[Can’t Opt Out]

The streets were cold. Desolate. Nothing like the home he had come from, filled with warm love and warm bodies that he had never thought he would lose—bodies that even in those early days he struggled to wrap his mind around the reality of losing, of being cast aside by, due to nothing but a genetic fault he hadn’t yet understood more than the basics of. Parents and siblings were forever—something entwined by hearts and genetics and biological inclination to protect that that was your own.

That was the problem, however, Porsq now knew. Back when he had first been left on the streets, he hadn’t understood why his parents would leave him there, despite them telling him exactly why they were choosing to do so.They had been hoping to keep themselves and the rest of their children safe from the increasing violence of Fräthk—a nightmare, pushing their way into the minds of everyone who had an irregular deviation or allowed those with them into their lives and homes—and Porsq had heard those words, let them roll around in his young mind, but he hadn’t really understood them.

Now, he did. So did Olivier, peering down at him and telling him it was okay to be upset at his parents for choosing to protect the rest of his family at the expense of sacrificing him, even if both of them—and Xavier, with his smart little brain, as well—understood that when one counted the lives potentially saved by their decision, it was clear that leaving him on the streets had been better, in terms of raw numbers.

“Just because a decision makes the most logical sense, it does not mean you do not have the right to be upset by it,” Olivier assured him, and while Porsq had heard that before, most of the time, such sentiments felt a little off. People could say such things, and mean them, and yet not, all at the same time.

It could be worse—it could always be worse. His parents could have just given him over the Fräthk, or killed him—removed all risk to themselves.

He knew this, but it still hurt. He knew this, just as much as he knew that life on the streets could have been worse—he was told that in the first few days of his new life on the streets. They could be above ground, for one. Here, in this subterranean city, the climate was mild and controlled.

Not too hot.

Not too cold.

It didn’t rain.

It didn’t snow.

Porsq, small as he was when his parents had first left him on the streets, didn’t know what snow was.

A few of the older people on the streets knew, so many of them wrapping shawls around his tiny body because despite what they said about luck and how the streets of Falmíer weren’t too cold, he was always cold.

“Likely because yer used ta sleepin’ wi’ your siblin’s,” one of the old grannies told him. She never told Porsq much about herself, but he could always tell, just a bit, why certain people were on the streets.

Some were like him: people with irregular deviations. Some were also running from Fräthk, while others had irregular deviations that made holding down a job difficult—impossible, in some cases. The Lüshanian school system was not kind to people who were different, Xavier nodded and said he’d heard that as well, even the little girl saying her mothers said the same thing—they, coming from a small ethnic group and possession skin and hair and cultural differences that could never be so easily hidden as many irregular deviations, must have understood how their differences and otherness set them apart from the majority of the population more than most.

Others were people with problems of a different sort. Addictions. Bad personalities. Trauma. Medical issues. All these things that made them unique and difficult to employee or even just be in the same place as.

One of the men had been an evil creature—and later, during the training Fräthk had forced him to take part in, Porsq would learn that the man had a black knot. Black knots were always easy to feel, although they could be different.

Currently, as he told Olivier—as well as Xavier and the little girl who had no name, not even one bouncing around in the privacy of her head—all of this, Porsq muttered something about having felt like there were more black knots in the city than usual, before he’d begun to question his abilities. Olivier’s mind had fluctuated with that, questions bubbling within it before they filtered out.

Questions for himself? Questions for Porsq that the man knew he was in no state to answer? Or maybe just questions for someone else?

The power of Olivier’s Censor had been explained to him, along with the fact that something was wrong with it. Usually, it could reach out to other brains and communicate—and Porsq really wondered how loud all those brains, bouncing around inside a single person’s mind, would feel. Porsq… wasn’t sure if he wanted to feel such a thing—Olivier’s mind was already loud. Cheska had said that as well.

An ocean of thoughts, the waves of each strand never ceasing—never falling still.Someone once put it to him like that.

Most of the older people who helped Porsq figure out how to live on the streets were part of the other group of homeless people: those who had become unable to work sooner than expected, for one reason or another.

“In a way, you are lucky to have never had to go through the cold life of our school and work system. It isn’t a kind place, and if you suddenly fail to meet expectations… well, you end up out here. So many of us are here, forgotten, simply because we did not fit the standards set by the government,” one of the old grandpas told him, his wrinkled and bony hands burning their ways into Porsq’s brain. They moved over him, wrong and painful, Izurial brushing tears away from his cheeks as he shared the horror of the streets with the silverstrain—Xavier brushed away his tears now, Olivier’s eyes filled with tears of their own that Porsq had to reach up to brush aside. A soft, “I’m sorry that happened to you,” left the man’s lips—the tremble of them betraying what Porsq could already feel echoing out of his mind.

Pain. Anger. Hatred.

All for him—all these feelings, aimed outwards for the small boy he had been, abandoned on the streets because he was a danger to everyone around him because he was valuable. He could do things no one else could—and in their centuries of collecting people who were different, even Fräthk had never come across someone quite like him.

Someone who could mend the minds of others to his will—not always, but often enough.

Later, after pain and trauma was forced into him by that old man, with his wrinkled, bony hands, and his wrinkled, terrible smile, Porsq pushed a stray thought into the old man who had hurt him—a stray instinct to just be done with it.

