[Can’t Opt Out]

The people within Fräthk’s holding cells were strange. Porsq thought that, after having spent months moving through the streets, getting to know so many different people, he would have seen all the sorts of people who could exist. He’d been wrong.

Some of the people were nice. Izurial was always nice, even if inside he was crying. It hadn’t taken more than meeting the silverstrain once for Porsq to realize they were the same: people who had been hurt in a way that was difficult to explain even when said in the most plain and truthful of ways. Of course, Izurial was hurt so much more than Porsq ever would be—this didn’t stop Izurial was later reprimanding the boy, telling him that the number of times someone was harmed played no part in how much pain they held within themself or how fast and easy that trauma should be to shake off—and he could feel it so often, echoing down from the world above.

Izurial had one of those minds that was so easy to memorize the feel of. He was kindness and warmth, laying over the stones of his heart. He was a creature who was meant to bask in the sunlight, and yet had been forced to become a rock, buried deep underground and never allowed to feel more than the growing warmth of the rotting dirt and plants above it—Fräthk had ordered that Porsq be taught to articulate what he felt from his awareness of people’s mental states as soon was he was captured. There had been a lot of reading old books with too much description and no plot, a lot of practicing on people. Most of his time, in those months between when he was captured and when he tried to escape, was spent with teachers outside, where he was made to sit and watch people wander by in their day-to-day lives. Later, he would be forced to not just feel out the ways their minds worked, but to pick a mind and follow it through to the furthest reaches of his abilities. Later still, he would be forced to manipulate people.

Make them stop in the middle of the path. Make them ignore the irate people around them, whom their halted steps were holding up. Drop this. Steal that. Go here. Go there. Practice practice practice until his mind was a bog of guilt because of all the things he had been forced to do and the always lingering reality that he would forever be forced to do yet worse things.

This wouldn’t come until later, and even within his small mind, Porsq had still known it wasn’t anything near as bad as what Izurial was forced to do. Where Porsq was able to easily shift the blame onto his teachers and Fräthk for asking these things of him—and just as he expected, after hearing so many stories of the ways in which Fräthk forced his little bugs to do as he bid them, when Porsq first complained about not wanting to force a woman to leave her child in the street, he had been punished and threatened with yet more horrible punishments if he ever dared complain again—Izurial had to live with the things that were done to him night after night, day after day because the only time that was ever safe was when Vtraní was there.

It wouldn’t be until months later that Porsq would learn that Izurial’s gorgeous silver hair and those eyes that sparkled with flecks of silver, cast over purple irises, was due to something called a silverstrain. It wouldn’t be until over a decade from now—this moment in which he related bits and pieces of his life to Olivier and the children—that Porsq would learn the true horror that could be birthed within the minds of silverstrains consigned to being a sex slave. All those frail slaves that Division 30 and their allies swiped out of Chinsata, not once but twice, broken and deformed not just because of what had been done to them, but because their bodies were made to enjoy sex.

The amount of self-hatred a single silverstrain could contain, as a result of their body betraying their mind and enjoying the horrific things that were done to them was not something thirteen-year-old Porsq could even imagine despite how many horrible things he had already felt in his too short life. The misery of his own life—the parents who had abandoned him in hopes of saving their other children; the man who had ripped away his innocence as yet more adults failed to voice a single syllable in an attempt to keep him safe; the coldness that broke through Izurial whenever he was taken away to entertain this person or that.

The worst thing about the holding cells was the people beneath their feet. Some of the people who lived in the cells around Porsq’s weren’t good people—and Porsq had to reiterate that they should all be glad so many people had left their group, back on the last level of the holding cells—but the things that existed beneath them? The way that he could feel each new person being burned apart? Their soul torn to shreds until they were something less than human? Something so monstrous their bodies gave up because human minds and bodies couldn’t sustain the horror of the thing Fräthk was trying to put into them?

“Put into them?” Olivier asked before shaking his head and muttering that he would ask Porsq for more details about that later. “When we can talk properly about everything you felt down there,” he said, and Olivier was going to keep him? “I’m going to keep you safe, and get you out of here. I’ll make sure you end up somewhere safe.”

“Is that possible?” Porsq asked, fingertip following the complicated patterns of aether that covered Olivier’s shirt. It was pretty, and the person who had used the ability—the skill, as Olivier had called it—had pretty aether. His silverstrain friend, whom he trusted with every part of himself—more of himself than Porsq even though the man aware of.

Had she been hurt the way he and Izurial had been? Izurial had once told him that few silverstrains escaped into adulthood without someone hurting them like that.

“We attract trouble,” he had laughed at the time, after Porsq had tried and failed to escape. Looking back now, Porsq thought the man had been trying to encourage him to not break under the reality that he hadn’t managed to escape for more than a few hours—to not let that failure destroy his spark of defiance. Izurial was sad—had been sad for a long, long time, Porsq thought, although it wouldn’t be until part way through the war that he would become more skilled at pinpointing the length of time something had existed within the minds of the people he looked within. At the same time, Izurial, from the moment Porsq first met him, had been bright and cheerful. He pushed and pulled despite everything that was done to him, and Porsq wanted to be like that—so, he had refused to be broken by his failed escape attempt or the years that came after.

