[Can't Opt Out]

Arc X.1 | Chapter 520: Interlude | Project Piketown Infiltration 23

“Make sure you let Emmie apologize to you properly.”Payton glanced up from where he had been slotting his things away into his room’s various drawers and amenities. It was a nice room, to put it lightly—all of their rooms were. Two suites of five rooms, each with an en suite bathroom. The outer, living area had various seating—including several cutting-edge Virtuosi Rigs—and a smaller bathroom, as well as a dinning and kitchen area, something most of their group had rolled their eyes at, claiming the point of a vacation was to eat out. This had not stopped Sil from ordering them some provisions, the man muttering under his breath about how often his friends wanted midnight snacks and how he was not going to be dealing with them crawling into his bed, begging him to order something for them.

Currently, Payton thought Sil was arranging his various purchases between their two suites, which seemed to have escalated into him needing to procure various essentials Beth and Pria had forgotten—or possibly never possessed—as well as him working his way through Emilia and Conrad’s bags to determine if they had everything they needed as well—neither had. All the while, Samina Baxter’s eyes had tracked him, her expression something between unreadable and amused.

Payton thought it said a lot about the woman that she so immediately trusted Emilia’s own trust in her friends, and therefore, saw no need to demand Sil not look through Emilia’s things. Sil had always been something of the parent to his friend group, Payton knew, from his years of observing them. Emilia could be that was well, Payton knew—she was, after all, the one who was usually shuffling her friends away from potentially dangerous people and situations. Unfortunately, he had been classified as one of those potentially dangerous people, but he had never been able to blame her for it—he’d felt a little bit of something over her constant dismissal of him at times, yes, but he was a black knot.

Black knots could be dangerous—it was a fact that had been forced into him by his father since the moment the man had learned of his mother’s black knot chased her and the older brother he couldn’t remember from their lives.

Black knots could be dangerous—as a result, he needed to be careful and not give in to his baser urges. Admittedly, Payton wasn’t sure he had those baser urges. He could kill people without remorse, yes, and while he could certainly find some pleasure in making people who had done wrong suffer the consequences of their actions, it weren’t as though he felt a desire to kill anyone either. As a result, Payton wasn’t sure what to think of himself—whether to assume all the stories of how black knots were meant to be were inaccurate, or if, instead, his black knot wasn’t quite right.

Unfortunately, it weren’t as though most people advertised their black knot, and while he could perhaps have gone to The Black Knot and asked to talk to someone—asked if he were as much a broken black knot for lacking those violent impulses they were alleged to possess, as he was a broken human for lacking so much humanity—such things would put him on their radar.

That was what he had assumed, anyways—while there was some speculation that the government may be violating genetic privacy laws and keeping track of Baalphorians who tested as having irregular deviations during their initial D-Level tests, this was nothing more than speculation, and he had personally never seen any reliable evidence on the matter. Now, turning to meet Samina Baxter’s assessing eyes, Payton wondered if the organization she worked for had always known about his black knot, either through his D-Levels tests or military service or something else entirely.

On the other hand, it could be a new knowledge. Perhaps, in all of the information Emilia had sent them about the situation with the knotter, the purist group, and what had occurred within the raid, she had told them of his black knot. He had thought it a possibility but never thought to mention his apprehension on the matter to her—never thought to ask her to lie for him and remove all mention of her conversations and thoughts on his black knot from whatever she gave them.

Part of him had known that, had he asked her to, she would have tried to keep his privacy for him. Another part told him that between her and Pria showing up in the clinic and her exiting the raid, her opinion on him had entirely shifted.

Likely, it had shifted during their trek to the purist building, when they had talked and come to some sort of understanding and his classmate had fallen silent for seconds at a time—a veritable lifetime for Emilia—her mind slipping away. Somewhere in that time—in the weeks of time within the raid that had come after—Emilia had decided they could be friends, and with her friendship came her loyalty, and Emilia was the sort of person who would go to war for her friends, that protection echoing out to their friends until all of her friends would protect their friends’ friends.

A cascade of protection that now included The Black Knot, and logically, Payton had known she had connections to the organization. While he hadn’t managed to bring it up with her, he had already suspected—in the way where he had been almost positive, but could have been wrong—that she was a member of Division 30. Having been a relatively skilled medic who had served throughout the entirety of the war, Payton had met several members over the decades of war, letting the clones slip conditions into his Censor so he couldn’t speak of their membership to anyone but the person themself or someone whom he knew absolutely to be a member.

