[Can't Opt Out]

Arc F1.8 | Chapter 32: Off Track

Only one of them had followed her.Only of them had followed her.

Fuck.

Samina swerved through the cave system, her contacts mapping out the bumps and ridges of rock formations for her. Without her contacts, she would be flat on her face—blind in a dark, formless world, any skill her would have used giving her location away to her pursuer, any light those skills would have provided her wth barely giving her anything to work with. Samina knew that world and the horrific nature of life within the blur of her damaged eyesight; there were times when she let herself live like that, her vision turning into nothing but a blob of colour as she stared outwards.

It was not a world she enjoyed, empty of life and movement. With her Censor and damaged eyes alone, Samina could still bits and pieces of the world. It wasn’t the same as even the world her contacts allowed for her—nothing compared to what she had once seen. Samina was good at smiling—at claiming it was fine. She was the one who had fucked up and burnt her eyes so entirely that they could barely see, after all, and she knew that her contacts gave her an edge over other people—this situation was a perfect example of why she had kept her damaged eyes, after all, only her contacts allowing her to chase after Lux and her kidnapper, to escape the one who was chasing her now. Her only other solace was that she had fucked up, not someone else—that her vision hadn’t been stolen by someone else’s error—and that she had fucked up and hurt herself, not Emilia, who so easily could have been the one to be caught in the explosion, partnered up as they had been.

Had Emilia—had even those and Samina didn’t really care for—been the ones to lose their sight instead, Samina wasn’t sure what she would have done. Killed herself, perhaps, especially if it were someone she actually cared about.

Sometimes, Samina looked back on Emilia and Rafe’s relationship, unsure of what to think of it for the simple fact that she could have sworn that even before the two began fucking that Rafe was in love with their childhood friend. Yet, if he loved her, how could he have hurt her so profoundly and not slit his wrists? It was so easy to see that Emilia still loved him, every moment with him a strike through her soul because she would let him back into her bed, if only he asked. Stupid as the girl was, Samina didn’t even think Emilia would demand he only come back to her if he really loved her—Emilia would accept a Rafe who felt nothing for her as long as they were together in some sort of way. All she wanted was a place for her love to pool, each little drop of affection forming around Rafe until he was drowning in it. It didn’t matter if he wouldn’t drown her return; as much as Emilia wanted to be loved, more than that, she wanted people to accept her love and devotion.

Surging forward, Samina hit the ground, Lux’s kidnapper having sent a surge of pure core energy towards her. Bits of silvery energy slipped through the latticework of rock. It wasn’t enough to truly hurt her—she didn’t think so, anyways—but neither was she going to be letting herself be hit by it.

A growl of rage exploded out of the man as he crashed into the rock separating them, and Samina was up and moving again, the man’s mishmash of language trailing her—interestingly, it took him a few moments to get moving again. Not trained well, then? Then again, the one man had been on the bulkier side, so perhaps he just wasn’t trained to not throw his weight around without an ounce of sense?

Quick steps took Samina back to one of the few places where there had been a branching path. As it led away from the path Lux’s kidnapper had been on, there had been no point in her going down it when she first passed it. Now, she hesitated at it. While the man couldn’t chase her down it and she wasn’t actually trying to lose the man—he might very well turn back and head back to Lux and the other man, and fuck did Samina not want to think about the reality that her friend was alone with that guy—something was calling her down this path.

Behind her, on the other side of the wall, the man crashed along. Each of his steps was a slam into the ground, and yeah… either the guy had severe anger issues or he had absolutely no training in managing his girth.

So strange.

Also strange? The pull to go this way.

Samina went , sliding into the much thinner passage—so thin that she wasn’t even sure her pursuer, with his height and muscular body, would have fit, had he been on the right side of the rock wall. Activating a skill, Samina send a spiral of an illusion surging down the path that followed the route the man would take. It would flicker out eventually, but for a little bit, it would lead the man along… assuming it didn’t shatter out of existence when it met one of those strange, liminal spaces of empty energy, anyways. Samina’s map of the path didn’t indicate she’d happened across any of those spots in this section of the save system. Thus, in theory, her illusion should be able to lead the man on for ten or so minutes, before it would either run out of power or run into the closest liminal space she had mapped.

Unfortunately, the map might not have been entirely accurate—Samina had catalogued moving through one of those spaces when she’d originally travelled the route she’d just come from, yet, it hadn’t been there on her race back through it. It was possible she’d missed it as she ran. Somehow, she didn’t think so.

Slipping fully into the new path, Samina pulled her presence as far inside herself as she could, moving quickly down the dark path—and fuck was it dark, especially as she didn’t want to attract the guy’s attention by using even the smallest of skills.

Ideally, she’d move a ways down the path, wait a few minutes to be sure the guy had moved past her, chasing her illusion. Then, she’d shift back out onto that main path and head back to Lux and the other person. Hopefully, Lux would be fine—and again, Samina needed to not think about that.

Samina tried to summon up other thoughts as she leaned against the rock wall, her breaths coming rough and fast as the world burnt and bent around her—a result of stress and worry for her friend? For all the friends she knew could be fighting or dead this very moment? For the darkness that even her contacts were struggling to see through? For the empty chasm of the universe she’d stumbled into?

It was simultaneously so much and nothing at all, this ever-present pulse of worry within her and a world with energy too spread apart, leaving the world to feel so empty and vacant and entirely —and how wrong must it have been for to be so fully aware of that fact?

Was it wrong? Or maybe she was wrong?

Not good things to think about. Think about something else—anything else.

Her brain had been so good at summoning up random tangents of no use before. Where was the Emilia-esque babbling now? Now, there seemed to be nothing to easily fill her thoughts; instead, she had to focus, focus, focus.

