Arc 9 | Chapter 423: A Ruinous Reuniting

Sorvell was already moving, hauling Jane and BJ against his chest and jumping over the edge of the cliff, before his brother had even voiced that

something

was coming. Skills to catch himself shuddered out of him as they fell, Jane squeezing his neck but trusting that he would keep her safe. BJ also trusted him, although by the time they landed beside the others, Halen already activating a skill to propel Darrian and Simeon back up, he was mostly just swearing and yelling.

“Why’d you leave!?” he demanded, as though they hadn’t already discussed the plan for if they ran into enemies while traversing one of the many cliffs and tiny tunnels that made up the cave system. In the case of easier split offs like the cliff, those who remained above them would be better able to fight whatever had come upon them if they didn’t need to worry about their weaker members’ safety; hence, the jumping. BJ wasn’t exactly weak—no member of this terrifying friends group was—but neither was it a secret that he was near the bottom in terms of both power and skill. “At the very least, you should have grabbed Lux, and not me!” he muttered just before a high-pitched scream broke the air.

Behind him, Halen and Valor shifted, uneasy with the fact that they had to stay down there—they couldn’t leave the rest of them without the defence. If something came along, Codeth and Leerin

should

be able to protect their group—at least, according to the details Taelor had given him when he’d first ended up joining this stupid mission. The scream at least was enough to convince them to send Rafe back up as well, the boy leaving a muttered comment about how they should have tracked down his younger twin brother to join them on this ill-conceived mission, before he was being hurled upwards by Halen and Valor’s use of some tandem skill.

Sorvell had heard mutterings about the youngest Laprise brother a few times over the trip. Mostly, it seemed that no one knew where he was and even hours after leaving Baalphoria, no one had heard from him. Apparently this wasn’t exactly uncommon—for as much as Andre Laprise was one of the most sociable members of their group, he also enjoyed his alone time and was known to vanish for extended periods of time, disabling his Censor while he did whatever it was he did. The way Zirell’s eyes had narrowed before shifting away, Sorvell had a feeling his older brother knew something about his patient’s whereabouts—or at least what he was doing. Doctor-patient confidentiality and all, there was nothing he could say about it. Sorvell had the sense his brother didn’t agree with what Andre Laprise was doing, however, and as much as they didn’t generally get along—unless they were being idiots and accompanying a bunch of chaotic children on missions to foreign nations, apparently—Sorvell could admit his brother had ethics and morals coming out of his ears, along with the sense to know that children would be children, especially in the privileged world of the Penns. So, if he didn’t like whatever Andre Laprise was doing enough that it showed on his face, it was probably something to be worried about.

Later, Sorvell would tell someone to check in on the youngest Laprise brother. Who, Sorvell had no idea—it wasn’t like he knew these children well, even if he also hadn’t been able to just leave them to whatever this nonsense was. At the same time, he again knew and more-or-less trusted his stupid, butt-faced brother. Zirell thought the kids were right to not tell The Black Knot or the Baalphorian government what was happening, so unfortunately, that meant Sorvell couldn’t either. This, very unfortunately, added up to him babysitting these kids, all of whom could probably kill him with barely a thought.

Seriously, the kids were terrifying—a thought that made it all the worse that screams were still echoing from above along with curses and demands that people do one thing or another. Willbrands sung as they were activated. Names were called. His Censor burned with too much awareness, the result of all the functions Halen had forced into his head, his brain able to support the strain but certainly not used to it. Flashes of messages and translated signs etched over his vision until he was wobbling on his feet and BJ was forced to stop arguing with Halen about sending him back up—Halen had very sensibly pointed out that with Zirell still up there, they needed to keep everyone else with medical skills safe down there—and help him. There wasn’t much the young man could do, other than support his weight and cut off his sharing of the translation function.

“How do you all support so many functions at once?” Sorvell asked, trying to blink away the white spots in his vision as the cacophony from above finally settled down for enough time that you could actually hear several voices respond with

“Practice.”

Then came the panicked calls of names.

“Lux? Levi?”

Fuck.

“I don’t like the way that sounds,” Codeth said, a moment before he was being flung upwards by a nervous looking Halen.

“What’s wrong?” Sorvell asked, reading the

wrongness

of the young Mhrina boy’s concern. He was a good gambler—it was how he spent most of his time these days—and with gambling came the ability to read the other people at the table. Halen didn’t seem just worried about the fact that Lux and Levi seemed to have disappeared in the chaos that had broken out above them, but something else as well.

“They’re gone,” he whispered, pulling up the weird stalking function they all had installed into their Censors now for Sorvell. “Same way Olivier just vanished, like he died.”

“You think they’re dead?” BJ asked, a bit too loud. Fortunately, Valor had already extended a layer of privacy over them—so as to not further distress the people above them, Sorvell thought—the clone’s own gaze fixed upwards as they waited for someone to report back to them properly what was happening.

“If they can’t find them, though… wouldn’t that mean that whatever attacked them… dragged their dead bodies away?” Jane asked, shifting on her feet, an endless back and forth, back and forth, until Valor was there, wrapping his arms around her.

