometimes such a burn on her soul that she was left wrapping herself in sweaters stolen from the boys and men she loved, wishing things were easier.

Things weren’t easy—had never been easy. Twenty-nine-year-old her had wanted to get down on her knees and beg and plead for the triplets to stay with her—to give up the careers they had been born to have with The Black Knot, and so what if Baylor’s instincts might cause problems? They could figure it out, surely?

Maybe?

Possibly?

Little Emilia had been too afraid to ask—too afraid that she would ask and be refused, too prettified that these boys she loved would stay and it wouldn’t work. Baylor would kill someone, or maybe they would simply wind up as untethered as she felt—a drifting ship, unsure of what she wanted to do with her life.

Emilia still had no idea, but during the virtual year and a half she had spent sitting in Sil’s Virtuosi Rig, her mind sifting through Helix’s code as she designed a CS that would allow for core use—as well as a few other things she had yet to try out—she had wondered, pondered, and still mostly come up empty, her reasons for not being able to figure out any path in life for herself buried deep.

It was a flicker of a thought, displaced within this dreaming world that both was a dream and reality, that when she got out of here—when the waking world called her back to itself—she wouldn’t be able to so easily brush aside all the reasons why trying to find some outlet for her passion and creativity had never been easy.

Generally, she could deny all she wanted the reasons why she struggled, a phantom boy with a smirking smile hidden behind all that animosity, crafted for her by the clones. Now, however…

Sleeping Emilia was aware, as she watched these events play out, that dreams were fleeting. She may awaken and remember no single moment of all she was seeing of not only her life but those of her friends as well. Perhaps every second would slip under her awareness. Perhaps the tendrils of the clones’ manipulations would grasp on to all these moments of flirting with Halen—of wondering if they could make something work between them—and beat them back into submission.

Halen had come to Lüshan, within her deformed memories, but he had come because Codeth had decided to come first—Codeth, who within her fabricated memories had already managed to cross more fully over to their friend group; Codeth, who within what Emilia could only presume to be this true course of events, had clearly only supplanted himself into their friend group during this trip.

It was odd to see these differences between reality and her memory, laid out so plainly for her, and even if she forgot the exact shape of all these moments, Emilia was sure she would remember the flavour—the spark of hope and longing, the want of a hug from a boy she had known for almost half her life and had suddenly found herself falling for.

Emilia didn’t know what to do with it because usually, she could force down the longing for Halen—for this version of him, whom she no longer remembered in more than slips of memories that the clones had missed or had been unable to completely erase. Most of the latter they pulled deeper, removed from the index of her mind until she couldn’t easily pull them up, and instead, they popped up at random to torture her.

“I love your obsession. It’s so fucking sexy—intoxicating, even.”

That displaced voice from the day before—from so very long ago, within the cycle of time Emilia had experienced—Halen’s and yet not, replayed itself within Emilia’s mind. Everything had felt closer to the surface the last few days. Originally, she had assumed it had been that terrible mech raid, tugging her back to being the war hero she was, despite her desire to not be that person, Halen’s legacy wrapped around her when she always tried so hard to avoid entering the raids that had been created by Hail from their passion.

Now, Emilia didn’t know what to think. Perhaps, when she wasn’t floating within a dream, her mind connected to her own and yet skipping over moments and thoughts, flashing between the people she loved and how had she never known how cute Levi and Gëon were together? Why had they never seen each other again, after everything in Lüshan, when they looked at one another like that? Was it the age thing? It couldn’t be that—both she and Levi had never shied away from fucking anyone, as long as it was all legal.

Within the cavern of her mind, Emilia actually wasn’t sure their sex had been legal in Lüshan. Well, whatever. Levi was consenting and legal age in Baalphoria, and while she understood that people couldn’t just go around breaking local laws in favour of obeying their own nation’s, what did they expect from a crime lord, for him to be willing to kill and smuggle and kidnap, but been caught up in Lüshan’s stringent age-gap laws when Levi as so clearly a consenting adult?

Her and Hyr having any sort of relationship would be illegal in Lüshan as well, she realized, not that they were anything, even if they were everything and—

Emilia’s eyes—the non-existent eyes of her dreaming mind—shifted away from her own body, passing Clemence—Clemence, gone from this world now, taken by the war too young—her shoes and sweater and xphern and the willbrand she’d taken from Gëon’s storehouse, to Rayleen. Had the woman known? Emilia thought she probably had; certainly, it would explain some of the odd, searching looks the woman had so often given her, and Emilia wished she were awake for this, reliving all of these memories in perfect clarity so she could dissect the woman’s words—her premonitions of the future.

“She will be fine,” the woman told Jerrial when he moved to stop Emilia’s younger self from heading into the machine, Rayleen’s confidence not something Emilia had appreciated at the time. Now, having met Hyr and seen their abilities…

Well, it would be much better had Emilia believed the woman—although, despite now realizing how entwined their lives had long been meant to be, Emilia doubted she would like the woman much more, should they ever meet again.

Was she alive? Had Hyr ever mentioned whether their mother still lived? Emilia wasn’t sure, her mind and heart unable to decide if she hoped the woman had survived the war or if she hoped Hyr had never been subjected to her brand of crazy. A life lived for the aether, perhaps? A pawn, unable to ever make her own decisions, and instead left to follow the flow of what she was shown.

