[Can’t Opt Out]

“Can we go now~” Baylor whined, leaning all his weight onto Darrian as he glared at Taelor.

Taelor, for his part, didn’t give Baylor the more affectionately exasperated look he usually did. Instead, he fell into his role of being the serious clone, his eyes an icy glare that had even Darrian recoiling and automatically tugging Baylor further into himself. While Taelor’s role was always that of the serious clone, outside of bedroom play, he was rarely severe to this extent; instead, it was an act, just as Baylor’s own over-the-top crazy was. Yet, it was still meant to be frightening, and Taelor doubted Darrian was actually pretending the whole of his fear; certainly, the way their former classmate pulled Taelor’s brother close wasn’t a movement born entirely of their act.

“Yes, Baylor. We can go.” Taelor’s eyes slid over what parts of Baylor were visible, now that Darrian had put himself partially between the two of them. It was interesting, Taelor always thought, the speed at which a black knot could attach themself on to another person. It didn’t matter that the three of them had known Darrian for over twenty-five years—somewhere, in the midst of that fall and their time alone on the ground, Baylor had decided Darrian was now his friend, Darrian accepting that friendship with ease and warmth.

It was adorable, and Taelor was happy for his brother, especially since out of all Emilia’s friends, Darrian was the one who most capable of loving Baylor back. The fact that their former classmate had so quickly fallen into touching and protecting Baylor, despite his brother being the most dangerous and powerful member of their group, was proof enough of that.

It was, however, something that could become a problem. Black knots having multiple people they cared for in danger was always an issue, especially if the things that needed to be done to protect them were contradictory. For some black knots, there was an order of precedence within their minds, whether they knew it or not. Valor, he knew, would protect Emilia over himself and Baylor. Taelor himself, who leaned more into logic, rather than his obsessive emotions—something that he knew wasn’t always a good thing—would attempt to work out what stream of decisions would keep the majority of his loved ones safe.

Baylor, however?

Baylor was always a cannonball of spontaneity. When it had just been Emilia they were looking for, it had been easy enough to plan to stay together to find her, even if they had to leave the rest of their group behind. It was cold, but the obvious decision for all of them. If they had run into an issue along the way that would cause them to need to decide to put a member of their pod at risk, a decision needing to be made as to whether to prioritize Emilia or themselves, they would have dealt with it when it came up, even if they all knew the answer: they would prioritize Emilia over even each other.

They would break without each other, but there was a possibility the ones left behind could go on, but only if Emilia were still there. If Emilia died, they would follow, broken husks of themselves. Maybe they’d take a veritable suicide mission from The Black Knot. Maybe they would kill one another, intent to leave this world as one, just as they had entered it. Maybe they would be a slow fizzle out of blades over skin and too many drugs as they sought refugee from their broken hearts.

Perhaps worse, there was the possibility that they would fall into their memories, the way some people did after their memories had been locked away for their own good. Sometimes, people pulled on those threads of memories that couldn’t be completely altered until they were reliving their life over and over and over again, memories cascading over them in a high of joy and pain and reality shoving through them at speeds even the Virtuosi System’s time skew couldn’t yet achieve.

It was a little funny that the government was so worried about the strain the time skew put on human minds, when every clone knew the risk of a memory high, and the strain on the brain wasn’t on the list. Instead, it tended towards obsession, an inability to live in the real world, trauma building upon trauma until the person reliving their memory was a shell, the only time they could find happiness within those memories.

Every clone had such horrific realities stuffed into them at a young age because they needed to know what the risk of leaving a knot of memory too loose was—needed to know that humans were creatures of curiosity and habit and addiction. They also needed to know they could fall into that trap of memories as well.

A person didn’t need a flawed memory lock in place to find themself reliving the same moments over and over again, but most people didn’t know how to properly experience a memory high without a memory lock to tug loose. Any clone could do it properly from the moment the abilities needed to dig through Censors and tug memories apart—tug them into different forms—became a part of them. They could do it to themselves just as much as they could do it to other people—indeed, in their role as the terror of The Black Knot, they were sometimes required to remove and lock away their own memories with only seconds notice.

This, of course, created the reality that they could lock up memories they wanted to relive over and over again, pulling them into a waterfall over themselves until all they wanted to relive it again, again, again.

