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Arc F1.9 | Chapter 3: The Only One With A Brain, Apparently

“What,” Codeth said, as though that would help illuminate the situation and the thought process of the Lüshanian girl to him—he hadn’t even spoken in Lüshanian, for star’s sake! he repeated, throwing more of a questioning tone into his now-Lüshanian words.Beside him, Cheska bounced on her toes, Izurial looked like he wanted to strangle her, and Vantril looked like she wanted to be anywhere but with them. The latter two, Codeth thought, were correct in their assessments of the situation. Cheska… not so much. Worst of all? The girl reminded him a bit too much of Emilia—as in, she was all hyperactive energy and kindness, with a good dollop of stupidity mixed in, all of which led to his former classmate having a penchant for running off and doing stupid things.

In a private relay with Mikhail, Codeth had asked if his friend also thought something odd about the situation happening in . They’d both known Emilia for a long time, and Codeth himself was having a difficult time not microsparking through the city, trying to get to the little boy who was about to be handed off to a predator. Had Levi’s group not been significantly closer, Levi assuring him that they were moving as quickly as possible—something the crime lord with them was insisting was fine, even if Levi microsparking him along when he could must have been leaving the man more than a little queasy—he might have ditched his three companions and tried to get to the kid himself.

No one should have to even be threatened to be sold off for another’s freedom, let alone a kid—and by women who had been taking care of him, no less!

Bitches better hope no one in their group came across them, Olivier de la Rue having forwarded photos of them to everyone in their group. If any of them came across the pair, they were dead—and if they didn’t get them here, they would be forwarding the photos on to every clone and Black Knot agent, onto every law enforcement agency they had pull with.

As they had been discussing all this in one of their group relays—they really had too many, but sometimes, certain people needed to be excluded from certain conversations—Codeth had been reminded of his earlier thoughts—about his realization that he was rather okay with killing people who didn’t deserve to live anymore. A few members of their group had been quiet during the conversation—BJ and Janie, most notably, neither of which was surprising at this point. BJ had always been someone somewhat softer, and while he wasn’t the sort of person who would stop the rest of them from killing the women—or anyone else they deemed needed to die—it was unclear if he would have it in him to kill, even to save his own life.

This—this stupid mission that had actually turned into —was something of a measuring stick for all of them, Codeth thought: where their lines lay; where their morals and values would allow them to tread without breaking.

Janie, a few of them had agreed in an even smaller relay, had already broken. Had they been able to convince Leerin to turn back, they would have had her take Janie with her—although, at this point, Janie was behaving so strangely that no one really wanted to leave Leerin alone with her, lest Janie freak and get them both killed. There was already a plan in place that, should they manage to meet back up with Doctor Vickers, they would try to talk Janie at least into leaving with him—their doctor could always sedate her, if necessary. This, of course, would leave their group without anyone with medical training nearby, but at this point…

At this point, quite a few of them thought Janie more of a liability than anything. The girl wasn’t doing anything—not contributing thoughts or opinions to anything. Janie wasn’t even managing Leerin anymore, something the other girl had noted, Leerin’s own behaviour becoming something both softer and more hostile as time went on because Janie acting so strangely was affecting her. While Halen had complained about it at one point, Polianna had pointed out that it was possible Leerin was trying to use her behaviour to force Janie out of whatever was happening within her.

So far, it wasn’t working, and as time marched on, Leerin had become more sullen, as though the awareness that her was no longer doing her job had tempered her. It reminded Codeth of himself, Levi, and BJ, all of them having parents and guardians who generally couldn’t be bothered with them, all of them acting out simply to try and gain a little attention. In BJ’s case, it had never worked well for him, what punishments he received never enough to soothe his heart. Levi’s fathers didn’t seem to notice or care about his behaviour, caring for the boy instead falling to Darrian, Miles, and Doctor Vickers. As for his own mother and grandfather? Codeth had learned long ago that having them forget he existed was better than them remembering he was there.

None of the Zentari parents were great, so perhaps it was understandable that Leerin was searching for —some sort of attention—from her friends. While they’d been in the same class forever, Codeth didn’t know Leerin well enough to be able to judge she behaved this way, but…

But if he to guess, he would say she was a bitch because her parents were trash who didn’t love her, even when she was being a good girl. If she was a bitch to her friends and they still loved her, maybe that soothed something within her.

Then again, what did he know? Had their entire class taken a whole slew of psychology classes? Maybe. Still didn’t mean he knew anything; mostly, it just meant that all of them were excellent at over analyzing things!

Regardless of Leerin’s situation, Janie’s behaviour was also, unfortunately, getting worse as time went on. It had been bad enough when her group had been moving through the Secretarial Stand, not a soul to be found. Now that they were being attacked? Rafe, Simeon, and Halen heartlessly knocking out—and in a few cases killing—those they came across?

Well, if BJ’s silence implied just didn’t want to be the one to snuff out anyone’s life, Janie’s was something more judgmental, while her vitals screamed of a disgust not in the people who were attacking them—the Lüshanians they increasingly suspected were actively trying to take down the government—but with her friends. What did she want her group to do? Turn back and leave the city? Abandon those of them down in the city?

