Mikhail tried not to glare at the notifications bouncing around the corner of his Censor, he really did. He just couldnât
not
glare at them.
It was always just so frustrating, this reality that Halen had been able to program the intricate function that Coral used to translate all her emotional readings of people into words that could then be transmitted to everyone with its companion function, while nothing could be done to help him with, well, anything.
Dozens of readings shuddered through his mind as he, Coral, and Polianna descended the long trail of stairs into the FalmĂer train station. They could have taken an elevator down, but Coral had wanted to get as many readings as she could before they actually got to the papers checkpointâpapers theyâd fortunately had the sense to grab before they left the Penns. Without them, Polianna might have still be able to get a few of them through the diplomatic checkpoint. Even she wouldnât have been able to get them all of them through. So, they were all carrying around the paper passports and various other physical documents most of their class had for their rare excursion into the Free Colonies. Such trips werenât exactly common, and Seerâikâtine had long been the sort of place where being asked for any documentation was rare unless you were causing problems.
Their entire class was known for causing problems. So, whenever they went to Seerâikâtine, they brought their papers. That was goodâit meant theyâd all been able to find their paperwork quickly, although Mikhail didnât really understand what the rush was. It was Emilia, and Emilia could take care of herself. If an extra five minutes ended up being the difference between her surviving or suffering some grievous injury in a fight they were too late to help in, he didnât really think they
would
be much help.
Emilia was the best of them. Better than Halen or Andre, who were otherwise the best. More brutal than Samina or Levi or Baylor, even if she hid it all behind smiles and giggles.
If Emilia couldnât do it, there was no way any of the rest of them couldânot that he wouldnât try! If any of his friends needed him, Mikhail would, of course, try to help them! Other people in their group⊠he wasnât so sureâŠ
Eyes flicking to Polianna as she huffed and gently complained about stairs, her overly plump body doing her no favours when it came to endurance, Mikhail wondered if she would try to help their friends, no matter what. They werenât really Poliannaâs friends, he supposed. While they had technically grown up together, he didnât know Coralâs girlfriend well. Some people, like Leerin, he knew would take off the moment things got too roughâit was why he was surprised Halen had even let her come, although he had long ago learned that talking about how bad a friend Leerin was one on the list of things he shouldnât talk about.
Other things on that list included saying sexual things about peopleâhe didnât really care what Codeth said, sex jokes were never okayâas were Poliannaâs weight struggles and her ever-changing appetiteâalthough he also knew he was supposed to tell someone like Coral or Halen or Taelor or Emilia if it seemed she was eating too much or too little. That was the thing with Polianna: she wasnât part of their class, and she wasnât friends with any of them. Really, he didnât think she liked anyone except Coral. Still, if she was struggling, their class would help her because thatâs just how they were.
They were people who would always help everyone else. Mikhail had learned that early, back when Emilia had stood up to Simeonâs parents and their teachers: they didnât give up, they didnât leave people to suffer, they were nice and caring. There were some times when it didnât work out, like with Bryce. Mikhail knew a few people in their class had still thought about her, until the moment they graduated, probably still did now, months later. How could they not think of this girl who was caught in her parentsâ machinations to gain more influence. If one day she turned around and wanted help getting away from her parents, Mikhail knew they would help, the same way he knew that, one day, they might be left stealing away Coral and Simeon. It wouldnât matter that it would make them criminalsâkidnappers. They would do it.
In a way, Mikhail knew he was lucky that he didnât have a form of Dyadism. He would never be forced to comply with his parentsâ demands that he be hidden away under archaic Dyad Containment Laws. Mikhail knew his parents didnât love him. They were a lot like BJâs: people who wished he would just be quiet and disappear. Unlike BJ, though, Mikhail knew he would have problems trying to go out into the world. If he left home today, trying to find a job, he knew it wouldnât work. Censors were used too much in jobs, and his Censor didnât like his brain. So, how was he supposed to get a job when he couldnât use half the technology that would be needed for a job? Maybe it would get better as he got olderânot because he would change, but because Emilia or Halen would figure out a way to connect his Censor and brain even a bit more.
