Arc F1.9 | Chapter 37: More Explosions (of a different sort)

“So the building… is gone?” Samina asked, her voice slipping out of her and catching on a skill she was using to make sure everything she said made it through to her xphern, across the cavern, and into the microphone she hadn’t even known the thing had—truly, she rarely used the things, and her training revolved more around their emergency use than anything. Knowing xpherns could transmit sound seemed somewhat helpful, however, as it seemed like it would be quite useful to set them up to record illicit conversations? One could even leave the device itself behind and set it to call another xphern in order to hear the conversation in real time—and yes, this shouldn’t have seemed surprising but…

Well, Censors couldn’t work that way. Censors were the person themself; they couldn’t be abandoned in order to allow a conversation to be overheard while the person who owned the Censor ran off. There were a handful of skills meant for spying, but they all had their limits, and while there were plenty of devices that could connect to the aethernet…

It seemed like an oversight to not have some sort of small device that could be left behind in order to eavesdrop on a conversation. Perhaps it was an ethics thing? Some law standing in the way of such things being designed and deployed? Unknown. Samina would have to ask someone about it later.

“Yes,” a tinny voice replied—the connection within the strange cavern she’d found herself trapped it was still holding, but it was a terrible thing, warbling and breaking off if Samina even breathed on her xphern wrong. Luckily, however, several skills she had were working well enough and combined with switching to using their voices, she had managed to make the situation work for her.

That was getting a bit ahead of herself, however.

Basically, after receiving the message about how someone was aware the xphern relay machine made contact with her and would be coming soon, Samina had been left waiting for a few minutes. Then, she’d met Meeho Kun’sai, who from what she understood, was an officer in the Dionese military who had effectively been kidnapped by Yujao in order to find a way to contact their group after they’d entered the cave system and lost their connection to both the aethernet and xphern transmission network. Originally, they’d been trying to let them know that the cave system was used by criminals; then, after the main group escaped the cave system—which, thank fuck—they’d switched to trying to reach her.

After that, Meeho Kun’sai had spent a bit of time getting her caught up on the situation in Falmíer which was… a mess. Samina being stuck inside a cavern that somehow no longer had an entrance or exit was bad; the situation in the city was worse.

At least her dumbass brother had been found, although she wasn’t sure what to think about the fact that he’d hooked up—and Meeho Kun’sai might not realize it, but Samina was pretty sure he had hooked up with Gëon in both the they are working together and they had sex ways. What an idiot. Getting involved with a criminal… that wasn’t the sort of thing a member of The Black Knot should be doing—not unless they were on a mission, anyways.

It was the sort of thing that could bring the Baxter family tumbling down, if it got out. There were already enough issues with the Baalphorian public viewing The Black Knot as barely better than criminals—and for their branch in particular? Who had to act as a mystery element, no one—often not even the other main families—ever quite sure what they were doing?

It would be too fucking easy for someone to take one of the scions of the Baxter family having any sort of relationship with a criminal the wrong way, whether platonic, sexual, or romantic. Emilia having so many connections to criminals was already bad enough, but the fact that she had a reputation for being obnoxiously ethical and friendly with so many people and wasn’t actually a member of the Laprise-Baxter-Hyrat family made her situation more tenable.

If, one day, she managed to work things out with Rafe?

If she did eventually agree to carry a child—the heir to The Black Knot—for him or Malcolm?

Then, it might become a problem. Such things were for the future, and maybe whatever Levi was doing with this Gëon was nothing but a fling.

Samina still didn’t like it; she had also explained none of this to Meeho Kun’sai—the girl was nice enough, but it was unclear how much any of them should be trusting with her. Clearly, she was being told most of what was happening, but the main reason their chat had been switched over the audio was because Yujao had wanted to speak with her and not leave a record of it.

The boy had kicked Meeho Kun’sai out of the room, then spent a bit of time letting Samina know about some of the more serious things going on in Falmíer. Top of the list had been the collection of people that her friends were planning to get out of the city, many of whom had such powerful irregular deviations that they were trying to keep the exact nature of their abilities on the down low.

“There’s also a bone puller.”

“Fuck.”