Hyr, at the very least, hadn’t seemed to have become like that. Hyr, with their personality and balanced responses to things. Now that she had connected the dots, Emilia could see the similarities in the two, all golden energy and light, even if Rayleen’s light had always been a deformed thing. If Hyr shone in all directions, their mother was a focused light, so bright she burned everything she touched.

On her younger face, Emilia could make out the conflict of growing within her—the knowledge that something was lurking out there, her mind connecting Olivier’s story of the aether’s enemies with whatever that thing was and yet knowing she couldn’t think of it and wanting to and how had she forgotten about all that? This wasn’t something the clones would have erased, and while, if she erupted from this dream with her memories of all she had witnessed in tack, she would definitely be asking around to make sure they hadn’t been the ones to touch this knowledge, something about these missing memories was odd.

Had Zavriel or another of the majenstra taken them?

Were they one of those threads of theories that led to the end of the war, which no soul should ever be allowed to know of, lest they undo what she did? Emilia didn’t know what she’d done, so maybe…

Maybe, but something told her that wasn’t it.

So, who the fuck else had touched her memories?

Something for later—hopefully, anyways.

For the moment, Emilia simply watched her younger self struggle with knowledge that something malevolent existed within the aether—at its edges, according to Olivier’s fractured story and was his aunt still alive? Did those original documents still exist? So much of the north, where his aunt had allegedly set down roots, had been razed during the war, so it was impossible to even guess.

Still, the knowledge that something was there was colliding within her younger self with the idea that perhaps Rayleen actually could see some amount of the future and people had been questioning her lack of belief in the will of the aether for decades—centuries, millennia.

Emilia had never had a good answer. Vibes. Lack of evidence. Something.

Something—someone—had fucked with that part of her mind as well—made it impossible for her to ever truly believe until Hyr had been there, softly pulling her into believing in so little time that it seemed insane that she had ever not believed—she thought, as she watched her younger self step through the open doorway to Curtisal’s playground, her mind flickering back to where it had started: her favourite teacher.

Professor Johanna Lee taught the most random of classes. While she wasn’t a public non-dev, Emilia suspected the old woman was one, something in her passion for learning and life reminding her of how she had once been. While Professor Lee generally taught the literature course all first years were required to take—some attempt to make them have some knowledge of culture and force some critical thinking skills into them—she also ran two or three courses every season with any topic she chose. Sometimes, they were deep dives into a specific book or genre—Professor Lee did love literature, so quite a few of these courses were based around books—but she had diverse interests.

Emilia’s favourite class had involved monitoring one of Olivier’s cases as it worked its way through the courts. The original plan had been for the course to be about some research that had recently been released by the Ridge Rind. As it was actually relevant to their course, quite a few students from the Data-Recovery Program had been enrolled, only for their ancient teacher to slide into that first class with an entirely different syllabus than the one they were expecting. Some of her classmates had stayed—the woman’s classes for notoriously popular and filled with students who had no connection to whatever she was teaching—while some had left to find a more relevant class to take. A few had complained to the administration about her sudden subject change, as they would have registered for other classes that were now full.

Professor Lee was popular enough that the administration had brushed them aside, informing them that as this wasn’t the first time she had done similar things, they should know to expect her to plan for the season might change.

Despite her reservations, Emilia had stayed, as had her friends. Fortunately, despite their professor trying to get them financing for a class trip to go see Olivier argue in court in person, there had been some difficulty or another and it hadn’t happened. As this had been years ago, Emilia wondered what would have happened had she shown up in the courtroom to watch him.

Maybe, she would have ditched and taken the hit on her attendance.

Maybe, she would have gone in, sat there in that courtroom and everything would have changed.

It didn’t much matter. The past was set in all but their memories, which was why watching this was so fascinating.

On the first day of all her classes, Professor Lee would ask her students one of a collection of questions—some attempt at getting to know her students and breaking the ice between all the different students, many of whom would have never met before due to their vastly different programs and the fact that her classes were open to all years. Having made it her mission to take as many of the woman’s classes as possible, Emilia thought she’d heard all the questions.

Certainly, she’d lied when answering all of them.

“What is the stupidest thing you have ever done?” Professor Lee had asked several of the classes Emilia had taken—it seemed to be her favourite, as far as she could tell.

Emilia was also pretty sure her professor had been able to tell she was lying, that first time she had answered the question. The story she had told was true, and even rather up there on her ongoing List of All the Stupid Things I’ve Done. It hadn’t been the stupidest, nor had any of the other stories she’d given in answer to that question been the stupidest—if the woman knew she was lying, Emilia might as well change her story each time it was asked.

This—entering this machine and almost dying—was by far the stupidest thing she had ever done. Looking back, Emilia thought that even if Hyr were the one telling her current self that she would be fine, she would be stupid to enter it.

This was the closest she had ever come to dying. There were moments during the war when death had loomed, but even at the end, when her core had begun to crack under the strain of whatever the fuck she’d done to end the war—to cut the aether’s enemies off from this world, if she were connecting all the dots properly—Emilia hadn’t felt as close to death as she had here, in this horrible place, where the aether’s enemies lurked, just waiting for her mind to slip and let it in.

Of course, in the end, those enemies weren’t what almost killed her in this stupid playground of death—no, that had been all the traps and arrows and the monster that lingered at the end.

The gate her younger self hadn’t seen slammed down behind her, and the oil fell, and the death game that was never really was a death game began.