[Can’t Opt Out]

The bubble bobbed along.

Sometimes, it sunk, pushed down by the rapids, but the tight squeeze of the path the river had carved through the earth was rarely so much that some small section of empty space didn’t exist above it—not breathable air, trapped down here for time unknown, but space free of water nonetheless. Thankfully, it was a powerful river, craving giant lines into the rock, the squeeze rarely leaving Emilia feeling as though she were about to be forced to turn back, lest her bubble be caught up in the too small gap.

There was a reason, in the end, why the subterranean river system had been used for sewage runoff for millennia. Had the river been shaped in a way that would lead to waste—shit and toilet paper and the dead bodies of people and animals and every other thing that people threw down toilets, that washed away down drainage pipes on purpose and by accident—backing up.

That wasn’t to say things never backed up within the river system.

Years ago, after she’d learned about the subterranean rivers and their potential use by criminals, her father had contacted people in a collection of Free Colonies where the river became a more normal, above-ground river. Many of them had known exactly where to go to search for camps, setup by criminals to catch goods and people being sent their way via the river. How? They had records of places where backups used to happen—still occasionally did, as while Lüshan had ceased using the subterranean river for sewage runoff, a few of the nation’s cities still had their drainage pipes hooked into the rivers simply because they weren’t used often.

It wasn’t like it rained in Lüshan, so mostly those drains were used for the occasional street cleaning, as well as to make sure that water had somewhere to go when a fire needed to be put out. Hence, stuff still sometimes washed down the drains, and each nation along the river regularly scheduled maintenance, in order to make sure the places where things were liable to get caught up were cleared, lest it become a serious issue. That said, a number of the rivers briefly came up in the basin rainforest between Crishar and the Dunnery of Rwun, much of which was so secluded that no one really knew if the strange little pseudo-kingdom that existed within parts of it or the slightly psychotic locals of other parts were doing anything to keep those sections clean.

Regardless of that aspect of the unknown, the fact that many of the rivers came up in less dangerous places—the basin rainforest was filled with dangerous plants and animals and people—had resulted in criminal groups—Fräthk’s, at the very least, but who really knew if they were the only one, considering how winding the river system was—setting up temporary pickup locations for the goods they funnelled down the river. Obviously, someone within the governments of those Free Colonies that discovered such setups had been leaking when the regular maintenance was, the criminals vanishing during those cleanup times, then presumably returning once they were no longer in danger of maintenance workers stumbling across them.

From what Emilia knew—which admittedly wasn’t a lot, as Crishar was the main nation where these pickups had been taking place, being Lüshan’s westerly neighbour—there had been some scuffles between Crishar’s military, sent to take a look, and the criminals who were meant to be receiving, well… her and the other people she’d helped free.

Now bumping her way down the river… Emilia wondered how that would have gone. Was it expected that a few of the victims who were sent down the river in fuck knew what—a sealed wooden barrel, for all she knew—would die on the trip? Or did the criminals have some fancy container to send people in? That seemed insane, as it wasn’t like any vessels could be returned to Lüshan after a single use.

Curtisal, maybe? Or someone else with an irregular deviation capable of creating physical objects with more ease than either core or Censor users could?

Alternatively, she could just be on a terrible, terrible route; for all she knew, there could be perfectly normal rivers that always had air floating above them somewhere else within the system. Everyone would have been put into a normal boat and left to float down to Crishar. Her own vanishing-into-the-abyss-of-the-water voyage was much more chaotic—much easier to die while travelling, without a proper, airtight vessel.

Was she about to die? No. Emilia was confident in both her bubble’s ability to keep existing, despite the moderate abuse it was going through, and her ability to stop herself from moving, should the bubble pop. Then, she’d have to summon air from the aether and figure out what to do—summon another bubble, probably.

Despite what many people would say about her, Emilia did try to put some thought into everything she did. Yes, sometimes her thoughts failed a bit—see her wandering into Curtisal’s playground for a wonderful example of that—but most of the time, things turned out fine!

