Arc F1.9 | Chapter 41: Not Worried; A Little Worried

“Where did they go?” Vantril asked as she landed back beside Codeth, her eyes skimming the area for the person who had just been attacking them. Fortunately, it seemed the person had vanished during the chaos of a nearby building collapsing—which… oops? While they’d been trying to run the person off, as the Drinarna intern had been getting increasingly reckless, destroying the city hadn’t actually been on the agenda.

Behind them, Izurial was trying to comfort Cheska, and mostly, Codeth was just hoping the pair were paying at least a little attention to what was happening directly around them. Considering neither had seemingly noticed an entire building collapsing a block over, he thought his hope a useless thing. It was a bit awkward: as the former captives had made it clear they weren’t particularly skilled in combat, their only real contribution to their travels Cheska’s ability to feel people out. Now, of course, that ability had proven faulty and she was hyperventilating. Not great, to say the least.

Emilia’s recon-like skill sequence shuddered out of him, edging through the world, looking for the person who had attacked them, making sure they were actually gone and not simply hiding nearby, waiting to strike out at them. While their attacker had in no way been weak, from what he had seen of the person, they were a lot like the clone who had been assigned to fight Coral: someone who had perhaps become too reliant on their ability to sneak up on people with irregular deviations in order to incapacitate or assassinate them, that reliance leaving them to feel safe and secure, and as a result, be less interested in training up the rest of their abilities… such as the ability to go unnoticed by even the most basic of recon skills.

This was perhaps a bit unfair—it wasn’t like Codeth didn’t know from conversations with that clone that training the mind to be completely silent was actually rather difficult. Actually, now that he was thinking about it… that sounded a bit like what Mikhail did sometimes, didn’t it? Every so often, Mikhail managed to vanish from Coral’s perception, and throughout his travels with the Crisharian man, Zavriel had noted that his abilities would suddenly stop working on Mikhail. It was simply something more sporadic and accidental than that clone’s ability to silence their mind had been.

Something to look into another time.

Diligently, his Censor sent off a message about it in his group relay with Mikhail, Halen, Coral, and Emilia. It was where they organized help for Mikhail, mostly, but since Coral had come to their school it had increasingly contained details of her functions as well, which Emilia and Halen consulted on. Occasionally, they had organized more friendly things within the relay, but that wasn’t common.

A few trips to the Strats and other places when all of Emilia’s other friends were away during the summer. Offers to pick up something or other from Emilia, whenever they were visiting a restaurant they knew she liked. Most of the time, those messages came from anyone but Halen; most of the time, Halen was the one organizing things, the rest of them simply allowing him to use them as his mouthpiece.

For their friend, they would of course allow him to show his affection to Emilia, even if she didn’t know that’s who was really behind every invitation, every offered snack.

If things between Halen and Emilia actually took off, Codeth would tell her—both she and Halen deserved for her to know… plus, if they actually managed to start dating, there was no way she wouldn’t realize it had always been him. Halen would immediately start lathering her with the affection he had wanted to share with her for a decade and a half, and it wouldn’t take Emilia long to realize he had always been the one behind those things.

At the same time… was Halen smart enough to try and get the rest of them to continue pretending to be the ones behind invitations and offers for this or that? Well, pretending wasn’t exactly the correct word. All of them liked Emilia well enough and they might have offered anyways. It was a funny thought, however, that Halen might try to continue the charade. Codeth thought Emilia would find that even funnier—would find the reality that Halen was such a dork, attempting to hide his years-long obsession with her by forcing his friends to continue on as though nothing had changed.

Something to consider, should they manage to work things out between them.

“I don’t see them around anymore,” Codeth noted, his skill splintering off and coming back with nothing after he’d run them all twice, just in case their attacker had managed to slip into some sort of liminal space—highly unlikely, but errors did happen—or actually was skilled at avoiding more standard recon skills and abilities. “I’ll run the skills again, once we’ve moved a bit, but I think they ran off.”

