Arc F1.9 | Chapter 34: An Ally, Maybe.

Halen could be such an idiot. Usually, it ended with him and Emilia rolling around, throwing fists and skills at one another, or their sides of the class embarking on missions to destroy the other side.

In a rare turn of events, Halen being an idiot was working for them.

There was nothing quite like someone saying some so… random to break the tension of the moment.

“I… thank you?” the bone pulled said, more question than statement. Her eyebrows pulled together slightly, a small frown tugging at her lips. Somehow, her eyes barely changed in size, the too big quality of them remaining, as though they were gaping wounds in her head. “My mama taught me how to do it. It’s very time-consuming. The braids last quite a long time, but most hairstyles for hair like mine takes hours, if not days, to do properly. Is your hair naturally like that? Or do you straighten it? Or is it a wig?”

How was this what they were talking about? It was better than fighting—Rafe had definitely not enjoyed being the one to fight the woman, given a single miss in the defensive skills that had been protecting him would have resulted in his death—but weird. It was, somehow, even weirder that Simeon knew the answers to the questions the woman had aimed at Halen—or, maybe it wasn’t so weird? Halen had this weird obsession with hair—seriously, he’d even told Baylor off for cutting off the hair of the teenager who was travelling with them. So… maybe Simeon had gone to him for a skill in keeping his own hair perfect?

Simeon had always been such a kind soul that the idea of Halen not having moderately peaceful chats with him while making something for him in an exchange of favours—skills for willbrands, although Rafe was almost positive no one in their class was keeping track of things like that. Vengeance owed? Definitely. Favours? Not a chance… although, now that he was thinking about it, there was one person who had definitely kept careful track of ever favour exchanged and owed—every bit of money, as well.

The bone puller seemed sufficiently distracted by the conversation about hair and how to manage the tighter curl patterns more common in Lüshanians, and really, enemies could talk about strange things, but if this woman wasn’t coming to the same conclusions they were about their goals being the same, he would be shocked; at the same time, having the same goal didn’t mean they were on the same side.

Regardless, Rafe took a moment to let his gaze slide towards Janie and whatever the fuck was happening with her. Her vitals pulled across his vision, and something within them didn’t seem right—seemed almost too muted for what was happening. The problem was, they didn’t have enough data points to confirm as much.

There were some, however, and regardless of Halen being distracted by the conversation—mostly, Halen and Simeon seemed to be testing the woman’s reactions to various pieces of information, getting a baseline for her expressions, body language, and aether fluctuations so they’d be better able to read her, once they got to discussing more important things—Rafe pulled a collection of those data points up for him and Halen to look at.

Oddly, a moment later, Halen also added Leerin to the relay. A few seconds more, Simeon was added; presumably, Halen and he had exchanged a few messages, Simeon almost immediately agreeing that Janie’s reactions seemed to be too much.

[Simeon:We may all accept that people will behave strangely in any situation, especially ones they have never experienced before. This, however, seems excessive.]

[Leerin:Yeah, it’s more than that, though?]

[Leerin:Like, as Halen and I were talking… I realized that Janie maybe hasn’t always been the best of friends—or the most reliable?]

A collection of specific examples from their past slotted into the relay, and yes, even without Leerin needing to tell him exactly what she had seen in those memories, Rafe could immediately see the cracks in Janie’s friendship with them and her reliability—also, since when had she and Halen been chatting in a way that was conducive to such discoveries? Clearly, the other boy had been walking her through figuring out the system that managed the xphern transmission network, but this sort of conversation was more… chatting. Leerin and Halen chatting was weird.

“Why are you so interested in all the hairstyles and products and care we use here?” the bone puller asked, tugging all of their attention more fully back to her.

In the background, Halen continued going through the data points Rafe had pointed out as potential examples of how the various members of their group, including Janie, had dealt with the situation and stress before their groups had first split up, upon entering Falmíer.

From what he could see of it, Janie had actually been one of the calmer members before then: when Emilia died and Valor had tumbled off the aetherstream along with Rafe, Levi, and Leerin the girl had barely blinked; when they’d been attacked in the cave system she had barely seemed to care they were killing their attackers; when they’d been disconnected from the aethernet, and everyone’s stress had risen that tiniest bit more, Janie’s… hadn’t.

“We have a few groups working their way through the city,” Simeon wrote into his text box—he and Halen had mutually decided that Simeon should reveal some of the more delicate bits of information to the bone puller, the boy always a bit better at reading the fluctuations of the aether around and within a person when they were talking directly to him. While this was in no way comparable to Coral’s ability to read emotions, Simeon had sat with her at times, reading those fluctuations; as a result, he could guess at what a person was feeling, as long as he was paying active attention to reading the aether. It had little-to-no nuance, but generally—and especially with long conversations and big emotions—Simeon could land close to what the person was feeling.

If they were disgusted, he would read them as upset; heartbroken as sad; elated as happy; fearful as worried.

Combined with other indicators—such as tone of voice, word choice, and body language—this meant that, as long as the person weren’t skilled in manipulating people, he could get close enough to determining whether the proper emotions were being felt by someone.

A collection of his guesses on the bone puller’s emotions came through as he explained bits and pieces of what was happening in the city below to the woman: little surprise to know that there were criminals causing problems; some concern that they had kidnapped a foreigner; a lack of surprise to know that they were pretty sure a few factions within the government were taking advantage of the chaos to try for something—potentially a coup, but that was nothing but a guess on their side.

In general, it wasn’t surprising for them that she would know these things, something about the woman suggesting she was well-educated, while the fact that she had been able to keep her abilities a secret lent to the idea that she was also part of one of these factions.

