"Get some air," Agatha had said, not looking up from the files someone had finally brought her in the wing, whole stacks of dusty reports she planned to spend the rest of the day on. "Selene will go with you. You're no use to me stuck in here watching me read."
It wasn't really a suggestion. Emma hadn't tried to make it one.
They left through the same restricted entrance that had let them in the day before, but on foot this time, no car, no visible escort besides Selene herself, who walked ahead as always, without turning around to check that Emma was following.
The city, seen from ground level, had nothing to do with the fragments she'd glimpsed from the inner courtyard. The streets of Tra were already buzzing with investiture preparations, workers perched on wooden scaffolding fastening banners in a red even brighter than the walls, children running between passersby's legs clutching hastily carved figurines, merchants shouting the merits of drinks Emma couldn't have named. A celebration was being prepared, sincerely this time, or at least sincerely enough that most of the people they passed seemed to believe in it.
It feels good, seeing this much joy in people, Emma thought, almost surprised at how much warmth the idea brought to her chest.
They walked for a long time, with no set route, Selene simply following the busiest streets, as if the sheer density of the crowd were exercise enough on its own.
Emma trained without needing to be asked. She barely stopped doing it these days, this habit of letting her Distortion brush against the people she passed, briefly, never lingering long enough for it to feel intrusive, or at least that's what she told herself to feel better about it. She could feel her Distortion growing, through sheer repetition, a sensation she wouldn't have been able to describe clearly just a few weeks earlier.
I feel like I'm touching something. My Distortion feels more real, like a feeling is almost managing to become physical.
"Selene." Emma finally decided to ask the question that had been turning over in her for days. "How does the Distortion actually work?"
The question didn't seem to catch Selene off guard in the slightest, as if she'd simply been waiting, from the start, for this day to come.
She didn't slow her pace, didn't even turn her head. "Your Distortion is your will painting on the canvas of your Qualia. One is the brush. The other, the surface it works on. And the way each person writes is different." She let a silence pass, as if giving Emma time to piece the image together herself. "Right now, your stroke is shallow. The more you use it, the deeper it goes, the faster and more precise it becomes. Your Distortion is a muscle, and it grows through practice, like any other."
A dried fruit seller, set up under a red canvas awning, was haggling sharply with a customer who didn't seem willing to give an inch. Emma brushed against her in passing, almost without thinking about it this time, the maneuver as natural as breathing now. Exhaustion, in thick layers, and beneath that exhaustion, a dull worry tied to numbers she couldn't quite make out, debts, probably, or a harvest that hadn't yielded what it should have.
"That said," Selene went on, "unlike a muscle, your Distortion has thresholds. For you, the next one is making it physical. Raising your will until it materializes. Since you're Pulse, that's the logical next step. It's called Distancing, because you're moving away from others still at your level, and even further from Hollows. You're starting to carve your own path."
She fell silent for a moment, as if she'd already decided she'd said too much.
"The rest, you'll have to find on your own. Every Qualia is different. So is every Distortion."
Emma felt the information piling up faster than she could put it away.
"And how will I know what my Qualia actually is? What it actually does?"
"I don't know," Selene answered, no hedging. "There are things you only learn in their own time. All I can tell you is that your Qualia has a name, like every Awakened's does. A powerful one, in your case, since you're a Relic, tied to the Tohotsi. And the day you learn it, everything changes."
They started walking again in silence, Emma lost in her own thoughts, trying to fold everything she'd just learned into something small enough to fit inside her head.
So I still don't know what my Qualia actually is. Or what it actually does. Just that I can read emotions, and push them around a little. That's not much. And now, on top of that, I'm supposed to find out the name of my own Qualia, like someone's just going to whisper it in my ear one day, out of nowhere.
A muscle, she repeated to herself, with a stubborn kind of determination. Fine. Then I train.
She doubled her efforts without quite knowing why, but a persistent feeling kept telling her she didn't have all the time in the world.
A child, sitting on the steps of a dry fountain, watched the crowd go by with that absolute attention only children still know how to give the world. Pure curiosity, with no calculation behind it at all, something Emma found almost restful to feel after so many weeks of running into nothing but heavier emotions.
