[Can’t Opt Out]

This was one of those moments that Emilia knew would be burned into her brain. Sometimes, it wasn’t until later that she would realize, “Hey, that moment? Actually really important in forming who I’m going to be going forward.”

Sometimes, it was a moment filled with so much love that it melted into her, forming ribbons of affection through her cracked heart and soul.

Her first time with Rafe was like that—the moment of experiencing so much care, and from a boy she had only seen as a friend at the time, that it had shattered her apart. So much of her had been broken then, even the smallest graze of skin against hers causing her to flinch back in fear. There had been no sex, and nor even any snuggling with Darrian and Levi, despite Darrian never being anything but safe and Levi being so gay there was never an ounce of sexual tension between them.

It didn’t matter; every touch had left her terrified, as though panic had dug itself under her bones and even being completely safe wasn’t enough to dig it out. So, she had still flinched at even Darrian’s fingers brushing through her hair and she had hated it.

Rafe, despite her flinching away from him over and over again, had been so sweet and slow with her.

“It’s fine, Emmie. I know it’s not me,” he had promised after rolling them onto their sides after she had begun to hyperventilate when he’d settled too much of his weight on top of her. In her memory, Emilia could hear herself muttering that she was sorry, she was sorry, she was sorry. It was something she remembered saying—could remember the movement of her tongue through her mouth, heavy and so entirely other; yet, at the same time, she hadn’t been the one saying it, not really.

Later, Rafe and pulled her on top of him, pulling her higher, higher, until she’d been settled over his face and there was something so much more intimate about oral sex than vaginal. Penetrative sex was, somehow, more distant. It was pleasure and if both parties closed their eyes, they could forget they weren’t using a toy—forget they didn’t actually like one another. Maybe it was different for other people, but for her, pressing her mouth to a cock, letting someone press their face into her…

It just hit different, was all, and here was her childhood friend, pressing kisses to her thighs and urging her hips to move. Rafe, who she suspected had been a virgin that night but had never admitted as much, had already come while trying to figure out how a vagina worked.

“It’s too soft,” he had muttered while she laughed, his annoyance with folds and slippery liquids enough to break some of the tension as he glared down at her like her pussy had personally offended him by being so confusing. Eventually, he’d figured it out, and almost immediately finished inside her.

It had been endearing, listening to him stammer apologies as though it weren’t cute. How could someone enjoying the feel of her so much they’d finished near instantly be anything but adorable and sweet, especially when her friend had been adding in promises that he wasn’t going to leave her unsatisfied.

He’d come again, come splattering over his stomach as he ate her out, his hands on her thighs as he kept her moving over him as she came again and again, and the entire night had been so unlike what she had thought it would be like: Rafe, making her feel safe, and even if it had been terrible, she would have hopefully been able to relax the next time she had sex.

All she’d wanted to do after that night was to be with him again—see if that care had been a one-off, or if every time with him would be fun and good. It had been, until the end. Since then… Emilia didn’t know. When she looked back, she tried to see where things had gone wrong—where she had made a mistake.

There they had been, she and Rafe, spending years of their life together. It had been fun and happy and she could swear that Rafe had loved her—part of her almost wanted to believe that her childhood friend had loved her before she had taken him to bed. Even the night she was raped, hadn’t Levi told her that Rafe wanted her? Emilia knew love and want were two different things, but…

But she had sworn that by the end, Rafe had loved her. So, she’d loved him back. Now, she still loved him and he was weird—stiff and soft with her all at once, as though afraid that the smallest brush of their skin against one another would shatter her.

Emilia would let him shatter her.

It didn’t matter—there was nothing she could do or say to force Rafe to confess what had made him break things off with her. Dozens of times she had asked. Never had she received anything but a pained frown and a lie—a lie, because she knew that when the boy claimed it had just been time to end things he was lying. There was a reason behind his actions, more solid than just a feeling, but he wouldn’t tell her and—

And thinking about this as she ran was just a distraction, her feet slapping through piss and shit that had leaked over the edges of the sewer… troughs? Were they troughs, these long swoops of stone and metal that funnelled the bodily fluids of the city elsewhere? Emilia didn’t know, and without aethernet access, her Censor didn’t have an immediate answer either. There was a lot of information preloaded into her Censor. Random words to describe various types of architecture wasn’t on the list. Should it be? Buildings were pretty, she supposed, but she’d never had much of a desire to be able to perfectly describe what various swoops and juts of building materials were called—and really, did the design of the sewer system even count as architecture? Or, did it fall into some other sort of engineering discipline? Or was architecture art? Multidisciplinary?

Emilia had no idea—that information wasn’t stored within her Censor or general knowledge of the world, either. It felt like she should at least know a little bit more. Something she was interested in or not, it would be nice to know something more as she raced, trying to fight down the panic welling within her because there was a little boy out there who needed help.

Logically, Emilia knew there were always kids out there who needed help. If she had her way, she’d help them all, but that wasn’t something easily done. While she had connections everywhere, there was only so much she could do—and really, it was through Yujao’s connections to the gorankai, and Ghiranie’s connections to various Grey Sander criminals, that they managed to help the most people.

Criminals, Emilia had often found, were much more capable of helping those in need than governments were. Mostly, it was the laws and politics and funding that kept governments from helping, their hands tied up in laws that made no sense, in amendments that required majority support and more money than was actually reasonable. The Black Knot could manoeuvre around a lot of those laws, both within Baalphoria and in nations where they had enough of a presence. They swiped up predators with little evidence, knowing that it was better to accidentally swipe someone innocent and release them with a little wipe of their memories of the visit than to let someone return home to abuse their family. Emilia suspected that they sometimes helped victims of abuse settle somewhere else—into another city, most likely—but there was only so much they could do.

