While she couldn’t completely get out of talking about how she’d already known Olivier before last night—thank you Samina… not—Emilia was patently refusing to give her friends more than the barest of details about their relationship.

  Had she already known him? Yes.

  Since when? Since she was in her late 20s.

  Had she had sex with him? Yes, Emilia told Pria over the sound of Sil choking and Conrad making a comment about how only someone who was crazy wouldn’t make it their life mission to fuck someone who looked like that, followed by him asking if Hyr knew how to use their Censor well enough to look up a picture of the lawyer.

  Hyr, to their credit, only smiled and told Conrad that the two of them would meet one day. “I can wait until then to learn what he looks like.”

  “Suit yourself,” Conrad replied, shrugging and shifting until he was leaning against Hyr’s much larger body—Emilia had been dragged onto the couch by an over-excited Pria, who was now frowning at Hyr, probably wondering how they sounded so confident that they’d meet Olivier one day.

  In other news, her two Free Colonier friends—who had somehow become fast friends despite barely speaking to one another—were adorable, and Emilia snapped a few pictures of them, saving them to her aptly named album: Adorable Friends Being Adorable. There was also an album named Dumbass Friends Doing Dumbass Things—it was quite full.

  “Was he the guy you hooked up with yesterday? The one who paid you for sex?”

  Sil had, rather unfortunately, not heard this part of the story, and choked on his drink once again—he had also spent too much time in the Virtuosi System now, trying and failing to decipher her hacks. “You what? That… He paid you for sex?” Her friend’s eyes flashed, angry and apparently sending off a message to someone? That was—

  “Please tell me who didn’t just send a message off to your sub-30 hookup about how their boss gave me money?” Emilia asked, cringing when Sil’s cheeks burnt. Unfortunately, Emilia already had a few suspicions as to who his mystery hookup was, and well…

  [Em: uh…]

  [Em: sorry, but my friend might have just messaged your cousin or brother about how you gave me money after sex]

  [Em: not sure which]

  [Em: i didnt frame it that way i swear]

  [Em: they just took it the wrong way!]

  [Em: and everyone is already really tense]

  [Em: so he didnt really think before sending it]

  [Em: oh]

  [Em: also]

  [Em: my knots are in much better order now!]

  [Em: so you don’t have to worry about me anymore!]

  “Look, he was just worried about me, is all,” she said, motioning to herself and realizing she was still wearing Olivier’s clothing. Oops—she’d meant to go back to her room and change but hadn’t managed to before the incident with Elijah. “It was not sex for money. Just sex that was topped off with money being foisted upon me.”

  “That’s what I told Elijah!” Pria said, and—

  “What!?”

  “Oh… did we not mention that that’s why we got in a fight?” Her roommate cringed, glancing at Sil and telling him she’d been wondering why he was only freaking out about that part of the story now. “Here I thought you were just too mad to actually hear the details of how we ended up arguing in the first place.”

  Sil levelled a glare at her, opening his mouth—likely to tell her something about how he was always paying attention, even if that was an exaggeration—before his eyes snapped to Emilia. “Why do you owe the de la Rue’s so much money?”

  Everyone’s eyes turned back to her, and this was so not how she’d wanted this conversation to go! And here she’d been most worried about the hacking and echo part of the story! How had her perpetual debt to Olivier become the topic of discussion!?

  “Because Olivier won’t let her pay him back,” Samina said from the kitchen, where she was ordering a quite frankly obscene amount of food from the fabricator. “It’s a whole thing, and I’ve seen Emmie try to pay him back for decades. Never works. The few times he did accept the money he invested it for her, rather than put it towards her debt.”

  “Invested in what?” Beth asked, curious because just like Emilia, she was always poor.

  “Something. I don’t know! I don’t manage it, nor do I even know what it’s worth now. It was before the war, so it could be worth nothing.”

  “Highly unlikely,” Samina said which wasn’t helpful.

  “Fuck… Em, are you… are you actually rich?” Pria asked, and no, they weren’t doing this.

  It took another few minutes to get the conversation back on track—as on track as this disaster of a conversation could be, anyways—during which time Emilia had needed to admit that she’d met Olivier due to some legal trouble—no, she very much didn’t want to talk about it—and yes, if they wanted to attend one of his hearings over the Alver lawsuit she would go and try to introduce them, but only if they could stop talking about this.

  Despite agreeing to the moratorium of Olivier related topics, Pria still asked, “What’s it like, knowing a non-dev?”

