Arc 7 | Chapter 273: Embarrassment to Last a Lifetime

Emilia wasn’t a stranger to awkward situations, in fact, one of her first memories after she was brought to her new home had been so thoroughly awkward—mortifying, even—that over sixty years later, her cheeks still burned to even think of.

Despite that, the overall situation that had led to that moment was one she would never wish to take back, even now, knowing that she—and everyone else involved—had greatly misread the situation and the potential consequences of their actions. In the end, regardless of the blush that threatened to spread over her cheeks, thinking of the dressing down she had been forced to witness, in part due to her own actions—she’d just been a child and easily forgiven for her part in the whole thing—in part due to Malcolm’s silence—he’d been a teenager, his Censor already installed, and had no excuse for his part in the incident—there was nothing she would do differently, given the chance. Malcolm either, she knew.

Back then, just coming out of an orphanage where, as much as she’d constantly overheard the adults speaking in not-so-hushed whispers about how no one would want a girl like her or her sister, a boy like her brother or Helix—although it wouldn’t be until they met again, decades later, that they would realize they had briefly been housed in the same facility—none of them had really known much about the world outside of that place. Certainly, none of them had any idea about black knots or the way so much of the world feared them. As a result, there was no reason for her not to trust the Laprise boys when they told her that her parents wouldn’t be happy about her becoming friends with them.

Looking back… Emilia could see where she’d gone wrong, in those first days of being friends with the Laprise boys. Their families’ homes backed up on one another, and although their parents hadn’t been particularly close, her new parents hadn’t warned her away from the wall that separated their estates either. Neither had they probably expected her to climb over the wall and land on top of Andre, though, Rafe wandering over when they both screamed, only to find his younger twin smushed underneath a strange, silver haired girl—even back then, the boys hadn't been close enough to hang out with each other; not without her, anyways, and that only came after she’d tumbled into their yard a handful of times.

To Andre and Rafe, she had been a strange chance at having a friend in a place where their family was treated with a strange reverence and fear that, even at such a young age, they’d understood all too well—an understanding that had been painful for Andre in particular, as everyone had already realized he was different, that he didn’t have the black knot that virtually every other member of their huge family had.

It wouldn’t be until later that the true extent of his differences were calculated, during that first, revealing D-Levels test. Still, it had been difference enough that he felt like an outsider wherever he went. He didn’t fit in with his family quite right, nor was he the sort of child other parents encouraged their children to befriend. So, yeah, when she’d fallen onto him, he’d panicked. Rather than turn her in to his parents to have her removed—or at least let her parents know where she’d ended up—he’d instead begged her to stay, begged both her and Rafe to not say anything.

None of them had said anything. When she’d come clean to her siblings about where she was disappearing to, both covered for her, just as they had when they were in the orphanage. People had asked Emilia about that several times over the years, when she told them the origin story of her friendship with the Laprise family. She could still remember the confusion on Olivier’s face as he asked if she really hadn't been afraid of the consequences of sneaking out of her new home, of becoming so immediately wrapped up in drama and lies. The truth was, she had been! She’d been so worried, but regardless of how she’d come to live in that place, of how much she and her siblings had wanted to believe the Starrbergs were serious about their intent to keep them, none of them had really believed it.

To herself, Indigo and Atticus, it had still just seemed like a matter of time until they would be sent back. Emilia knew she was too much; she was too troublesome, always drawing attention to herself even when she was trying to make herself small, invisible. Indigo knew she would never be a genius, letters and numbers and facts falling through her mind like raindrops; she would never be able to keep up with anyone, let alone the few children from The Penns they’d been introduced to. Atticus knew that he was all those things and more; he was every bad part of his siblings rolled into someone who refused to speak, refused to look anyone but his sisters in the eye and could become so overwhelmed he had to be restrained—not that their parents had ever done that with more than tight hugs and loving, constricting words.

The point is that, for each of them, allowing Emilia a small moment of friendship with their cheerful and grumpy twin neighbours was just the thing to do. They would keep secrets, bend the truth and cover up what was happening, because eventually, something more serious would break the tentative peace of their new home, and they’d be returned like the unwanted things they were.

This was great logic for kids, Emilia still thought. It wasn’t so great logic for Malcolm, older by them by more than a decade. While all the little pieces of the puzzle of the Starrbergs had yet to fit into place in any of their young minds, Malcolm should have known his parents wouldn’t care about the little girl tumbling into their backyard constantly. Even if he didn’t know the Starrbergs well, he had eventually admitted that if he had put even a little more thought into it, he would have realized they wouldn’t care so much about Emilia visiting his younger brothers so much as they would care when they inevitably realized she was missing.