Death, Taelor thought, would be better than any of them finding themselves living their lives with Emilia’s ghost over and over again, unable to move forward and instead only left to look back at a life that would never again be possible. So, even if they never spoke of it, they all knew the truth: Emilia came first because without her, what was there?

Darrian, however, inserted an unknown variable into the equation because Baylor was unpredictable, even to himself. Their friendship, new and unknown, might not be solid enough for Baylor to risk the rest of them for their former classmate. At the same time…

Well, it was annoying, and absolutely adorable. Seriously, while Emilia’s relays had been silenced so even emergency messages couldn’t get through—something that was highly concerning—Taelor had been sending her pictures of the pair as they went, although they hadn’t been quite so tactile between when the rest of them had landed and now.

Now, as they worked on making their way through Falmíer towards the area where Emilia and Olivier de la Rue were—which was also where Mikhail and the Crisharian man were headed—Baylor seemed disinclined to let Darrian go—their odd teenage companion either. The three of them made quite the picture, but for the most part, it was convenient, especially as Darrian was excellent at keeping Levi entertained and controlled. The other boy had a gift for managing Levi, and he was extending that gift onto Baylor and Westrial, leaving the rest of them to question their new Drinarna intern captives.

They were exceptionally cooperative, as far as captives went. That could be a red flag that they were trying to gain their trust before running off; Taelor doubted that was the case. Instead, the pair—and the girl in particular—seemed to already have had some notion that something was odd within the Drinarna.

“I’m a legacy, you know? Or, do you know what that means?” she asked, bouncing along behind them with the energy of an officer who hadn’t yet seen the horrors that her job would eventually lead her to.

“You have a parent who's also a Drini?” Sorvell asked, nodding along as the girl told him that both her parents, as well as her maternal grandparents, were Drinarna.

“Even if it was just my grandparents, I’d still be considered a legacy, though,” she explained. “That doesn’t really matter, I guess? Although, it could? Uhm…”

“Just tell us everything you can,” Codeth told her. “We really don’t know what will and won’t end up being good to know, after all. If we think you’ve gotten too off-topic, we’ll let you know.”

Smiling, bright and cheerful for someone who was still tied up and being escorted through the city towards a relatively unknown conflict, the girl went on, adding that only a few generations of Drinarna had descendants who weren’t considered legacies. “But usually, they can’t become Drini anyways? Like, their ancestors were part of a generation of Drini who were really corrupt? Sometimes, there’s a whole generation who are taken out, and the new leadership has to start again? Usually, its more like what Officer Fulbrun did a few years ago—some people are expelled or imprisoned for their crimes, and their descendants are considered a potential risk, so they’re excluded from consideration as future officers?”

Taelor doubted this was of any use, although as they had a ways to go, he let her go on. Mostly, he learned that some crimes were considered so big that all descendants, in perpetuity could never become Drinarna officers. Those people were often the descendants of people who had committed crimes so severe that, when the other intern gave a few examples of things they had done, Codeth turned a bit green.

Horrific things. Torture. Rape. Crimes against children. Medical experimentation. All of it mostly against their own citizens.

It seemed that refusing to allow these people’s descendants to become Drinarna officers wasn’t the whole of it, either; rather, they were excluded from many other professions and schools as well.

“The point is to make them leave Lüshan as a whole?” Sorvell guessed, the interns glancing at each other before admitting that was the general assumption, although there was nothing so official ever stated.

“They can’t make a good life like that, you know? And there’s no hope of like… maybe if their child is smarter they’ll be able to find a better career?” the other intern told them—and why hadn’t they asked the interns for their names?

A somewhat awkward series of introductions later—half their group had been some mixture of embarrassed and amused that they’d never introduced themselves, Westrial muttering that she’d just assumed she hadn’t been paying attention when introductions were made—they had learned the interns were named Vantril and Bireth.

“And what about you?” Taelor asked Bireth once introductions were done, before Vantril could start talking about the history of corrupt Drinarna ancestors again—he really didn’t think it was relevant, other than in the fact that he had no record of such knowledge within his Censor. It might have been information kept only to higher ups within The Black Knot, but that would be odd; instead, he thought it likely that no one had ever learned about the effective exile of those ancestors due to it being unofficial.