Besides, she had a feeling that, had her plans not been perfect, Halen would have said something when he looked them over. There were a few reasons she’d told him about what was happening—about her going for Xavier—but his ability to see things she couldn’t had definitely been one of them. Another part had just been… wanting him to know. It had felt like he should know, for some reason. Emilia didn’t know why—couldn’t articulate the reasons behind that need. It just… it was a need that existed—this feeling that had come to exist at some point, and really, Emilia couldn’t even claim to know when it had started.

In some ways, it seemed to be a brand-new feeling—something that had sprung to life yesterday, when Halen had popped up in Seer’ik’tine, smiling that too soft smile, his teasing so much kinder than it had been before. In other ways, it felt like something that had always been there.

“What are you looking at us like that for? Do you have a problem with us enjoying ourselves before we go to the museum?” a younger version of herself asked, Baylor hissing at her to stop telling that asshole where they were going.

What did it matter if she told Halen, glaring at their group through the heat of summer, where they were going? Of course, later, he and several of his friends had shown up at that same museum. Oddly, there had been an altercation that day, not between their class, but with some random man who had grabbed her ass, then whispered disgusting things into her ear as though she weren’t clearly too young for him. Before anyone could react, Halen had him on the ground, so much fury in his expression as he broke a number of bones in the man’s body while Grenner rushed to detain him, that Emilia had been too shocked to say anything; instead, she had simply let Rafe drag her off, her gaze occasionally shifting back to Halen as he answered a few questions from security.

Other moments of needlessly telling Halen where she was going—of needlessly speaking to this boy she didn’t like—stood out to her as well.

“Are you going climbing?” Halen had asked, having caught sight of her from where he was drinking some fancy drink on a bench, near the slideline that lead to the dock, a ferry there taking people out to the Strats every hour. “Alone?”

“Everyone else is busy,” Emilia could remember biting out, annoyed that everyone had plans but her. It had been a different summer, a few years later—the summer when Rafe had broken up with her, her plans to spend the summer with him cracking alongside her heart. Half of her friends were off on family vacations, and while her temper had cooled between the breakup and her trying to kill Halen and the triplets dragging her off camping with them, Emilia hadn’t been able to blame some of her friends for not wanting to spend time around her.

The triplets had never refused—Darrian, either—but the triplets had been off on some clone retreat, despite their best efforts to get out of it, while Darrian had been dragged on a family vacation. Mostly, all four had been messaging her, rather than paying attention to what was happening around them, but that day, the triplets had needed to pay attention, while Darrian had been dealing with one of Leerin’s moods and she’d told him she’d be fine.

Emilia had not, in fact, been fine.

Emilia had stomped past Halen, spraying him with water as she stepped onto the slideline, the boy shrieking something about his hair behind her. The next ferry departure had still been a ways off, so she’d sat there in the terminal, waiting, miserable. Shortly before it arrived, Halen, Codeth, Mikhail, and Coral had shown up—Polianna hadn’t yet been dating Coral, then relatively new to their school, having only transferred in near the end of the school year.

That was, in many ways, how Coral ended up straddling the line between their sides of the class: Emilia had taught the girl how to climb, Halen keeping his distance in the background while Mikhail and Codeth shifted between them.

Back then… had Halen liked her? Had he seen how much pain she was in and called his friends to help make her feel better? Emilia had always assumed he’d been trying to mess with her, or that he’d perhaps known that she and Coral could become friends—they’d already trashed her former school together and worked a bit on the functions for managing her Dyadism by this point, but she and Coral hadn’t yet been friends.

Looking back, if felt like that was right—like he had liked her and wanted to make her feel better; then, he’d kept his distance from her because he hadn’t wanted to make her feel worse because she didn’t like him.

