[Can’t Opt Out]

“Hey… that actually looks pretty good,” BJ said, leaning in a bit closer to inspect the haircut Baylor had given the teenager.

Baylor flipped his knife through his fingers, making the iridescent metal of the blade he had won in a game of kyra a few years back glitter in the lights of the city. Falmíer’s lighting was weird. Part of it was the perpetual, lingering darkness of the underground, of course, but another part was how the stone walls glittered in what artificial light the city cast off. Slices of light scattered off the stones and gems, off the stalactites hanging like ominous blades high above them, just waiting to fall and slice some poor, unsuspecting soul to pieces—although, the overhanging spears of reds and blacks, and occasionally other colours, were said to be just as much remnants of the Lowdourans’ abilities as the cave system. As a result, just as the cave systems were seen as eternal, nothing capable of altering them but another Lowdouran, stalactites falling wasn’t considered a risk.

That said… they had somewhat managed to alter the cave system during their trek through them, hadn’t they? While they had let the instances of {Hidey Hole} they had needed to activate to get through some of the squishier parts of the cave systems fall, returning the cave system to normal, once they were through, technically they didn’t have to let it fall back into normalcy. So… was the cave system actually untouchable? Maybe it would have popped back into place, regardless of whether they tried to leave {Hidey Hole}’s alterations behind or not. Alternatively, perhaps Emilia had done the unthinkable and somehow created a way to alter stone affected by the Lowdouran without knowing it!

That would be cool, Baylor thought, although it was probably more likely that the stories of the Lowdourans’ abilities leaving inalterable material behind were overblown. Cool, in a completely different way.

Baylor gazed up into the glittering crystal above for a long moment, his blade flipping, flipping, flipping—

“Baylor, stop playing with the knife. You’re scaring the kid,” Darrian sighed, nudging Baylor’s shoulder with his thigh—Baylor was still squatting in front of their captive—and that lack of fear was nice.

It would have been understandable if, after accidentally pushing the other boy to his potential death, Darrian was a little leery of getting close to him for a bit—especially while he had a knife in his hands. Instead, Darrian almost seemed… most affectionate, more comfortable, more… something with him than normal? That was… was it nice? Baylor was unsure. Darrian was one of the more pleasant members of their friend group, and Baylor wasn’t exactly opposed to thinking of the other boy as an actual friend—assuming he could get his black knot to cooperate and wrap itself around Darrian—rather than friend adjacent. He had also been a good hugger, and had even let Baylor play with his hair and—

“Why would you assume my haircutting skills wouldn’t be good? I’m good with my hands, relatively artsy, and good with a blade! Isn’t this, like, the perfect skill for me!?” he demanded, flipping his knife closed, the blade hiding away in the handle before he stuffed in back into one of his shirt’s many hidden compartments. To the side, Sorvell frowned and glared between his and his brother’s outfits, likely wondering if his brother’s had a knife of their own on their person—they did, although theirs were replicas of the one he had.

Emilia didn’t like it, claiming that—just like any difference between their person and what they had on them—such a unique item could be used to tell them apart. As a result, they had taken multiple trips to see various Free Coloniers she knew, testing to see if they could tell them difference between them based solely on his blade.

Aside from the Blood Rain General, no one else had ever been able to feel anything different about them. That man was a monster, though, and could also tell them apart based on their blood—something about different makeups of minerals and vitamins within them. They had spent an entire season in Dion with Emilia, eating the exact same portions as one another in an attempt to see if that was enough to fool the old man. Their efforts had been a success… for a few minutes. Unfortunately, the guy was so observant that he could see the smallest differences in the way they fought and acted. The smallest bit of hesitance within Valor because this wasn’t the life he would have chosen for himself and while he did a good job at faking comfort with combat, he wasn’t quite enough to fool Dion’s premier soldier. Then there was the slightly less instinctual way that Taelor fought, each movement holding a bit more thought than his younger brothers’. Of course, there was the lingering bloodlust within himself, there, even when he pushed it as far under his skin as he could.