As Fräthk had proven, criminals were in no way a good bunch of people, yet Emilia could imagine a better version of their criminal empire. It would have been so easy to have offered the captives they had stolen away a better life—one of crime, yes, but also one where they had power and were to be feared, rather than left to be abused by family or left to suffer on the street.

Fuck—having received some summaries from Levi about the people who had been with Olivier and how they had ended up with Fräthk…

What sort of person just leaves their kid on the street? There had to have been a better option—and really, even if the Drinarna were corrupt, at least try to get your kid to someone who isn’t corrupt!?

All Emilia wanted to do was wrap her arms around that boy—a preteen who was so malnourished he seemed no more than eight, according to Levi—and squeeze him close, assure him that no one would ever leave him to the streets or criminals again, simply because they might be in danger if he were around.

Hopefully, that sentiment would be enough to convince the scary man to let them take the kid out of the city—and Emilia wasn’t sure what to make of the scary man. While Levi seemed to like him and trust him well enough, her friend had always been clear that the guy didn’t seem like the sort to let them take the little mind eater in particular, if he thought them incapable of protecting him.

It wasn’t even something she could judge the scary man for, considering the kid’s abilities were so powerful she’d felt them being unleashed, back when Olivier’s group had first been split up—she’d gotten a timeline of everyone’s movements from Halen, based on conversations he was having with everyone, a while ago. A few bits were still blank, no one having come across the other two groups of escapees yet, although there was some speculation that the area that was currently a little smoky—Emilia was inclined to believe this was Halen not wanting to tell her an entire section of the city was now on fire—was where the one group had ended up.

Codeth’s group was currently headed that way, Halen having forwarded her a message from his friend informing her that one of the captives—Cheska—was far too much like her. Both she and Halen had largely come to assume this meant the Lüshanian girl had seemed liable to run off with or without Codeth’s permission.

It was interesting that Codeth had been someone capable of guessing that she was going after Xavier alone. Perhaps because Codeth found her exhausting, he was more aware of the things she was likely to do that would be considered exhausting?

Unknown. Later, she’d ask him; for the moment, she was just happy that no one else seemed to have realized she was no longer with her group—or, if they had, no one was doing anything weird about it. A small part of her suspected there was a chance Coral’s group might know—Halen could have told Coral, while Grenner had literally spent the last decade and a half learning to guess what sort of crazy thing she was going to do next. Really, there was even a possibility Polianna might have guessed, assuming the entitled girl bothered to think about her, anyways. Why? Because much like Codeth, Polianna found her annoying and exhausting—the only difference was that Codeth actually liked her, if only in small doses.

On the map she had pulled up of Xavier’s movements, his dot stopped and Emilia’s heart stopped with it.

It was so much better when he and his kidnapper were moving—moving meant the man couldn’t do more than scare and threaten the little boy. Stopping could mean nothing; it could also mean her time to catch up to them was running out and she still wasn’t close enough.

Another few minutes of running and microsparking and maybe she would be there, but that was assuming she would be able to microspark and the sewers and tunnels were weird, shifting between long stretches of pin-straight paths before becoming twisting mazes and Emilia’s only thought as to why was that the Lowdouran’s abilities had affected some of the ground. Much like the cave system above was a mess—the strange tunnels she’d travelled through before, as well as the stairwells in Fräthk’s dungeons—and the buildings of the ceilings had to be hung from whatever crevasses already existed in the crackling beauty of the cavern, these sewers and the underground tunnels had also needed to be built around what already existed, untouchable, unalterable, by any known ability or skill.

All this meant that when Emilia microsparked to the end of a section and turned, she was unsurprised to find a twist of passages that she would need to run through.

On her map, Xavier’s dot continued to barely move, and Emilia wished it would move—even if that dot began to move so fast she had little chance of catching up, movement was better than stillness.

In the background, Olivier’s dot moved as well, far behind her now—she’d actually passed relatively close to his group a while back, a part of her wishing she could explode out of the earth and wrap him in a hug. It was actually possible that she’d have been able to, even if using so many skills to remove herself from the subterranean river and not kill herself moving through the strange ground likely would have drained her. Then, she would have been able to wrap herself around Olivier; yet, they never would have been able to catch up to Xavier from the surface—if it were possible, Levi would have left the scary man and Olivier behind long ago.

The city was too much of a maze of paths and stairwells to go any faster than they already were. Was Olivier panicking as well? His heart a pound through his very soul because the little boy he had promised to protect was in danger? Because he had been unable to protect him?

It wasn’t Olivier’s fault the little boy had been taken—Mikhail and Levi had forced the story out of him, and it wasn’t his fault.

Emilia knew that knowing that wouldn’t stop her from blaming herself—and really, she was already blaming herself because she could have turned back when their groups crossed paths, back in the holding cells. She hadn’t, and yes, they had been able to save that group in the dungeons—she’d gotten a message a little bit ago that the group was now starting their ascent, where they’d hopefully meet up with the main drop group—but that didn’t mean that Xavier being taken wasn’t indirectly her fault.

Had she been with them…

Emilia shook herself as she smacked into a wall, having slipped on something—she wasn’t looking back, thanks. Wondering if she could have made a difference, had she turned back, wasn’t useful.

Focus.

Run.

That’s what she could do: focus; run; get to the little boy as fast as she could.