Later, after the Flaming, when their Censors had been left empty, all of those locks and conditions and the memory files linked to them vanishing into the sizzling aether, some of those people who knew too much about Division 30—or the Alliance’s other, secretive unit—had attempted to get out of having those conditions inserted back into them. Some had run, the military’s secretive unit and The Black Knot hunting them down and forcing their minds to accept those manipulations back, either from the clones or one of the various irregular deviations that could also pull at the seams of the mind and make it do as they pleased.

Payton had never understood why they would run. They would be found, the reach of those who would protect Division 30 and their most powerful members stretching through virtually their entire continent.

There had been as much a possibility of escape for them as there had been for the bartender who had dosed Pria. Some sins couldn’t be forgiven. Some secrets had to be kept.

So, yes, Payton had known Emilia, with her connections to Division 30—something that her performance during the echo event and Olivier de la Rue’s subsequent appearance had effectively proven—and the unit’s connections to The Black Knot, must have known a few Black Knots agents. While the two organizations were known to collaborate, it had always been unclear how close the members themselves were to one another. It was generally accepted that at least a few clones—most notably Cyan Hyrat—had been part of the unit, but enough members had spoken of friction within the unit that it was impossible to deduce where uneasy teamwork existed, rather than friendships.

Plus, it was well known that Cyan Hyrat was odd and didn’t actually work for The Black Knot, despite all clones being effectively forced into the organization. Not Cyan Hyrat—not Alaric Mhrina’s partner.

There was speculation, of course, of how at least some of the members must have had crossover outside of the unit itself, clones being raised in the Penns as they were. While school records were private, Division 30 enthusiasts had long considered the possibility that the Laprise boys had attended the same school—perhaps even been in the same class—as members such as Halen Mhrina, Codeth Runsk, and Mikhail Al’ren, the latter two having never made a secret of sharing a compulsory classroom with their late friend.

Unless it slipped from the lips of a public Division 30 member themself, however, everything was simply speculation—rumours piled upon rumours until it was impossible to determine what was true, what nothing but stories of a thousand different people taken as stories about one.

Now, however, knowing that Emilia was friends with Samina Baxter, Payton wasn’t sure what to think. Mostly, he thought that, had he asked her to keep references to his black knot out of her reports, she would have agreed while also telling him it was unnecessary—would have insisted that The Black Knot wouldn’t care, wouldn’t do anything to him, wouldn’t change his life in any way. Looking back at some of their conversations—about her conviction and almost fury when she told him his father was wrong for the way the man had attempted to form him into something other than what he was, at her insistence that he was better when he was acting more natural, at her looks of almost affection when he let his mask of normalcy fall…

No, looking back it was obvious she hadn’t just had friends who were black knots; instead, Emilia had black knots whom she loved and cherished, and this terrifying woman was one of them.

“Apologize?” Payton asked, turning fully towards Samina Baxter and wondering how far up the Baxter family’s chain of command she was.

Out of all three families that ran The Black Knot, the Baxter family was by far the most secretive, no one quite sure how many members existed nor what the family was exactly responsible for. Currently, it was headed by Leonel and Christof Baxter, who were known to have at least two children who would one day take over the branch. As both men had survived the war—although just barely, as they had been in Seer’ik’tine in the hours before the destruction of Alliance Ridge, having only escaped with their lives due to some sort of incident that pulled them to Crishar—the Baxter family was considered the most stable of The Black Knot’s families. So many clones had died, and it was known that those still alive were chronically overworked as they both raised younger clones and attempted to fill the vacuum those dead clones had created, while Penelope Laprise had died during the war. While two of her sons had taken control of the family—and by extension The Black Knot—both were young—biologically young, anyways.

Having spent time with Emilia, Payton suspected the stories of time skew abuse amongst Division 30 members and some of the higher ranking Black Knot agents likely had some truth to it. After nearly a decade of virtual raids, Payton thought he could see the signs that someone had spent a significant amount of time within a skewed flow of time as well as he could see oddities in a person’s knots. Just as he had been able to see, within the twists and curls of Emilia’s DNA, that she had once been a non-dev, trauma whittling her down into something that was no longer perfect, he could see the strangeness of her personality.

