[Can’t Opt Out]

Baylor surged forward, swiping the blade of his willbrand over the neck of the Drinarna agent they had been targeting—the third of however many they decided they needed to take down as they moved through the city, attempting to both get to Emilia and find out more about the situation as the Drinarna knew it.

This particular officer had been putting up more of a fight than the last two, who had been teamed up, and when Sorvell—who was exceptionally confident in his ability to defend himself—had wandered up to them and asked if they would surrender and give up their xpherns because something odd was happening in the city and they wanted answers, they had happily surrendered.

The pair had been in the midst of beginning to tell them about when they had first noticed their xpherns disconnect from the xphern transmission network when this fucker had come out of the shadows and slit their throats!

It was very rude, and seriously, what better way to prove that you were an enemy than to kill other Drinarna!

Baylor felt a little bad that they hadn’t had the sense to realize the corrupt Drinarna might be perfectly happy to kill the not-corrupt Drinarna—really, it was quite the oversight!—but he supposed these two might have not been not-corrupt Drinarna. They could easily have been corrupt for the other side—for the scary man—rather than that Fräthk person, after all.

Still, two Drinarna were dead, and while he and Sorvell had tried to capture this third dude, it hadn’t been working. So, killing him it had been!

Annoying, and bloody, and not even satisfying! Baylor would have much preferred a more interesting kill—better yet, he would have preferred to have dragged the man off into a back alley and tortured his secrets out of him. Slice through his stomach and hold the man’s entrails in his hands. Suspend his life a little while he played with them—if he put them back nicely enough, the man still might live, after all? Wouldn’t the man tell him the truth, if only so he could be put back together and not die?

More than likely, Baylor would have killed him anyways—putting bodies that had their intestines spilling out of them back together was always annoying, and really, did they actually want to leave one of these fuckers lingering about? Emilia would be upset if someone they could have killed had then turned around and hurt one of the Drinarna she actually liked, after all!

Alas, there would be no torturing of any of the Drinarna they happened across—Taelor’s idea.

“Remember, we are not acting in an official capacity. Killing the Drini we come across will be bad enough, but at least defensible. If we begin torturing them, it may become more of an issue,” his older brother had said into the group relay—into the big group relay because while Baylor was the one who enjoyed torturing people, it wasn’t a secret that at least a few people knew how to torture people.

Doctor Vickers, they were all sure, knew exactly which biological buttons to push to get information out of someone. Simeon as well could be a cold-hearted bitch, and after that whole incident in the cave system, where the other boy had looked at him like he might very well turn Baylor’s killing intent around and torture him!?

Yeah, Baylor had no doubt that Simeon had it in him to be a first-class torturer.

This was to say nothing of the reality that, as he had already proven with that piece of shit Warren, Rafe would happily torture someone for Emilia—and really, Baylor wasn’t sure he would ever get over the fact that his distant cousin hadn’t included him in all that! Had the other boy had his reasons? Sure. The more of them who knew exactly what happened to Warren, the more risk there was to all of them—guesses and assumptions weren’t as incriminating as facts. There was also the fact that killing someone more for rage and vengeance might have risked triggering his serial killer instincts into a place he couldn’t come back from.

Still, he was bitter and wanted to make that fucker suffer! Really, Baylor thought Rafe had gone too soft on Warren, only torturing him a little bit before killing him. If it had been Baylor in that room with him, it would have been slow, meticulous. Chances were the guy would still be alive, even a decade later, slowly being sliced apart by his fury over… and over… and over again.

Nothing—not time nor Emilia’s smiles nor knowing the boy who had hurt her was dead—would ever soothe the rage Baylor held within him, aimed at a man who no longer existed.

Aether help anyone who ever dared hurt Emilia like that again, for they would have the brutality of his existence layered over them for not just their own evils, but Warren’s as well—for every disgusting person who had ever looked at the girl he loved because of her silverstrain or body that wasn’t quite ready to grow up yet.

Fuckers.

Trash.

Scum.

All that was to say that there were a number of people in their group who needed the reminder that, for some reason, human society tended to look more harshly on torture than murder, especially if the murder could be brushed aside as self-defence—something that this particular killing could definitely be classified as.