This experiment with their food and subsequent realization that they still could be told apart by the old man had been followed by another season of learning under him—which was nice of him, they all knew, the Blood Rain General rarely teaching anyone who wasn’t officially one of his students. Did they all know they were unlikely to ever come across someone as skilled and observant as him in combat? Yes. The Blood Rain General was a power unto himself, who had led Dion to becoming one of the most powerful nations on the continent. Emilia and Hurinren—as well as the mysterious third student who came around so rarely the three of them had never managed to meet him—may one day match their teacher in such things, but even they admitted it wasn’t a give. After all, as far as Baylor knew, Hurinren still couldn’t tell them apart based on their nutritional scores alone.

They had discussed, shortly after all this training occurred, if they should offer their services in training Hurinren to sense such things. While all knowledge could be useful, the skill itself wasn’t something Hurinren would have much use for, was the thing. Ignoring rumours about the gloria being clones—and if they were, they weren’t wearing the same face—they were the only line of clones currently living; as such, teaching Hurinren to differentiate them like this would have only been teaching him to fight Hyrat clones more effectively. At the time, they had decided that while they trusted Hurinren, it wasn’t worth their time and effort to let him learn such a thing off them. Currently, however, Baylor was second guessing that decision—after all, this had been a few years ago and while the older clones had never been particularly restrained in their opinion of those of them who were different, it hadn’t yet become much of an issue. Yes, they had effectively tried to break Finn with his first assignment, but those of them who were actively aware of the older clones’ actions and intentions had collectively decided to just let the issue lie.

As long as the older clones left them alone, they would leave them alone. They all knew it wouldn’t last, and now that he and his brothers were beginning to step into their roles, Malcolm effectively having to manage them himself as the older clones seemed intent on sending them to their deaths…

No, maybe they should be teaching Hurinren how to mark and identify each of them with a little more accuracy. They all knew Levi was working towards something that would help their group in dealing with the rot that was lingering within their organization. Maybe they should do a little as well? Hurinren would help them out, whenever they needed to finally take down the older clones and anyone else aiding in their efforts—something that most of them knew had to include at least a few high-ranking government and military officials.

“Are you just… contemplating betraying the nation aloud?” Sorvell asked into their group relay, looking a tad pale and scandalized as Taelor agreed with all the points Baylor had been signing to their group. “Well… not aloud, but—” He waved his hands haphazardly, although a few vague and malformed signs could be seen within his attempts to illustrate what not aloud meant. The man really was quite skilled with languages to have picked up enough to sign anything at them in their sign language after only a few hours together.

“You should become a teacher, like your dad, but for languages,” Baylor told him, before turning back to the teenager, who looked significantly less disgusting than before. Less shit on them—and fuck if there hadn’t been a lot in their hair. “Have you been living in the sewers?”

The teenager bristled, pulling up straight and glaring at him. “It’s the safest place.”

“Safe from whom?”

“Everyone.”

“Everyone, as in, this Fräthk person? And some ‘scary man’ who has the ability to turn Drini to mush with no effort?”

The teenager made an affronted sound, even if they lost a little colour, their eyes skimming this way and that, as though worried one of the city’s collectors of those with irregular deviations might pop out of the shadows—they wouldn’t, but Baylor couldn’t blame the kid for being concerned. The thing about the lighting of this city, was it was a strangely static thing. There were no flickering lights on the street—no flames casting strange shapes over the world. Combined with the odd angles that light appeared at, cast everywhere and nowhere by the cavern itself and all the metal that the buildings were built from, themselves a haphazard arrangement of puzzle pieces that didn’t quite fit, everything seemed to look a little wrong.

Perhaps it was normal for people who had grown up in such conditions, but Baylor thought the irregularity and unexpectedness of the lighting of Lüshan’s subterranean cities had to take a psychological toll on the inhabitants. It was normal human perception, perpetually pulled into something incorrect, and the wrongness must certainly have fractured its way through the minds of the humans who lived within it.