When it came to some of the other stuff? That was… not necessarily surprising, but certainly quite informative.

The amount of shock that rattled through her when she learned that numerous people—thousands over the past few hundred years, based on information from Vtraní—had been kidnapped and held captive by Fräthk, seemingly without the Drinarna who worked the streets giving a single shit was so palpable that Simeon had to stop his story and ask if she was okay. A hand had slapped to her mouth, and according to Simeon, she wasn’t faking it: the bone puller, who had massacred everyone who had been working in this room, truly felt sick to her stomach at the reality that people—children—were living lives like that and no one seemed to care.

“There’s no way Wander knew,” she said, firm—and truthful, according to Simeon’s reading of her. Also, telling. While first names were far more commonly used in Lüshan, as Chief Drinarna, it would have been more expected for the woman to use his full title and last name. Could be nothing; could show that the pair are connected, either as friends or allies, or through a lack of respect on the bone puller’s part. “He… do you know how long it has been going on for?”

“Several hundred years, at least,” Simeon wrote out, slipping in that their kidnapped friend had helped a number of the captives escape, one of whom had been a captive virtually his entire life and seemed to be approaching three-hundred. “There seems to be some speculation that Fräthk inherited the operation from someone, but no solid proof.”

“What are you going to do with the people your friend helped escape?” she asked, eyes flying between Simeon and Halen, still diligently casting each of the moments Rafe had tagged into an analysis function, in order to compare some of the things seen within them. The other boy had also started running the data through a function, looking for upward trends in all of their data—something about wanting to see how all of them were handling the situation. “You want to take them with you?” she guessed. “That’s why you were curious about things having to do with hair: Baalphorian hair care is so much different that you’ll have trouble caring for them?”

“Yes,” Halen replied. “The adults have asked us to help them get out of the city. It’s unclear what they’ll do from there, but the kids and teenagers? If they were safe here, we’d give them the option to decide their fate. It’s not. Even without the corruption in the Drini that led the one who was homeless to know that, if they went to the Drini for help, there was a good chance they’d be handed right over to Fräthk, the city—possibility the entire nation—seems to be headed for a civil war. I’m not inclined to let the kids decide to stay here—and none of them have parents, or if they do, we’ve heard no requests to return them to said parents or even distant family members. The adults can decide what they want to do once we’ve gotten them out of the city. They can stay with us, stay in Lüshan and hope a different city is better, or go wherever the wind takes them. The kids come with us. That way, we’ll know they’re safe and loved and that no one will force them to be weapons again.”

Big blue eyes blinked at them. Once. Twice. “Good,” the woman said, everything about her demeanour relaxing, as easy as that, apparently. “My name is Euphenial. I work for Wander—unofficially, of course. I am effectively his eyes and ears in this department and others, although I can’t say I’ve done that good of a job of it, considering I had no idea there were plans to do anything so soon—although, I also suspect the factions are making use of the chaos of the criminals going to war below us to act without too much planning.”

“Taking advantage of chaos does seem exceptionally difficult to plan for,” Leerin noted, the first thing she’d said to the woman. “Why is it good that we want to get the kids out of here? If you work for Wander Fulbrun, you must be aware that, should a civil war be coming, he will need all the support he can get. They might be young, but quite a few of the children and teenagers we’ve come across are monsters who could help him keep power.”

“Do not get me wrong, Wander is a wonderful man and I do not regret working for him,” the bone puller—Euphenial—said. “By keeping my abilities off the record, he saved me from having to use my abilities for terrible things, but there have been times when he has considered asking me to use them. Just as I used them here, I would have used them had he asked, but…”

“But you hate it,” Leerin finished, nodding and telling Euphenial, the woman’s eyes a little wider with shock that Leerin had known what she was going to say, “I could see the evidence of your inexperience and hesitation in the bodies. All these teeth? That’s the lack of control, yes? And some of the bodies… it looks like you tried to stop them non-lethally, before being forced to kill them?”

“Yes,” Euphenial breathed out, barely more than a whisper, and even if his black knot kept him from emphasizing with the woman, Rafe could appreciate the pain she was in. This woman had been born with a horrifically powerful and coveted irregular deviation; she wasn’t wrong that, had more people known about it, someone would have attempted to force her to use it. If she refused, they would have killed her—viewed her as something that could turn against them, due to that lack of loyalty—or made her into a monster some other way.

Torture.

The murder of someone close to her.

Putting her into situation after situation where she could have saved more lives, if only she used her abilities on that single person, all with the goal of breaking her down and forming her into a weapon.

It was quite a terrible fate.

“I have more training in… gentleness,” the woman continued, sparking both Simeon and Halen’s interest. As Halen was still busy with analyzing the data, Simeon was left to ask her about what sort of things she could do, but not before Rafe cut in.

“We’re connected to a number of high-ranking government officials in both Baalphoria and Seer’ik’tine. Obviously, we don’t want this to become too much of an international incident,” he began, ignoring Leerin’s snort and comment about how unlikely that was at this point. “Ideally,” he continued, catching the bone puller’s eyes, something within them reflecting the reality that she too knew how the situation becoming international would make things so much worse, “we get at least the kids to safety and leave. They’re all missing people that the government doesn’t care about anyways.”

“Okay… why are you telling me this?” the woman asked, but something told Rafe she already knew—and when her answer to his next question was almost immediate, his assumption was all but confirmed.

“Do you have anything you can tell us that might help prove that you’re actually aligned with Wander, and not simply guessing that, as Baalphorians, we may have more faith in him than some unknown head of a faction?”

Euphenial’s lips twitched. “I doubt I have anything so solid that it will be proof absolute, but I have a few things that might tip the scale of trustworthiness in my direction.”