Seriously!? What kind of asshole comes out so hard against a bunch of young adults!? Many of whom very much still look to be in their mid-twenties!? Also! While the dude had killed his fellow officers first, he’d then gone after BJ and Valor, who had solidified themselves as the weakest members of their group. Neither of them had been hurt—and you can bet that even Taelor wouldn’t have been able to stop him from torturing the man, had he managed to hurt their baby brother—but still, the guy had clearly been intending to take their entire group down.

Unfortunately, the group of Drinarna who came across them next, presumably brought in by all the aether being disturbed by their fight, hadn’t seen that part of the scuffle. No, instead they saw a Hyrat clone standing over a dead officer, his head all but cut away from his body—and really, if Baylor couldn’t torture anyone, he should at least be able to make their death’s more interesting, but apparently, decapitating people so smoothly they retained awareness for a few seconds was too potentially traumatizing to the non-clones of their group according to Taelor.

Out of all the reasons to ditch the rest of their group, Baylor thought the fact that everyone else apparently had weak stomachs was high on the list. Killing people should be fun and interesting! Yes, the fighting was still enjoyable, but killing people so perfunctorily was going to get old really fast.

At the same time… Well, Baylor had been in the middle of eyeing up Darrian, considering how he now considered the other boy a friend and how friends probably avoided doing things that would traumatize each other, when that next group of Drinarna happened across them. There was a horrified gasp, some pointing and shouting. Sorvell had attempted to explain that the not-quite-decapitated officer had been the one to kill the other two—shockingly, said explanation hadn't been believed.

More mayhem had broken out after that, but these officers had now been successfully tied up. They were, however, not nearly as helpful as the first two had been intending to be. At the very least, they did manage to confiscate everyone’s xpherns and confirm that none of them were working, not even the one that belonged to the obviously corrupt officer.

“I don’t think that’s enough data points,” BJ commented, glancing over the injuries to their two newest captives, trying to determine if any were so serious that it needed to be dealt with.

They had been gagged, due to how much noise they were making, and after determining that they were fine enough, BJ sent a bolt of aether through them using a skill that Doctor Vickers had somewhat begrudgingly taught him. It was a… somewhat less violent version of a skill Black Knot agents also had, which temporarily disabled access to both cores and aetherstores for more than the most basic of bodily operations.

For Black Knot agents, such skills were used to disarm potentially dangerous captives, but the brutality of the skill often permanently damaged meridians, while it left scars over aetherstores. As a result, while it could be used as a punishment or warning to hostile parties, it was generally only used when junk skills and other methods of disabling the abilities of captives weren’t considered viable options—usually, this was when the captive was so powerful that they might be capable of breaking through such things.

According to Doctor Vickers, the private med skill he used was meant more for patients who were belligerent. “Sometimes, patients are afraid of treatment, or are in the midst of a panic attack. Mostly, this skill is used during disasters or war, where people who are injured or soldiers might be confused. While knocking them out is an option, with head injuries, that often isn’t recommended and can lead to more confusion when they wake up later in a different location,” their childhood doctor had explained when he had taught BJ the skill, back when Valor had fallen off the aetherstream and they had decided to take a short break to refresh their stamina for the second half of the journey.

“War?” Janie had asked, BJ having been practicing using the skill on her—Halen and Taelor had decided that she was the easiest to carry along the aetherstream if the skill took longer to dissipate than it should, given the parameters BJ set, something that could happen if the person’s connection to their body was on the weaker side. As expected, the skill had dissipated faster than the parameters would typically allow—Janie might be on the weaker side, but every one of their group was frightening in their own right. “The skill has existed long enough to have been used in a war?”

It had taken Janie asking for Baylor to realize she was right: while there had been small internal conflicts here and there over the last few centuries, the last true wars had been the last Colonial War and the takeover of the Grey Sands, both having occurred about three hundred years ago.

This had started an argument—a small disagreement, really—about why the med skill was being kept from The Black Knot, when it was clearly better than their own version. As he didn’t much care about not permanently fucking up a captive’s meridians and aetherstores, Baylor hadn’t much been listening. Mostly, he had gotten the impression that the odd medical association that oversaw all medical staff but didn’t technically exist both didn’t want their skill being used for torture and thought that giving up the skill to The Black Knot would lead to them using the skill so much that a Baalphorian criminal organization might come up with a counter for it, which would in turn make their jobs harder—they also used the skill to take down criminals who were disinclined to allow medical treatment, fearing they’d be arrested while being cared for, or who were simply being a nuisance.