Stars bless and curse her siblings, who—after years of covering up for her at the orphanage when their caretakers were looking for her, intent to punish her for this or that—had continued covering for her when their new parents finally noticed Emilia was missing.

They didn’t know where she was.

They hadn’t seen her.

They had no idea where she could have gone.

How Indigo and Atticus thought that would turn out, Emilia still had no idea. Panic makes people do strange things, she supposed, children even more so.

So, her parents had searched for her, almost immediately heading over to the Laprise household to ask the boys’ mothers for help in finding their missing daughter. It never occurred to any of them that she might have scaled the wall into their backyard dozens of times since arriving there, several weeks earlier—and, to be fair, Emilia knew all the adults had been horrified to realize she’d been sneaking away for hours at a time virtually every day and none of them had noticed.

They had, however, asked Malcolm to help them look. Malcolm, who knew perfectly well where she was—had, in fact, just seen her chilling with his little brothers in the backyard. Malcolm, who hadn’t come clean either.

By the time she returned home, finding her siblings sitting with one of the elderly Hyrat clones—Hanlen, the first clone she would meet and attempt to befriend as they waited for their parents and the Laprises to return—who had been called over to watch them, half the neighbourhood and several hundred of the clones were searching for her, Malcolm

searching

with them.

Emilia could still remember the lecture he was given. While her parents had never confirmed it, she wasn’t convinced their parents hadn’t made her, her siblings, and the Laprise twins sit through the lecture because the awkwardness of witnessing those terrifying women chastise their eldest son for not fessing up had been a punishment in and of itself.

It wasn’t the last time Emilia had experienced the mortification of sitting through someone else being lectured over this or that. During the war, there had been soldiers lectured for fucking up, the rest of them left to listen and learn and die of secondhand embarrassment all at once. She’d even been known to do similar things at times, using lectures as punishment and education all at once.

Lectures were better than the awkwardness of the silence surrounding them now. It would be better if someone—anyone—said something about the situation. No one was speaking. Perhaps no one had any idea of what to say—certainly, Emilia had no idea what to say to Leerin or Darrian or their younger cousins.

What do you say to people who have gotten themselves wrapped up in such a horrible situation? People who had sat back and watched as their family did terrible things for decades?

“Where did you even get this information?”

Emilia messaged Loren as she looked through the dossier he’d sent her on the goings-on of the Zentari family.

Loren had been the other Hyrat clone she’d met that day. Say what you want about black knots, but there’s no denying that they have a connection to their children and can appreciate the horror of losing a child just as much as the next parent. While none of the Hyrat clones were technically

parents

, many of them did assist in raising new clones in a parental role. As he was the parental figure to the triplets, who were the same age as herself, her siblings and the Laprise twins, Emilia had always been close to him, and somewhere along the way, he had ended up as something like her handler, when it came to Black Knot information.

It was nice that, even after so long gone, he had stepped back into that role with perfect ease, giving her updates on the situation with her ex and his roommates—not to mention Victor and his stupid parents—erasing Hanalea’s memories, and now walking her through what they knew about the Zentari family’s connections to purism.

“Why didn’t anyone tell any of us about this?”

she continued, before the man had a chance to reply to her first question.

It wouldn’t have been the first time someone at The Black Knot gave their friend group some bit of information they shouldn’t have, so why not this? A brief message to the Laprise boys confirmed that neither Malcolm nor Rafe knew about the Zentari’s connections to Penn purism, although they had both known about the general shape of growing purism there, leaving the clones to handle it—Baalphoria was big, and it wasn’t like even Malcolm, near the head of the organization, knew every detail of everything they were doing.

As for Andre? He hadn’t gotten back to her, something that irked her. While he had been one of the few people she’d stayed in contact with following the war, somewhere along the way, they’d mostly stopped communicating, the list of potential reasons punctuated by the most likely and really fucking bad option.

Had she done something to piss him off? Not as far as she knew, but maybe?

Was he finally done with being her friend? That would be heartbreaking, but deserved, after decades of friendship and a decade of broken conversations and trauma.

Was he busy with work, just like his older brothers? He was the head of The Black Knot now, so maybe?

Emilia had no idea, only knowing that some invisible wall had risen between them several years previous. She didn’t want to consider the most likely sort of wall that had risen between them, nor whether Malcolm or Rafe knew about it—although if it was

that

there was no way either didn’t know; rather, it was likely if it was

that

, they just didn’t know how to tell her, that they hadn’t wanted to pressure her back into their lives for Andre.

