[Can’t Opt Out]

Halen, who had been pulling up the rear with Baylor while Taelor and Valor focused on moving as quickly as they could along the various paths of the tunnel, pushing their Censors to burning as they mapped and microsparked in an effort to find the fastest route out, stopped. He took a step back. Another. Another.

A step forward.

Another.

Another.

A step back.

Another.

Another.

“What are you doing?” Baylor asked, turning to glare at him, a hand planting itself onto his hip.

The pair of them were technically buddied up, as though they were school-age children who needed another child to keep them in line, so the clone couldn’t leave him behind. Everything in Baylor’s attitude throughout their travels had indicated that he did, in fact, very much want to leave Halen behind. Halen thought that, were the situation even a little different—were Lux, Samina, and Levi not still lingering behind them in the dark tunnels, missing, searching for Lux, and run off, respectively—all three triplets might have abandoned them. They had a map out of the tunnels, and could all turn back and retrace their steps back to the surface if needed. So, even if they lost three of their most powerful members—not to mention the only three with any real ability to use recon skills—it wouldn’t leave them stranded in the cave system.

As it was, it seemed like the three had decided it was too messy to just abandon the entire group. Halen… didn’t exactly understand their reasons, honestly. His best guess as to the why of it was that the three didn’t think they alone would be enough to save Emilia. A few of their members might have been able to keep up, but not all of them, and with their numbers so split, there was little chance that anyone but perhaps Rafe would leave with them, the rest of the group left behind to retrace their steps and potentially run into the group who had attacked them.

All he knew was Taelor has assured him they wouldn’t be leaving the group behind while they were still within the cave system. Yet, the reality remained that the minds of black knots, and the clones in particular, were mysteries—and that wasn’t even accounting for the three boys being the most insane clones Halen had ever met. As a result, Halen wasn’t entirely convinced the three wouldn’t abandon them yet, even if it would involve stranding them in the cave system. They loved Emilia, but keeping her alive would surmount their desire to keep her heart from breaking, were all her friends to perish in these caves. Due to that knowledge, Halen hesitated to tell Baylor why he was moving back and forth.

Hiding it wouldn’t do him any favours, however.

“I had aethernet access, just for a second,” he told the middle triplet, forwarding the message he had received into the relay that included himself and the clones. As they were largely responsible for managing the group, they’d created their own relay, lest they run into a situation where hard decisions needed to be made and their arguing in front of everyone would do more harm than good.

Really, it was rather odd how easily they had fallen into cooperating so seamlessly. Sure, he and Baylor were snapping at each other a bit, but that was nothing new. Baylor had always been the clone who seemed to have the most issue with him. The way Codeth had explained it, a few months after he had transferred to their school, Emilia was so bad at holding a grudge that all the people who loved her had taken it upon themselves to hold grudges for her.

“It doesn’t matter that she actually is holding that grudge against you,” Codeth had laughed when Halen had pointed out that in no way did the silverstrain, who had been torturing him with a collection of non-skill-based pranks at the time, need anyone’s help in making him feel even worse than he already did for saying those things about Malcolm Laprise on his first day. “They’re all used to it, so they’ll keep pushing you. There’s also a good chance they’re all happy that she’s not just forgiving you,” his friend had mused, pausing to snack on a cookie from a local shop that everyone love.

Every day, the bakery sold out an hour or two before the store was meant to close. As the owner maintained a small staff, they saw no reason to hire more people so they could bake more, although they had been considering expanding into other confections—it was, however, a consideration they had been having since before Halen transferred, and few people thought the owner would ever do so.

“If it were me… I’d be pushing her to fuck with you as well,” Codeth had eventually admitted, explaining that, for one, everyone was having fun—at least for the most part. They were creating memories and unique skills, not to mention gaining experience that couldn’t be replicated. “I doubt that’s what Baylie is arguing, though. He’s always just been the one who takes holding Emmie’s grudges the most serious, as though if he doesn’t do it, it’s a personal failure,” he had added, in one of the first slips that had told Halen that his friend might be closer with the other side of their class than he generally let on—only those who were close with the group were ever allowed to use their nicknames, but Codeth had rarely let the nicknames slide off his tongue.