  Samina snorted. “They ain’t that special.”

  This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  “You know some?” Beth asked, curious because despite having rejected so much of her sub-50 culture, she could never quite shake her ability to deduce what someone’s D-Level was based on their habits and abilities, and she’d never actually met a non-dev—not knowingly, anyways.

  Emilia’s childhood friend snorted, holding up a hand as she counted people off. “Olivier, a childhood friend, the Daymark kid—annoying little bitch—the asshole leader of D30—thankfully dead—the hy Gru, the head of The Black Knot. Plus a bunch of people with irregular deviations who probably surpass non-dev, under the right circumstances.”

  “Shouldn’t Andre Laprise have a black knot?” Pria asked, frowning as she flicked through information. “Everything says he is?”

  “Nah. He’s a non-dev—keeps an additive black knot when he needs one.” Samina shrugged like she wasn’t revealing less than public information to a room full of people she barely knew.

  Sil’s eyes trailed over the woman, accessing her yet again. “You were a member of Division 30.”

  Samina smiled, all teeth and menace as Sil, Pria and Beth stared at her. “Yup~” she popped out, leaning back the exact way she had when they were teenagers, young adults, an image of her swinging one long, brown leg over the other echoing through Emilia so strongly her stomach churned.

  Across the room, Hyr’s attention snapped to her. Unlikely Conrad, who was still letting a tether of energy connect them, the syn’s had dropped away when they physically disconnected. Emilia wasn’t sure if they simply weren’t capable of maintaining a tether, or if something else had led them to drop it. Either way, she missed the soft support of the syn. Also, what was it that had drawn their attention? While she was upset—melancholic—at the injury her friend had suffered, it wasn’t the same as when they’d been told what Victor had tried to do. This wasn’t an emotion so strong she was struggling to control herself, or anything.

  “Oh~ I guess I met the Blood Rain General, too,” Samina noted, fingers tapping over the arm of her chair. “He’s probably the only one who’s special in a way that’s… harder to quantify.”

  Emilia itched to add on the other names she was missing to the list—there seriously had been too many non-devs in and associated with their unit—but she couldn’t. Not without revealing she’d been a part of the unit as well. Given the way Sil glanced her way… yeah, he might have already put that together. Fuck. At the very least, he had his own secrets from the war and wasn’t about to bring up hers. Small mercies, she supposed. Very, very tiny ones.

  “Like Sammie says,” Emilia quickly added, before anyone else could put together her attachment to one of the alliance’s most secretive units as well, “non-devs are just people. Olivier is nice and sweet. He’s also brilliant and really powerful, but in the end, he’s just a person, and he works hard and relies on other people just the same as anyone else.”

  “Sure, but you have to admit,” Pria said because apparently they weren’t dropping this subject yet, “he has a track record that’s really impressive.”

  Emilia’s Censor spun, pulling up records for every lawyer who fell under the de la Rue umbrella. Idly, she listed off a handful of names who had just as impressive track records but weren’t household names, her mind catching on a recent case one of Olivier’s distant cousins had recently done. Louis was now helping Olivier on the Alver case, but this last one… from just before he—

  Louis had appeared on the ridiculous reality show Helix was currently on? What even.

  “Okay, okay!” Pria moaned as Emilia continued droning on about various lawyers with just as much skill as Olivier. “I get it! Please, just stop!”

  “You are probably selling Olivier a little short, Emmie,” Samina said, Emilia entire body tensing.

  Just because she had refused to talk about the case that had led her to Olivier, that didn’t mean Samina would respect that decision—as previously noted, the woman was a wild card. Uncontrollable, spontaneous. It was part of why they’d always gotten on—most of their other friends were way more controlled and sensible—but currently…

  “Don’t worry,” Samina signed, the movement so subtle anyone who wasn’t fluent in the sign language would brush it off as nothing but a small muscle spasm in the person’s hand, or perhaps an idle fidget.

  Relaxing back into the couch, Emilia listened as Samina pointed out that while tons of people were just as talented as Olivier, one of his strengths was his fearlessness. “He did take on that case that made him famous—the one that changed the precedent around D-Levels being taken into account in self-defence situations—when no one else would. That perhaps is what makes him and other non-devs special: they have always been so… outside the bounds of reality, even before they officially knew what they were, that they don’t hesitate to continue stepping over the imaginary lines that keep other people contained.”