Somehow, Mikhail didnât think they would find anythingâthey had decades of searching and experimentation between them, after all. Still, despite knowing he would struggle out in the world, he was happy that he would never be like Coral or Simeon, with terrible parents threatening to lock them into their childhood bedrooms with no hope of escape. They would claim their Dyad children would be a burden on Baalphorian societyâclaim they needed to be treated like children in need of constant parenting for the rest of their life. The government wouldnât bother checking if they were lying, so, their class would break them outâget them somewhere safe. Mikhail could do thatâhe didnât really care about breaking stupid laws, another thing he shouldnât talk about, but instead hold close in his heart.
Mikhailâs eyes continued boring into Poliannaâs back, a message from Coral popping up, asking if he was okay. At least she hadnât forwarded her reading of his own feelings to him. It was annoying enough when he couldnât understand his own feelings, his thoughts slipping about and never quite completing themselves and leaving him with the perpetual feeling of confusion because there had been a conclusion, lingering within the corner of his mind, and he had been pulling it towards him with threads of connections. Then, a thread would snap, another voice or thought would interrupt him, and it would be gone.
Poof.
Nothing left but the feeling of confusion. Mikhail didnât need to know he was confused, and he definitely didnât need to know what sort of feeling he had been having before the confusionâbefore his thoughts popped and vanished into the aether.
Sending back a reply that he was fine, he instead focused on going over Coralâs readings of the people in the station. It was his job to read them, although he knew Halen and Taelor and probably Emiliaâit depended on what she was doing and how much attention she could spareâwere reading them as well. Mikhail was also supposed to read them. While no one would say they wanted him to read them because he was stupid, he knew that was the case, a least a little.
Where the others would be dragging each item that Coral read together to create a giant puzzle of connections, Mikhail couldnât do that. He could try, his brain burning as he tried to hold on to each slip of information, but just like his thoughts shimmered away, so would those connections, no function on his side able to connect with his brain well enough to catalogue it all for him so he wouldnât lose track. Instead, he was left with his brain alone to remember it all. No matter how hard he tried, eventually, every thought and feeling would vanish, leaving him only with that dim sense of confusion that had been his lifelong companion.
So, he would look at each feeling and take it for what it was: a single instance of humanity within a jumble of connections. Two people were talking, one was upset. It was easy to assume, without more information, that one person was saying something that was upsetting the other. It didnât have to be that way, and when looked at individually, Mikhail could create his own storiesâcould take in the scope of human emotions and find the smallest sliver of
something
that didnât belong. One person was upset, and without knowing they were talking to someone, what would he think they were upset about? Within isolation, what was happening inside them and why? What were all the options? All the important bits in this single instance of humanity, rather than the maze that was the interconnectedness of why humans thought and felt what they did?
It wasnât the first time heâd done this, he and Coral teaming up when their class played at war to determine who had the secret weapon they needed to disable or steal. Everyone would be throwing out emotions to mess with her abilities, so he would dig through them for her. They were often quite successful, although it was always harder when the triplets were actively messing with her, primed as they were to be anything and anyone for a blink of time.
Aside from the clones, Mikhail thought their class might be the only group on the continent capable of purposefully messing with and EEC Dyadâs readings, thanks to all those silly games. Their prank wars had helped as well, while some of them had become excellent at purposefully riling up their emotions so she could feel themâlearn to catalogue them. While he thought they all hoped theyâd never need to avoid being read by an EEC Dyadâthey were rather scary, with their ability to walk through a crowd and know so much about everyone their abilities touchedâhe knew they would do quite well⊠as long as the person relied on their Excess Empathy to give them an edge. Having seen how powerful Coral could be against people who didnât know how to block herâor werenât trying to, as they sometimes did in their gamesâMikhail doubted anyone with Excess Empathy Levels wouldnât use their abilities as much as possible.