“Yes,” Yujao had replied, leaving the silence to hang between them for a beat, Samina’s mind spinning as she tried to figure out if she’d ever heard even the smallest rumour about Lüshan having a bone puller; she hadn’t. “Halen’s group has confirmed—as much as one can—that the bone puller is working for Wander Fulbrun. They’re currently going over the systems that manage the xphern transmission network, trying to determine what took it down.”

“They’re not really trusting the bone puller, are they?” Samina had asked, concerned with… many things. Many, many things. Top of the list? How come it was considering Halen’s group? Also, were they idiots, trusting a bone puller? Also, where was Janie in all of this?

The last she’d heard of her friend was when Meeho Kun’sai had summarized how the groups had broken up, first originally, and then in the time since. Janie had briefly been mentioned as part of Halen’s group, and responsible for babysitting Leerin; then, she was never mentioned again.

After she asked after her childhood friend, Samina had regretted doing so. It wasn’t that Yujao had told her many details of what Janie was doing; rather, it was that he had left so little unsaid.

“It’s—Your friend has… not been doing well, emotionally. It sounds like she has checked out and become a liability, doing nothing while everyone else has been left to protect her,” Yujao had told her, his voice an even drawl only interrupted by the crackle of the bad connection. Compared to some of her other friends, most notably the triplets, Samina didn’t know the Dionese boy well; she still knew him well enough to know that Yujao controlling his voice so finely was a bad sign.

Had he been worried for Janie’s mental health, there was no reason not to let a note of distress and sadness slip through.

If he was disgusted with her behaviour, there was no reason to let her know that he—and perhaps Halen, primarily responsible for using his group’s xphern—were so unhappy with her actions.

For the moment, Samina was refusing to make any judgments of anyone, although a bubble of annoyance rippled inside her—the result of her friendship with Janie, her black knot roiling with the implication that her friend could do anything worthy of Yujao’s disgust, especially considering the boy had never met her, as far as Samina knew. The few times Yujao and Hurinren had managed to sneak away from the Inner Court and visit the Penns, Janie had been away with her family on vacation, and while Emilia was always inviting all of them to join her on trips into the Free Colonies…

Well, Samina wasn’t sure Janie had ever gone along with her—something about disliking travel, maybe? Or was it that she generally didn’t get permission? Or Emilia’s offers were always too last minute—although, Emilia’s offers were some mixture of planned out months in advance and sudden because Miles’ job entailed trips of both sorts.

Alone in the darkness for a moment, Yujao having gone to retrieve Hurinren and Meeho Kun’sai so they could attempt to help her figure out how to get out of there, Samina had felt her emotions turn over. Truly, there is nothing worse than being alone to force the mind to turn over a million possibilities and stories, those potential negative emotions aimed at Janie tugging dozens of less-than-favourable examples of the girl’s behaviour and words into the background of Samina’s mind.

Then, the three Dionese people had returned, and there those contemplations remained, in the back of her head. Samina wanted to push them aside—wanted her black knot to burn them up because that was what black knots were meant to do: create a connection so powerful that nothing could break it. Her own black knot had always been a strange thing, however, able to wrap her around each of her childhood friends with far more ease than any other black knot she knew.

What if her black knot could unravel itself from her friends just as easily?

After Yujao had returned with his partner and hostage in tow—apparently Jin’kori Zazuza had been in the room the whole time, attempting to fix the weapon Yujao had used to blow himself, an annoying ryohua, Jin’kori Zazuza, and a small section of the rongdo, which may have included an entire building, up—Samina had left the xphern in audio mode and set a number of skills around it.

So far, all of the skills had deployed properly and were holding firm; Samina had little faith that they wouldn’t give up at any moment.

Essentially, she needed to move and explore the cavern. The xphern itself, with its sketchy connection, could not be moved. In came the skills. One had held her xphern steady while another crafted a holder from the aether—which continued to both be too thick and impossibly thin, all at once. With it secure, another skill had been wrapped around the thing to amplify the sound—it was probably loud enough that she could have heard it from the other side of the cavern, but Samina was already somewhat unenthusiastic about leaving it behind while she explored and she wanted to be sure she could always hear it—along with the skill to ensure her own voice reached the xphern, no matter how far she moved. There was also a chance she’d set up some monitoring skills around her xphern, in case something came along and decided to steal it away—not that she was admitting that to her new, audio-only companions.