Not that they would have told her; the reality was they each loved her more than each other. They would always put her wellbeing first, and if that meant not telling her that her decision to fuck off had led to Andre doing

that

—something none of them would be able to deny—they wouldn’t tell her. Probably, they would spend the rest of their lives hiding it, if she let them.

It didn’t matter if they didn’t tell her. If it turned out her friend had done

that

to himself in the absence of her friendship, the only thing left would be to help him and hate herself.

Something for her to-do list, she supposed. Figure out what was up with Andre, and if it was

that,

force him to undo it and then help him put himself back together.

“Because we aren’t supposed to know,”

Loren replied, pulling her out of her self-hatred to tell her that the clones had been getting some amount of information from the weird twins who were currently accompanying them.

“We’ve learned that many purists use a Censor function to lock down information, the sort we use for informants and have been seeing more of in organized crime. The twins can get around that lock, if only a bit, but if they give us too much too often…”

“Are Leerie and Darrie locked up as well?”

Emilia asked, thinking back to the way they had talked around what was happening a bit. Maybe that was why they’d never brought it up?

Loren was quiet for so long that, when he came back telling her he didn’t think they were, Emilia wasn’t surprised.

“I don’t think they’re told as much about their family’s activities, from what the twins have told us. Neither Leerin nor Darrian are trusted, but their family won’t let them go either—not without consequences.”

There was another brief silence while Emilia contemplated that—contemplated what sort of consequences the Zentaris could be holding over her friends’ heads—before Loren came back with a warning for her to be careful as well.

“I wouldn’t put it past them to out every one of you, just to get back at Leerin and Darrian for leaving. It is part of the reason I have also been conflicted about what to do about the family, and have instead left it to the twins and your friends as to what to do. We take the information we get from the twins and use it to instead learn what we can, and occasionally step in when it won’t be obvious where we got the information. They are not official informants, and they are under no obligation to stay there, but we have also left it to them as to whether they want to leave or not and whether they wish our help in doing so. I believe they stay for their sister.”

Emilia could hear the frustration edging through Loren’s message, probably because he knew these kids. Loren cared for Leerin and Darrian in the same way he cared for every member of their friend group. In the end, though, this was just the standard for the Black Knot’s voluntary informants: leave it to them to decide their own fate. The Black Knot wasn’t in the business of either forcing people to remain in a compromising situation—not unless they were criminals, anyways—or forcing them to leave. From everything she saw in the information, she couldn’t even fault the clones for leaving kids in this family.

Yeah, the Zentaris had some horrific beliefs, but she doubted it was enough to argue the kids be removed. Leerin and Darrian might adults, the weird twins in their early thirties as well, but Korrin was still a teenager. There wasn’t a lot Loren or anyone else could do to get her out of there—not unless something more serious was revealed, and Emilia had a feeling that if they knew of anything like that, the twins would have revealed their ability to get around whatever function was installed in their Censors in order to do get their sister out of there.

That was… terrible. It was also so, so complicated, even more so now that she knew the Zentaris and whatever purist organization they owed allegiance to could be watching.

Worse, it was far too much of a coincidence for a family with purist ties to end up on the ship while they were looking for a terrorist with purist ties. Whoever was behind all that could be watching as well—could have already seen her conflict with Leerin, although they could brush that off as Hyr having messaged some of the situation, rather than Darrian revealing it to them.

So. Fucking. Messy.

As they stepped into the small room at acted as a transitional space between the first and second levels of the raid, outfitted with a handful of Virtuosi Rigs, so heroes could alter their skills and hacks as needed, Emilia’s mind raced, trying to figure out how to get around the itching reality that purists may be watching them.

While they would already know about the twins and Korrin’s betrayal of their cousins—Leerin and Darrian’s betrayal as well—the more they could keep about the depth of the situation from them the better.

The more they could pass this off as old friends teaming up, despite their family’s purist views, the better.

“How is it that the twins are able to get around the spying function?”

Emilia asked, glaring when Loren’s message came through, telling her she wasn’t going to like it, before the actual details came through.

No—no she very much didn’t like it.

Fortunately, as much as she didn’t like it—had those boys really been using

that

function as a way to get around the spying function for most of their life? No wonder they seemed so weird—it was also perhaps the most ideal circumstances she could ask for when it came to getting around that function herself.

This, however, was really going to suck.