Focus on her breath. In. Out.

Focus on the feel of her back against the rough rock. Something dug into her hip. Her feet were uneven, one higher than the other, skewing her back into a curve that would one day be uncomfortable because aging was inevitable and no matter how much they cared for their bodies they would one day become horrible, wrinkled, crippled things. Samina was already crippled, her eyes staring blankly into the world as her Censor came back with nothing, as though the rock behind her, the rock under her feet, were nothing but an illusion.

Once, Levi had asked her if, were the option open to her, she would learn to use her core to the world. Having been in the sort of mood where she hadn’t much wanted to think about things that could never be, Samina had bitten out at him—told him to fuck off, go find someone else to bother, leave her alone.

Her brother had vanished for almost three weeks. This had been during the first break after Emilia was assaulted by Warren, and regardless of Emilia’s burgeoning relationship with Rafe, she’d still gone off with her father to the Free Colonies. It was only later, once her friend was back, that she’d learned that her brother had gone with Emilia, visiting Dion and a collection of small Free Colonies that held little power on the international stage but the Secretary General still had to visit from time to time. A few were so unimportant that the Baxter family didn’t even have plants in a few—so unimportant that Samina couldn’t easily point to a blank map and say where they were, what their political situation was like, what their name was.

Blank spaces on a map of power, their allegiances and alliances and with the more powerful nations of their continent the only thing that sustained them—kept them from becoming yet another nation pulled into the power of another nation, intent to colonize them.

Samina left like a blank space, sometimes, only her friendship with Emilia keeping her tethered to reality. Without Emilia, she would be a sightless thing—wouldn’t be here, wouldn’t be in line to control the Baxter branch anymore. They all knew she and her brother would share the role, assuming their stupidity didn’t get them killed, anyways. Without her eyes, though? Sure, people could claim that she would have adapted, and maybe she would have.

Standing there now, unable to see anything with her Censor, barely able to make out anything with even her contacts—even when she risked lighting the world a bit the world remained virtually invisible to her—Samina knew it wasn’t true because she could make out the blur of the world with her damaged eyes. Here, had she possessed nothing but undamaged, perfect eyes, she would have been unable to see with light alone, and maybe she wouldn’t have been there—wouldn’t have risked gong after Lux alone—if not for her contacts. If not for her contacts, perhaps she would have replaced her eyes, but they would never have been a perfect replacement for what she lost—and sometimes, the replacements didn’t take.

Sometimes, brains hated the eyes that had been pressed into sockets, refusing to communicate with them, and that was the thing: Samina was always saying that she loved her contacts, and so she’d kept them, rather than bother with a replacement. That, however, was a partial lie. In reality, Samina had felt as though she knew—she and her brain and body —that if she plucked her damaged eyes from her body, that was it: she would be completely blind from that point forward. It was insane; Samina still thought it true today.

If she returned home and had her eyes removed, when she woke from surgery, she would see nothing ever again.

Normal people could get on in a sightless world, but she was not . Some people claimed that anyone could do anything, if only they set their mind to it, but that wasn’t true. People required support—required the belief of other people that they could do it. They needed assistance in certain tasks—fuck knew she’d needed assistance those first few weeks of being near-blind. Without her contacts—without Emilia and her tedious programming of the things—that assistance would have stretched further—would have allowed her to acclimate to this new world of blurry forms and never being able to see her friends’ beautiful smiles and heartbreaking tears again.

Her fathers wouldn’t have assisted her in learning how to navigate her destined role with The Black Knot, nor would any of their older relatives. There was just too much that existed on paper alone, privacy functions placed within their Censors to make sure even the OIC could never see those details of their plants and plans. If she couldn’t see, she couldn’t read those files, and in no world would anyone be reading a million words and stories and histories to her—it was already time-consuming enough to read the physical copies, and she had functions to speed that up.

So yes, she felt a strange thing, only given this life by Emilia and Doctor Vickers. Hence, she needed to get Lux and get out of here—she loved Lux and Emilia both, but Emilia would fall to pieces if Lux died in this stupid cave system.

Seriously, what a stupid way to die! Not even in Falmíer and whatever was happening there, but after having been kidnapped by some random man who seemed completely unrelated to anything!?

What even.

Other stupid ways to die? Not being able to find ones’ way out of a random cavern of emptiness!

Samina tried to backtrack—something that shouldn’t have been hard, given she had a map.

The map was wrong.

The map was .

The map was fucking wrong, and Samina’s hands met a rock wall where there should have been the entrance to the path she had come to the cavern through. She groped, hands reaching as she tried to find the entrance. Surely, her map was only a little off—something about the strange state of the cavern had set her Censor to acting a little oddly, surely?

There was nothing to the right, Samina’s hands brushing rock, rock, more rock. Back to the left. Her feet tripped over rocks she couldn’t see, her contacts barely able to make out of the world of the cavern because something was wrong with it. What the fuck. This hadn’t happened before, when she’d come across those smaller pockets of emptiness. Was it because this place was so big? So gaping, like an open mouth, ready to swallow her down?

That was insane. It still felt like an undeniable reality.

“Well… fuck,” Samina breathed out. It was fine. Worst come to worst, she’d start using {Hidey Hole} to try and find the path. Doing so, however, required picking a direction and hoping that the skill wouldn’t suddenly give out on her and leave her a crush of gore within the cave system’s stomach

Last resort only, definitely. In the meantime…

In the meantime, Samina pressed her hand to the cavern wall and began to move, hoping that at some point, she’d come to a path—hopefully, the path that she’d somehow lost track of.