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Arc F1.7 | Chapter 30: Drat—She Isn’t Quite Stupid Enough

If Leerin had been unhappy about simply being pulled—and in the one case pushed, screaming—along the rope connecting mostly horizontal sections of the hanging city, she was absolutely irate about the plan to rappel down the top portion of the rope that would lead to Rafe’s new position and then just sort of… slide the rest of the way down. It have been a long slide of over forty metres.It would be fine—the ropes were all properly secured. Leerin didn’t seem to care.

Halen was tempted to push her once again, but it had been pointed out in his group relay with Simeon and Rafe—the two more cold-hearted members of their group—that Leerin may simply throw a tantrum and refuse to move once she reached the lowest part on the rope they’d need to traverse. This would be a problem, as they needed to pull themselves up the last ten or so metres in order to reach the building.

Essentially, after his fall, Rafe had swung below the walkway the rest of them were standing on and collided with the underside of another building. The middle Laprise brother had then summoned a collection of climbing gear and managed to break into the building, discovering it to be one of the numerous governmental buildings that littered the area. Of course, they had no idea if the building would be of use to them, but as the majority of the government’s buildings were at least partially connected via more private bridges and elevators…

Well, at this point, they thought that getting arrested by the Drinarna so they could get to Wander might not be the worst idea. It also wasn’t a good idea, and had Rafe discovered the building to be populated with tons of people, they would have aborted and brought him up. As it was, the building was empty as could be—Rafe had even extended a recon skill through much of the building and… nothing.

If there were people in that building, they weren’t anywhere close to where Rafe had broken in.

Hence, were going to be going down the rope, whether Leerin wanted to or not!

Halen signed, done with forcing the girl to tag along with them. he continued, glancing over at where their doctor was no longer standing.

While the person who had attacked them had vanished, they hadn’t really wanted to tempt fate by having the doctor either extend the rope on his end and throw it to them to anchor or having him climb along the still existing path of rope suspended from the ceiling—the man wasn’t nearly as much of a climber as the rest of them, but he could have made it with some rests in the middle.

As a result, the doctor had chosen to make his way along the paths again. In theory, he would eventually catch up. In practice…

In practice, who knew where the increasingly annoyed man would end up. With any luck, he’d magically find Wander, and Leerin would be left standing here, forever.

Unfortunately, for as much as Leerin was apparently not the smartest of people—Halen didn’t think she was stupid, just… noticeably less strategy inclined compared to the rest of them—she wasn’t quite stupid enough to have realized that Doctor Vickers might never find this exact spot.

Hence, down they all went!

It was, admittedly, not the more enjoyable descent, and Janie—whom Halen suspected was also growing annoyed with Leerin’s attitude—even teased her friend about how the horizontal pulley system she’d been so resistant to using was better than this. Leerin had not been impressed with the teasing, and oh, how Halen wished he could mute her out. He had already actually turned her voice away from his awareness, unless his Censor thought her screaming in fear. Unfortunately, Leerin yelled a lot, and his Censor was having trouble differentiating between angry Leerin and fearful Leerin; of course, even when his Censor was correct in its understanding of her state of mind, and pulled her voice from his awareness, Halen was still given a transcript of everything she was saying.

As group leader, it would be irresponsible for him to completely filter out what she was saying.

While Emilia might be offaether, Halen still decided to share the transcript with her. While part of him wanted to ask she was friends with the insufferable girl—did Leerin say anything positive?—he decided to let Emilia take from the transcript what she would. The fact that Leerin was also saying disparaging things about a handful of them, Emilia and himself included?

Well, Halen didn’t much care about Leerin’s opinion of him, but she didn’t actually seem to like Emilia much? It was a bit hard to tell—and honestly, if he had to guess, he would probably say Leerin both loved and hated her friend?

Emilia was bright and colourful and wild, and to Leerin, these were good things, until suddenly they weren’t.

That shining brightness became a burning laser of focus. Colourful creativity became psychotic, dangerous discoveries. Wild freedom became suicidal missions. Leerin, from what he could tell while pulling up the rear of their group and reading through everything Leerin said because it was morbidly fascinating and voyeuristic, liked Emilia when she was a softly glowing bug in the darkness—something pretty but not overwhelming. She liked Emilia’s creativity, but only if it wasn’t causing problems, just as she liked her wild friend within the constraints of the law and polite society.

In other words, she liked the character Emilia made of herself when she was forcing herself to be small. This Emilia that Leerin liked didn’t truly exist; rather, it was the Emilia who was brought out for teachers who were annoyed when she was excited in class, the one who submitted assignments to teachers who hated innovation, the Emilia who had drawn her wildness into something sensible when Alaric had begged her to help design a scavenger hunt for his twelfth birthday.

