[Can’t Opt Out]

Mikhail was paying attention. He very much was. He was watching as Polianna worked at convincing the Drinarna officers who had been given the unfortunate job of managing the diplomatic entrance today into allowing them entry to the city. She would get there, he knew. Polianna was demanding and… unpleasant. A number of times, people had told him that, when he of all people found someone unpleasant, they definitely must be because he didn’t dislike people often.

Without really thinking about it, Mikhail could probably list off every person he didn’t like—that was how short the list was, that even with his mind unable to latch onto most concepts for too long, he still knew all the people he didn’t much care for.

There was Polianna, who was… hard, cold. The warmth she showed Coral was nice, but Mikhail didn’t think anyone else liked her. Mikhail thought everyone judged Coral a little for being with her. “A mean girl,” he had heard Polianna described ever since they were children. “Someone who will always be out for herself, even over the smallest of things.”

Once, Polianna had gotten into a fist fight with one of her classmates over a dress for a school dance. They had both wanted to wear the same dress, which, according to a laughing Codeth, was completely unacceptable, didn’t Mikhail know! Unless he had greatly confused something—which did happen, but Mikhail was almost positive he understood this situation—the other girl had bought her dress first. According to Codeth, most stores kept a record of purchases, so students going to the same dances wouldn’t wear the same thing. That’s how big a no-no it was to wear the same dress!

Polianna had gone dress shopping sometime later and decided she wanted that same specific dress. With the other girl having already bought hers and registered it for their school’s dance, Polianna couldn’t buy it. There had been whispers that Polianna had tried to bribe the store into altering their records and then contacting the other girl and claiming there had been a mistake, and she couldn’t wear the dress because it was already spoken for. Mikhail wasn’t sure if that was true, but with Polianna, it could be. If it was true, the store had refused. Polianna had then taken to bullying the girl, in hopes that she wouldn’t want to go to the dance anymore—this hadn’t worked—and then demanded the girl tell the store she wasn’t going to wear the dress.

“Keep in mind,” Halen had added, when he and Codeth had been explaining why there had been a showdown in the science lab that day to Mikhail, “that it wasn’t like Polianna was okay with them both wearing the dress. No, she alone was going to wear that dress. The thing isn’t returnable, either. That poor girl would have had to go get a whole new dress—which is a whole thing and takes hours of trying on dress after dress, and then you need shoes and accessories too. Of course, she would have needed to pay for everything all over, and still been forced to keep that first dress that she couldn’t even wear.”

“Find a good dress this late in the season?” Codeth had laughed, throwing all the silly, fake accent some of the students used when speaking into his voice. “Impossible! She might as well show up in a paper bag for how atrociously ugly anything left unspoken for will be!”

Contemplating that, Mikhail had asked if that would be the case for Polianna as well—whether she was trying to get the other girl to give her the right to wear the dress because she couldn’t find anything nice that wasn’t already being worn. Both Halen and Codeth had agreed it was quite likely.

“She’s been away, you remember? Not an excuse for her being a bitch, but she didn’t have an opportunity to shop where she was. Probably didn’t even know for sure she’d be back in time for the dance,” Codeth had said, a strain of sad frustration in his voice. It hadn’t been the first time Polianna had ended up in an in-patient program due to her eating disorder, nor had it been the last. According to everyone, it also wasn’t an excuse for her to treat her classmates badly or get into fights with them.

Mikhail had heard a lot of stories like that about Polianna, all revolving around this entitled girl who wasn’t afraid to demand anything from people. Currently, she was demanding the Drinarna let them in—them now including several Hyrat clones, who had apparently been struggling to get in through the regular entrance as well. Something about a hold up with another person trying to enter the city. It was a lie—Coral didn’t even need Halen’s function to translate the feelings she got from her readings of people to tell them that lies had been oozing out of the officers.

Lies, and a lot of confusion, Coral stating that it felt as though few of the officers knew anything of what was happening in the city.

They had all still looked at the data Halen’s function spit out. Everyone agreed that most of the Drinarna they had crossed path with between entering the train station and getting to the papers checkpoint weren’t part of whatever corruption appeared to be going on. They were just trying to keep people out of the city because someone had told them there was a problem in the city. A few seemed to know more details, but they weren’t sharing what they knew with anyone. The timeline for everything was odd within their feelings. Olivier de la Rue had been missing for hours, and the embassy had informed their contacts within the government, but most of the officers had no idea why they were holding people back; instead, they were holding people back with fabricated issues without knowing why they were doing so, which didn’t seem like a good way to run what was effectively a border crossing. They also were letting people in, just slowly, rather than outright closing the papers checkpoint.

No one liked it. No one liked how they were being held up at the diplomatic entrance either, but Polianna was insistent that she would get them through. Thankfully, Malcolm had finally been told about the situation, so they didn’t have to worry about him finding out because they were flagged as having entered Falmíer legally. The Drinarna officer they were dealing with also wasn’t one of the bad officers. Mikhail also didn’t like those officers.

They were not good people, every reading Coral got from the few they’d come across featuring lewd and inappropriate thoughts about the people who passed them by. Sometimes, they would catalogue irregular deviations in the people they saw, bad intentions clear in their thoughts now that they knew what to look for. Sometimes, they had words about silverstrains and Baalphorians and little bugs twinning through them. Mikhail had sent a message to Emilia about the weird translation they were getting for the last one, and no, Mikhail didn’t like any of the Drinarna officers who were thinking about little children and sick people and other innocents like that. It wasn’t nice, and while he usually tried not to dislike people, Mikhail was okay not liking people who were so accepting of working for a criminal who was using people like that.