There was a point, he thought, where suddenly, the mind of those people who lived too long shifted. Some became hateful in their old age, the world a horrible place they would quite happily be done with. Others reverted into being children, experience and age allowing them to relax and enjoy the ebb and flow of life with far more ease. Veterans, Payton had found, were often something too hard for their biological age, simply because the war and a few decades—maybe a few centuries—within the Virtuosi System had changed them. Yet, he had seen the softness of other veterans, especially those who came from Division 30 and the handful of other military powerhouses suspected of time skew abuse—had scoured Memory- and AetherealBoards for conversations on the positive effect of extended Virtuosi System use in readjusting to post-war life.

Time healed as much as time broke a person, and for veterans who were already broken, sometimes, being shattered by centuries—possibly millennia—of time was the thing that could put them back together.

This wasn’t particularly relevant to Emilia—Payton had looked at those traumatic knots, and while he wasn’t about to give up on figuring out how to remove them, he understood why proper knot therapists hadn’t wanted to touch them. They were volatile, and for a girl—and despite his suspicion Emilia was far older than he could ever guess, his classmate often had all the energy of a girl—who he increasingly suspected had played a pivotal role in war, touching them wasn’t something anyone should do lightly.

They also weren’t something time could ever fix—honestly, he wasn’t sure they could be fixed, despite his resolution to see if he could figure out a way to slowly unwind those knots without killing her in the process.

What that time skew abuse was relevant to was the Laprise boys—to Malcolm and Andre Laprise, and possibly, their rarely spoken of brother—and the world’s perception of them. They were young, Malcolm Laprise barely older than Payton himself, and Payton certainly felt unprepared to be an adult despite solidly being one and having no time skew abuse to excuse his messed up sense of time and identity.

Did the Laprise boys feel just as much a child as he himself did? Had they abused the time skew until their minds defaulted back to that of a young adult, the world nothing but their playground, the way Emilia seemed to so often see the world? How much should they worry that so many of their continent’s most powerful and influential people possessed the power of monsters, the experience of people millennia old, the minds of children, and knowledge that no one else seemed capable of gasping?

Did this woman—this woman who potentially saw herself as a girl as well, even if Payton couldn’t bring himself to think of the terrifying presence that was Samina Baxter by such a gentle, non-threatening word—sitting in front him, the bare stumps of her legs pulling at his mind to ask why she had never installed proper prosthetics, even after the war ended. The recovery time for installation was brutal, and there had certainly been as many veterans who had refused to be removed from the field for surgery and rehab as there had been those who used their prosthetics as an excuse for why they couldn’t yet return to the field, while still receiving their full pay because they had full intentions of going back, as opposed to the medical discharge pay they would receive if they admitted they never wanted to set foot on the front again.

“For how she treated you, before last night,” Samina Baxter replied, blinking steadily at him. “She sent Mallie all of her memories when she asked for an agent to accompany you guys. He watched them. I watched them. Emmie feels pretty bad about how she treated you—downright horrified, honestly. Doesn’t know how she didn’t realize she’d become someone who wouldn’t try to befriend you, and instead went full circle to being someone who would reject your attempts at friendship.”

“Em had her reasons,” Payton replied, unsure what Samina Baxter was trying to accomplish. Was she trying to see whether he would become angry with Emilia? Payton didn’t see much of a point in that. After years of trying, Emilia had accepted his friendship; why would he reject her now? Why would learning she felt bad that her trauma had gotten the better of her and she hadn’t even realized it had happened make him angry with her? They were friends now, and all it did was make him sad for her—sad for the person she had forgotten how to be, sad that he couldn’t pull each of those traumatic knots from her and return her to the person she had once been.

Shrugging, Samina Baxter agreed that she had—agreed that her reasons were understandable. “I’m just saying, she owes you, and I know what it’s like to have a black knot. I’ve barely seen the two of you together, but I can see it, you know? That glimmer of friendship that will lead you to forgive her without any fuss because we’ll always forgive those we love at the expense of ourselves. That’s fine and all—its part of who were are, and Emilia wouldn’t want you to be anything other than what you are.”

“With some limits,” Payton had to add.