Forwarding the information back to Loren and their handler—who had now been informed of what they were doing, and aside from telling the three of them that they were idiots, had mostly been silent—Taelor listened as Bireth stated that he was a new-gen Drinarna.

He, apparently, was also concerned about Vantril’s storytelling abilities, and quickly transitioned them back to what he assumed her original point had been: the way their supervisors had been treating a bunch of them had been odd.

“Yeah, according to my parents and grandparents, their own years as interns were a lot more consistent between themselves and all their peers? All our supervisors are really weird and inconsistent? Some of us are treated really well—sternly, but pretty well! It was more like the stories I was told about how interning would go? Not me, though—Bireth either. Both our supervisors… Well, let’s just say we’re not surprised they turned out to be corrupt or involved with criminals? Plus…” Vantril’s dark-brown eyes shifted back to Bireth, as though unsure if she should say more.

“There’s been a number of interns who have gone missing—or… we think they’re missing? But their supervisors just say they were kicked out of the program for not showing some sort of essential skill, or that they willingly gave up and went home?” Bireth said, eyes shifting as though he thought an officer might overhear him and… what?

“I didn’t think people were kicked out of their programs still late?” BJ ask, in a rare moment of actually speaking since they had landed. Unfortunately, he was one of the weaker members of their group, and the stress was getting to him a bit… and he was used to defaulting to other people’s expertise. That wasn’t to say he was useless, but when it came to questioning people or attacks, he was certainly on the more tell me what to do side of things.

When it came to the educational practices of Lüshan, however, most of them knew more than a little because their own self-education had been inspired by the nation’s intensity. As clones, this hadn’t applied as much to Taelor or his brothers, but Codeth, Darrian, and especially BJ understood it perfectly well.

“Yeah, that’s why it's weird?” Bireth told them, shaking his head in an attempt to get his hair out of his face. He had been hit by a burst of water during their initial attack, and his tight curls had deflated. Until that moment, Taelor hadn’t realized just how much those tight curls could expand, and the boy’s previously short hair now hung below his ears, bits sticking to his forehead as they attempted to dry in the cool air of the city. “Drini intake classes are huge, and start earlier than most careers, because of how many people end up not being suitable for the job? To be removed this late? Or to willingly drop out… Well, it’s not like they can go and join a new school when they’re decades older than everyone else?”

“I was going to ask my parents about it, the next time I saw them,” Vantril said, her head tipped back as she gazed into the ceiling—possibly into the ceiling that contained her home, Taelor realized. Lüshanians rarely introduced themselves with their last names, but in this case, it was possible the girl was covering up some connection to a more influential Drinarna officer. “I didn’t think it was the sort of thing to put into text, especially since all our messages are monitored.”

“In other words,” Baylor said because despite his soft chattering with Darrian and Westrial, he had been listening to their conversation, “because of how many supervisors you didn’t trust, as well as a long history of consistency within the internship programs—which could lead to any complaints being brushed aside as impossible—there really wasn’t anyone you could trust who's currently operating within the program—after all, if you all were thinking the number of interns disappearing from the program was weird, those higher up in management must have noticed as well. If they didn’t raise any alarms, they’re probably corrupt as well… or incompetent, I guess.” Shooting the girl a smile, he added that there were incompetent clones as well.

Another look shifted between the interns, silent words exchanged between people who had trained alongside one another for a long time—between people who were perhaps covering up that they had gone to school with one another before being assigned to intern in the city, or who had perhaps known each other before even that. That was a guess, of course—and if he was correct, their lack of transparency was probably some attempt by the pair to not end up being used as leverage against one another—but what better person to see the signs of a long familiarity than a clone, raised alongside the people he would be teamed up with for as long as they suited one another?

“Like I said, there have been a number of things that are weird, but when it comes to the disappearances, well…” Vantril began to say, trailing off, her teeth digging into a thick, soft brown lip.

“Most of the interns who have ‘gone back home’ have had irregular deviations,” Bireth finished, and wasn’t that just perfect: that there might be a group of former interns out there, either kidnapped by Drinarna loyal to Fräthk, or who willingly chose to leave to work for them or the scary man—after all, it seemed somewhat obvious that the corrupt officers had infiltrated the internship program in order to find more people to pull to their side.

Just. Fucking. Great.