“I don’t think I was that scary,” Vantril noted, and Codeth had to agree. As much as the Drinarna intern was skilled, with just her fighting him, Codeth having largely been left to defend the former captives, running off after revealing themself was a strange move—that was part of why they’d chosen to not let him escape earlier.

His eyes slipping back to where Cheska was continuing to panic, now feeling as though her abilities and perception couldn’t be trusted, Codeth said, “I think they might have been trying to do, well… this: convince you to stop trusting yourself.”

“You think so?” Vantril asked, Izurial’s purple eyes slipping up to his, an agreement written through them. They hadn’t been together long, but it was clear that the man was intelligent, perhaps the result of having seen and experienced too much as a sex slave.

“People talk, like, soooo much after sex,” Emilia had once laughed, the pair of them entwined in one of the beds that populated the treehouse. It had been years ago, between when he’d happened across her and Rafe playing in the woods and when the pair of them had broken up. A few times, she had offered to let him join them. Rafe was terrifying. In no world could Codeth imagine saying no.

“Rafe?” he had asked, gaze shifting towards the bathroom, where Rafe was rinsing off—Emilia had managed to scratch him up pretty badly before he’d managed to pin her, and Codeth had never really known what to do with the violence that could exist between the two, but watching them both be free in their enjoyment of one another? In their love?

That was what got Codeth going—the part of joining in as an extra in an established relationship what he loved most: being allowed to see that intimacy, being allowed to be part of it, if even for a moment.

It was also the part he hated, in a way—after all, he knew that Rafe loved Emilia, despite the doubt she now held within herself. He had been able to see it so clearly; thus he knew, absolutely.

As previously stated, however, Rafe was terrifying and in no world could he imagine asking the other boy what his problem was.

“Yes,” Emilia had laughed, although, during the handful of times he had joined them, Codeth had never seen any sign of this chatty, post-sex Rafe. Still, Emilia had rattled off stories about other hookups and all the information they dropped following their orgasms. It was a lot—she knew a lot.

This had been before Emilia turned twenty-eight, of course, and Codeth had to wonder how much more she’d learned since then. The clones had always trusted her, but with the magic of a tongue loosened by sex between them, he imagined she knew far more than they had ever intended to tell her. Combined with the reality that Emilia lived on that edge between knowing she never needed to use her body and sexuality to get on in life and accepting that, sometimes, using her silverstrain to get what she wanted was the easiest and most effective option?

Yeah, Codeth had no doubt that, every so often, Emilia opened her legs or mouth for someone she might not otherwise have, all in order to get something she needed.

“I think part of the reason our coren’taz is so terrifying is that we’re just… willing to do what needs to be done? It might be terrible and harsh, but we’ll do it and not judge one another for it,” Lan’za had once told him, the pair of them having met up when he’d gone along with the Mhrinas to check on their holdings in Seer’ik’tine.

During one of the dinners, he had overheard one of their business acquaintances talking about how much those kids would one day control of the world. The guy had been rude, suggesting Halen court any female of the coren'taz in order to solidify his family’s power.

“Don’t worry, lad,” the creep had laughed, all salacious grins and rotting energy that had turned Codeth’s stomach, “you just need to stick a baby in the female, then, you’ll be free to go play around with any little girl or boy you want.”

Somehow, the way the man had said little girl or boy had implied he truly meant a child. Later, after the Mhrinas had signed and certified a number of contracts with him—all of which, from Codeth’s understanding, had heavily favoured their side of things—the man had popped up dead. Sometimes, Codeth found himself thinking that all of them being complicit in Warren’s murder had changed them; other times, he thought it something that had existed long before that.

They all had memories of creepy men and women approaching Emilia, after all, something so insidious in their eyes and smiles and even the tone of their voice that it was impossible to not know what they would do to her, if given the chance.

They all knew those people had been ripped away and killed by The Black Knot. Such had been the reality of the world they lived in since Emilia had first come into their life, a clone grabbing the wandering hand of a man who had been reaching for Emilia on their first school trip.