  “That’s something a lot of sub-30s have,” Beth noted, adding that she was referring to those raised in sub-30 households, rather than new-gen sub-30s.

  Samina laughed and agreed. “I grew up in the Penns, and yeah. We’re all arrogant fucking assholes. The non-devs of D30 were definitely monsters, but everyone in our unit was. There’s a reason some of the biggest innovations came out of there, and it wasn’t just the non-devs. It was more that we were all just fucking crazy.”

  “You make it sound like you contributed to those innovations,” Beth noted. Her eyes hadn’t shifted from Samina since she’d revealed she had been part of Division 30. That was fair—it wasn’t everyday anyone met a member of their division, especially not someone who hadn’t previously been publicly named. Actually, it was amazing there wasn’t more freaking out going on.

  “Not as much as some of the others,” her childhood friend easily admitted. Where some members of their unit had always felt a little impotent by their inability to contribute more, Samina hadn’t been one of them. “I was pretty good with testing, though. The training system, new willbrand tech or skills, sparking—I was always right there, willing to risk my life trying out everyone else’s crazy ass ideas.”

  “That is also, in fact, how she had damaged her eyes when we were teens: being a dumbass who took part in badly devised experiments,” Emilia noted, realizing her mistake too late: while everyone seemed to have forgotten they were childhood friends over the course of the chaotic conversation, the fact that Samina had just admitted she was from the Penns was tantamount to Emilia admitting she herself was from the Penns.

  Fuck.

  Fucking fuckity fucks.

  Pria and Sil turned to look at her—and honestly, Emilia should have been more surprised than she was that Beth had apparently already guessed at her origins.

  Part of her wanted to just admit it—get everything out in the open.

  Yes, I grew up in the Penns.

  Yes, I know all those people you’re now wondering if I know.

  Yes, I was part of Division 30, and yes, I was a big part of that group.

  Also, you know what? I ended the fucking war and then things went to shit for me mentally, and I’m only now managing to pull myself back together.

  Oh, and I’m also the other anonymous creator of the training system, the EMY hack and dozens of skills that people still can’t contemplate even trying to create, despite having had decades to analyze them.

  She wouldn’t, though. Eventually—and hopefully with a much nicer tone than the one the Emilia in her head was using—but for the moment…

  “Hyr?” she asked, instead of addressing the eyes glued to her.

  “I do not,” they said, and there was just something so natural about the way the syn didn’t even have to hear her question—about how they’d apparently already divined the future and seen her intention. “Conrad should come as well.” The northerner’s eyes flicked through the room, judging the people through it. “Pria should send her… brat’iyn’sa?”

  “Willbrand,” Conrad translated before Emilia could even compute what the syn was saying. The other Free Colonier was still tucked against Hyr—and man, were they cute—pretending to nap so he could avoid the disastrous discussion.

  Now, he straightened and held out his hands like a child, begging someone to help him up. It was silly, and Emilia rolled her eyes as she popped off the couch and moved to haul him up. She held out her hands for Hyr as well, under no illusions that she’d be able to do more than pretend to help them up without a physical skill or two to help. The syn gave her a small, amused smile, but let her pretend to help them up regardless.

  “Gimmi your willbrand,” she said to Pria, holding out a hand for it. “Hyr doesn’t have one, so we’re gonna go to a smith. I’ll have him update yours as well.”

  “You have a willbrandsmith on call?” Sil asked, and ooh, he was mad, practically glaring holes into her. If she burst into flames, she wouldn’t be surprised.

  “You didn’t finish your story,” Beth noted, as though she hadn’t been part of the reason the conversation had so completely derailed.

  “Sammie knows the rest. Keep asking her your questions about her crazy life, and then she can tell you the rest. Be packed and ready to go in”—Emilia checked the time, her Censor automatically suggesting a time to meet up, helpfully early because certain people were rarely on time—“twelve hours. It’s a week long, and we might run into trouble, if that wasn’t obvious, so pack appropriately.”

  Holding out a hand to accept Pria’s willbrand—Sil had a number of willbrands, including one from the war, while he’d financed Beth’s custom one, so neither of them needed the sort of help she had in mind, especially when they’d already be pushed for time—and she forwarded along information about Ship’o Stars to the group, so they could pack appropriately.

  “See you soon,” she said, hooking her arms through Hyr and Conrad’s and poking each with a request to let her spark them. They accepted and a blink later, they were gone.