Warren was another person he didn’t like for similar reasons. There were so many reasons to dislike Warren, who had lied about being with him in an attempt to cover up whatever terrible thing he had done to Emilia. That was bad enough, that using of him to claim innocence. It was worse because he knew why Warren had done it: Mikhail often didn’t know how he ended up in one place or another. Sometimes, it seemed that the world simply slipped away from him. One moment, he would be sitting and having a snack in his living room, thinking about this or that, the next, he would be wading into the ocean, intent to rescue a child who had stepped too close and been pulled out by the tide—there were a lot of moments like that, where his awareness seemed to slip away and then boom! He’d be in exactly the right place at the right time.

Mikhail wondered if Emilia’s stalking function—although Halen hadn’t referred to it like that, Baylor had, and Baylor was much more honest about the silly, embarrassing things that Emilia did than Halen was—would be able to track him the next time that happened. There were never any records in his Censor, almost as though something of him ceased to exist in those time frames. Then, he’d be aware of the world again and his Censor would be recording as though nothing had happened.

It was weird, but Mikhail’s relationship with his Censor had always been atypical, not even Emilia or Halen managing to make more than the barest sense of it. Surprisingly, it hadn’t been that hard to accept, once Emilia had pointed out that there was something not quite right in his genetics. Everything had made sense after that, and he had finally known that it wasn’t some failing on his part—had known that all the things that made him different weren’t some problem in his brain or with his personality, but rather, they were a result of these tiny flecks of DNA that weren’t there.

It was such a small blip on his genetic code that even Doctor Vickers hadn’t been able to find because D-Level tests didn’t look for what he had. No, instead, the baseline genetic tests done during pregnancy tested for it, then suggested the parents abort. Such an odd thing to test for, this small little blip that made his life a little annoying at times, but no more annoying than the lives the Dyads in their group lived. What he had wasn’t the only thing they tested for during pregnancy, but those baseline tests didn’t test for Dyadism, didn’t test for being a non-dev or a silverstrain or even a lavender code. No, the things that were tested for where abnormalities seen as incompatible with life, or things that would life so unpleasant the person might wish themself dead—something Mikhail did not wish for. A positive test for what was wrong with him didn’t mean abortion was required, only that it was heavily recommended.

It was still a strange thing, to know the government would have suggested his mother get rid of him, had her tests actually shown that something, in their estimation, was wrong with him. Fortunately for him—he quite liked living—she hadn’t known.

Emilia had hacked into his mother’s medical records for him. There had been no sign of the missing fragments of his genetics on those baseline tests, taken throughout every Baalphorian pregnancy.

“Maybe something went wrong during the tests,” Emilia had suggested, frowning and poking around before discovering that Mikhail had been born prematurely, before the final baseline test. Chances were he had experienced a genetic spasm between the penultimate test and his early birth. “You might have even been born a little early because of it… then again, that far along, most people don’t abort anyways?” Emilia had cringed, muttering something about how, instead, many of those babies who were born wrong were given up for adoption, before refusing to speak any more on the subject.

Despite hearing the unspoken intention in her words—this implication that he didn’t want to know the information, so she wasn’t going to tell him—Mikhail had made the mistake of looking up all the reasons why abortions that late in a pregnancy were uncommon. Some were expected. Parents had already named and bonded with their unborn child, and although that didn’t always stop them from giving the child up, it did make it harder to abort. Other reasons… he could have gone without knowing. Just thinking about it now, he could feel the phantom chemicals of death seeping into him, product of his imagination that they were.

Mikhail was still glad to know what was different about him, even with all the strange awareness of how he could have been killed before ever being born, had anyone known something wasn’t quite right in his DNA. That was probably why what Warren had done to him felt so bad. Here was this part of him that he had come to accept, even with all the trouble it caused him and his friends, and Warren had taken it and twisted it into something terrible—something that could be used to hide the horrible things he had done to Emilia. Mikhail might not know exactly what Warren had done to Emilia, but he could guess, and they were inexcusable. He wasn’t sure Warren had deserved to be killed for it, but he wasn’t sure he hadn’t deserved to be killed for what he’d done and how hard he had tried to cover it up.

“If someone does something once and gets away with it, of course they’ll do it again,” Halen had told him as he prepared to go and wreak havoc on Coral’s former school.

Mikhail had thought that, as Coral was nor longer a student at the school, there wasn’t a point in destroying it—although he was pretty sure the destroying had only happened because Emilia had joined in. For Halen—and Emilia—the risk was that another Dyad would end up at the school and be treated the same way.

In the same way, if Warren hadn’t been killed, he might have turned around and done the same thing to someone else one day. Maybe, he would have even used Mikhail as an alibi again. Rafe had never bothered questioning him directly about the fake alibi—Mikhail had found out about it and gone straight to Halen, who had insisted he sleep over while he dealt with the situation—so he assumed Halen had told Rafe it had been a lie and asked him to let it go. Mikhail wouldn’t have lied for Warren—people only lied about where they were when they had something to hide, and there should have been nothing to hide from Rafe—but using him as that fake alibi had put Mikhail in danger of Rafe’s wrath.

That was just… mean. Warren had known that Mikhail might not have remembered that night clearly, might have panicked and lied, might have wondered if he had forgotten spending more time with his friend. So, Mikhail might have confirmed Warren’s alibi and Rafe might have killed him for it later.

It was the sort of careless disregard that Mikhail had only ever felt from teachers, and to feel it from someone he had considered his friend…

Mikhail startled when a message from Codeth, which included a picture of Baylor cutting the hair of their accidental teenage captive, broke through his sadness, a frown immediately pulling at his lips because… where was he, and how had he gotten there? Of course today would be the day where he would not only have his Censor failing on him far ahead of schedule, but also a day where he would fall into his mind and somehow end up somewhere he wasn’t supposed to be.

Then again, usually, he ended up exactly where he was meant to.