“Emmie’s lucky,” Mikhail had said at the time, so blunt in his assessment that, for a moment, a few of them had been worried Baylor—young, but still possessing all the energy of someone who could easily become a serial killer—would kill him. They had just watched Emilia flinch away from a man’s fingers, trying to run them through her hair in a way that, even that young, they had all known was wrong. “She has the clones to protect her—including you three. Other kids who have people trying to touch them like that don’t have anyone to protect them.”

Later, a clone had taken Mikhail aside, intending to make sure that the boy hadn’t been speaking about something he had personal experience with—he hadn’t, but over a decade later, Mikhail had asked Emilia if she could look up information about a girl who had been their classmate during their first year before, suddenly, she’d been gone.

It turned out that during that questioning, Mikhail had said he had a feeling that one of their classmates had someone touching her, that classmate being the girl in question.

Using her access to The Black Knot’s servers, given to her within a few months of her Censor being installed, Emilia had found the file and the reality that, somehow or other, Mikhail had known that girl was being hurt by her mother. The mother had been questioned by The Black Knot's, the truth pulled from her mind, and the girl had been sent off to live with her aunt—and aunt who, it turned out, had also been abused by her older sister, back when they were kids.

Through The Black Knot, Mikhail had been able to reach out to the girl, and the two occasionally exchanged messages. Some people might resent Mikhail’s accidental reveal of what was happening to her, as it had lost the girl her mother; the girl was nothing but grateful… and confused, because how had Mikhail known?

No one knew. It was just one of those things that Mikhail was somehow able to know—the result of the same urge that had allowed him to trail behind Zavriel and find his way into Falmíer, perhaps. Who knew.

“That sounds… frustrating,” Cheska muttered as Codeth summarized some of his friend’s struggles with figuring out his brain to her.

“It is, and even though he’s used to it… it really is something annoying,” Codeth replied, squatting down in front of the young girl, and like this, curled into Izurial’s embrace, she really did seem so young. In reality, just like so many of the people they were finding themselves allied with, both Izurial and Cheska felt younger than their group itself was, despite that not being the case for any of the adults. Ironically, while he had yet to meet any of the children, the impression everyone had been giving in their relays was that those kids were also far too mature of their age… kinda.

Everyone they were picking up were both far too mature and impossibly inexperienced, he supposed.

“You’re trying to tell me that feeling like my abilities can’t be trusted isn’t just a me thing,” Cheska noted, and yeah, that had been what Codeth was trying to say without saying it.

With a smile, he noted that it wasn’t just that. “I’ve also found that distractions can serve to move someone out of their emotions quite well, and I was already thinking about my friend—I mean, he’s the only reason we left the rest of the drop group. So, of course I’d be thinking about him.”

Big eyes blinked up at him from under that mop of blue hair that seemed natural, not even the slightest bit of differently coloured root shining through. “I just…” Cheska started, her eyes flickering towards Vantril before falling back to the ground. “I feel so useless. If I can’t even tell if we’re about to be attacked again, then what good am I here? Izurial as well: we’re just slowing you down. We’d be better off being left here while you go find the others and your friends. We can… start towards the spire and the Baalphorian embassy without you, and—”

“No,” Codeth cut in, Vantril also looking one word away from telling the girl off. “We aren’t leaving anyone behind, even if they’re useless—and I don’t think either of you are useless. Do the rest of us need to pay a bit more attention to our surroundings and not rely on you? Sure, but that doesn’t make you useless.”

Cheska didn’t look convinced, neither did Izurial or Vantril, although the Drinarna intern did look relieved to know they weren’t splitting their group up.

Unfortunately, Codeth wasn’t convinced that the pair weren’t more of a liability than anything. In the end, however, they’d learned how to deal with useless teammates and civilians in their combat classes as well. So, he wasn’t too worried; he was still a little worried, to say the least.