An old soldier, sitting alone at a tavern table, his breastplate set down beside him like an object he no longer quite knew what to do with. Emma lingered on him a moment longer. Weariness, yes, but also something sharper underneath, an anger with no clear target, or too many to choose from.
She was starting to understand, with a clarity that would have frightened her a few weeks ago, that people almost never carried just one emotion at a time. It was always layers, one thing sitting on top of another, and the real skill, Emma had come to realize, wasn't catching the surface, anyone paying enough attention could do that without any Distortion at all. The skill was knowing how deep to dig, and where to stop before drowning in something that wasn't hers.
"Feeling anything?" Selene asked, turning to look at her, as if she'd followed the thread of Emma's thoughts without needing it explained.
"Layers. A lot of layers." Emma hesitated. "I'm learning which ones are worth stopping for."
"That's already more than most Awakened ever learn in a lifetime." That was all Selene added, but something in her voice, the barest fraction of a degree, suggested the compliment, rare as it was coming from her, was genuine.
She never really knew what pushed her to go further, a little later, as they turned onto a wider street.
Maybe the accumulated tiredness of so many small incursions. Maybe just curiosity, that same curiosity that had already carried her further than she should have gone, once, at the Capitol market. She let her Distortion stretch out wider than usual, taking in not just one person but an entire stretch of street at once, the way she'd learned to do in the wells of existence.
What hit her had nothing to do with anything she'd felt so far.
It wasn't one more layer stacked on the others. It was an entire wall, a mass of hatred so dense and so concentrated it seemed, for one second, to take on an almost physical shape behind her eyes. Blood. Pure violence, with no nuance, without the faintest layer of civility to soften it. And beneath all of it, something even more terrible, a wicked joy, the thrill of watching someone suffer and die purely for the pleasure of watching.
Emma pressed her hands to her temples, a bolt of pain tearing through her skull all at once, so violent she lost her balance. The air itself seemed to slip away from her lungs, every attempt to breathe running into that black mass still pressing down on her, as if she'd plunged her head underwater without time to catch her breath first.
"Emma!"
Selene's voice reached her muffled, distant, before two firm hands closed around her shoulders, forcing her to steady herself.
It took several seconds, long as hours, before the mass finally receded, leaving behind nothing but a dull headache, almost trivial compared to what she'd just been through.
Selene didn't ask what had happened. She'd already turned her head, her gaze fixed in one precise direction, past the rooftops, toward a red mass Emma recognized without difficulty, even through the tears the pain had brought to her eyes.
"That's it," Selene said, her voice strangely calm despite the scene that had just played out. "The arena of Tra."
She started walking again without further explanation, and Emma, still unsteady, had no choice but to follow.
The arena of Tra stood apart from the center, less massive than Emma had pictured when she imagined the word, but built from the same red clay as the rest of the city, which gave it, up close, something almost organic. A crowd had already gathered in front of the main entrance, far denser than Emma would have expected for a simple day of waiting before the fights.
"They're highly prized," Selene said, answering a question Emma hadn't yet put into words. "More than we'd like to admit, at the Capitol. Fights to the death between gladiators. Sometimes just between slaves who never chose this fight at all."
"How is this allowed?" Emma couldn't quite mask the disgust in her voice. "People in chains, forced to fight to the death, for the crowd's entertainment."
"It isn't allowed, strictly speaking." Selene kept her eyes on the building. "It's tolerated. It's well beyond our control anyway, it always has been. The Capitol can legislate taxes, borders, the conduct of the Sceaux. But an entire people's anger, once it's found a place to pour itself out without threatening public order, no one has ever managed to put that back properly in its box."
"So we let people die so everyone else has somewhere to be less afraid of themselves."
"Exactly." Selene didn't even bother softening it. "You're starting to understand how this world actually works, Emma. That doesn't mean you have to like it."
Emma stayed quiet, the nausea left over from the pain now mixing with something heavier still, a disgust that had nothing to do with her Distortion this time.
They lingered a moment longer near the entrance, long enough for Emma to catch a glimpse, between two guards, of a row of cells whose bars glowed red under the late afternoon light. She never could say what drew her eyes to that particular row rather than any other, or why, for one fraction of a second, she thought she saw a flash of blue, almost out of place in all that red, before a shift in the crowd blocked her view.