Sorvell had grown up around the clones, as did all the kids in their region of the Penns—as well as many other regions, as the Hyrat clones tried to disperse their children across the Penns, even if they tended to stick close to the southern tip, where the Laprise and Baxter families largely resided. Never had he seen clones this close with their peers, however. Sure, they’d sometimes have a friend or two they were obsessed with. Usually, they stuck to the pods they were raised in or were seen with other clones. For these three to be friendly with all these kids… it was interesting, especially considering how many other black knots were part of their friend group. Sorvell had no idea if the Hyrat boys actually liked the people in their friend group—and certainly, a comment from his brother had implied that he should be aware that the triplets would prioritize Emilia and each other over everyone else—but Levi was clearly close with several people, as was Samina. Rafe seemed… rather like the Hyrat boys, and more concerned with getting to Emilia, although he also seemed to watch a few of his friends, most notably Simeon, with an edge of obsession.

It was interesting—fascinating to watch because these kids seemed both like normal children, intent to make mistakes without a care in the world, and like little monsters, capable of fighting like soldiers and barely flinching even though they

still

had no idea what was happening above them.

“I think that’s unlikely,” Halen finally said when Jane pulled her face from Valor’s chest. “I think it's more likely that something has interfered with their Censors—not that we can get too far from one another without the cave itself interfering,” he reminded them.

They’d been forced through yet another squishy little tunnel a while back. It had been long and winding, and while Valor had confirmed there was a way out, it had taken a while to get to it. While they hadn’t gone one by one—waiting for one person to come out the end before the next began to crawl would have taken far too long—by the time Valor popped out the other side he had lost contact with those still back at the start, the stone interfering with the non-aethernet communication method they were now using once they got too far apart. It was only because those in between had been able to contact Valor that Baylor hadn’t freaked—something everyone had assured Sorvell he didn’t want to see.

Still, the reality remained that too much physical distance in this place meant being cut off from their group. That was bad. Assuming that Lux and Levi had been dragged off, alive but without an ability to use their Censors properly…

How the fuck were they supposed to find them? If they were still conscious, it was possible their mapping functions were still working, but if they weren’t? How were they even supposed to find their way out? Assuming they could escape whoever—or whatever—had taken them and still access their map, they might be able to match it up with the crossroads they came to if they wandered the cave system long enough, but…

“This is bad…” he muttered just as their group relay began to fill with an explanation of what had happened.

Essentially, a group had been following them. They had no idea how they had been able to evade all the functions everyone was running, keeping track of their surroundings, but they had. For whatever reason, they’d finally attacked.

“A few of them are dead,”

Taelor messaged, sending along pictures of the dead bodies, which… what the fuck had those kids done to them!?

The bodies had been torn apart, their severed limbs lying in what were more lumps of flesh than removed limbs beside them, as though someone had decided to reunite the bodies after death. If looked like something a few Free Colonies did, attempting to make sure as much of a corpse was together as possible before burial. Previously, Sorvell might have thought that nice, especially within the context of enemies killing one another. Now, having seen it, he thought it more perverse than anything—a reuniting of ruin.

From what he could see of the bodies, however, it was clear they were Lüshanian. At least they weren’t people from some other nation, he supposed. Whatever these people were doing in the cave system, they definitely didn’t want to get involved in it, but if it had been a foreign military campaign or something, that would have been worse than whatever this was.

“Smugglers or criminals?” he suggested as the group above them related that at some point in the fight, Levi had chased after someone running off with his not-a-stone. The fact that no one was surprised by this was slightly concerning. The fact that only Darrian and Samina seemed even slightly worried about the other Baxter twin was even more concerning—if anything, everyone seemed to be under the impression that the criminals would be trying to return Levi as soon as he caught up with them.

What had happened to Lux was a bigger question, as the last time anyone had seen her, she’d been fighting back to back with Samina. They had separated for a moment, each of them scuffling with a mystery assailant. Then, Lux had been gone, her presence cut off from Halen’s stalking function.

More importantly, there had been a brief few seconds when both Simeon and Baylor had seen her alive and moving after her presence had vanished; in other words, she definitely hadn’t been dead and they couldn’t trust that people vanishing from the stalking function actually meant they were dead. Unfortunately, shortly after, they’d lost track of Lux in the chaos. Now, they had no idea where she or several of their attackers had gone.

“There were at least four more that we couldn’t kill,”

Taelor added to the messages, and even through the text Sorvell could feel the coldness in him—the reality that he would kill those four if given the chance.

It wasn’t like Sorvell could fault the clone for that; still, it was a lot to feel so outright, the boy seemingly not even caring to hide his apathetic regard for the people they had killed. The reality, however, was even more horrific, once he noticed it: no one cared that these people had died. That was… pragmatic—they had been attacked by these people, after all—but these kids…

How did they not care at all, even Jane, so clearly the softest of all of them, seemingly not caring at all for the lives they had taken or the state they had left the bodies in?

“Little monsters,”

he thought, not for the first time. This was the first time, however, when he wondered if his brother weren’t only here because he knew telling The Black Knot and Baalphorian government about the situation might cause more problems than they would solve; rather, perhaps his brother had already been aware of what these kids were capable of. They probably wouldn’t have killed his older brother, if he tried to stop them. Now that he had thought it, however, Sorvell couldn’t shake the feeling that his brother had known they would stop him, through whatever means necessary, if he got in their way.

That was… he wasn’t really sure what it was, or what to think about it.

Still, the image of his brother, tied up in his office by BJ and Coral, did make him smile, just a little.