Give up.

Give up.

Give up.

This life is horrible.

This life isn’t worth living.

Kill yourself.

Kill yourself.

Kill yourself.

By the end, it wasn’t stray thoughts, but a symphony of hatred for a man who would do that to a child who just wanted comfort and warmth.

“Good,” Olivier said, true and strong and unwavering, when Porsq told him this—told him about the first man he had ever killed with his mind alone. There was no fear there—no apprehension that perhaps Porsq may one day turn that power onto him. No, all there was within the man was… pride? What a strange thing, for Olivier to be proud of him for killing a man.

“He wasn’t a good person,” Olivier replied when Porsq asked him why he felt that way—the feeling so clear that it was impossible not to feel it, although Porsq knew there was a difference between what his abilities were and what someone with Empathy enough to read the emotions through the aether itself experienced.

“Are you not going to ask why I didn’t do it sooner?” he asked, voice small and fragile because he knew what everyone thought: that if he was going to kill the man anyways, why not do it before the man’s hands had explored his body? Better yet, why not just force the man not to touch him at all? Why not remove those horrible instincts and lusts from the old man’s mind entirely?

If he could force the man to slit his own throat with those wrinkled, bony hands, why couldn’t he simply force those hands away from his body? Force the man to let him leave that tragic bundle of blankets?

It wasn’t that simply—nothing was ever that simple, and…

“For one thing,” Olivier said—whispered, their voices all so low it was, at times, hard to hear what the other was saying—“you were only a child. Even now, if you killed someone later, rather than stopping them from hurting you in the moment, I would not judge you. I would not judge an adult for it either. Our bodies and minds are not always something so easy to control that we always make what might seem, with hindsight, to be the better decision. For another, you have not mentioned even once in your story letting anyone know about your abilities. Did anyone even know?”

Porsq shook his head, muttering that no, he had told no one.

Everyone knew he had an irregular deviation—why would his parents have left him alone on the street, otherwise?—but very few of those street people with irregular deviations ever gave the exact details of their abilities to anyone. They trusted each other like nothing at all. They trusted each other as much as they had to. Anyone could be the enemy, however—anyone could be a friend who would sell everyone else out for their own freedom.

To share anything of themselves was to give someone else information that could be used against them. If anyone knew about his abilities, other people on the street might wonder if, after having those wrinkled, bony hands on him, he had encouraged the man to kill himself. Porsq had no idea what any of those people would think about the part he played in the man’s death. Some had liked the old man, despite his faults. Others had seen him as a terrible person, and yet never raised a finger to keep him away from Porsq or a handful of other small bodies that lingered on the city streets. Other people had found no fault with anything the man had done—couldn’t figure out why we would kill himself when his life was pretty good.

Porsq kept his distance from those people, in the weeks between that night when his innocence was stolen from him—Izurial’s words—but it wasn’t enough.

Someone had already caught his scent.

Rayleen, Porsq now thought, had already known he existed. The golden one claimed to not always be able to see the abilities and paths of everyone, but Porsq could sense the lie in her at times. The woman worked for Fräthk. The woman was friends with them, despite what Porsq could only describe as disgust for so much of what Fräthk did flowing off Rayleen at times. The woman was a ball of mysterious—of different desires and thoughts that Porsq didn’t like the feel of.

Porsq’s first real friend on the streets was an older girl. She wasn’t that much older, although to his tiny mind, she seemed so much older and wiser. Really, he now thought she was likely the age he was now—thirteen to his then seven. Someone who knew the streets—knew how to get by on them, how to stay safe, how to enjoy the freedom not having parents around gave them.

He trusted her, eventually, and with that trust came stupidity.

He trusted someone he shouldn’t have—let his first friend in months of sleeping on the cold, hard streets, pull his secret abilities out of him.

That was the end of everything—the end of his time on the streets, the end of his freedom, the end of his friendship with the girl.

“It’s weird, don’t you think, that Fräthk treats us so badly?” Porsq asked into Olivier’s chest, the man rocking them slightly—very slightly, not just due to the risk of attracting the still lingering Hwris’ attention, but also because three children in his lap was a lot to balance. “Life on the streets was so terrible. All it would take is some warmth and consistent food, and most of us would cooperate with at least some of Fräthk's plans? Maybe not all—some of the things that are asked of us are really terrible—but… if we started out with a baseline of okay treatment, then were punished for refusing to do certain jobs… that would make more sense, you know?”

“I think Fräthk is very stupid and doesn’t know how to run an operation like this,” Olivier stated blandly, and Porsq had to bury his face into the man’s chest in order to keep his giggles from echoing out in the world.

It really would be quite terrible if Hwris confirmed they were there, all because he was laughing at Olivier so clearly stating that he thought Fräthk unsuited for their role within the criminal organization they had somehow found themself near the top of. Sometimes, Porsq thought they had amassed the power they had due solely to Rayleen—she really was quite terrifying, her ability to locate those with irregular deviations that would be of use to her friend something almost monstrous, despite its flaws and her lies.

“That life,” he said, when his laughter subsided, “would have been okay—would have been something better than life on the streets, even if we were still technically captives.”

As it was, within days of finding himself within Fräthk’s grasp, Porsq was already wondering if he could escape, and within a few months, he knew he had to get away.