Now, of course, watching Codeth so easily fit in with the group, Halen was reminded of how the other boy had never seemed to fit with their own, admittedly terrible, side of the class. The reality, which had been a growing suspicion within him for years, was that Codeth had stayed on their side of the class for him alone. It would have been so easy for him to take Mikhail across the imaginary line of their classroom. Then, he had arrived. Then, Codeth had stayed for him, Mikhail continuing his strange straddling of the line. Then, Coral had come and they had slowly edged away from their rest of their so-called friends—not completely! Halen still had the most passive of hopes that their former classmates might one day become better people. Plus, they had needed the numbers in their prank war.

Still, for years, it had increasingly become the four of them against everyone else. Now… now, maybe it could be the four of them—plus Polianna—crossing that invisible line and joining these people more permanently. It was easy to imagine; easy to hope. Perhaps, however, not so easy to achieve, Baylor glowering at him with all the energy of someone who might kill him.

Baylor… probably wouldn’t kill him? Still, as Codeth had pointed out over a decade earlier, Baylor’s argument for Emilia continuing her vendetta against Halen hadn’t been the things they had been able to take away from the experience. No, Baylor just thought that Emilia embracing her petty vengeance side had been good for her soul! Evidently, the middle triplet didn’t think Emilia mean enough, and what better way to encourage her to hold grudges more often than to encourage her to never, ever let go of her grudge against him!

For the most part, Halen thought this had backfired. While Emilia definitely disliked the majority of the kids on their side of the class—Mikhail, Codeth, and Coral excluded, of course—he had never really seen her hold a grudge against anyone else? Even when the triplets had been sharing what they knew about Emilia’s involvement in taking down the Lüshanian trafficking group a few years ago, it had been clear that she had asked that those who were arrested in the aftermath not be treated too terribly.

All of them, having known Emilia for so long and having spent so many hours learning about justice and punishment from the clones, and the hard decisions that often had to be made about how to deal with criminals, knew exactly why she didn’t want the traffickers she helped stop treated like the criminals they were: there were always reasons why a person turned to crime.

When they’d been teenagers, there had been this really popular anthology series airing. One of the episodes had followed a lavender code as they tried, and largely failed, to live a normal life. Everywhere they went, they were vilified for their genetics. It didn’t matter that they had never been violent—had never even coded, if they were to be believed. They could be dangerous, and therefore, everyone treated them as though they were dangerous. Throughout their episode, multiple people implied they should just give up on their education, where they faced fear and discrimination from students and staff, and become a criminal. A few people even outright told them they should join a gang, some in an attempt to help them find a more accepting environment, some because they thought it inevitable.

The lavender code was taking up a spot in class where a normal, good Baalphorian could be.

Even if they graduated, they would struggle to find a job; so, their education was a waste of everyone's time and resources.

They would eventually snap and hurt someone; therefore, it was better that they be around criminals or have already been arrested when it happened.

There were reasons why people were forced into crime, and they all understood that—knew that was why Emilia hadn’t wanted to support the Drinarna or Wander Fulbrun in punishing all but the most abhorrent of the traffickers.

It was a nice sentiment, and Halen knew they all shared similar beliefs in the value of reintegrating criminals into society in a meaningful and therapeutic way, even if they all also accepted that some people were just evil, or so lost a cause, that there was no coming back from what they had done. Still, it wasn’t a secret that Emilia was too hopeful, too forgiving. Sure, she could be brutal when needed—could kill when it was the better option, all things considered. He was also sure that she really hadn’t held even a single grudge against anyone, even those traffickers, since meeting him.