Just as Izurial had insisted that, despite all the horrific things that were done to him—by the perpetual betrayal of his body in becoming aroused even as his mind hated everything he was forced to do—he would not break, neither would Porsq.

That little bit of light—that reminder that he wasn’t allowed to break—was enough for Porsq to force his story out of his mouth. If being so close to the monsters Fräthk was trying to create hadn’t broken him, neither would not recognizing Hwris’ mental signature.

For months, Porsq was taken outside the holding cells, and while he was made to do things to the people they saw on the street, it was rarely something so terrible it was worse than the holding cells themselves. That was only at the beginning. At first, it was easy—a stretching of his area of influence, a testing and practice of each ability to see how good his control, how powerful. Slowly, the stretching of his abilities became something more insidious.

The first mother he was asked to make abandon her child was allowed to come back. So was the second parent. The third caregiver. The fourth father, until eventually, he lost track of how many parents he had momentarily separated from their children. Each time, Porsq would keep the parents away a little longer—make them move a little further through the city before releasing his manipulations and then following their frantic steps back.

Then, it became something more complicated, then something more complicated still.

Amongst the rules he had to follow as his training became increasingly complex, there was the following:

Make the parents leave their child for a given period of time. At first, it was seconds—or even measured in footsteps. Make them walk three steps away. Make them leave their child for five minutes. Make them run to a certain spot and then release them mid-stride—that one Porsq hated the most, because sometimes, the parent would trip and hurt themself. Then, they would have to make their way back to their child with an injury that needed rest—that was a strike of pain through his own mind. The reality that he had forced down instincts that would cause them to search out their child even while in so much pain was, at times, enough to make him spew vomit across the walkways. As he was already underfed and undernourished, this was always a travesty.

Make all the other people in the area ignore the child. That rule was okay because a few times, other adults had tried to help the child. Mostly, no one did—and it was really sad that people were like that.

Stuck in their own world, not even noticing an abandoned child.

Too worried about what would happen if they tried to help.

Thinking it someone else’s problem, and they didn’t want to get involved.

Worse, a few times adults had tried to take the child. Later, Porsq would come to think there was a good chance this particular rule was meant to have been added later, except whenever an adult tried to steal a child away, Porsq would do bad things to their minds—would shatter them to the point that they slumped to the ground and then he and his teacher would need to run, before the Drinarna were called.

Horrible that the adults would call the Drinarna over an adult who had been intending to do horrible things to a child collapsing, but not an abandoned child, nor even a child in the midst of being stolen away.

So, Porsq learned to expand his abilities to more people—and really, he was sure this was where Fräthk’s people had gone wrong: in teaching him how to both manipulate swarms of people and in creating zones of influence, where anyone without sufficient defences who stepped foot within his influence would fall victim to him.

Make the parent aware or unaware of what they are doing. Both were horrible. When the parent was aware of what they were doing, it was setting them up to think one of two things: their bodies were being controlled by someone else, or they couldn’t trust their own mind. So many parents, Porsq discovered as he worked through learning to use his abilities, had a negative relationship with their identity as a parent. The reasons were myriad, but the reality was, that by placing that tiny bit of doubt within their minds by doing nothing more than making them step away from their child while aware that it was happening, many returned to their child worried about what other things they might do to their child—worried about what other terrible intentions lingered within their minds. So, unaware was better, even if once they came back to themselves and were blocks away with no memory of how they had gotten there, and their panic became a visceral pang of pain through the world.

Make an older child wait for their parent to return or stop a child of any age from crying—an exercise in not just effecting multiple people, but also in affecting them in different ways while they worked their ways into increasingly different locations. This was, in many ways, a kindness… for a time, anyways. When he was allowed to affect the minds of the children, he would stop them from remembering anything had happened. Their parent hadn’t abandoned them. They weren’t afraid. Everything would be alright—and for a time, this hadn’t been a lie.

Make the parent return at a certain pace. Run. Walk. Crawl. It had been bad enough when the rule of having to make the parents aware of what was happening had been added. It was nothing compared to forcing a parent to wander away unaware of the child they were leaving behind, then, once they were at the stop point, he was made to force awareness back into them, then, they had to dawdle back to their child, all while their mind and stomach rolled. Porsq didn’t doubt that a few of those parents had been broken by what happened to them. Not only had they left their child far away, unattended, but now they wanted to get back and they couldn't.

They couldn’t.

They couldn’t.

Porsq grew to hate himself and all the things he was forced to do quite quickly. The worst, however, was yet to come—his breaking point had yet to form as more than a fear over his mind that he refused to fully acknowledge.