Unfortunately, a number of them thought that was exactly what Janie wanted: for the ceiling group to turn back as a whole and leave the rest of them to their fate. They wouldn’t do that, of course, but it made her worse than useless, and Codeth’s heart ached for the rest of the group up there—after all, if Janie were suddenly in active danger, they would have to decide whether to even bother defending her, knowing she might very well stand by and watch them die, were their roles reversed. Mostly, Codeth was glad their group compositions had changed, as he didn’t have to deal with any of that.

All this was to say that Janie’s silence in the group relay discussing killing the Lüshanian women on sight was telling. That particular relay also hadn't included Doctor Vickers but had included Sorvell, the younger Vicker brother proving that he was ethical and cold-hearted enough to do what was needed. Doctor Vickers, Codeth knew, could also kill, but he didn’t deserve to have their ethics and decisions of morality piled atop him. Better to leave the man in the dark about this, just as they left most of the adults in their lives to certain things, but to never know for sure.

No adult knew for sure that Warren had been killed by Rafe, his name and guilt provided to him by Halen. Everyone still assumed he was dead—killed because he had done something terrible and everyone knew that those of them who knew the truth would never share what they knew, no clone willing to dig into their minds without permission because Emilia was a monster.

If a clone touched any of their minds without permission? Best case, they wouldn’t be granted access—even Halen’s hacked CSs utilized Emilia’s blocks against the clones, at least for a few members of of the class. Worst case, Emilia would come for any clone who dared try to work their way into her friend’s minds—would consume their mind with her own.

Really, the whole lot of them had been given too much leeway by the adults in their lives, by the government itself. Codeth wasn’t complaining—he quite liked his freedom—but, he couldn’t deny that both Emilia’s legal problems and their current situation were a direct result of that leeway. Still, he did think they’d gotten away with too much.

This was all beside the point that if heart was aching for that little boy, there wasn’t a chance in all the aether that Emilia’s wasn’t breaking for him. Yet, allegedly, she was still down in the dungeons, a message having come through from her new friend, Clemence, informing them that they were just about ready to start heading back through the dungeons and then up through the many levels of the 17th holding cells.

The teenager messaging wasn’t exactly strange—she’d been messaging on a mixture of her own and Emilia’s xpherns back when Emilia had been —but Emilia had been silent for a while, and Codeth didn’t trust that silence. The Emilia he had grown up with—the one who had gone to war for all of her friends, and even for Halen at times, most notably after a boy from another school had called him a —should have been content to linger down there while a little boy was in danger and knew if they could get to him soon enough.

Mikhail, at the very least, when questioned about his opinions on the likelihood that Emilia had actually ditched her group and simply not told the rest of them, hadn’t bothered to lie to him, telling him all about how Emilia was, indeed, no longer with the group. Apparently, only Mikhail—and by extension the Crisharian man, Olivier, and —and Halen knew that Emilia had taken off.

Halen had explained, after they had moved the conversation into their small, group relay.

Mikhail had added, Codeth wondering all the while how was the only one in their trio with any brain cells—actually, it wasn’t just between the three of them. Emilia herself had seemingly forgotten that everyone knew of her insanity and propensity for risking herself for other people!?

Codeth had asked. Since then, the relay had been silent—possibly both were busy, Mikhail moving through the city with a nervous preteen in his arms while Halen’s group was being actively attacked.

Somehow, Codeth doubted that either had told Emilia that she was an idiot and at least a few other people amongst their friends have figured out there was no way she’d be waiting around down there. If anyone else had figured it out, they were probably in the same position he himself had been in: they didn’t want to realize it.

Sometimes, people had blind spots—had bits of information they couldn’t see, despite having all of the pieces laid out before them. Given the triplets were still with the rest of the drop group, Codeth assumed that was the case with them. As well as the triplets knew Emilia, they wanted her to be safe. Their desire for her to be safe could very well be blocking them from believing she would be stupid enough to wander off from her group.

Emilia, however, was stupid enough to wander off from her group—fuck knew both she and Codeth had wandered off tons of times on school trips, intent to hook up and see if would notice. A few had, but usually, they’d already known the two of them occasionally fucked.

As a result, Codeth knew this blue-haired girl, who reminded him so much of his childhood friend, was just like the bratty silverstrain he’d grown up with—someone who, if she didn’t get her way, was liable to run off without them.

Fuck.

Codeth’s eyes turned upwards. Black smoke was rising through the city, pooling on the ceiling and hiding many of the buildings that hung there in sooty darkness. The air purification systems were screaming, trying to suck the potentially toxic fumes out of the cavern while pumping fresh air downwards. While they couldn’t see the district where the fighting was taking place from here, it would be easy enough to seek it out—to find the woman, Cravena, and the teenager who had been with her when Olivier de la Rue’s group of escapees had been broken up, both presumably at the heart of the conflict.

[Codeth:]

[Mikhail:]

[Mikhail:]

[Codeth:]

[Mikhail:]

Codeth still didn’t like that Mikhail was no longer with either Olivier de la Rue or Levi. At least they had working Censors—although Olivier de la Rue had admitted that the Crisharian man had done to the oil that had been blocking his Censor to get it back onaether, and that the man himself had been unsure if it would last. Hence, Codeth had the same concerns as before, when he and Vantril had first broken off from the rest of the drop group: if Mikhail’s Censor started having more issues, finding him would be difficult, but as long as he had the map and a xphern…

[Mikhail:]

[Mikhail:]

[Mikhail:]

What, indeed?