Unexpectedly, the woman burst into rolling laughter. Her head tilted back as she laughed, those strange eyes of hers squeezing closed. “Oh, I’m so looking forward to when ya’ll meet Baylie,” she said, once her laughter had subsided. “Some people don’t notice what’s different about him, but you all? Most of you are the sorts to catch those differences in the palms of your hand and drink them in, and I am soooo looking forward to it.”

Payton… didn’t know what to say to that. Emilia had mentioned a Baylie once, in a conversation about kinky sex with some classmates. At the time, no one had been quite sure whether she was making shit up or telling the truth—it was often a little difficult to tell with Emilia—but the things she had said about sex with this Baylie had been… something else. Most people had assumed she was joking when she mentioned blood and blades and asphyxiation. Now, learning that this Baylie was a real person, presumably with a black knot, who required limits…

“Just don’t let her get away with not making it up to you, is what I’m saying,” Samina Baxter said, turning to leave, her wheelchair simmering in the dim light of the room. “Emmie is… the sort of person who has to be told things outright in order to believe them—something I think you noticed, what with how fast she took you at your word once you started being honest with her—but she’s the sort to show her sincerity through actions. It’s why she likes being yelled at when she fucks up. It’s an outlet—a grounding of everyone’s feelings in reality. It’s also why most of us won’t yell if it was a huge fuck-up—she’ll torture herself more than our words ever could… or she’ll end up repeating our words in her head and driving herself crazy, I guess. Literally, that girl is so much work sometimes. The point is, accept her making amends. Ask for whatever you want, and she’ll do her best to give it to you. Revenge. Resources. Snuggles. Sex. Some expensive item you’ve been eyeing—fuck, make her join you in raids if you want. Just give her an outlet because you might not need her to show her sincerity, but she needs to get it out of her.”

“Why are you telling me this?” Payton asked, in the moment before his room’s door closed behind Samina Baxter.

The woman twisted, the scars over her nose and cheeks and eyelids stark against her soft brown skin. “Because from what I saw in those memories, you’re not the most experienced with friends. Combined with Emmie telling you to be yourself and to forget what you learned from your father, you probably have no idea how to exist in the world at the moment. You’ll figure it out, I’m sure, but in the meantime, I think you need a little advice.”

A smile, wide and sharp, split over the woman’s face. “You can tell me to fuck off, of course, but I do come from a long line of black knots who are generally pretty good at getting on in the world; plus, I’ve known Emmie since we were, like, six. While she might have been gone for a decade and some of us are a little pissy about that, well… she had her reasons. I love her. I think you’re on your way to loving her, and I think she has room enough in her heart to love you back, assuming you don’t fuck it up by not knowing what the fuck you’re doing.”

Suddenly, the door snicked shut and Payton was left staring at it, wondering what, exactly, Emilia’s understandable reason for keeping him at a distance had been, when she had been friends with at least one black knot since she was six. Something horrible, Payton imagined—something perhaps separate from the war, that had sunk under all her other trauma?

That would be… interesting, for a different trauma to have slipped under whatever presumably war-related incident caused her traumatic knots and made a home for itself. Uncommon—rare, even—but not entirely unheard of.

Definitely something to consider, when he got to looking at those pesky traumatic knots again, searching for a way to loosen their hold on his friend.

Smiling to himself, Payton turned back to his unpacking, realizing he had forgotten his deodorant. He could see it in his mind, sitting on his bathroom vanity back in his dorm room, forgotten in his hurry to pack and get the training rooms to start making friends. It would be easy enough for him to order another one to be delivered to their suite. On the other hand…

[Sil:Oh, come on. Not you too!?]

Regardless of Sil’s complaints, Payton knew his classmate was ordering him the deodorant for him because Emilia’s friendship meant everyone accepting him. It meant Pria giving him hugs and smiles and telling him she liked him better with his natural smile. It meant Beth snickering at his bad jokes. It meant Samina Baxter giving him friendship advice. It meant Sil acting as his parent as well.

That was nice—nice enough that, while he didn’t really think Emilia’s apologies necessary, he would take Samina Baxter’s advice and make sure to accept Emilia’s offers of apologies in whatever form they came in. Apparently, that was what friends did: hold each other accountable and not let them off the hook for the harm they had done, regardless of the reason why they had done it.

Funny—his father had always told him to not demand apologies or covet what might be offered in recompense for slights against him. His father, he was learning, had been wrong about a number of things.