Baylor also had the impression that Valor had been arguing with Doctor Vickers over the skill’s secrecy mostly so he could learn as much about it as possible, likely planning to give the conversation to Emilia for later—their doctor had put a lock on the skill as he gave it to BJ, so he couldn’t give a copy to anyone. Honestly? Baylor felt bad for Doctor Vickers, to be thinking a lock like that would stop Emilia from getting a hold of the skill. It was also encrypted from what he could tell, the skill dripping through BJ quite slowly as he used it on their two hostages, and then on more and more Drinarna as they swept through that area of the city, looking for more data points because there was actually a point to not just avoiding the Drinarna they came across.

They needed more information about how much the Drinarna knew about the situation. Maybe it would get them nowhere, maybe it would give them the bit of information they needed to figure out what to expect going forward—there was a big difference between the corrupt Drinarna being unwilling participants in all this and them being organized and happy to help, after all. As a result, they were taking a moment to hunt down all the Drinarna in the area—something Westrial was exceptionally helpful with, as she knew exactly where the closest groups would be stationed.

They did, however, move their holding area for the officers they snagged away from the place they’d burned the bodies of the three dead officers back into the aether—too much disruption, and someone might reasonably realize they’d already taken down a few officers—while also sticking the original two officers who had seen their bodies into a back alley, not wanting to upset any of the subsequent Drinarna they grabbed. This, unsurprisingly, was a lost cause—while a couple Drinarna willingly gave themselves up, most were some mixture of sensibly suspicious of their group and outright hostile. A few were killed in their scuffles as well, but even the Drinarna who witnessed those deaths found them odd—odd, as in, in one case, the officer had been more concerned with killing off their captive Drinarna than even defending themself. In another case, the officer had actively gone after their ever-growing pile of unworking xpherns rather than either try to save themself or rescue the captive officers.

This, Baylor thought, was the issue with law enforcement being filled with random people, rather than people raised from birth to fill such positions: they seemed to lack some inherent sensibility. Were The Black Knot or the families behind it perfect? Fuck no—not only were the older clones shitty fuckers, but Samina had been right when she said the Baxters were fucked if Levi alone were left to inherit the mantle of head of their branch of the family. Still, for all their flaws, Baylor didn’t doubt that the older clones wanted the Hyrat clones to be the best it could be; rather, it was simply that their image of the best version of the Hyrat clones didn’t align with what many of them imagined it to be, causing friction. In the same way, Levi was insane and perfect—and while the brat had run off, Baylor didn’t doubt he had his reasons.

They were crazy and perfect and flawed all at once. One day, the older clones would need to be wiped out, their corruption, born of a vision that no longer aligned with the minds of most clones, vanishing into the aether along with them. One day, Samina and Levi would lead their family, and they would do it in a way that worked for them and the organization. It might be messy, but at least they would all be competent.

These Drinarna that attacked and spit at them, seemingly without thinking through how their actions would look to the other officers they had captured… Baylor couldn’t decide if they were simply idiots, or if they no longer needed to care about hiding their corruption—if they knew that something was coming that would split the Drinarna apart, and therefore, knew there was no reason to bother hiding their allegiance any longer.

The bigger risk, however, was that they weren’t hiding their corruption because they generally didn’t need to—that somewhere within the organization there existed a part where corruption was to be expected. The same way that the older clones had carved out a place for themself where they could speak freely about their hatred for clones like himself, Finn, and Cyan, perhaps these officers had a place like that as well: a place where they could be open and free and not worry who might overhear their plans for do… something, that freedom leading them to be stupidly open about their corruption now.

Perhaps it was both—perhaps something was about to shift and that had led to those who wanted that shift being more free with their intentions.

Annoyingly, out of all the things the idiots were and weren’t saying, why they were working for Fräthk—or perhaps that other criminal—wasn’t on the list, and really, it was quite annoying that Baylor had been forbidden from torturing information out of them.

They were so obviously corrupt, surely it would be okay to torture these guys, right?

According to Taelor, it was not okay.

“Do you really want to waste time torturing them, when we could be getting to Emmie faster?” Valor asked into their triplets-only relay, and at least that was a good reason not to torture them: Emilia was out there, waiting for them to catch up, even if she had demanded no one descend into that building to find her.

Fuck that. If Baylor got to that building, and she hadn’t yet emerged, of course he was going in to find her. The aether itself wouldn’t be able to stop him.