Even the bit of information about the aether in the cavern being weird she’d only briefly mentioned, brushing it off as most likely the result of the caves having been created by a Lowdouran. Who really knew for sure, and none of her Dionese companions were in any way an expert with aether theories. Had Halen not been dealing with a bone puller, Emilia not bolting through the city trying to get to a little boy who needed help—something both Dionese men had guessed at before forcing the truth out of Halen, and why did he know when it seemed few of their actual friends knew?—there was a chance she would have requested Yujao send them a bit of information. As it was, neither Emilia nor Halen would be able to reply, and it seemed like a massive waste of time to bother explaining so much to the Dionese boy.

On the other hand, Samina wasn’t sure if listening to Yujao regale them with tales of his destruction of the building he’d found Jin’kori Zazuza was a good use of time either. At the very least, it was amusing, showcasing the lengths that the factions of the Inner Court would go to in order to prove one theory true over another.

“I cannot believe that ryohua would just run off like that,” Hurinren noted. It was easy to tell when he was talking, his voice so much deeper than anyone else’s. Jin’kori Zazuza had only said a few words—and not to her—while Meeho Kun’sai and Yujao’s voices were so similar through the distorted audio that it often took a moment to figure out who was speaking.

“I do think he would have been better off sticking around to make sure we were alright,” Yujao agreed, beginning to ramble about how the ryohua in question would have been better served pretending to be both competent in defence and a complete idiot. “Him saving all of us from actually being blow up just proved that he had defensive abilities, but I’ve known plenty of people who are great at combat and complete and utter morons in everything else.”

“Yes,” Meeho Kun’sai agreed. “I am often forced to work with people who really are only suited for certain roles. The number of officers who have been assigned to ‘help’ with paperwork as some sort of punishment is quite large. Some find it boring, and managing them is tiresome. Too many have no understanding of how file systems work. Considering it is usually numerical or based on the standard Kutai’runi system, which they all should have learned when they were children, I am inclined to believe the average person is quite stupid. They are also quite skilled soldiers, from what I know, and generally being punished for ridiculous things.”

“Like?” Samina asked, mostly curious as to how the woman’s definitely of ridiculous—the Dionese word tarisu seeming to imply a mixture of the thing done being ridiculous and the thought that it was a good idea and wouldn’t result in trouble being ridiculous—lined up against the things her friend group often did.

“One person didn’t go to their mandatory haircut appointment, and their hair was out of regulation. They decided to light it on fire. Technically, they were in regulation after all their hair—including their eyebrows—burned off, but they also lit a rongdo on fire during the process. I remain unclear on whether if, had the rongdo not caught fire, they would have been punished or not. Another person encouraged another officer to go skinny-dipping in one of the ponds of their dormitory rongdo. When the other officer refused, they threw him in, during which time he hit his head and almost died in three inches of water because the offending officer ran off, fearing retribution. There was also an officer—who was relatively high up and in line for a promotion that would have required him to know the file systems we use—put laxatives in the food of another officer who was in line for the same promotion.“

“I remember that. The idiot didn’t realize the other officer was friends with a few ryohua,” Yujao noted, adding in that he had explosively shit himself during a meeting with his superiors. “Called in his ryohua friends to figure out who dosed his food. That guy got punished… apparently with torture by file systems? And was removed from consideration for promotion.”

“Did the explosive-poop officer get his promotion?” Samina asked, thinking that, at the very least, most Black Knot agents weren’t nearly as… weird when it came to promotions. Occasionally, someone was killed in order to clear the way for someone else; it was rare, especially considering how apathetic they are. Samina had never really thought about it, but maybe most black knots didn’t care about promotions any more than they did people who were unconnected to them? Interesting that she’d never bothered to consider it before.

Also, yes, the explosive poop officer did get the promotion. It remained unclear if Meeho Kun’sai would consider many of the things her friends group got up to ridiculous.