No… Halen was sure that all her grudge energy had been directed at him since hours after they met, his mouth spouting off about Malcolm Laprise in what was an uncharacteristic and exceptionally cruel turn of the day. What he’d said had been so terrible that he couldn’t even fault Emilia for holding it against him, although he did think that her continuing to hold it against him for so long was a little uncalled-for. Seriously! While he knew part of it lay on him, for never properly apologizing for what he said until they had trashed Coral’s old school, Emilia pressed so sweetly beneath him as they tried to garner an alibi from a SecOps pick up for public indecency, the fact that she’d admitted that she still held it against him, even after all those years between, was a little insane.

Granted, the girl’s default mental state tended to be somewhere between a deranged insane and an altruistic insane, but still! It seemed a little excessive to have still been holding it against him, even then! Of course, by then they also had thousands of pranks and other, more pointedly cruel comments lying between them. So, there had been no going back—no returning to the moment when Halen had first arrived at school, his parents leading him to the head office.

Did Emilia even know he’d seen her then? Lingering with her friends, all of them watching him with curiosity and an openness that he hadn’t let himself believe was possible.

He was a Grey Sander, if not in the eyes of Grey Sanders who actually lived in their homeland, then in the eyes of Baalphorians. He was something other—something that didn’t belong, and his D-Levels hadn’t helped, nor had his brilliance or drive or strange obsession with skills and Censors and the functions that powered them.

His parents had assured him that the Penns would be different, but until that moment, he hadn’t really believed them—until seeing all these students surrounding a girl who was just as different as he was, if in her own way, he hadn’t excepted anything to be different.

Then, he had fucked it up, of course, but for those few hours between seeing the most beautiful girl he had ever seen—would ever see—he had let himself imagine what it would be like to be friends with them. They were monsters—that had been clear within moments of meeting them. Halen had wanted to be a monster alongside them, and when he had found out that Emilia didn’t have a boyfriend, even when it had been so clear to him that a handful of the boys who circled her would happily fill the role, he had let himself imagine that as well: what it would be like for this sparkling girl to let him bask in her light.

It had been a long time since he’d let himself hope that they could backtrack—could start over from a kinder place. They would never be what they could have been, he thought—never be something that was always soft—and that was okay.

Halen enjoyed what they were: rivals—people who were perpetually fucking with one another, their nonsense pushing one another forward. These last few months without Emilia in his life had been painful, his mind constantly shifting to the girl he had fallen in love with even as they warred against one another.

While the rest of their group argued about whether to send someone back to the last place they’d had aethernet access, in order to let Emilia know what had happened—they had only now realized they were also out of the xphern transmission system—or if they should just continue pushing forward, Halen instead examined the few messages she had sent to him alone, slipped through to him in the barely there moment of having aethernet access, now gone, no matter who stepped through the exact place it had just been.

The messages were strange and sporadic. On top of the rather concerning message they had all received about a teenage black knot now stalking her—which, of course Emilia had managed to find herself with yet another black knot falling over themself for her—there were complaints about how Hail’s growth was encouraging Censor hacking and leading to no one believing how old she was, as well as a comment about how she couldn’t wait to not look so young. There were some pictures of the city—little things that she claimed reminded her of Grey Sands architecture, which… yeah, Halen could see it. Something to wonder about later, he supposed.

Then, however, there was a message from around the time Emilia had realized they were unreachable. Most likely, she’d sent similar messages to all of them, telling them they had to be okay and she was thinking of them. It didn’t matter. It didn’t matter that everyone had likely gotten all but identical messages; the fact that Emilia had even bothered to send him a demand that he be okay was enough to push his hope that whatever had happened between them in Seer’ik’tine had changed something between them.

“You too,” he sent back, knowing that it wouldn’t reach the girl he loved until he was back onaether, even if only for a bubble of a second as he passed through another random area with a connection. Hesitating before deciding to just go for it, he sent along another message as well, then another and another, blushing as he sent them off—wondering if he’d just made a giant mistake.

Then again, his father always was telling him to just go for it.

What was the worst that would happen? Emilia’s grudge would reignite? Well, Halen would take that grudge over the silence of the last few months, definitely.