Halen, who had been responsible for that scavenger hunt, had been expecting Emilia to come in with insane ideas—he’d heard of the things she and her friends got up to before his family had moved there, after all, and clearly, the girl’s understanding of what was safe and reasonable for a twelve-year-old and his friends must be unreasonable. Regardless of how much he liked Emilia, he had suspected he’d need to tell her to rein it in. This had only been a few months after they trashed Coral’s school together, so of course, the pure, wild fury she was capable of had been fresh in his mind.

Instead, she’d shown up and helped him seriously, designing a scavenger hunt that Alaric still talked about whenever his birthday came around. It wasn’t that Emilia hadn’t enjoyed herself, but while those small prank skills and silly hints and challenges had been , they had also been a small sliver of what she was—a few droplets of the girl he loved, glorious and cruel and wildly free, and yet here was Leerin, wishing she would be that smaller version of herself all the time. Surely, having known Emilia since they were children, Leerin must know that making herself small would eventually break her friend? For specks of time, Emilia could make herself small and enjoy those dollops of time. It wouldn’t last, and instead, that compression would destroy her.

he asked Rafe and Simeon in their relay.

Rafe told him, his annoyance with Leerin palpable enough that it echoed through their connection.

he asked, confirming with the other boys that Janie had pulled herself fully off the rope before casting one last look around and descending himself.

Simeon replied, adding in that the main reason they kept her around was a mixture of some people hoping she’d find happiness elsewhere of her own accord, while others were worried Darrian would go with her if they outright kicked her from the group.

Halen asked, glancing over Simeon and Rafe’s opinions as he rappelled down the short section of rope that was pressing into the bottom side of the walkway—mostly, it seemed both of them thought Darrian likely to stay with their group, but they hadn’t been as confident in that sentiment when Leerin .

Reaching the end of the bit of the rope that he had needed to rappel down, Halen reached the short section of free rope, where he would need to use his brake to control his descent; then, more rappelling, more controlled falling until he’d need to pull himself up the rest of the rope to the building everyone else was in. Not the longest of treks, nor the most difficult; still, he had to admit, there was something about sliding into the darkness below that was ominous.

Part of it was likely the lingering reality of Rafe’s near fall into the depths, slotted into his mind and even more terrifying than Darrian’s fall because Baylor had been right there, Halen’s own body already moving to attempt to help the other boy. Had Rafe plummeted into the city, there would have been little any of them could have done, whoever had attacked striking when Rafe was practically in the middle of the rope. While attempts to use skills to catch him would have reached him—Halen had already been pulling up a skill to catch Rafe and push him upwards to grab the rope Simeon had anchored into the ceiling—it would have done nothing had he actually fallen or if the person had continued attacking and left Rafe to believe chancing the fall and the landing was the better option.

They could help him reach the ceiling, maybe help slow his fall if he indicated he was unlikely to hit the landing by himself. Other than that…

Halen didn’t like it. They were taking risks, and that was stupid. More than that, however, he didn’t like that whoever had attacked them possibly hadn’t done it at random.

whoever it was had stumbled across them right when Rafe was at the midpoint and attacked. whoever it was had been waiting, hoping that a midpoint attack would be most likely to kill Rafe.

Said attacker had slipped away, falling back under the barrage of Simeon’s attacks. They could be going to get backup—letting someone know there were invaders from who-knew-where coming towards the spire. That was part of the reason they’d decided to follow Rafe: they didn’t want to risk climbing another section of the ceiling, knowing someone else might come along to attack them, while they didn’t want to linger along a path that didn’t know but that whoever had attacked them might know the exact location of.

For that reason, when Halen had left the walkway, he had tugged the rope across the ceiling free—marking each of the anchors on a map in case they needed to use it again and someone needed to quickly work another rope through each still-dangling quickdraw—while also removing evidence of their having been there as best he could.

The glass panel that had been removed to allow them in was put back, but the rope was now anchored to the underside of the walkway—not completely hidden, but hidden enough that if someone came along looking for signs they’d been there, they wouldn’t easily find any.

With Simeon having been attacking the mysterious person, it was impossible to know if they had any idea that Rafe had landed on the building Halen was now hauling himself into or not, but if they hadn’t seen anything, they didn’t want it to be too obvious. As it was, anyone who came after them would need to remove the glass once more, then hang off the walkway to see the rope trailing downwards. From there, they’d probably have to go down the thing to figure out where they’d gone—and really, if could be a false lead as well.

It wasn’t like, had Rafe needed to be hauled back up, they wouldn’t have left the rope to hang, simple to leave a potentially confusing trail that they might have gone down.

All this was to say that everything was a mess. What else was a mess? The office they’d come out in—was it an office? Halen thought so, but he also thought someone had likely been living there.

Miles replied when Halen asked if Lüshan’s government workers living at work was normal. he asked, most of their group diligently going around, sending Emilia’s father images of various objects and text they found around the room while Simeon worked on extending the more powerful recon skill the two of them had learned from the clones, to see if there was anything noteworthy in the building.

the man replied.