That… was painful. There was something so sad about realizing he had been trying to help her feel better, even knowing that he would only make her feel worse—something heartbreaking about this boy who liked her, and yet, hadn’t been able to make her like him back.

Only a few weeks before this, Rafe had broken her heart and she had tried to kill Halen, only Baylor able to talk her down. She had tried to kill him, yet there he had been, organizing his friends—the friends he knew she liked or would eventually like—to cheer her up. Halen had even watched her slip away with Codeth at one point, something in his expression that she had found strange at the time. Even looking back… it wasn’t jealousy, to know his friend was hooking up with the girl he liked; rather, if Emilia had to describe it, she would say Halen had looked glad that she was managing to relax and have sex with Codeth.

As she bobbed along, occasionally pushing her bubble down one path or another, seeking to get closer to the little dot of Xavier’s existence, currently frozen while those women waited for someone to arrive for them to heartlessly hand him over, Emilia’s mind shifted over her relationship with Halen, re-examining a thousand different moments.

It didn’t even take that much work to view so much in a different, softer context.

There was Halen, always engaging with the conversations she started in class. Yes, sometimes he disagreed with her, his tone a little too cutting, the pair of them half screaming at one another by the end, but even when it came to topics he didn’t much care about, he had an opinion. Then, the next time some niche topic she liked came up, he’d know more about it. Emilia had always assumed he wanted to one up her—wanted to always know more about everything all so he could beat her in some debate or another. Now, Emilia looked at all those instances and wondered, instead, if it was Halen trying to get closer to her.

There was Halen, catching her hand before she took a tumble, once again the first one to notice her about to fall. Then, there was Baylor, pissed and pushing him away from her.

There was Halen watching her when they collaborated—and now that she was thinking about it, who were they kidding, claiming they rarely collaborated? They were always working together on something important—half the things they did were important, a quarter side projects that Emilia realized she had always wanted to show to Halen, a quarter pranks to use against one another, and fuck had she been missing creating those pranks, missing Halen.

Emilia wanted to splatter Halen with glitter—wanted to press her hands to his cheeks and leave prints behind, some physical evidence that she had been there. She wanted to steal off with his clothes, make him chase her trying to get them back. She wanted to tangle her fingers through his hair and leave behind streaks of skills that would fuck with his finicky ass for days.

Emilia wanted to watch him while he looked over her code again—like she had the day before, when he’d been horrified by her annotation system—and actually watch him. See the twitch of his lips when he wanted to smile or frown or laugh because she’d done something insane. She wanted him to turn and look at her like she was the most amazing thing he’d ever seen, just as he had a million times before without her ever noticing.

How had she never noticed him looking at her like that? Like she was brilliant and perfect? Like, even if she was mean and petty and didn’t like him back, he would accept her annoyance and hatred, just to remain close to her a little longer?

Emilia wanted him to look at her like that again, only this time, she was going to drink it in—appreciate it for what it was, appreciate Halen for what he was and what he was offering her. He had been offering it for a long time, and Emilia felt like an idiot for never noticing it before.

Shaking herself, Emilia pushed herself down another path of the river, getting closer and closer to where her old map of the sewer systems and the old runoff should meet. As long as she could brute force her way through a sealed entry, she should be able to get back up to the city—not that it would be pleasant, but she’d still be able to do so. At this point, she’d actually passed where Xavier was—passed where Olivier’s group was as well, Olivier’s movements on her map suggesting that Levi had taught him how to microspark and their group was now proceeding with a mixture of running and microsparking.

With as twisting as the city was, the roads often rising and falling, Falmíer was already a difficult place to navigate with microsparking. Combined with the threat of criminals popping up and attacking them? Yeah, this was part of the reason Emilia had decided to risk the subterranean river: as much as she wasn’t sure it would work, the risk of getting caught up in some conflict, had she instead forced her way back up through the holding cells as fast as she could, then through the city itself, was significantly higher.

Now, of course, she just had to get out of there.