That ability to read everyone was currently a lot, however. There were thousands of people within the station, and while Coralâs abilities couldnât quite reach all of them, she was reaching a lot. Mikhail was doing his best to go through each reading, but they were quickly backlogging, especially since it wasnât like she received only a single reading for each person.
Human emotions were always fluctuating, and while Mikhail knew they didnât shift so much second to secondânot unless something big happenedâit was still a lot, and he didnât want to miss anything.
It would not be good if he missed something and someone got hurtâespecially not Coral because he liked Coral. That meant Polianna couldnât be hurt either, as Coral liked Poliannaâmaybe even loved her. Theyâd been together a few years, and Mikhail wasnât sure how long it took to love someone. Halen had once said it was painfully fast and horrifically slow all at once. He had claimed it was a slow building thing, but only when looked back on, when the glow of love had already surrounded you. Before that, he said, it was just existing and finding your eyes straying to the person aggravatingly often. Codeth had laughed at him so hard he had fallen off the wall they had been sitting on. It was at the beach, so he had been fine, just rolling over and laughing more while Halen threw balls of water pulled from the aether at him. It had been hot that day, so Mikhail didnât think Halenâs attempt to punish Codeth for laughing had worked well.
Mikhail⊠wasnât really sure why Codeth had laughed. Didnât he see how much Halen loved Emilia?
Ah! That was another thing he wasn't supposed to talk about: when people loved each other. It was okay if the other person knew and accepted their love; it wasnât okay if one person didnât know, or had said they didnât love the other person back. That one he had learned young. His mom didnât like being reminded that he loved her because she didnât love him back. Valor had once said it might be because he was a little different, and some parents didnât know how to deal with their child not being what they had expected them to be. Valor had also added that people shouldnât have expectations for their children and been very forceful about making sure Mikhail knew that, which he did. Mikhail also knew that any children he hadâif he found someone to have them withâwould be loved no matter what. The clones couldnât have biological children, but Mikhail was sure that Valor would raise any children under his careâwhether children Emilia had or young clonesâwell too.
Valor was smart and would make a good parent, but Mikhail didnât think him being different was the reason his mom didnât return his love. Even when heâd been really small, nothing really
wrong
with him yet, he didnât think his mother had loved him. Instead, she was just sad and going through the motions, and until Emilia had found the smallest thing wrong in his DNA, he had assumed that maybe he was
wrong
because his mom hadnât been a good mom. Sheâd tried and failed, and that was probably why she didnât like that he loved her: she knew she didnât deserve his love and understanding, just as much as she knew it was wrong that she couldnât love him backâknew that some maternal part of her was broken. Coral had once told him that his mom was always frustrated when around him, but it wasnât something aimed at him; instead, she was frustrated with herself and her inability to be a good mom.
So, he wouldnât hold his momâs trouble with being a good, loving mom against herâshe hated herself enough for that. Heâd just keep loving her, quietly from a distance because he knew she was trying to best. Her best just wasnât workingâwasnât good enough for her or society or him.
He wouldnât talk about how much Halen loved Emilia either, but he would reprimand Codeth for laughing about that love and making sex jokes about themâthat was bad no matter what, but it was especially bad because Halen loved Emilia, and it was so much worse because Emilia was a silverstrain. Codeth wasnât making sex jokes because of that, though! If he had been, Mikhail would have been actually upset, not just gently reprimanding!
Emilia was too nice. She didnât deserve to be joked about for anything, especially not her genetics!
It was with that thought lingering in his mind that Mikhail caught it: a sliver of a reading that told him
someone
had been making sex jokes about a silverstrain, hidden within the mess of readings. From there, it wasnât hard to pull up connected strands from the database Taelor and Halenâand to a lesser extent Emilia, as she had apparently needed to find a bathroom, resulting in accidentally starting an argument with her travel companions which had distracted her from Coralâs readingsâhad been dutifully cataloguing all of the readings into for them, organizing the functionâs default cataloguing with the care only human minds could accomplish.
A single thread of emotion, tugged, until information lay piled through their mind and even Mikhail knew: this was bad.