Strange, she thought, unable to say why that particular blue felt suddenly familiar.
They were about to leave when a movement further down the street caught Emma's attention before it caught Selene's.
Two Tra guards, recognizable by their dark red uniforms, were dragging a man out of a shop, a scribe, judging by the ink stains on his fingers. The man wasn't really struggling, but his legs seemed to refuse to carry him, as if his body had already accepted what his mind still refused to believe.
"I didn't do anything! This is a mistake!" he kept repeating, his voice rising then falling without ever finding the right pitch to really be heard. "All I did was ask a question, one question, I swear."
No one in the street really stopped, as if used to the sight. A few glances turned their way, curious or uneasy, but the crowd kept moving around the scene with that same dispiriting fluidity Emma had already noticed earlier, that collective ability to absorb horror without ever quite stopping for it.
"Selene." Emma felt her legs move before she'd decided to. "They're taking that man away and he hasn't done anything, I felt it. And no one's doing anything."
"Leave it." Selene had already closed her hand around Emma's arm, firm without being rough. "It isn't our business. Not here, not now, not with the current political situation."
"But he hasn't done anything wrong!" Emma couldn't tear her eyes away from the scene, holding onto a naivety that maybe hadn't quite kept pace with the rest of her, from that man being dragged like an overloaded sack toward a covered cart waiting a little further on. "This is exactly what Agatha was talking about. People who ask questions and disappear."
"Exactly." Selene's voice sharpened. "If Lady Agatha wants to turn this into diplomatic leverage, it has to go through her, in a room, with consequences she controls. Not through you, in a street, where the only thing you'll accomplish is getting the two of us killed before the week is out."
The man was hauled roughly into the back of the cart. He turned his head one last time toward the crowd, searching desperately for a single face, any face, willing to meet his.
No one did.
Emma felt something clench inside her, a cold anger, purely human, that had nothing to do with anything she'd felt from other people until now. Before she'd really weighed what she was about to do, she let her will stretch out toward the two guards, refusing, the way Selene had taught her, even the smallest scrap of permission, harder than she ever had before.
She aimed at the closer of the two, the one still holding the man by the collar, and planted, as hard as she could, one shapeless word. Doubt.
The result was immediate, and nothing like what she'd imagined.
The guard froze, his hand loosening all at once on the scribe's collar, but what crossed his face had nothing to do with ordinary, reasonable doubt. Something far more violent painted itself there, a sudden, disproportionate suspicion, and he wheeled on his own partner with a viciousness that caught everyone off guard, accusing him at the top of his voice of tampering with their orders. The second guard, caught off balance, shoved him back hard, and the two men went down together against the side of the cart in a confusion of shouting and blows.
That was enough.
The scribe, taking advantage of the chaos, slid to the ground and vanished between two stalls before either guard could notice.
Selene pulled Emma back, already dragging her in the opposite direction, walking fast, almost running, before the scene could draw any more attention.
"What did you do. I told you not to do anything." It wasn't really a question, but there was something in her eyes too, something that looked like shock. "That guard was clearly not a Hollow. An already awakened mind always reacts harder to that kind of intrusion. You got lucky it turned on his partner instead of you."
"I don't know," Emma admitted, still out of breath, a mix of terror and a shameful satisfaction twisting her stomach. "I just wanted him to let go."
She felt it then, like something clicking into place. Her Distortion, almost tangible, a soft sensation running down her spine, like a caress she'd never felt this clearly before. She was close, this time, to something. She would have bet everything on it.
"You planted doubt in the mind of an armed man, in a crowded street, three days before the new Sceau's investiture. And you don't even know what that man had actually done." Selene didn't slow her pace.
"Next time, it might not be two guards fighting each other. It might be a blade, buried in the first person standing in front of them when the doubt hits."
Emma said nothing. She knew Selene was right. But the feeling of her Distortion advancing was too good, addictive even, almost more intense by contrast, because she'd known the man was innocent, she'd felt it with her own hands, without ever learning why he'd been arrested in the first place.
She also knew, with a certainty that unsettled her far more than the pain still lodged behind her temples, that she would do it again, the next chance she got, probably in exactly the same way, because she wasn't loyal to anyone but herself anymore.