It didn’t help that, due to the static nature of the lights and the shadows they cast, when something disrupted them—a person potentially blocks-of-reflecting-light away walking through light that would bend and distort before ending up somewhere entirely new—it was startling. There was so much light, and yet, so little, all at once.

Everything, cast dim and dreary, each shift in light a jolt through the soul.

Baylor knew there was no one around because every time he moved he let his recon skill expand once again—it was part of the reason he was still squatting in front of the teenager: his recon skill was fully expanded and he didn’t want to move and have to start over again.

“That’s how you knew I was there?” the girl—and thank fuck she had finally used a word form that indicated her gender, using the teenager within his mind had been growing tiresome—asked, pulling her eyes away from a light that kept shifting and startling her, and back to Baylor.

“There’s a parent, holding a crying baby and walking in front of several windows over that way,” Baylor told her, pointing in the general direction of the person who was causing the lights over there to flicker so constantly and yet impossibly inconsistently. “You’re pretty jumpy. Running from one of our mystery collectors?”

“’Your’ mystery collectors?” the girl asked, glaring at him but not in a way that seemed antagonistic—more, it was curious, interested.

The smile that split over Baylor’s face as he took that curious interest into himself was something deranged, he knew—all clones had to sit and learn each movement of their body to perfection from a young age, after all. Every movement had to be something they could choreograph, when necessary. Every potential personality forced into them until they were a thousand people inside a single body, each one primed to be pulled out at a moment’s notice.

Right now, he wore something worse than his real face. He was himself and Levi and something even more unpredictable and insane, all rolled into one. If their roles were cast with Valor as the timid clone, Taelor the one who always stood strong and unwavering—indifferent to the plight of those around him, his shoulder constantly moving in an attempt to shake the clinging Valor off—Baylor was the one who pulled all attention to himself.

He was loud and deranged—unpredictable in whether he would attack or hug or offer to cut a strange teenager’s hair.

The dangerous one.

The one who needed to be watched, lest they snap.

The one who needed to be taken out first.

The girl recoiled, just the smallest bit, from the insanity he let leak into the world. Still, as he explained why they were there, she relaxed once again, nodding along with his story of Emilia and Olivier and the situation happening in the city.

“So… have anything you can add to our information?”

A pink tongue flicked out, the girl licking over her cracked lips. They bled a lot, Baylor imagined, and while he couldn’t feel bad for the girl, exactly, he could feel something for the life she had been living—could know that, were Emilia there, she would be insisting they help the kid.

Emilia’s empathy was a nuisance; it was also what made her the girl Baylor loved—this person filled with so much emotion that he could never truly experience, only sip from the goblet that was empathy for her.

“Maybe,” their accidental captive said, startling when Baylor popped up—he really had been squatting in front of her for a while, and they needed to move.

“Good,” he cheered, letting his smile become something soft and accepting—he had to sell that insane and unpredictable thing, after all!—as he turned to Sorvell and demanded he let the girl go.

Sorvell, dutiful in following their script despite his lack of experience, turned to Taelor for permission, Baylor complaining and muttering about how unfair it was that Taelor was in charge and not him, but snapping his mouth closed when his older brother glared at him. Baylor glared back—some group dissent, just for good measure—before suddenly Darrian was there beside him, fingers brushing against his in quiet support? Baylor wasn’t sure, but when he glanced up at the other boy, seeing nothing but soft acceptance there…

There it was, his black knot wrapping around his new friend, permanent and unbending, their hands sliding together as Baylor grinned up at the other boy.

“You’re just gonna… let me go?” the girl asked, pushing herself up onto wobbly legs that Baylor doubted were due entirely to the position she’d been left sitting in for the last few minutes.

Turning back to her, Baylor let his cheerful smile fall a little softer, Taelor forgotten behind him, Darrian’s hand still slipped through his—warm, solid, and Emilia was right to seek out Darrian for good hugs and physical connection. “Not exactly,” he told her.